Sixties Scoop Adoptees: Social Media, not laws, help adoptees find family

Woman helps adoptees

by The Canadian Press | Dec 28, 2014

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Lori Campbell and her mother Brenda Campbell are shown in a handout photo.

Lori Campbell's most prized possession is a thick folder filled with paperwork.
"This is how I know who I am," she says. "This is how I know how much I weighed when I was born, what my smile was like."
Campbell has spent the last 23 years searching for her family.
The Regina-born Metis woman was put into foster care at 14-months-old and later adopted by a white family.
During her harrowing search for her biological mother, she learned that she had seven younger siblings. Five brothers and one sister were all placed in foster care or put up for adoption. Another sibling died at birth in 1995.
Campbell, 42, met her mother in 2001 and completed her search for her siblings in October when she tracked down her last brother, Dwayne Lyons, in Ontario.
Social media helped connect the two, when Campbell posted a photo on Facebook detailing her missing brother's name and date of birth.
But the public search has had some unexpected consequences.
Since posting that photo in January, Campbell says she has communicated with about 75 people who are looking for their birth families. With nowhere else to go, strangers have inundated Campbell with messages asking for help. She says she has a backlog of more than 100 people waiting for answers.
One man in Illinois knows he was born to a 15-year-old Metis woman in Regina. Another says he was 11-months-old when he was put into foster care. The list of people hoping to piece together their childhoods with minimal information seems endless, Campbell says.
"I have been constantly writing people back," she says.
Much of the correspondence is with aboriginal people who were born in Regina but placed in foster care or adopted.
Aboriginal children are disproportionately represented in the foster care system. The most recent numbers from Statistics Canada show that in 2011 almost half of all children under 15 in foster care were aboriginal.
"(There are) all these people who don't know who they are," Campbell says.
It's an all too familiar feeling for her.
"I remember always looking for someone who looked like me," she says. "There was always this sense that I was dropped in the middle of nowhere and my life began when I was two."
Campbell remembers sitting in the archives at a public school, flipping through old yearbooks. She would scan strangers' photos looking for her own features.
Campbell would learn that her mother became a prostitute at age 13 and her father was a john. She also learned that some of her siblings had physical and cognitive disabilities.
Campbell's mother has struggled with addictions and is coping with health issues including multiple sclerosis.
Brenda Campbell, 57, says she never thought she'd get to know her daughter.
"Everybody says she's a miniature me," she says, adding with a laugh, "well, a younger me."
Ron Duncan, a reverend in Brampton, Ont., was instrumental in Lori Campbell's search for Lyons.
Duncan says Lyons has had three different last names used for paperwork. He was also moved from Saskatchewan to Ontario, which made his records more complicated. It's an example of how difficult it is to navigate the system, Duncan says.
"I discovered his experience was not unique and unfortunately, far from it," he says.
Duncan believes connecting children with their aging parents is a matter of urgency. He adds that some children aren't aware of their aboriginal status, which was the situation with Lyons.
"He was unable to access any of the benefits that come from that, particularly related to education," says Duncan.
He adds that because foster care and adoption programs fall under provincial jurisdiction, it is often difficult to trace someone's family across the country.

Robert Twigg, a psychotherapist based in Winnipeg, has worked in child welfare around the country.
"People need to know where they came from, what their ethnic, cultural, biological roots are, any kind of health concerns they should know about," he says. "Whether it's a passive or active thing, the system is set up to block that kind of thing."
He adds that he's not surprised to hear about the difficulties people face when navigating a system he calls "entrenched."
He says during his career, he has seen records that are "pathetically lacking."

"I wonder ... if you could even go back to those, would they even be helpful," he says.
Campbell is slowly wading through the messages that multiply each day.
She says the latest one comes from a man who is searching for answers about his father and three siblings.
"Are you the lady that found your birth mom and siblings after being separated at a young age? If so, I need help," the message says.
The man explains his story and outlines the current information he has.
He asks Campbell the same question she faced in 1991, when she embarked on her search.
"Where do I start?" he says.

 

 

Facebook, not laws, helps locate family

BY: Denise Jewell Gee | December 29, 2014 |The Buffalo News.com

 

Kimberly O’Connor didn’t think much about her biological roots when she was little. She had loving parents. Three older brothers who adored her.

But as she grew older, O’Connor, now 39, began to wonder about the woman who gave birth to her at Mercy Hospital on an April day in 1975 and then, six months later, gave her up for adoption. O’Connor wondered about her own ethnicity, her family medical history.

So, in her early 20s, she pressed for her birth records, first contacting the adoption agency and then working through a lawyer to get the records she could. The documents gave her only a few clues: Her birth name. Notes that her mother was tall and thin, that her father was even taller. A hint that her maternal grandmother had once suffered from tuberculosis.

She wanted to know more, to understand what health risks might lay deep in her DNA, to connect with siblings she never knew.

In May, she took a leap, scrawling out her birth name – Brandy Lee Stevens – and date of birth on paper with black marker and posting a picture of herself with the sign to Facebook. “Here goes!!” she typed.

“I knew if I didn’t do it right then I would change my mind,” O’Connor said. “There are so many people on Facebook, that was really the only chance that I had.”

A week later, more than 10,000 people had shared it. Messages of support poured in from all over the world. Channel 2 contacted her. Then came a friend request that would unlock the clues to her family.

It came from a woman who turned out to be O’Connor’s cousin. Those conversations led O’Connor to discover she had a half sister and half brother. Sadly, she also discovered her birth mother had died 10 years before.

In August, O’Connor drove down to meet her siblings for the first time. She now talks to her sister every night.

Facebook, it turns out, was the key to solving a lifelong mystery that New York law had kept her from knowing.

Many birth records in New York are still shielded from adoptees, concealing the names of biological parents. That can lead to long and frustrating journeys for children like O’Connor who are left wondering about their roots.

Yet a handwritten sign and a post on Facebook ended her search in a matter of days. For O’Connor, it was less than two weeks before a family member reached out. Her picture has since been shared more than 24,000 times.

Not everyone is so lucky, and O’Connor’s journey has led her to believe adoptees should have access to basic information that can help them discover their medical histories.

It’s an issue still often fraught with emotion, and O’Connor understands that some parents may never want to be found. But she strongly believes that all children should have access to as much of their medical histories as possible.

“I find it so confusing that so many people have to live with not knowing what to watch out for,” O’Connor said.

New York lawmakers were close in the spring to changing the law, but a bill that would have allowed adult adoptees access to birth certificates failed to pass. Other states, including Connecticut and New Jersey, have recently loosened restrictions on birth certificates.

The puzzle for O’Connor is only half solved. She still hopes to find her birth father. For now, though, she feels blessed to find a family she thought she’d never meet.

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. 

Debby Poitras: First Nations Siblings Unite

Debby's photo

My friend Debby Poitras-Precius from Toronto contributed to the book TWO WORLDS and CALLED HOME, two ground-breaking anthologies of Native adoptee narratives.

Please read about Debby's remarkable reunion with her siblings.

http://www.mjtimes.sk.ca/News/Local/2011-06-21/article-2600941/Siblings-unite-and-visit-mothers-grave/1

Lost Daughters: Secrets by Anonymous Guest Author

Lost Daughters: Secrets by Anonymous Guest Author

Of all my secrets, this is probably the most dangerous, and thankfully the least recurring.

Third Mom: Honor adoptees by honoring their privacy

Little Trace, age 3

Third Mom: Honor adoptees by honoring their privacy: There has been a lot of talk this week in my online circles around a post by a popular adoptive parent blogger about her kids... Holidays should not be about schedules and stuff, they should be, as author Terra Trevor so beautifully says, about love.


I add my two cents on adoptee privacy HERE...and it started a firestorm of comments! Trace

Interview: Adoption Survivor, not Victim

Note from Trace: Because of spam attacks, I am reposting this and deleting the original. Can I win the war with spambots? I guess I will try by deleting the old posts and win that way.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Von Coates interviewed me about my adoptee and my writing experience in my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE, published in 2009 - I wanted to share an excerpt of this interview:

VON:  In your life was there a pivotal event that changed you from being a victim of adoption to a survivor?

Trace, 1st grade

Trace: That is a great question because lots of people won’t recognize there is a definite shift from victim to survivor.

When laws restrict opening adoption records, these policymakers make us victims. There are many adoptees ready to know their family name, meet relatives and have reunions, but cannot because of adoption laws.  Other adoptees, lulled by gratitude, may fear upsetting their adoptive family, and may not see themselves as victims of a corrupt unjust system.   
The adoptee moves from victim to survivor when they decide to break the law, when they decide to regain and restore their own identity, and get their name. That’s a giant leap forward.
My becoming a survivor happened in stages, in a sequence of events. As a child I grieved. I promised myself as a teenager that I would find answers but it looked impossible with sealed records in Wisconsin.  I felt overcoming my low self-esteem was first. In my 20s, I realized there would be “emotional processing” I’d need to do, slowly, over time.  Opening my adoption records was very important in 1978 but troubling since I had no help to locate my parents. This was before the internet.  I also had to face reality that I might not find them or my parents might not be willing to meet me.  I never met my mother Helen which felt like a second rejection in the 1990s. I was 38 when I met my father Earl in 1996. Reunions (or not having a reunion) take time to process.  Over the years, other adoptees were great teachers for me since there are no guidebooks for dealing with adoption and the trauma. There is so much to understand, obviously.
Writing and remembering everything again and research changed me most – like a light bulb went on. I started to see adoption as an industry and a measure of control over a mother’s maternity and placed orphans in a state of emotional disgrace.  Recognizing adoption as an institution, one that has outgrown its purpose, one that is damaging for mother and child, was perhaps my biggest transforming moment.  (It was actually magical…)

VON:   You say in your book adoption involves many traumas, not just the one of the loss of a mother. Many of the things that happen to us, the damaging relationships, breakdowns and illness result from those traumas. How do we move from being vulnerable, to strength and survival?

Trace: In my book, I mention four distinct traumas for adoptees and I know there are more. Adoptee and natural parents are vulnerable to the billion dollar adoption machine that still manipulates us. I felt manipulated. Restricting us from meeting, laws which prevent our meeting, then add a dose of shame, judgement and misunderstanding, all deeply affects and even harms adoptees.  I do write about this in depth.

Adoption is very isolating.  Many adoptees like me suffered in silence. I see many adoptees create stories for their missing parents. If they do not know the truth, and never meet them, adoptees can stagnate emotionally and get trapped in illusions, lies and excuses. That is a very hard way to live. It’s very difficult to tell an adoptee what to do, or how to heal and overcome this vulnerability.  I took small steps on my own and finally realized that there was only one solution for me – find the truth.

A closed adoption is the ultimate act of disruption. Because of my disgrace and orphan-status, I was not living emotionally well. I was not empowered as a human since the very act of adoption removed my identity.  I made a decision to not live this way or accept the fantasy-land my adoptive parents and adoption industry created for me. I had to open my adoption, period.  I would not give up.

It took me a long time to see how I failed myself with very troubling decisions and blamed Helen my birthmother for misery I had as a child.  I fought the idea of being a disgrace.  I fought feeling rejected by Helen when I finally found her.  I fought very hard to heal myself, know myself and release judgment.  Even as a teenager, I thought it was ridiculous to be expected to live a fantasy and project gratitude.

Finding the truth and meeting relatives moves you from feeling vulnerable to empowered, from victim to survivor.  

====================

ENDNOTE: I view adoption as torture. It's cruel and inhumane to force adoptees to live this fantasy life, with lies, with falsified records.

The blog Once was Von was actually deleted by Google because of complaints from anonymous readers who were in disagreement with Von's views on being an adoptee. 

It might happen to me, too, but I hope not. Trace

Siksika First Nation first band to kick provincial child protection workers off their territory

'A lost tribe': Child welfare system accused of repeating residential school history, sapping Aboriginal kids from their homes

Adrian Humphreys | December 15, 2014 

(Leah Hennel / Postmedia News)  Homes on the Siksika Nation Reserve in Alberta on pictured in 2009. In 1973, the Siksika First Nation, east of Calgary, became the first band to kick provincial child protection workers off their territory and start their own agency.

Elders from the Wabaseemoong First Nation in north-western Ontario remember the bus that drove around their reserve picking up children and shuttling them to a waiting plane for a 345 kilometre flight north to Sandy Lake, a remote community with no outside road link, except for ice roads built on frozen lakes and rivers during the winter.
“When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” said Theresa Stevens, executive director of Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services, the current child protection provider for Wabaseemoong.

Such mass apprehension of children from troubled Wabaseemoong, including those flights in the 1970s, have been draining the reserve of its youth for decades, until in 1990, the community had had enough.
A band council resolution was passed: the Children’s Aid Society was forbidden from entering the reserve.
“They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’ ” said Ms. Stevens.

The situation was desperate: a third of the reserve’s kids were in foster care; the dip in school-age children made teachers redundant.
“From that day forward they’ve assumed more and more control over their children,” said Ms. Stevens.
In that community near the Ontario-Manitoba border, known in English as Whitedog, standoffs and feuds preceded a new sense of stability. Ms. Steven’s agency has been handling child welfare since 2001, and doing it with the province’s approval since 2006.
“We went from having almost 300 children in care to where we are down to just slightly over 100 for that community. And that is huge,” she said.

A Wabaseemoong elder, Eli Carpenter, poignantly told her the difference it has made. One day he was struck by the uplifting sound of children playing; so many kids had been taken it had been years since he had heard that.
“That’s when we finally started to know we were making inroads and changing the tide of what had happened,” said Ms. Stevens.

Wabaseemoong is not yet a place to be pointed to as a universal model of success in tackling the problems of aboriginal child welfare, but it stands as a marker of hope and a portrait of the hard journey native child welfare reform takes.

Today, after the public apologies and restitution over the government’s residential school system, disproportionately high rates of aboriginal child apprehensions continue across Canada.

“There are more First Nation children in care today than during the height of residential schools,” said Shawn Atleo, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. “We cannot lose another generation to the mistakes of the past. First Nations are the youngest and fastest growing segment of the population. We are the future. This is about Canada’s future.”

Goyce Kakegamic, a residential school survivor who is now deputy grand chief for the Nishnawbe Aski Nation — covering two-thirds of Ontario in an arc from Quebec to Manitoba — said it is the missing children of today, not just of the past, sapping vitality from native communities.

“So many of our children have been taken away they are like a lost tribe,” Mr. Kakegamic said.

---------------------------------------------------

While all child welfare systems in Canada face challenges, the added complexities of aboriginal child welfare bring a seemingly unbearable quandary.
About 15% of kids in care in Canada are aboriginal, despite natives comprising only 3% of the population; children on reserves are close to eight times more likely than other children to be taken into care.
These statistics alone suggest a problem worthy of attention, but they are coupled with studies saying a majority of native child apprehensions are not over allegations of abuse but, rather, concerns of neglect — with serious questions of what role culture and poverty plays in defining neglect.

“The child protection system for aboriginal children and youth is broken,” said John Beaucage, who was the first Aboriginal Advisor to Ontario’s Minister of Children and Youth Services.
“We see the same type of things repeating: aboriginal children taken away from their community, taken away from their culture and usually … these children find themselves, as adults, trying to figure out who they are, where they belong and are somewhat lost.

“We, as a country, have been repeating the same mistakes over and over again.”

Among those mistakes: not doing enough to tackle root causes that lead to legitimate child apprehension; not finding ways of keeping more native children out of state care by ending unnecessary apprehensions; and finding a balance between meeting demands for aboriginal cultural integrity while maintaining critical standards of care.

“If we keep on doing the same old stupid things, we’re not going to see it stop,” said Mr. Beaucage. “We’re going to see it continue to rise without real benefit and without real change.”

—————
In 1955, the federal Indian Act was changed to allow provincial laws to apply on native reserves and the provinces then went into the business of providing aboriginal child welfare services, although funded by Ottawa.
“We had social workers untrained in the experience of First Nations people; they’d walk onto these reserves, see all this poverty and devastation and children from the residential school system — who are now parents — in a lot of trauma and, instead of seeing that for what it was, they removed the kids all over again,” said Cindy Blackstock, the Executive Director of the and an associate professor at the University of Alberta.

(Shaughn Butts / Postmedia News)   Cindy Blackstock, executive director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

The federal policy ushered in what is referred to now as the “60s Scoop,” when an estimated 20,000 native children were taken for foster care and adoption, primarily into non-aboriginal families in Canada, United States and Europe.

In 1973, the Siksika First Nation, east of Calgary, became the first band to kick provincial child protection workers off their territory and start their own agency. Manitoba bands soon followed.

There are now 108 aboriginal agencies in Canada mandated to handle child welfare services; at least one in every province except Prince Edward Island and with none in the northern territories.
More are on the horizon. In Ontario, for instance, the seven mandated aboriginal children’s aid societies will almost double if six “pre-mandated” agencies gain full authority; two are on the verge of full mandate status.

Meanwhile, the demands to recognize native culture in child welfare are becoming codified.
In Ontario, the Child and Family Services Act was amended in 2006, requiring child protection workers to ask whether a child has Indian status so that it can be taken into account in care decisions.

In Manitoba, where 80% of children in care are aboriginal, the Authorities Act now states that values, customs and traditional communities must be respected in cases involving aboriginal people.

And last year in Nunavut, where the population is mostly Inuit, the Child and Family Services Act was revised to allow interpretation according to Inuit societal values.

Along the way, the federal government has tinkered with funding in a patchwork approach with provinces: Ontario struck the Indian Welfare Agreement in 1965, allowing the province to bill Ottawa for services it provided for First Nations, although at about 93-cents on the dollar. A funding directive covered the rest of Canada from 1991 until 2007 when Ottawa unveiled an Enhanced Funding formula that brought new money to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.
—————
All child protection agencies across Canada start their cases based on a range of suspected maltreatment, including physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Increasingly, children are apprehended without evidence of actual maltreatment but, rather, for concern over neglect, substance abuse, lifestyle or living conditions.

That can hit native families particularly hard.
“It is quite heartbreaking,” said Katherine Hensel, a lawyer who has represented First Nations and aboriginal organizations across Canada.
“First Nation families are still experiencing the wrongful taking of their children on spurious grounds. There is still widespread, unnecessary and unwarranted removal of children.
“Many, many loving and perfectly good aboriginal homes don’t meet a province’s standard of requirements for being foster homes. There are different cultural norms on how children should be raised,” said Ms. Hensel.

Practices by many aboriginal people — such as parent-child co-sleeping, shared housing and multi-generational responsibility for childrearing — are often seen in social work as signs of dysfunction.
“If we deem a home to be a good home and a safe place for a child — but it might not meet all the provincial standards — we try to be as flexible and creative as we can,” said Ms. Stevens, from Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services.

First Nation families are still experiencing the wrongful taking of their children on spurious grounds. There is still widespread, unnecessary and unwarranted removal of children

While such flexibility and creativity may solve short-term problems, Ms. Blackstock wants long-term solutions. Her organization, along with the Assembly of First Nations, filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2007 with the aim of prying more money from Ottawa. The complaint says the government discriminates against aboriginal children living on reserves by providing less funding than is available for non-native children.
Ottawa funds child welfare for on-reserve First Nations while the provinces fund child welfare for non-native children. The gap between the two funding models is estimated to be 22%, the hearing heard.
Ottawa fought to quash the case but the tribunal pressed ahead, holding 72 hearing days in Ottawa ending in October. A decision is expected by the spring.

Answers may come from other directions, too.
Mr. Kakegamic was born in Keewaywin First Nation in Northern Ontario and has experienced a spectrum of native life, raised on the land in a traditional lifestyle by his extended family and also placed in a residential school. He is university educated and now responsible for social services for member bands across northern Ontario — most remote, fly-in only reserves with poor infrastructure.

“We don’t need someone with a PhD to come and tell us what the problems are. We know what the problems are. Because they end up in child care, they end up in drugs and alcohol,” he said; feelings of “futurelessness” lead to high youth suicide rates. “It wounded us to our core and sometimes it is hard to move forward when you are wounded.
“But the answers do not all come from Ottawa.
“We need to look at ourselves. We can do more as a community. We can do more as parents… it’s not only more money and more resources.”
He wants to strengthen and expand aboriginal child welfare agencies in his territory and push more resources into prevention and early intervention.
“We have the skill, we have the capacity, we have the experience — now give us the way to help our own people.”

—————
Moving toward aboriginal jurisdiction over child welfare is not a quick fix.
Last year, a joint Edmonton Journal-Calgary Herald investigation found that, proportionately, more children died in the care of an on-reserve Delegated First Nations Agency than in Alberta’s Children and Family Services Agency.

Tyler Anderson / National PostLandon Kakegamic (left), 6, leans on a fence while watching a game of baseball at Keewaywin, a First Nations community in Northern Ontario in 2006.

The continuing problems of aboriginals in the child welfare system also became a focus in Manitoba with the inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, a 5-year-old native girl who died in 2005 after abuse in her mother’s home on Fisher River reserve, north of Winnipeg, three months after returning to her mother’s care.
Even after the intense public attention of the inquiry, gaps in native child welfare still invite tragedy, including 15-year-old Tina Fontaine of Sagkeeng First Nation who was in the care of a Child and Family Services agency in Winnipeg and, within a month, her body found sexually abused and wrapped in plastic in the city’s Red River.

Galvanized by another tragedy, the government has announced another round of changes.
Ms. Stevens, from Anishinaabe Abinoojii, said aboriginal agencies have two concurrent goals: “We have a mandate that is both from the government but also from our First Nations. We’re not just in the business of child welfare, we are also in the business of rebuilding our nation by rebuilding our families.”
A year ago, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth, released a scathing report on the province’s aboriginal child welfare, calling it a “colossal failure of public policy.” She said the province spent at least $66 million on “talking” about problems “without a single child being actually served.”

Moving toward new aboriginal agencies is part of the adjustment agencies need to make, said Mary Ballantyne, Executive Director of the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies, where the boardroom is decorated by a quotation from Sitting Bull, the Indian chief who led the native resistance at Little Big Horn.

Darren Stone / Postmedia News  Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth in 2012.

“More and more, there is recognition that we need to find unique solutions in unique community circumstances.
“But we also need to make sure that the kids are OK. Aboriginal parents don’t want their kids in appalling conditions anymore than anybody else wants their kids in appalling conditions.”

Nico Trocmé, director of the McGill Centre for Research on Children and Families in Montreal, said he supports First Nations control over child welfare services—“with one enormous caveat: Simply dumping those services on First Nations communities and not providing the funding and resources needed is not going to change much of anything.”
“It is not going to be a quick and dirty solution,” said Mr. Beaucage, the former Ontario aboriginal advisor. “A lot of governments, they want a solution before the next election. You have to gauge your success by a different timeframe.
“The solution is not measured in months or years but maybe in ten years, or tens of years.”

 

MORE AT WEBSITE

Spammers Besiege this Blog

By Trace Hentz

I'm having to remove some of the posts that are being heavily attacked by spam. If you look at the right sidebar, you may notice the story about the Taylorville adoptee in Illinois has been removed. I hope you had read it prior to now. It was read by over 1,000 people but has been hit daily by spammers.
Sadly, I am going to have to remove more posts with the highest readers since they are generating spam daily.
This siege is annoying. Since the internet is monitored heavily by spambots, this blog is popular and has a big audience and is getting more hits.
So read the posts now. They may not be there tomorrow. (Print them out if you want to save them for future reference.)

Canada: Vatican Crimes #adoption #validvoices

Christmas is not a good time for many of us adoptees, or mothers of loss... many of us feel loss and anger over human trafficking and loss of family... Trace

Vatican and nun crimes happened in Spain - research "Spain Stolen Babies" by BBC and this atrocity also took place in Australia (so much so that the government even forced the nuns to issue an "apology" in 2012 for stealing babies). The news program "Dan Rather Reports" did a story on this topic called "Adopted or Abducted?" highlighting the fact that this also took place in USA.
Now this video highlights that this also took place in Canada. In fact, we encourage viewers to look for the book called "GONE TO AN AUNT'S" where reporter and author Anne Petrie further discloses how this took place in Canada.

The Protect Your Children Foundation is committed to exposing all the lies and crimes of religion worldwide to alert the nations of the dangers these criminal organizations pose in our communities. For more information, visit: http://areyourchildrenprotected.org and http://www.protegeatushijos.org

NPR Coverage of DOJ’s Commitment to Enforcing the Indian Child Welfare Act

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Turtle Talk

Here is “Justice Department Vows To Fight States That Violate Indian Child Welfare Law.”
An excerpt:

This summer the Justice Department intervened for the first time in its history in a federal district court case in South Dakota, concluding that the state has violated the rights of Native American parents.
Two of the state’s largest tribes argued that the state has removed children in hearings where parents were rarely allowed to speak and often lasted less than 60 seconds. The children were then placed indefinitely in largely white foster homes.
Stephen Pevar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit along with the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes, called the hearings “kangaroo courts.”
“There was nothing — nothing — that any of the parents did or could have done,” Pevar said. “It was a predetermined outcome in every one of these cases.”

Janice Howe fought the state of South Dakota for a year and a half to bring her grandchildren back home after they were placed in foster care.

 

 

2011 coverage: READ MORE

Sadly, the comments on NPR in 2014 are stunningly bad, racist, belaboring the same myths about alcoholism, but not poverty or real concentration camps, and absolutely nothing about the reality and loss we face as children removed from our tribes...Trace

Colonization is Always War: A War for LAND and Territory

By Zig-Zag, WarriorPublications.wordpress.com
(Originally pub. 1999 as Colonization is Always War, Revised 2012)


“If anyone is trying to destroy you, STOP HIM!” Karoniaktajeh – Louis Hall, Warrior’s Handbook p. 1

War & Colonization
Just slightly over 500 years ago, in 1492, three European ships under the command of Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of what has come to be known as the Americas. With this began a genocidal war aimed at destroying Indigenous nations, occupying our ancestral territories, and plundering the natural wealth of the earth. How many tens of millions of Indigenous people were killed in this war will never be known, although the methods of massacres, biological warfare, executions, torture, and the enslavement of entire nations, has been well documented by historians.
Similar invasions were being carried out in Africa and parts of Asia during this same period. This systematic campaign of genocide and colonization was a total war waged against Indigenous nations by European colonialist nations. No one can deny this historical fact.
Colonization can be defined as the practise of invading other lands for the purpose(s) of settlement and/or resource exploitation. When the land is already occupied by another people, the result is usually war. In fact, colonialism occurs in a similar manner to many military conflicts between nations: there is a reconnaissance, an invasion, occupation, and then assimilation (the same methods can be seen in Iraq and Afghanistan).

War can be defined as, “a state of hostilities that exists between or among nations, characterized by the use of military force… a violent clash between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other. “The means to that end is the organized application or threat of violence by military force.” Warfighting, p. 3

Here in North America, military violence can be said to have characterized the imposition of colonialism & the establishment of settler-nations up to 1890. That year, 300 Indigenous men, women and children were massacred by US military forces at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. By the late 1880s, the use of gun-boats to destroy villages had ended along the Northwest Coast. In the southwest, Apache guerrillas had also been defeated. At this time, the military domination of Indigenous peoples was virtually complete. This was only slightly over 100 years ago.

Mass grave at Wounded Knee, 1890; the massacre was carried out by the reformed 7th Cavalry

Is There A War Against Indigenous Peoples Today?
Today, there are some who believe that military force and violence does not characterize our present-day reality here in N. America. But this is not entirely correct: The selective use of military/police violence can be clearly seen in recent examples from the last 30 year period.
Thousands of soldiers and police, using military equipment, weapons and tactics, have been deployed against Indigenous movements and communities.

The most notable examples being:
• the 71-day siege at Wounded Knee, S. Dakota, in 1973. Hundreds of police, FBI and paramilitaries, with military assistance including armoured personnel carriers, weapons, ammunition, etc., engaged in fire-fights with warriors in bunkers and trenches. 2 warriors were shot & killed.
• the re-occupation of Ganienkah by Mohawks in New York state in 1974. Hundreds of state police laid siege, and gunfire was exchanged with white vigilantes. NY state eventually retreated & negotiated a parcel of land still occupied today.
• the blockade at Cache Creek, BC, in 1974.
• the re-occupation of Anicinabe Park near Kenora, Ontario, in 1974.
• the 1975 shoot-out at Oglala, S. Dakota (two FBI agents and one warrior killed). Hundreds of FBI agents were deployed to Pine Ridge in a massive search for AIM members.
• Restigouche, 1981: over 500 Quebec police raid the Mi’kmaq community of Restigouche, carrying out assaults & searches for ‘illegal’ fishing.
• the 77-day standoff at Kanehsatake (Oka) and Kahnawake, near Montreal, Quebec, in 1990. Over 4,500 Canadian soldiers were deployed. One SQ police officer was killed in an initial raid by a heavily-armed police tactical unit on Mohawk road-block, July 11.

Kanehsatake/Oka 1990: a 77-day armed standoff between warriors and military.

• the month-long siege at Gustafsen Lake, BC (Ts’Peten), in 1995. Over 450 RCMP ERT members were used, with 9 Bison armoured personnel carriers from the Canadian military. During the siege, RCMP used an explosive charge to disable a vehicle, then rammed it twice with an APC. In a fire-fight which occurred, as many as 20,000 rounds were fired by police, yet only one defender was wounded (1 dog killed).
• the re-occupation at Ipperwash (Aazhoodeena), Ontario, 1995. A police tactical unit opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing Dudley George and shooting a 15-year old youth in back (1 dog killed).
• Burnt Church 2000-01. Hundreds of heavily armed DFO & RCMP officers (inc. ERT units) in boats, helicopters, & planes were used against Mi’kmaq lobster fishermen & security escorts (inc. Westcoast Warrior Society).
• July, 2001: over sixty RCMP were used to dismantle a road block at the Sutikalh re-occupation camp near Mt. Currie, BC. Along with a helicopter & dog teams, heavily-armed ERT members were used to arrest 7 (unarmed) people. The blockade had shut down all commercial traffic on Highway 99, a vital link between Vancouver & the southern interior.

Wounded Knee, 1973

• Sun Peaks (Skwekwekwelt), where RCMP arrested approx. 80 elders & NYM’ers from 2000-08. These arrests resulted from occupations, road-blocks, & protests against expansion of the Sun Peaks ski resort (near Kamloops, ‘BC’).
• September 21, 2002: RCMP from the Integrated Security Enforcement Team (INSET)—an anti-terrorist unit created after 9-11— along with ERT, raided homes of Westcoast Warrior Society members on Vancouver Island (BC).
• April 8, 2003: RCMP with ERT & helicopter raided NYM member homes in Bella Coola & Neskonlith (BC). They seized computers, discs, address books, & printed materials.
• October, 2003: a convoy of approx. 100 RCMP in over 30 large vehicles & vans, with ERT units, riot cops, and dog teams, rolled through Cheam as a show of force (Cheam had blockaded a CN railway cutting through their reserve in protest against logging in Elk Creek).
• June 27, 2005: over 30 Vancouver Police & RCMP (including ERT & INSET members) arrest 2 members of the Westcoast Warrior Society in Vancouver. They confiscate 10 rifles that had been legally purchased at Lever Arms. No charges are laid and the weapons kept as part of an ongoing investigation (shortly after, the WWS announces its disbandment).
• Spring, 2006: hundreds of Ontario Provincial Police are deployed against the Six Nations reserve near Caledonia, Ontario, after a housing development & highway are blockaded as part of a land reclamation. On April 20, police attempt to remove people from the reclamation site using batons & pepper spray but are forced back. This begins months of blockades and sabotage.
During these incidents & the time periods in which they occurred, hundreds of people were assaulted, arrested, and jailed. At least six Indigenous people died during these incidents; in S. Dakota, between 1973-1976, nearly 70 members/associates of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were killed by paramilitary groups & BIA police, acting under the direction of a corrupt tribal president, with the complicity of local, state, and US federal law enforcement agencies. FBI agents supplied training and equipment to these paramilitary & tribal police forces.

At roadblocks or re-occupation camps, heavily armed police ERT’s are also frequently used for surveillance and over-watch for regular police making arrests. When the Lil’wat road block at Mt. Currie was dismantled in the Fall of 1990, the large RCMP force which arrested over 60 people was covered by ERT snipers.
During a Spring 1995 road block near Merritt, BC, (Douglas Lake Ranch), an RCMP ERT unit was discovered conducting surveillance.

RCMP Emergency Response Team pose in front of Bison armored personnel carrier.

In May 2001, near La Loche, Saskatchewan, an RCMP ERT unit was discovered conducting surveillance on a blockade camp. The camp was alerted to the presence of camouflaged police by a dog. After being confronted, they ran back to an old cabin, where other ERT members were brewing coffee. In their retreat, they left behind several items, including a tear gas canister and a 9 mm pistol.
Following September 11, 2001, and new anti-terrorist measures, the RCMP have become even more aggressive in their repression of Indigenous resistance. As noted, in September 2002, RCMP INSET & ERT units raided the homes of Westcoast Warriors. In April 2003, RCMP & ERT raided the homes of NYM members in Bella Coola & Neskonlith, BC. Then, in June 2005, the arrests of WWS members in Vancouver (after legally purchasing weapons) by INSET officers & ERT.
In 2006, a draft copy of the Canadian Forces new counter-insurgency manual included a description of the Mohawk Warrior societies as an example of domestic insurgents:
“The rise of radical Native American organizations, such as the Mohawk Warrior Society, can be viewed as insurgencies with specific and limited aims. Although they do not seek complete control of the federal government, they do seek particular political concessions in their relationship with national governments and control (either overt or covert) of political affairs at a local/reserve (‘First Nations’) level, through the threat of, or use of, violence.”
Because of Native protests, the CF removed the reference to warrior groups. Despite this, it is clear that the military continue to train and prepare for future domestic operations against Indigenous defenders.
Considering all this, it must be acknowledged that the use of military/police force, or the threat of violence by military/police force, has in fact continued, directed against and mostly limited to, those Indigenous people who become involved in protest or resistance activities.

Tyendinaga Mohawks at blockade, Arpil 2008

Psychological Warfare
Because of the focused use of state violence against Indigenous resistance, some people believe these confrontations are the result of “extremists”, and that this use of military\police force is used only to resolve “criminal” matters.
This view reveals the success with which the state has isolated resistance, in the minds of some, as being the work of Indigenous “criminals” & “terrorists”, etc. In fact, after the 1990 Oka Crisis, an analysis of the siege concluded that the use of the military gave the Mohawk warriors a ‘moral victory’ in the eyes of the public. This was seen to contribute to widespread sympathy for the warriors across the country. One report recommended the use of heavily-armed police to reinforce the view of Indigenous rebels as “criminals.” This tactic was successfully used at Gustafsen Lake & Ipperwash in 1995 (along with strict control of the media).
Leonard Peltier, an Anicinabe-Lakota involved with AIM in the 1970s and imprisoned for over 30 years, has observed that,
“If white society’s attempts to colonize people meets with resistance, it is called war. However, if the colonized Indians of N. America unite to rise up and resist, then we are called criminals.”
Portraying resistance as “criminal” is a primary method by which our enemy seeks to undermine our movement. Other common smears include “terrorist,” “thugs,” etc. These terms carry negative & anti-social meanings. When attached to a group, terms such as these influence public perception & loyalties. Corporate media play a big role in disinformation campaigns & counter-insurgency operations.

War by other Means
Some may agree that the selective use of military force is used, but argue that this is the result of the imperfect society we live in. They might add that in other parts of the world, Indigenous people live with deadly violence on a daily basis. In N. America, we may be oppressed, but it is not a war, because military force is not used against our people as a whole.
This perspective, however, is based on a narrow definition of war, characterizing it as purely military. A broader definition of war states:
“War involves the use of all the elements of national power, including diplomacy, military force, economics, ideology, technology, and culture.”
Warfighting, p. 25
Wars can be of either high- or low-intensity, depending on the overall objectives & the means available to wage that war. By its very nature, because it is a struggle between two opposing wills, war is both uncertain and constantly changing. Because of these factors, different means of waging war will tend to dominate in certain conditions.

Native children in Residential School.

Here in N. America, as our military ability to resist was overcome, other means besides a military one came to dominate colonialist strategies and methods. The suspension of military campaigns did not, however, mean the end of colonization.
Colonization is an ongoing and continual process that does not end so long as the territory and people are occupied by the colonialist nation. Just as war cannot be said to be purely a question of military force, neither can colonization. The imposition of special laws contained in the Indian Act, including the reserve and band council system; the residential school system and religious indoctrination; distorted and incomplete depiction’s of our people & history in the public education system, etc.; these are some examples of colonialism using legal, political, ideological, and cultural means.

Colonization is War
Colonization, the occupation of a territory and the domination of the Indigenous people, can be characterized as a clash between two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, with one attempting to impose its will onto the other. It is a life & death struggle. This characterization fits our definition of war as previously stated.
It is therefore correct to say that colonization is a condition of war, and is it itself a form of war to gain territory for resources &/or settlement.
Because colonialism continues to this day, it follows then that a war is being waged against our people at this time. This war of colonization is conducted by the state of Canada using all the elements of national power at its disposal, including diplomacy, military/police force, economics, ideology, technology, and culture.

1995, siege at Ts'Peten (Gustafsen Lake) in south central interior of 'BC'.

Identifying The Effects Of This War And Combating Them
“There is another type of warfare waged on the native… It is waged against the mind of the natives. This type of warfare is every bit as dirty and deadly as the ones with guns. The casualties are the drunks, dope addicts & suicides. The casualty rate is high. There are Indians walking around dazed and confused suffering from identity conflict. This is one of the wars the modern… warriors have to fight. To fight any kind of war, one needs courage, gumption knowledge of the enemy and strategic planning. The biggest single requirement is FIGHTING SPIRIT.”
Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall, Warrior’s Hand Book, p. 10.
The more that a war of colonization comes to rely on political, economic or ideological means, and the less it uses military force, the more difficult it is for the Indigenous people to comprehend and understand that a war is in fact being waged against them.
In this way, the inferior condition of the Indigenous person in all aspects of life, and little progress towards remedying this oppressed condition, cannot be accounted for, except as an “unfortunate” result of history. Yet, despite continual inquiries and special commissions & constitutional debates & new government programs — all aimed at uplifting the Indigenous people, we are told — the fundamental conditions which keep Indigenous people oppressed do not change.
This lack of change is not due to history, it is because our enemy actively prevents any movement towards fundamental changes to its system. It in fact seeks to prevent even the thought that fundamental changes are necessary.
Ideology and psychological warfare, transmitted through the public education system, corporate media and entertainment industries, and political institutions, serves to obscure and make incomprehensible the full nature and extent of a war of colonization.

Know Your Enemy
Unable to comprehend this war, the Indigenous person is then incapable of defining an enemy and the means by which they are oppressed. This understanding can only come through education & consciousness. The identification of the colonial system as an enemy of Indigenous people must therefore be clearly communicated. Another important part of de-colonization is the history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism. As well, people need to be exposed to the realities of the global capitalist system, its use of military force to impose imperialism, the role of white supremacy & patriarchy in this process, etc.

St. Michael's Residential School in Alert Bay, 2011

Casualties of War
The effects colonization has had on our people must be acknowledged. Indigenous peoples have the highest rates of suicide in the country; the highest infant mortality rates; the lowest life expectancies; disproportionately high rates of AIDs, cancers, and imprisonment; the lowest income level; the highest unemployment rates, etc.
Many have suffered physical, mental and sexual abuse in the residential school system; the effects of this have resulted in inter-generational patterns of abuse in our communities. How many tens of thousands of Indigenous children have been taken from their families, and their people, and fostered out in non-Indigenous family units may never be known, and still continues.
The overall physical and psychological effects of these oppressed conditions can never be fully known, for the casualties and deaths of such a war do not appear as bodies on a battlefield, but instead as suicide statistics, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and slaves. Many become apathetic to these conditions, while some attempt to assimilate themselves even further into this system and its way of life, a form of self-destruction in itself. Unable to see colonization as the fundamental condition which oppresses them, many not only lack a will to resist, they can even lack a will to live (i.e., disproportionately high rates of suicide among Native peoples).

Fighting Spirit
A primary aim of Indigenous resistance must be to strengthen the fighting spirit of our people and their will to resist. Fighting spirit can be strengthened and affirmed in many ways, i.e. through the use of certain language and concepts, graphics, clothing, crest animals, songs, etc. A fuller understanding and practice of our own Indigenous cultures would also contribute to raising fighting spirit, and in & of itself is a form of de-colonization. Our people’s history of resistance, and especially the last thirty year period, should be maintained and communicated.

Masked warriors at Kanehsatake, 2004, after shutting down the police station.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article has been to expose the reader to a view of colonization as a war for territory. It is believed that this view is critical to understanding the true nature of our struggle and the intentions, strategies, & tactics of our enemy.
That state security forces will be used to enforce colonial rule & corporate access to resources is an already established fact. As economic & environmental conditions decline, as resources become more depleted, the potential for ever-greater social conflict increases. For these reasons, fighting spirit must also be augmented by preparations for militant defense of land, resources, & communities, in the years to come.

 [The chapter of the Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA are also part of this pattern of colonialism. We are living proof of what these governments did...Trace]