NEWS and UPDATES from Trace

Ellowyn's Lakota doll

REBLOG from 2011 AND EDITED:

 

I thank everyone for reading this BLOG and for signing up to get it via email (top box).
 

Back in 2011:
On average I hear from three new adoptees each week. That is good. That was and is my prayer. That is why I am a journalist who blogs about adoption news and being adopted. I will help anyone who contacts me and I will get them the help they need if I cannot do it myself.
I have been working all year on a brand new second edition of ONE SMALL SACRIFICE and it should be out in a few weeks. It's the same book with a few more chapters. It has two prefaces, four major chapters and an epilogue.  Also, there is a new WARNING to readers that this is NOT a chronology but written as I was learning and remembering my own childhood and doing the search for my family.  My book has Indian history born of pain and experience, history you won't read in newspapers or mentioned in North American classrooms.
 

One of the best comments I hear is I did a lot of research. Yes, indeed. Over five years and counting and I am still learning.
Book 2: TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is ready and we are looking for a publisher.  This new anthology goes further and tells individual adoptee stories, in their own words. This book will change hearts and exposes more of our history! I will let you know when we do get it published.
The ultimate goal of this blog is to find new adoptees (Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects) and to have a group of adoptees testify before Congress to expose how we were adopted and erased from our tribal nations - deliberately.  Some of us were physically and sexually abused (YES) and in many states we are STILL denied access to adoption records so we cannot go home to our tribes and families.

 

A few days ago I made a new relative in South Dakota, Evelyn Red Lodge, also an adoptee and a journalist at Native Sun News. Evelyn is working to make these hearings happen, in the not-too-distant future. She helped NPR do their three-part investigation (posted on this blog in November) which made headlines across the globe. 
Adoptees like Evelyn and Sandy White Hawk at First Nations Orphans Association are rewriting history and helping others to heal with their activism. Here is a link to Evelyn's story on Indianz.com: http://64.38.12.138/News/2011/003731.asp
Evelyn is helping to organize a rally for residents in South Dakota to stop the adoptions of Indian children in her state. More happen each day, in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act. 32 states are in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act, according to recent NPR reports.
As I wrote on this blog, our governments in North American made us orphans and sealed our records so we'd disappear completely. But they can't erase our blood or our memory.
If erasure was the intention of the Indian Adoption Projects - to separate families and ensure adoptees would lose contact with their tribal relatives - in many ways they succeeded.
Now, today, our major task is to expose this attempted ethnic cleansing and rejoin our families and our nations.
Until all adoption records are open, in particular the Indian Adoption Projects and Indian Programs, conducted secretly in many states, I will not rest.
And neither should you...

Orphan Trauma: I didn't know

By Trace L Hentz (blog editor and adoptee)

Part 2: Adoption Awareness Month: Orphan Trauma I didn't know

or·phan    (ôr f n)

Deprived of parents. Intended for orphans: an orphan home. Lacking support, supervision, or care. Affecting so few people that the development of treatment is neglected or abandoned for being unprofitable: an orphan disease. ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English, from Late Latin orphanus, from Greek orphanos, orphaned

trau·ma    (trô m , trou -)

A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption. ETYMOLOGY: Greek

“My problem is secrecy. I believe that perpetually secret adoptions assure un-accountability and lack of transparency. And secret adoptions are only the tip of the iceberg. The secrecy permeates the process: secret identities, secret parents, secret records, secret foster care providers, secret social workers, secret judges and lawyers (all their identities are sealed, typically), secret physicians, secret statistics and, in the case of some adoption-oriented organizations, secret budgets and secret boards of directors. In any social practice, when people in positions of power hide behind masks, one can be pretty sure that they have something to hide.”

Albert S. Wei, Special Advisor to the Bastard Nation Executive Committee

“The Indian survived our open intention of wiping them out. And since the tide turned they have even weathered our good intentions toward them, which can be more deadly.”
- John Steinbeck, America and Americans

I didn't have a clue about any of this growing up.

When I get older: I ask myself, where is the missing piece …where is the voice of the adopted… what happens to the adoptee?  Honestly, there are very few orphans.  Most children have a relative, or a mom or dad.  Yes, after war, there are some orphans but your community (and country) is still your family, your kin.

I didn’t know the trauma of my being adopted was a problem, the real culprit.  In real life, adoptees who have been to a counselor for behavioral/emotional problems: 41% adopted as infants; 45% adopted from another country; 54% adopted from foster care. (Source: Illinois State University: A Comparative Study of Child Welfare Adoptions and Other Types of Adopted Children and Birth Children (2004)

In the last 50 years, adoption globally is widely publicized, with November as Awareness Month, and is still touted as noble, saving kids and particularly saintly of those men and women who adopt, who give so generously to orphans, all over the world.  That’s about all we hear: how great it is to adopt. 

That is how propaganda works: also why it's a billion dollar adoption industry! 

In 2004 I decided to write about my experience (as an adoption survivor and journalist) and include other American Indians who experienced being adopted. I found much more going on with the business of adoption, so I included it in my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE.  Certainly this was a controversial book on adoption since I was often in a state of shock and utter disbelief during my years of research.

Indian child removals by adoption set out to accomplish the break-up of Indian families and culture.  Once adopted, you’re erased, an outsider, a stranger to your own nation, lands and people. I prefer to think of my younger self as brainwashed. There was fear and emotional illness, which I explain.

What is known about the Indian Adoption Projects and the aftermath, few books actually acknowledge it happened here. (Erasing this is also part of propaganda.)

There is persistent rampant poverty in Indian Country even now. Poverty is a tool, and so is assimilation/adoption. I found out Indian people were white-washed through strenuous puritanical forces using assimilation via adoption and boarding schools. Torture? Yes.

Adoptees with Indian blood find out soon enough their reservations are closed to strangers. Without proof, you’re suspect.  You can’t always get the proof since laws prevent it. 

You need that OBC: Original birth certificate. Most states have them locked up.

Associate Attorney General Tony West Delivers Remarks at the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s 32nd Annual Protecting Our Children Conference ~ Monday, April 14, 2014

 "...There's more work to do because every time an Indian child is removed in violation of ICWA, it can mean a loss of all connection with family, with tribe, with culture.  And with that loss, studies show, comes an increased risk for mental health challenges, homelessness in later life, and, tragically, suicide."

(Almost) Dead Indian: Writing in 2008

By Trace L Hentz, blog editor

 

In 2008, this is what I wrote as an introduction to the memoir I was working on... (a draft)

… a memoir of brainwashing and life as a dead Indian…

 

I did have to pretend to be someone – and live a lie - because I’m adopted. Ask any adoptee who has Native American ancestry.  If you are not told any truth, you’re just another dead Indian, at least on paper or on tribal rolls.  Our papers are usually fake and we live with amended original birth certificates (OBC).  Our adoptive parents are listed as our biological parents, which is another lie we live with....        

            America is like that.  Adoptees seem invisible yet the number of adoptees in the United States is estimated to be between six and ten million.  They’d prefer every one of us to live as an American citizen as if none other were as good or as important.  America forgets it’s very new by all standards and just acts like its old.  America has its own amnesia.

I intended to write about adoption history and what I experienced opening my adoption many years ago.  America’s adoption files of my era (the 1950s) are still sealed by laws in most states, still shrouded in secrecy. I expected little help or new discoveries.  Never did I expect to find so many adoptees in the same boat from 2005 onward.  I didn’t know there were millions of us, some blazing new trails on the internet global highway. I found friends.

            In the last 20+ years, adoption’s gone global, widely publicized and still touted as noble, saving and particularly saintly of those men and women who adopt, who give so generously to orphans.  That’s about all we hear: how great it is to adopt.

            I asked myself, where is the missing piece …where is the voice of the adopted… what happens to the adoptee?  I decided to write about my experience (as an adoption survivor and journalist) and include other American Indians who experienced being adopted.  I found much more going on with the business of adoption, so I include it.  Certainly this will be the most controversial book on adoption since I was often in a state of shock and utter disbelief during my years of research on the adoption industry.

            Indian child removals by adoption set out to accomplish the break-up of Indian families and culture.  Once adopted, you’re erased, an outsider, a stranger to your own nation, lands and people.  I prefer to think of my younger self as brainwashed.  There was fear and emotional illness, which I explain. What is known about the Indian Adoption Projects (more than one) and the aftermath, few books actually acknowledge it happened here.

            There is persistent rampant poverty in Indian Country even now.  I found Indian people who were white-washed through strenuous puritanical forces using assimilation via adoption and residential boarding schools. 

            Adoptees with Indian blood find out soon enough their reservations are closed to strangers.  Without proof, you’re suspect.  You can’t always get the proof since laws prevent it.  Just one Minnesota tribe, White Earth, decided to call out to its lost children; this made news in the fall in 2007.  Going back takes a special kind of courage.

            One Native American adoptee I know was told – be happy, be white. Ask yourself, how would you react? Is Indian Country such a bad place to be from? How did this happen to us?

            Society determined long ago what was best for children.  Once adopted, society can let us go, write us off.

            Here in America, thousands of Indian children were taken from parents and given to non-Indian people.

            Survivors are here to tell you this was a genocidal act against our humanity. Some of us were abducted, abused, brainwashed and all of us erased.

            Adoption secrets are protected by laws.  Laws prevented me from ever knowing the truth of my true identity.  I still found a way. 

 

This edition is on amazon and in some bookstores

p.s. Wayne Carp, an adoption advocate and author who went “undercover” to compile his book on adoption industry history kept running into secrecy problems. Unlike Carp, I am the story.