For Immediate Release: CALLED HOME published

CALLED HOME

 (Vol. 2) Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects   SECOND EDITION

An important contribution to American Indian history is told by its own lost children/adult survivors

An impressive second anthology of American Indian and First Nations adoptee narratives... Editors Patricia Cotter-Busbee and Trace A. DeMeyer are writers and adoptees who reunited with their own lost relatives.  From recent news about Baby Veronica to history like Operation Papoose, this book examines how adoptees and their families experienced adoption and exposes the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects. 

One quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed in non-Indian adoptive and foster homes or orphanages, as part of the Indian Adoption Projects….. One study found that in sixteen states in 1969, 85 percent of the Indian children were placed in non-Indian homes.

Where are these children now?

This new anthology “CALLED HOME: Stolen Generations” and the earlier work “TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects” are very important contributions to American Indian history.  The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both adoptees, found other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative.  In the part one of Called Home, adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, feeling CALLED HOME, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with tribal relatives.  Some share their mothers and grandmothers story.  Adoptees who wrote in Two Worlds provide updates in part two.  In part three, adoptees still searching for their families share their birth information, date and location.  Recent history about the Supreme Court case involving Baby Veronica and The New Normal: DNA is also covered by co-editor Trace DeMeyer.

The new anthology CALLED HOME offers even more revelations of this hidden history of Indian child removals in North America, their impact on Indian Country and how it impacts the adoptee and their families.

Since 2004, DeMeyer was writing her historical biography “One Small Sacrifice.”  She met adoptees after stories were published about her work.  In 2008, she began to ask adoptees to send her their narratives.  Many more adoptees were found after “One Small Sacrifice” had its own Facebook page and DeMeyer’s blog on American Indian Adoptees started in 2009.  In 2010, Trace was introduced to Patricia and asked her to co-edit both books Called Home and Two Worlds which are the first books to expose in first-person detail the adoption practices that have been going on for years under the guise of caring for destitute Indigenous children.  Very little was known or published on this history using closed adoptions as a tool of assimilation and ancestral genocide.

These unforgettable accounts of Native American adoptees will certainly challenge beliefs in the positive outcomes of closed adoptions in the US and Canada and exposes the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects.

As DeMeyer writes in the Preface:

"For Lost Birds/adoptees coming after us, when they find this new book and the earlier anthology TWO WORLDS, adoptees themselves documented this history and evidence.  We have created a roadmap, a resource for new adoptees who will wish to journey back to their First Nations and understand exactly what happened and why.  There is no doubt in my mind that adoption changes us, clouds the mind and steals years of our lives, but there is something non-Indians can never steal and that is our dreams and the truth we are resilient!”

Publisher: Blue Hand Books

www.bluehandbooks.org

 

Excerpt:

“Then several different Native men and woman got up to speak, each one telling a story about their lives.  The strange thing was, almost every story was almost the same about how they grew up and who they grew up with.  Native people growing up in white families.  We were all adopted.  We all had alcoholic mothers who couldn’t take care of us.  We all felt lost at some point in our lives and maybe some of us still did.  We all had questions about who we really were.   What was our Indian Culture or Heritage about, we didn’t know.  Were we all related?  Probably not, I thought to myself.   Then suddenly, it hit me, I turned and looked at my caseworker from the Children’s Home.  She had tears running down her face.  I said to her, “You have been lying to me all these years, haven’t you?”  She began to cry.  I began to cry.  Once I got myself back together, I told her it probably wasn’t her fault, that she was just doing her job.  She’d been telling me what she was told to tell me.” - Cynthia Lammers (Dakota)

(We lost our friend Cynthia in 2017)