Press Release: Trace DeMeyer at Pequot Museum

Award-winning Native American journalist Trace A. DeMeyer will read from her book "One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects" at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum on Saturday, March 5, at 1 p.m.


The books combines a fascinating personal memoir with a ground-breaking expose on the systemic removal of American Indian children from their mothers, families and tribes for adoption into non-Indian families. This practice went on for generations and the adoption industry continues this practice today.

Through a sympathetic judge in her hometown of Superior, DeMeyer opened her court-sealed adoption file at age 22. That was in Wisconsin, one of 43 states that require adoption records be permanently sealed. Thought to be a comfort to potentially adoptive parents, sealed records prevent adult adoptees from owning or ever seeing a copy of their own legal birth certificate and adoption files.

She shares her heartbreak and hope in a journey that takes her around the country, finally meeting her birthfather in 1996 and learning about her Shawnee-Cherokee ancestry.

DeMeyer has crafted a book that will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion dollar adoption industry.

As an adoptee right advocate, DeMeyer is in contact with adoptees around the world through her blog: www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com.

DeMeyer is the former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing.

Known for her exceptional print interviews with infuential Native American such as Leonard Peltier and Floyd Red Crow Westerman, DeMeyer started extensive research on adoptees in 2004. Her discoveries led to this fact-filled 227-page book that weaves eye-opening congressional testimony and evidence with her own jaw-dropping story of search and reunion.

"One Small Sacrifice" was chosen as Native America Calling's Book of the Month in March 2010. Her interview with Harlan McKosato is archived at http://www.nativeamericacalling.com/nac_past2010.shtml#march (March 26, 2010).

Go to: http://www.pequotmuseum.org/ for more information.