Grief Memoir: Mothers at the Catholic Infant Home

reblog from 2013

Linda Back McKay also went to the same Catholic Infant Home as my mother Helen and Kay.

 

 

By Trace Hentz,  January 24, 2013 |  Over a week ago, I had a conversation with Kay (not her real name) who resided and relinquished her baby at the Catholic Infant Home in Minnesota, about 10 years after my own mother was there. Her story revealed details I had only guessed. I've had conversations with other first mothers, but nothing enlightened me as much as this call with Kay.

Unmarried young women like Kay and my mother Helen were taken to 933 Carroll Street, the address of the Catholic Infant Home (an unwed mother's home that shut its doors in 1969). The girls were dropped off with their suitcase and were expected to leave the same way. 
At check in, each were given fake names. (I call this classic Catholic shaming.)
Each day the girls/women were expected to scrub and clean the home and do chores while they waited out their pregnancies; a few went to work for wealthy Catholic families as day workers and nannies. On a few weekends, Kay was happy to leave there to visit with her family during this difficult time. The women were expected to attend daily mass and "act Catholic," in Kay's words. She admits she cannot even remember details of the rooms since she blocked out those memories.
(Her family expected her to give up the baby, as if this was her only option. Nobody talked about it, not before or after.)
When it was time for Kay to deliver her baby, the infant home called her a cab that delivered her to St. Joseph's, the same hospital where I was born in St. Paul, MN.  At the hospital she begged them to call her mother but they refused. It was a long labor since it was her first delivery and at 19, she was very frightened but noone was interested in helping her or guiding her through the contractions. Eventually they drugged her and when she woke up, they wouldn't tell her the sex of her baby and wouldn't bring the baby to her.  As soon as she could, Kay walked to the nursery and put up a sign with her name so a nurse could point to her child.
She finally saw her beautiful son.
Kay wasn't allowed to hold him.  It was all head games, Kay told me, all to make her feel unworthy of him, and of being a mother. She was told to forget about him, he was gone.
Then a day later, a nurse walks into her room with her newborn and tells her to dress him and get ready to leave. The brief contact she had with her baby was the cab ride back to the Catholic Infant Home.
For years, Kay would not go back to St. Paul. She said it held too many bad memories for her.
She handed over her son and he was whisked away to some deserving family, she was told.  Kay signed the paperwork to relinquish him and signed a payment plan to pay for the hospital bill, which she was expected to pay monthly. (She paid for one year then stopped. It horrified her she was expected to pay when they took her baby.)
Kay never had another child. The trauma of losing him, she believes, hurt her so deeply - she was never able to have another baby.
It took many years but Kay found her son in 1986 when he was 19. (He told her he was raised in an alcoholic home in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb and shown no affection by his adoptive mother.)

I was so sad to hear this story but I thanked Kay for her courage in sharing it with me, and for helping me to understand the pain of the mothers at the Catholic Infant Home.

Next week, Kay and her son plan to have another reunion.

Memoir gives voice to #60sScoop experience of being raised outside of Indigenous culture

Brittany Penner. Photo supplied. Credit Michael Maren.

 

By Shari Narine, Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
September 4th, 2025  

Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home is Brittany Penner’s account of being adopted as a baby by a Mennonite family in Manitoba and searching for her birth parents.

Such an adoption practise—having white families raise Indigenous children—continues, points out Penner, who is now 36 years old.

“I really keep thinking about…how many children and teenagers are still facing realities like this where…they have been cut off from their first families, where they're being raised outside of their culture, and how it's not something that's in the past. It is something that is still very present across our country today,” said Penner, who has Anishinaabe, Cree and European settler lineage.

When Penner started writing her memoir, it was under a different title. But when she explained it to people, the phrase “children like us” kept coming up. 

“It was always in reference to…children who were Indigenous, who were placed for adoption or relinquished or apprehended or in foster care. And that was just how I think, and my siblings and my cousins, collectively, thought of ourselves,” she said.

Penner and the other Indigenous children who were fostered or adopted by her extended Mennonite family were part of the Sixties Scoop, a common practise by the Canadian government to place Métis, First Nations and Inuit children with non-Indigenous families in other provinces and sometimes in other countries.  The Sixties Scoop began in the 1950s, ramped up in the 1960s, and carried through until mid-1980. It’s estimated 20,000 children were taken.

Penner was the only child her parents adopted.  She had numerous foster siblings (21 before her seventh birthday), who she connected with as brothers and sisters only to have them torn away from her over the years.  Due to these losses, as a youngster she became obsessed with when she would be taken away, and it was a fear she lived with despite her mother’s attempted reassurances that that that would not happen to her. Her father’s Mennonite family, including his parents, adopted and fostered numerous Indigenous children. These were the Native aunts and uncles and cousins that Penner grew up with.

In offering her story, Penner cautions the reader in the book’s foreword that this is “not a memoir wherein I ask you to choose a side.” She says that mattered to her because, when she was growing up, she was told she “should be grateful” that her adoptive parents had chosen her.

As she writes in her memoir, “I’m adopted. I’m reminded of this again and again and again—until I begin to believe there is something inherently wrong with me for not feeling unendingly lucky.”

keep reading👇 

Interview: Andrea Currie (60s Scoop)

Andrea Currie writes as a survivor of the Sixties Scoop

CBC Books · Oct 18, 2024

Finding Otipemisiwak is a memoir by Andrea Currie, pictured. (Arsenal Pulp Press, Ken Woroner)

 

The Next Chapter 11:41 

Andrea Currie on Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves

 

The Saulteaux Métis writer, healer and activist shares stories of family, resilience and her life as a Sixties Scoop survivor in her latest book.

Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of Sixties Scoop survivor Andrea Currie and her journey to finding her Métis roots and reuniting with her birth family. It's a tale of survival, identity, family and culture in the face of colonial practices and Indigenous erasure.

Currie is a writer, healer and activist. She lives in Cape Breton where she works as a psychotherapist in Indigenous mental health.

She spoke with The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about finding a way back to her heritage.

You start off the book by saying, since nobody has written what I need to read, I'll have to write it myself. Why do you think the Sixties Scoop has remained in the shadows?

Given what we're talking about in terms of the history of all these colonial interventions, I really feel like we could flip that question and ask settler folks why so much of the history of what has happened to Indigenous peoples on our homelands remains in the shadows.

We are still, in so many places and communities and regions, some of us just surviving.  Others are prioritizing healing and finding ways to strengthen our Indigenous cultures and to live as well as we can in our communities, or wherever we choose to be.

So I'd kind of like to ask our settler listeners, why is it that it's taking so long for this history to become just a part of our understanding, our collective understanding as a country? I do think there's a lot of difficult feelings that this history brings up for people, right? There's a human response to want to deny, avoid, not get into that, but we have to move forward to repair and create the relationships that we could have had and could still have if we don't acknowledge this history.

You reunite with your younger brother Rob, who the book is dedicated to. Can you tell us more about him and your life together?

I would love to. Rob and I were the youngest two of three adopted children. We were both Métis Sixties Scoop kids, although we had no idea of that at the time, but what we did know is that we did not feel acceptable or that we belonged in that family. It seemed like our adoptive mother was always disappointed in us and there was some way that we were supposed to be that we just couldn't measure up to. 

 That created an incredible bond between us.

- Andrea Currie

But we also knew that there was something not right about this, you know? And I think because we both shared that experience, we were able to guard each other's perceptions about that ... and that created an incredible bond between us. I honestly think it helped us survive our childhoods.

• Métis Sixties Scoop survivors gather to discuss next steps in reconciliation process

He was sent back to Children's Aid when he was 15, which changed the trajectory of his life forever and was a devastating loss to me. So I included parts of Rob's story in my book to resist that erasure of him and his truth and to honour him.

In the book you reflect on the concept of blood memory. What is blood memory and your relationship to it?

Blood memory is the knowledge that is present in us both spiritually and genetically. It's our ability to know things without ever having consciously learned them. So I had a number of moments in my childhood that I recall vividly when I knew how to do something without ever having been taught or shown, like weave a mat out of reeds, for example.

Or when I clearly had beliefs that were unlike the rest of the family members that I was growing up with, that I now see were aligned with Métis core values and ways of thinking. In fact, later on, after I'd met my birth family, I remember sharing some of these stories of disconnection with my oldest sister and her simply saying to me, "You were thinking like a Métis."

When you spoke to your birth mother for the very first time, she mentioned the parallels between your life and the life of your family. Can you tell me more about that?

I come from a family of writers. For instance, my grandmother is a celebrated Métis writer, Marie Therese Goulet Courchaine. I have always loved to write and I've been a musician. When I met my family and we were just sharing information and stories about what we'd been up to for, you know, 38 years, I sent my mother some CDs that I'd been part of recording. She sent back CDs recorded by my brother and his band and my uncle and his band.

I can't even tell you how profound and just joyful it was to realize that in many ways, in much of my life, I had been living a parallel life that was still in some ways connected to the lives of my birth family members. 

 I had been living a parallel life that was still in some ways connected to the lives of my birth family members.

- Andrea Currie

You were 38 when this journey of reconnecting with your birth family began. What place do you see this book in that journey?

I have had the opportunity to do a lot of healing in the 26 years since I found my family and to really do some of the work of integrating all of this. It's a lot, as you can imagine. And so this book really isn't for me.

This book was written to contribute to the conversation that I think needs to happen in our country, and in particular, it's written for other Sixties Scoop survivors so that we don't feel alone. I want other Sixties Scoop people to be able to find things to read or stories to hear and to connect with that help them feel less alone.

Who am I? Podcast with Michelle Gauvreau (Mohawk adoptee)

LISTEN: 

Thriving Adoptees - Healing, Inspiration & Empowerment For Adoptees

Sep 14, 2023

 

Who Am I? Michelle Gauvreau

How do you keep going when your world has been turned upside down? When you find out that you've been lied to over and again? When the shocking truth comes out. Listen in as Michelle shares her inspirational story of resilience and dogged determination as she found out who she really is.

Michelle Rice-Gauvreau is a native Mohawk woman born in Canada and raised in Connecticut via an illegal adoption, which was commonplace for many Indian babies throughout many years across North America.   She is a compassionate advocate for all adoptees looking for their own truth, peace and hope.  She hopes to instill her strength to any adoptee struggling to find their way.

Michelle now works as a legal professional for a prestigious law firm. She resides in Connecticut with her husband of many years, and her two senior cats.  She enjoys traveling and learning more about native cultures far and wide. 

Find out more at:

https://www.michellegauvreau.com/

https://www.facebook.com/adopteesmatter

https://twitter.com/ladystarre

https://www.instagram.com/ladystarre/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-gauvreau-45755919/

 

HARTFORD COURANT:

https://www.courant.com/2023/10/02/finding-her-identity-an-indigenous-ct-womans-resilient-journey-to-making-peace/

MEMOIR: WHO AM I?

Memoir examines path from illegal adoption to finding herself as a “proud Mohawk woman”

Tuesday, December 19th, 2023 windspeaker

Michelle Rice-Gauvreau with her book Who Am I?

Summary

“I was like, ‘Oh, I have a family. Maybe they'll rescue me.’ Right. Every adoptee might have that fantasy. Little did I know the culture shock I was going to get because I was not raised on the reservation.” —author Michelle Rice-Gauvreau

 

By Shari Narine
Windspeaker.com

Like many adopted children, Michelle Rice-Gauvreau believed that meeting her birthmother and extended family would save her.

Instead, the first time she travelled by bus from Connecticut to Montreal and then by borrowed car to the Kahnawake reserve resulted in culture shock.

“It was tough at 15 (years of age). And I was so headstrong. I was like, ‘Oh, I have a family. Maybe they'll rescue me.’ Right. Every adoptee might have that fantasy. Little did I know the culture shock I was going to get because I was not raised on the reservation. I'm being raised in white society,” said Rice-Gauvreau, 54.

In Who Am I?, a self-published accounting of her life from birth, Rice-Gauvreau traces her time from the hospital room of her delivery and her illegal adoption by Tom Rice, also of the Kahnawake reserve, to growing up in Connecticut where Tom lived.

When Tom dies before Rice-Gauvreau turns three years old, she is raised by Lea, Tom’s widow. Lea suffers from mental illness, which in part presents through hoarding and controlling her adopted daughter. Rice-Gauvreau lives in a filthy, moulding, cluttered house until Lea sends her away, first to live with an aunt and finally into the foster care system.

Rice-Gauvreau dedicates her memoir to Tom.

“I don’t think I would have wanted for anything (had he lived). I was told I was a Daddy’s girl,” she said. “I think everything, all of my needs, would have been met. I don't think he would have let my adoptive mother hurt me the way she did.”

Then again, she admits, that could be another adopted child’s fantasy.

“I'm sure I romanticize it a lot, but I also go by the stories that I was told, too, about him,” said Rice-Gauvreau.

Her memoir is a hard-hitting journey through pain, numbness, anger, and depression to forgiveness and understanding.

Like many Indigenous children in the 1960s, Rice-Gauvreau was given up because of poverty. It’s not an aspect she examines in any depth in her memoir because, she says, “it was a common-sense type of thing” to understand.

And because of that, Rice-Gauvreau says, she never had to forgive birth mother Sharon Armstrong, who she understood had no choice.

Sharon was living with her mother Mary, who was already raising Sharon’s first child, and she could not afford to raise and feed a second child. Rice-Gauvreau’s birth father had taken off.  While in hospital, Sharon’s roommate became aware of the situation and contacted Tom.

Rice-Gauvreau would not learn that she was adopted until Lea’s sister told her at the age of 15. Her birth and baptismal certificates had been forged which presented another issue when Rice-Gauvreau needed to get a U.S. passport in order to travel into Canada.

Rice-Gauvreau did a few successive trips to Kahnawake in her late teens, including spending time with Mary before her grandmother passed away. However, it wasn’t until she met up with foster parents Elaine and Geoff that she started to more fully embrace her First Nation heritage.

The British couple fostered only First Nations children. They co-founded the Connecticut River Powwow Society. It was at these events, Rice-Gauvreau writes, that her mind was “opened…to the spiritual world and the spiritual animals that are always guiding us.”

Rice-Gauvreau is continuing to learn about her Mohawk culture.

While today she is semi-estranged from Sharon and older brother Mike, she is in constant contact with one of her aunts. As for her birth father Eddie, he met her only once when she was a young adult and then cut off contact.

Rice-Gauvreau has no contact with Lea’s family. After Lea passed away, Rice-Gauvreau, with the support of her husband and son, spent five years sorting through Lea’s decrepit house. She sold many of Lea’s collectibles on eBay. The money from that she considers as her inheritance.

It was a hard job, she says, for her physical and emotional health to be in a house that held no good memories.

Rice-Gauvreau is continuing to learn that her feelings and experiences as an adopted child and adult aren’t unique for children or adults in her position.

For about one year now she has belonged to a group for adoptees, from which she gets support and gives support.

“I needed to feel what others were feeling. I needed to know that I was relatable to them,” said Rice-Gauvreau.

After writing her memoir, she says, she needed to connect with other people.

While putting her feelings and thoughts down on paper was cathartic, she says it was difficult.

“I still think about it. I still think about certain circumstances, absolutely. I think that happens with everybody. And I think it will always happen but I don't feel sorry for myself,” she said.

Writing her memoir came about in 2019 when she ended up in the hospital with sepsis and thought she might not make it out. She realized her only son Raymond, now 30, didn’t know her story. She started writing and even after learning she would recover, she kept on writing with the help of a book coach.

“I wanted to get my voice out there,” she said. “It took a long time. I also relived quite a bit. So I'm still kind of healing… but I think I'm doing a good job. That scab is pretty solid.”

And while that scab may be “pretty solid” now, in her memoir Rice-Gauvreau recounts the poignant goal of trying to make Sharon and Lea proud of her. Proud that after such a difficult beginning and upbringing, she survived and worked hard to get a college education. She now works as a legal professional in Connecticut.

Pride for her accomplishments is something Rice-Gauvreau feels only now for herself.

“If you asked me that five years ago, I wouldn't have said yes… because I don't think I knew where I was headed...I still didn't have a direction in my life, and that wasn't until I became sick. And then I realized, ‘Oh, I got direction. And I also have a voice and I need to use it.’.. I started writing and I started feeling my voice coming out. And that's where the pride started coming from,” she said.

It was frightening to put her life out there in a “very raw” way, she says, but her memoir, which came out in August, has received positive attention both in Connecticut and Canada.

At the end of her memoir, Who Am I?, Rice-Gauvreau answers the question, “So many events in my life shaped me into who I am today and that will never change. Growing up between two countries and two cultures, I now tell myself: ‘I am strong, I am thankful, I stand as a proud Mohawk woman. I am Michelle.’”

Who Am I? can be purchased at michellegauvreau.com

BOOK: These are the Stories

These are the Stories: Memories of a 60s Scoop Survivor was published by Kegedonce Press in December 2021. It is available through the publisher, Amazon, Indigo and local bookstores.

Free literary festival draws Indigenous writers of all genres

In a one-on-one session, Adler will be leading Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith, who will be video conferenced in from Toronto, in conversation about the writing life and how “she’s really getting important stories out there.” Smith is a journalist and memoir and fiction writer. She is the author of These are the Stories: Memories of a 60s Scoop Survivor and editor of Silence to Strength: Writings and Reflections of a Sixties Scoop Survivor.

Indigenous writers will be featured prominently on Saturday at Word Vancouver’s Reading & Writing Festival.

And guest Indigenous curator Nathan Adler is hoping that writers and audiences form a new bond at western Canada’s largest free literary festival which runs until Sept. 23.  See website here: WV/23 (wordvancouver.ca)

READ MORE: https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/free-literary-festival-draws-indigenous-writers-all-genres

Miskonoodinkwe Smith’s life has also been a journey, one that saw her decide to undertake higher education in her 30s, graduating from the University of Toronto with a specialization in Aboriginal Studies in 2011. She earned her Master’s in Education in Social Justice in 2017.

Today she lives in Toronto and works as a data coordinator for the Miziwe Biik, an Aboriginal employment and training centre.

“I’m a lot stronger than I was. I’m more confident than I was. I’m successful. I have a hard time talking about myself in a positive way that way, but that’s just residual negative thinking that I had in the past,” said Miskonoodinkwe Smith.

She has triumphed over those who thought she would never live past her 25th birthday.

“I think that’s the fighter in me,” she said.

Writing her story is not only about letting other Sixties Scoop survivors know they’re not alone.

“In order for the government and mainstream public to understand the impact of how the Sixties Scoop affected Indigenous children, and still has an impact to this day, I find it important to tell our stories, because then it will be hopefully understood that there are many children who were impacted in one way or another,” she said.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/sharing-sixties-scoop-story-important-other-survivors-government-canadians 

Author’s seminal novel remains relevant even after 40 years

“We knew people don't like us, but we don't know why it could be. You know, because we're brownish and because we're foster kids.” — Beatrice Mosionier, author of In Search of April Raintree

 

By Shari Narine
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Windspeaker.com

 

Little did Beatrice Mosionier expect that her first novel, In Search of April Raintree, would have such a profound impact on Indigenous readership.

But perhaps she should have.

When she was seven or eight years old, she was working in the basement of her second foster home in St. Norbert, a suburb of Winnipeg.

“I got this really powerful knowledge, and it was that I would have these three animals that would guide me: The wolf, the bear and the cougar,” said Mosionier, a Plains Métis woman.

“Later when I finally started talking about it with other people, I was told about guide animals, spirit animals, that give you strength… And it was like I was going to do something special in my life.”

She forgot about the spirit animals until she hit her thirties. In 1980, when Mosionier was 31, her oldest sister Katherine committed suicide. Sixteen years before, her other sister Vivian had taken her own life.

“It was just like things were shifting inside of me. I think that's probably how I came to decide I was going to write a book, and I think that was what led up to this,” said Mosionier.

But when she wrote In Search of April Raintree in 1983, Mosionier never believed it would be published.

Forty years later, Highwater Press is releasing a special 40th anniversary edition of the novel.

Mosionier and her siblings were apprehended in the earliest years of the Sixties Scoop, which saw an estimated 20,000 or more Indigenous children removed from their homes between 1951 and 1984.

Mosionier was taken at the age of three by the Children’s Aid Society of Winnipeg. The loss that resulted from that action was the story she told in the lives of April Raintree and the fictional younger sister Cheryl.

It was a story that resonated mightily with Métis and First Nations readers, as noted in words of praise that accompany the anniversary edition.

“In Search of April Raintree was the first book I read that spoke to the Indigenous experience, and it changed me for the better,” wrote Governor General Award winner David A. Robertson.

“I could feel it in my blood memory. Because it was tender and brutal, authentic and unapologetic, heartbreaking and hopeful,” wrote Rosanna Deerchild, host of CBC Radio One’s Unreserved.

“Reading Beatrice Mosionier’s seminal novel was lifechanging. As a young Indigenous woman, it was the first time I felt seen,” wrote Manitoba NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine.

Those words make Mosionier feel “really humbled.”

She wrote the book “to find answers,” spurred on by the deaths of her sisters.

“I think that’s really hard on a parent…When you lose a child to suicide and then you lose a second child to suicide, there's something majorly wrong,” said Mosionier.

In writing the novel, Mosionier gained personal insight into her own family and into the larger picture of being Métis.

“I was raised in white foster homes since I was three years old. I wasn't connected to—back then we used to call it the Native—Native people,” she said.

“I did get more understandings about the why and everything. Because when I grew up, we didn't know words like ‘oppression’ and ‘racism’ and all the things like that when we're in school…We knew people don't like us, but we don't know why it could be. You know, because we're brownish and because we're foster kids.”

Along with telling the personal stories of April and Cheryl, heartbreaking and uplifting, in turn, Mosionier used Cheryl’s essay writing talent in the book to tell the wider proud Métis history.

Mosionier had to research for Cheryl’s essays. She started watching a Winnipeg television series that had interviews with Indigenous people. Her next-door neighbour, who wasn’t Indigenous, gave her a book by Heather Robertson titled Reservations are for Indians.

“I read that book and then I had a fairly good sense, because back then we didn't have computers and Google and all of that,” she said.

After her book was published, she discovered that St. Norbert had a rich Métis history. She also learned that her father used to play the fiddle.

“I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know. I just didn't know anything positive,” said Mosionier.

While there are brutal scenes in the novel, perhaps the most haunting scene comes in April’s realization near the end, which echoes the words of her broken father: “Baby Anna. Such a small part of our lives. Yet she had changed our lives the most.”

It is when Baby Anna is sick and goes to the hospital that April and Cheryl are wrongfully apprehended, and that single action sets in motion everything that follows.

Forty years later, Indigenous children are still being apprehended at a disproportionate rate.

“In Search of April Raintree is one of the all-time great works of Indigenous literature, and it is still as vital and relevant today as it was forty years ago,” wrote Dr. Warren Cariou, a professor at the University of Manitoba.

Mosionier agrees with Cariou’s observation about the relevance of her novel.

But, “I kind of feel sometimes that (the novel) didn't do its job because a lot has changed but a lot has not changed, and sometimes you think it's getting worse,” she said.

If her novel opened the gates for other Indigenous authors, Mosionier says, “I feel good about that.”

And she encourages Indigenous authors to keep doing their strong work, many of whom are now being recognized with awards.

As for her spirit animals who told her she would do something special in her life, Mosionier firmly believes writing In Search of April Raintree was that act.

The special 40th anniversary edition of the novel will be released by Highwater Press in September.

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada. SOURCE

 

Sundre author’s book recounts her experience as Sixties Scoop survivor

A Sixties Scoop survivor who wrote an autobiography about her experience hopes that sharing her story will not only raise awareness but perhaps also embolden others with similar life experiences to embark on their own personal path of healing.

Shirleylee Shields, who moved to Sundre about a year ago, was taken away from her biological parents at the age of three and subsequently placed into the care of a foster family in a strict religious sect.

She recently offered a presentation at the Sundre Municipal Library to provide insight into her 2009 book, A World Within A World. She also penned a sequel called My Son My Son.

During a June 13 interview with the Albertan, the 58-year-old candidly recounted the long, difficult journey of self-discovery that ultimately led her to walk away from a fundamentalist life that was forced upon her and to reconnect with her family and heritage.

Sharing experience a liberating step

“There’s no more skeletons in the closet,” she said with a laugh in response to being asked how seeing her published story felt. “You have nothing to hide. It was the most freeing, cleansing thing to do, was to reveal and to bring all of this out and throw it on the table.”

At first, she confessed being “petrified” that nobody would even want to read her story. But A World Within A World is now on its fourth print run, while copies of My Son My Son are out of stock for now.

Born on May 1, 1965 in Benito – a small, rural Manitoba community just east of the border with Saskatchewan – Shields lived only briefly for three years with her six other biological siblings and parents, an English mom named Myrtle Harrington and a Métis dad called Herman Moses Bercier, at a home in the Roblin area south of where she was born.

“Me and my younger brother had been removed from the home and put into foster care and dad didn’t even know anything about it,” she said. “He came home (from working in the bush) and we were gone.”

Shields was fostered into a family that already had 10 children – making her a distant 11th – not far away from Roblin in a relatively remote rural community called Shortdale, Man., where her adoptive parents owned and worked a farm.

“They were part of the Mennonite society, but they were the Holdeman sector, which is the strictest of the Mennonite society,” she said. “There was no radio, no television, no higher education, no makeup, no jewelry; the list is endless. That’s where they dropped me off when I was three.

“It was all I knew, from three years old. You grow up with that environment, it’s just like a cult,” she said. “That’s why my book is called A World Within A World.”

Raised by her foster parents Benjamin and Tina Isaac, the couple eventually adopted her at age 10; a decision she would not find out until years later was actually Benjamin’s idea.

Strict religious upbringing

Amid a strict religious upbringing that demanded unquestioning conformity to rigid rules, Benjamin was among the few silver linings to be found.

“Even though he was a staunch believer and a member of the Holdeman Mennonite society – he loved me,” she said. “He is the only human that I knew growing up that loved me unconditionally; I did everything with my dad. He never hit me; he was the kindest soul that you could imagine.”

He even seemed to understand the internal struggle she faced on a daily basis.

“He knew,” she said. “Even when I was young – six or seven – I would look at him and I’d say, ‘I don’t belong here.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, for now, you do.’”

Expressing a deep respect born of affection for her adoptive father, she said, “I loved him and he loved me.”

Sometimes, she said he was even reprimanded.

“He’d be (temporarily) expelled from the church for associating with what they considered ‘worldly’ people; so, people of the town,” she said. “It blows your mind at the mentality that they are allowed to sit in judgment of every human being on this planet, but yet they will preach god’s love or whatever they want to believe Sunday morning. I mean, it’s just ludicrous.”

Yet she never developed a connection or relationship with Tina, who died in a vehicle collision in which only Benjamin and Shields survived; she was 15 at the time and subsequently sent away to live in Steinbach, Man. for 11 years.

But she does remember Tina as a “phenomenal gardener” who knew how to prepare a hearty meal.

“We were never hungry; we ate very well,” she said.

(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.