PART FOUR: Victims of Adoptions and Lies:: Ceremony for Adoptees

By Trace Hentz

I woke up with two thoughts: there are two victims of adoption who need help and not necessarily from each other: the adoptee and the first mother. Each has its own burden and neither can heal the other.

“I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile I keep dancing.” That is a line in the book “Bird by Bird” by Ann Lamott.  Her comical book offers instructions on writing and life and so far -- I’ve had good belly laughs. Yep, Ann made a funny book!

In part two, Ann was fighting herself over jealousy of another writer friend. She wrote, “Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic - jealousy especially so - but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime poisoned by it."

Poison is nothing to mess with.  I spoke with an adoptee friend last night and Levi is sure we adoptees need to create new ceremonies, even some just for us adoptees. I was nodding at every word Levi said.  A lifetime of isolation from what we know to be ours, our blood rights as Indigenous People, our language and culture and the healing offered by participating in ceremony, it was not ours growing up white and adopted and assimilated.

But we adoptees are not victims, Levi said. No, we are changed by adoption but not its victims.

I thought about ceremony, what ceremony I missed growing up, and what other Indian people probably took for granted growing up. That does make me jealous. I didn’t get to meet my grandmothers in flesh, only in dreams.

I am sad I do not how to make my own regalia. I see others dance at powwow and wish someone had time to teach me what I need to know.

I can think of a million things I’d like to know. When I met relatives in Illinois last year, I was over the moon happy.  My Harlow cousins filled many holes in my heart.

I am in reunion. Jealousy is not my poison.

For those not in reunion, their hearts ache.  We need to find a way to heal them.

Levi Eagle Feather has contributed to this blog.

This is the lost post, Part 4 of the series.

Black Market Adoption in Indian Country: Stolen Navajo Twins

Boston Globe June 2, 1996 REUNION DAY AT 43: NAVAJO NATIVE FINALLY HOME Author: Royal Ford, Globe Staff TOLANI LAKE, Ariz. -- She stood in brilliant white sunlight, scuffed the cracked skin of the vast, parched land and stared down at the very spot where the old woman told her she had been born, right there, in a hogan that is gone, beside a field where corn once grew. The woman her family called "the old aunt" reached up with a warm, dark hand and touched her high cheekbone. "You are so like your mother," Besbah Yazzie told her. Weeping in the baked expanse of the Navajo Reservation, they hugged. Yvette Silverman Melanson, stolen along with a twin brother from her Navajo family 43 years ago, raised rich, white and Jewish in Brooklyn, was finally home. "One more of us is still out there and a whole lot more of the others," Melanson said in reference to her missing brother and thousands of other Native American children stolen from their families over the years and put on the black market for adoption. "This is not right. We have to find them. We have to find the boy." Navajo natives had come from across the reservation to welcome her home.  In a hot gymnasium here, 60 miles northeast of Flagstaff, the Tolani Roadman -- Medicine Man -- had wept as he told her tale in the native tongue. Behind him, Yazzie Monroe, her father, brushed tears from his weathered cheeks. The old women of the tribe wore their finest turquoise and silver in her honor. Children danced in a colorful whirl of beads and feathers. "I don't know my own culture," Melanson told the gathering. "I am going to need your help in understanding. I am humbled. "Teach me, teach my children" she said. She stood amid the swirling talc-like dust of the reservation, a long way from the cloying green spring back in her Maine home and further still from the life she has lived thus far.  As a child, there had been winters at a fine Miami hotel, summer camp in Pennsylvania. Later came long trips to Israel where she marched the length of that land and stood military guard at her kibbutz. After her adoptive parents had both died, there were two stints in the Navy and, later, marriage to a retired scallop diver named Dickie, with whom she now lives in Palmyra, Maine. But forever there had been the question, "Who am I?"   She had always known she was adopted, but until three months ago that was all she knew. Then one night while exploring on her computer, she found out.  On a national website, she saw that a Navajo family was looking for its lost twins. The trails of her search and theirs crossed in the Southwest. A piece of tattered and fading paper she possessed, bearing the names Yazzie Monroe and Betty Jackson, solved the puzzle. They were the mother and father of the large family that was looking for her. It was an unlikely trinity, ancient and new, that brought her home: the Internet, that scrap of paper, and the mysterious works of the Holy People on her reservation who had held ceremonies to help find her. This weekend, that family welcomes her home. She will stay here for two weeks along with her husband and daughters, Lori and Heather. Her mother died years ago, but her father was there to take her, looking almost fragile, into his great brown arms. Her seven brothers and sisters were there, as were numerous nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, cousins and members of her clan. "We have always known she was around somewhere," said Nettie Rogers, her sister.  "We want to thank the Holy People for bringing back our child, our daughter, to the center," Freddie Howard, a Tolani Lake official, told a crowd that streamed into a gymnasium for ceremonies welcoming Melanson and her family to her birthplace.  She had come to the reservation east from Flagstaff, crossing through the Coconino National Forest. The Navajo lands began where the trees ended and a hot, dusty, vastness sprawled ahead. To the South were towns that bespoke stereotypical western violence: Two Guns, Two Arrows; and a place of real cataclysm, a giant crater created when a meteor smashed into the Earth 50,000 years ago. Across the reservation were the four sacred mountains of her tribe, dark, bruised buttes and colorful mesas that glimmered like poured sand art."I've never seen mountains go straight up," she said as they shimmered in the white light of afternoon. Her return came as efforts to find the so-called "lost birds" of the Navajo and other tribes across the country have intensified.  After Melanson's story made national headlines and television news last month, a website previously set up by the Lost Bird Society, founded by a Lakota woman named Marie Not Help Him, was peppered with inquiries. And it came as the tribes are fighting a bill in Congress that would make the adoption of Indian children by whites easier. It would weaken a federal law passed in 1978 that requires that Indian children removed from their homes be placed with relatives or other Native families. In welcoming Yvette home, Navajo leaders rose to speak in defense of their children.  "We are more than dances, turquoise and rugs," Genevieve Jackson said in a plea that the outside world understand what is happening to Native children.    "Yvette's story is the Navajo story," Delores Grey Eyes added.   Melanson's father presented her with a Navajo wedding basket symbolizing Mother Earth, Father Sky and a Navajo people planted in harmony between.  He said, as another sister, Laura Chee, interpreted, that he was "happy to have his daughter home, and now he wants to know if they can get the boy back." "We must let people know what has happened, what is happening through adoptions," Melanson said, clutching the Navajo blanket the tribe had given her.  "My family, my friends back home, were outraged. They had no idea something like this was happening." "The taking of the children has to be stopped," she said. Later, her family took her to her birthsite and told her how she had been taken.  She'd been born in a hogan and was sickly. A public health nurse came and took both her and her brother to the hospital at Winslow. The family never saw them again. "Your mother would come to the road here," Desbah Yazzie told her, "and she would hitchhike into Winslow, looking for her children. She never found you, and later all they told her was that the children had been adopted." Yvette Silverman Melanson, born Minnie Bo Monroe, stood in a ceaseless expanse of her birthplace and marveled."You can see forever," she said. "The sky is endless, the land is so big. If someone disappeared, a baby, how would you know which direction to go to even begin to look for them...  This story is old (1996) but the fact is she is still looking - there are no updates on her lost twin brother....Trace

In Other Words: Susan Harness and Sandy White Hawk

REBLOG: listen at links

 

January 11, 2013

By Susan Harness

Recently, I was interviewed for a radio program in Missoula, Montana regarding my research on American Indian transracial adoption. It originally aired on Montana Public Radio (MTPR.org) Tuesday, December 11th 2012, on the program In Other Words, which explores experiences through a feminist perspective. The interview looks at American Indian transracial adoption and its intersection with race, history and class. If you weren’t able to catch it live, click on the link below to listen now.

http://www.susandevanharness.com/in-other-words-montana-public-radio/#comments

Sandy White Hawk’s Response to Susan Harness

Posted on May 3, 2012 by kevinhaebeomvollmers 

Below is our friend Sandy White Hawk’s response to the podcast we did with our friend Susan Harness. Enjoy.
_______________
Dear Kevin, (Land of Gazillion Adoptees)
I wanted to respond to Susan Harness’ reference to the Southeast Asian tradition the Gifting of a child as an alternative to standard adoption.
In Indian Country a traditional alternative to standard adoption practice is now developing.  It is called Customary Adoption or Custom Adoption. Long before first European contact Indian nations had a custom that kept and maintained balance with their communities; adoption was one of those customs.
Tribes are beginning to reclaim their traditional ways of maintaining family connections for those who would otherwise be separated from their families and communities if the family was struggling in taking care of their children.
The White Earth Tribe Band of Ojibwe of Minnesota has been the leader in developing this practice in its tribal court. Adoption money, SSI and other benefits follow the child in the process just as in a standard adoption. The major difference is parental rights are not terminated. In White Earth they use the term “suspended.”

Termination of parental rights is not a tribal belief. One cannot severe the familial connection. The termination of parental rights adds to the pain of a struggling parent, family and community. Children need to be protected if their parents who are not able to keep their children safe but terminating parental rights do not have to happen to protect the child or help the struggling parent.
Suspension of parental rights allows the mother and or father to re-enter the child’s life if they get on a good path, as a full custodial parent if that is in the original agreement. The adoptive family is often a tribal member and or approved by the tribe. They do their own home studies and adoptions through their tribal court.
Customary Adoption in White Earth has been very successful. In 2009 they had done about 250 adoptions where only 2 have disrupted. I believe this is due to the tribes Home Study Program they developed. The fact that parental rights are not terminated more relatives come forward to help because they will not have to be part termination hearings, which has to be exceptionally painful for families.
In White Earth Customary Adoption the birth mother or father can have a voice in the placement of their children and the adoptee can come get any information in his/her file anytime they wish.
Since parental rights are not terminated, only suspended, (or whatever term a particular tribe chooses) the mother can re-enter the child’s life, if they get on a good path, as full custody parent if that is the agreement.
Tribes from across the country are starting to develop Customary Adoption. Customary Adoption was passed into California law in 2009, http://www.calindian.org/alerts/62-2010-alert/99-tribal-customary-adoption.
Customary Adoption is based in Native thought – life ways. For the Lakota people it is one of our Seven Sacred Rites, called Hunka (Making Relatives) Ceremony. It is when a child (or adult) is adopted into a family, without severing their original family ties so families expand.
The Making of Relatives binds the adoption through ceremony and is honored until death.
The elders tell us that Hunka happened in many different ways. If a child was lost to disease early in life a family may Hunka another child offered by another family. Adults would make relatives maybe after their family member died so the family would Hunka a young man or young woman to take his place. This helped in a couple ways. The young man or young woman who was adopted would assume the role of the missing family member. That meant contributing by hunting, preparing food, taking care of the children or the old ones; it preserved the family system and strengthened the extended family.  The Lakota people have never stopped Making Relatives in the traditional Hunka Ceremony. It is very common to hear someon say, “This is my Hunka Uncle or Hunka Sister.”
I was honored to witness a monthly White Earth Adoption Day in 2007. Relatives from both the birth family and the adoptive family attended along with community members and the spiritual leader. There were approximately twenty-five people gathered. Words of encouragement were shared by the spiritual leader and then all participated in a traditional pipe ceremony before they went into courtroom. The court room filled up with everyone even the young ones. Both birth mother and adoptive mother are wrapped in star quilts and pictures are taken.  After the formality of law is done everyone gathers for a feast. Another honor song is sung and blessing said. It was beautiful to witness.
I interviewed the young birth mother afterwards and she said that she had five children. The oldest three were placed in stranger adoption (my words) but her two youngest daughters she got to help to choose the parents and visitation was arranged through Customary Adoption.
She admitted that she was not in a place to take care of her babies because she is addicted (as was her mother). Grandmother was a boarding school survivor, distant but tried to be there for her family. She said that she felt good about this adoption.
I know that while she knew she did the right thing for the safety of her children it was still sad for her. When the feast was over she leaned on the large glass window forehead pressed to the glass watching her two young girls walk away with the parents she agreed to let raise her babies.
As a Native American adoptee who was adopted in during the time of systematic removal of tribal children, secrecy and during the time that adopted children were adopted to “have a better life” my heart rested knowing that these Ojibwe children will know who they are, where they come from which will help them understand what they are going to do in life and where they are going to go. The four essential questions in life our elders tell us we have to be able to answer to have balance. Most importantly this generation of White Earth adoptees will remember the drum, the song sung in their honor, the prayers said in Ojibwe, the food, running and playing while the adults visited; a memory of being cared for by a community; no shame, no guilt, only a community of relatives there to support them and their mother.
Another source of information on Customary Adoption can be found at:  http://www.nicwa.org/adoption/.
Sandy White Hawk 2012

Editor's Note: Both Susan and Sandy (Native adoptees) are writing memoirs. Susan's website: http://www.susanharness.com/about/

UPDATES: In The Veins, Goldwater #ICWA lawsuit

www.bluehandbooks.org

In the Veins poetry anthology editor Patricia Busbee (adoptee, Cherokee mix) spoke with Dr. Dawn Karima (who also contributed stunning poetry to this book) about Native poetry and our history recently:

LISTEN:
http://talktainmentradio.com/podcasts/Conversation%20with%20Dawn%20Karima%20042417.mp3

****

Notice of Appeal in Goldwater ICWA Litigation

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Kate Fort

As they promised they would, Goldwater filed their notice of appeal to the 9th Circuit in the Arizona ICWA class action case.

Here.

Order they are appealing is here.

As always, documents in the case will be housed here.

***LOST CHILDREN  BOOK SERIES

This highly-anticipated collection is part of a history-making book series Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects.  This series includes TWO WORLDS (Vol. 1), CALLED HOME: The Road Map (Vol. 2), and STOLEN GENERATIONS: Survivors of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop (Vol. 3).  
IN THE VEINS (Vol. 4)  ISBN: 978-0692832646 $9.99, will share part of its proceeds with Standing Rock Water Protectors.
Paperback $9.99   Kindle ebook $3.96

Dawnland: Maine's Stolen Generations

Dawnland Trailer from Upstander Project on Vimeo.

About the film

When most people hear about children ripped from their families, they think of faraway places or of centuries past. The reality is it's been happening in the U.S. for centuries—and is still happening today. Native American children are more than twice as likely as non-Native children to be taken from their families and put into foster care, according to a 2013 study.

Americans should know that these atrocities are not history. 

READ MORE

We mention this documentary in the anthology STOLEN GENERATIONS (see sidebar)

My birth certificate is literally ‘fake news’

Connecticut is the home to many Native adoptees who were transferred and adopted there from Washington state - yes, all the way across the country! That is the Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA in action.



Its starting. #impact #adopteeslobby https://t.co/EDH7LlUv9s

— Access Connecticut (@AccessCT) April 19, 2017

Older birth parents and relatives are dying off, so are some of the adoptees leaving their children and grandchildren with big holes in their personal family health histories.  Adds Caffery, “We feel strongly that time is of the essence. It’s time to end this failed social experiment of secrecy and shame. It’s time to threat us as full citizens of our country and our state.”

Special Needs Adoption

News

Adoption Fairness Bill: Bipartisan Legislation for Tribal Special Needs Children

Adoption tax credit fairness for tribes: Bill would give parents adopting tribal special needs children an adoption tax credit available to ...

Read More »


Click here to learn more about the bill and Click here to read a letter of support from Chairman Dave Archambault II on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
 

Canada’s Child Welfare Crisis in 2017

Op-Ed in Maclean’s About Canada’s Child Welfare Crisis

Posted on April 17, 2017 by Kate Fort | Turtle Talk

 

Here, by Pam Palmater. Canada’s numbers of Native children in care may be currently worse than pre-ICWA numbers in the United States (Task Force Four Report).

The increasing number of First Nations children being placed into foster care in Canada is nothing short of a crisis. Although Indigenous children make up only seven per cent of the population in Canada, they represent 48 per cent of all children in foster care. It is an astounding number until one examines these rates on a province-by-province basis. In Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Indigenous children represent a shocking 73 per cent, 85 per cent and 87 per cent of all children in care respectively, according to the most recent Statistics Canada report. However, Manitoba reports that their numbers of Indigenous children in care are increasing and currently stands at 90 per cent, which represents one of the highest rates in the world. This isn’t much of a surprise given that one newborn is taken away from his or her mother every day in Manitoba as a matter of course—the vast majority being Indigenous. They are not the only provinces implicated as Indigenous children in Ontario are 168 per cent more likely to be taken into care than white children.

MORE: Prisons are the ‘new residential schools’

the Indigenous Rights Movement in Canada Honored with Top Amnesty Intl Award

Published April 14, 2017

MONTREAL – Celebrated global music artist and activist Alicia Keys and the inspirational movement of Indigenous Peoples fighting for their rights in Canada have been honored with Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award for 2017, the human rights organization announced today.
The award will be officially presented at a ceremony in Montréal, Canada, on May 27.
Accepting the award recognizing the Indigenous rights movement of Canada will be six individuals representing the strength and diversity of the movement, which has bravely fought to end discrimination and ensure the safety and well-being of Indigenous families and communities. They are Cindy Blackstock, Delilah Saunders, Melanie Morrison, Senator Murray Sinclair, Melissa Mollen Dupuis and Widia Larivière.

Cindy Blackstock hopes that the award will help to focus global attention on the injustices still prevalent in Canada today.
As head of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, she led a decade-long legal battle against the underfunding of social services for First Nations children. In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a landmark ruling calling on the federal government to take immediate action to end its discriminatory practices.
However, the Canadian government has continued to drag its feet in fully complying with the ruling, meaning that First Nations children are still suffering discrimination.
“The conscience of the people is awakening to the Canadian government’s ongoing racial discrimination towards First Nations children and their families,” said Cindy Blackstock. “Now the question is: What are we going to do about it? Are we going to allow Canada to celebrate its 150th birthday while it bathes in racism, or will we speak up and demand the discrimination stops?”

READ: Alicia Keys and the Indigenous Rights Movement in Canada Honored with Top Amnesty Intl Award - Native News Online

The Rights of an Indian Child

The Rights of Indian Children ABA Article

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Kate Fort

The tribe I worked for decided to “bring the children home” through a focus on children in their community and ensuring resources to support that work. Many strategies were employed, depending on case specifics. Ensuring the tribal children were closer to home, both in proximity and culturally, was the goal. Some cases achieved the goal through reunification with the natural parents, others by placement within kinship care from stranger foster care. One of the primary practices was the transfer of cases to tribal court when the parents were amenable. In the end we brought all but one child back into tribal custody with an over 75 percent kinship placement rate.

AND 2017 ICWA OFFICERS (27 page pdf)

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Kate Fort

Print them out and use them PLEASE:
2017-Designated Agents for ICWA Service

Darker Agenda: Is the adoption industry looking to monetize our children or worse #goldwater

A Right-Wing Think Tank Is Trying to Bring Down the Indian Child Welfare Act. Why? | The Nation

Posted on April 6, 2017 by Matthew L.M. Fletcher

 

 

Here.

 “Accepting Goldwater’s premise that tribal citizenship is race-based undercuts all of federal Indian law.”

 —Kathryn Fort, an expert on ICWA

 ...A ruling in Goldwater’s favor, according to Fort and other legal experts, could undermine the authority of tribal courts, shutter tribal casinos, and open up reservations to privatization, something that could benefit oil and gas developers like the Koch brothers. 

Indian School Road

In Indian School Road, journalist Chris Benjamin tackles the controversial and tragic history of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, its predecessors, and its lasting effects, giving voice to multiple perspectives for the first time. Benjamin integrates research, interviews, and testimonies to guide readers through the varied experiences of students, principals, and teachers over the school’s nearly forty years of operation (1930–1967) and beyond. Exposing the raw wounds of Truth and Reconciliation as well as the struggle for an inclusive Mi’kmaw education system, Indian School Road is a comprehensive and compassionate narrative history of the school that uneducated hundreds of Aboriginal children.
Source: Indian School Road

Reconciliation Pole installed on UBC Vancouver campus

Reconciliation Pole at UBC nails the past to confront harsh reality of residential schools

NATIONAL

 

Reconciliation Pole at UBC nails the past to confront harsh reality of residential schools

One of the most distinctive parts of Reconciliation Pole are the copper nails. It has 68,000 of them pounded flat into the surface. Each one represents an indigenous child who died at residential schools across the country, said Haida artist James Hart, who was commissioned to design and carve the totem pole.  Click here to read more ...

Click here for complete national news coverage

Today's Book of Poetry: Burning In This Midnight Dream - Louise Bernice ...

Louise Bernice Halfe Sky Dancer has published a third volume of poetry, Burning In This Midnight Dream, and it is a burning indictment, a hushed prayer, an angry account.  Burning In This Midnight Dream articulates some of Canada's worst history from the inside looking out.  

These poems are an insider's nightmare memories of Canada's residential schools.

Halfe/Sky Dancer is a quiet poet of considerable reserve yet these poems rumble with thunderous revelations that reverberate off of the page, run up your arms and attack your guilty heart.

nipin nikamowin - summer song

I listened to outrageous laughter

there by the stone-carving shelter

where children painted and listened

to Alex Janvier.

Year after year

on the grounds of Blue Quills

I shared a tent with a friend and we told stories

of those lonely nights and how we preserved

our broken Cree.

I walked, ran, skipped

swore and sang the fourteen miles

from that school all the way to Saddle Lake.

We were told by our guide to meditate, be silent

in our walk. How could we after our voices

where lost in the classrooms of that school?

When I reached my home reserve

the Old Ones received me

and danced me on my blistered feet.

Water, tea, fruit, bannock and deer stew.

What food would heal this wound

bundled against my back?

A child still crying in those long school nights.

I know of a man who still carries his suitcase,

began at six, now sixty years, carrying

those little treasures of home

that was forever gone.

...

Burning In This Midnight Dream is a peat fire of poetry.  You don't see any flames on the surface but you know for certain that you are on hot footing and that all is ablaze underneath, smoldering and determined.

Halfe/Sky Dancer has included several family photos along with the text and this case is the exception that proves the rule about photos and poetry.  These photos are necessary.  The poems work just fine on their own, they are all strong, exude the strength of a brave survivor, but these photos make the stories blood, flesh and bone.  We see the young children in a new and different context, we see them as clearly as the "boy in the striped pajamas," the red-coated lost girl in the opening frames of Steven Spielberg's Shindler's List.  The fine and perfect faces in these photos are calling out through these poems.

Residential School Alumni

An uncle shot his wife

left her lying behind the house

with the rifle at her side.

Their four children peered

behind the curtains.

He was never able to look at anyone.

A lake held him as he froze, standing,

clutching his traps.

One son joined the marines

a mosquito killed him in Vietnam.

In a police chase another son

hit a slough and drowned in his grave.

Their little brother slept in a flaming

house with needles, spoons, heroin and cocaine.

My cousin was left alone.

I remember them.

...

Our morning read here in the Today's book of poetry offices was a little more sombre than usual but that's not to say we didn't enjoy the poems.  We certainly respected them.

Louise Bernice Halfe Sky Dancer wants the Truth and Reconciliation process to succeed.  Burning In This Midnight Dream is an honourable attempt to plow as much truth into the open as the open can bear.

SOURCE: Today's Book of Poetry: Burning In This Midnight Dream - Louise Bernice

Raising The Spirit: Cultural Connections Plans for Aboriginal Children | Intergenerational Trauma

In The News: Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families Act

Senator Heitkamp, Franken, Durbin Unveil Bill to Heal Trauma in Native Children

Senator Heitkamp will focus on how trauma impacts Native children and communities with her bill: the Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families ...

Read More »