Pandora's Box: Opening an adoption & the stages of search

REBLOG from 2011

By Trace Hentz, blog editor
 

Opening an adoption is just like opening Pandora’s Box. You just never know who - or what – will fly out at you.

I think back to my inner battles years ago. There were many stages I went through:

• I almost stop when I hear I was "saved" from being an orphan - so that should be the reason I never search. I don't know it will take years to find my parents.
• I almost stop when I hear adoptions were done legally yet it's illegal for me to search. Wisconsin was a closed record state. Now the state will contact your parents to get their consent to let you know who you are.
• I almost stop when I think my mother had problems so she had to give me up. I get scared of why she did it. I get scared she might not want to meet me (and in fact, she didn't).
• I almost stop when I do not hear back from the ALMA registry in New York. Apparently no one is looking for me.
• I almost stop out of guilt. I feel guilty because my parents were so generous to raise me, since I was an orphan. They didn't have to adopt me but they did! (But can they imagine what it feels like being adopted? No. Can I talk to them about searching? No.) I love them for adopting me.
• I almost stop when friends tell me to get over it and move on with my life. "Forget about her." Adoptees know this game. "Don’t talk about it. Shut up. Stop whining. You were lucky to be chosen."  Really? I didn’t feel lucky. I felt hurt, betrayed and rejected.
• I almost stop when I read the letter from my natural mother, saying she doesn't want anyone to know about me. She's worried what people will think.

Back then it was like I was wedged between helpless and hopeless. I was doing this search for me and my own sanity. Plus it was impossible to search without names. And what was I being saved from? I should be grateful that I lost my natural parents?

I moved past all that and found my natural mother, and then my father.

Having a reunion with my dad was the hardest thing I ever did and the best thing I ever did. It was not what I expected, that's for sure.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine how meeting him (and his kids) would change me as a person. I was almost 40 when we met. There was no one to advise me on what to do, or what to say, or what to expect having a reunion.

First things first.  My birthdad Earl Bland wanted a DNA test to be sure I was his.  I wanted to know that, too.  This all happened back in 1996 and I traveled from Oregon to meet him in Illinois. (I paid for my plane ticket and $500 for the DNA lab with help from my ex-husband).

My dad and I got the results (by mail) a little over a month later. Earl was indeed my dad but I never saw him again.

I write about my reunion with Earl and our time together in my memoir "One Small Sacrifice." I looked for him for years and only met him once. How does the adoption industry justify keeping us apart for years with secrecy and laws, then my dad dies shortly after we meet.

All I can say is I wish everyone who is adopted gets the chance to meet their natural parents. Even if it is only once. Even if it is only one parent. It is a spiritual awakening.

Since I read so much about the adoption industry, I was wondering when an adoptee's emotional well being and health would be mentioned and considered? 

 Apparently, this is not an issue, and not a concern of the adoption industry. It's about protecting the adoptive parents. Secrecy and sealed records is part of their sales pitch. It's not about the adoptee but the adopter. The mood, anxiety, thrill and angst of our adopters is what we hear growing up adopted - and we learn to be appreciative, silent and grateful. We mourn in silence.

Every adoptee I know wraps their mind around this. It's simply ridiculous to be denied the chance to know and meet our natural parents. There should be people and laws helping us, the natural parents and the adult adoptee. We all need to understand the family dynamics to have meaningful reunions, and know what to expect.

Sadly, this is not happening. Not yet.

((1-22-2011))

PTSD | Time Machine

By Trace L Hentz (blog editor)

There is no time machine to transport you back to the moment you were abandoned. You can’t erase how you felt or how it feels now. Or how it controls your life. Or how it breaks your heart into a million pieces. You don’t know how to stop feeling this way. You pray you’ll find your family, some one like you, who gets you, who looks like you. You want to put the pieces of your life back together, but you don’t know how.

These were thoughts I had – as I was processing.

Yes, there are adoptees who also feel this but never get to say it. I see it on their face. I hear their words and their silence.

No matter how much love and care we are given, the truth is – we are (and will always be) someone else’s children. We’re just not able to say it out loud, usually.

No doctor diagnosed me with birth trauma or splitting sickness. Therapists would recommend drugs which would only deaden my senses, missing the whole point. I didn’t want to feel more dead; I was already dead, or at least part of me was. I wanted to feel alive! Instead I just shut down. Power off.

My sickness was a dead zone, a black hole. It was not visible on my skin, nor did it raise its ugly head in one outburst or one tantrum.

I heard a story about another adoptee, a doctor with an Ivy League education, who was unable to meet his birthmother before she died. His wife told me he was never able to get the information he needed to find his birthfather, or know his identity.

Regardless of this man’s expensive education and medical training, the pain wounded him so badly he just couldn’t function, feel love or have a successful relationship. The pain was so deep, he couldn’t see it.

His wife told their therapist about his adoption, how he reacted, and how he seemed cold, heartless. Even marriage counseling didn’t save their marriage. Their therapist thought his adoption trauma was too much for him to handle; trying to work on it might kill what was left of him.

I’m not sure where I got my strength.

(excerpt from One Small Sacrifice, which is out of print)

“I’ll Take That One” #NAAM2019

So how does this work? 

By Trace L Hentz (excerpt from One Small Sacrifice)

Was I like a lost-and-found item in a department store then put out on display? Did strangers come in, spot me and point, “I’ll take that one.” How did they know it was me they wanted? Why me in particular? It’s not like an interview if I can’t talk yet.

Actually, my parents didn’t choose me. I was available and the Catholic Charities people brought me to them and sold them on me. After this transaction, I became invisible, unidentifiable and perfectly suited to blend in with all the other children. I was in a real sense legal property, given a new name and identity and supposedly matched to look like my adoptive parents.

How strange, really. Then I’m supposed to thank them and love them for buying me and giving me a home.  Of course I did.

There must be a rule book on this somewhere, right?

My birthmother Helen was Catholic. Marriage was an institution, central to many religions. Had this religion instructed everyone to judge a woman with an illegitimate child? Make this baby a sacrificial lamb? Did they say to her, “You get a do-over if you abandon your baby…No one will ever know they existed….You’ll never find a husband with a bastard kid.”

It was different in Indian Country. Native women would choose a father for her children and if he didn’t work, she’d choose another one. For many Native mothers, the rule book changed when organized religions took over. Native mothers had many things working against them, like poverty and oppression, and the wrong ideas about savage Indians.

I finally saw the myths created for me. Gratitude is easy when you’re young. Impossible when you’re an adult. My gratitude silenced me, almost permanently.

When I reached adulthood, the words “this was done in your best interest” felt like pure nonsense. 

Clearly that wasn’t enough information to build a life on.

I was not their legal property but a human being.

[I am working on my memoir again... adding more history]

Adoptees who can't #FlipTheScript #breaksilence #adoption

By Trace (Adoptee-Author-Blogger)

After you read this post at Lost Daughters blog by Rebecca, HERE, I wanted to share a story about what happened to me in Wisconsin in 2008. I was invited to read an excerpt from my memoir at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison.

My memoir One Small Sacrifice wasn't done. It was a draft. It had changed almost daily. I knew it had holes in it.

I was having trouble finding and proving the Indian Adoption Project(s) had happened on paper.  I was using internet archives.

I was not finding adoptees who wrote narratives. I was not finding news articles.

I knew I was one voice among thousands of Lost Birds/Split Feathers. THOUSANDS!

This troubling chapter of history (Indian adoption projects run by the governments of Canada and America) and the truth of this intended genocide was buried, hidden.  Even academics had not caught on. Some were writing about residential boarding schools, not adoption.

The Native adoptees I was finding had not spoken to anyone. More than one adoptee said to me, I thought I was alone. I thought I was the only one.

Well their words echo in me even today...

Some adoptees are still not aware that there are thousands of others just like us - in the next town, in the next village, in the next county.

That happened here in western Massachusetts where I live.  One village over, I meet Daniel, a Lakota adoptee; we met at a ceremony in Wisconsin. Then I met another in the next town, an adoptee from Boston who is Inuit.

If adoption intended to isolate us from other adoptees, from our tribes, from our first families, they did it very successfully. Closed adoption succeeded by isolating us, by silencing us, paralyzing us, alienating us.

There is this silent shame in being adopted, lost to our tribes because of a government plan to erase Indian children from tribal rolls.

I felt such shame, and abandoned. Yet I was afraid to upset my adoptive parents. I was afraid something might be wrong with me. I was afraid to look for answers. I did not have friends helping me process what to do, what was next. I could not afford a private detective.

The inventors of this genocide experiment were successful until my first story about the Indian Adoption Projects ran in Talking Stick in NYC in 2005.  The article "Generation after Generation, We are Coming Home" broke that silence. Then adoptees found me. They broke their silence too.
If I had not met adoptees like me, I would not have been able to finish my memoir.

Two books, their narratives, stories written by Native adoptees soon followed - Two Worlds and Called Home.  These books will reach more adoptees like us. I wish I'd had these books when I was 22 and just starting my search. I had nothing to go on, and very little hope.

At the end of my reading in Wisconsin, a young man came up and said he was adopted too. Painfully shy, he admitted that he was afraid of upsetting his adopted parents if he tried to look for his first family.  He had not even tried because Wisconsin had sealed their adoption files tight as a drum. He was also scared of the expense ($$$) of looking!  I told him I understood and how many of us adoptees suffer from a "gratitude attitude," when we feel silenced and afraid. I told him to start his search when he was ready and I'd help him. I told him to contact me.

I gave him what I knew he needed: HOPE.

How much I changed (Part 5) #adoptionsurvivors

I gave this interview some time ago but my thoughts still stand...Trace
Take a read:

Excerpt:


Interview with Australian blogger ONCE WAS VON in 2011
old link: http://eag-oncewasvon.blogspot.com/search?q=One+Small+Sacrifice

Trace DeMeyer published her first book ONE SMALL SACRIFICE on the Split Feathers, the children taken from the First People of Turtle Island or the United States of America as it was renamed by those who claimed it. The Split Feathers (adoptees) were taken for education and for adoption in planned destruction of their Peoples. Many have not been found or found their way home. Trace includes the story of her own journey and tackles the difficult areas of adoption and the adoptee experience.

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

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 almost 40 when I met my father Earl in 1994. 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 trauma. There is so much to understand, obviously.
Writing my memoir, remembering everything again and adoption 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.

Von: You say in your book, that 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 in “One Small Sacrifice.”
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 – 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.

(to be continued) How much I changed (Part 6) #Starved into submission #Food Insecurity #Occupied Tribes

ONE SMALL SACRIFICE mentioned in national magazine!

My memoir One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is mentioned on page 40 of this national magazine! (Happy Dance!)
The goal is more people will learn this history and understand how so many children were affected and removed from their tribal nations.

Here is the link:  http://www.pagegangster.com/p/bdWT9/





see my book on page 40

 

Press Release: Trace DeMeyer at Pequot Museum

Award-winning Native American journalist Trace A. DeMeyer will read from her book "One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects" at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum on Saturday, March 5, at 1 p.m.


The books combines a fascinating personal memoir with a ground-breaking expose on the systemic removal of American Indian children from their mothers, families and tribes for adoption into non-Indian families. This practice went on for generations and the adoption industry continues this practice today.

Through a sympathetic judge in her hometown of Superior, DeMeyer opened her court-sealed adoption file at age 22. That was in Wisconsin, one of 43 states that require adoption records be permanently sealed. Thought to be a comfort to potentially adoptive parents, sealed records prevent adult adoptees from owning or ever seeing a copy of their own legal birth certificate and adoption files.

She shares her heartbreak and hope in a journey that takes her around the country, finally meeting her birthfather in 1996 and learning about her Shawnee-Cherokee ancestry.

DeMeyer has crafted a book that will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion dollar adoption industry.

As an adoptee right advocate, DeMeyer is in contact with adoptees around the world through her blog: www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com.

DeMeyer is the former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing.

Known for her exceptional print interviews with infuential Native American such as Leonard Peltier and Floyd Red Crow Westerman, DeMeyer started extensive research on adoptees in 2004. Her discoveries led to this fact-filled 227-page book that weaves eye-opening congressional testimony and evidence with her own jaw-dropping story of search and reunion.

"One Small Sacrifice" was chosen as Native America Calling's Book of the Month in March 2010. Her interview with Harlan McKosato is archived at http://www.nativeamericacalling.com/nac_past2010.shtml#march (March 26, 2010).

Go to: http://www.pequotmuseum.org/ for more information.

My recent book tour (October 2010)

I had a blast!

By Trace L. Hentz (formerly DeMeyer) 

 Sometimes it takes me awhile to process what just happened. In other words, I had to recover from my recent mini-book tour/road trip to Wisconsin.

    
 Driving is my therapy. I think best while driving. This time I used the 30+ hours to pray and ask “what should I read?”  Great Spirit answered loud and clear. Four times I read from One Small Sacrifice and each time was different!

  
The first time I visited the Menominee tribe in 2001, it was to attend the Wiping the Tears ceremony, led by the most sacred holy men Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Elder Chris Leith. Here I was, nine years later, back there with my own story. That ceremony for adoptees was the first one ever and the miracle I attended was not lost on me. My writing about Lost Birds feels like ceremony.

  
On Sept. 27, I met my friend Jackie in the Milwaukee suburb of Brown Deer and she shared recent updates about Ben-Ani, who is an adoptee currently incarcerated. I’ve known Jackie a few years and we talked about “abduction trauma,” while others may refer to this as “being adopted by non-Indians.”  Ben is Anishinabe-Menominee and he’s agreed to tell his story in my second book, Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects..

  
Monday night Jackie and I drove to the Menominee rez and stayed at their casino (their new guestrooms are even fancier than casino hotel rooms out East).  Tuesday for breakfast, we met up with Colleen, a Lost Bird from the Menominee tribe, who went full circle – from a stranger adoption in Pennsylvania to a reunion with her tribal family and is back home living on her rez in Wisconsin. Colleen is my relative now and always will be. It was Colleen who graciously arranged for me to read at the tribe’s high school and then at their tribal college.

  
Tuesday: One of the saddest moments for me was when I asked the high school students how many of their parents had attended boarding school and practically all their hands shot up. Their parents had been sent as far away as Texas and California. Stranger (not traditional kinship) adoptions and traumatic boarding school experiences permeate every American Indian experience, one way or the other. I think of this as “generational trauma.”

  
Next stop: the audience at the Menominee Tribal College was perhaps keenest and most sensitive to the Lost Bird/adoptee experience. Colleen was sitting up front with me and told of her own experience to the surprised group. The hour-long talk was taped. I answered all their questions and they asked if my talk could be used later in their classrooms. Of course I said YES! (News from Indian Country will later post this video on their internet TV channel. I’ll post a link on my blog when it airs.)

  
Late Tuesday afternoon I drove north. I was going home. I’d see cousins, old friends and even friend’s parents who remembered me but lost contact when I moved away after college. This was going to be the real test, sharing my personal life. Writing at 4 a.m., I would often think about my friends and relatives and what I never told them about my childhood being raised by an alcoholic who molested me. If they read the memoir, they’ll know every single gory embarrassing detail. Even writing it, I felt nauseous.

  
My grade school classmate Julie helped me to process this by letting me talk. I stayed with her and her husband Mike in Billings Park. By the time I read at the Superior Public Library, I was truly calm. (Thanks Julie!) Former mayor of Duluth and Superior, my awesome SSHS classmate Herb Bergson, was there to introduce me. Herb promoted my Twin Ports readings with emails and an update on Howie’s blog: http://www.howiehanson.com/?p=49616.

  
Wednesday morning, I was interviewed by the local National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate at the University of Wisconsin in Superior: that interview was broadcast on National Native News later! Even my friends John and Sara heard me in Tuba City, Arizona. This was fantastic!

  
On Wednesday night at the Public Library, I read a few chapters about my younger days in Superior as a rock musician and even had 'em laughing. I also showed them the shawl my adoptee friend Kim Peterson gifted me for high school graduation. Across the street from the library was the apartment building where Kim was murdered. I’ll never forget Kim, I told them, and her photo is where I can see her every single day. Kim is who I credit for surviving my troubled teens, and why I dedicated my book to her.

  
That hour went by so fast at the library, I barely remember details. There were a few tears. I did survive emotionally, I told them. What irony I was reading on the birthdays of my favorite uncle, Chet McIntyre, and my own birthmother, Helen Thrall. Neither of them lived long enough to see this homecoming or know I wrote about them in my memoir.

  
 On Friday, the reading at Jitters in Duluth felt so good, it didn’t seem like a book reading. I caught up with new friends from Facebook and met classmates from high school. Gary, the awesome Jitters coffeehouse owner, made Julie and me his famous Mocha Malt. I have to admit, if every reading went this smooth, I’d never stay home.

  
 That week I had dinner with my first cousins Scott and Mary Margaret and had lunch with a family friend, Faye from Allouez. They gave me the greatest gift of all – their memories. They shared stories that made me so full and happy, I felt a profound peace. I do hope they realize this “troubled kid” can see her parents as people now. That gift, peace of mind, I wish I could give to every adoptee I know.

  
 I didn’t catch the bug going around during my week in Wisconsin but my sore throat was a sign it was time to head home to western Massachusetts.

  
To wrap up my talk, I shared this story with the high school students on the Menominee rez:  “The old story goes there was a farmer who found a wounded eagle and placed him in a chicken coop to recover. The eagle started to act like a chicken, he bobbed his head like a chicken, he ate like a chicken, and otherwise thought he was a chicken. Until one day an Indian came along and asked what the eagle was doing with the chickens. The farmer told him the story, and the Indian asked if he could remove the eagle. The Farmer gave his permission to do so. So the Indian took the eagle to the mountain and said, “You have to know who you are and what you stand for...” The eagle started to flex his wings. His keen eyesight started to return, and the strength in him started to come back. The eagle flew and soared and everything came back to him, who he was and that he wasn’t a chicken. He gained everything back he lost because of where he was placed.”

  
I told the students Lost Birds are that eagle and every adoptee raised away from their tribe and traditions needs to return home.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the readings of One Small Sacrifice a success: Colleen, Dale K and the Menominee Tribal Nation, Janet and Maggie at the Superior Public Library, Gary at Jitters, Mike Savage and Kalisha at UWS, the honorable Herb Bergson, Faye and her Allouez Book Club, my friends Julie, Mike, Jackie, and JRey, my cousins who I love so much, and my heartfelt thanks to everyone who showed up!

One Small Sacrifice book review by John C. Hopkins (2010)

By John Christian Hopkins
Tuba City, Arizona (NFIC) May 2010

     The Beatles sang of a long and winding road, but they never set foot on the long, treacherous path of a Native American adoptee that is strewn with potholes, deadends and disappointment.
     Award-winning Native journalist Trace A. DeMeyer (Hentz) shares the heartfelt journey of loss, loneliness and finding love in her powerful, new memoir “One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects,” an exposé on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families.
     One reader told DeMeyer it was like being “punched in the gut.”
     Pulling no punches, DeMeyer, who now lives in Greenfield, Mass., with her husband, Herb, rips away the illusion that adoption ends happily ever after as soon as the documents are signed and finalized.
     She delves into the dark world of doubts – “Why didn’t my mom want me?” – and the fear that asking too many questions would cause her adoptive parents to throw her away all over again.
     She suffered years of abuse – emotionally, sexually and physically – as pain became her constant companion and a pretend happy smile her childhood defense against the torrent of doubts in her life.
     DeMeyer has spent years meeting and talking with other “Split Feathers,” Native American children taken from their homes and placed in non-Indian families; she discovered that her experiences weren’t new or unique, that many other adoptees, just like her, had unanswered questions, mountains of sadness and, often, shattered lives.
     Conquering that tumultuous beginning felt like the easy part as DeMeyer attempted to find her birth family. Her first obstacle was that her adoption was “closed,” meaning sealed and she had no legal right to view her own file!
     A sympathetic judge in her Wisconsin hometown allowed DeMeyer to look at her file when she was 22; she found tantalizing clues about her birth family, and even more questions to haunt her as sought to come full circle and discover who she really was.
     “I read this powerful book cover to cover, Trace tells her story with such compassion and truthfulness;” Alutiiq-Cherokee adoptee and author Anecia O’Carroll wrote. “Her memories, feelings and facts are written with such unflinching truth, in my mind and heart she is a warrior and a hero.”
     Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native Americans, DeMeyer started research on adoptees in 2004, which led to this fact-filled, 227-page biography that includes congressional testimony, evidence of Indian Adoption Projects and how the Indian Child Welfare Act came to exist.
     Available as a download (e-book, $3.00) or in book form ($15.95) at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/one-small-sacrifice/6242298, her jaw-dropping narrative of living as an adoptee, her search, meeting birth relatives, will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion dollar adoption industry.
     Her journey takes her to Illinois to meet her birthfather in 1996 where she learns about her Cherokee-Shawnee ancestry.
     DeMeyer is former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing. She freelances for News From Indian Country, a national independent native newspaper.
     DeMeyer’s chapter on Sac and Fox Olympian Jim Thorpe won critical praise in the 2001 book Olympics at the Millennium (published by Rutgers Press). Her poetry was published in the spring 2009 edition of Yellow Medicine Review; and she has an essay in the upcoming Foothills Press book, “I Was Indian Before It Was Cool,” edited by Susan Deer Cloud.
     In the 1870s Ponca Chief Standing Bear had to take his case to court to prove he was a human being; but DeMeyer’s journey took her so much further as she tried to prove to herself that she was somebody, too.

Link: http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9191&Itemid=1

Trace at the Jackson Hole Wyoming airport in 1983 with actor twins