This blog is a backup for American Indian Adopteesblog
There might be some duplicate posts prior to 2020. I am trying to delete them when I find them. Sorry!
SURVEY FOR ALL FIRST NATIONS ADOPTEES
ADOPTEES - we are doing a COUNT
If you need support
Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ .
MY EMAIL: tracelara@pm.me
Born of History: A Tulalip Youth’s Journey to Indigenize Child Welfare
Dear Imprint readers, Today we are pleased to share with you the first in our three-part series, Born of History: A Tulalip Youth’s Journey to Indigenize Child Welfare. The
series was reported and photographed by Indigenous Children and Families
Reporter Nancy Marie Spears, and shares an in-depth account of a rarely
heard voice — a young person who grew up in a tribal child welfare
system. Over three days, Born of History covers the past, present and
future that Andres “Dre” Thornock represents, and the unique role this
23-year-old plays within the Tulalip Tribes. The series is being
co-published with ICT.
Formerly known as Indian Country Today, ICT is the largest news
organization covering the Indigenous world, including American Indians,
Alaska Natives and First Nations. Nancy,
who is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, reported
this story over the past 10 months. Her reporting includes a four-day
trip in March to the Tulalip reservation, and dozens of in-depth
conversations with Thornock by phone and videoconference. For contextual
information and expert opinion, she reviewed thousands of pages of
court files and interviewed members of Tulalip Tribes, Thornock’s kin,
attorneys, tribal officials, judges, social workers and academics. As
always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback after reading Born of
History. We could not do this work without your support, and very much
appreciate the time you devote to The Imprint's pages.
Best, Karen de Sá (She/her)
Executive Editor
The Imprint
Saskatchewan Treaty Commissioner Mary Musqua-Culbertson
By Shari Narine | Local Journalism Initiative Reporter | Windspeaker.com
Saskatchewan
Treaty Commissioner Mary Musqua-Culbertson didn’t mince words when she
spoke to members of the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples Oct. 25
about the difficulty in accessing Catholic Church records for Indigenous
residential schools.
Not only has her office come up against barriers in trying to acquire
student records for four of the former Indian residential schools in
the Prince Albert diocese, but staff had to sign a non-disclosure
agreement (NDA) for 21 years in order to access the diocese records they
were told were housed at St. Paul University in Ottawa. However, she
says, Prince Albert diocese records were never found there.
“Who specifically asks for a 21-year NDA? Who within their
organization needs to die within that 21 years that is being protected?”
asked Musqua-Culbertson, a lawyer who added that 21 years is not a
usual timeframe.
“There is still people who are responsible for sexual abuse and
deaths that are still alive that are still out there and they’re walking
about within our institutions and in churches and in religious
organizations. I do believe that religious organizations are there to
protect religious organizations and the people within them,” she said.
Musqua-Culbertson drew the connection between persons of interest
(POI) who were named by survivors during the Independent Assessment
Process (IAP). The IAP was used as part of the Indian Residential
Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), signed in 2006. Through the IAP,
survivors had to recount how they were sexually or physically abused in
order to receive compensation beyond what the base common experience
payment was.
Musqua-Culbertson served as legal counsel during the IAP.
“So you have these vast lists of POIs. Where is that database? Could
that be a database? Because POIs are still protected…Those are people
who were named as abusers,” she said.
She also pointed out that the IAP records will be destroyed unless survivors state otherwise.
Musqua-Culbertson recounted numerous incidents where the diocese gave
her staff difficulties as they tried to access residential school
records, including promising to release records and then reneging on
those promises.
“When we come back up against this (many) barriers when it comes to
the graves of missing children, it’s very disheartening,” she said.
The Office of the Treaty Commissioner of Saskatchewan officially
built its library and archives in 2020, although documents began to be
collected in 1989. In the past few years, the office has started to
collect documents and church records relating to the four Indian
residential schools of Delmas (west of Thunderchild First Nation), St.
Anthony’s (Onion Lake Cree Nation), Beauval (English River La Plonge
Reserve) and St. Michael’s (Beardy’s and Okemasis and One Arrow First
Nations).
Raymond Frogner, head archivist for the National Centre for Truth and
Reconciliation (NCTR), also recounted the frustrations involved with
working with the Catholic Church. Centre researchers are combing through
the oblate records housed at Société historique de Saint-Boniface
(Manitoba) and Deschâtelets-NDC Archives (Quebec).
“We….are currently funding researchers to go into their archive, go
through their records and tell them what records they have that they’ve
been holding for decades. Tell them which ones are actually relevant to
residential schools…They’re also asking us to pay for the digitization
of those records because they aren’t digitized,” said Frogner.
“We all know the Catholic Church did not pay the compensation that they originally were assigned to pay up for the IRSSA.”
Four churches were signatories to the settlement agreement. While the
Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches have paid their agreed-upon
negotiated amounts, the Catholic Church has fallen well short.
Frogner said that the archive at the NCTR held approximately four
million records largely focused on the daily administration and
operation of the schools.
“There is not a single one of the 141 schools that were part of IRSS
agreement …that has a complete set of admission records, discharge
records or quarterly returns. This is because, partly, the quality of
record keeping was abysmal, to put it lightly,” he said.
Frogner recommended moving away from the legal perspective set out
for the records to start to search the more expansive Indian residential
school experience.
He suggested documentation be collected from five different fields.
Education would document curriculum, development and staffing at the
schools, along with a focus on evangelical curriculum development and
projects undertaken by the protestant and Catholic missionaries.
He pointed to health care records, much of which fell under
provincial jurisdiction. Disease and pandemics forced children from the
schools to hospitals where many died.
He noted that records are being held up in the court system because
of ongoing or pending legal action. While court proceedings prevented
the release of the records, Frogner said, a file list could be requested
and then the records acquired when they were no longer restricted by
the court.
A list could also be made of where records are being held in
semi-active disposition awaiting processing within government offices or
Library and Archives Canada, which would eventually be acquired by the
National Truth and Reconciliation Centre.
Frogner’s proposed wider expanse could get limited support from the
new Residential School Documents Advisory Committee headed by former
Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme. The committee has been
mandated to work with federal government departments and agencies to
scope out their documents in order to identify which are to be
transitioned to the NCTR.
Cadmus Delorme
Delorme
told the Senate Committee there are “grey areas” when it comes to which
records the committee can transition. Records that deal with the 141
Indian residential schools acknowledged through the IRSSA are the
targets. Other documents, like hospital records or records in the
justice system, both of which will identify children, are not included
in the committee’s “main mandate.”
However, Delorme said, “we can identify on the sideline other things
that are going on because there will probably be other mandates similar
to what we are doing. So let’s make sure we identify those (other
records).”
Healthcare records were part of the work undertaken by Anne Panasuk,
who was mandated for two years by the Secretariat for Relations with
First Nations and Inuit of Quebec, as special advisor for support for
families of missing children.
Panasuk told the committee about Bill 79, the Quebec legislation
adopted in 2021 that gave Indigenous families the ability to get
information about their children who went missing from health
institutions in Quebec in the 1950s to the 1980s. This included children
who were sent from residential schools to healthcare facilities.
The bill, said Panasuk, “unlocks medical archives and religious
archives and it forces institutions to provide medical files…It bypasses
the act of protecting information for the health department. Some
religious organizations managed hospitals in the past—the diocese, the
parishes, the cemeteries. So all these institutions are now obligated to
provide information requested by the family.”
However, she said, as the bill is provincial, families do not have
access to the records of children who were transferred to health
institutions outside of Quebec.
Panasuk suggested that similar bills be adopted by other provinces and territories.
Musqua-Culbertson also suggested legislation that could be useful in
addressing “when there is protectionism and when there is barriers put
in place.”
Senator David Arnot
Senator
David Arnot, former chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights
Commission and federal treaty commissioner, referred to what the Senate
Committee had heard as a “litany of frustration with the non-compliance
truculent stonewalling purposeful barriers” that was being faced by
those trying to gather records from the Catholic Church.
What the Senate Committee heard Oct. 25 was in direct contrast with
what they were told on Sept. 27 by Father Ken Thorson, provincial
superior of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) Lacombe Canada.
Thorson said that since the 215 unmarked graves had been identified
at Kamloops Indian Residential School, the Catholic Church’s “commitment
has been renewed and strengthened” to work with researchers and
survivors.
However, Arnot called what they had heard from Musqua-Culbertson and
Frogner of their interactions with the Catholic Church as
“incomprehensible conduct.”
Other senators described the testimony as “disturbing”, “appalling”, and “shocking.”
The Senate Committee, chaired by Mi’kmaw Senator Brian Francis from
Prince Edward Island, is holding a series of hearings as follow-up to
recommendations included in their interim report, Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation, released last July.
That report was the result of hearings that took place in March where
the Senate Committee heard from representatives from the Office of the
Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked
Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, and
the NCTR about the difficulty in accessing records that could be used to
either identify children who died at Indian residential schools or
locate where they were buried.
The Senate Committee has invited specific witnesses to answer
questions on why all residential school documents have not been
disclosed.
Windspeaker is owned and operated by the Aboriginal
Multi-Media Society of Alberta, an independent, not-for-profit
communications organization.
Gordon Bluesky was elected chief of the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation in April 2022.
On this episode of Face to Face, he shares his journey as a ‘60s Scoop survivor who grew up in the United States before returning and reconnecting with his nation and culture.
#aptnnews#aptnfacetoface
To publicly mourn and honor adoptees who have died;
To raise awareness of crimes against adoptees by adoptive parents;
To raise awareness around adoptee suicide; and
To recognize that some international adoptees, through no fault of
their own, do not have US citizenship, and that some have been deported.
From the Adoptee Remembrance Day Facebook page: “We are opening October 30th to be our day of truth, transparency, and remembrance for adoptees all over the world.”
Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees is
dedicated to Ethiopian adoptees like Hanna Williams who died at the
hands of their adoptive parents, as well as to Ethiopian adoptees who
died by suicide: they include Amanuel Kildea, Ashkenafi Jitka Lom,
Fisseha Samuel, Gabe Proctor, Kaleab Schmidt, Tadesse Söhl, Mekbul
Timmer, Seid Visin, and all those who have left us too soon. The book
also has an essay by Mike Davis, a deported Ethiopian adoptee,
May they rest in power and in peace. May their memories be eternal;
may their memories be a blessing. May their friends and families find
peace and healing as well.
Taking away a person’s ability to reproduce without consent, or through coercion, is called forced or coerced sterilization. This process is often done through surgical interventions. According to the International Justice Resource Center (IJRC), forced sterilization in Canada “disproportionately,
and possibly exclusively, targets women of ethnic minorities.” A
heinous practice that is still not confined to the past—dating back
decades and even into 2018—Indigenous women in Canada have been forcibly subjected to this torturous act of gender-based violence and discrimination.
The breadth of the issue remains unknown, as there is a both a lack of publicly available data and a lack of in-depth investigation. Synonymous with the data for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
that have yet to be properly and reliably documented, there is limited
data concerning the sterilizations that have been conducted. However,
since the 70s, at least 12,000 women have been affected by sterilization.
—
It was the mid-70s
when Morningstar Mercredi was impregnated from a rape. She chose to
keep the child, as her community condemned abortion, but later she slipped on ice and began spotting. Mercredi went to an emergency room where she was admitted. She was 14 when she woke up from surgery, only to discover her fetus had been removed. An incision spanned across the length of her lower pelvic region. She later learned that the surgery had also removed her left ovary and fallopian tube.
This is just one of many similar stories.
Many Indigenous women were forced into sterilization because they were deemed “unfit”
and not in the right circumstance to have a child by the standards of
health care professionals. A parallelism to past events, like the Sixties Scoop—the
removal of Indigenous children from their birthparents—this pattern of
discrimination of ethnic minorities with different styles of living is
entrenched in Canada’s history.
Alisa Lombard,
a legal and policy matters lawyer from Maurice Law, the first
Indigenous-owned and operated firm in Canada, represents many of these
women. She stated in The Guardian
that “[t]hese are people whose choices were taken away and they are
choices based in fundamental human rights. The very intimate and
personal decision to have children—or to not have children—belongs to
the individual. It’s not something that can be influenced or coerced or
forced.”
The IJRC
is working with Lombard and other Indigenous rights lawyers who are
engaged in litigation and advocacy to end the practice of forced
sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada. Since November 2017,
IJRC has partnered to secure multiple advocacy opportunities before
bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the
United Nations (UN) Committee against Torture.
This advocacy collaboration has resulted in numerous powerful
statements from human rights organizations, the Canadian government’s
final acknowledgement of its responsibility in the matter, and most
significantly, increased public awareness and campaigning.
The issue of forced sterilizations will be raised at the United Nations’ Committee Against Torture. The United Nations (UN) sees this plainly as an act of genocide that should not be labeled as anything less, in accordance with Article II of the UN Genocide Convention, which prohibits “imposing measures intended to prevent birth within [a] group.”
As a non-status Cree Indigenous woman, I view this act of coercive
sterilization upon Indigenous woman as a serious violation of human
rights that sheds light onto the systemic discrimination and racism that
Indigenous people face within the health care system. Issues like these
disproportionately impact Indigenous women due to lifestyle differences
and perceived inadequacies in rearing children to the post-colonization
Canadian standards. These women were not in a position to make any
permanent decisions regarding their reproductive organs and abilities,
they were betrayed by the Canadian medical system, as these healthcare
recommendations came from professionals.
SUDBURY — M’Chigeeng authors Marty Wilson-Trudeau (60s Scoop adoptee) and Phoenix Wilson
were recently recognized with the PMC Indigenous Literature Award in the
Children’s Category for their Second Story Press children’s book, Phoenix Gets Greater.
Joseph Kakwinokanasum, from James Smith Cree Nation, was also
recognized with the PMC Indigenous Literature Award in the Young
Adult/Adult Category for his Tidewater Press book, My Indian Summer. The two awards were announced by First Nation Communities READ 2023-2024 on Oct. 2.
“It’s absolutely amazing — I’m very honoured and humbled because the
other books that were in my category were all fantastic, amazing books
written by wonderful authors and illustrators,” says Wilson-Trudeau, a
secondary school drama teacher in Sudbury. “Our book is about my
youngest son coming out as a two-spirit person and what we did as a
family to accept him and make him feel like he could be authentically
himself.”
Wilson-Trudeau says it was a great experience working on the book with her son.
“We bonded and we did the exchange of ideas and how to go about
writing this and writing that,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “It just kind of
strengthened not our mother-son relationship but respecting each other’s
ideas, and on that note it strengthened our relationship.”
Wilson-Trudeau says they created the book while Phoenix, who is now pursuing post-secondary studies in Toronto, was in Grade 12.
“It was very quickly written and even more quickly accepted to be
made into a book,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “I said to him that I’d really
like to write a book because it could help families and other children
out there that are two-spirit and he said OK.”
Wilson-Trudeau says she wrote the skeleton of the story and Phoenix added to it that evening.
“The next day, I sent it out to the Second Story Press and she called
me within about 20 minutes and said, ‘We’ll take it,’” Wilson-Trudeau
says. “It’s a story of bullying and my son growing up always knowing who
he was but never coming out and saying it because he was getting
bullied, and then him coming out to his brother and myself and us
accepting him for who he is. It’s just this beautiful tale of family and
acceptance and Phoenix being brave to say who he really was.”
Wilson-Trudeau says she used to write short stories and longer
stories and always wanted to be a writer, but she put writing on the
back burner to pursue her teaching career.
“The love of writing has always been there, even when I was a young
kid,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “There’s a lot of creative aspects [in
theatre] but I’m telling somebody else’s story in theatre. This way,
when I write a book, I’m telling my own story.”
Wilson-Trudeau says she has had a very positive response from people who have read the book.
“People that I’ve encountered at different writing festivals and my
own publisher and the women that work for her [have been] very positive,
really wonderful,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “I met this teacher … and when
she found out I was the lady who wrote Phoenix Gets Greater,
she was like, ‘I read this to my class, it’s amazing.’ So it’s really
great to hear the positive effects that this book has had.”
Wilson-Trudeau says working with the editor at Second Story Press was a wonderful learning experience.
“I was very happy with everything,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “As a child,
I could have never imagined that I would be here and I would have done
this.”
Wilson-Trudeau says she is currently working on a graphic novel based on her experiences as a Sixties Scoop survivor.
“It’s loosely based on my life as a Sixties Scoop survivor and the
whole aspect of being lost and not knowing who you are because you’re
cut away from your culture,” Wilson-Trudeau says. “[It] will be for
older kids so they can really understand how it is to experience loss
and loss of culture.”
Kelley
Bova, right, receives a hug after speaking to a group of elders at the
Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. Bova,
Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, brought home a pair of moccasins that had been
confiscated from a Native boy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in Pennsylvania more than 100 years ago. They were repatriated to the
tribe along with the remains of two students who died there in the late
1800s. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses
from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in
the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis
Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
LAKE
TRAVERSE RESERVATION, S.D. — The moccasins sat for decades in the
corner of a glass-enclosed bookcase in Pennsylvania, nestled on a shelf
with a Davy Crockett trading card and Canadian Mountie knick-knack.
They
had long been separated from the unknown Native boy who had worn them
into the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years
ago, where they were taken from him along with his Native connections
to family, language and traditions.
By
the time they returned quietly home to Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate lands in
late September, however, their anonymity had made them universal, a
reminder of the forced assimilation that had formed the mission of the
Pennsylvania school.
“It's
all about those moccasins,” said Tamara St. John, a Sisseton Wahpeton
Oyate historian and South Dakota state representative. “They are the
symbol of everything that happened there.”
Their
journey home – accompanying the remains of two Sisseton and Spirit Lake
boys repatriated to their tribes and families – brought not only
another step toward reconciliation and healing for those involved but
also inner peace and a sense of purpose to others along the way.
Moccasin tracks
The
skilled craftsmanship of the moccasins’ quill and beadwork apparently
caught the attention of seamstress Susan Zeamer, who worked at the
Carlisle school from 1895 to 1908.
At
some point, she took them home for herself. Whether she slipped the
moccasins into her pockets or was given permission to keep them is lost
to history.
The
moccasins were then passed down through generations until a
great-nephew by marriage, John Baker, 72, now of Buckingham Township,
Pennsylvania, became their owner in 2011.
A
pair of moccasins and a medicine pouch that were confiscated from a
student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago
were repatriated to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate on Sept. 23, 2023.
They had been in the possession of a Pennsylvania family for more than a
century before Kelley Bova, a tribal citizen, was asked to return them
to the tribe. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
Baker
remembers being fascinated by the moccasins in the bookcase in his
parent’s home as a boy in the 1950s, when Westerns were popular on
television and movie screens. He visualized a young Indigenous boy
wearing them on adventures.
Over
the past decade, however, despite the sentimental attachment, Baker
became uneasy with possessing them. Like many who grew up in the
Carlisle area, Baker’s knowledge of the Carlisle school was limited, but
being the owner of the moccasins had enlightened him to the reality of
the harsh history of the school and the treatment of Indigenous
children. He felt a new responsibility. He understood the moccasins were
not his to keep, but his quest to find their home of origin was filled
with frustrations.
Museums
and tribes did not always reply to his queries, but his research
convinced him the moccasins were Plains Indian in style.
He finally reached out to Arla Patch, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a founding member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies
advocacy, group which has led a fight against Native mascots. He showed
her the moccasins on a Zoom call and told her of his desire to see them
returned.
"I
was getting pretty frustrated,” Baker said. “What’s going to happen to
these? … They're more than just an artifact, they're actually part of a
lineage that still is alive and well."
Patch introduced him to her close friend, Kelley Bova, a fellow member of the Coalition of Natives and Allies, who is Dakota.
Bova,
too, had been removed from her culture and traditions. Born in
Sisseton, South Dakota, she was adopted as a 3-month-old infant by a
White family and grew up far from her Native relatives.
Independent
research with tribal historians and museum experts confirmed the
moccasins were Plains Indian in style, though a specific tribe could not
be pinpointed. Officials with the Blackfeet, Dakota, and Rosebud Sioux
tribes all felt they were characteristic of their style.
Kelley
Bova (not shown) shows the moccasins to Helena Little Ghost at the Lake
Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023. The moccasins
were confiscated from a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
more than 100 years ago. They remained in the possession of a
Pennsylvania family for more than a century before being repatriated
back to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
Bova
believed her own tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, should take the
moccasins, and tribal officials agreed. Bova was tapped as the proper
person to deliver them to their symbolic home.
“I
find it mystical that Kelley and my path would cross, and that John's
and my path would cross,” Patch recalled. “It's just so amazing. You
couldn't write a script like this.”
Baker
presented the moccasins to Bova in November 2022, at Peace Valley Park
in Bucks County. He said he felt both a void and a peace to no longer
have them in his home in the antique bookcase that he inherited along
with the moccasins.
“It
was really strange to not have the moccasins in the bookcase anymore,”
he said recently. “They've been there my whole life. I kind of lost this
imaginary friend. But I can't tell you how much peace that brought me.
There was a real sense of well-being about it. Something definitely was
settled.”
A different era
While
Baker felt the absence, Bova quickly formed a close bond with the worn,
leather shoes. They had been on similar journeys, more than a
half-century apart, and Bova felt it was time to take them home.
“I
would actually talk to them, tell them that they were safe now,” Bova
said, as she waited to take the moccasins to Sisseton. “I have prayed
with them, and I treat them like a child. I take care of them and plan
to be able to bring them home.”
Finding your way home is something Bova knows about.
Her
journey began as Rose Anne Owen, a Dakota infant taken from her family
at birth and moved to Rosebud to await adoption. At age 3 months, she
was placed into the hands of Salvatore and André Petrilli, a suburban
Philadelphia dentist and his wife. The Glenside couple, of Italian and
Irish descent, had struggled to have their own biological children and
had arranged for the adoption through Catholic Charities.
Rose
made her 1,900-mile journey to Glenside, Pennsylvania, and was renamed
Kelley Elizabeth Petrilli. A new birth certificate was created to
reflect that she was the child of two Caucasian parents. Her American
Indian heritage was wiped away on paper. A Montgomery County Orphans
Court clerk, ironically with the last name of Custer, gave the final
stamp of approval to the adoption.
She
had become a child of the Native adoption era, a decades-long forced
assimilation of Native children established under the Indian Adoption
Project, which started in 1958 and evolved to include 50 private and
public placement agencies across the United States and Canada.
By
then, boarding schools had proven to be expensive and unsuccessful.
Adoption was the new attempt at assimilation, but the expenses would be
the responsibility of the adopting parents and not that of the
government. Raised in a White home, without the communal support of
other students, adoption was viewed as a more successful tool for
assimilation.
In
the next 20 years, until the Indian Child Welfare Act ended the
adoption project, almost 13,000 Native children were adopted. Native
children are still four times more likely to be removed from their
families and placed in foster care than non-Native children.
Love without identity
Unlike
many other adoptees, Bova did not suffer a childhood of abuse. The
Petrillis provided a loving, middle-class home and private schools,
while never hiding her Native heritage.
Eventually,
they would have five biological children on their own, but Bova always
knew she was different, a Native island in an ocean of White suburbia.
“You’re an Indian, you’re an Indian,” one of her cousins would taunt.
“No, I’m not,” she would scream back, a denial that still embarrasses her and causes her pain today.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be White; I still feel guilty about that,” Bova told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2021. “I just wanted to fit in and be like my sisters. … I did not like being tall and brown and different.”
For Bova, that feeling of isolation led to what she calls her “dark years” after high school.
“Deep
down, when you are adopted, you have a wound inside yourself,” she
said. “If your parents gave you up, how lovable can you be?”
Sandy
White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, knows the feeling. She was
adopted at 18 months, and grew up to found the First Nations
Repatriations Institute. She currently works at the Indian Child Welfare
Act Law Center in Minneapolis.
“Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are,” White Hawk told the Inquirer. “Love doesn’t provide identity.”
Bova,
now 60, did not find her way back to her biological mother, Lillian
Owen, and siblings, or her Dakota tribe, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate,
until she was 50. Like students who attended Native boarding schools,
she found herself split between two worlds and not fitting completely in
either.
“When
any child was taken, they were also not able to continue their journey
of being Native American. We were robbed of our identity,” said Bova,
who is now an enrolled member of the tribe. “I think that's the hardest
part for me to sometimes wrap around, that you're robbed of that. And
people don't understand that, but I'm … grateful that I found my family
and I try to learn as much as I can.”
Patch said the journey continues.
“Kelley
does not have her Whiteness, and she does not have her Nativeness,”
Patch said of her friend. “The healing power of Kelley’s story is that
she is now getting to be Dakota. She’s getting to connect with that
Dakota heritage.”
Rose’s story
On
Memorial Day weekend in 2021, Kelley made her first visit to the former
grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, drawn by a group of
Native women and others from the Circle Legacy group who clean and
decorate the graves each year.
She
stood in the Indian Cemetery on a raw, rainy day with the white
gravestones laid out in front of her in perfect rows, like desks in a
classroom.
Kelley
Bova, of Pennsylvania, pays her first visit to the Indian Cemetery on
May 29, 2021, at the site where the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
operated from 1879-1918. Bova was taken from her family as an infant
and adopted out at three months old to a White Pennsylvania family. She
later reconnected with her birth family and is now a member of the
Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. (Photo by Charles Fox, courtesy of The
Philadelphia Inquirer)
They
marked the remains of the students who had died while attending the
school but had not been returned home to their families. Most were
victims of diseases such as tuberculosis.
Her
eyes became transfixed on one particular grave. The gravestone simply
read “Rose, Sioux.” It was the name she had been given by her biological
parents.
“Just seeing that grave with her name, my name on it,” Kelley later said, “it just made me cry.”
It
was the grave of Rose Long Face, also known as Little Hawk, Rosebud
Sioux, who was among the initial group of 84 students to arrive at the
school on Oct. 6, 1879. She died 18 months later on April 29, 1881.
Their
journeys had been separated by 84 years but were nonetheless similar.
Both had made the journey from Rosebud to a Pennsylvania town, to have
their Native identities removed and be renamed in the process. Both had
been separated from their families and the land that should have been
their home by a government assimilation program.
Bova
moved a few rows over and found the graves of two other Dakota
students, Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright. She knelt, placing
tobacco bundles on their graves, speaking softly to let them know they
were not forgotten and one day they would be home again.
Rose
Long Face made it home first, however. In the summer of 2021, she was
among nine Rosebud students repatriated from the cemetery to their
homeland in South Dakota. She had been away 140 years.
Amos and Edward
Amos
and Edward began their journeys home in September 2023, when they were
disinterred from the Carlisle cemetery in a private ceremony that
included tribal members, ancestors and others.
Their homecoming provided a chance to return the moccasins, as well, to Sisseton.
Amos
and Edward were among six Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate/Spirit Lake students,
four boys and two girls, who arrived at the Carlisle school on Nov. 6,
1879, along with seven students from other tribes. They arrived exactly
one month after the first group of students had walked through the
gates.
Chairperson
Lonna Street, left, Spirit Lake Tribe, and Tamara St. John, Sisseton
Wahpeton Oyate historian and a South Dakota state representative, stand
in the Indian Cemetery at the former site of the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School late in the evening of Sept. 17, 2023. Work in the
cemetery disinterring the graves of Amos LaFromboise and Edward Upright
had gone on for approximately 11 hours on a rainy day. (Photo by Charles
Fox for ICT)
In
20 days, Amos was dead — the first student to die at the school. There
is no record of the case of death, though a newspaper report at the time
suggested he was sick when he arrived at the school.
Edward,
son of Chief Waanatan II, was 12 when he arrived at the school, a year
younger than Amos. He died on May 5, 1881, of pneumonia as he was
recovering from measles.
Amos
and Edward were among four students disinterred from Carlisle in
September as part of the U.S. Army’s disinterment project at the
Carlisle Barracks. The others, Beau Neal, Northern Arapaho, and Launey
Shorty, Blackfeet, were also returned to their tribes and families.
Amos
and Edward were taken by a caravan of nine passenger vans and vehicles
that left Carlisle on the afternoon of Sept. 19 for the 22-hour drive to
Sisseton.
Along
the way, the caravan stopped in Ohio to pick up two more remains being
returned by Oberlin College. Two additional remains, believed to be
about 500 years old, were already waiting for burial in South Dakota
after being returned by a North Dakota coroner’s office.
Amos
and Edward arrived on Sept. 20 at the site of the former Sisseton
Agency, where they had last said goodbye to their parents. This time,
however, they were greeted by about 100 people gathered in celebration.
They
were then taken to the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate repatriation grounds to
complete the traditional four days of mourning before a private ceremony
and burial at the repatriation cemetery. The other four remains were
also buried at the repatriation cemetery.
Bova
made the same journey with the moccasins tucked inside a shoebox,
boarding the caravan at Carlisle for the trip to Sisseton.
For
her, the trip was an opportunity to take part in an historic moment for
the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and Spirit Lake people, but also an
opportunity to continue her healing process. She had visited Sisseton
more than 10 times in the past 10 years for Sundances, powwows, and
family events.
“It's
like there's this vessel and this wound and every time [I go to
Sisseton] it gets filled a little more, then a little more and a little
more,” Bova said afterward. “That's why it helped doing this. Because
that was able to fill [the void] even more. Fill that wound up and heal
it.”
During
the final three days of mourning at Sisseton, with ceremonies at
sunrise and sunset, gatherings with food, and conversations with elders,
Bova experienced events she had missed for 50 years. This was
especially true of her time spent with the Buffalo Heart women.
“Those Buffalo Heart women allowed me to help with the remains,” she said. “That was such a gift to me.”
‘These are my people’
On
Saturday, Sept. 23, the day of burial for Amos and Edward, about 100
people of all ages stood on the hillside overlooking the open graves.
The
remains were taken down from a wooden scaffold and eventually bundled
in buffalo robes along with a star quilt, moccasins, and other
traditional items brought by relatives. They were then placed in their
graves with the love and respect that should have been afforded them as
the sons of chiefs.
Kelley
Bova, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, speaks to a gathering at the Lake
Traverse Reservation in South Dakota on Sept. 23, 2023, after bringing
home a pair of moccasins confiscated from an unknown Native boy at the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School more than 100 years ago. They had been
in the possession of Pennsylvania family for more than a century.
(Photo by Charles Fox for ICT)
“Whenever
I am in the teepees, by the fire, and hearing the men drumming and
singing, it takes me back to another time,” Bova said. “It’s something
that makes me feel so special. …That’s my DNA; that’s my heritage. Not
knowing it for 50 years and finally seeing things like that, it has a
healing power inside of me that helps a lot. Seeing all of this, I come
to the realization that these are my people. This is who I am… The
biggest thing I have learned is to let go of how I was raised as opposed
to who I really am.”
Then
it was Bova’s turn to address the group. She spoke to a gathered group
of elders at the front of the crowd where they could see the moccasins
she held in her hands.
She
told the story of the moccasins and their pathway to her, and then
presented them to tribal chairpersons J. Garret Renville of the Sisseton
Wahpeton Oyate and Lonna Street of Spirit Lake, as well as historian
St. John.
“It's a privilege to be able to do this,” she told ICT.
“And it's a very spiritual thing. Because I feel like it's my journey
home, and now I can help these moccasins go home. I know they're just a
thing. But to me, there are symbols of every child that was taken,
whether it was through adoption or through the residential schools. I
think it's just so important that these go home.”
Upon
hearing the news of the moccasins' return to the Dakota people, Baker
responded from his Pennsylvania home that he felt “ relief, peace, and
closure” and “a sense of gratification that comes with complete
accomplishment.” The endeavor had taken over a century but was finally
achieved.
St. John has big plans for the moccasins.
“I
could build a museum around the moccasins to forever tell the stories
of so many — past, present, and future,” she said. “I want them to be
representative of our children and their journey home. I want them to
represent how the federal assimilation tactics of places like Carlisle
did not win.”
The moccasins can tell that story, she said.
“Our
boys will be here and laid to rest on the homelands and protected ever
on, but those moccasins will sit in their place in our collections with
their story,” St. John said.
“To
‘keep one’s moccasins’ is said to mean that a Native person did not
give up their traditional way,” she said. “Our children came home with
moccasins.”
T he Métis National Council and the Government of Canada will be working collaboratively, Nation-to-Nation, to develop a process to engag...
To Veronica Brown
Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.
OUR HISTORY
BOOK 5: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
