(Almost) Dead Indian: Writing in 2008

By Trace L Hentz, blog editor

 

In 2008, this is what I wrote as an introduction to the memoir I was working on... (a draft)

… a memoir of brainwashing and life as a dead Indian…

 

I did have to pretend to be someone – and live a lie - because I’m adopted. Ask any adoptee who has Native American ancestry.  If you are not told any truth, you’re just another dead Indian, at least on paper or on tribal rolls.  Our papers are usually fake and we live with amended original birth certificates (OBC).  Our adoptive parents are listed as our biological parents, which is another lie we live with....        

            America is like that.  Adoptees seem invisible yet the number of adoptees in the United States is estimated to be between six and ten million.  They’d prefer every one of us to live as an American citizen as if none other were as good or as important.  America forgets it’s very new by all standards and just acts like its old.  America has its own amnesia.

I intended to write about adoption history and what I experienced opening my adoption many years ago.  America’s adoption files of my era (the 1950s) are still sealed by laws in most states, still shrouded in secrecy. I expected little help or new discoveries.  Never did I expect to find so many adoptees in the same boat from 2005 onward.  I didn’t know there were millions of us, some blazing new trails on the internet global highway. I found friends.

            In the last 20+ years, adoption’s gone global, widely publicized and still touted as noble, saving and particularly saintly of those men and women who adopt, who give so generously to orphans.  That’s about all we hear: how great it is to adopt.

            I asked myself, where is the missing piece …where is the voice of the adopted… what happens to the adoptee?  I decided to write about my experience (as an adoption survivor and journalist) and include other American Indians who experienced being adopted.  I found much more going on with the business of adoption, so I include it.  Certainly this will be the most controversial book on adoption since I was often in a state of shock and utter disbelief during my years of research on the adoption industry.

            Indian child removals by adoption set out to accomplish the break-up of Indian families and culture.  Once adopted, you’re erased, an outsider, a stranger to your own nation, lands and people.  I prefer to think of my younger self as brainwashed.  There was fear and emotional illness, which I explain. What is known about the Indian Adoption Projects (more than one) and the aftermath, few books actually acknowledge it happened here.

            There is persistent rampant poverty in Indian Country even now.  I found Indian people who were white-washed through strenuous puritanical forces using assimilation via adoption and residential boarding schools. 

            Adoptees with Indian blood find out soon enough their reservations are closed to strangers.  Without proof, you’re suspect.  You can’t always get the proof since laws prevent it.  Just one Minnesota tribe, White Earth, decided to call out to its lost children; this made news in the fall in 2007.  Going back takes a special kind of courage.

            One Native American adoptee I know was told – be happy, be white. Ask yourself, how would you react? Is Indian Country such a bad place to be from? How did this happen to us?

            Society determined long ago what was best for children.  Once adopted, society can let us go, write us off.

            Here in America, thousands of Indian children were taken from parents and given to non-Indian people.

            Survivors are here to tell you this was a genocidal act against our humanity. Some of us were abducted, abused, brainwashed and all of us erased.

            Adoption secrets are protected by laws.  Laws prevented me from ever knowing the truth of my true identity.  I still found a way. 

 

This edition is on amazon and in some bookstores

p.s. Wayne Carp, an adoption advocate and author who went “undercover” to compile his book on adoption industry history kept running into secrecy problems. Unlike Carp, I am the story.

How much I changed (Part 7) Scared Silent, Four Traumas, PTSD

Family Photo

By Trace L Hentz (DeMeyer)

(Part 7)

I have met quite a few adoptees who can’t talk about being adopted. Why? They can’t put feelings into words. They didn’t talk about it as a kid and they never learned how to talk about it as an adult.

They might be as confused as I was when I was a child hearing that I was adopted - this was before first grade. What did “adopted” mean? Somehow I got it -  these were not my parents, someone else was. But who? And why?

I got used to hearing we “adopted” Trace.

They'd explained I had a different mother and father. I don’t think I took the news well at all. I sat with it a long time. All I could imagine was “bad.” Nothing  good. Something bad happened or else I wouldn’t be there. Later I was very pissy and unhappy about it. I don’t remember exactly how I acted but I do remember my a-mom Edie would tell me I didn’t like her. I never recall saying to her “I want to go home and leave here” but I would have acted out my hurt and confusion, because I had no words for what I was feeling!  She took it that I didn’t like her. (Which was the groundwork for guilt which I did feel...)

Now that we have the internet and many new ways to find useful information, I read adoptees are more traumatized than a prisoner of war. That’s right. It’s called PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. A prisoner of war may escape or be released, but an adoptee may suffer their entire life.

(The following is taken from my memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE)

I believe there are four distinct traumas in being an adoptee. They are: 1) in utero, when you feel what is happening to you or sense what is coming; 2) when you are delivered, abandoned, and handed to strangers; 3) later when you are told you are adopted and realize fully what it means; and 4) when you realize you are different, from a different culture or country, and you can’t contact your people, or know them, or have the information you need to find them.

It took me years to get this. (The adrenals do go into over-drive, the fight-or-flight syndrome.)

Some adoptees are scared silent - they are not able to communicate any emotions they feel. This is the adoption fog.  

Then some adoptees are afraid to meet their birthparents -  afraid to know why they were given up as babies.

Then we fear we might disappoint them! (Or in my case, I had no tools when I was told by my b-mother to never contact her again. How was I supposed to handle that?)

There are more traumas, too, that happen as you age – like when I’d fill out forms at the doctor’s office. I had no medical history. I had no idea if I was sitting next to someone who could be my biological brother, sister, mother or father. In my 20s it was terrifying to think I could marry my own relative! I could carry a gene or trait that I might pass down to my children – and I wouldn’t know until it’s too late. If my birth-parents were alcoholics (they were), then I really shouldn’t drink. I could be predisposed to diabetes or heart disease or cancer or depression and not even know. My list went on and on.

In 2006, I found out my birthmother had diabetes, another shock. I never knew anything about my mother’s side until the 1990s, then I met my dad when I was 38 in 1994.

Today I realize a powerful link exists between what I’m feeling and what happens in my body. There may be some adoptees who do not wish to face all this and go on as they are, holding on to these sad feelings and self-pity, rather than do the mental work to heal and go into reunions. Recognizing a pattern of belief is tough, partly because you gain sympathy by stealing (or sucking) energy from others when you act sick. Some call this co-dependent behavior. That is no way to live. You need to be your own person, self-energizing, and emotionally stable.

Some adoptees believe that when we meet first mother or father, all pain and agony will disappear. That sadly is just hope. That is not the way it works. A reunion is just one step on the journey and it helps, but there are many many more steps just as difficult.  It’s truly a test to get better.

Regardless of your ancestry, blood or skin color, adoptees can heal this.  But the only one who can fix you is YOU.

(to be continued)