GUEST POST: Levi EagleFeather Sr.

         Living life for me during my early years was much like walking through a very colorfull yet very surreal collage of everyone else’s bad or leftover dreams. Nothing made any sense!

 

        Hello, my name is Levi William EagleFeather Sr. I am a Lakota by heritage. Sicangu Lakota by birth. I am an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe of Rosebud South Dakota. I was adopted at the age of four but haven’t been since I changed my mind about it at the age of fifteen and got the hell away from the whole sordid mess. That was quite awhile ago. I’m 55 now.

 

         It wasn’t until the first summer I sundanced that those dreams faded and reality became mine. Clarity, like cool clear water to a thirsty parched throat or shade to a sun drenched overheated mind, soothed my weary war torn senses and  underfed spirit. At long last I had found sanctuary and once again re-entered the land of the human being or as we say in Lakota, Ikce Wicasa (common man). 

         Somewhere in Scott Momaday’s writing he wrote that telling a story takes words to describe words. Life is certainly that way.  Whether it’s yours or mine it’s story.  Being such it requires or demands words many words to bring forth a full sense of our reality. Words which describe the full spectrum of thought, emotion and feeling that make-up the scattered and fragmented and sometimes incomprehensible reality of our lives as American Indians. Especially in the aftermath of the wars and ongoing efforts of genocide against our people. Adoption is but one of those many efforts and the resulting ism’s are but its results. Results that force us into, well let’s just say that chameleons have nothing on us!  Nevertheless, for sanity’s sake for peace of mind these results are ours to overcome.

         The words of our overcoming, these words, my words, your words, our words describe just a portion of life's meaning, but it’s our life and it‘s important.  A living reality of experience, thought, feeling and emotion. No two experiences ever exactly alike. No two thoughts, feelings or emotions ever exactly the same, at the same time, or about the same thing. Always ongoing ever-changing, growing, metamorphisizing neither negative or positive necessarily, but always changing describing the ever shifting ever adapting overcoming that is life and living. That part of life and living that in its many forms and shapes is you and me, the American Indian.

         In looking back, when all is said and done life has been pretty full for me, as it should be. I am, for the most part most of the time, a happy man and enjoy living come what may. Although, it hasn’t always been this way. Time and distance have allowed my spirit the space needed to recover somewhat so the light of day no longer sears the consciousness of my soul. I think, an experience of surviving hell and high water and coming out on the other side does that to a person. Living through it can and often does make us creatures of a darker understanding of life and living. Sometimes morphing us into a breed of walking dead, soul dead. Adoption can be like that, hell and high water, for some. It was for me and my sibs.

         I realize throughout it all some don’t do so well. Adapt and overcome I mean. Seems that some get burned pretty bad and take on lots of water and experience lots of hurting for many years after. I think, myself, I just became hell. Unfortunately, for those associated with me or those who experienced me during my early days will attest that that was the reality of being too close or trying getting to know me. There was much scorched earth left in the wake of my struggling. Struggling to survive those early years on my own alone.

         Understanding the reality of all of this. Who, what and why I was and am has taken many years to gather and digest.

One thing good about us though is that we are just another form of nature. Being such, raw nature, we are energy. Raw energy and we seek to flow. In flowing we seek our own level much  like water running to the sea. Sometimes we rage sometimes we flood cutting our way through the rock and the barriers that obstruct our knowing and our understanding. Our journey our destiny if you will becomes cluttered with the debris of our raging and flooding. Disrupted journey’s disrupted destiny’s on the way to experience the ebb and flow of natural being.

This is the first in a series. Words, just words strung together to convey meaning and understanding to a reality that wasn’t supposed to exist, but does. It’s my story.

 

Levi lives in Germany and will be contributing to this blog.

Author Susan Devan Harness - on Lost Birds/adoptees!

The Land of Gazillion Adoptees Podcast Conversation with Susan Harness, author of Mixing Cultural Identities through Transracial Adoption: Outcomes of the Indian Adoption Project by kostvollmers I have known Susan since 2008 when we gave a talk on Stolen Generations in Wisconsin. She is brilliant, her book is excellent and this podcast about American Indian Adoptees is so important  - please click on headline and listen and share with other adoptees and parents of adoptees ... Trace AND: this posted today _ May 3, 2012: Sandy White Hawk’s Response to Susan Harness by kostvollmers

Adoption Scandal in Spain investigated

Spain Opens Court Inquiry on Newborn Abductions

By RAPHAEL MINDER

Published: April 12, 2012 New York TimesNew York TimesTop of Form

Bottom of Form

MADRID — An 87-year-old Spanish nun became the first suspect to appear in court Thursday as part of an investigation into at least 1,500 allegations that newborns were abducted and then given or sold for adoption over four decades.

The nun, Sister María Gómez Valbuena, used her right to remain silent before the judge. She then made her way from the Madrid courtroom to a waiting car amid a crowd of journalists and onlookers, some of whom jeered and shouted abuse at her.
Sister Gómez Valbuena was subpoenaed last month after being accused by María Luisa Torres of abducting her baby daughter, born in a Madrid clinic in 1982. Ms. Torres was reunited with her daughter Pilar last summer, after the start of a nationwide campaign to help parents find their abducted children, using DNA testing to confirm parentage.
While the nun refused to testify in court, she issued a statement later in the evening denying any wrongdoing and saying that she found "repugnant'" the idea that a mother could be separated from her baby. She said that she had spent her long life helping the most needy in a disinterested manner, in accordance with her profound religious beliefs.
The associations that have spearheaded the campaign met Thursday with Spain’s ministers for the interior, justice and health, as well as the attorney general, to seek stronger government support for their crusade and to push for a more speedy judicial handling of the cases.
While the associations have complained about foot-dragging by Spain’s judiciary, the attorney general and investigators have underlined the difficulty of confirming startling allegations that have resurfaced several decades after the events and that have involved several people who have since died.
The baby-snatching practices supposedly started in the 1950s under the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco and are believed to have continued until about 1990, 15 years after Franco’s death.
The investigations have also proved sensitive because many of the cases have at least indirectly involved the Roman Catholic Church, since its nuns commonly worked in maternity wards or orphanages.
Antonio Barroso, president of Anadir, an association representing parents searching for missing children, described the meeting Thursday with the ministers as “clearly positive.” The ministers agreed to take several measures to help with the investigations, including devoting more staff to such inquiries as well as setting up a national archive to help coordinate and contrast the different data.
“We have wasted a lot of time, but things should speed up now,” Mr. Barroso said. “While it’s too early to claim any victory, it’s important to have strong government support.”
Anadir also says that Spain was a hub for gangs trafficking snatched babies, with many of the newborns then sold into adoption overseas. Such trafficking dwindled after 1987, it says, when tighter legislation on adoption procedures came into force in Spain.
Meanwhile, some judges across Spain have recently ordered exhumations from cemeteries to confirm whether infants had in fact been buried there. These exhumations have been linked to cases filed by mothers who claim that their newborns were taken away from them immediately after giving birth — officially to undergo further medical checks — and that they were then told that the infant had died.
Ms. Torres recently told the judge investigating her case that she had attempted to get her baby back from Sister Gómez Valbuena, who worked in the maternity ward of the Madrid clinic where she gave birth. But according to Ms. Torres, the nun instead threatened to denounce her for adultery because Pilar was fathered by a man whom she met shortly after separating from her husband.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/world/europe/spain-opens-court-inquiry-on-newborn-abductions.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

We know that Canada, Australia and Ireland had inquiries into the practices of Catholics and other churches who sold babies for profit. Spain is the latest on the list... Trace

WA #NDN tribe gain full control on Child Welfare matters

Port Gamble S'Klallam Obtain Full Control Over Child Welfare Matters

Posted on March 29, 2012

After a decade-long effort in conjunction with the federal and state departments of Health and Human Services, the state Attorney General's Office, and tribal lawyers, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe has achieved a landmark goal -- complete control over the welfare of their own children. The 1,000-member Tribe in western Washington became the first in the nation to assume all control of guardianships, foster care, and adoptions for their children. Under an agreement with the federal government, the Tribe has disengaged the oversight by DSHS and is now solely responsible for its child-welfare cases.
The contemporary practice of removing Native American children from reservations in child-welfare cases has been likened to the infamous boarding-school era, when the federal government forcibly placed Native children in state or religious institutions to “assimilate” them into “American” culture.
To break away from this system, Port Gamble S'Klallam's children and families coordinator Jolene George has spent years working with DSHS to draft policies on how they would handle child-welfare protocols, which are listed under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act. "We will no longer lose our children," George said. "We didn't do this with a grant. We put our efforts, our money and whatever we could to do this."
Francine Swift, a member of the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribal Council, said it's vital to have children stay on the reservation so they don't forget their ancestry and traditions. She said that before the Indian Child Welfare Act, children were adopted out and lost complete contact with their relatives, ancestors, and culture. "We never want to see our kids go through this again," Swift said.

 

http://www.nativelegalupdate.com/admin/trackback/274803

 

 

This is one excellent example of tribes in action - and it is happening in more states! Happy Dance!

Trace

How many children were adopted in 2000 and 2001? STATiSTiCS

It's important to know the most recent statistics on adoption; here is the most recent report (2004)...

The Children’s Bureau and its Child Welfare Information Gateway (Information Gateway) are grateful to the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) for its important work in verifying adoption information from courts, bureaus of vital records, Native American Tribes, and private adoption agencies.

The purpose of this ADOPTION report is to estimate the number of children adopted in each of the States for 2000 and 2001 and to use these numbers to estimate the composition and trends of all adoptions in the United States.
Key findings are summarized below:

• In 2000 and 2001, about 127,000 children were adopted annually in the United States. Since 1987, the number of adoptions annually has remained relatively constant, ranging from 118,000 to 127,000.
• The source of adoptions is no longer dominated by kinship adoptions and private agency adoptions. Public agency and intercountry adoptions now account for more than half of all adoptions.
• Adoptions through publicly funded child welfare agencies accounted for two-fifths of all adoptions. More than 50,000 public agency adoptions in each year (2000 and 2001) accounted for about 40 percent of adoptions, up from 18 percent in 1992 for those 36 States that reported public agency adoptions in 1992 (Flango & Flango, 1995).
• Intercountry adoptions accounted for more than 15 percent of all adoptions. Intercountry adoptions increased from 5 percent to 15 percent of adoptions in the United States between 1992 and 2001 (U.S. Department of State, n.d.).
• The other two-fifths of adoptions are primarily private agency, kinship, or tribal adoptions. With the available data, it is not possible to separate figures within this group, although the percentages of all adoptions in that group as a whole have decreased. In 1992, for example, stepparent adoptions (a form of kinship adoption) alone accounted for two-fifths (42 percent) of all adoptions.

No one agency is charged with collecting data on adoptions. The National Center for State Courts’ (NCSC’s) Court Statistics Project collects data by calendar year (which most States use) and State fiscal years for the total number of adoptions processed  through courts. NCSC’s figures are incomplete, however, for several reasons. Some parents who adopt in foreign countries choose not to file in a U.S. court. While all domestic adoptions are finalized in U.S. courts, adoptions are such a small percentage of court caseloads that they are sometimes included in a larger category, such as “other civil petitions,” and cannot be separated from other civil petitions.

Three other sources of adoption information provide numbers of adoptions by type: the Federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), the State Department, and the Office of Immigration Statistics within the Department of Homeland Security. AFCARS provides data on adoptions through public agencies, and the State Department and the Office of Immigration Statistics provide the number of visas issued for intercountry adoption. There is no overlap between the AFCARS data and the data provided by the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security. Other data sources are inconsistent in terms of reporting period and population reported and are not mutually exclusive.  The number of adoptions in the third category—private agency, kinship, or tribal—can be approximated by subtracting the AFCARS and intercountry adoption numbers from the total adoptions reported by courts. The result is an approximation, but any difference due to gaps and overlap among counts from the three types is probably only slight.
To access a copy of these Highlights, go to www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_adoptedhighlights.cfm.
This material may be freely reproduced and distributed. However, when doing so, please credit Child Welfare Information Gateway. Available online at www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_adopted/index.cfm.

CITATION: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2004). How many children were adopted in 2000 and 2001? Washington, DC: Child Welfare Information Gateway.

Adoption by Type

Three sources of adoption information provide numbers of adoptions by type: the Federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), the State Department, and the Office of Immigration Statistics within the Department of Homeland Security.
AFCARS reported 54,627 adoptions in the United States during fiscal year 2000 and 50,136 adoptions in fiscal year 2001.

1992

PUBLIC: 18%

INTERCOUNTRY: 5%

PRIVATE, INDEPENDENT, KINSHIP AND TRIBAL: 77%

2001

PUBLIC: 39%

INTERCOUNTRY: 15%

PRIVATE, INDEPENDENT, KINSHIP AND TRIBAL: 46%

This number includes private agency, independent, and tribal adoptions with public agency involvement that were reported to AFCARS.

Adoption information in AFCARS is updated continually based on new reports submitted by the States. The data in this report were those available on May 15, 2003. In Illinois, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Arizona, in both 2000 and 2001, the public agency adoptions comprised the largest share of all adoptions. More than half of all adoptions in these States were public agency adoptions. Of all States, Alabama and Wyoming had the smallest percentage of public agency adoptions.
More stats available online at www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_adopted/index.cfm.

[I was asked recently how many children are adopted each year...These statistics tell us plenty...Trace]

Coming Home to Self: Interview with Nancy Verrier

Read this interview with the brilliant author of "Primal Wound" Nancy Verrier. She writes about “The Three A’s” for adoptees which are awareness, authenticity, and accountability in her second book "Coming Home to Self."

Here is the link to the interview in Adoption Mosaic.

Verrier's work helped me so much as I was writing my adoptee memoir "One Small Sacrifice." Writers do read much more than they write! It seems I had to release myself out of a fog and find the light. All my issues as an adoptee had to be viewed and witnessed all over again, childhood to present, victim to survivor.

Verrier said in this recent interview," One of the things people need to recognize is that there is no biological mirroring for the adopted child. They don’t see physical and personality traits reflected in the relatives around them. (These are inherent genetic traits; they’re not things you just pick up from living around people.) People who are born into biological families and stay in them take biological mirroring for granted. But this isn’t present in an adoptive family. So the adoptee is always trying to figure out how to be in that family and the family is trying to figure out how to be around that child."

True words for the thousands of us adoptees who were transracially-adopted and assimilated via adoption..... Trace

It's Complicated, Baby

All across America, people still prefer to adopt babies. Millions of Americans adopted babies and some of us were adopted as babies. I’m guessing it’s because tiny babies don’t show their feelings; baby screams sound just like cries.  This may also explain why so many children languish in foster care: they’re just too old. Older kids do exhibit fear, uneasiness or apprehension; some kids even act like babies.

            Adopting babies is easier. Adoptive parents can hope their new baby will adjust and bond favorably by the time baby will talk. Some adopters believe they saved us as babies since our mother was a slut or wretched teenager, or maybe a sick woman on an Indian reservation or from a trashy tenement. Maybe we're Third World babies from an over-populated Chinese, Russian or African orphanage. Sometimes adopters simply ignore our culture and history, like it doesn’t exist. Some of my friends heard words like “dirty savages and filthy heathens.”

            Adopters might hope to mold “orphan babies” into something they want. They'll try loving us first. Yet we know love doesn’t cure everything. Love can’t erase genetics or ancestral memory. If love doesn't work, the adopters might try bullying us or drugging us into submission until we show them some gratitude.

            An even more complicated reality exists, a much bigger untold desperate story. 

            Adoptable babies are scooped up quick, especially if they are white and healthy and from America. You can even order one, but it will cost you thousands of dollars.

            If that doesn’t work, and if you can afford it, you can always buy a surrogate mother; these women widely advertise now. She’ll carry and deliver your baby for a price. Some sisters will do this for an infertile sibling.

            Then there’s a huge “underground market,” where they still kidnap and sell babies. Baby peddlers, some who practice law, are out there making money, too. Some abducted babies were made child sex slaves. Guatemala is now under investigation for illegal baby peddling. Someone made a ton of money on babies!

            A newer adoption scam is happening online – when a woman fakes a pregnancy, offers her unborn baby as bait, then steals the unsuspecting couple’s money (thousands of dollars) using the internet as a trap.

            There are tragic stories about sick women or couples who will kill a pregnant woman just to take her baby. This happened in Massachusetts recently.

            There are more stories about babies being dumped (abandoned) all across America. One mother dumped three babies in California (two were saved but one died from exposure). In New York, three sisters were arrested for helping one sister dump her newborn girl in the trash, causing the baby to die.

            Some mothers are illegal immigrants and don’t want their new baby. They'll do their child a favor by dumping them off at a firehouse. Those adoptees rarely find their mothers, since birth records won’t exist. There is a slim chance their mother will seek them out for a reunion since they are considered felons and criminals in most states.

            For the millions of us who have been handed over, dumped, or exchanged (or sold, or taken) for a hundred years – has anyone dared to ask how we felt at the exchange? 

            Apparently we are studied, not consulted.

            Bear in mind, babies didn’t create this billion dollar adoption industry or cause infertility. Babies can't solve social issues but we're sold as one solution. Babies can't cure the pain in women who can’t conceive. Babies didn’t create poverty. Some would say certain babies arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time. We were an inconvenience, or a sin, or a mistake.

            How will we ever fix this? It's complicated, baby!