Leland
Morrill was estranged from his Navajo lineage for twenty years. Today,
as an author, advocate, and speaker, Morrill shares the unique
perspective of how adoption is viewed by Native American family and
culture, through the eyes of an adult adoptee.
Leland
Morrill was born in 1966, on sovereign land, in the Navajo Nation,
within the state of Arizona. He was not issued a birth certificate, and
does not know the exact date of his birth. His young, unwed mother was
his sole caretaker for the first few years of his life, and according to
Leland, this wasn’t unusual in Native American culture.
“Marriage
is a Christian concept, not Native,” said Morrill. “Many people from my
parent’s generation weren’t married. It’s a very matriarchal society.
When you’re born, you take on your mother’s last name, you go to your
mother’s family, and the women decide whether the men stay around after
the children are born. That’s the way it was. ”
When
Leland was two years old, his mother suffered a fatal head injury after
flipping her car on a bridge in Albuquerque New Mexico. It was
September 1968; Leland was two years old.
“My
brother and I went to St. Anthony’s orphanage, where they figured out
that we were Navajo, and took us back to the reservation to stay with my
grandmother. In our culture, once your mother dies, your next
caretakers are your aunts and grandmothers. They are considered your
mothers,” said Morrill.
Less
than a year after being placed in the care of his grandmother, Leland
was taken to the Indian Health Services Hospital for a minor burn on his
foot. After Leland was treated, he was taken to another hospital in
Gallup, New Mexico, where the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to
investigate.
“They
saw poor people, Indians. My grandmother was a sheepherder, living on
an Indian reservation without electricity,” Morrill said. “My relatives
couldn’t speak English, so they said— ‘we don’t know if these people are
your relatives or not, so we are going to take you.’”
Leland
was immediately removed from his home and placed with an adoptive
couple looking for Native American children to foster and adopt. The day
after he was adopted, the family moved to Ontario, Canada, severing all
ties Leland had to his biological, Native American family.
Not uncommon for the times, before 1978, when Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act,
a very high number of Indian children were removed from their homes by
public and private agencies and placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive
homes or institutions. Leland, who was part of the Amicus Group that
went to DC to attend the argument on behalf of Dusten Brown and the
Cherokee Nation in the “Baby Veronica” adoption case,
explained that there are new laws and bills being passed currently to
help further protect biological families. One bill in particular, the Oklahoma Truth In Adoption Act (HB 1118),
urges judges to consider the biological family members first before
allowing a child to be placed with non-related adoptive parents by an
adoption agency.
“From
a human trafficking point of view, I was trafficked,” said Morrill.
“Every time they adopted a child, they went to another country. They
adopted seven more children when we got to Canada, and then we moved
right after that. They separated us from our cultures.”
“They
trained us within the Mormon ideology; they thought they were saving
us. They thought they were doing the right thing, and from that
perspective they were good people. But from a Native American
perspective—they were not.”
Leland
Morrill returned to his mother’s clan, the Many Goats Clan, for the
first time in 1989, to be greeted with open arms by his grandmother and
his cousins. “I was a little freaked out, like—wow! this is what I would
have been raised like.”
“I
tell Native American adoptees like myself—yes, this is what happened to
you. You were trafficked. But you have to get past that. Consider
yourselves different, because you were forced to assimilate into a
different culture. But use that assimilation in your favor—whatever
education or opportunities were presented to you that others on the
reservation didn’t have, you can come back and use them to help your
people.”
For more about Leland’s story, read: Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
