BELOVED STRANGERS: Help this film - give what you can

‘Beloved Strangers’ will be a feature documentary film about adoption, searching and reunion, with an eye-opening segment on the disrespected and discriminated status of adoptees in most U.S. states. Daniella and her group have now set up a website and can now take donations directly. Go to : www.belovedstrangers.com - watch this trailer and give what $$$ you can... Trace

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!

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

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. I do!

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)...."

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

My post on Lost Daughters

Read my blog post: "Nothing was going to stop me!"  Lost Daughters and their contributors are great!

http://daughterslost.blogspot.com/2012/06/nothing-was-going-to-stop-me.html

I am headed to Wisconsin next week and will resume blogging around July 1. Thanks everyone for your comments and love and support of this blog... Keep good thoughts... Trace


One more thing: read this blog  Real Daughter  - it's brilliant: http://realdaughter.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/parades-pomp-and-circumstuffs/#comment-2550

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/

So you're more Indian if you live on a rez? Really?

Lona Dell Harlow (Morris) is my Cherokee grandmother

Continuing with the Elizabeth Warren debacle - her family story isn't enough. 
Apparently the Cherokee are not opening any doors for Ms. Warren but Twila Barnes (who is demanding an apology) has invited her to lunch.
According to this, Indians who live on or near their rez are more Indian.

The following quote is from the New Yorker:

Twila Barnes, the proprietor of Polly’s Granddaughter, a blog devoted to Cherokee genealogy and pseudo-genealogy. Last week, during an interview with the talk-radio host Laura Ingraham, Barnes tried to explain Cherokee identity as a form of citizenship. “Being Cherokee is not a race of people—it’s a nation of people,” she said. “And we descend from a group of people who always stayed with their nation, rebuilt their nations after destructive things like the Trail of Tears or the Civil War. Those people always stayed together as a nation.” Her definition hints at the violations that have served, perversely, to sanctify this identity, and also at the responsibilities that usually accompany the privileges of citizenship.
Barnes and Ingraham spent a few pleasant minutes dissecting Warren’s unproven claims, and then Ingraham asked Barnes about her own background.

Ingraham: “So, Twila, are you full-blooded Cherokee, yourself?”
Barnes: “No.”
Ingraham: “What’s your lineage?”
Barnes: “My blood quantum is—”
Ingraham, laughing: “‘Quantum’! I like this. What is it?”
Barnes: “It’s blood quantum, and mine is seven thirty-secondths.”
Ingraham: “What the heck does that mean? I don’t even know what that means!”
Barnes: “That means I am—my grandfather was just below being a full-blood Cherokee.”
Ingraham: “O.K.”
Barnes: “And then my grandmother was white, so my mother got half of his blood. And my father’s white, so I got half of my mother’s.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/06/elizabeth-warren-who-is-native-american.html#ixzz1wsH4F9xP

And here is a another viewpoint:..."First of all, they're Republicans," she said, practically spitting. "And that's how they think, instead of looking at the fact that Elizabeth Warren could be the best thing that ever happened to Indians, with all the work she's done for the economically oppressed." http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/elizabeth-warren-and-attacks-cherokee


Add this interview with David Truer to the list:

Audio and Transcript from Yesterday’s Talk of the Nation

Talk of the Nation had David Treuer and Mary Annette Pember on to discuss Native identity and ancestry yesterday.

Here is the audio: .20120607_totn_03
The transcript is here.

Yes, we made into Glamour Magazine!

Yes, we made into Glamour Magazine!

Met Miriam Christina and this is her story! It's awesome! She is MakersDaugther on Twitter!

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

Sitting with Sorrow: great blog!

http://sittingwithsorrow.typepad.com/sitting-with-sorrow/adoptees/
I am always happy to find a new blog about adoption.

This post by Sitting With Sorrow is just great:  Adoption Healing (A Book Review)

Please share with others... and my thanks for following my blog!  Trace

IF... repost from Von

If………. by eagoodlife So tell me, if adoption is so wonderful and beautiful - Why don't adoptees have equal rights? Why so much adopter angst and justification? Why do we cost so much? Why do people fight over us? Why do open adoptions close? Why can't we know our full stories like everyone else does? Why do we need the UN to focus on us specifically? Why are we marketed? Why do adopters go to jail for abusing and killing us? Why do attorneys and others go to jail over it? Why do we still suffer stigma, racism and adoptism? Why is there so much argument over us, about us and with us? Why has consensus not been reached? Why aren't all mothers happy, content and pleased about the future they gave us/are giving us? Why in Australia will the Federal and all State Governments be apologising for adoption? Why do organisations exist to research, oppose and educate about adoption? Why are so many books written, films made and blogs written about adoption by adoptees? Why are so many making money from something others see as 'a gift'? Why does adoption involve lies, scams, deception, illusion, omissions and secrets? Why does adoption break-down and adoptees are returned, sent back or re-homed? Why are the figures for domestic and transnational adoption falling steadily? Why are adoption agencies going out of business or being prosecuted? Why do professionals describe such things as 'the mask of adoption', 'adoption syndrome' and so on? Why do research figures show such a high rate of psychological difficulties for adoptees? A recent adoptee conducted survey indicated nearly 90% of adoptees at some time suffer anxiety and depression! Why the continuous hard-sell? Why specialist therapies, interventions and practitioners? Why so many non-adoptees unable to cope with the views of adult adoptees on adoption? Why so many myths, lies and deceptions about adoption? Why is so much money needed, so many bribes and sweeteners? Why are so few adoptees pandering to the market with books, training etc ? A couple of interesting links packed with information and differing views on adoption's beauty, relevance and integrity in case you haven't seen them - coming-out-from-ones-own-ignorance-is-considered-radical/ stigmas-about-adoption-remain-and-hurt-families I had to share this blog post from my adoptee friend Von who is in Australia - add your own IF question in the comments section... Trace

Celebrity Adopters still making headlines

Madonna adopted from Malawi twice

The following Yahoo story is further evidence that Hollywood has NOT got the message: Stop adopting other mother's children...

Take a look at any celebrity news outlet these days and — among the stories about baby bumps and luxury delivery rooms — another parenting theme has emerged: adoption. Dozens of stars, from Sandra Bullock to Katherine Heigl to Charlize Theron, have all famously adopted children recently, often going out of the country to do so.

International adoptions were indeed on the rise for years, but despite the fact that half the members of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's brood of six hail from foreign countries, or that Madonna and her two adoptions from the African nation of Malawi made headlines, the number of Americans adopting from outside the country has actually plummeted recently, thanks to a variety of complicated factors including the enforcement of an inter-country adoption treaty, which has forced some agencies that can't comply out of business, as well the uncovering of corruption in certain nations.
Of the approximately 130,000 or so adoptions that took place in America last year (of which, more than a third consist of a stepparent adopting a stepchild), surprisingly, less than 10,000 involved children from overseas. The majority of the remainder, according to Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, are adoptions from foster care, and — despite the little ones we see celebs taking home — those children are rarely babies.
Over just the past year, stars including Denise Richards, Kristin Davis, Viola Davis and her husband, actor Julius Tennon, and Mariska Hargitay and her husband, actor Peter Hermann, have introduced the world to their newly adopted infants. So does that mean they received special treatment because they're rich and famous? Indeed, celebrities may wind up with an advantage when it comes to adoption, but the benefits usually stem from being rich, not famous.
"Adoption outside of foster care, particularly so for infant adoptions and international adoptions, has come to be quite expensive and that locks a lot of people out," explains Pertman, who is the author of Adoption Nation. "Does power, influence, money make a difference? Yeah, it does in every realm that we're aware of, but a wealthy surgeon probably gets the same sort of treatment as a wealthy movie star, just that nobody's following the surgeon around with cameras."