Aspects of Life – Thoughts and Conversations
I am so honored to have been invited to be a presenter at this year’s Speaking of the Children Conference in LaVista, Nebraska. This conference is heavily attended by people in all aspects of child welfare, including social workers, law enforcement, mental health specialists, lawyers and now a cultural anthropologist! Historical events and policies, designed […]
Considering that ICWA is at stake on the U.S. Supreme Court level, it is important for child placement professionals, and prospective adoptive parents to really understand how impactful anti-Indian structures are on American Indian transracial adoptees.
Recently, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett suggested that child placement through adoption makes Roe V. Wade a moot point. And there are pleny of myths that point to this seemingly painless transaction. But as Katherine Joyce, a writer for Salon, states, “the suggestion that adoption entails nothing more than several months of inconvenience […]
Adoption contains both privilege and oppression, but for whom? What do these actions look like? How do they leave their mark, their scars? Join Susan Dusza Guerra Leksander LMFT, Blake Gibbins, and myself in a keynote panel, moderated by Adam Kim, as we deconstruct these issues from personal and professional experience. For more information, visit […]
American Indian children who are adopted into white families are accompanied by the supernova that occurs when race, history, and policy collide. We don’t fit anywhere because of cultural structures that are so deeply inbedded in the U.S. as to be nearly invisible. The theories of ethnic group belonging, social hierarchy and capitals, and social […]
Join me as we get into the details of what it means to write about the adoption experience, and what the experience is reading that experience. Discussion of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoptees. Members only.
Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption took home two awards from the 2019 High Plains Book Awards – Indigenous Writer and Creative Nonfiction. It was indeed a humbling moment, because, like any event, it doesn’t sit alone and isolated, but is mixed and kneaded with so many life-changing events around it. One such event […]
Is American Indian a ‘racial’ or ‘political’ identity? It’s complicated. I’d just posted on FB how the conservative right (the Goldwater Institute) is attempting to upend the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) through its state-by-state litigation. There are two legal arguments, both funded by right-wing think-tanks, whose money can be traced to the […]
Unless you are Stephen King, publishing is like graduating from college – people aren’t knocking down your door asking you to work for them, or in this case, talking about your book. At least not until you get your name out there. And that can take a bit of time, a lot of patience, and […]
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, American Indian children were placed with white families at a phenomenal rate. By 1974, approximately 30% American Indian children were removed from their American Indian families and placed with non-Indian families. Neglect was cited most often, a vague term that was responsible for changing the lives of Indian children, […]