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Exposing and Repairing the Devastation Caused by the Indian Adoption Project

repost from December 2011

Terry Cross

By Stephanie Woodard

Indian Country Today Media 

December 6, 2011

 

 

St. John, snatched from his family when he was 4, says he was raised without his culture.

.

I’m an angry Indian,” Roger St. John, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, told the First Nations Repatriation Institute’s second annual adult adoptees summit. The elite panel included child-welfare specialists, judges, lawyers, community activists and scholars. The most important experts, according to the organization’s founder/director, Sandra White Hawk, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, were adult adoptees—such as St. John—who related their experiences at the three-day meeting at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in St. Paul in 2011.

 

“I’m more than glad to tell you I’m pissed off,” continued St. John, a 49-year-old truck driver with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I was the youngest of 16 children, grabbed at the age of 4, along with three older brothers—no paperwork, nothing. The other kids in the family escaped because they took off.”  Soon, St. John and his siblings ended up in New York City at Thanksgiving time. The year was 1966: “We were on the front page of the newspaper, along with lots of good talk about the holiday and adoption. We were brought up without our culture, which took a terrible toll on our lives. I grew up angry and miserable.”
 

St. John’s experience was replicated all over Indian country in the mid-to-late 20th century. The boarding-school era that had begun in the late 1800s was winding down and the abusive residential schools set up to isolate and assimilate Native children were being closed down or turned over to the tribes, a process that was largely completed by the 1970s. Meanwhile, another means of separating Native children from their communities was gathering steam.
 

The Indian Adoption Project was a federal program that acquired Indian children from 1958 to 1967 with the help of the prestigious Child Welfare League of America; a successor organization, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, functioned from 1966 until the early 1970s. Churches were also involved. In the Southwest, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints took thousands of Navajo children to live in Mormon homes and work on Mormon farms, and the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations swept many more Indian youngsters into residential institutions they ran nationwide, from which some children were then fostered or adopted out. As many as one third of Indian children were separated from their families between 1941 and 1967, according to a 1976 report by the Association on American Indian Affairs.
 

“People have heard of the boarding-school era and know it was bad, but they don’t know our adoption era even exists,” said White Hawk, who was taken from her family on the Rosebud reservation as a toddler in the mid-1950s. “A few small studies of adult adoptees have been done, and we’re just learning how to talk about what happened. We need think tanks and conferences and scientific research to explore what occurred and how it affected us.”
 

Then, White Hawk said, that information can inform current Indian child-welfare cases. “When experts take the stand to testify in a child-welfare hearing [about placement of a child or termination of parental rights, for example], they need academic backup to explain the relationship between, for example, suicide and being disconnected from your culture,” she explained. “The courts want Ph.D.-level research to back up what we tell them.”
 

A paper by Carol Locust, Cherokee, describes Native adoptees suffering from what she calls Split Feather Syndrome—the damage caused by loss of tribal identity and growing up “different” in an inhospitable world. Lost Bird is another term researchers have used to refer to the group, recalling one of the earliest Indian adoptees. A Lakota infant who survived the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee sheltered by the frozen corpse of her mother was claimed as a war trophy by a general who named her Lost Bird, according to her biographer, Renée Sansome Flood in Lost Bird of Wounded Knee.
Thanks to copious newspaper coverage of the massacre and its aftermath, Lost Bird became her generation’s celebrity adoptee, but fame did not save her from a fate that was a harbinger for too many Native children. She endured intolerance and isolation, and when she rebelled as a teenager, was shipped back to her birth family, where she no longer fit in. After a stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the loss of three children—two died and she gave away the third, according to Flood—Lost Bird was felled by influenza in 1920, at the age of 30. “Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty, misunderstanding and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would find out where she really belonged,” Flood wrote.
 

At the summits and other events White Hawk has organized or spoken at since 2003, modern-day adoptees have recounted their dramatic life journeys, sometimes for the first time. “The stories vary from the most abusive to the most beautiful, but that’s not the point,” she said. “Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are. Love doesn’t provide identity.”
 

“I never felt sorry for myself,” said St. John, “but if I ever got hurt, it wounded me to my soul, because I felt no one was there for me.” In recent years, he has found his birth mother and connected emotionally with his adoptive parents. “They were so young, in their 20s, when a priest convinced them to adopt four Sioux boys from South Dakota. It was too much—for all of us.”
 

During the adoption era almost any issue—from minor to serious—could precipitate the loss of an Indian child. Two Native people interviewed prior to the summit said they were separated from their families after hospital stays as young children, one for a rash, the other for tuberculosis. A third was seized at his baby-sitter’s home; when his mother tried to rescue him, she was jailed, he said. A fourth recalled that he was taken after his father died, though his mother did not want to give him up. A fifth described being snatched, along with siblings, because his grandfather was a medicine man who wouldn’t give up his traditional ways. As in St. John’s case, no home studies or comparable investigations appear to have been done to support the removals. “Indians had no way to stop white people from taking their kids,” said yet another interviewee. “We had no rights.”
 

Eighty-five percent of the Native children removed from their families from 1941 to 1967 were placed in non-Indian homes or institutions, said the Association on American Indian Affairs report. The aim, said White Hawk, was assimilation and extinction of the tribes as entities, as their younger generations were removed, year after year—just as it had been with the boarding schools.
 

“We can’t be afraid to use words like genocide,” said summit participant Anita Fineday, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, managing director of Casey Family Programs’ Indian child-welfare programs and a former chief judge at White Earth Tribal Nation. “The endgame, the official federal policy, was that the tribes wouldn’t exist.”
 

As Native adoptees struggle to recover their identities, some have trouble accessing their original birth certificates. Many states seal adoption records to protect the confidentiality of the process. “In a state that does this, you have to be a detective to find out where you’re from,” said White Hawk.
Or lucky. According to Sharon Whiterabbit, Ho-Chunk Nation, a business consultant and internationally known rights advocate, the son she’d given up as a teen mother found her because he lost his social security number. To get a new one, he had to petition the courts for his original birth certificate and, using the information he found there, tracked her down.
 

Could something be done on a tribal level to keep adoption records open and available for those who want them? Whiterabbit asked the group. This summit was about solutions, as well as problems, and Fineday had an answer: “Tribes have a right to know their members, so we can demand the records. We’re not requesting, though. We’re demanding. At White Earth, we were successful with this tack in a couple of cases. When the [adoption] documents arrived, I got goose bumps.”
 

Carrie Imus, director of social services for and former chairwoman of the Hualapai Tribal Nation, suggested that tribes do pre-enrollment of children who are being adopted out, to ease their return.
According to Terry Cross, Seneca Nation of Indians and founder and executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, nontribal child-welfare workers usually did not recognize the large support network that Native children enjoy: “In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, children were removed from Indian families because auntie was taking care of them, and the system called that neglect. But it was simply a different cultural way of meeting the child’s needs. To this day, social workers who remove Native children don’t know what an Indian family is and what supports are available
in the extended family and tribe.”
 

Decades of stolen children caused unresolved personal and community-wide grief and high rates of alcoholism, suicide and other social ills that stalk individuals and tribes to this day. “It took me years to realize nothing was wrong with me and the response I had to the trauma I’d experienced as an adoptee,” said Sandra Davidson, White Earth Band of Ojibwe and a program manager for Praxis International, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating violence toward women and children.
 

Often referred to as “historical trauma,” the pain can’t be cured with quick-fix programs, said Cross. “In Canada, we looked at places where suicide is the highest, and it’s where the culture is most broken down,” he said. “In such cases, do you start suicide-prevention programs, or do you restore balance in the community through more self-governance? I have found that unless you change a community systemically, you can’t affect the symptoms of imbalance, such as suicide.”
 

Linear thinking—see a problem, apply a solution—is ineffective, he added. “Mainstream society’s services are so fractured. Medical doctors get the body, psychologists get the mind, judges get the social context, and clergy get the spirit. But, in fact, we are all whole people, and real solutions have to address that.”
 

Cross pointed to the sweat lodge as a way of caring for the whole person. “It’s done in groups and includes teachers, stories and protocols for how to conduct oneself, which relate to the social context,” he said. “You sweat, and you experience aromatic herbs, which heal the body; you participate in prayers and songs, which are in the realm of spirit; and when you come out, you feel better and have moments of clarity that are aspects of mind.”
 

That type of healing is required for entire communities, as well as for individuals, and is a part of what Cross called the “remembering” of indigenous cultures. Colonization has pulled indigenous cultures apart worldwide, as colonizers have taken land and resources. “They also usurp sovereignty and attack spirituality,” he said. “The last item is removal of children to educate them in the language and worldview of the colonizer. Now, though, we Native people are remembering our traditions and remembering our communities. We’re healing from within.”
 

The adoptees’ stories must be articulated so they can heal, so their communities can be restored, and so the experiences can help remedy Indian country’s ongoing child-welfare crisis, said White Hawk. The percentage of Native children cared for outside the home remains disproportionately high across the nation, despite the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1978 law that sought to ameliorate the situation—but has yet to do so.  In Alaska, Native children make up 18 percent of the child population but 55 percent of the children in foster care; in South Dakota, Indian kids are 15 percent of the state’s youngsters, but 53 percent of those in foster care. Other states topping the list for skewed numbers include Minnesota—where the overrepresentation of Native kids in foster care increased substantially from 2004 to 2009—Montana, Nebraska and North Dakota.
 

Another summit attendee, Gina Jackson, Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, is educating judges through a model-court program of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, in Nevada. The program helps jurists understand ICWA and relevant best practices. “We’ve signed up 66 jurisdictions and will help them work for compliance,” she said.
 

Education of the judiciary is crucial, said Arizona state judge Kathleen Quigley: “ICWA cases are not the bulk of a judge’s work, so many are not familiar with the law.” And the concept of the “active efforts” needed under ICWA to find and notify a child’s tribe of a possible removal from the family is not dealt with sufficiently in case law, she said.
 

“At this meeting, it has been critical for me to hear from folks who’ve been in the system and to understand how being taken from their families and communities affected their lives,” Jackson said. “I want everyone who works with kids and families to hear these voices.” Michael Petoskey, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and chief judge of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, agreed. “Thank you for sharing your stories,” he told the survivors of the adoption era. “We judges may underestimate the impact on people’s lives when we terminate parental rights.”
 

“Your saying that is medicine for those of us who’ve been through this,” White Hawk responded. Going forward, the repatriation institute will work to affect policy and will organize a day of prayer and healing for Friday, November 2, 2012. “We’re hoping to have events at state capitols nationwide,” said George McCauley, Omaha, head of the Institute’s board of directors.
 

Jerry Dearly, the renowned Oglala Lakota storyteller and educator who serves as White Hawk’s advisor, informed the group that healing is about identity, understood on a profound level. “You have to find out who you really are, who you really were,” he said. “Go to a quiet place where it’s just you and the Creator. All of us are beautiful, but you have to believe in yourself.”
 

“Now I have cancer and am waiting for an operation,” St. John told the summit. “But I believe in myself, and I can survive anything.”

SOURCE: https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/native-americans-expose-the-adoption-era-and-repair-its-devastation

[And each story like this one will finally change this devastating history... Megwetch everyone...Trace]

ONGOING: Watching the Feds

Ruth Hopkins

8/9/16

As a reservation NDN descended from exiles who went to war against the U.S. Government, I've been under surveillance by the Feds my entire life. I was born at an old military fort on tribal land: Fort Yates, North Dakota, on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. I grew up around other old military forts on reservations that were formerly prison camps. Fort Sisseton, South Dakota, on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Fort Totten, North Dakota, on the Spirit Lake Nation Reservation. It’s funny what a child is able to normalize. Until I went off to college, I never realized the depth and breadth of how unusual my upbringing was from the typical American youth. Sure, I watched Saved By the Bell, but I had no idea that the national park I played at was named for a man, General Sully, who slaughtered hundreds of innocent, unarmed Dakota and Lakota men, women and children in a little known ambush called Whitestone Hill. In a fury of bloodthirsty hatred, the soldiers even killed my ancestors’ dogs and horses, and burned their winter rations.

The military installations that surrounded us were not put in place to protect or assist my ancestors. They were put there to contain us. The U.S. Government and its agents massacred and imprisoned my People. We were enemies of the state. Thanks to corrupt government officials who withheld treaty promised rations, my ancestors were starving and forced to fight for their survival in the Minnesota Uprising of 1862, also known as The Dakota Conflict. At its end, 38 of our warriors were hung in Mankato under orders from Abraham Lincoln, everyone’s favorite President, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. We were outlawed from our own Minnesota homelands. Governor Ramsey placed a bounty on our scalps, our "red skin." Some of us were shipped off to prison in Iowa, where soldiers forced Dakota men to watch as they raped their wives, sisters and daughters. Some were marched naked through the snow to Crow Creek, South Dakota. Others ran to Sitting Bull for protection, or escaped to Canada.

Outsiders read these stories at a comfortable distance. To me, history is alive. These people are my grandmothers and grandfathers. Genocide is personal. It’s my story and the story of every Native.
My great great grandfather was hauled off to an asylum for being disobedient (a bad NDN). He died there, from a ‘head wound.’ They stole my father away to boarding school when he was only 4. He was still nursing at his mother’s breast. These actions have had a profound effect on my family and oh boy, does the government know my family well. Like other Rez NDNs, the government keeps thorough records of my bloodlines' births, deaths, land holdings, and whereabouts. They know our genealogy better than we do. Like the Jews during the holocaust, I am assigned a number. It will follow me my entire life.

I went away to school and studied their laws as well. I know the history of lies and deceit; the trail of broken treaties left behind. I know the destruction of our lifeways continues to this day, as I see my relatives struggle in abject poverty, which has manifested within our communities as a direct result of the Federal government's actions and inaction. I've seen the oil spills on tribal lands that are never cleaned up. I've witnessed Federal agencies hamstringing Tribes so they're unable to actualize economic development, provide adequate health care, foster care and law enforcement, yet it is the Tribal leadership who is called into question during congressional hearings. Our suffering is not for show. If justice is real, Congress should indict itself.

The NDN knows their games. We’ve watched politicians fly in and out of our territories for photo ops during election season only to disappear once it’s over. We’ve seen the insidious workings of governmental organizations like COINTELPRO, who labored tirelessly to tear down Red Power and the American Indian Movement. Leonard Peltier, a Native political prisoner, fellow Dakota, and elder, remains behind bars despite calls from Nelson Mandela and many others, for his release. We see the black cars and agents at protests today.

I cannot shut my eyes to these things. I cannot forget the theft of our lands and resources, and the ongoing destruction of Mother Earth perpetrated by government-protected corporations, or how they removed us from our hunting grounds and natural, healthy gathering places where food was medicine, and replaced it with poison that gives my People diabetes and cancer. I will not forget how they outlawed our sacred ceremonies, kidnapped our children to ‘kill the Indian, save the man,’ nor the young women on Reservation lands who’ve appeared before me in tribal court, scared for their lives against non-Native women beaters who continue to be protected by loopholes in federal law and more empty promises yet to be implemented.

So forgive me if I don't trust the government. Pardon me if I choose not to get into bed with the establishment that committed genocide against my People and continues to commit it here and abroad against other Indigenous Nations to this day. There is something in us that they do not have and that they greatly fear. I, for one, will never surrender.

Ruth Hopkins (Sisseton Wahpeton & Mdewakanton Dakota, Hunkpapa Lakota) is a writer, blogger, biologist, activist and judge.

SOURCE http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/08/09/watching-feds?utm_content=buffer7fe37&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Attacking #ICWA: Goldwater, RadioLab's bias is blaring #BabyVeronica

By Trace L Hentz  (adoptee, author and activist)

Remember this photo? In the big world out there, few people even knew about the Indian Child Welfare Act until Baby Veronica was adopted out... Then headlines were screaming for months. Indian Country responded and fought back using the federal law but even that wasn't enough to allow a Cherokee father to keep and raise his own daughter.

I have wanted to say something about the RadioLab program/podcast about Baby Veronica and the Supreme Court Case. This was a few years ago and rebroadcast a few days ago.

More Perfect presents: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
I spoke with the interviewer. He didn't use one word of my story in his RadioLab report. I have no clue why not. I did give him names of other adoptees he could speak to... He spoke to many many people and quoted them but not one adoptee!  I recall I told him I was Baby Veronica just 50 years later.  My dad would have raised me. There was no Indian Child Welfare Act when I was adopted by strangers. I was traumatized. I was not going to stop looking for my family, even if my records were sealed in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I was one of thousands who lost their family connections and tribal connections. I didn't want Veronica to go through what I did.  Our culture matters and adoption steals years of our lives.

These Goldwater and RadioLab people didn't and don't want to hear me, or adoptees (young or old). They simply don't. Their bias is blaring. (It's been drilled into their minds how adoption is always good and saving poor kids.)

I wrote an essay in 2013 about this case and submitted it to the Atlantic editors but they didn't publish it. WHY? I didn't get a reason but it's clear...they don't consider Indians and adoptees interesting enough or news-worthy, let alone a federal law concerning Indians.

Finally (with utter frustration) I sent it to Indian Country Today Media in New York. They published it.

I’m a “lost bird," one of thousands of Native children adopted-out of tribal communities from the late 1950s to late 1960s as part of a federal program called the Indian Adoption Projects. The Project came after the decades long boarding school era when government and missionary schools aimed to “kill the Indian to save the child.”

 

Read more at https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/12/baby-veronica-case-david-vs-goliath

 

Is that fair reporting and analysis if "THEY" (the mainstream radio, TV, newspaper media) don't consider WHY there is an ICWA?  Have they considered Baby V will grow up and not be a child anymore and imagine her loss of family and culture?  Who better to ask than an adoptee who has lived through it?

Why are they ignoring the ADOPTEE STORY in this story?

In San Diego a few weeks ago, Diane Tells His Name, Leland Kirk, Karen Vigneault, Tom Lidot (Tribal Star) and I had breakfast and we discussed this. (We were together, presenting at the California State ICWA Conference on June 7, 2016.)

"...There is an ICWA because of us, all the American Indian Adoptees, Lost Birds, Stolen Children, 60s Scoop, and Indian Adoption Project adoptees. WE are the reason there is a law. We are still called the Stolen Generations. We are the second phase of atrocities committed against Indian People before during and after the boarding schools. (WE were supposed to permanently disappear in closed adoptions with sealed records, living "happily ever after" with our white parents.) There is a federal law ICWA because of us, because adoption trafficking in Native babies and children was clearly genocide. With ICWA, there will be many less adoptees... We get that; in Indian Country we know this."

.@Sherman_Alexie We thought you should know ur quote opens this viciously anti-ICWA article by Goldwater https://t.co/mVKJhMAZYm #DefendICWA

— NICWA (@NativeChildren) June 20, 2016

“And finally this, when the sun was falling down so beautiful we didn’t have time to give it a name, she held the child born of white mother and red father and said, ‘Both sides of this baby are beautiful.’”

—Sherman Alexie

The ICWA Penalty Box: In Defense of Equal Protection for Indian Children By Timothy Sandefur (Goldwater Institute) used this quote.

For 15 Minutes Of Fame, Pages using #BabyAlexandria

By Trace Hentz, American Indian Adoptees Blog Editor

Turtle Talk has posted the latest developments in the #BabyAlexandria (Lexie) case out of California. I have my own concerns.
The daily media circus is being manipulated and slanted, as we would expect from the same players who participated in the Baby Veronica case.
The Pages (Lexie's foster parents) are deliberately playing out their case in front of television cameras, a glaring manipulation of media and the public, seeking their 15 minutes of fame. These people seem oblivious to how racist it is to use a child, demean her blood quantum, just to elicit and gain sympathy for themselves.
Remember her foster family filed appeals three times, delaying Alexandria's rights to be with her own family and siblings. Now Lexie is home, and safe.

"Finally, the use of the media in this case to inflame opinion, spread false information about the situation, publicize a child’s name and face, and to try to dismantle ICWA itself [again] is deplorable," Kate Fort said in her Turtle Talk post (see below).

Choctaw Nation’s statement.
The following statement reflects the Choctaw Nation's position on the case of Lexi.

We appreciate the concern for Lexi and want to assure everyone she is in a safe, loving home with her relatives and her biological sisters.
The Choctaw Nation has advocated for Lexi to live with her family since 2011. These relatives have been a part of Lexi’s life for almost five years. They are not strangers. They have maintained a relationship with her, visiting her in California, making regular SKYPE calls, and Lexi has also been on extended visits to Utah.

The family has been waiting for five years for all of them to be together.

Foster care is a much-needed temporary service provided for children until the child can be returned to the care of his or her family. Placement with family is the gold-standard of any child-custody case, not just a case involving tribal children. The Pages were always aware of this goal.

Many steps have been taken by the Choctaw Nation to ensure the best placement of Lexi.  An independent clinical psychologist was brought in to gauge her ability to transition from the foster home to her relatives.  The California court appointed a marriage and family therapist to perform a child custody evaluation to assess the mental health and parenting practices of both parties. The experts along with Lexi’s long-time individual therapists, her social worker and her attorney, all agree it is in her best interest to be with her relatives. The foster family understood this.  All children, not just Native children, do better with caring relatives.

The case was decided in the California court system three separate times, with three different trial court judges ruling in favor of Lexi’s relatives in Utah.  We, as a tribe, are required to follow federal law.  The foster family filed appeals three times to keep Lexi, delaying the reuniting of Lexi with her relatives.

Lexi’s safety and wellbeing are the Choctaw Nation’s paramount concern.

Her family will provide her a safe, stable and nurturing home to grow up with her sisters and to have contact with her extensive extended family.
Please respect the privacy of Lexi and her family.


NICWA’s statement

###

Turtle Talk will continue to add statements from other groups as we receive them. And, because it’s what we do, we’ve created a page with all of the publicly available primary source documents in this case. You can find that here. (see below)

The foster parents’ attorney has issued a statement claiming she will use this case to appeal ICWA up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. We’ve heard this before, and there are very few legal routes left for them to do that, but we still expect they will try them all.

Meanwhile, this case is not just about Indian Country.  The role of foster care in this country is clear–to provide a temporary, loving home for a child while her family receives services to so the child can go home safely.  It is also provides time for the state to search for other -relative- homes for the child.  This is a best practice regardless of whether the child is Native or not. It’s actually state law in California. Ann.Cal.Welf. & Inst.Code § 361.3.  In fact, it’s the law in a lot of states.  That’s because relative preference in placement is also required by the federal government for states to receive Title IV-E funding. 25 U.S.C. 671(a)(19). Preventing a child from living with her siblings and relatives –family she knows, and who have spent considerable time planning this transition– contrary to court order is not the role of foster parents.

Finally, the use of the media in this case to inflame opinion, spread false information about the situation, publicize a child’s name and face, and to try to dismantle ICWA itself [again] is deplorable. The type of comments that NICWA, the California Children’s Law Center, Choctaw Nation and other individuals are receiving, particularly on social media, should disturb us all. Those taking the brunt of this deserve our full support and thanks.

In re Alexandria P.

A note on using a child’s name for this page–that is the name of the only reported appellate case in this situation. It’s the citation we all have to use.
Docket from the California Court of Appeals for the In re Alexandria P. appellate decision.
Turtle Talk post on the case.
Docket from the California Supreme Court denying review.
Unpublished decision after lower court keeps placement order with family.
Docket from the unpublished decision.
Docket from March Petition for Writ of Supersedeas
Statement from NICWA
Turtle Talk post
Follow up Statement from NICWA
Statement from Choctaw Nation

#Baby Deseray NEWS

Mike and Debbie Nomura, co-directors of Heritage Family Services and husband and wife (Heritage Family Services)

Oklahoma Adoption Attorney Approves Baby Deseray Removal for Friend

Suzette Brewer

10/25/13

Next week, South Carolina Judge Marsh Robertson has a hearing scheduled for the finalization of the adoption of Oklahoma-born infant, Merry Rejoice Bixler, better known as “Baby Deseray,” in Greenville County family court. The hearing, on Monday, October 28, comes a little over a month after Oklahoma County Judge Allen Welch granted custody of the girl to the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and ordered her return to that state.

... In the Baby Deseray case, Indian Country Today Media Network has learned that Nomura is close friends with Swain, who is on the board of directors for Nomura's Tulsa-based private adoption agency, Heritage Family Services. Nomura has been the state’s Department of Human Services compact administrator for ICPC applications since 2008.



RELATED: Second Indian Infant Whisked to South Carolina for Quickie Adoption
Oklahoma Judge Gives Custody of Deseray to Absentee Shawnee Tribe

Read more at https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/25/oklahoma-adoption-attorney-approves-baby-deseray-removal-friend-151918

 

 

Viral Video #BABYVERONICA

A YouTube video is protesting the "illegal and unethical adoption of Veronica Brown," a member of the Cherokee Nation. In the background, father-daughter team Jorge and Alexa Narvaez sing a cover of 4 Non Blondes' "What's Going On." The pair, who became a YouTube sensation starting in 2010 with their cover of Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zero's "Home," when Alexa was 6, gave permission for their video to be used with the photo compilation of Veronica hugging and laughing with her dad.
Hearing the musical collaboration between a loving father and his vibrant daughter amplifies the hard reality that Veronica Brown will miss out on this kind of incredible bond with her biological father, who lives in Oklahoma near the Cherokee reservation, while being raised by an adoptive couple in South Carolina.
The video description asks viewers to learn more about the case at www.keepveronicahome.com or on Facebook at Standing our Ground for Veronica Brown.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/09/heartwarming-youtube-video-protests-adoption-veronica-brown-151677

Native Adoptee Susan Fedorko: Veronica’s 'Lost Bird Wings' Will Fly Her Back

Susan Fedorko's first book, Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel

ICTMN Staff

10/1/13

Susan Fedorko was 40 years old when she found her birth family—or rather, when a long-lost sister found her. Her first book, Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel (Outskirts Press, 2012) chronicles Fedorko’s journey from Native American adoptee-turned “white” mother and wife, to a person reunited with her extended family. That family hails from the Grand Portage Indian Reservation people on her mother’s side and the White Earth Nation on her father’s, both Chippewa/Ojibwe. In an unexpected twist, Fedorko discovered that just a few years after her birth, her birth mother—Cathee Dahmen—had become an immensely popular supermodel, probably the first Native American woman to attain that status.

RELATED: Reclaiming her Identity: A Conversation With Native Adoptee and Author Susan Fedorko

Fedorko sent Indian Country Today Media Network the below gripping open letter to Veronica Brown's adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco.


By Susan Fedorko:
My heart is heavy for Dusten Brown and the entire Cherokee Nation/Native American people.
He has done everything right he could do to keep his biological daughter Veronica.
I am a Native American adoptee who was adopted prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. I spent my entire life trying to return to my Native people. I finally returned at the age of 40.
These things we do know about what Veronica will likely endure as an adoptee:
1. She will most likely constantly be challenged with her identity. She knows who her biological father is. On paper, her father may be Matt Capobianco. But in heart and soul it is Dusten Brown.
2. She will most likely never trust again. You have ripped her away from her father and step mother and sibling.
3. She will most likely yearn to be accepted. Relocating her from her biological family will leave her “unsure” where she belongs.
4. She will most likely be reminded that she is an adoptee all her childhood years. School age children will serve as a reminder that she is different from the other kids.

My heart aches that Veronica will not be exposed to her Indian language and customs. These traditions and customs should be a part of her life as a Cherokee child. She should be able to dance and pray—it is her birth-given right that you have stolen from her. This child should have never been rendered as “adoptable”; she has a loving father and family.
The Native American community has been run over once again, cast aside without regard. Veronica Brown is of Native American decent, and her civil rights as Native have been violated. The rest of America just stands by and watches a non-Native couple steal her away from her father who was determined fit to raise her.
She will one day become a teenager, and then adult Veronica. Her Lost Bird Wings will find her way back to Oklahoma.
Undoubtedly you will have 14 years with her—14 years of pretending to be her parents. It was obvious that Veronica was a member of a perfectly loving family. I just do not understand this degree of selfishness—to take one man’s biological daughter away from him, when clearly they were meant to be together.  What are we missing when a non-Native couple can waltz in and claim our Indian children?
I am a Native American adoptee who wishes that I had someone fighting for me as diligently as Dusten Brown has fought for his daughter.
Adoption is not for the weak. I have survived it, and if there is one thing that I have learned it is that Native blood does not wash away, regardless of how much other blood runs through our veins. We are proud Indian people.  I am sure that Veronica will return home to stay after learning of the circumstances that led her away from her biological father.
I hope in the future our Indian Child Welfare laws will be enforced to protect our Indian children. To protect them from being planted into another non-Native family.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/01/native-adoptee-susan-fedorko-veronicas-lost-bird-wings-will-fly-her-back-151513

 

 

Suzie also wrote a narrative in the anthology TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects. Both her memoir and the anthology are available on Amazon.com.

#BabyVeronica a Victim of Colonial Domination

Baby Veronica: U.S. Doesn't Respect or Understand Native Culture

A note from Ray Cook, ICTMN Opinions Editor: The political and legal ramifications of the Baby Veronica case have, in broad strokes, done two things....

Read more

Baby Veronica Is a Victim of Colonial Domination

Click here to read part 1 by Dina Gilio-Whitaker....

Read more

For Indigenous people around the globe, far too many moms and dads had no choice, truly no choice, when their children were taken. Even uneducated Indian people are not stupid. Giving Indian babies to white families was part of a larger plan: colonization. It worked. It ultimately did change our future.

            This was quite a revelation for me, being one of the colonized....Trace

Please READ: Observations of Adopted Children: http://larahentz.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/observations-of-adopted-children/

#BabyVeronica Case – David v. Goliath

Don't let Ronnie become a LOST CHILD

I have been writing this Op-Ed for INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY MEDIA for a few weeks. There are links to the PR campaign "The Coalition for the Protection of Indian Children and Family" being led by the Christian Alliance and Jessica Munday to "SAVE" Baby Veronica and take from her dad Dusten and they are lobbying to end the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Read here at https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/12/baby-veronica-case-david-vs-goliath

A new comment on ICT:

The PR agent friend Munday's company, Trio-Solutions.com notes that she specializes in social media including edits to wikipedia pages. This might explain why when Munday's PR campaign is brought up on some discussion sites, those posts get heavily downvoted by multiple accounts, which act behaviorally like sockpuppet armies controlled by one firm. Much more disturbing than that is this organization the Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare. Their website sells a book "Dying in Indian Country" which establishes clearly that their goal is not just to end the ICWA, but to "fight" tribal "sovereignty", and to pursue a termination policy that ends "the reservation system", which it calls "socialist". Termination of the reservations and of indian sovereignty would of course allow a lot of things, like sales of reservation lands to corporations who need unfettered access to minerals, gas and oil. Who knows who is really behind these web sites or what their real goal is, given the end game they are pursuing would be so convenient to profitable aims for so many non-indian parties. There is an agenda behind this case that has little to do with adoption and everything to do with this being a test case to assault the ICWA and tribal sovereignty. These goals are even stated explicitly when looking closely at the stated goals of some of the players. This knowledge suggests some possibilities about where the mother's "free" attorneys might be getting their incentive to sue the government to end the ICWA, and onwards legally from that step.

 

Monday, August 12, 2013 - 17:13

Please read and share the link on social media and with your family and friends.....


...and a very revealing yet disturbing update on Christy Maldonado, the birthmother:

https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/08/12/selling-christy-maldonado-150831

Birth Mother Speaks in Baby Veronica Case: Analysis

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/07/15/birth-mother-speaks-baby-veronica-case-analysis-150417

 

Part 4 and 5: The Fight for Baby Veronica

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/12/fight-baby-veronica-part-4-149873
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/17/fight-baby-veronica-part-5-149932

Suzette Brewer at Indian Country Today

who has reported on this story really deserves an award, a Pulitzer for her journalism!

 

From Trace:

One thing that bothered me about this from the very beginning is how Veronica's first mother accepted $10,000 for adopting out Veronica. That is a big incentive for a mother of two who is relinquishing, and perhaps why Dusten was left out of the adoption decision she made. That's what adoption agencies do - keep the young couple separate and not talking. $10K is a lot of incentive and Dusten was the ex-boyfriend she should avoid. (Perhaps why she misspelled his name, too, when she knew he is an enrolled tribal member and how the Indian Child Welfare Act is federal law.)

 

The shady adoption industry is so cunning these days:

Baby Dads don't really have rights - just keep them away.

Cash for babies is a perk, an incentive, a bonus.

Accept that adoptive parents are much more deserving and will provide a better life for your baby.

 

Adoption propaganda in America is never about the baby. It's about the needs of adopters - they get what they need and pay big money for it. That's their business model: find a need and fill it.

 

When you think about this case: the only ones who won't feel any pain and loss are the social workers/agency workers/adoption lawyers who move on immediately to their next case. 

 

In a corrupt industry, all you have to do is follow the money.

 

Part Two: The Fight for Baby Veronica

   

Veronica at home in Oklahoma (Indian Country Today)

          

Another article in this excellent series.

“The birth mother knew I was Cherokee, she knew I was a tribal member, she knew my birth date and she knew how to spell my name,” said Brown matter-of-factly. “Look, we've known each other since we were 16. We were engaged. She absolutely knew all of my vital information. And she gave [the attorney and the tribe] the wrong information [hoping to keep the adoption secret].”

Facts Are Stubborn Things

From the outset, the case of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl has been rife with errors: Errors in spelling, incorrect dates, bad judgment, and finally, errors in execution. Whether by prevaricated fabrication, purposeful obfuscation or the result of a simple incompetence, the crucial mistakes made in the very beginning and thereafter proved pivotal to the subsequent battle between the Capobiancos and Dusten Brown.

Read more at  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/05/13/fight-baby-veronica-part-2-149336

Tiny Horrors

Tiny Handcuffs. Photo by Mary Annette Pember

A Chilling Reminder of How Cruel Assimilation Was—And Is

Mary Annette Pember, Indian Country Today, January 01, 2013

For such small objects, the child’s handcuffs are surprisingly heavy when cradled in the palms of one’s hand. Although now rusted from years of disuse, they still convey the horror of their brutal purpose, which was to restrain Native children who were being brought to boarding schools. “I felt the weight of their metal on my heart,” said Jessica Lackey of the Cherokee tribe as she described holding the handcuffs for the first time.
Lackey, an alumnus of Haskell Indian Nations University, was working at the school’s Cultural Center & Museum when the handcuffs were unwrapped last spring after being kept in storage for several years. I had heard rumors about the existence of the handcuffs during visits to Haskell over the years and had made numerous inquiries to school authorities about them, but people seemed very reluctant to discuss this touchy artifact. This past summer, however, Haskell agreed to allow a public viewing of the handcuffs. Andy Girty, one of the elders who first blessed the handcuffs when they were given to Haskell in 1989, helped unwrap them for me.
Known as the Haskell Institute in its early years, the school opened its doors in 1884. It was originally founded as an instrument of the final solution to this country’s “Indian problem”; Haskell Institute’s mission then was embodied in the now infamous motto of Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” This mind-set led to decades of forced acculturation through brutal military-style incarceration cloaked as education in U.S. Indian boarding schools.
Although begun as a model for assimilation, native students have, over the years, transformed Haskell into a model for self-determination. The school’s early curriculum featured training in domestic and farming skills but has since evolved into four-year university.
Haskell’s Cultural Center & Museum, located on campus, tells the full—and often cruel—story of Haskell’s painful past as well as providing a venue to showcase Native art, culture from the past and present. Opened in 2002, the center features the permanent exhibit Honoring Our Children Through Seasons of Sacrifice, Survival, Change and Celebration, featuring artifacts, photos and letters from the school’s early days.
Read the rest here: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/tiny-horrors-chilling-reminder-how-cruel-assimilation-was%E2%80%94and-146664?fb_action_ids=10151260247109550&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

Pow Wow Welcomes Native Adoptees Home

By Racheal White Hawk Strong

November 22, 2012

• Read More:
• Assimilation
• Department of Human Services
• First Nations Repatriation Institute
• ICWA
• Indian Child Welfare Act
• Nina Lulu White Hawk
• Racheal White Hawk Strong
• Rosebud Sioux

 

I’ve been to pow wows before, but this one was different. The entrance read, “Gathering for our Children and Returning Adoptees.” The annual powwow is in its ninth year at the Minneapolis American Indian Center, and is a collaboration between the Department of Human Services, Hennepin County ICWA Unit’s Tina Knafala and Jacque Wilson as well as my Aunt Sandy White Hawk, Director of the First Nations Repatriation Institute. The goal is to reconnect adoptees with their families and culture as well as raise awareness of the need for Native foster/adoptive homes. My heart smiled seeing my Auntie and cousins. For the last several years I’d been on a quest to find the rest of my Lakota family. My mom had largely given up; then again you could say she never really tried.
“They’re like strangers to me. They’re not family. My adoptive family is my real family.”
“Why can’t we have both?” I countered.
“I don’t know! Quit asking!” The unknown is scary for my mom.
My family history follows a common theme in Indian country: assimilation. My mom was one of 9 children born to my Sicangu Lakota grandmother, Nina Lulu White Hawk on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. Before the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), social workers broke into my grandmother’s house when she wasn’t home, stole her children and flung them to the winds. Grandma Nina’s only crime was lack of an indoor toilet.
My mom and three of her siblings were placed in an orphanage in Nebraska. Mom recalls being locked in the closet at the orphanage without food or water. When she was sleeping, a social worker stole her stuffed kitten and chucked it into the dumpster because it was a reminder of her previous life. A white family finally adopted my mom and three of her siblings with the command, “Forget your mother. We are your only family now.” They were raised in Custer County, Nebraska, where they were the only Indians except for the school mascot.
None of us were allowed to be Native growing up. My adoptive grandparents painstakingly attempted to hide our biological family from us, but over the years we were able to connect with many of our relatives thanks to Aunt Deb. This year at the annual Rosebud wacipi, I was finally able to meet my mom’s biological sister, Aunt Sandy. And despite my adoptive grandparents’ misguided beliefs that all Native Americans are alcoholic, suicidal, drug abusers, I am immensely proud to be Lakota.
At the Pow Wow I hopped down the bleachers filled with a couple hundred onlookers to join the circle of returning adoptees preparing for the healing ceremony. Suddenly I felt a knot in my throat growing. “Crap,” I thought. “I’m going to cry before the ceremony even starts.” I was there representing my 52-year-old mom, who had refused to come despite my every attempt.
Sage smoke filled the air. I stood with the other adoptees in a circle, surrounded by a ring of jingle dress dancers followed by a ring of veterans. I gazed across the group to see a visibly distraught woman tightly clutching her shawl and choking back sobs. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying.
The drum group started to sing a healing song. The jingle dress dancers began their sacred footwork, waving their eagle feather fans over us. They swayed and dipped. Tingles shot down my spine with every fan that touched my shoulders. Then I lost it. Tears flowed uncontrollably. Every tear represented a moment I felt lost, afraid, angry, frustrated, empty, and confused. Every tear burning down my cheek screamed at those who thought taking us from our family was in our “best interest.” I felt the anger boil up from all the hurtful comments about Natives my adoptive family has said over the years, laughing at me for making regalia. The rage spilled out as I recalled my adoptive Aunt Lila’s comments last month that the “poor, pitiful Indians” still needed saving. But I was comforted by the swish of the jingles mimicking the sound of water, the sound of healing. And slowly my emotional burden started to fade. As the tears fell to the ground, I felt lighter. When the singing stopped, I felt a sense of renewal. Crying is medicine.
After the ceremony, we gathered upstairs for an adoptee talking circle. We each reflected on our experience. Several adoptees commented the powwow was unlike any other they’d been to. Even though so many of our Native children were lost through adoption, many tribes don’t yet have a powwow or ceremony to acknowledge their return. But the adoptees felt welcome at Aunt Sandy’s powwow; they felt like they were finally coming home to a community. One older man commented he felt the gaping, empty hole inside him start to fill up to form a complete person.
Throughout the powwow, I filmed my Aunt Sandy and cousins Dyani, John, and Alicia to familiarize my mom with our biological family and ease her fears. Next year I hope she’ll join us at the powwow, especially for the end of the ceremony when community members streamed down to shake our hands and said with a warm embrace, “Welcome home.”
Racheal White Hawk Strong, enrolled Rosebud Sioux Tribal Member, is the administrative secretary at Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, a Native Daughters graduate student and a former Fulbright Scholar to China.

SOURC: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/pow-wow-welcomes-native-adoptees-home#ixzz2D3rkSJhX