Wawahte: Stories of Residential School Survivors - FULL DOCUMENTARY

I was taken from my home and raised as a “nice Jewish girl,” but I’m Indian...

Sixties Scoop survivor finds sister, only to lose her again

Her story is in the book STOLEN GENERATIONS

Dark Cloud: 60s Scoop Survivor | Short Documentary

What does history tell us about adoption

By Trace Hentz (Blog Editor and adoptee)

The Dakota expression for child, wakan injan, can be translated as “they too are sacred,” according to Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktonwan Dakota and a member of the Elk Soldier Society on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

“To us, children are as pure as the holy, moving energy of the universe,” he says, “and we treat them that way.”

What does history tell us about adoption? Most telling is the timeline of adoption history: https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/timeline.html

Can you see the curve American Adoption took to become a profitable industry after seeing that timeline?  Do you notice how some states stepped in and made laws? Can you see the influence of the religions and their judgements of single parents? What role did poverty and racism play? Can you see how secrecy and laws protects the industry and the people who adopt?

Twenty years I've studied adoption in my own investigations and I think 20 years later... adoption is not about child care at all but has morphed into child trafficking, a response to an infertility epidemic, lawyers and judges, billions of dollars, propaganda and bad history.

Supply and demand requires: Where do you find an available baby for an infertile couple in America?

What was born of this curve in 20 years: there are camps. The two most common camps for adoptees are "be grateful" and "the activist."

Not everyone wants to hear adoptees in any camp. I simply cannot believe the adoption debate has gone on as long as it has.

If adoption hurts anyone, then it should be abolished. Period.

When you see how adoption was used against Native people, then it was a criminal act. (This was important to document in the four-part book series LOST CHILDREN OF THE INDIAN ADOPTION PROJECTS: see the books in the sidebar of this blog)

My adoptive parents were miserable people, very sick. I cannot begin to calculate the source of their behaviors but their infertility and religion resulted in my being adopted by them through Catholic Charities and then abused by both of them.

If there had been careful awareness by the adoption industry's social workers prior...maybe it would not have happened. But the social workers never returned.

Who would create a system for children that would not check on adopted children?

Child trafficking via adoption is profitable. That seems to be why it won't go away.

I'm not bitter because that was the system and how it was created. But when you see the harm, and the trauma and the lifelong issues for the child in a closed adoption, how does adoption exist in any form?

Caring for children who are true orphans, without any biological family is so rare, a community could step in and care for the orphan.  It would not require a bureaucracy to do that. The decision could be made by tribal leaders. If you are a member of a tribe, the entire tribe is your family. Kinship care always worked for children who had lost their parents.

I was not an orphan. I had two biological parents who were in their 20s. Relatives told me later they could have and would have raised me.

But someone created a system that didn't allow that, and instead the adoption industry chose strangers to raise me.

I was born before the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978. I do not have my Original Birth Certificate.

I will never stop fighting for Native children. They deserve our protection.

Read my earlier post: What Being Adopted Cost Me.

Toni Morrison says that “facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”


Trace is working on a new edition of her memoir in 2020.

Notice to readers

out of print

It was necessary to retire the first edition of Two Worlds. The new 2nd edition replaced it.
If you do have the first edition, it's now a collector item! Nice!
Also, Blue Hand Books has retired Trace's memoir One Small Sacrifice. It was her choice.
She may publish it eventually with updates.

The 2nd Edition is here:

Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects (Vol. 1) : SECOND EDITION (Volume 1) Dec 11, 2017

wind cave

This is Makȟá Oníya /Wóniya Wakȟáŋ, Wind Cave. It is where the Lakota Oyate (People) first emerged into this world. The water beneath it is said to be the 2nd purist on all of Ina Maka (Mother Earth). Pics by Bino Garcia. pic.twitter.com/yEfqFLe1Az

— Ruth H. Hopkins (@RuthHHopkins) April 17, 2018

TWO WORLDS second edition!

For Immediate Release

Greenfield, Massachusetts (2017)

Tragic, true, heartbreaking, astonishing... those words have been used to describe the anthology Two Worlds, the first book 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 in North America.

What really happened and where are these Native children now? 

The new updated Second Edition of TWO WORLDS (Vol. 1), with narratives from Native American and First Nations adoptees, covers the history of Indian child removals in North America, the adoption projects, their impact on Indian Country, the 60s Scoop in Canada and how it impacts the adoptee and their families.

"This book changed history," say editor Trace Hentz. "There is no doubt in my mind the adoption projects were buried and hidden... we adoptees are the living proof."

The Lost Children Book Series includes: Two Worlds, Called Home: The Roadmap, Stolen Generations, and In The Veins: Poetry. The book series is an important contribution to American Indian history.

Trace Hentz (formerly DeMeyer) located other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative for the first anthology. The adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with their tribal relatives. Indigenous identity and historical trauma takes on a whole new meaning in this adoption book series.

Since 2004, award winning journalist Hentz was writing her historical biography “One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir.” She was contacted by many adoptees after stories were published about her work. More adoptees were found after “One Small Sacrifice” had its own Facebook page and the American Indian Adoptees blog started in 2009. In 2011, Trace was introduced to Patricia Busbee and asked her to co-edit the first edition of Two Worlds.

As Hentz writes in the Preface, "The only way we change history is to write it ourselves." This book is a must read for all that want the truth, since very little is known or published on this history.

"I was asked to update this book by one adoptee contributor and I added a new narrative by Levi Eagle Feather, and more information on the 60s Scoop. Please tell your friends and other adoptees," Trace Hentz says. "One day in America, we Lost Children will have our day in court." 

Patricia Busbee is writing a new chapter on her adoptee reunion in the anthology CALLED Home in 2019.

For more information, to order copies, bulk orders, media etc:  www.bluehandbooks.org

Blue Hand Books Collective is a small Native American-owned publishing company based in western New England.

The first edition has been retired.

November 16 BOOK TALK

Called Home: The RoadMap

PLEASE USE BOOKSHOP (LINKS ON THIS BLOG) if you buy this book

 

Links to amazon Called Home: The Roadmap (Vol. 2): Lost Children on the Indian Adoption Projects Book Series (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption… Oct 17, 2016 by Patricia Busbee and Trace L Hentz  Paperback Kindle Edition

PRESS RELEASE: Stolen Generations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New anthology sheds new light on the STOLEN GENERATIONS

Greenfield, Massachusetts [2016]  -- Award-winning Native journalist Trace Hentz continues her heart-rending efforts to peel away the malodorous layers of Native American adoption with her newest book, Stolen Generations: Survivors of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop (Publisher Blue Hand Books).

“What is significant about this new book?  Everything,” Hentz said.  “Ten years ago there were no books on stolen generations.  Now we have more than one generation who have experienced the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop.  These survivors have bravely documented their life experience in their own words in three anthologies (Two Worlds, Called Home and now Stolen Generations) that I’ve compiled so far.”

Hentz (formerly DeMeyer) has worked tirelessly since 2004 to shed light on the dark corners and secret crevices of American Indian adoptions, and by extension, all adoptees.

 “For me, that is all I hoped for, prayed for,” Hentz said.  An adoptee herself, Hentz reunited with her own birth family over the past 20 years.  Her late-father  Earl was Shawnee-Tsalagi and Euro mix.  “I had to do something, as a journalist and as an adoptee to end the secrecy.”

When adoptees do start asking about their birth parents they often run into a wall of silence. Hentz offers to help them and often refers them to work with Librarian Karen Vigneault-MLIS, a member of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel in California, who can provide genealogy and research for no charge.

In the case of a First Nations adoptee in the US or Canada, being unable to trace a birth parent can deny that adoptee and their child(ren) their rightful place on tribal rolls, their rights to ancestral land, and may disqualify them from tribal benefits they qualify for and deserve.

Indian adoption is nothing new, nor has the essential purpose changed.

It was long common policy to take Indian children from their families and communities and to place them in non-Native homes or send them to residential boarding schools.  In fact three contributors in Stolen Generations were the children of parents who had also been adopted out.

In 1978 tribes fought to get the Indian Child Welfare Act approved by the federal government.  ICWA’s intent is to keep Native children in tribal communities.

However, even now, some in Congress seek to overturn the ICWA.

“We are the pre-ICWA adoptees – before the federal law was signed, preventing adoption to non-Indian parents, thereby lawfully supporting kinship-care adoption so First Nations children remain in their community,” Hentz explained.

Stolen Generations is an anthology, letting adoptees tell their own stories, in their own words.

“For these adoptees and their adult children, it takes real courage to think about the past and try to make sense of it,” Hentz said.  “Many of us thought we were the only one.  I know I did.  Many of us felt very alone, isolated, confused.”

The introduction to Stolen Generations was written by Johnathan Brooks (Northern Cheyenne). Trace Hentz (Shawnee-Cherokee mix) wrote the preface.

Among the other contributors are author Patricia Busbee (Cherokee), Joseph Henning (Cree), Leland Pacheco Kirk (Navajo), Susan Devan Harness (Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes), author Dana Lone Hill (Oglala Lakota), Rebecca Larsen (Quinault Indian Nation),  Nakuset (Cree), and Joshua Whitehead (Peguis First Nation Manitoba). (Read complete list of contributors below)

“They told their story in their own way in their own words,” Hentz said. “As you read this book, you will see Native adoptees must overcome many barriers preventing them from uniting with their own tribal families, to regain status as enrolled tribal citizens.

“It’s widespread (in Canada and the US) and it's a growing issue,” she said.  “With sealed adoption records and the Bureau of Indian Affairs not actively helping, adoptees might wait years to rejoin their tribes and reclaim sovereignty.”

Hentz will continue fighting for the many generations affected by the various Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop, supporting ICWA’s intent, using her blog American Indian Adoptees (www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com.)

“I just want to spare a future child the pain and loss we felt,” Hentz said.

###

BUY LINK

ISBN-13: 978-0692615560 (Blue Hand Books) 

Paperback $12.96 

Kindle ebook $3.96

Stolen Generations: Survivors of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects Book 3)

An anthology of adoptees’ firsthand accounts and historical background of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop in North America

Contributors:

INTRO: Johnathan Brooks (Northern Cheyenne)
Preface: Trace Hentz (Shawnee-Cherokee mix)

Joseph Henning (Cree)

Leland Pacheco Kirk Morrill (Navajo)

Nakuset (Cree)

Debra Newman (Choctaw Cherokee)

Belinda Mastalski Smith (Oneida New York)

Janelle Black Owl (Mandan, Hidatasa, Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Lakota)

Susan Devan Harness (Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes)

Dana LoneHill (Oglala Lakota)

Joy Meness (Iroquois)

Levi William EagleFeather Sr. (Sicangu Lakota)

Patricia Busbee (Cherokee)

Karl Mizenmayer (Minnesota Ojibwe)

Mitzi Lipscomb (Walpole Bkejwanong First Nations)

Rebecca Larsen (Quinault Indian Nation)

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee)

Mary St. Martin (Koyukon Athabascan)

Joshua Whitehead (Peguis First Nation Manitoba)

 

COVER ARTIST: Terry Niska Watson (White Earth Ojibwe adoptee) 

“This illustration I painted years ago when I was in a very dark place in my life.  This is a painting of a subject matter that has always drawn my interest, that is the Native life and the beauty of tradition, family and nature.  As my sister, Elizabeth Blake, said about this painting that still hangs on my wall, “the most interesting part is that the face is not visible.  That is how it is when you do not know your birth family.”

###

Blue Hand Books Collective is a small Native American-owned publishing company based in western New England.  Website: www.bluehandbooks.org

Media Contact: Trace Hentz, Greenfield, Massachusetts, phone: 413-772-6996, email: bluehandcollective@outlook.com

BOOK PDF available for reviewers.  For interviews with book contributors, contact Trace.

AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: STOLEN GENERATIONS!

click: AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: STOLEN GENERATIONS! Survivors of the Indian Adopti...:


Cover art by Ojibwe adoptee Terry Niska Watson

NEW BOOK NOTICE: April 20, 2016

Contributors:

PREFACE: Johnathan Brooks
(Northern Cheyenne)

Joseph Henning (Cree)

Leland Pacheco Kirk Morrill
(Navajo)

Nakuset (Cree)

Debra Newman (Choctaw
Cherokee)

Belinda Mastalski Smith (Oneida New York)

Janelle Black Owl (Mandan, Hidatasa, Turtle Mountain
Chippewa, Lakota)

Susan Devan Harness (Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes)

Dana LoneHill (Oglala
Lakota)

Joy Meness (Iroquois)

Levi William EagleFeather Sr. (Sicangu Lakota)

Patricia Busbee (Cherokee)

Karl Mizenmayer (Minnesota
Ojibwe)

MITZI LIPSCOMB/ROSEMARY BLACKBIRD (Walpole Bkejwanong
First Nations)

Rebecca Larsen (Quinault Indian Nation)

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee)

Mary St. Martin (Koyukon Athabascan)

Joshua Whitehead (Peguis First Nation Manitoba)

 

COVER ART: Terry Niska
Watson (White Earth) 

PREVIEW:  Once Upon A Time

KINDLE:  HERE

US UK DE FR ES IT NL JP BR Canada MX AU IN

CALLED HOME Contributor: Athabascan Adoptee Welcomed Home

AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: Athabascan Adoptee Welcomed Home: By Mary St. Martin-Charles I’ve always dreamt in Indian.   Vivid, lucid, in color and shaded with symbols. 

An interview with Leland Morrill, Navajo adoptee

CLICK HERE: AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: My interview with Leland Morrill, Navajo adoptee (click)



Weaving a new life: My conversation with Dine adoptee Leland Morrill 

There was a reason Indian leaders went to the Senate in the 1970s...

Leland Morrill (Navajo) met recently with Chai Feldblum, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity  Commissioner (at left), to discuss the Real ID Act of 2005 and how it affects Native Americans who are adopted without an original birth certificate, census number, or certificate of Indian blood. Lack of documentation now affects employment, Morrill said, creating a sub-class of "former" US Citizens who are unable to get work without a state issued driver’s  license. Morrill, who is an adoptee, and Feldblum are writing an amendment and will present it to Real ID Act of 2005 author, Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin).”

Telling Our Stories

Becky shares her story and her mother's story in the new book Stolen Generations

Book Review: Two Worlds, Called Home contributor Johnathan Brooks

Beacon Hill Training rated it 5 of 5 stars Good Reads

Shelves: social-work (2012)

 

Johnathan Brooks (Cheyenne/Cree) Contributor to Called Home and Two Worlds

In the final countdown to BAAF National Adoption Week, I stumbled across a story on Twitter reported in the Kent and Sussex Courier about a Native American man adopted into a Western family in the mid 1960s. The article caught my attention, not only because of my interest in adoption but also because of the fascinating cultural implications of such a tale. Johnathan Brooks has contributed a chapter to the edited volume Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Adoption Projects, which I have now been able to read. Johnathan's is just one of several stories detailing the cultural assimilation of Native Americans into a wider American / Europe world, something about which I was previously unaware.

Johnathan was relinquished as a baby by his Native American mother and adopted by Countess Barbara von Bismarck-Schonhausen and her husband Hollywood publicist Steve Brooks. From a life of almost certain poverty in a Native American reservation, Johnathan was raised in London and received a progressive Steiner education in rural Sussex. As was 'the norm', Johnathan's history was effectively erased and he was issued with a new birth certificate. He was aware that he was adopted and was told almost by accident when his mother found him play-shooting the Indians who were 'baddies' in the Western movie he was watching.

Sadly, Johnathan's privileged upbringing was marred by his adoptive mother's mental health and addiction problems following the tragic deaths of her parents and sister. Johnathan felt that his relationship with her was always strained, perhaps due to the fact that he was not her biological son and she felt his place in her life was not necessarily permanent. This emotional distance was somewhat exacerbated by their lack of physical proximity; Johnathan lived with another family during term-time to prevent him from boarding at school.

Despite his adoption being almost taboo within the family (the main exceptions being when his birth mother was being disparaged), Johnathan's adoptive mother bought him a ticket to America when he was 21. He tells the story of his desire to trace his biological parents, juxtaposed with the ongoing routine of his life in England. I won't 'spoil' your enjoyment of this book by telling you much more, but it certainly is an engaging story and had me captivated.

As a human interest story, this one certainly is entrancing. But it serves more than that. Of course, given that the average age at adoption has significantly increased, there is less possibility to 'hush up' adoptions today. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that adoptive parents wouldn't do so if they felt able to, despite current thinking that honesty really is the best policy. The realities of adoption for both the adoptive parents and the children must be more thoroughly explored by the applicants and their social workers before the matching takes place. I'd suggest you try our previous blog post Opening the Eyes of Prospective Adopters for a real eye-opener about the realities of modern adoption.

Perhaps the more alarming aspect of Johnathan's story is the cultural assimilation (eradication?) of the Native American people in this period. The book as a whole contains many stories of 'transracial' adoptions where Indian children were raised by non-Indian families and their histories sealed by the government to prevent later re-entry into their tribes. The sad reality is that the children of this 'stolen generation' were removed, sometimes forcibly, in a methodical attempt at ethnic cleansing. The recent Nigerian baby exchange scandal shows just how easy child trafficking can be, preying on vulnerable people who simply wish to have a child. The popularity of international adoptions in the celebrity world has raised their profile and are often considered by people wishing to adopt a newborn. While ethnic compatibility is no longer considered the be-all-and-end-all of matching criteria (and certainly a stable and loving home should override this), I would certainly recommend that social workers and adoptive parents read this book to as a stark reminder of the damaging effects of closed adoptions and sealed birth records.

[Johnathan wrote an update in the new anthology CALLED HOME (book 2) Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects]

AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: Called Home gifted in California

CLICK: AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES: Called Home gifted in California: Tribal STAR News Blessing of ICWA Court in Los Angeles

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines

Cassandra, a producer at Fault Lines contacted Trace and others for this incredible sharing... LINK

Diane Tells His Name, Suzie Fedorko*, Julie Missing and Trace DeMeyer* are featured along with the first Lost Bird. The baby who survived the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 became known as Zintkala Nuni, or, in Lakota, "Lost Bird."

For more than one hundred years, U.S. policies and practices separated Native American children from their families. Prior to 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act went into effect, Native American children were regularly plucked from their homes and sent to live with non-Natives. Some children grew up surrounded by love; others suffered enormous hardships. Many had a powerful desire to reconnect with the culture that they had lost.
In "Lost Birds," we profile four adopted women who sought out their Native American roots. Read the stories of how each woman came to discover and connect with her true heritage. - from the Al Jazeera website

* Trace and Suzie are contributors and writers in the new anthology CALLED HOME: Book 2: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects. Diane Tells His Name is a contributor in the anthology TWO WORLDS (Book 1)