PLAIN INDIAN LEDGER ART: historical accounts from our people, should be kept by our people

 Imprisoned for what exactly, you might ask... Being Indian was enough of a reason... TLH

Contested Native Artworks Resurface at Art Fair, Drawing Scrutiny

The drawings, taken from ledger books made by Native people imprisoned in the 19th century, were sold at auction in 2022 against tribal members’ wishes.

  Matt Stromberg 

“Cheyennes Chasing Antelope” at the Donald Ellis Gallery booth at Expo Chicago 2024, from A complete Fort Marion drawing book (1876) illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nockkoist, Tsis tsis’tas) and Ohet-Toint (Ohettoint / High Forehead) (Bonhams lot 20) (all images used with permission)

Earlier this year, David Nolan Gallery in New York mounted the exhibition Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900, gathering over 100 works on paper by Native artists from the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota tribes. Co-organized with Donald Ellis Gallery, the show prominently featured works by Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) of the Cheyenne Nation and Ohettoint of the Kiowa Tribe, two of 72 Indigenous warriors who were imprisoned without trial at Fort Marion in Florida between 1875 and 1878 after the Red River War. The United States military campaign “aimed at the forced displacement and migration of Southern Plains tribes onto reservations,” according to a press release.  Art critics called the show “plaintive, pathos-filled” and “heartbreaking,” and Hyperallergic’s John Yau remarked that “the drawings of Nokkoist and Ohettoit … belong in an art museum.”

What was not mentioned, by either the galleries or critics, is that the exhibition featured several drawings from ledger books that were auctioned off by Bonhams in Los Angeles in 2022.  Representatives for the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes attempted unsuccessfully to halt the sale, based on the arguments that the ledger books represented “significant cultural patrimony” and were created by incarcerated artists, calling into question the “chain of custody of the objects,” as Chairman of the Kiowa Tribe Lawrence SpottedBird wrote in a letter to Bonhams.

The auction house did not disclose the identities of the buyer or buyers of the four books, which sold for a total of $908,700 including premiums.  However, drawings by Nokkoist and Ohettoint were taken from three of the books — which had been unbound, and the artworks individually framed — and included in the Fort Marion and Beyond exhibition.

This past weekend, they were also featured in the Expo Chicago booth of dealer Donald Ellis, who confirmed to Hyperallergic that he was the buyer of those three books at Bonhams in 2022. 

Donald Ellis Gallery booth at Expo Chicago this weekend

Members of the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, as well as other Native individuals with knowledge of ledger drawings, reacted with alarm and frustration when they learned of the recent displays.  

“When I read your email, my heart dropped,” Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw), the CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs, told Hyperallergic. “It provides another level of evidence of how people are taking control of our cultural heritage, working to create their own narrative that is separate from the Native peoples who should be the true holders of this type of cultural heritage.”

“It just feels wrong that they’re here,” Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean), co-founder and director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a Chicago-based Native arts nonprofit that also had a booth at Expo.

Top: “showing three distinctly attired warriors on hoseback”; bottom: “depicting a procession of warriors wearing fur turbans and other distinctive headdresses, a flag bearer at the head of the group,” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book (1876), illustrated by Ohet-Toint / Ohettoint (Bonhams lot 23)

Yepa-Pappan and her colleagues confronted Ellis at his booth, asking him where the ledger drawings came from and whether any Native groups or descendants of the artists were benefitting from the sales of the works the gallery was offering at the fair, which she says were priced between $8,000 and $80,000.  She described his reaction as “defensive” and “rude.”

On Saturday, April 13, Casey Brown (Ho-Chunk), an artist and member of the Center for Native Futures, wrote an email to Expo Chicago staff, raising concerns about the ethics of selling ledger drawings at the fair. 

“I was surprised to see ledger art outside of a tribal cultural center, museum or archive and also available for purchase,” his letter read. “This art was made under duress while these men were unjustly imprisoned; ownership of any of these works is problematic.”

When members of the Center approached Ellis and his assistant, they were “unable to explain where the collection came from and unwilling to let them copy down the names of who created these pieces for further study,” Brown said. “When asked if he had contacted any family of the unjustly imprisoned men, Ellis said he has ‘strong relations’ with ‘plains tribes’ but openly said he’s the only person profiting from these pieces.”

Within half an hour of sending the email, Brown was contacted by Tony Karman, the president and director of Expo Chicago, who spoke with members of the Center about their concerns.

“We are grateful to the Center for Native Futures for drawing our attention to the Ledger Books and to Donald Ellis Gallery for participating in a conversation with the Center around the complex issues involved,” a spokesperson for the fair told Hyperallergic. “Expo Chicago has committed to engaging with the appropriate organizations on the development of guidelines on the display of these types of materials, affirming our commitment to the proper handling of cultural property.”

“Sun Dance” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book (1876), illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nock-ko-ist, Tsis tsis’tas (Bonhams lot 22)

Max Bear, the tribal historic preservation officer of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, echoed the Center’s dismay. 

“When the books were sold, they became art pieces in Pratt’s narrative, not ours,” he told Hyperallergic, referring to Richard Henry Pratt, the Army officer who oversaw the prison at Fort Marion. Pratt commissioned and purchased many of the ledger books — which included depictions of battle, the warriors’ journey as detainees from the Plains to Florida, and prison life — directly from the incarcerated artists, considering them examples that his attempts to assimilate and “civilize” Native Americans were successful. 

Bear bristled at the term “ledger art,” adding: “These are historical accounts from our people, and should be kept by our people.”

Although there has been a growing movement over the past several years towards repatriation of objects, art, and artifacts to Native Peoples, the ledger books reside in a legal gray area, said Ross Frank, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). 

“In the letter of law, as it stands now, it’s a hard row to ask all ledger material to go back to the tribes. It is a kind of cultural patrimony, but in these cases, there was some kind of sale, which was legal at the time,” Frank told Hyperallergic. But the works’ legal status aside, Frank noted, “there may be ethical concerns about coercion” because the artists were imprisoned.

Frank explained that there are seemingly two systems that apply to US cultural institutions on the one hand, and private dealers on the other.  Institutions should adhere to best practices, involving consulting with tribes regarding the exhibition and responsible stewardship of objects related to their culture. 

“Recounting a meeting between two warriors on horseback carrying eagle feather fan tails, likely representing Tsis tsis’tas (Cheyenne) and Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnee) leaders,” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book, illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nock-ko-ist, Tsis tsis’tas) (Bonhams lot 22) 

The tribal historic preservation officers of the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes told Hyperallergic that they had not been contacted by either gallery prior to the exhibition. 

According to Ellis, he was approached by “an intermediary on behalf of the Kiowa” after the auction and offered them the ledger book with drawings by Ohettoint at his cost (it was sold for $138,975 with premium), but received no response.  He added that his gallery is “supporting financially and with loans” an upcoming exhibition on Fort Marion which “dozens of direct descendants of the Cheyenne prisoners” are involved with. 

“They are aware of my activities and involvement in the exhibition and we are not aware of any pushback,” Ellis said.

But as Frank of UCSD explained, “with private collectors, it’s a whole different world. We’re at the mercy of a global capitalist system…which values the pages separately far more than the book staying together,” he said about the decision to unbind the books and display the drawings separately. (Frank is the founder of the Plains Indian Ledger Art (PILA) project, which digitizes complete ledger books, making them accessible online.)

Ellis defended the choice to detach the drawings, arguing that “one of the unique aspects of the Fort Marion sketchbooks is that there is no narrative arch between individual sheets, linear or otherwise, unlike most books that predate them.” 

Karen Kramer, the curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum, offered a counter perspective, telling Hyperallergic that “to separate these drawings is to dismantle cultural heritage.” 

“Breaking apart ledger books that have Plains Indian drawings short-changes the possibility of understanding each drawing as a part of a whole story,” Kramer said.  “In the context of Fort Marion, these prisoner-warrior artists conveyed personal experiences and remembrances of tribal rituals and histories within the broader story of colonization and ledger art production under imprisonment and its radical aesthetic evolution between 1875–78.”

“Depicting a group of men around a campfire on a wooded beach, likely Fort Marion prisoners on an excursion to Anastasia Island,” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book, illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nock-ko-ist, Tsis tsis’tas) (Bonhams lot 22)

It is also worth noting that at least two drawings that were originally two-page spreads in the ledger books were framed and exhibited as single sheets, splitting the original image in half, at Ellis’s Expo Chicago booth.

In his communications with Hyperallergic, however, Ellis made clear that he considers himself more as a caretaker than a dismantler of Native cultural heritage. 

“With the possible exception of Ross Frank and PILA, my gallery was most instrumental in the preservation of complete ledger books over a 20-25 year period before the advent of digitization,” he said. “The decision to exhibit the drawings as individual works (our first experience in doing so) was a long and difficult process. Ultimately we decided the end justified the means.” That end aim, according to Ellis, is “to bring them to widespread institutional and private attention.” He noted that PILA has complete files of the three books he purchased and that he plans to produce facsimile versions.

Institutions that receive federal funding are bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 law which facilitates the “protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” Private sales are not subject to NAGPRA, but they do fall under the recently passed Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony (STOP) Act, which helps prevent international trafficking of objects of significant cultural patrimony, although that legislation would likely not apply in this case.

Despite the technical legality of the books’ ownership, O’Loughlin sees the original terms of the sales by the incarcerated Native artists to Pratt as reason to reconsider grounds for repatriation. 

“If the original transfer does not hold up, if it was considered a kind of theft, then every transaction after that would be colored by that,” O’Loughlin said. She considers the books’ current owners complicit “because they know all the history, they know how the Tribes fought the purchase.”

Top: drawing “titled ‘Kiowas’ in pencil, the name ‘Saul’ written in ink above one of the figures;” bottom: drawing with “‘Kiowa and Wife’ in pencil, ‘Saul’ in ink above the horseman,” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book (1876) illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nockkoist, Tsis tsis’tas) and Ohet-Toint (Ohettoint / High Forehead) (Bonhams lot 20)

Top: “Cheyenne Feast”; bottom: drawing inscribed “Medicine Dance (Cheyenne),” from A complete Fort Marion drawing book (1876) illustrated by Bear’s Heart (Nockkoist, Tsis tsis’tas) and Ohet-Toint (Ohettoint / High Forehead) (Bonhams lot 20)

#60sScoop | Understand The Suffering | #Reunion

👆Brothers meet half century after being separated by 60s Scoop

 

 

ARE YOU IN REUNION? WANT TO SHARE YOUR STORY?

EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me

#60sScoop - How did he end up in Connecticut?

CT man taken from First Nation family as child finds purpose in sharing story: ‘I’m not the only one’

WILTON,  CONNECTICUT — Ripped from his sister’s arms and taken to a new country over a half-century ago, Canada native Taber Gregory said he’s still reconciling with how and why he wound up in Wilton.

About 20 years ago, the longtime Wiltonian and owner of Gregory’s Sawmill on Pimpewaug Road said he learned he was one of thousands of survivors of what’s known as the Sixties Scoop.

The Sixties Scoop refers to a decades-long period in Canadian history, from about 1951 and until as late as the 1990s, marked by the mass removal of Aboriginal children from their homes — in most cases without the consent of their families — into the child welfare system.

Many of the children were placed in non-Indigenous households in Canada, while others — including Taber Gregory, who was born Henry Desjarlais in the Canadian province of Alberta in 1968 — were relocated and adopted out to families outside the country. 

Gregory, now 55, said he always knew he was adopted but didn’t know about the early years of his life until connecting with biological family members in his early- to mid-30s.

“I started getting some random calls saying somebody wanted to talk to me, and the person claimed he was my father,” Gregory said. “I was a little confused and didn’t accept the phone call because I didn’t know what to think about it.”

The calls kept coming, and Gregory said he kept refusing. 

Then one day, he finally accepted and learned that the person calling was, in fact, his biological father, Louis Desjarlais. Gregory said his biological father has since died, but he has stayed in touch with one of his biological siblings in Canada.

Through telephone conversations, Gregory said he learned he was the youngest of seven children and had been taken from his family’s home in Canada when he was about one-and-a-half years old. He said his adopted parents had been unaware that he had been forcibly removed from his biological family. 

“My sister walked me through everything, and it kind of snowballed from there,” he said.

Gregory showed Hearst Connecticut Media an August 2001 letter from the Cold Lake First Nations, verifying his Cold Lake First Nation Registry List membership and identifying his biological parents, as well as their own membership. The letter said that since his biological parents were “of 100% North American Indian Blood Quantum,” Gregory “has at least a 100% North American Indian Blood Quantum” himself.

One of Gregory’s four biological sisters, Alicia Minoose, claimed to have been holding him when social service workers came into the house, took him out of her arms, put him in a vehicle and left.

“She told me she ran out the door, chasing after me, and that was the last time she ever saw me,” Gregory said. “She was the last one to hold me.”

According to Tony Merchant — a Canadian attorney whose law firm was involved in a Sixties Scoop survivors class-action lawsuit several years ago that Gregory benefited from — government-funded social services agencies involved in the removal of Indigenous children from their homes were not closely supervised and “intensified their search for likely candidates/victims for adoption” over time. 

“Grabbing children became a need-for-supply phenomenon, and this was particularly true for boys,” he said, noting that they were “significantly more popular for adoption than girls.”

According to Gregory’s sister, two of their siblings were taken as well. She said they were placed with foster parents and eventually brought home — but the family couldn’t find Gregory, whom she still refers to by his birth name of Henry.

“Somehow, mom found David and Margaret ... but they couldn’t find you,” she said over the phone during Gregory’s interview. “They didn’t know what happened to you. We were searching and searching, but there was no information.”

Gregory said he was told that his biological mother, Bella Desjarlais, “cried and cried” after he was taken and he believes stress and heartbreak from what happened may have contributed to her death — which he said occurred before he reconnected with his biological family.

Later learning what he and his family in Canada went through, Gregory said he “went into survival mode.”

“I went through some depression, but I was able to get help and kind of turn that around and stay motivated and positive,” he said. “I did have to take a step back and kind of digest everything.”

Adoption and life in Wilton

Wilton has been the only home he knows — or at least remembers. 

Gregory said he has no recollection of his time in the Canadian foster care system, traveling to the U.S. or when his name was changed from Henry to Taber — but he knows he ended up at an adoption agency in Pennsylvania. 

From there, Gregory said he was adopted by Steve and Judy Meier when he was around 3 years old, moved to Wilton and had two brothers — both of whom were also adopted, but from different places. One was born in Vietnam, and the other was born in Bridgeport, he said.

Gregory said his adoptive parents didn’t know he had been forcibly taken from his home.

“The Welcome House in Pennsylvania was like the first stop, and they just adopted me from there,” he said. “They had no idea how I got there, so I can’t blame them for anything like that. They had no idea what happened.”

According to the website of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation — the parent organization of Welcome House — the adoption program “matched more than 7,000 orphans and children from around the globe with adoptive families in the United States,” and was phased out in June 2014 “because of changes in international adoption regulations.”

Samantha Freis, a curator with the foundation, said the organization does not know what the adoption process was like during that period.

After his adoptive parents divorced, Gregory said his mother Judy Meier ended up working at Gregory’s Sawmill and meeting John Gregory. 

“They made a connection, and we ended up here with Mr. Gregory and kind of became a family,” he said. “We grew up on the Gregory farm (where) we had draft horses, oxen, pigs and chickens.”

After their adoptive mother died in 1985, Taber Gregory said he and his brothers stayed with John Gregory, whom he considered a father figure and legally changed his last name from Meier to Gregory at his request.

When John Gregory retired in the mid- to late-1990s and moved to Ohio, where he later died in 2006, Taber Gregory said he took over the sawmill business — which has been in the Gregory family since the 1850s — and has been keeping the family legacy alive ever since.

“I became a Gregory and have been continuing the family business,” he said.

Gregory said he never knew, nor suspected, that his separation from his biological family and subsequent adoption were forced — but he’s grateful to have learned the truth about his past, “survived the ordeal” and reconnect with his family in Canada, who he said he has not yet visited in person but hopes to see in the near future.

In the meantime, he said his sister keeps him informed about what’s going on with family members in Canada — many of whom Gregory said still reside on a First Nations reservation and speak Chipewyan. 

Class-action settlement 

Several years ago, the Canadian government reached an $800 million class-action agreement with Sixties Scoop survivors — $750 million of which was set aside for individual compensation — the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported in 2017.

The settlement, through which all First Nations and Inuit children who “were removed from their homes — and lost their cultural identities as a result — between 1951 and 1991 (were) entitled to compensation,” was less than the $1.3 billion sought on behalf of about 16,000 Indigenous children in Canada’s Ontario province, according to the CBC article.

The settlement agreement followed an Ontario Superior Court judge’s February 2017 ruling that the Canadian government not only “breached its ‘duty of care’ to the children and ignored the damaging effect” of the child welfare program, but also “breached part of the agreement that required consultation with First Nations” about it, the CBC reported.

The judge approved the distribution of $25,000 to $50,000 in payouts to about 22,000 Sixties Scoop survivors the following year as part of the settlement agreement, through which the Canadian government also agreed to establish a foundation designed to “enable change and reconciliation.”

According to a class-action claims process website set up for the settlement, 21,208 of the 34,816 claims received by the December 2019 late claim deadline had been approved as of January 2024.

Gregory — who showed Hearst a questionnaire he filled out for Merchant Law Group LLP, one of the law firms involved in the class action — said his claim was among the ones approved.  He wouldn’t disclose the exact payout amount he received — saying only that it was over $10,000. 

“Everything I know is consistent with him being a (Sixties) Scoop survivor who received compensation,” Merchant said.

He said Gregory did not become a client “because obtaining compensation was something done directly with the claims service providers,” but said his firm did provide assistance to Gregory.

Gregory, who feels the Sixties Scoop settlement payout isn’t enough to compensate for the harm caused to those taken from their biological families, said he shares his story not for pity, but for purpose — to raise awareness about what he and thousands of other Indigenous children went through and help prevent something like it from ever happening again.

“I know I’m not the only one, and I don’t want anybody going through what I did,” he said.

SOURCE: https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/taber-gregory-wilton-sixties-scoop-canada-18672082.php

 

Eclipses have special ties to Indigenous peoples

 

During eclipses Navajo people must stay indoors, with closed windows and doors, and not look outside, limit consumption of food by fasting, not drink water, not sleep, not bathe, brush hair or groom themselves, no intimacy with families or partners, exception between mothers and children. Arts and crafts during solar eclipses are not allowed. Lightly cleaning or remote work at home is allowed. 

GREAT READ:  https://ictnews.org/news/eclipses-have-special-ties-to-indigenous-peoples

Healing the Children of Horse Nations | Season 3: Elders

Healing the Children of Horse Nations

A new multimedia package produced by The Imprint and Voices of Monterey Bay takes readers, viewers and listeners deep inside rural Oregon’s Indian Country, where elders are Indigenizing social work through equine therapy for young people who have experienced foster care and youth justice systems.

“Horses take us all the way back to our history before our land was taken away,” explains John Doug Spence, who leads equine therapy sessions across Oregon. “It’s a way of taking back our power.” 

The project, Healing the Children of Horse Nations, is a collaboration between The Imprint’s Indigenous Children and Families Reporter Nancy Marie Spears, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; podcast producers Julie and Mara Reynolds; and visual storyteller Josué Rivas, who is Mexica and Otomi.

This season, we’re hearing from elder survivors of systemic injustice and historical trauma. They’re showing newer generations what they’ve learned about how to address and prevent those kinds of harm. 

 

Our first episode for this season is titled Uncle John, and it was co-produced by Julie Reynolds, Mara J. Reynolds, and Nancy Marie Spears in partnership with The Imprint, as part of the multimedia project Healing the Children of Horse Nations.

LISTEN NOW: Episode 1 | Uncle John
READ: Healing the Children of Horse Nations at The Imprint
VIEW: The photographs of Josué Rivas

Our Indigenous Roots

 This is a long post so please click READ MORE

This map shows you which Indigenous lands you’re living on.

 Click here to access it.

BY Rob Brezsny (SUBSTACK)

Our Indigenous Roots

Even if our forebears arrived in what we now call Americas in the 1600s, and our predecessors have lived on the continent for the last 14 generations, we can all trace our ancestry back to some group of Indigenous people.

Maybe your people were Celts who lived in what’s now Austria during the ninth century BCE. Or perhaps your biological line was Jewish Egyptian three millennia ago, or Chinese as far back as the ancient Xia Dynasty, or Mycenaean in the Aegean area of what we now call Greece circa 3200 BCE.

One fact is indisputable: In a literal sense, every one of us has Indigenous roots. At some point, our ancestors fit the official definition of Indigenous: “a culturally distinct ethnic group that is native to a particular place.”

Let’s go further. Mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade tells us that whether or not we know our own Indigenous past, we can and should strive to be in close touch with our inner Indigenous person.

What does that mean? Meade says we can benefit from seeing the world through an Indigenous perspective, with a reverence for nature and receptivity to the teachings available to us from the non-human intelligences of animals and plants as well as the spiritual realm.

Here’s the sticky part. Even if we have not personally participated in damaging the Indigenous cultures of the land we now live on, our destinies are defined and shaped by the fact that those cultures were damaged. Everything we do is built on the results of the damage.

When most of our fellow Americans came of age, our education included little about the calamity committed against the native people. If the evidence for the desecration appeared in our history textbooks, it was dealt with cursorily. We grew up with a carefully cultivated amnesia about the tragic origins of the United States. The story of African American slavery was almost equally suppressed.

Our hypothesis is that this amnesia, this failure to fully acknowledge the roots of our civilization, dampens our ability to be, as Michael Meade recommends, in close touch with our own inner Indigenous person.

We may not feel guilt, remorse, and shame on a conscious level. But like all suppressed emotions, they churn and burn in our deep psyches, alienating us from the Indigenous perspective we all need.

And yes, we need that perspective if we hope to reverse the juggernaut of humanity’s ecocidal ways—and preserve our earthly paradise for the generations to come after us.

On a personal level, we need a full, generous communion with our inner Indigenous person because it has tremendous power to keep us grounded. It potentially provides us with essential support in our lifelong labor to ensure our mind is anchored in earthy practicality.

3-Part Series: NEW rules under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

 INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY : FANTASTIC SERIES

LINK

Read ICT's entire NAGPRA series:
—NAGPRA Part 1: A sea change in federal regulations
—NAGPRA Part 2: ‘A state of Gozhoo’
—NAGPRA Part 3: A model for future Indigenous exhibits

Blood Quantum use is controversial

 

How a US colonial notion of ‘blood quantum’ for tribal membership is threatening Indigenous nations

"Blood quantum" is a U.S. colonial notion to identify whether someone is Indigenous and to which tribal band they belong. Its use is controversial.

READ MORE

 

👇

More: Wisconsin’s story doesn't start with Jean Nicolet. A brief history of forced relocation and 'landcestry.'

More: 28 site names that slur Indigenous women are being removed in Wisconsin. Here's what's happening next.

Indigenous academics argue that all First Nations in the U.S. will soon have to address blood quantum to deal with declining enrollments.

Quick Note: Google is harvesting data - but as far as we know, there is not another platform to use for this blog... STAY TUNED!

[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real

[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real: photo: Daughter Jane and Lorraine 

Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real

Daughter Jane and Lorraine

It was a bracing morning being brought back to reality about how the world see the woman who gave up a child for adoption. Not nicely is the short answer. 

A ten-minute morning interview for drive-to-work radio show in the New York/New Jersey area led to be being mentally whacked for having a relationship with a married man, which I did, and his having an Irish Catholic background was another reason to pile on the  criticism.  She gave the listeners advice--don't have an affair with a married man, look where that led for this stupid person I'm interviewing.

We did cover that I found her, that her adoptive parents had already tried to find me, that her epilepsy was almost certainly caused by the birth-control pills I took when I was pregnant but did not know...and then she asked how my relationship with my daughter was today.

I had to say that she died.  Since the next question was going to be about that--I told the truth.  She died by suicide.  Mincing words is not my style.  I was able to say some more but since people listening today might come to the blog to read about suicide, 

I'm excerpting a small section of Hole In My Heart below: 

    While there are no good statistics on adoptees who actually commit suicide, research on adopted populations shows that a disproportionate number are likely to. No matter how you slice the numbers, adoption increases the probability of suicide, no matter how many adoptees never have a thought of it, no matter how many adoptees are successful, smart, and may one day end up on the Supreme Court. It is unlikely there will ever be good statistics on how many adoptees commit suicide because “adopted” is not noted on death certificates. 

    What we do know is that more adoptees than non-adoptees think about suicide quite often.  Google “suicide and adoption” and what pops up is an entry from the medical journal Pediatrics, “Adoption as a Risk Factor for Attempted Suicide during Adolescence.”  That study unequivocally states, “Attempted suicide is more common among adolescents who live with adoptive parents than among adolescents who live with biological parents.” The connection between adoption and suicide persisted even after the researchers adjusted for depression, aggression, and impulsive behavior.  Not surprisingly, “family connectedness,” whether among the adopted or non-adopted, did decrease the likelihood of suicide attempts. 

    Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior, such as psychiatric disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic disengagement.  Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide.  About 75 percent of the adopted teens in the study (more than 1,200, all living in Minnesota) were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from South Korea.

    This deep dive into suicide and adoption followed a study by the lead researcher and others who concluded that being adopted approximately doubled the odds of having a disruptive behavior disorder and having contact with a mental health professional. Interestingly, international adoptees were less likely to exhibit behavior disorders.

B. J. Lifton wrote that at a seminar for adoptive parents when she brought up the fact that the percentage of adoptee suicide was statistically high, a prominent psychiatrist asked if that nasty bit could be deleted from the tape, which was to be later sold as a record of the talk.  Lifton agreed but later wrote she was sorry she had. --from Hole In My Heart.

The Great Divider: How the Baby Veronica case was the sign

 REBLOG from February 24, 2014

By Trace Hentz

OK, as promised, I have more thoughts after I went to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School last Friday to hear a review of the Baby Veronica Case - and to hear what NCAI, NARF and the Tribal Supreme Court Law Project at Yale were doing while this major case was going on... and I reported to you yesterday what they said essentially…

There weren't any surprises for me unless you count how these panelists didn't use the time to discuss the genocide that actually occurred prior the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and the child abductions by social workers and missionaries - nor did they mention human trafficking and the Nightlight Adoption Agency dealings with Maldonado, the birthmother.  They did mention boarding schools.

So, I was truly upset. From what I heard, it appears American Indians are eons behind in civil rights and we can't seem to win a case in the Supreme Court.  I’d heard that warning years prior but this time at Yale was a bit more in my face. This case was about adoption by non-Indians, something I lived myself.

We had Justice Alito writing an opinion that Veronica is 1.2% Indian.  NARF attorney Joel West Williams asked the Yale audience, "Who in America is 1/16 or 3/256th anything?"  Yet we have a judge issuing his opinion by measuring an Indian for their Indian-ness which equates to measuring a child’s blood? This is still happening?

·        JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court:

This case is about a little girl (Baby Girl) who is classified as an Indian because she is 1.2% (3/256) Cherokee. Because Baby Girl is classified in this way, the South Carolina Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 required her to be taken, at the age of 27 months, from the only parents she had ever known and handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his [**736]parental rights and who had no prior contact with the child. The provisions of the federal statute [*2557] at issue here do not demand this result.

 

·        Jun 25 2013: Judgment REVERSED and case REMANDED. Alito, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, Thomas, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., and Breyer, J., filed concurring opinions. Scalia, J., filed a dissenting opinion. Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Ginsburg and Kagan, JJ., joined, and in which Scalia, J., joined in part. Read more here

·         

I couldn’t sleep ... Dusten Brown never had a chance. He went to Iraq knowing the Capobiancos had his daughter but he had to serve a year and a JAG lawyer took his case.  The puzzle remains why Maldonado mysteriously breaks up with him and severs all communication. Was she punishing her high school sweetheart Dusten by selling his baby or was she manipulated by the adoption agency to take their money?

Then it hit me - keeping America ignorant of Indians, culture, actual history - this all works to take Indian children.  Judgment is easy.  Third World poverty (which we didn’t create) somehow equates to abuse of children.  Add their general ignorance of sovereignty and culture, what it means to be Cherokee or Lakota or Navajo or any tribe - and it means you can't win public opinion polls or cases before the Supreme Court? 

Ignorance about Indians? Exactly!

It's been going on since colonial contact.  Please, let's not call them settlers anymore but invaders.  America has always been the Great Divider, building its fences, writing its laws, counting on classism and racism to divide us. 

America wins every time when it perpetuates this ignorance of Indians.  Do Indians do a good job of educating others about culture, or what's important to us?  Not really.  We're way behind in any civil rights movement.  We've had movies romanticizing us over 100 years and it's hard to kill those "savage" “redskin” stereotypes drilled into all our heads!  

What do Americans know about Indians? Nothing.  Practically zilch.

America's "taking care" of Indians only works to create HATE among Americans who view us as privileged in some way that they are not.  Like why do we even have a law that keeps nice white people from adopting Indian babies?  Trust me, ICWA is under attack.

I do know that Indians are way ahead in surviving every broken treaty and then fighting each other over small scraps of power.  Some tribes even subscribe to "blood quantum" as if they need to purge their citizen rolls of those who may be too white or too black.

We have Supreme Court Justices using the blood quantum argument and you see that is not entirely their fault (they all went to law school but didn’t even have a course on Indian Law at those Ivy League schools) but it tells me - do not go anywhere near them.  They are not even aware of their ignorance.  Dusten Brown didn't have a chance, not in that court.

We Indians shouldn't go anywhere near that court or any court with that level of stupidity.  No, you can't tell Americans they are stupid.

What the panel did say was each and every tribe needs to create and have their own child protection network. I agree since it's pretty evident that you can't trust any non-Indian social worker to go to the reservation and use their mother- father “family unit” example.  Only Indians can decide who the right people are to care for its children.  That person might be an auntie, grandmother or another relative, depending on who in the tribal family is willing and able.

And the panel said we need more American Indian lawyers who become judges - because the way it is now - Indians can’t win.

For many years Vine Deloria and others did try very hard to educate others (with their brilliant books) on the white man’s level, even earning degrees in white man’s colleges like Yale and Harvard, but it all comes down to this:  whites don’t really care.

And if we really think about it, this is a very dangerous situation to be in.

Footnote:  I attended white schools like most everyone else - Really nothing I learned was true or real about Indian culture or history. I learned more sitting at the kitchen table of my friend Ellowyn who is Oglala Lakota, who gave me an education about Indians not written about anywhere.  Then there was my one adoptive aunt (a first-born American) who calls me a liar when I told her there were Indian Boarding Schools, and this was right after I visited Haskell in Kansas.  No, Americans are not learning about Indians or the truth of our history. 

The Baby Veronica case is the sign, whether we wish to see it that way or not - but we can no longer ignore the ignorance or the danger surrounding this case. 

 

THIS BLOG HAS MANY POSTS ABOUT THE BABY V CASE... Yes, she was adopted out...

 

BLOODISM? READ THIS