REPOST from MAY 2011 (edited)
By Trace Hentz
Yesterday I attacked the kitchen! It’s a sure sign when I start tearing apart a room, cleaning, washing and moving stuff around. Hours later it hit me I am in the throes of processing again.
I reread their stories and their words and in their sincerity, find my own grief re-ignited. We were long-silenced by deliberate secrecy. I’ve met so many adoptees and children of adoptees with the same questions and concerns I had.
When adoptees from closed adoptions email or call me, I feel their pain like it is my own. When I first hear their stories, I tell them we are all related. I relate what I can about our shared history as “removed Indians,” why we are called Lost Birds and Split Feathers, and describe my own "wound" after being adopted by strangers. I share how my adoptive parents did not help me or encourage me to find my other parents or my tribes.
It kills me too many adoptees are still very desperate to find answers and a family name. Just one detail, just one name, which tribe, could change everything. I send them prayers they find what they need. I send links to search angels, to Karen Vigneault. I listen and email and offer to help.
Like my story, many other adoptees stubbornly refuse to accept secrecy, even defying laws and religions and the wishes of their adoptive parents. They’ll risk everything to find their tribal families and identities.
There were too many years I was so desperately alone, not knowing any adoptee who had
successfully opened their adoption or had a reunion with relatives. Today I know several. Today I have many friends who have gone full circle and met all their families.
There are some stirring voices in TWO WORLDS...and the anthology CALLED HOME. I cry reading these stories by Native American adoptees who were placed in closed adoptions, but celebrate them like war heroes who fought laws and sealed adoption records in North America to find their way back to their sacred sovereignty and tribal relatives.
My co-author Patricia Busbee (also an adoptee) and I have bonded like sisters doing these projects. I thank her for her deep compassion to do two books with me.
Editor Trace Hentz
There is a book by Margaret D. Jacobs I want to recommend: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. This is the book I wish I had written. It is mind-blowing history. I have to say, just 100 pages in, I am in such a rage, I decided to put the book down awhile, to cool off and absorb what I already read. Margaret’s work will probably ignite you as it did me. You may also find yourself tearing apart your house and attacking your kitchen!
I know why adoptees are some of the strongest people I have ever met. We truly are the child survivors of an ethnic cleansing campaign, when colonial dictators did battle with tribes to steal more and more land.
Taking Native American children was just one more horrific tactic.
But in the end, every adoptee who finds their tribe and family wins this war and those governments who may have tried to kill our identity will not succeed as planned.
This story is still being written in 2015, and will be until all adoption files are open and exposed.
I assure you, you will never forget these stories or these very brave adoptees.
By Trace Hentz
Yesterday I attacked the kitchen! It’s a sure sign when I start tearing apart a room, cleaning, washing and moving stuff around. Hours later it hit me I am in the throes of processing again. I reread their stories and their words and in their sincerity, find my own grief re-ignited. We were long-silenced by deliberate secrecy. I’ve met so many adoptees and children of adoptees with the same questions and concerns I had.
When adoptees from closed adoptions email or call me, I feel their pain like it is my own. When I first hear their stories, I tell them we are all related. I relate what I can about our shared history as “removed Indians,” why we are called Lost Birds and Split Feathers, and describe my own "wound" after being adopted by strangers. I share how my adoptive parents did not help me or encourage me to find my other parents or my tribes.
It kills me too many adoptees are still very desperate to find answers and a family name. Just one detail, just one name, which tribe, could change everything. I send them prayers they find what they need. I send links to search angels, to Karen Vigneault. I listen and email and offer to help.
Like my story, many other adoptees stubbornly refuse to accept secrecy, even defying laws and religions and the wishes of their adoptive parents. They’ll risk everything to find their tribal families and identities.
There were too many years I was so desperately alone, not knowing any adoptee who had
successfully opened their adoption or had a reunion with relatives. Today I know several. Today I have many friends who have gone full circle and met all their families.
There are some stirring voices in TWO WORLDS...and the anthology CALLED HOME. I cry reading these stories by Native American adoptees who were placed in closed adoptions, but celebrate them like war heroes who fought laws and sealed adoption records in North America to find their way back to their sacred sovereignty and tribal relatives.
My co-author Patricia Busbee (also an adoptee) and I have bonded like sisters doing these projects. I thank her for her deep compassion to do two books with me.
Editor Trace Hentz
There is a book by Margaret D. Jacobs I want to recommend: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. This is the book I wish I had written. It is mind-blowing history. I have to say, just 100 pages in, I am in such a rage, I decided to put the book down awhile, to cool off and absorb what I already read. Margaret’s work will probably ignite you as it did me. You may also find yourself tearing apart your house and attacking your kitchen!
I know why adoptees are some of the strongest people I have ever met. We truly are the child survivors of an ethnic cleansing campaign, when colonial dictators did battle with tribes to steal more and more land.
Taking Native American children was just one more horrific tactic.
But in the end, every adoptee who finds their tribe and family wins this war and those governments who may have tried to kill our identity will not succeed as planned.
This story is still being written in 2015, and will be until all adoption files are open and exposed.
I assure you, you will never forget these stories or these very brave adoptees.
No indeed not Trace and I'm looking forward to it's arrival.Your indentity will not die and things will change, the damage however is not repairable I feel.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment on my blog. You have a great one too and your books sound very interesting!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment on my blog. You have a great one too and your books sound very interesting!
ReplyDelete