Kindness of Strangers

Welcome to 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days, hosted by Portrait of an Adoption. This series will feature guest posts by people with widely varying adoption experiences and perspectives.

By Suzanne Gilbert

excerpt:

...Years later I would learn that his son, my half-brother, applied to and attended Princeton University as a native American, drawing on our Cherokee paternal great grandmother having grown up on the reservation in Oklahoma. We are also of slight Iroquois descent.
Among other provisions, the ICWA returns to Indian adoptees access to their original birth certificates with their first parents’ names on them. Despite that, I was imperiously scolded by someone who answered the phone at the Indian Museum in Manhattan that I had no right to search because I, apparently as an infant, had “legally agreed to protect” my first mother’s confidentiality.
After that, another adoptee, adoption reform activist Barbara Cohen, put me in touch with the attorney who helped draft the ICWA. He in turn put me in touch with a tribal historian on the Iroquois reservation in upstate New York.

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