Torn apart under a dictatorship, a Chilean family is reunited | REUTERS

Torn apart under a dictatorship, a Chilean family is reunited | REUTERS - YouTube

ADOPTION REALITY: CHILE

SAN ANTONIO, Chile, Feb 25 (Reuters) - "I knew she'd find me," Edita Bizama, 64, said from her home in the Chilean port city of San Antonio after finally reuniting with the daughter who was taken from her over 40 years ago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Adamary Garcia was removed from her mother a few days after birth and sent abroad for adoption, one of as many as 20,000 children that authorities estimate were forcibly taken from their parents by a military government that saw international adoptions as a way to reduce child poverty.

"There was a social worker that was persistent, really persistent," Bizama said. It was 1984 and Bizama, who already had two young children, had expressed an interest in adoption during her pregnancy. But then she started having doubts.

"But the social worker said, how are you going to raise three children? You don't have a job, you don't have a home, you don't have any stability."

Bizama said she spent five days with her daughter, holding and feeding her, before she was taken to an office a few hours away, forced to hand over her baby and sent on a bus back to her hometown.

It was a secret Bizama kept from most of her family for decades. She had no name or way of finding her daughter.

Thousands of miles away, Adamary Garcia - who grew up in Florida and now lives in Puerto Rico - knew she had been adopted but knew nothing about the circumstances.

Then a friend shared a story about Tyler Graf, a Texas firefighter who found out he had been taken as an infant during the dictatorship and had started an NGO, Connecting Roots, to reconnect adoptees with their biological families in Chile.

Traced via her sister's birth certificate and then confirmed with a DNA test, Connecting Roots identified Bizama as Garcia's birth mother.

Item 1 of 7 Edita Bizama laughs with her daughter Adamary Garcia, one of the victims of Pinochet-era forced adoptions, at the airport in Santiago, Chile February 22, 2025. REUTERS/Pablo Sanhueza

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Garcia, now 41, looks like her mother and two sisters.  Like her older sister, she has a fascination for dogs - they have rescued and fostered dozens of dogs between them.

source: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mother-reunites-with-american-daughter-taken-baby-during-chiles-dictatorship-2025-02-25/

 

National Adoption Awareness Month stories #NAAM

• ‘Mom, tell me the story of my adoption’ [USA]. My experience as an adoptee isn’t a monolith, nor is it isolated. It’s an important reminder that across the country, thousands of adoptees are navigating a one-sided narrative. Adoption has historically been framed as a beautiful method of family creation. This conveniently leaves out the separation from one’s birth family that occurs.

  A Community Call to Action

  November is National Adoption Awareness Month, and it’s an important time for diverse communities to unite around our people. Many of our community leaders, colleagues, friends, and even the friends of our children are impacted by adoption, and yet, they fail to get the community support they need to process, heal, and honor their stories. Which is why I invite you toward action.

  This November, through The Janchi Show and Conversation Piece, I’ll be elevating stories and voices that deserve to be heard, amplified, and validated. I’ll also be available to support Indianapolis’ corporate community as they look to properly understand and honor adoption within the workplace. I invite you to tune in, engage with these stories, and lean in to help contribute to a more inclusive, more supportive community. Schedule a conversation with me at https://www.patrickintheworld.me/.

  
  

• We Are Grieving [USA]. I found out that I was adopted from a grade-school bully. Instead of offering emotional support, my parents said it was a lie and ignored it. Over the next few years, this information was used by my peers to humiliate me, as they knew my parents were lying to me.

   

  • NAM/NAAM Day 3. It's About Time: Adoption Oversight, Protection, Transparency Bill Hits Congress [USA]. Every year Marley Greiner of Bastard Nation, DailyBastardette, and Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes takes on NAAM, writing a new post every day, including this one about the ADOPT Act introduction in Congress. Another goody? How to Say Nobody Cares About Adoptee Rights Without Saying They Don’t

    
    

  • Live Podcast! Adoptees Crossing Lines will host a live podcast next week, on November 15, 2023, beginning at 6:30pm Eastern. Check it out.

    
    

  • Episcopal Church Approves Committee to Investigate Forced Adoptions [USA]. The Episcopal Church’s executive council voted to form a committee to investigate the church’s involvement with forced adoptions that occurred between the 1940s and ’70s.

   

  REMINDER: If you want to share on social media, please do... this information is important and should be shared... Trace 

  👇 you can use the little boxes below
  

Vine Deloria's last video interview #NAAM2023 #bloodquantum

 

(reblog) Listen to the comments he makes about adoption and blood quantum- it is vital we understand.

It is now National Adoption Awareness Month (#NAAM2023) - we will be posting more on the topic of adoption all month.

Somewhere, there are records and I want them. They’re mine.

 

sample of 2022 adoption bingo card

Loved this article by an adoptee

22 Nov

“Here we go again.

Those four words pop into my mind every November, like an annual calendar reminder set to go off with a cartoon “boing.”

November is National Adoption Month, and as an adopted person you might think we’re all a bundle of anticipatory excitement, planning the kegger and booking the cover band.”

For example, I’ve been on a 30-year mission to obtain every page of my medical, adoption, foster care and genealogical records.

I’ve had some success at this mostly because I haven’t stopped asking after being told no.

 

Mardi Link: Happy National Adoption Month

Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh #60s Scoop #NAAM2020

 

Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home by Editor

 

During the Sixties Scoop, over 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their biological families, lands, and culture and trafficked across provinces, borders, and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households. Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh delves into the personal and provocative narrative of Colleen Cardinal’s journey growing up in a non-Indigenous household as a '60s Scoop adoptee. […]

Read more of this post

 

ANOTHER REVIEW: Book review: Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (”Raised somewhere else”) By Colleen Cardinal #netgalley – Amber Unmasked

 

NAAM2020 is National Adoption Awareness Month.  Every November this happens. 

#NAAM2019 - ICAV - coming out of the adoptee fog

Coming Out of the Adoptee Fog

WATCH

#NAAM2019: National Adoption Awareness Month begins today

I plan to share posts from other adoptee bloggers all month...

Click and read:

The adopted ones blog

Two adoptees – one vocal the other not so much…

Day One of the longest month of the year (despite being only 30 days) where we all get to hear how wonderful and downright beautiful adoption is...

Day One 

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Daniel Drennan ElAwar

Isn’t it valid to compare adoption with a pregnancy?

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Adopto-Snark

 

Here We Go Again

by Snarkurchin

Yay! It's National Adoption "Awareness" Month, in which almost nobody is made aware of anything about adoption except that it exists. Apparently people's brains fall out every Halloween and they have to be reminded about adoption (and furniture and birds, for all I know).

In short, there's nothing special about November. It's pitching the same "awareness" we're told about adoption the rest of the year. That is bullshit, and it needs to change. Some of us who have an actual awareness of adoption have been trying to change it for decades now. Very few people listen.

https://snarkurchin.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/here-we-go-again/

 

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Adoptee Author Lynn Grubb

The Latest Breakthrough on My Birth Father Search

 

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 How the US stole thousands of Native kids (VOX)

https://youtu.be/UGqWRyBCHhw

  

These are great books and helpful:

How did you feel? Can you imagine this?

This is the last post for #NAAM, or National Adoption Awareness Month, and it's something I wrote a few years back:

How did you feel…

16Sep 2017 | By TAO

I’m trying something new.  New is scary for me, but, it’s something I thought of doing for a while on many different topics.  I decided to start with adoptee rights which means that there are two different questions for adoptees, and a third question for other voices.  Hopefully, hearing feelings of others may convince people to change their mind and support upcoming legislation.

1.  When you are denied the right to your factual original birth certificate, how does it make you feel?
2.  For those who’ve finally gained the right to the original birth certificate, tell me how it felt when you held your original birth certificate in your hands. 
3.  Other voices in adoption, how does it makes you feel knowing your child either has the right to their original birth certificate upon request, just like non-adopted do, or doesn’t have the same right.
(If you want to answer on Tao’s post, here is the link)

My Answer:

I will answer number one. I can answer number one.

When I was 22, I called Catholic Charities in Minnesota who said to me, “Sorry we can’t help you. All our adoption records are sealed.” They had my adoption file since 1956 and they had my name. They had me in their system somewhere – this church who had sold me into this adoption, and a life of lies and fake documents. These social workers/nuns/priests had my identity locked up in a drawer somewhere and they weren’t going to tell me anything? Exactly. (I felt very angry and very desperate. What could I do?)

Have you imagined what it would be like to not know your own family? How you might meet someone and wonder “could we be cousins or siblings?” I was 22. I had questions about my health, my medical history, and nothing to write on the doctor’s office forms. Can you imagine this? People who are not adopted, can you?

At age 22, I was hurt. I was. After calling them, I was so hurt. Actually devastated. And to make matters worse, my adoptive parents would never be helpful. (They probably had my adoption file hidden away – they never showed it to me or offered me any help.) At that point I was a college graduate and living on my own. This phone call to Catholic Charities was my decision and I didn’t need anyone’s permission to search for my own adoption records. AND I wasn’t sharing anything important about my search since my adoptive parents had very little contact with me.
WOW – I do recall how I felt anger. How in the world can I live this way? I might be dating my own brother! I might be working with a cousin or my own parent? Fuming hostile anger!

There was nowhere to put this anger. I didn’t have a counselor to guide me. I had no one. (Yet I never felt sorry for myself.)

Then finally I had an idea. Go to the courthouse. I did. The rest is in my memoir (in greater detail.)
I found out my name. I had my mother’s name. I had a physical description of my father and his age.
I was 22 and NAIVE so this adoption file was a thick legal file. I had no idea what I was reading but this court proceeding was about ME. I took notes. I kept two scraps of paper like they were my most important possession. (In 2010 I petitioned the state of Wisconsin where I was adopted and paid for my own adoption file, not the same thick file I read in the courthouse at age 22.)

I wanted and still want my REAL birth certificate. Many times, many letters I mailed to the state of Minnesota. I asked them for a copy of my original birth certificate (OBC). They always refuse. I talk to a judge friend and she made inquiries for me – nothing. I asked again last year and nothing.
A simple piece of paper – a copy of my own birth certificate – is not mine to have? Apparently not in Minnesota. If I lived in Alaska or Maine, I’d have it by now.

How do I feel about this, my fake birth certificate that lists two people as my biological parents when they are not? I am much older now… Now I feel this is an grave injustice, a human rights violation, a travesty. I didn’t agree to these conditions. I didn’t ask to be adopted. I DID find my biological family after I read my adoption file but I still want that simple piece of paper. I deserve it.

Anger is one thing. Feeling outrage is another.

I wrote a letter (in 2015) to the ACLU in Minnesota and asked for their help. I wanted their help to sue Catholic Charities for stealing my identity and holding my adoption file and identity hostage. (ACLU turned me down.)

This is war. I am still fighting.

(A few years back, a member of CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) sent me a file. It’s a copy of my original baptismal record from Catholic Charities in Minnesota. On a single piece of paper is my mothers name and my name Laura Jean Thrall crossed out and replaced with new parents and my new name.)

How would you feel?

60s Scoop: Sharing their stories #NAAM

Shaun Ladue

Shaun Ladue calls himself the “survivor of a horrific childhood.” Adopted into a white family at the age of 3, Ladue, 48, says he endured abuse while growing up in Watson Lake, Yukon. So, at 14, Ladue left and never went back. He later became the first child in care in the Yukon to graduate high school and go on to university. And despite grappling with mental health issues for more than a decade, he’s “put all that behind” him and has reconnected with members of his biological family.
Looking back, Ladue recalls hearing the wind blowing in his backyard as a child — a unique, comforting sound he’s never heard anywhere else. “I now think on that wind, my ancestors were speaking to me, and they were giving me the strength to survive day-by-day abuse and ridicule,” Ladue says.
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For three decades across Canada, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes and adopted.

By: Lauren Pelley | TorontoStar

KEMPTVILLE — The scent of tobacco and sage fills the air as members of Canada’s aboriginal communities gather around a fire on the shores of the Rideau River.

Each takes a turn fanning medicinal smoke towards their bodies in a cleansing smudging ritual. Then, one by one, the 40 or so attendees of this Indigenous Adoptee Gathering introduce themselves to the group. Some are from Ontario, others from Manitoba or the Yukon. Some are Cree, others Métis or Ojibway.

Most are members of a stolen generation.

Beginning in the mid-1960s — and for several decades after — thousands of indigenous children across Canada were removed from their homes and typically placed with white middle-class families in Canada and abroad.

Patrick Johnston, author of the 1983 report Native Children and the Child Welfare System, dubbed it the Sixties Scoop.

 

Here is the link to the 60s Scoop story, photos, profiles and video in the Toronto Star HERE