Aspects of Life – Thoughts and Conversations
I am so excited to announce I’ve been invited by Office of Multicultural Student Services at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to keynote for the Loving Day Celebration. Loving Day ( June 12) commemorates the 1967 Supreme Court decision to remove state bans regarding interracial marriage. As an American Indian transracial adoptee, my research and […]
Katya Cengel, author of From Chernobyl with Love, looks younger than her forty-something years. Maybe it’s her smile, maybe it’s her thoughtful blue eyes, maybe it’s the look of a dreamer that she gets when I ask her questions about her reactions to living in Eastern Europe. Or maybe it’s not about youth, but about […]
We never know where our paths will take us. We just know we are going on a direction, many times, we are being led. For me, it is deeper into the forest. Now, that forest isn’t scary, but it is relatively unexplored. That forest is American Indian child placement. I was in my 40s when […]
Last month, I participated in a podcast with the Archibald Project, an organization that uses storytelling to address the orphan and child vulnerability crisis in creative and educated ways. I loved talking with them because they asked the hard questions, those questions that reveal the complexity and depth of tough issues, the ones that make […]
Addictions run in my family, so when I told my sister I have a social media addiction issue, she just laughed. My son and daughter-in-law said (and I thought initially that they were joking), “We knew that. We’ve known that for a long time.” How long? And why didn’t anyone tell me? Why am I […]
I stared at the posts of two of my white friends on Facebook, and my heart dropped. Each post contained what seemed to include supportive at best, innocuous at worst illustrative photos, each began with the right words of racial awareness, both, about midway through, switched so delicately to mirror the structure of white supremacy. […]
When I first saw the name on the email, the name looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Phillip Barcio. It turns out that he wrote a fabulous review of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption for the Western Humanities Review! That’s why it sounded so familiar! The email was at the same time […]
Yesterday, I spoke with Phillip Barcio, who is an arts journalist. He also wrote a fabulous review for Bitterroot for the Western Humanities Review.What was really interesting about his interview is that he asks guests to think about the idea of apocalypse, and submit 10 pieces of music that would be meaningful for the guest […]
So, I did a little math. The top fundraising numbers (not counting anyone but the top 5 presidential candidates, including Trump) for the 2020 election campaign comes to $1,116,023,900. Over one billion dollars! And when I see this number my blood pressure begins to rise. I feel like each political email I get is a […]
You can’t imagine how honored I felt when my editor, Matt Bokovoy at University of Nebraska Press, told me Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption was going to paperback. That means, people are buying it, connecting with its message, talking about it, and putting it into a larger worldview of transracial adoption. As an […]