Roots & Ties program keeps children in care in B.C. connected to their community

Program helping aboriginal kids in foster care to be cut

By Darryl Hol and G.P. Mendoza, CBC News 

Chantal Douglas and a friend listen carefully to the story being told at Roots and Ties. (Darryl Hol and G.P. Mendoza)

Eleanor Stephenson remembers a time when she only saw her granddaughters two or three times a year.
Chantal and Nora, now 12 and 9, were living in foster care because their parents couldn’t care for them.
Her family’s situation is all too common in the small Cheam First Nation - located about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver - where nearly every extended family has been affected by the child welfare system.
That’s why she started the Roots and Ties program four years ago. It’s an event that welcomes Cheam children living in foster care back to the community to visit their families.
“I feel that if there was no Roots and Ties, a lot of the children wouldn’t know their grandparents, even their parents sometimes,” says Stephenson.

Eleanor Stephenson started the Roots and Ties program four years ago. (Darryl Hol and G.P. Mendoza)

Held on the third Sunday of every month, foster parents are invited to bring children in their care to the community hall for a meal, birthday cake, and cultural activity.
Everyone is welcome, including parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, foster parents, and social workers.


Read more here

Our governments need a wake-up call that programs like this are necesssary and much-needed for the emotional health and stability of tribal children in care in Canada and the US...cutting funding hurts children. It should not be an option but a necessity....Trace

7th Annual Demons in Adoption nominations (a must read) #BabyVeronica

The link for nominations may be found at: http://poundpuplegacy.org/seventh_demons_of_adoption_nominations

7th Annual Demons in Adoption

Submitted by Priscilla Sharp

Hands down this year!! The Matthew and Melanie Capobianco, Troy the Stalker Dunn, Nightlight Adoption Agency and its owners/attorney Raymond W. and Laura Beauvais Godwin, their PR rep, Jessica Munday and her company, Trio Solutions, and their national fund-raising/lobbying arm Christian Alliance for Indian Child Kidnapping
By their outrageous behavior - violating gag orders, hiring PR firms, taking what should have been a private matter to the court of public opinion and peddling lies and slurs against Veronica's father on talk shows, in newspapers, "news" programs, exploiting a minor child by using her image and name to raise tens of thousands of dollars, contracting with a TV reality show producer to film her and invade her privacy (show up at her school uninvited and unannounced), demanding public officials arrest her father and "seize" her, threatening the safety and security of the Brown family to such an extent that they had to move out of their family home and into tribal housing and be provided with 24-hour security guards, and more - the Capobiancos have proven to the world that so-called "love" for this child and her safety and security are the furthest things from their minds. By their actions, they have indelibly harmed her for life. They began exposure of an innocent child for public display in such a manner that she will never know privacy and peace again. From now until forever everyone will know who and where she is. Her security has been compromised beyond repair. For these reasons and more, including the underhanded, unethical and probably illegal means in which she was abducted from OK at birth, they have forfeited any right of entitlement or possession of this or any other child, if not provided ample grounds for criminal charges and civil liability to the Brown family.

There are plenty more to read but this one nailed it on the BABY VERONICA CASE... Trace 

I nominate the Nightlight Adoption Agency

Submitted by Trace A DeMeyer

I nominate Nightlight Christian Adoption Agency and its owners and operators for their violations of the Indian Child Welfare Act and trafficking in babies. Rumor is there are 50 children from North Dakota tribes placed thru Nightlight in addition to Veronica Brown and Baby Desaray (and untold others).
Nightlight is a corporation with Laura Godwin, its CEO/director, and Ronald Stoddart as Principal Officer for tax purposes. In 2011 alone, they grossed $2,747,914. Nightlight is licensed in Colorado, California, South Carolina and in Kentucky so far. Now in two lawsuits over Native American babies they attempted to place for adoption...
Raymond W. Godwin, called an unethical adoption attorney in news reports, was the original adoption attorney for Matt and Melanie Capobianco and is also involved in this dispute called #BABY DESARAY. His wife Laura is the director of the Nightlight adoption agency that handled the Baby Veronica placement/adoption.
Read more here: http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/Article/Index/7609

What we learned at Brock University about #60s Scoop #ADOPTION

By Trace A. DeMeyer

I'd mentioned on this blog we were invited to speak to students and then the general public at Brock University near Niagara, Ontario on March 25.  Patricia Busbee and I had co-authored and edited the 2012 anthology Two Worlds but we had not met in person (but we've shared hundreds of emails and phone calls).

You ever have that feeling you've known someone but you've never met them in person? Well, that was the feeling I had with Patricia. I snuck up on her at the hotel near Brock and instantly - she's like my closest friend, a sister returned to me.  Being in the same room with her felt like being home. When she offers her thoughts, insights, it's like she's reading my mind!

At Brock, we met with two other contributors in Two Worlds and again, it was deja vu! Debby and Elaine are like sisters, too! You can read their adoptee narratives in the Canada section of Two Worlds.

One thing is certain - we understand one another. We are simpatico - of like mind. Debby and Elaine shared the same feelings of isolation growing up -  though they were adopted and being raised in Canada while Patricia and I were here in the US.  We were all told lies about our ancestry and yet we found the truth and our relatives anyway - but it was not easy for any of us.  Adoptees do feel very isolated until we meet other adoptees. Then like magic, POOF, you made new relatives. This book and the event at Brock gave us all a great gift: our very own reunion!

We as a group went to speak to a class of about 40 students at Brock who had read Two Worlds and they were very open and appreciative to our writing and what we shared that day. The students really liked the book, and asked really good questions about how it was growing up away from our families and culture. The take-away for me is students admitted they knew NOTHING about this adoption history prior to reading Two Worlds.  They really knew NOTHING about the First Nations in Canada and were not taught anything in their school.  Their eyes were opened, obviously!

Knowing what is truth all goes back to BAD HISTORY. When you allow a country to devise its own telling of conquest and colonization, leaving out how they did it, how Indian people were killed off or made to disappear to remote reserves and then they abduct children for boarding schools and adoptions, that is just bad history.  It's 2014, still happening...

During the evening panel and book talk, an Anishinabe adoptee named Michael shared his experience. (Michael and I had been emailing since 2011 and finally met. He and his wife Irene are like long-lost relatives as well!)  Michael shared the story of how he needed his name for when he passes on to the spirit world and how he needs to speak this name in his language or his soul would be lost. Michael shared so much wisdom.  He asked, "I know where five percent of the adoptees are - where are the other 95%??" [He was referring to 20,000+ placed into adoption during Canada's 60s Scoop, what is known in Canada as cultural genocide.] [The US numbers are sealed so we don't know how many babies and children were lost here.]

And we met Jolene, an adoptee from Arkansas who also shared her adoption story that evening and how she plans to return to her British Columbia tribal family in two years.  I knew some of her story from a news article Brock University has posted about her. And we met a friend Lynn (Adoption Trauma) who brought Suzanne, a beautiful Native woman in great pain over the loss of her sister. And I spoke to the daughter of an adoptee; her father spent his life visiting the reserves but was never able to open his adoption or find his own First Nations family.


What we learned is there is no way to stop adoptions of Native children in this Six Nations area in eastern Canada today: we heard this is because of a shortage of foster homes, plus destitute conditions and not enough available adoptive parents on their reserves.  What First Nations social workers do give to these babies is all the information and history that they will need when they become adults, when they decide to look for their birth families. They practice open adoption and use friendship centres so adoptive parents can bring the children and expose them to their culture, language and relatives. And we all agreed that something has to change in both countries to allow babies to remain with their mothers and tribal relatives, with every effort made for family preservation and finally eradicating poverty on the reservations.

Being there with relatives, it's like a fire was lit inside me. When the Six Nations women sang a "Strong Women" song for us, it was humbling, a sacred moment.

What we learned is there is much more community-building and after-adoption support needed for Native American adoptees in the US. There are no repatriation services in the US like there is in Canada. That must change!

Patricia and I finally connected in person, we made new relatives in Ontario - and all that is good. Now we're starting on the new book CALLED HOME: Stolen Generations and will publish more history and narratives from the lost children of the Indian Adoption Projects in Canada and the US.

Adoptees do have the power to change history with every story we write and share! Every writer in Two Worlds and the new book CALLED HOME can hold their own events and this fire will grow and spread... and that is good, that is very good...



(The Brock Reads Summer Program 2014 is open to the whole community so this book Two Worlds will have many new readers.)

Our deepest thanks to the organizers at Brock University Aboriginal Education Council and the Niagara Native Women for offering this amazing event!

Dark Adoption Climate: a letter to #StopCHIFF

To My New York Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer on International Adoption

By Frank Ligtvoet SOURCE

Dear Senators,
A few years ago the story of a woman who put her 7 year old adopted son on a plane back to where he came from, Russia, made headlines.  You must remember the case. The boy was by himself with just a note from the mother to the authorities at the other side of the Atlantic, telling that she couldn’t handle him anymore.  In a certain way it was a mild case, compared to recent cases where adoptive parents abused and eventually killed their kids. Korean Hyunsu O’Callaghan (3 years old) for example, who was only a few months with his new family, when his father beat him to death in February of this year.  Last year in July a criminal process took place in which adoptive parents were accused of abusing their Ethiopian daughter, until her death in the cold rain followed.

Investigative journalist Kathryn Joyce described in Slate of last November the girl’s ordeal as follows: “On the night of May 11, 2011, sometime around midnight, 13-year-old Hana Williams fell face-forward in her parents’ backyard. Adopted from Ethiopia three years before, Hana was naked and severely underweight. Her head had recently been shaved, and her body bore the scars of repeated beatings with a plastic plumbing hose. Inside the house, her adoptive mother, 42-year-old Carri Williams, and a number of Hana’s eight siblings had been peering out the window for the past few hours, watching as Hana staggered and thrashed around, removed her clothing in what is known as hypothermic paradoxical undressing and fell repeatedly, hitting her head. According to Hana’s brother Immanuel, a deaf 10-year-old also adopted from Ethiopia, the family appeared to be laughing at her.”

I know, Senators, that child abuse and infanticide are not specific to adoption, but prospective adoptive parents are screened by social workers for their capabilities to raise children with this background; they are held or they should be held to a higher standard. It is obvious that those screenings in these cases, and in many others, didn’t work. Those cases also include the shady practice of ‘Re-homing’ where overwhelmed parents try to place often over the web their kids in other families who are not vetted at all. About the dire outcomes of this ‘solution’ to the problems of incompetent parents Reuters reported extensively last year.

You may wonder, dear Senators, what has this all to do with me. Well, in every other section of our society these stories would have led to an investigation of the industry responsible for these deaths. Bluntly said: General Motors is investigated for the deaths of 303 people in accidents regarding 1,6 million cars since 2003. Compare that with the almost 200 abuse cases in various degrees of severity on ca. 160.000 international adoptions in the same period which adoption activist website Pound Pup Legacy (http://poundpuplegacy.org) documented with newspaper articles and official documents.

The laxness of the American authorities, which are in a certain way under your control, where it regards the adoption process in the US is disturbing. There is no check on the methods used in, and the effectiveness and the quality of the so-called home studies, which describe and evaluate the new parents’ abilities to raise transnationally and transracially adopted kids, often with special needs.

And there is no check on the competences and the quality of licensed social workers, who deal with adoption in agencies.  I know personally how easy on the parents the home study process is and how flimsily we – two white men - were prepared to become adoptive parents of black kids. And I don’t know one case where prospective parents were told that they were not fit to raise an adopted child. Not only oversight is missing, the industry itself has serious systemic flaws. One of them is that it is fully adoptive parent driven: the parents are the paying clients and there is no independent representation in any form for the first parents or the child, here or abroad. Another problem is the savior ideology that permeates the industry: so many kids are saved from their horrible situations that ‘we’ can live with a few kids who fall between the cracks.  The savior argument is just false: most kids would have been helped better (and with less money) within the context of their extended families or their community.

Is the situation in the US, Senators, already daunting, the situation in the countries of origin of the adoptees is even worse. The acclaimed study of Katherine Joyce, The Child Catchers, on the Evangelical Christian adoption movement and its devastating corrupting effects abroad attracted a lot of attention. You might have seen it.  There are others who wrote extensively on corruption, child laundering, baby stealing, fraud, racism and trafficking, like E.J. Graff in the Washington Post and Slate a few years ago, and David Smolin and Deleith Duke Gossett in their academic work.  David Smolin’s latest piece has the telling title: ‘The Corrupting Influence of the United States on a Vulnerable Intercountry Adoption System’. I dare to say that every prospective adoptive parent, who is at this moment in the process of adopting internationally and doesn’t read extensively about abuse in and outside the US, doesn’t check his social worker and agency carefully and doesn’t soul search his abilities to raise a child of color that is abandoned first and then adopted, treads on unethical grounds.

In this dark adoption climate two of your colleagues Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Roy Blunt (R-MO), proposed new legislation for international child welfare and adoption: the Children in Families First Act (CHIFF). You know that because both of you became sponsors of the CHIFF act. Positive in that proposal is that adoption is seen within the context of child welfare. The website has: ‘CHIFF brings the need for ethical, transparent and accountable child welfare systems to the forefront.  By ensuring systems are in place to help children remain in their family of birth, be reunited with family or be adopted locally or internationally.’ The policy relies thus strongly on collaboration with the authorities in the ‘donating’ countries to ensure – I repeat ensure - those ethical etc. systems.  That seems a rather unrealistic vision, when one thinks of vast countries like China and India, or ‘difficult’, dead poor or infrastructure poor countries like Ethiopia and Vietnam. Elsewhere I calculated that CHIFF has a maximum budget of 22.5 cent per child, which would generate for child welfare in for example Ethiopia a bit over a million dollars for 4 million orphans. Since the adoption industry for the US alone in Ethiopia can be valued at $92 million dollars, it is obvious that adoption will be the preferred choice of ‘child welfare’. The proposal comes on top of that with new regulations to make the international adoption process for parents easier and quicker. Easier and quicker is definitely not the way to go in the current corrupt adoption situation. It seems more appropriate to clean the houses here and there first, before spending new money and applying easier regulations for Americans who want to adopt.

The welfare aspect in the proposal is not only diminished by the lack of serious finances, but by two more factors. The first comes to light in the list of  ‘Endorsing organizations’ on the CHIFF website, which consists for the biggest part of adoption agencies, many of them rooted in the evangelical (and may I say as a gay man: homophobic) community. Lacking are (international) welfare organizations, adoptee and first parent organizations. The latter were also not involved in the discussions in the preparations of the legislation. The second factor shows in the rather surprising list of the political sponsors from both parties of CHIFF: Michele Bachman, James Inhofe, Elizabeth Warren amongst others. And I was honestly speaking taking aback to find your names in that list. International welfare may imply for some of them birth control education and practice, which would lead to less adoptions; and for others the promotion of ‘extreme personhood’ (human rights bestowed on fertilized eggs), which would lead to more adoptions. Since there is no common ground to be found in these two positions, the communal focus has to be on adoption, and based on the positions of many of your listed colleagues, on heterosexual couple’s adoption.

Dear Senator Gillibrand, dear Senator Schumer, may I ask you to reconsider your support of this proposed legislation. As real democrats, who tend to reach out to those who had or have no voice, in this case the first or birth families and the adoptees, and who are naturally questioning the powerful, you really don’t belong on that list.

CHIFF will hopefully die a quiet death. Thank God, it doesn’t seem to get serious political traction. However, the discussion about international child welfare and adoption and the ethics thereof, is very necessary and one may hope that this flawed proposal will be the start of that conversation.

I copy you to give you a full range of arguments against CHIFF links to letters from other concerned voters in other states to their representatives, to Senator Warren (MA) (http://irreverentpsychologist.blogspot.com/...) and to the Washington representatives (http://lightofdaystories.com/...)

Respectfully yours,
Frank Ligtvoet
Brooklyn

#60s Scoop seek formal apology

Sixties Scoop: Aboriginals Adopted Into White Families Seek Apology

  By Chinta Puxley, The Canadian Press 

WINNIPEG - Some aboriginal people who were adopted into white families during the so-called Sixties Scoop say it's their turn for reconciliation and are calling for a formal apology from the federal government.
Dozens of adoptees gathered in Winnipeg on Monday to tell their stories — many for the first time — and figure out how to get justice.
Coleen Rajotte was taken from her Cree community in Saskatchewan when she was three months old and raised by a Manitoba family. Adoptees were robbed of their real families and feel someone has to be held accountable, she said.
"If someone came into your home today, took your children and shipped them to the United States and around the world, we would want answers," she said. "That's what we as adoptees are asking for. Someone has to take responsibility for this."
From the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes by child welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families. Many consider the adoptions as an extension of the residential school system, which aimed to "take the Indian out of the child."
Rajotte said she was lucky enough to be placed into a loving home, but she lost her language, her culture and her connection to her ancestral home. When she recently went to the home she would have grown up in had she not been adopted, Rajotte said it was overwhelming.
"I was physically ill for days just trying to process all of that," she said.
But while residential school survivors have had a formal apology and are the subjects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, adoptees haven't been formally recognized.
"Personally, I would like to see some kind of formal apology to all adoptees that were taken from their homes," Rajotte said. "That's a lot of children — 20,000 children across Canada."
A spokeswoman for federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said there would be no comment.
"As this case is currently before the courts it would be inappropriate to comment further," she said in an email.
A class-action lawsuit launched by some survivors in Ontario in 2009 is slowly making its way through the courts. The lawsuit was certified, but Canada recently won leave to appeal that decision.
Manitoba Aboriginal Affairs Minister Eric Robinson said it's time adoptees were given the same opportunity for reconciliation as residential school survivors. Some adoptees were put with families where they were treated as farm hands or subjected to horrific abuse, he said.
"It's not an easy thing to talk about the hurts that many of them endured as children, not knowing who they were, being a brown face in an all-white school as an example," said Robinson, a residential school survivor who organized the two-day gathering.
"Those things are very difficult to talk about in this current day but they have to be addressed."
Those adoptees at the gathering hope to emerge with a strategy for recognition and a sense of what supports they need to heal, he said.
"Compensation no doubt will come up," Robinson said. "There's got to be a certain degree of accountability by governments."
SOURCE

Meet the Authors: Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

Near Niagara, Ontario

By Dr. Raeschelle Potter- Deimel

 
TWO WORLDS: LOST CHILDREN OF THE INDIAN ADOTION PROJECTS, ISBN: 978-1479318285, Trace A DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, editors, Blue Hand Books, 2012, paperback on Amazon and ebook $6.99 available for all devices.

TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects, is classified as an anthology by the co-editors Trace DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee.  The published book, however, exceeds any and every expectation of this label.  It not only offers an avalanche of information on the book's very pressing topic, but it includes a multitude of written testimonies showing the ills caused by decades of governmental enforcement of Indian Adoption Projects. 

Trace DeMeyer, co-editor, journalist, and former editor of THE PEQUOT TIMES, successfully brought this issue forward in ONE SMALL SACRIFICE, published in 2009.  It was a heart wrenching tell-all memoir of the author's own life. We followed the writer along her path of trying to find answers to a lifetime of questions.  Now, adoptees DeMeyer and Busbee have succeeded, as co-editors, in bringing together a circle of like souls, "Lost Birds" who have spent their lives wondering if they would ever feel true warmth and belonging.  "Lost Birds" of America and Canada have shared their despair with written contributions in excerpts of books, papers, poems and stories on the topic. One most jolting fact, found in the publication, casts a shadow on the persistent governmental use of Trans-racial Adoption.  Tribal methods of taking care of their own children, kinship, have always been part of strong cultural traditions.  It is all the more astonishing to read: "One quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed in non-Indian adoptive and foster homes or orphanages, as part of the Indian Adoption Projects."  Yes, there is great poverty clouding over many tribes which may, for those who support adoption, help condone the practice of taking Indian children away from tribal families to place them in a more economically adjusted environment.

The government continued to condone the system under a shield of haphazard statistics gathered by such researchers as David Fanshel, in 1960.  He in turn, preferred to follow earlier methods used in the state of Florida by the researcher, Helen Witmer, during a period of racial polarization.  During this period adoption services were eager to rid themselves of discriminatory accusations and were more prone to favor trans-racial adoption.  There were multiple considerations which should have been respected but were ignored in order to prove that "white couples committed to racial equality were the most likely to adopt non-white children and succeed as parents."  Fanshel felt that there was "little risk to the physical or emotional well-being of individual children and that these adoptions had 'saved many of these children from lives of utter ruination'."(358) 

Most adoptees did have access to formal education, but there are also success stories of tribal supported college students.  What about rituals and lessons traditionally learned in tribal culture, which could not be passed down to children and grandchildren?  What could these generations of children have been able to offer their tribal communities, if their nurturing had been able to continue within their tribal culture?  Patricia Busbee clearly poses the alternative to trans-racial adoption.  The alternative of governmental planning and financial support of Indian and First Nation child care would have actually been the easier path to follow.

"I am Lakota," a contribution in the book, looks into the life of a trans-racial adoptee and defeats stoic assumptions that Native children grow to become totally adjusted in non-Indian families.  Here, the adoptee did not know about her Native heritage throughout her childhood.  The pool in the backyard, the new car, and the possibility of having a good college education, was not enough to fill the constant emptiness felt throughout Diane's young life.  It was also just not enough for her to feel "devoted and proud to be an Irish Tommaney."(12)

A term of endearment comes to mind, when pondering these adoptee narratives and findings, which has come to be the labeling of helpless spirits held bondage under the ills of Indian adoption.  The description is of 'Split Feathers;' those innocently caught up within two worlds.  Their search to simply find themselves comes from not having known the world they were born in. They were unable to experience comfort of belonging in the world of trans-racial adoption.  Bravery to step forward and find their way home did not come easily, with their efforts thwarted by closed files and records.  Success of tribal family reunion was not a promise, only another hurdle to conquer for having been placed on a too distant path, too long.  Still, reports of forced adoption continue, as small voices cry out, lost and in despair.  Even Fanshel, in final conclusion of his early research believed that "only the Indian people have the right to determine whether their children can be placed in white homes." (359)   

Those who seek answers to the many baffling issues surrounding Indian Adoption Acts will become well-versed, within the pages of the anthology, on the history of these acts that were forged under well- known efforts of the country's acts for Assimilation. 

As a special bonus, the co-editors have presented specifics for viewing problems suffered by First Nations of Canada.  We find that a Canadian survey actually focused on families and their problems, after the removal of their children by provincial child welfare authorities, from the late 1960s to the early 80s. The six-month study report was compiled by Native Child and Family Services and titled OUR WAY HOME.  The staff writer of "WINDSPEAKER" magazine, Joan Black, reports that the survey not only shows effects of adoption and foster care on Indian adoptees. "It also identifies a variety of obstacles that Aboriginal people face in trying to re-establish family ties, and sets out a four-phase strategy aimed at easing repatriation for those who desire it."(331) The question is, will they and other American adoptees, be given necessary documents for proving their identity?

Natives and First Nations of Turtle Island are the only people required to prove their ethnicity.  With modern day research, and access to more adequately translated chronicles and diaries, written by early explorers, it is clear that Native People of the New World were always very diverse in physical features as well as cultural traditions.   DeMeyer's article on "Blood Quantum" is truly an eye opener as it confronts the core of ethnic prejudice which has been nurtured and continues to stifle North America today.  Native people often say, "It was never easy being Indian!" Thus, we remember other aspects of ethnic intrusion.  The scope is wide: from Indian slavery and breeding, followed by official record keeping written by unknowing and illiterate census takers; to the confines of Indian schools; and certainly of course forced or coerced Indian adoption.  All of these intrusions have remained under a cloud of constant propaganda favoring assimilation.  No, it has not been easy being Indian! 

The 31st chapter in the book, "Congressional Testimony" proves that the most helpless, the Lost Children of these Indian Adoption Projects and Programs were most vulnerable, as government presented a sure method for forcing assimilation upon children.  William Byler, Executive Director, Association of American Indian Affairs stated that “The disparity in rates for Indian adoption and non-Indian adoption is truly shocking.”  He presents statistics beginning with the state of Minnesota where “Indian children are placed in foster care or in adoptive homes at the rate of five times, or 500 percent greater than non-Indian children.”(183)  His statistics move on through other states which show even greater numbers.  Indian Adoption Acts have continued to be an acute disruption of tribal culture through many decades while Religious groups, with help from federal and state government, have held fast to ill-fated convictions.  With every effort made by Lost Children, seeking out a way home, more problems emerge. "Our American government still defines us today, using census reports that are highly suspicious and definitely untrustworthy to define sovereign status or what degree of Indian blood or blood quantum exists."(Suggested reading: Blood Quantum, 185)

With the disappearance of children from our tribes, generations have been lost and therefore, in some cases, tribal existence has become threatened.  Some Lost Birds have been able to find their way home and have been accepted by their tribal families.  Others, some still not aware of their tribal bloodlines, continue to search for a place of belonging and sovereignty. 

The anthology answers many questions, but it also presents the urgency for those in power to recognize failed concepts.  The book is in a total thumbs-up category and highly recommended.   

Dr. Raeschelle Potter-Deimel received her PhD from the University of Vienna in Austria in Cultural Anthropology and lectures on North America and Native American topics.  An independent researcher and Fulbright scholar, Dr. Potter-Deimel frequently travels for lectures and master classes to America and throughout Europe.  She can be reached at: potterdeimel@aon.at.

Resonating Reconciliation Project #60sScoop #Adoption

By Trace A. DeMeyer

From their website: http://www.ncra.ca/resonating/documentaries

Resonating Reconciliation Project are the radio documentaries. As part of this project, forty campus and community radio stations across the country are working with local Indigenous producers to create a documentary about the legacy of Indian Residential Schools in their communities in Canada. They are the result of the culminating hard work of the Indigenous producers to write, record, and produce the documentaries, and from the stations to train, provide assistance, equipment, and technical support for the producers.

Two Worlds

The documentaries share the stories of survivors, people who work for child and family services, family members, friends, and many more people whose lives have been impacted and shaped by the legacy of Indian Residential Schools.

The 60s Scoop included America, too, and perhaps longer since adoptions effected Native children until 1978 and even continues today with American judges who do not abide by or understand the Indian Child Welfare Act.    Much more work needs to be done to document America's Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA - which is why I am now working on a new anthology CALLED HOME. The first anthology TWO WORLDS collected narratives of adoptees from the US and Canada.

The only way we can change this history of assimilation and cultural genocide is to tell it ourselves...


The following documentary speaks about Adoption and the 60s Scoop in Canada
Click to LISTEN:  (MP3 of part 1) (MP3 of part 2)

Produced by: Dana Wesley
Featured Speakers/Guests (part 1): Beth and "Kayla"
Featured Speakers/Guests (part 2): Laura Maracle and Janice Hill

Music (part 1): "Greetings Sunrise" by the Four Winds Women's Singers from Honoring Our Ancestors; "Wildflower (remix)" by the Women of Wabano from Voices; "Universal Healing" by David R. Maracle from Sacred Healing

Music (part 2): "Universal Healing" by David R. Maracle from Sacred Healing; "Tomorrow" by Nick Sherman from Drag Your Words Through; "Her Dance" by Joanne Shenandoah from Covenant

Summary: This documentary follows the life of its producer and includes interviews with others on how the 60s scoop continues to impact families, communities, and individuals.

Adoption Language and Propaganda: Code Switch

AN EXCERPT by Joy Lieberthal (aka Song Eun Hee)
FROM Adoption Echoes (how the adoption story continues long after you figured it out)

...As more adoptees demand a change in the way adoption is conducted, talked about and discussed, there is another side code switching to make adoption sound urgent, necessary and in peril of going extinct. I should clarify….international adoption.  Frankly, it’s driving me crazy. 

Imminently, our legislators are seeking ways to pass the CHIFF legislation and their code is amazingly effective.   It makes me wonder what is wrong with my brain that I seem to read their words in a completely different way than what I see.  Right now, there are groups in the US who are in near hysterics about the “orphan crisis” in the world, mobilizing people to believe they must adopt, adoption is the only solution.

Every time this happens, I call upon my friends and colleagues who are adopted and it does feel like we are reading another language.  We don’t agree universally on every issue, but I appreciate the passionate civility we dialogue.  Our code has always been with the intention to have the adopted as the center of our focus.  It is clear and trusted.  I asked for help and I got it.

Melanie Chung-Sherman, my co-author, lives in a place that I swear speaks a different English at times.  Her “Blessings” sign-off at the end of every email causes me to chuckle and I look to her to help me better understand the language religion plays in the adoption world.  Living in a more secular, rather less evangelical, area has be me blind to the codeswitch.  She agreed to write with me and help clarify from her perspective the code switching that happens in the world of “saving the orphan” movement that I struggle with. 

So, here is our list of how the code is switching in our heads.  I am hoping it drives you equally mad!  I am hoping when you read the CHIFF legislation and future media pieces on adoption that you may begin to see the code for yourself.

• child advocates- code for those in support of perpetuating and increasing the number of foreign born children being adopted to White American couples.  If you read the list of supporters of the CHIFF legislation, the list of adoptee organizations and organizations internationally recognized as working for preserving children in their country/family of origin is glaringly light.
• children in families first – code for children from Third World countries into the homes of privileged, American couples
• growing up in a family is a child’s basic human right – code switch for “growing up in an adoptive family in America”; perpetuation of international adoption
• international adoption as a solution – code for international adoption is THE solution
• best practices – code for ways to primarily advance the process and promotion of international adoption
• orphan - a complex code word steeped in biblical meaning that has been simplified that has categorized  and subsequently emotionally petitioned the adoption community into action on behalf of children in need who may or may not be legally available for adoption. It does not diminish the fact that there are children without direct care, but is overly referenced for all children who appear in need and lacking a road to Christian salvation by Western standards. At one time this terminology was antiquated, but was revived at the height of the evangelical adoption movement.
• rescue –to save a child in need by means of international adoption in a Westernized home (“being called to adopt”) and many times not critically considering the long-term implications for that child and first family, alternatives to permanency in-country or the possible reasons and/or methods in which a child was referred for international adoption originally. Taking on the theological salvation narrative and attempting to vertically apply to the child while overlooking the fact that adoption is about permanently building a family, not rescuing someone.
• resources can be reallocated to achieve more timely, effective, nurturing, and permanent familial solutions for children living without families– code for taking existing federal funds already benchmarked to promote family permanency in-country and reallocating them to ensure international adoption policy, practice, and placement is securely funded.
• shall lead the development and implementation of policies that will ensure the timely provision of appropriate, protective, and permanent family care for children living without families – policy codeswitch that will engender the least restrictive, fastest, and Western-centric measures to ensure international adoptive placement while deconstructing and maneuvering around current international and federal accountability standards in an effort to boost numbers of adoptions.

And for the ultimate codeswitch, when we read that a piece of legislation is in keeping with the core American belief that families are the best protection for children, this really means, regardless of global cultural considerations, which include the impact of poverty, gender and social class bias, diverse social norms, as well as a country’s sovereignty, Americans still know what is best. Thus, it is only in an American family that a child can truly flourish.

[And we find ourselves as American Indian Adoptees with this same situation in regards to the

Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare (CAICW) who wish to open the floodgates AGAIN and end ICWA protections so more white people can adopt from Indian reservations...Trace].

Native American Leaders Call for DOJ Investigation of ICWA Violations

Published: February 3, 2014
 

PORTLAND, OR—Today, National Indian Child Welfare Association Executive Director Terry Cross formally requested the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division launch an investigation into the unlawful treatment of American Indian and Alaska Native children in private adoptions and public child welfare systems.
Cross presented a letter on behalf of four leading national Native American organizations—the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the Native American Rights Fund, and the Association on American Indian Affairs—during a meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland hosted by Department of Justice Acting Attorney General for Civil Rights Jocelyn Samuels.
 

PDF: http://www.nicwa.org

NOTE: This letter gives me the idea that WE adoptees can also draft a letter to the DOJ asking for an investigation into this case, mentioning our own adoptions pre-ICWA.... Use the addresses on this letter to write your own letter TODAY....one solution is public outcry - that is needed now... Trace

32nd Annual Protecting Our Children: National American Indian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect

NICWA is pleased to announce that at this year's Protecting Our Children Annual Conference, First Nations Repatriation Institute Founder and Director Sandy White Hawk will facilitate a special meeting for American Indian and Alaska Native adoptees, former foster children, and their birth relatives.

The session is open to anyone touched by adoption. Participants are welcome to share their experiences or just come and listen. White Hawk will lead the discussion on what it was like growing up not having words to describe what adoptees experienced. She states, "We can share our stories and find out we are not alone."

White Hawk is quick to emphasize, "We will not bash our adoptive parents. Coming to terms with our adoption experience does not mean we encourage separation from our adoptive parents or relatives. There are those who are estranged from their adoptive parents, others who are not. And still others suffer from rejection of adoptive parents with whom they would like to have relationship. It is complicated. We support each other in our process, wherever we are within that journey."

Birth mothers, fathers, and other relatives are also encouraged to attend. White Hawk elaborates, "Adoption impacts everyone. Our birth mothers and fathers have often suffered the loss of their children without the benefit of any resource to express the pain, confusion, and guilt associated with relinquishing a child. We want to give them space to tell their stories. There are also birth mothers and fathers who don't experience these negative things, which we are also grateful for and invite their participation too. All are welcome."

FMI: www.nicwa.org/conference/

United Nations alerted to human rights violations of #BABYVERONICA case

 Baby Veronica with her father Dusten Brown

Kristen Carpenter and Lorie Graham on Human Rights and Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Kristen Carpenter and Lorie Graham have posted a very compelling and powerful paper about the Supreme Court’s decision in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl.  It is required reading for anyone interested in the case, and is destined to be the definitive paper on the international human rights aspects of the case.

The article is titled Human Rights to Culture, Family, and Self-Determination: The Case of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. Here is the abstract:

The well-being of indigenous children is a subject of major concern for indigenous peoples and human rights advocates alike. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not prevent the adoption of a Cherokee child by a non-Indian couple. This occurred over the objections of her Cherokee biological father, extended family, and Tribal Nation. After the decision, Baby Girl’s father and the adoptive couple contested the matter in a number of proceedings, none of which considered the child’s best interests as an Indian child. The tribally-appointed attorney for Baby Girl, as well as the National Indian Child Welfare Association and National Congress for American Indians, began examining additional venues for advocacy. Believing that the human rights of Baby Girl, much like those of other similarly situated indigenous children, were being violated in contravention of the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples Rights, and other instruments of international law, they asked us to bring the matter to the attention of the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples Rights (“UNSR”). We prepared a “statement of information” to alert the UNSR of the human rights violations occurring in the case. With the permission of the attorneys and organizations involved, this chapter introduces the Baby Girl case, contextualizes the claims in international human rights law, and then reproduces the statement of information, and portions of the UNSR’s subsequent public statement. It concludes with an update on the Baby Girl case and broader discussion about the potential for using international law and legal forums to protect the human rights of indigenous children.

If anyone wishes to read this paper, I have the pdf.  Email me: tracedemeyer@yahoo.com

The Great Divider: How the Baby Veronica case is the sign

By Trace A. DeMeyer

OK, as promised, I have more thoughts after I went to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School last Friday to hear a review of the Baby Veronica Case - and to hear what NCAI, NARF and the Tribal Supreme Court Law Project at Yale were doing while this major case was going on... and I reported to you yesterday what they said essentially…

There weren't any surprises for me unless you count how these panelists didn't use the time to discuss the genocide that actually occurred prior the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and the child abductions by social workers and missionaries - nor did they mention human trafficking and the Nightlight Adoption Agency dealings with Maldonado, the birthmother.  They did mention boarding schools.

So, I was truly upset. From what I heard, it appears American Indians are eons behind in civil rights and we can't seem to win a case in the Supreme Court.  I’d heard that warning years prior but this time at Yale was a bit more in my face. This case was about adoption by non-Indians, something I lived myself.

We had Justice Alito writing an opinion that Veronica is 1.2% Indian.  NARF attorney Joel West Williams asked the Yale audience, "Who in America is 1/16 or 3/256th anything?"  Yet we have a judge issuing his opinion by measuring an Indian for their Indian-ness which equates to measuring a child’s blood? This is still happening?

·        JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court:

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee. Because Baby Girl is classified in this way, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 required her to be taken, at the age of 27 months, from the only parents she had ever known and handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his [**736] parental rights and who had no prior contact with the child. The provisions of the federal statute [*2557] at issue here do not demand this result.

·        Jun 25 2013: Judgment REVERSED and case REMANDED. Alito, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, Thomas, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., and Breyer, J., filed concurring opinions. Scalia, J., filed a dissenting opinion. Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Ginsburg and Kagan, JJ., joined, and in which Scalia, J., joined in part. Read more here

·         

I couldn’t sleep ... Dusten Brown never had a chance. He went to Iraq knowing the Capobiancos had his daughter but he had to serve a year and a JAG lawyer took his case.  The puzzle remains why Maldonado mysteriously breaks up with him and severs all communication. Was she punishing her high school sweetheart Dusten by selling his baby or was she manipulated by the adoption agency to take their money?

Then it hit me - keeping America ignorant of Indians, culture, actual history - this all works to take Indian children.  Judgment is easy.  Third World poverty (which we didn’t create) somehow equates to abuse of children.  Add their general ignorance of sovereignty and culture, what it means to be Cherokee or Lakota or Navajo or any tribe - and it means you can't win public opinion polls or cases before the Supreme Court? 

Ignorance about Indians? Exactly!

It's been going on since colonial contact. Please, let's not call them settlers anymore but invaders. America has always been the Great Divider, building its fences, writing its laws, counting on classism and racism to divide us. 

America wins every time when it perpetuates this ignorance of Indians.  Do Indians do a good job of educating others about culture, or what's important to us?  Not really. We're way behind in any civil rights movement.  We've had movies romanticizing us over 100 years and it's hard to kill those "savage" “redskin” stereotypes drilled into all our heads!  

What do Americans know about Indians? Nothing.  Practically zilch.

America's "taking care" of Indians only works to create HATE among Americans who view us as privileged in some way that they are not.  Like why do we even have a law that keeps nice white people from adopting Indian babies? Trust me, ICWA is under attack.

I do know that Indians are way ahead in surviving every broken treaty and then fighting each other over small scraps of power. Some tribes even subscribe to "blood quantum" as if they need to purge their citizen rolls of those who may be too white or too black.

We have Supreme Court Justices using the blood quantum argument and you see that is not entirely their fault (they all went to law school but didn’t even have a course on Indian Law at those Ivy League schools) but it tells me - do not go anywhere near them. They are not even aware of their ignorance.  Dusten Brown didn't have a chance, not in that court.

We Indians shouldn't go anywhere near that court or any court with that level of stupidity. No, you can't tell America they are stupid.

What the panel did say was each and every tribe needs to create and have their own child protection network. I agree since it's pretty evident that you can't trust any non-Indian social worker to go to the reservation and use their mother- father “family unit” example.  Only Indians can decide who the right people are to care for its children.  That person might be an auntie, grandmother or another relative, depending on who in the tribal family is willing and able.

And the panel said we need more American Indian lawyers who become judges - because the way it is now - Indians can’t win.

For many years Vine Deloria and others did try very hard to educate others (with their brilliant books) on the white man’s level, even earning degrees in white man’s colleges like Yale and Harvard, but it all comes down to this:  whites don’t really care.

And if we really think about it, this is a very dangerous situation to be in.

Footnote:  I attended white schools like most everyone else - Really nothing I learned was true or real about Indian culture or history. I learned more sitting at the kitchen table of my friend Ellowyn who is Oglala Lakota, who gave me an education about Indians not written about anywhere.  Then there was my one adoptive aunt (a first-born American) who calls me a liar when I told her there were Indian Boarding Schools, and this was right after I visited Haskell in Kansas. No, Americans are not learning about Indians or the truth of our history. 

The Baby Veronica case is the sign, whether we wish to see it that way or not - but we can no longer ignore the ignorance or the danger surrounding this case.