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Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ . THANK YOU MEGWETCH for reading

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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Yesterday I attacked the kitchen!

REPOST from MAY 2011 (edited)

By Trace Hentz


Yesterday I attacked the kitchen!  It’s a sure sign when I start tearing apart a room, cleaning, washing and moving stuff around. Hours later it hit me I am in the throes of processing again.  Stories in the anthology TWO WORLDS do haunt me, visit my dreams, keep me awake, yet fill my heart with a sense of urgency and compassion for each and every adoptee I know and do not know yet.

I reread their stories and their words and in their sincerity, find my own grief re-ignited. We were long-silenced by deliberate secrecy. I’ve met so many adoptees and children of adoptees with the same questions and concerns I had.

When adoptees from closed adoptions email or call me, I feel their pain like it is my own. When I first hear their stories, I tell them we are all related. I relate what I can about our shared history as “removed Indians,” why we are called Lost Birds and Split Feathers, and describe my own "wound" after being adopted by strangers. I share how my adoptive parents did not help me or encourage me to find my other parents or my tribes.

It kills me too many adoptees are still very desperate to find answers and a family name. Just one detail, just one name, which tribe, could change everything. I send them prayers they find what they need. I send links to search angels, to Karen Vigneault. I listen and email and offer to help.

Like my story, many other adoptees stubbornly refuse to accept secrecy, even defying laws and religions and the wishes of their adoptive parents. They’ll risk everything to find their tribal families and identities.

There were too many years I was so desperately alone, not knowing any adoptee who had
successfully opened their adoption or had a reunion with relatives. 
Today I know several. Today I have many friends who have gone full circle and met all their families.

There are some stirring voices in TWO WORLDS...and the anthology CALLED HOME. I cry reading these stories by Native American adoptees who were placed in closed adoptions, but celebrate them like war heroes who fought laws and sealed adoption records in North America to find their way back to their sacred sovereignty and tribal relatives.  

My co-author Patricia Busbee (also an adoptee) and I have bonded like sisters doing these projects. I thank her for her deep compassion to do two books with me.

Editor Trace Hentz

There is a book by Margaret D. Jacobs I want to recommend: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. This is the book I wish I had written. It is mind-blowing history. I have to say, just 100 pages in, I am in such a rage, I decided to put the book down awhile, to cool off and absorb what I already read. Margaret’s work will probably ignite you as it did me. You may also find yourself tearing apart your house and attacking your kitchen!

I know why adoptees are some of the strongest people I have ever met. We truly are the child survivors of an ethnic cleansing campaign, when colonial dictators did battle with tribes to steal more and more land. 

Taking Native American children was just one more horrific tactic.

But in the end, every adoptee who finds their tribe and family wins this war and those governments who may have tried to kill our identity will not succeed as planned. 

This story is still being written in 2015, and will be until all adoption files are open and exposed.

I assure you, you will never forget these stories or these very brave adoptees. 




3 comments:

  1. No indeed not Trace and I'm looking forward to it's arrival.Your indentity will not die and things will change, the damage however is not repairable I feel.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment on my blog. You have a great one too and your books sound very interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for your comment on my blog. You have a great one too and your books sound very interesting!

    ReplyDelete

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The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.

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Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

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The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.

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Why tribes do not recommend the DNA swab

Rebecca Tallbear entitled: “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe”, bearing out what I only inferred:

Detailed discussion of the Bering Strait theory and other scientific theories about the population of the modern-day Americas is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it should be noted that Indian people have expressed suspicion that DNA analysis is a tool that scientists will use to support theories about the origins of tribal people that contradict tribal oral histories and origin stories. Perhaps more important,the alternative origin stories of scientists are seen as intending to weaken tribal land and other legal claims (and even diminish a history of colonialism?) that are supported in U.S. federal and tribal law. As genetic evidence has already been used to resolve land conflicts in Asian and Eastern European countries, this is not an unfounded fear.

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In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines. This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation. In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet. - https://desultoryheroics.com/2023/11/12/internet-censorship-everywhere-all-at-once

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