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

By Trace L Hentz  (adoptee, author and activist)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Why are they ignoring the ADOPTEE STORY in this story?

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

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

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

— NICWA (@NativeChildren) June 20, 2016

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

—Sherman Alexie

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

LOST BIRDS: Four adopted women seek out their Native American roots

by The Fault Lines Digital Team

For more than one hundred years, U.S. policies and practices separated Native American children from their families. Prior to 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act went into effect, Native American children were regularly plucked from their homes and sent to live with non-Natives. Some children grew up surrounded by love; others suffered enormous hardships. Many had a powerful desire to reconnect with the culture that they had lost.
In "Lost Birds," we profile four adopted women who sought out their Native American roots. Click below to read the stories of how each woman came to discover and connect with her true heritage.

Please Share This: http://alj.am/1lE3sZT

My friends Suzie Fedorko, Julie Missing and Diane Tells His Name are in this story with me!   It's pure awesome.... Click on the arrows to hear us talk about our lives!  Trace

Suzie's memoir

My memoir

Diane Tells His Name on NPR #NDN #Adoption

NPR StoryCorps on American Indian Adoption by Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Listen Here.

Transcript:

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And it's time now for StoryCorps, the project recording the stories of everyday Americans. And today, we're going to hear from Diane Tells His Name. She's a Lakota Indian. Growing up, she never knew anything about her heritage. She was adopted when she was a baby. And at StoryCorps, her daughter, Bonnie Buchanan, asks Diane about her childhood.

BONNIE BUCHANAN: When did you first feel like you were different?

DIANE TELLS HIS NAME: Probably elementary school. I had a younger sister, and I really didn't like doing the same things that she would do. She would do tea parties and play with dolls and things like that, and I was outside looking at the clouds and the stars. And my sister was blond, tall and thin like my mother, and I was round and brown.

(LAUGHTER)

NAME: I remember going through the family albums, looking for my face in the old photographs, and I didn't see me. And eventually, when I was 37 years old, I happened to see a picture of my mom in October of 1951 - and it shocked me, because I was born in November of 1951 - and my mother was not pregnant. So that's when I knew that I was adopted.

BUCHANAN: How did you feel?

NAME: It was very satisfying to know that I wasn't crazy. I didn't blame them. I wasn't angry with them. In 1951, you just didn't talk about those things. So when I got my original birth certificate, it said on there my birth mother's name, and it said that she was born at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

So I went to South Dakota to receive my Indian name and get a crash course in how to be Indian. After that, my husband and I told Indian Family Services we wanted to adopt a child from my tribe, a Lakota child. And, finally, they faxed us a picture of a little Indian child, and she was drinking chocolate syrup out of a Hershey's bottle. And our son said, that's her. That's the one we need to adopt. And it was you.

I started doing research on your family, and when I started looking at your family tree, I saw one of my relatives on your paper. So we are cousins. I thought that was just - that was amazing. I'm glad you're my baby.

BUCHANAN: I know. I'm glad you adopted me.

NAME: I am, too. It's like our whole family was just planned out so that it would be best for all of us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: You can take a moment to collect yourself. That's Bonnie Buchanan with her mom, Diane Tells His Name, at StoryCorps in San Francisco. Their story will be archived with thousands of others at the Library of Congress. The podcast is at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

I am so happy that Diane was able to record her story with her daughter. She is a contributor in the new anthology TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects.  Her photo is on the cover, next to the book title. I am blessed to call her my relative and friend! ...Trace