Roadblocks

A few years ago, I received an email request to help the daughter of an adoptee. She was writing a dissertation on forced assimilation practices from the boarding school movement to the current foster care system for Indigenous communities in the U.S. "And, for that, I am also writing segments about my own life," she told me.

 I told her that her story is about ROADBLOCKS.

I wrote to her:

I cannot stop thinking about your work. I am trying to research missing children, especially from Carlisle. Some died, but how? Some were placed with farm families off school grounds. Then disappear into thin air.

What the governments did in establishing these residential schools was to create hostages - so their parents wouldn't make war.

Abusing a child is a criminal act but because it was a church school, they got a free pass? No charges?

Like slavery, they made examples and tortured and killed kids to scare the rest of the students... to make them literally insane and fear for their lives.

With adoption it was more permanent - families would be torn apart forever. Sealed files prevent reunion. Adoptees lose everything.

YOUR story is about your truth, how you are running into every roadblock to find your own tribal identity after his adoption. Most of the men adoptees tell me they never had a good relationship with a woman. They could never trust anyone.

This interior trauma follows an adoptee their entire life.  Maybe it happened to your dad, too.  Lots of medical terms exist: severe narcissistic trauma, PTSD, etc.

YOUR story is the roadblock. The printed one-sided oppressor history is bad which is also the goal of oppression.

If you tell your story of the roadblock, people will understand how the gov't wanted this to play out. Not only your dad but you are on the outside as well.

 

Tribal sovereignty - gone. Measuring blood - eventually there won't be any Indian left with enough blood. All the plan.

Family lore is not enough anymore... you have to be able to prove your direct connection to a tribe and have relatives who know you and accept you.

I opened my adoption despite all the roadblocks and was 38 when I finally met my birthfather.  Am I enrolled? No. Why? I do not have a copy of my original birth certificate from Minnesota. I have met relatives on both sides.

 

Despite every roadblock, many many adoptees are finding their way home.  I have two close friends who live on their rez and have met all their relatives. Long process but they did it.

 

Lost Daughters: Is Knowing Our Parentage Our Right?

My grandparents grave...I took this photo at my father's funeral

Please read this post at Lost Daughters. Lost Daughters: Is Knowing Our Parentage Our Right?

"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility." -Robin Morgan

By Trace Hentz

For adoptees, I think it is OUR right to know both sides of our ancestry and family and clan system.  If I could redo adoption, when a child is adopted, the adoptee keeps their name and knows every detail, including their medical history and ancestry. When you adopt a child, you are borrowing them. They are someone else's child. You don't own them. But you agree to parent them to adulthood.

AND it must be our legal right to know our parentage! Closed adoption creates a fantasy family, and fantasy creates trauma which is not healthy for anyone.

For me the only way to find my father Earl Bland was to contact my mother Helen Thrall - who didn't want to meet me. (I was a secret and she had not told others.)  After the shock and rejection wore off, two years later, I sent her a threatening letter.  Helen wrote me back, gave me his name and I jumped on a plane and met my dad in Illinois. 

Then I met relatives and learned who I am.

Absolutely NO ONE should have to live a mystery, live a lie and not know their identity.

Why would a mother not tell us a father's name? Is it because they were ashamed in some way? Grow up, people. The scandal is in her head and burying the truth won't help. It's a "belief" problem, not an adoptee issue. Adoptees grow into adults and need the truth to live our lives.

Rejection by a mother is one thing but her withholding who your father is should be a crime. She should not have that power over us. She doesn't have that right!

I did DNA with Earl since we were not sure Helen was telling the truth. Yup, 99.9 percent, Earl is my dad.

Adoptees live much better knowing the truth.