Guest Speaker – Bitterroot and the Issue of American Indian Transracial Adoption
I have the honor of being asked to speak for the Utah’s Annual ICWA Conference. I will be giving a virtual presentation. American Indian children who have been removed from their home and are being considered for placement in foster care or adoption require stability. The removal itself is traumatizing, with effects that last late […]
Presentation – Bitterroot
I will be giving a presentation of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption and talking about the writing of it, and why it was an important book to be out in the public space. Please join me at the LaVeta Library at 1:oo p.m. for a reading, conversation and questions.
Working Within the Religious Community for Child Placement reform and Social Justice
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 […]
Bitterroot is a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award
Just before I left for London last week, I was notified that Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption had been chosen as one of four finalists in the Creative Nonfiction category of the Colorado Book Awards. I am thrilled and I am so very honored to be among this list of great writers with […]
Essay published in High Country News – Adoption Didn’t Solve the “Indian Problem”
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, […]
The Importance of ICWA – Bringing Our Children Home
The Indian Childwelfare Act of 1978 was established to stop the wholesale removal of American Indian kids from their families and communities. Prior to its legislation, Indian children were placed and hidden behind closed adoptions, with no way to find our way back to our families, our tribes. We were forced to live in a […]
My interview with Ryan Warner, of Colorado Public Radio’s “Colorado Matters” has been posted.
A live interview is far more difficult to carry off than a taped and edited interview. Questions are asked that may not be what was expected, so there are pauses and “ums” as words are searched for in a room filled with tons of information. Even so, listening to this podcast still makes my throat […]
Star Tribune Review of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption
Last month, Carter Meland, Ph.D., wrote a fabulous review for Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, noting that there are many ways to be Native. Transracial adoption was one of them. This is an important point to make. Our families and communities have become fragmented due to the atrocities committed by the U.S. government […]
Colonization and Adoption – A History
This first appeared in Gazillion Voices, November 2014, Issue 16 Recently, after giving a presentation on American Indian Transracial adoption, I was asked a question. “Where do you think you’d be now if you hadn’t been adopted?” Without pausing, the man who asked the question answered for me. “I bet you wouldn’t be giving presentations […]