Propaganda, more money chanelled to adoption via #OXYGEN Channel

(2012) Warning: EXTREME ANGER and SWEAR WORDS

By Trace Hentz

First watch their video and read this:
http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/964841/oxygen-media-set-to-premiere-im-having-their-baby

"Oxygen's new series "I'm Having Their Baby" provides viewers with a look at the adoption experience by chronicling birth mothers as they face the decision whether or not to place their children with another family."

WTF?

NOW: I have a better show idea - go interview the doctors who diagnose the adoptees (and some mothers) with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - or adoptees stuck in mental hospitals - or tell the stories of abusive adoptive homes or children languishing in foster care  - or the struggle to keep families intact in poverty-stricken areas - but NOT THIS.
It would be like torture to watch a woman give up her baby - what kind of idiot would think up something so perverse? What planet are we living on here, folks? What century is this?
Why are their unplanned pregnancies in this modern age? How about having a member of your family raise your child if you can't???
Didn't the media get the message yet? Adoption hurts people and even kills people! Adoptees and some birth moms commit suicide! Hasn't OXYGEN done any research?

Instead OXYGEN chooses to glamourize it - and f'cking plug these celebrity adopters again and again:

"Celebrity adoptions"

"In recent years, a number of prominent celebrities have have adopted children through private domestic adoption and international adoption. Though Angelina Jolie may be the first one to come to mind, she's certainly not alone. Sandra Bullock, Kristin Davis, Edie Falco, Joely Fisher, Katherine Heigl, Hugh Jackman, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman (and Tom Cruise), Madonna, Ewan McGregor, Denise Richards, Meg Ryan, Charlize Theron and many more celebrities are adoptive parents.

If celebrities adopt, then it must be OK, right?
THIS is how they promote selling a baby to the highest bidder?

They choose the word "BIRTHMOTHER" when most of us in the blog world call them mothers and first mothers.  Again, OXYGEN is not paying attention!

"Adoption from the birth mother's view"

We often see stories of adoption from the point of view of the adoptive parents or the adoptees, but there's a third party to every adoption -- the birth mother.

Oxygen Media recently announced the premiere of its newest docu-series I'm Having Their Baby on Monday, July 23, at 11PM ET/PT. The series aims to provide viewers with a sneak peek into the adoption process by capturing the often untold stories of birth mothers as each one is faced with the difficult decision to place her baby for adoption.
Each hour-long episode chronicles the heart-wrenching, powerful stories of two birth mothers struggling with unplanned pregnancies as they decide whether to place their babies in the hands of another family.

The commodification of infants means more babies for sale and more money, money, money.....

I expect some of you will totally disagree with me.

EMAIL ME: laratrace@outlook.com

Enrollment issues affecting ICWA children

Archival Photo

Convincing me courts are doing their best to protect Indian Children today - it's just not happening.
The amount of urban Indians who are enrolled or not is part of the problem and a real issue here.
Here is a case from Michigan where the mother said her children were Delaware and entitled to protections under the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Allowing time for tribes to respond is a big issue since many tribes have few or overworked enrollment officers who can't always get historical information to enroll their members and/or their children who live off rez. If tribes did manage enrollment at birth, it would certainly help.

http://turtletalk.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/20120628_c304669_68_304669-opn.pdf

Making more Native children adoptees is not a solution. Helping American Indian families stay together is federal law!

Book Review: One Small Sacrifice

Review: One Small Sacrifice

By Cris Carl

Trace A. DeMeyer’s most recent book, “One Small Sacrifice,” expresses the experience of adoption in a well-researched and brutally painful light.  Focusing primarily on the travesties of U.S. adoption policies relating to American Indian families and children, DeMeyer carefully illustrates the damage done to a “tribe” of lost children.  These children often referred to by some tribal peoples as “Lost Birds,” suffer more than potential neglect and abuse.  Even in the most loving and well-intentioned adoptive families the sense of lost identity and abandonment can and has created generations of damaged Indian children, according to DeMeyer.

DeMeyer states that the U.S is one of the world’s biggest adopters, with 20,000 children adopted from around the world in 2002 alone.  Adoption rarely makes headlines, but on February 4, 2010, 10 Baptist congregants from Idaho attempted to steal 33 Haitian children. According to the New York Times the children were held in intolerable conditions, they had no relevant paperwork, and some continued to cry that they had parents until Haitian authorities captured the kidnappers.  The practice of removing non-white children, placing them with white American families has a long and well-established history.

Stealing American Indian children has been an accepted and legal practice in the U.S. since the early 1800’s.  DeMeyer notes in her book that congress passed the “Civilization Fund Act” in 1819, the first in a series of laws and acts intended to assimilate American Indian people’s and undermine tribal customs.  The act “authorized grants to private agencies, primarily churches, to establish programs to ‘civilize the Indian,’” states DeMeyer.

DeMeyer goes on to note the advent of the “large, militarist boarding schools or institutions where Indian children were placed involuntarily  and forced to abandoned their beliefs, customs, and traditions.”  The schools, which were established by the U.S. government and private agencies, lasted well into the 1980’s before they were shut down.  “Severe punishment, in the form of beatings, being chained and shackled, bound hand and foot and locked in closets was not uncommon,” said DeMeyer.  Remember, we’re talking about children here.

DeMeyer speaks often of the government policy known as the Indian Adoption Project, which in the 1950’s used pubic and private agencies to remove and place hundreds of Indian children into non-Indian homes.  The practice lasted until 1978 with the creation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.  “By 1900, after decades of forced removal of Indian children from their families and communities, and the stripping of their culture from them, the natural child protection system that once flourished in every tribal community began to break down,” as DeMeyer quotes Terry Cross.

While DeMeyer carefully spells out elements of genocidal government policies that have been destructive to American Indian culture for hundreds of years, far more powerfully, she tells her own story.  At times, reading One Small Sacrifice, I felt I was watching a disaster in the making. 

Painfully, I sensed what was coming with the foreboding that there was nothing I could do but be a witness. 

However, I also found a far-reaching underlying psychology that can be applied to a wide-range of identity and trauma issues – particularly relating to abandonment. 

One Small Sacrifice is a must-read for anyone dealing with not only the aforementioned issues, but for clinicians who wish to look deeper into adoption’s effects.

Cris Carl, (c)2010, All Rights Reserved

Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers...

Note from Trace:
This article is from a lawfirm wesbite - in fact there are special lawyers if you want to return your defective adoptee, special lawyers when you adopt a baby overseas, and now lawyers who will specialize in keeping adoptees "home" in the USA.   Branching out, are we?  So let me get this straight -- Americans pay to adopt you, then forget to pay for a special lawyer to get you citizenship? I wonder if there are lawyers to sue the adopters for forgetting? What about the countries who let their babies leave - do they have lawyers for the babysellers?  In this adoption racket, lawyers just follow the money...

http://www.marcschifanelli.com/blog/2012/06/can-adoptees-in-us-face-deportation.shtml

Can adoptees in U.S. face deportation?

On behalf of Schifanelli & Associates, LLC posted in Deportation on Friday, June 8, 2012

In late May, a Utah woman faced deportation proceedings even though she was adopted as a baby into the United States. The reason? Her mother died before she could finish the adoption paperwork.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) discovered the woman's undocumented status when she was charged with, and pled guilty to, forgery for falsifying checks.
Unfortunately, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial court's decision that the woman could be deported.

Older Adoptees Falling Through the Cracks
There is a law in place to prevent this exact situation from happening. The 2000 law grants automatic citizenship to children adopted from other countries as long as they were younger than 18 years of age on February 27, 2001. Yet, older adoptees remain legal residents. This means that, like other permanent residents, they can be deported for committing a crime of moral turpitude or an aggravated felony.
While this is a rare situation, the fact that it happens at all is alarming. Many of these adoptees do not know they are not citizens until they face deportation to countries some of them have never even visited since their adoptions.
A recent article in Multi-American, a Southern California Public Radio website, highlights similar cases:

• A 29-year-old El Salvador-born adoptee, adopted by U.S. parents at six months of age, was sent back to El Salvador. He did not speak Spanish.
• A 50-year-old Japanese-born adoptee, adopted by a Filipino American and Mexican American when one year old, was sent back to Japan. "I grew up thinking I was half Filipino and half Mexican. They could send me to Mexico and I would get by. I can speak a little Spanish. But Japan?" he asked.
• A 26-year-old Brazilian-born adoptee was deported to Brazil where he was murdered.

These are only a few of the tragic cases of adopted U.S. children who face deportation back to countries where they know very few, if any, people. If you find yourself in this situation or face deportation for any other reason, speak with an experienced immigration lawyer to learn what options you have for staying home, in the United States.

Source: Multi-American, "How does an adoptee get deported? More easily than one might think," Leslie Berestein Rojas, May 29, 2012.

60s Scoop update



Marcia Brown, a key plaintiff in the class-action suit, says she won’t give up. “The law process is slow but we will use this time to get the truth of the Sixties Scoop out to people,” she said from Kirkland Lake.

MATHEW HODGINS/for the Toronto Star file photo

Ontario native class-action suit stays alive

Link: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1210395--ontario-native-class-action-suit-stays-alive

Lawyers acting on behalf of aboriginal children who lost their families and culture during what’s known as the “Sixties Scoop” in Ontario have won the right to keep fighting for their class-action suit.

Keeping this story in the news is IMPORTANT! Trace

Adoption Learning and Survival: Loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors...

This post "Adoption Learning and Survival" and this quote below will resonate with adoptees - please read Von's excellent blog.

http://eagoodlife.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/adoption-learning-and-survival/

"Adoptees suffer many ambiguities in adoption - the loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors, identity, medical history,birth place, time and date, rights as a citizen, legitimacy and often country, culture, language, food, religion and those subtle things which help us identify with our motherland (the sights, sounds, smells, animals, birds and geology, the lie of the land)...."

Adoption Learning and Survival.

This entry was posted on June 9, 2012, in adopters, adoption, ethics, Food for Thought, life, mothers, pathology of adoption, the adopted life, Uncategorized and tagged adoptees, adopters, adoption, authenticity, childhood, life, pathologyofadoption, primal wound. 7 Comments

Over at my old blog Once Was Von: Surviving, Learning, Laughing. Those of us who struggle for existence, who fight for our place at the table and find every battle is hard-won often manage to use that experience in a productive way, it gives us insight and if we’re lucky, empathy and compassion. Those things are irreplaceable in what some would call ‘the conduct of human affairs’ but I call living. Those opportunities don’t come to all: trauma, pain, suffering, loss are potential human experiences but are not visited on all, as they are on most adoptees. Like oysters we can produce pearls of wisdom, of understanding and develop an ability to empathise with other adoptees which is beyond price. No-one ‘gets it’ like another adoptee even when they’re not reading off the same page
And of course as we discovered this week over at the Facebook Group Occupy Adoption, sometimes Not!

It all began with a quote from adopter and psychologist Dr Whitten. This quote – “It’s important to keep in mind that adoption is not abnormal, nor should discussions about it be stressful for adoptive parents.” Really the point was about the ‘normality’ of adoption and the way in which many involved in Big Adoption like to push the idea that adoption is normal, a valid way to build a family; that adoptees are just like any other kids in families and there is nothing for adopters or prospective adopters or hoping to adopters, the AP/PAP/HAP’s, to be worried or concerned about! To promote those ideas is misleading, inaccurate and mischievous.

Here’s why. There is nothing normal about a child being removed from a mother, being abandoned by a mother or being given for adoption by a mother. Big Adoption has worked for decades on making it seem normal, accepted and a good way to build a family. It appears that this view is now so accepted that those in certain forums are castigated for supporting women who wish to raise their babies following an unplanned pregnancy! Now that is weird! In some circles it seems to have become more important to keep the adoption market supplied with babies than it is to preserve families, support biological connections and ensure that children know their identities and histories and don’t suffer loss and trauma!

I’ve had a few messages and queries lately about Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss which I mention anywhere and everywhere, because I believe it is an essential piece of reading for anyone who has anything to do with adoption in any way. For those involved in therapies, counselling or working with adoptees and mothers, the concept of ambiguous loss makes sense of what has happened and what needs to happen. Loss, as we keep being informed by the ‘experts’ can be healed, and so it can with skilled help and work. Ambiguous loss on the other hand, which is present in mothers and adoptees cannot be healed, has no closure, but can be dealt with, lived with and managed productively if it is recognised and the tools to handle it used effectively.

We see time and time again, mothers going round in circles, over and over their decision, their loss and their tragedy when they chose adoption or were forced to choose adoption. There are many blogs in which the same story is told, retold endlessly, without resolution, because ambiguous loss has not be acknowledged or accepted and guilt, pain and regret take the upper hand. These mothers and many others like them, never appear to fully get on with their lives, some of them appear not to want to, because there is a benefit in retelling the story over and over and the concentration on this episode in their lives is tragic and deeply saddening. Those adoptees who tell us they found a mother in reunion who had discovered  a way to get on with her life were gladdened, relieved and often found reunion went more smoothly and was more lasting. When ambiguous loss is dealt with it provides a much sounder base for a reunion which has some chance of enduring, proving of benefit to all and establishing family connections that were broken.

For adoptees, there is much ambiguous loss in adoption. Loss also, but it is not enough just to deal with the losses. We need to front up to that which is ambiguous, has no resolution but often it appears is helped by the acknowledgement that ambiguity exists. For instance in other situations where a loved family member is missing those remaining are helped by recognising that their loved one may be dead and never return but at the same time holding the thought that there still may be hope that one day there may be a change of some sort. Those relatives of victims of 9/11 dealt with the ambiguity of not having a body to bury by having a funeral or ceremony in which an object symbolic of the person was buried or cremated. Individual rituals were invented which had meaning for the families and we can take a lesson from that in adoption.

Our mothers send us off into an unknown world with strangers and usually have no knowledge of how we are treated, how we survived of if we did survive. They mourn with no body to view, no grave to visit or information to calm or comfort them. It is too big an ask and is often no better dealt with today than it was in other eras of adoption, sometimes it’s worse and even less humane.
Adoptees suffer many ambiguities in adoption – the loss of mother, father, family, history, ancestors, identity, medical history,birth place, time and date, rights as a citizen, legitimacy and often country, culture, language, food, religion and those subtle things which help us identify with our motherland (the sights, sounds, smells, animals, birds and geology, the lie of the land). Many of us have no way of discovering that information and it is lost, as we are lost, in the limboland that is adoption. We never know if it will be possible to recover that information; those who have little reason to hope, cling to any vestige of optimism, knowing in their hearts that the chances are so slight as to be a miracle if it were to happen. That is not curiosity about our beginnings, as non-adoptees would have us believe and convince themselves and others, because it is safer, easier and less threatening. That is ambiguous loss asserting itself and wanting to be dealt with.

With the Indian Adoption Projects, they had a goal - assimilation. Removing us from our families would ultimately remove our culture and language. But adoption never erases our blood... Trace

Kansas adoptees are in luck!

Paula Alwin embraces her son, David Hattaway of Shawnee, who recently tracked her down -- 45 years after she gave him up for adoption. Alwin, who lives in Gatesville, Texas, has visited Hattaway and his family twice during the past few weeks, and he paid her a surprise Mother’s Day visit in Texas. See link: happy reunion

Kansas agencies aid in searches

For Kansas-born adult adoptees wishing to learn a birth parent’s identity and, perhaps, establish contact, the journey begins at the state’s Office of Vital Statistics.
To obtain a pre-adoption birth certificate, adoptees 18 and older can go to www.kdheks.gov/vital, click on the “adoption” link, then click “Obtaining a Before Adoption Birth Certificate.”
The next step is the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which can be contacted online at www.srs.ks.gov. To obtain a form titled Adult Adoptee Searching for Birth Parents, click on the “Services” tab, click “Adoption Services,” then click the “Children and Family Services” link. That will open a page allowing the user to select “Adoption Records and Search,” which leads to online forms for adult adoptees seeking birth parents or siblings. A form for birth parents requesting contact with adult adoptees is also available.
Patricia Long, an SRS program administrator, said her office processes the forms, searches for adoption records and provides them to the adult adoptees requesting them. The agency also will conduct free searches for birth parents and for adult birth siblings the adoptee had an established relationship with prior to the adoption.
With approval of the birth parents and siblings, the agency also will provide current contact information to the adoptee. It also facilitates reunions when requested.

Read this happy reunion story: http://www.shawneedispatch.com/news/2012/jun/05/search-birth-mother-has-happy-ending/

Supreme Court won't hear case

archival photo

Supreme Court rejects adoption case involving Cherokee Nation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday (May 21) declined to hear an unusual adoption case from Utah involving the Cherokee Nation and the question of when a person becomes an Indian.

Without comment, the high court let stand a decision by the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a child's natural mother could not regain her parental rights by claiming that the child she gave up for adoption was an Indian who was subject to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act.
The mother of the child terminated her parental rights in court the day after the child was born in 2007. However, a month after the adoption was finalized in 2008, the mother filed a federal court petition seeking to nullify her voluntary termination of parental rights because the Indian Child Welfare Act required a 10-day waiting period in cases involving American Indian children.
The Cherokee Nation intervened for the mother, arguing that because the child's ancestors could be traced to the original tribal rolls, the child was automatically given temporary tribal citizenship at birth and that the Indian Child Welfare Act prohibited the mother from terminating her parental rights within 10 days.
A federal judge agreed. But the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the question wasn't the Cherokee Nation's citizenship laws, but the federal law. The court said the law applied only to children eligible for tribal membership because their parent was a member and the child's mother was not a Cherokee citizen.
Utah attorney James B. Hanks, who represented the couple that adopted the child, said in an email response on Monday that the Supreme Court decision on Monday ended the case.
The Cherokee Nation declined comment on Monday.

Read more: http://newsok.com/washington-briefs-supreme-court-rejects-adoption-case-involving-cherokee-nation-majority-of-oklahoma-congressional-delegation-speaks-at-level-above-congressional-average/article/3677448#ixzz1wdyz6700

It's sad these news stories never mention the child as sacred or worthy of protection. It becomes the colonial mindset of who is Indian enough to be protected by federal law - which speaks volumes about court cases involving Indian children.... Trace

Arizona accused of abuses in prisons

EYMAN

click here for story:
Arizona accused of abuses in prisons

My Lakota nephew is incarcerated in the Eyman Prison complex in Florence, AZ and he is an adoptee. He has written many times about the atrocity of living in there. He does not get three meals daily and he's shackled when he goes to the cage for recreation which has no fresh air or sun. His status as a prisoner has been deemed inhumane by Amnesty International in a recent report.
Why are so many minorities incarcerated? Do we see a pattern here? How many adoptees are incarcerated? Those statistics are not available to me. I have asked.
Jess has asked for prayers... so I ask you, my friends, to keep good thoughts until he can be freed. Mitakuye oyasin all my relatives!
Trace


Google Earth: http://youtu.be/Q5AUNraAdBY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence,_Arizona

Profits for Private Prisons: http://youtu.be/QXH3DlW3vMs

One day the world will wake up

Lost Daughters: On Being Generic Ethnic

It is important for all adoptees to know their ancestry, VERY important. Please read this great post on Lost Daughters (click on title) by an Illinois adoptee.
Sadly, the adoption world continues to ignore adoptees in this regard, and fails to see the importance of our medical history which is clearly so necessary and essential to every human being - yet sealed adoption records leaves us adoptees out in the cold and in the dark.
Some day, one day soon, the world will wake up. I mean it. One day the world will see adoption for what it truly is - a farce, ridiculous, barbaric and demeaning for the adoptee.
I wait for that day.
Trace

Deportation of adoptees? Yup!

Citizen of no land: The story of Kairi Shepherd

by Danish Raza May 25, 2012 First Post:India
#Adoption #India #Kairi Shepherd #OnOurMind #United States

Kairi Shepherd, a 30 year-old Indian-origin adoptee is staring at the prospect of deportation from United States to India and says being sent back to India would end her life as she knows it.

“The deportation order which may force me to part from my physicians, family, and friends here, could be a death sentence to me,” said Shepherd, who suffers from multiple sclerosis.
Hers is a strange and tragic tale that reveals how children adopted across borders often fall through the cracks of domestic law.
Utah native Erlene Shepherd adopted a three-month-old Kairi from a Kolkata orphanage. Kairi was one of the 11 children the single mother adopted from across the globe. Erlene died when Kairi was eight.

Kairi Shepherd. File image. Image courtesy Anjali Pawar/ Sakhi

When Kairi was arrested and convicted of felony check forgery – a crime she committed to feed her drug habit – a US court and Kairi discovered that she was not a US citizen. The court then upheld the right of the US government to deport Kairi to India.
How did Kairi fall through the cracks?
To claim Kairi’s citizenship, Erlene had to submit a form with the US authorities before her adopted daughter turned 21 years old. But Erlene died without doing so, making Kairi, a nobody’s child. If parents who are technically granted legal guardianship by the sending country, don’t re-adopt their children after their arrival in the US, then their children are not US citizens.
She also does not benefit from the 2000 Child Citizenship Act, which represented a significant step forward and provided automatic citizenship for adoptees, because it does not retroactively include adult adoptees.
“The Child Citizenship Act failed to include all adoptees upon its passage in 2000 and so brought into question adoption’s most fundamental claim, a forever loving home. Adoptee vulnerability to removal and undocumented status violates an adopted person’s rights as outlined in the Hague Convention on Inter-country adoption to which the U.S. is a signatory and the UNCRC, which sending countries like India have ratified,” said Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, community adviser with AdopSource, a resource group for adoptees in the US.
Dobbs has tracked 40 cases of adult adoptees who have been deported to their countries of origin.
In 2008, Jennifer Haynes was deported from the US to India in a similar manner. Adopted by an American couple, she was sexually abused by her foster father, and spent years being shipped from one foster parent to another.
Charged in a case of drug possession, she was sent back at the age of 32. Her children- eight and nine years old- are growing up in the US without mother.
“I am away from them for more than four years now and I am not sure if I will ever see them again. What kind of law is this?” said Haynes.
The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), central government body which sanctions inter-country adoption says that it cannot be held responsible because it was non existent when Haynes and Shepherd were adopted. CARA was formed in 1990.
“Currently we issue conformity certificates in case of every inter-country adoption to facilitate immediate citizenship of the adopted child,” said Anu J Singh, director, CARA, adding that the Authority has written to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the US Embassy for details of the Kairi Shepherd’s case.
The MEA has been maintaining that it is looking at ways to provide legal assistance to Kairi to challenge the US order.
International Mission of Hope, the Kolkata orphanage which put Kairi in adoption, shut shop ten years ago and Kairi’s last hope is a favorable order from the US Supreme Court.

The insanity of adoption continues - a child doesn't choose to be adopted, or asked to be placed in another country...and yet Americans who adopt didn't file all the proper and necessary paperwork for their acquisition, putting their "adoptee" at risk... It begs the question: why? Trace

Coming out from one's ignorance is considered radical?

http://larahentz.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/2949/
This is my other blog... about becoming Lara.... check it out - click BLOG on top bar.... read the re-blog "Coming out from one's ignorance..."

Thanks for recent comments, everyone. Please know that if you sign in as "anonymous" you may not get published on this blog....

ICWA: By The Numbers #NDN #Adoption

by Kate Fort | May 18, 2012 

This information is from a presentation I gave May 18th at the Minnesota CLE.

In 2011 there were 199 ICWA cases (249 in the allstate-cs Westlaw database using “Indian Child Welfare Act” search. 50 were not ICWA cases). Of those 122 (61%) were California notice or inquiry cases. This is less than the last time we checked in 2007 (308 cases). The state continues to remand nearly 50% of all the notice cases (58 remanded, 48%). The only state even close to California on notice cases is Michigan, with 8 last year, and 5 remanded.

Of the family lore cases, there was only one additional case in 2011 from the same lower court as the others and none in 2012.

Once we take out the California notice cases, active efforts cases are the next most litigated cases (24). A large number of those are out of Alaska, and even ones that aren’t out of Alaska are using Alaska cases to define active efforts.
Otherwise, there were 8, transfer cases, 7 QEW cases, 7 notice and inquiry cases (non-CA and MI), 6 burden of proof cases, 5 placement preferences, 5 jurisdiction cases, 1 due process, 1 standing case. There were a number of cases that were ICWA cases, but didn’t really use or discuss ICWA in the final decision, which was strange. In this paragraph, some cases were counted twice, because active efforts and burden of proof, for example, are usually discussed in the same case. We’re still deciding how best to classify those.
So far in 2012, there have been 71 cases. 33 (46%) of those were California notice and inquiry cases, and 48% (16) were remanded. There were 5 Michigan notice cases. Nationwide, there were only 2.
Our current assumption is that as notice cases fall in numbers, other cases will rise–this is based on the hopeful idea that a decrease in notice cases means courts might actually be doing notice properly. Once notice is done properly and ICWA applies and/or the tribe is involved, it seems logical that other areas (specifically transfer, active efforts, and placement preferences) of ICWA will be litigated more often.
In 2012 there were 8 active efforts, 7 placement preferences, 6 transfer, 2 other notice and inquiry, and 1 QEW case.

2012 has had two disturbing private adoption cases as well. See our coverage of those here and here.

Finally, we’ve also been keeping track of all transfer cases since the passage of the law. So far our spreadsheet has 123 cases total. 37 (30%) of those have either transferred cases to tribal court or reversed a denial of transfer and ordered a hearing on the issue (7). 60 cases have affirmed an initial denial of transfer. 21 cases have reversed an initial transfer. Only 19 cases have reversed a denial of transfer. 3 did not consider the issue of transfer.
When a GAL is involved in a transfer case (60 of all transfer cases), 40 times the GAL opposed transfer, 3 times the GAL supported transfer and in 17 cases it was impossible to determine the GAL’s position. When the GAL opposes transfer, the court agrees 80% of the time (32 cases). There are only 8 cases where the GAL’s position against transfer is known when the court disagrees and transfers.
Other areas we’re still looking at in the transfer cases is the different results from state appellate courts versus state supreme courts. This might change the way we ultimately count an outcome, but in this post each decision is counted individually, even if it the case was appealed up.

FREE #Adoption ReunionRegistry relaunched!

Search Quest America announces the relaunch of ReunionRegistry.org, a Free Resource for Adoptees and Birth Family Members Separated by Adoption 

Pamela Combs-Wickel
and Vicki Caton Buckle Reunited

Cape Coral, Florida (PRWEB) May 17, 2012

Search Quest America is a licensed investigative agency based in Cape Coral, Florida which specializes in one of the fasted growing forms of skip tracing – family search. Since the company was founded in 2008, over 2,000 families have been reunited!

CEO Susan Friel-Williams states, "We recognize our clients’ need to reconnect with missing family and are here to help! Children can be separated from family members through adoption, growing up in the foster care system, or because their parents divorced and they lost touch with a mother or father. Our research professionals understand that search and reunion is a journey of self discovery for our clients. Every one of our research professionals has personal ties to adoption issues."
ReunionRegistry.org, a free resource for adoptees, birth parents and siblings separated by adoption, has been relaunched. We’d like to thank our Internet design team at Search Quest America for re-designing and releasing our newest version.

We also have a great reunion success to share with you from Pamela Combs Wickel in Washington, who wrote and shared her story: "On January 6, 2012 I found my answers. An investigator left me a message asking for my help in a case she was working on. I can still remember calling Susan at Search Quest America back. I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest. Could it be me someone is looking for? Well it was and I am so thankful to be found!"
"That evening I spoke to my birth mom, Vicki Caton Buckles for the first time. It was as special as I thought it would be. And my biggest question of all was answered. Yes, she loves me! On April 22, 2012 we met for the first time. It was absolutely one of the highlights of my life. She is as loving, caring, happy, kind, awesome and beautiful inside and out as I had imagined her in my mind to be. I feel whole and complete and I am so grateful to Susan at Search Quest America for that most incredible, life changing day. Thank you for finding me Susan - and Vicki, Thank you for looking. This is the beginning of an amazing future.”

Register or visit today and see who might be searching for you.

Contact:  Susan E. Friel-Williams
CEO, Search Quest America LLC
Phone: (888) 949-6996
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Free Genealogy Database For Adoptees

By Elisa Black-Taylor (Greenville Genealogy Examiner)

Research for adoptees is very different from regular genealogy in that you're going in with very little information. You may only have your own date or birth and the town you were born in. Sometimes searching for a birth mother or child feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Today I want to tell you about a firm that has a very high success rate in reuniting families.

Research Etc., Inc. is a private investigation firm located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The business opened its doors in 1995 and is owned and operated by sisters Kristen Hamilton and Judy Andrews, along with their mother Ava Friddle.

Along with adoption cases, these ladies also handle other forms of private investigations. They're most famous for reuniting adoptee's and their birth mothers. Much of their fame can be credited to a book about many of their success stories.  Back To The Beginning: Remarkable True Stories Of Adoption Services & Reunions was published in 2008 and offers insights on what it's like for a birth mother to be reunited with a child.

Research Etc., Inc can be reached by phone at 1-800-992-3571 or by email at RSearchEtc@aol.com.

The name of the free database for adoptees is Birthline Reunion Registry and is located at http://www.researchetcinc.com/birthline.html

If you're an adoptee and wish to post your information there's a one time fee of $10. The search option itself is free.

On it you'll find birth mothers and adoptees listed along with date of birth, hospital and an email address to contact.

Birthline Reunion Registry services not only the U.S. But also Australia, Canada, England, China, Germany, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Russia, Scotland, South Africa and the U.K.

There are only a handful of states in the U.S. that have open or semi-open access to adoption records. Those states are Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Tennessee.

This means the information (most likely a birth certificate)is accessible to the person named on the document, meaning the birth parents. Once a child reaches age 18, they may also have the right to access the information through the Vital Statistics Office or other sources. Records are easier to obtain once the birth records are 50 years old.

They caution not to expect miracles and no one price fits all cases. Some cases are solved in a few hours while others may take a year or longer. The more information a client has at the time of a free consultation, the lower the cost will be.

The firm does state that some birth mother's are reluctant to name the birth father. Many birth mother's take that information to their grave.  A birth mother may not always be pleased when first contact is approached.  Research Etc., Inc. also offers services to arrange emails, phone calls or visits between mother and child.  Some clients feel the need to make arrangements personally. The firm treats each case individually and does whatever the client wishes in handling a reunion.

There are probably many such databases online. I wanted to highlight one that's free and easy to use.

Many states are trying to change the law where more mothers and their children can search for each other more easily.

There are many adoptees who cannot afford to pay for a private investigator but if you can search a free database - then FREE is wonderful! Get busy! ... Trace

Michigan Supreme Court honors ICWA

Michigan SCT Adopts “Conditional Reversal” Rule for Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Notice Violations

Here.

An excerpt from Justice Cavanagh’s unanimous opinion:

While it is impossible to articulate a precise rule that will encompass every possible factual situation, in light of the interests protected by ICWA, the potentially high costs of erroneously concluding that notice need not be sent, and the relatively low burden of erring in favor of requiring notice, we think the standard for triggering the notice requirement of 25 USC 1912(a) must be a cautionary one. Therefore, we hold first that sufficiently reliable information of virtually any criteria on which tribal membership might be based suffices to trigger the notice requirement. We hold also that a parent of an Indian child cannot waive the separate and independent ICWA rights of an Indian child’s tribe and that the trial court must maintain a documentary record including, at minimum, (1) the original or a copy of each actual notice personally served or sent via registered mail pursuant to 25 USC 1912(a) and (2) the original or a legible copy of the return receipt or other proof of service showing delivery of the notice.1

Finally, we hold that the proper remedy for an ICWA-notice violation is to conditionally reverse the trial court and remand for resolution of the ICWA-notice issue.

Briefs are here and here.

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY - this protects Indian children - so let's have all the other states do this and follow ICWA rules in every case! Trace

Indian Identity - It's complicated in New England!

www.sjf.edu

By Trace L Hentz (Eastern Cherokee by blood)

Living in New England (yes, it's still called that after 400+ years), I have come to understand how Native Americans here evolved through some of the most troubling, extreme and dangerous circumstances --- yes, dangerous.
Many non-Indians here have deeply-embedded fears of Indians, because of stories passed down in families.
Many New Englanders are of the mindset Indians are of the past, not the present. We are no longer a threat like we were in colonial days.
Today Massachusetts has no great track record of dealing fairly or honestly with its tribes. One example, the Mashpee Wampanoag had their federal recognition delayed over 30 years.

There are many more Indian people here who are not in federally-recognized tribes and have no identity card to show other Indians or the demanding media. 

This issue is affecting Senate-hopeful Elizabeth Warren (Democrat) who is running against Scott Brown (Republican). Elizabeth's ancestry is Cherokee. Her Cherokee ancestors might have been educated in New England, maybe at Harvard or Dartmouth. I don't know.

Since Elizabeth is not enrolled with the Cherokee, her lack of an identity card is a huge problem for the media and other Indians.

Really?

HEY! Indians in New England get it. She's one of us. We have our own stories passed down in our families, too.

Granted it's not easy to trace your ancestors from the late 1800s to secure that government-issued Indian Identity card. (My friend Russ calls his tribal ID, "My Holocaust Card.")

Why is Indian identity so complicated? 

Long-standing racism by state officials on the East Coast who wanted us dead - and a backlog of over 250 recognition bids sitting in the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Washington DC.  Delays are notorious. Tribal Elders who started the petitions are often dying before they see their petition recognized. 

In the 1800s, there was absolutely no benefit whatsoever if you were Indian. Saying you were could get you killed: After the Pequot War, hunting down the Pequot was common - there was a bounty on every Pequot - man, woman or child.  Bring in dead Indians and you get paid. The media never covers this.

So back to identity... tell me, could you provide records to the exact day your immigrant ancestor arrived here on a boat? Yet Indians are supposed to prove they are Indian?

In this part of the world, Native people intermarried for survival. After the Indian Wars, Native woman married outside of their tribes since there were so few men left who had not been killed in war.
Their survival was not complicated, it was necessary. 

Read the CNN coverage on INDIAN IDENTITY: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/14/whos-a-native-american-its-complicated/

QUOTE:

"It seems to me one of the ways of getting rid of the Indian question is just this of intermarriage, and the gradual fading out of the Indian blood; the whole quality and character of the aborigine disappears, they lose all of the traditions of the race; there is no longer any occasion to maintain the tribal relations, and there is then every reason why they shall go and take their place as white people do everywhere," said Anthony Higgins, a U.S. Senator from Delaware, in 1895 congressional testimony.

Mother and Daughter Both Adoptees: Knowing you're Indian is not enough

A Mother's Day story: Mother and daughter both given up for adoption 

By Mary Annette Pember (photos and story)

May 14, 2012

This year, for the first time in a long time, Mother’s Day didn’t bring with it the painful unknowns for Jeanne Winslow and Rachel Banks Kupcho of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.  Jeanne and her daughter Kupcho met for the second time last October, more than 35 years after Winslow gave her newborn up for adoption.
“The day I got the call was the day I knew my life had changed forever,” says Winslow. That call on a cool October day carried the news that her daughter had found her and wanted to meet.
Their reunion was not a made-for-TV event filled with balloons and flowers. Winslow recalls that seeing her daughter for the first time in such a long time was quietly powerful, a bit like the first time she heard the drum and knew deep in her body that she was American Indian.
Like Kupcho, Winslow was put up for adoption as a newborn and raised by non-Indians.
Their story puts a quintessential Indian twist on the standard Mother’s Day tale of maternal perfection, and shows the inexorable pull of blood and spirit that so many Native people describe when they speak of wanting to know their culture.
I first met Kupcho in Minneapolis back in 2008 while doing a story about the challenges faced by American Indian adoptees who want learn more about their cultures and their birth parents. At the time, she knew only that her birth mother was Ojibwe from Minnesota. Her adoptive family was supportive and understanding of her efforts. A bright, confident young woman, Kupcho is convinced that without the unconditional love of her adoptive parents she would not have been strong enough to pursue her passion and calling of working to support the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). While working with the National Indian Child Welfare Association, she met Sandy White Hawk, executive director of the First Nations Repatriation Institute in Minneapolis. White Hawk, an adoptee herself, founded the organization to advocate for Native adoptees in accordance with ICWA and to help unite adoptees with their birth families, cultures and tribes.
In October, they informed me that they had found Kupcho’s birth mother, Winslow, a children’s counselor living in Iowa.
Winslow and Kupcho, along with Kupcho’s 18-month-old daughter Mika, quickly arranged a meeting. Kupcho recalls that Winslow seemed to be in quite a hurry to meet her. She soon found out why.
Winslow’s birth mother (and Kupcho’s grandmother), Audrey Banks, who Winslow had met 20 years earlier, was dying. Winslow immediately rushed everyone to her mother’s bedside.
“There were four generations in that room meeting for the first time,” Winslow recalls. “That was the first thing Kupcho and I did together. It was the greatest privilege and honor to be there with her. It was a very healing experience. This has all been about circles connecting. At first, it was just my circle but now I see that so many others are interconnected.”

Kupcho didn’t know it at the time, but she had previously connected with her grandmother—Audrey was well known and respected in the Minneapolis Native community for her work helping social service agencies maintain compliance with ICWA.
Like Kupcho, she earned a master’s degree in social work in order to better serve Native children. “There has definitely been something bigger at work in my life; there has been a path I am meant to walk,” Kupcho says of this coincidence.
In many ways, Audrey’s experience as a young Ojibwe woman may have helped set the direction of that path. 
Born on the Leech Lake reservation, Audrey was sent to the Pipestone Indian boarding school at age 9 and remained there for the remainder of her childhood. After moving to Minneapolis she gave birth to three boys and three girls.
According to her daughters, social workers from Catholic Charities showed up at her bedside after each birth, pressuring the single mother to give the girls up for adoption.
“She said that she felt coerced by the social workers that said that the girls would have better lives if they were raised by white people,” recalls Bernadine Harroun, Audrey’s second daughter. “I think that influenced her decision to go into social work and help keep Indian kids with Indian families.”
Bernadine and her younger sister, Winslow were adopted by the same family and raised together. Bernadine initiated the search for Audrey and Winslow and was responsible for their first meeting in 1989. They learned that Audrey, all of her children and Kupcho all lived and grew up within 20 miles of each other.
“Most of the stories of Native adoptees finding their families are like miracles,” White Hawk says. The distinguishing factor for Native adoptees, according to White Hawk is that the children were prayed for by generations of parents who knew hard times were coming. “Native people have that spiritual pull, like a spiritual umbilical cord that compels us to seek out our families,” she says.
Many Native adoptees report that hearing the traditional drum often activates that spiritual pull. Indeed Winslow recalls the first time she heard the drum. “I heard it and I knew I was Indian. The drum goes to some place so deep,” she recalls. (She didn’t know it at the time, but her uncle, well-known activist Dennis Banks was one of the people at that drum. He was giving a presentation at Winslow’s suburban high school about the happenings at Wounded Knee.)
Except for the strange longing awakened in her by the drum, Winslow says life in her adoptive suburban home was good. Ironically, because of this positive experience, she was able to make the difficult decision to relinquish her own daughter for adoption. Newly independent and sexually inexperienced, she found herself pregnant at age 19. “I knew that I couldn’t give my daughter the chance she deserved unless I did something drastic,” she recalls.
With the support of her adoptive family, Winslow put Kupcho up for adoption. “Leaving the hospital without her was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. Over time, however, she was at peace with her decision although birthdays, Christmas and Mother’s Day were hard. “I never stopped wondering about her,” says Winslow.
There was always a lingering, fear, too that Kupcho would be angry with her if and when they reconnected. She says, however, that her meetings with Kupcho and Mika have been smooth and joyous. She compares it to dancing in the circle for the first time with Audrey. “Somehow my feet knew what to do,” Winslow recalls.
“I can’t imagine the pain Winslow went through in making the brave choice to give me up for adoption. I give her tons of credit,” says Kupcho, adding that Winslow needn’t have feared she would be angry. “If anything her love gave me the wonderful life I have now. The home I was adopted into has afforded me the ability to do the work that I do.”
Kupcho is starting a new job with a non-profit organization that licenses foster homes for Native children. Her main focus is creating permanent, supportive homes. Although her adoptive placement was loving and good, advocating for a child to be in a loving home is not specific enough.

“Being with family is ideal,” Kupcho says. “Love is not always enough. Going to the occasional pow wow is not enough. We need to know about our traditions and culture. Even knowing you’re Indian is not enough. With the experience of meeting my birth family, I understand this more fully. As a mother and as an adoptee I have a better sense of myself. I have a stronger, more confident gait. This is the only thing my adoptive parents haven’t been able to give me.”

Finding her birth mother, however, was not the whole key to Kupcho’s search. “I needed to know where I came from and make that tribal connection. When visiting the reservation I am suddenly among family and I feel good,” she says.
Both Kupcho and Winslow report that they are going forward with their new relationship without expectations and going with that process as it unfolds. Their first Mother’s Day was one of quiet joy. “I’m a mother, now I have somebody,” explains Winslow. “Plus it’s great to be a grandma.”
“Mother’s Day is definitely more complicated now, but only in my mind. I’m taking it as it comes,” says Kupcho, laughing.
Sandy White Hawk’s message for Mother’s Day and every day thereafter: “We need to encourage our birth mothers to forgive themselves and remember we wouldn’t be here without them. We need to tell them that regardless of the kinds of lives we have had, we can have good lives from this day forward and for that we are grateful.”

NOTE: This is an update to a 2010 story that was published on DailyYonder.com.

Read more: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/05/14/daughters-given-up-for-adoption-seek-knowledge-about-their-culture-and-birth-mothers-112830#ixzz1urPQTkzG

Stolen Makeni Children

Another example of Americans who adopt internationally to find out they were duped...This has happened before and sadly, it will happen again when children are $old to Americans... Trace

A court finds that the adoptees from Sierra Leone were in fact kidnapped.

Were Samuel Mosley and Adama K. stolen from their birth families in Makeni, Sierra Leone so that Americans could adopt them—and so that greedy middlemen masquerading as child welfare workers could get paid? That question was at the heart of the series published here last August, The Makeni Children, which investigated the torturously complex stories of 29 adoptions in 1998 from Sierra Leone to the United States. Birth families from Makeni had agitated for more than a dozen years, insisting that their children had been wrongfully taken. But the child welfare organization that had taken those children, HANCI (Help a Needy Child International), insisted that the families were lying—that in the midst of the brutal civil war, they had knowingly and willingly given their children away.

Read the story here: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/05/sierra_leone_adoptees_were_found_to_be_kidnapped_.html