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
