The Un-Adopted (another Russian orphan story)

In 2002 alone, U.S. families adopted over 20,000 children, from far-away places like China, Russia and Guatemala.

We rarely hear about adoptive parents who notice the signs of a mental disorder, despair or disease in their adopted child, then abandon the adoptee/orphan.  Abandon them? Un-Adopt them? Yes, this happens far more than we realize…

One mother in Texas blogged openly about her experience adopting a little girl from a Russian orphanage in 2005-2006. (She shall remain anonymous.)

How generous it was for her to open her heart and home to an orphan, we read. How expensive these international adoptions are, we read. When the child showed signs of distress and disrupted her home and biological children, we read her “Russian” child was “unadopted,” sent away to someone who could deal with her problems in Wisconsin.

This Texan had her illusions dashed about “saving this baby” and apparently had no idea about orphan trauma, though she read “everything” about raising children. Day after day, she blogged her difficulties - then once the girl “P” was gone, the blogging stopped. Apparently she went back to raising her biological sons.

This is an excerpt from her blog:

“I think being more informed about the probable emotional expectation possibilities for these children would have been all it took for me to know international adoption was not for us. So many professionals have NOW told me... despite any care she receives she will quite probably never be like your other children. The affects of institutional care on a baby is many times lifelong and you can never expect them to be like your other children. Why didn’t they tell me this BEFORE we adopted? I was searching for the kind of relationship I have with my boys, the kind my mom and I have. If I had known I could never even expect this child to feel close to me or identify with me, I feel I certainly would have never adopted.

"So, truth to be known- we should never have adopted any institutionalized child!

"My personal experience goes on to be complicated by a truly adored referral that we lost before we got to travel and perhaps, did not allow ourselves to grieve enough for. We traveled to meet a child who we found obviously had a major neurological problems and we had to turn down - in this country (this was traumatic and extremely hard to get through as well).

"Then the ridiculous circumstance of getting to spend one day with “P” before we made our decision and flew home to await our second trip.

"This was surely not the best way to decide on such a huge factor in your life yet we did. In order to adopt internationally YOU HAVE TO make rash decisions based on pictures and sketchy information. You have to give it to God and pray you are doing right. Didn’t you at some point too?

"Due to flight change unavailability, expenses, red tape, time factors, children waiting for us at home, orphanage visiting rules, and emotional upset, we made decisions we SHOULD NOT HAVE MADE. I DO accept responsibility for making a decision with all those factors in place but also point back to Russia’s laws on adoption and all the problematic Russian ways and secretiveness that are SO not helpful to the futures of these children or the people trying to make the best decisions for bringing them home into new families.

"As a mother I tried to base my decisions on emotional intuitiveness and gut feelings. In retrospect a more logical approach and lots of caution would have been more productive. I needed to feel right... but I mostly felt confused, afraid, lost.

"Then there was the “twinning.” Bringing home a child who was so close in age to my biological son was a HUGE folly. Again, this is mostly our fault of course. We, being bullet proof and invincible, thought we could make this work. We thought we would have it rough for a while but would pull through and live happily ever after. NOT SO. Throwing this on top of the attachment issues was just too much. We never even thought about our bio sons mental health... sure there would be some normal sibling rivalry, but what manifested was so magnified to the norm that we were shocked and scared out of our minds at the long term effects this would have on EVERYONE! Neither he, nor “P” could get the emotional support they needed because it was just too much for one Mom to be able to do. It was unfair and unhealthy for both children and “P” needed focus and diligent emotional support FULL TIME in light of her issues.

"Upon bringing “P” home, the problems continued as we found a huge deficit in the help and support we needed in our area. We found all the help we thought we had behind us turned into incompetent therapists not versed in RAD and doctors with little or no experience with post adoption issues, money-hungry therapists, and a lack of coverage for the issues “P” had from our insurance company, then perhaps the most damaging... we found RAD.

"So, obviously I have no crystal ball here but I think these bits of information, truths, and circumstantial situations and bad and hasty decisions might have created extra issues and a much different outcome for us.... They say hindsight is 20/20 but I am still putting the pieces together here. Here are some things I do believe hindered our success but perhaps there is far more I have not realized.... First, gain more perspective and educate yourselves. There is a list of disruption sites that may help many people to understand, avoid, and support this process when it is necessary. There are many common factors in an adoption that end people up in disruption. These factors should be on a neon sign at every agency!!!!”

Far From the Reservation, 1972

This longitudinal study was one of the first to systematically explore the outcomes of transracial adoptions. Beginning in 1960, Fanshel followed 97 families that had adopted children through the Indian Adoption Project, more than one-quarter of all the children placed between 1958 and 1967. Researchers interviewed parents in 15 different states at approximately one-year intervals, but made no effort to interview or assess children directly. Most of the children had been two years old or younger at the time of adoption and were not yet teenagers when the study ended. No control group of same-race adoptees or non-adopted children was used for comparison. The study provided detailed tables and statistical correlations, as all outcome studies did, and used the instrument that Helen Witmer and her colleagues had devised to measure the quality of adoptive homes in their study of independent adoptions in Florida. Far from the Reservation also offered a wealth of narrative detail that illuminated what these adoptions meant to the parents involved.

Far From the Reservation was published at a moment of racial polarization and vehement criticism of transracial adoptions. Its main author was David Fanshel, who was one of the most prominent child welfare researchers in the postwar decades. Although Fanshel was white, he had been one of the first to tackle the question of discrimination in adoption services in his 1957 report, A Study in Negro Adoption. Fifteen years later, Fanshel still believed deeply in the promise of empirical research to improve transracial adoptions, but the changed historical context in which he worked shaped his interpretation of research findings.

Fanshel found that factors often identified as strongly correlated with outcomes were not as noticeable in these adoptions. Age at placement, for example, had been considered crucial ever since Sophie van Senden Theis‘ 1924 study, How Foster Children Turn Out, showed that children placed earlier turned out much better.

In Native American adoptions, the influence of age appeared weak, outweighed by other variables, the health status of the birth mother in particular. In addition, many professionals and researchers assumed that white couples committed to racial equality were the most likely to adopt non-white children and succeed as parents. Far From the Reservation suggested that this was not the case. Parents’ social attitudes—about civil rights, politics, and religion—did not matter except negatively. Families that were more socially concerned and active had more problems with their adopted children. Why would this be the case? Fanshel had no idea.

The study’s summary measure of outcomes, The Child Progress Scale, showed that 78 percent of all the adoptees were adequately or excellently adjusted. Only one in ten children had problems that raised serious doubts about their future well-being. This was very good news. It indicated that transracial adoptions could be arranged on a solid foundation of objective knowledge that they would turn out well rather than a subjective hope that they might. The study reassured its audience that transracial placements posed little risk to the physical or emotional well-being of individual children and Fanshel agreed that these adoptions had “saved many of these children from lives of utter ruination.”

Yet he did not equate evidence of good outcomes with endorsement of transracial adoptions. It was a mistake to consider the lives of Native American children one at a time, apart from the future of their tribes, Fanshel wrote. “It seems clear that the fate of most Indian children is tied to the struggle of Indian people in the United States for survival and social justice. Their ultimate salvation rests upon the success of that struggle. It is my belief that only the Indian people have the right to determine whether their children can be placed in white homes. Even with the benign outcomes reported here, it may be that Indian leaders would rather see their children share the fate of their fellow Indians than lose them in the white world. It is for the Indian people to decide.”

Studies that documented very good outcomes empirically were still not answers to some of the most basic questions. Were transracial adoptions wise? Were they right? Who had the right to decide?

[Source: www.darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/FanshelFFTR.htm]

Kinship care missing from survey

Seneca tribal expert not surprised by foster numbers

Native American Times, June 6, 2006 - The head of a non-profit organization that works towards the benefit of Native American children and their families was not surprised to learn that more minorities are amenable to the idea of accepting foster children into their home.

An ABC News/Time national poll on foster care issues in 2006 showed 31% of minority members surveyed answered “Yes,” when asked “Would you seriously consider becoming a foster parent or adopting a foster child, or not?” compared to 19% of Caucasians.

Terry L. Cross, executive director of the Portland-based National Indian Child Welfare Association and an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation New York, said the results have their roots in cultural backgrounds.

“Cultural norms, including sustaining strong extended families, handing down of culture and traditions, and establishing a positive identity, contribute to perceptions of our foster care system and notions of your place within that system. What is missing from the survey is how many people would support ‘kinship care,’ or relative care, over foster care placements in a stranger’s home,” Cross said.

Cross said kinship care is considered by most to be a cultural norm of Indian Country, and when a crisis arises other family members step in to share the burden of taking care of the children. Given a choice of a child being removed from a home due to maltreatment and being placed in a licensed foster home with strangers in a new community, Cross said, it appears most Indians will choose informal kinship care arrangements, even if it means little financial support for the kinship caregivers.

The association that Cross heads up has been working to change laws preventing children in the custody of tribal courts from receiving the benefits and protections that the association says are currently available to all other children. Congress in 1980 enacted the Foster Care and Adoption Assistance Act, which provides entitlement funding for foster care and adoption assistance services for income-eligible children who are placed by state agencies or public agencies with which the state has an agreement. Children who are under the jurisdiction of their tribe and are placed by tribal courts and agencies are not included in the program. The funds are only available to tribes who have entered into agreements with their respective states, with critics charging these agreements are often limited in scope and may only allow the tribes access to one portion of the program.

Various lawmakers have spoken out against the law.

“All children deserve to have a loving, nurturing home where their basic needs are met”, Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). “Native American children placed in foster care or adopted through tribal placements should have all the resources available to children placed by state services. This bill makes that happen.”

The nonpartisan Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care has recommended providing tribes with federal child welfare funding.

The association is also pushing to prevent the practice of completely removing children from their home, believing that doing so leads to severing any contact with parents. The Indian Child Welfare Act mandates that the child’s tribe must be notified when placing a Native American youngster in foster care.

[Source: Native American Times, June 6, 2006, www.nativetimes.com]

ADOPTION AND REPATRIATION SERVICES TO FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE OF CANADA

ADOPTION AND REPATRIATION SERVICES TO FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE OF CANADA - RESOLUTION BY ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS.


Moved by: Chief Gerald Esquash, Swan Lake First Nation; Seconded by: Chief Ted Quewezance, Keeseekoose First Nation; Carried. Certified copy of a Resolution made the 22nd day of July, 1999 in Vancouver, B.C.; Phil Fontaine, National Chief Resolution No. 10/99

SUBJECT: Adoption and repatriation services to First Nations people of Canada

WHEREAS First Nation’s people across Canada have been tragically affected by the adoption of their children, (16,810 treaty status children, DIAND Statistics, 1996) in the last thirty years; and,

WHEREAS adoption of First Nations children by the governments in Canada is a continuation from the boarding school policies of the assimilation of First Nations through First Nations Children; and,

WHEREAS the affects of these government policies of assimilation has devastated and tragically affected First Nation’s children, families and communities, culture; and,

WHEREAS the ‘sixties scoop’ was a massive failure on First Nations families and was effectively a form of genocide; and

WHEREAS the long term effects of the ‘sixties scoop’ continue to be felt in every First Nations community in Canada as parents and children deal with the children problems of lost relatives and ensuing social problems; and

WHEREAS these children, now adults, are searching for family, culture and identity and,

WHEREAS birth families, grandparents, mothers, fathers, siblings and extended family are searching for their children lost to adoption; and,

WHEREAS the demand for service to assist and facilitate searches and reunions is enormous; and,

WHEREAS the funding for repatriation services are inadequately funded or non existent in most provinces; and,

WHEREAS the Federal and Provincial Governments are responsible for this destruction of First Nations families and their communities; and,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that National Chief Phil Fontaine support and assist the First Nations communities of Canada in their efforts to secure adequate funding for repatriation programs from the Federal and Provincial Governments of Canada.

THE APOLOGY (CWLA Shay Bilchik)

THE APOLOGY

Working Together to Strengthen Supports for Indian Children and Families: A National Perspective

Keynote Speech by Shay Bilchik at the NICWA Conference, Anchorage, Alaska on April 24, 2001

I. Truth and Reconciliation

I want to begin with a story that was a favorite of Dr. Carlos Montezuma, also known as Wassaja. He was an Indian activist, a Yavapai who was born in 1875 at Fort MacDowell, Arizona, and a physician, back in the days when doctors made house calls. As he told the story, a certain doctor used to walk once a week or so down a particular street to visit a patient. On his way, he passed by the home where a friend of the patient lived. Each time he passed her door on the way back from his house call, she would be sitting outside, and she would ask how her friend was doing. “She’s improving,” the doctor always reported.

After this had gone on for many weeks, there came a day when he had a different answer: “I’m sorry, she’s dead.” The woman went inside and conveyed this news to her husband. “What did she die of,” he asked? “I don’t know,” said the woman. “I guess she died of improvement.”

When Carlos Montezuma told this story, sometimes in testifying before Congress about the condition of his people, he used it to warn his audience that American Indians and their irreplaceable cultures were in danger of dying from “improvement” if the U.S. government persisted in the policies it was following.

Now the Child Welfare League of America, the organization I represent, has never been a part of the U.S. government. But most of its members, public and private child welfare organizations, represent a profession that has always been dedicated to improvement, in its positive and sometimes negative sense. For that reason, I think that you and all the people you represent deserve an accounting of one phase of our history.

I have not met many of you before today, and we don’t yet have an established relationship. Even so, I want to talk with you on a very personal basis about a matter of great importance to all of us.

The spirit in which I stand before you today, as a representative of CWLA and as an individual, is the spirit of truth and reconciliation. In recent years, many countries have dealt with the aftermath of a period of great injustice by creating national truth commissions. This approach was based in the belief that while the past could not be undone, it could be faced squarely, and in a highly public forum- and that a full accounting of the truth was the best possible basis for moving forward to build the future. When the truth had been told as fully as possible, those who had been offended could have at least the knowledge that denial was at an end, and that the world knew what they had suffered. The perpetrators shared that knowledge. Reparations and reconciliation could proceed, on the foundation of truth.

It is with this attitude that I approach you today, and begin a discussion that I realize will need to continue - and to grow over time.

Some of you are already familiar with CWLA, but for those who are not, I’ll offer a brief history. In 1909, the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children recommended the formation of both a Children’s Bureau within the federal government and a non-governmental body that would unite the various public and private groups working across the U.S. for the sake of children and families. Around the same time, leaders of many child-serving organizations in the Eastern and Midwestern states were realizing for themselves that they would be stronger together than alone. They were particularly interested in developing standards to guide child welfare practice, in hopes that high quality services would become the national norm. CWLA opened its doors in New York City in 1920 with 63 member agencies.

This all happened just about the time that child welfare was beginning to take itself seriously as a profession. Individuals viewing the work from something of a business perspective were stepping up to take control away from the “church ladies” and society wives who had originally established many of our agencies, and a few colleges were beginning to offer professional degrees in social work.

Since 1920, CWLA and the child welfare profession have grown up side by side, and although we like to believe that today’s practice is the state of the art, we know that both still have a lot of growing to do. In no area of practice is this truer than in Indian Child Welfare.

Our profession is other-centered. It’s dedicated to improving conditions of life for people, like children, whose capacity to help themselves is limited by age or other circumstances. By its very nature, this exposes us to a strong temptation to think we know what’s best for other people, so we constantly have to rediscover humility and respect.

Although we strive to provide leadership for our member agencies, as a membership organization we haven’t usually been very far ahead of our members, who haven’t been very far ahead of the mainstream culture. For a long time in the early history of child welfare, many educated middle-class Americans sincerely believed that the world would run smoothly and sweetly if everybody would just make the effort to think and behave like they did. In the name of improvement, Irish and Italian children were scooped up from city tenements that looked crowded and dirty, away from “unfit” single parents and the smells of unfamiliar cooking, taken to the countryside in orphan trains, and parceled out to rural families. Most of them never saw their parents or siblings again.

These were terrible acts, no matter how noble or “professional” the intentions of their perpetrators. Next to the death penalty, the most absolute thing a government can do to an individual is to take a child away. But these were acts against individual immigrant families, and no European national group was singled out for these removals to the point of being imperiled.

One ethnic group, however - American Indians and Alaskan Natives - a people of many cultures and governments, and the original citizens of this land - was singled out for treatment that ranged over the decades from outright massacre to arrogant and paternalistic “improvement.” CWLA played a role in that attempt. We must face this truth.

No matter how well intentioned and how squarely in the mainstream this was at the time, it was wrong; it was hurtful; and it reflected a kind of bias that surfaces feelings of shame, as we look back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

I am not here today to deny or minimize that role, but to put it on the table and to acknowledge it as truth. And then, in time, and to the extent that each of us is able, to move forward in a new relationship in which your governments are honored and respected, our actions are based upon your needs and values, and we show proper deference to you in everything that concerns Native children and families.

These are the facts. Between 1958 and 1967, CWLA cooperated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, under a federal contract, to facilitate an experiment in which 395 Indian children were removed from their tribes and cultures for adoption by non-Indian families. This experiment began primarily in the New England states. CWLA channeled federal funds to its oldest and most established private agencies first, to arrange the adoptions, though public child welfare agencies were also involved toward the end of this period. Exactly 395 adoptions of Indian children were done and studied during this 10-year period, with the numbers peaking in 1967.

ARENA, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, began in early 1968 as the successor to the BIA/CWLA Indian Adoption Project. Counting the period before 1958 and some years after it, CWLA was partly responsible for approximately 650 children being taken from their tribes and placed in non-Indian homes. For some of you, this story is a part of your personal history.

Through this project, BIA and CWLA actively encouraged states to continue and to expand the practice of “rescuing” Native children from their own culture, from their very families. Because of this legitimizing effect, the indirect results of this initiative cannot be measured by the numbers I have cited. Paternalism under the guise of child welfare is still alive in many locations today, as you well know.

Far From the Reservation, David Fanshel’s 1972 CWLA study of these adoptions (which only covered five years in the children’s lives), concluded that while the children were doing well and the adoptive parents were delighted in almost every case, only Indians themselves could ultimately decide whether this adoption program should continue. “It is my belief,” Fanshel wrote, “that only the Indian people have the right to determine whether their children can be placed in white homes.”

Indian people knew from the beginning that this policy was very wrong. In Fanshel’s own words, they saw this “as the ultimate indignity that has been inflicted upon them.”

Fanshel came to this realization, as he concluded his research, because of the vigorous Indian activism that was underway in the early 1970s. Your legislative answer, after another 5 or 6 years of education and advocacy, was the Indian Child Welfare Act, passed into law in 1978. In the words of ICWA, Congress endorsed the unassailable fact that “no resource is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children.” As you have clearly articulated, children are the future.

While adoption was not as wholesale as the infamous Indian schools, in terms of lost heritage, it was even more absolute. I deeply regret the fact that CWLA’s active participation gave credibility to such a hurtful, biased, and disgraceful course of action. I also acknowledge that a CWLA representative testified against ICWA at least once, although fortunately, that testimony did not achieve its end.

As we look at these events with today’s perspective, we see them as both catastrophic and unforgivable. Speaking for CWLA, I offer our sincere and deep regret for what preceded us.

The people who make up CWLA today did not commit these wrongs, but we acknowledge that our organization did. They are a matter of record. We acknowledge this inheritance, this legacy of racism and arrogance. And we acknowledge that this legacy makes your work more difficult, every day. As we accept this legacy, we also accept the moral responsibility to move forward in an aggressive, proactive, and positive manner, as we pledge ourselves to see that nothing like what has happened ever happens again. And we can ask- I do ask and hope- for a chance to earn your respect and to work with you as partners, on the basis of truth, on the ground of our common commitment to the well-being of children and young people and the integrity of families and cultures.

We will begin by demonstrating our respect for you and your work, recognizing the authority of your governments, and taking seriously our position of influence with public and private child welfare agencies and the governments supporting them, to fully comply with the spirit and the letter of the Act.

In recent decades our relationship has been characterized by a fluctuating level of effort and many sins of omission. There has been silence from the League on many occasions when we should have spoken out, on ICWA in particular. And we haven’t yet demonstrated sufficient leadership for our members, or the field, in this area.

But more encouraging things have been happening recently, and the trend is definitely looking up. The credit for that goes largely to Terry Cross, of NICWA and the Seneca Nation, and to Faith Smith, founder and president of Native American Educational Services College, who has served on our board since 1992. Faith Smith is an Ojibwe from the Lac Courte Oreilles in Wisconsin. Both of them have been insistent and persistent- in the friendliest possible way. A newer CWLA Board member, Faith Roessel, who is a Navajo from Round Rock, Arizona, has also guided our new course. And a number of our staff members have urged and guided us in this direction, beginning with Burt Annin in the 1980s and including Deputy Director Shirley Marcus Allen, and staff members Linda Spears, Lynda Arnold, John George, Tom Hay, and others. We established an internal Task Force on Indian Child Welfare in early 1999, and some of the recommendations it has developed are already being implemented.

[EXCERPT: Source: http://www.cwla.org/execdir/edremarks010424.htm]