Native Bidaské: Dr. Aaron Payment on Historical Trauma & Effects On Tribal Communities

REMINDER: If you want to share on social media, please do... this information is important and should be shared... Trace 

👇 you can use the little boxes below

BEAUTIFUL SCARS + iskwē & Tom Wilson - Blue Moon Drive

And he is an adoptee

An incredible guy in so many ways. I would highly recommend checking out his book. It’s amazing. https://tomwilsononline.com/

Sister's Emotional Reunion #60sScoop

 READ: https://globalnews.ca/news/10211379/sisters-reunite-sixties-scoop-vancouver/

WARNING: This story deals with disturbing subject matter that may upset and trigger some readers. Discretion is advised.

It was a reunion decades in the making and a kickoff to the new year the Quill family will never forget.

Sisters Nita and Brandy Quill met for the first time at a SkyTrain station in Vancouver last week, more than 30 years after they were separated during a period of colonial violence against Indigenous families known as the ’60s Scoop.  The pair found each other on Facebook in the years after their mother’s death.

“It’s surreal. Nothing like this has ever happened in our lives before,” Brandy said, embracing her long-lost sister at Burrard Station downtown.

“This is to me a miracle. I’m just trying to take it in. It will probably take a long time to process it. It’s a dream come true.”

’60s Scoop advocate Katherine Legrange on the need for a national inquiry

 

The ’60s Scoop refers to a period between the 1950s and 1980s after amendments to the Indian Act let provincial governments take over Indigenous child welfare. Thousands of First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their birth families, usually without consent, and placed in non-Indigenous homes.

Many were stripped of their language and culture, and left with complex questions about their identities. Many also experienced physical, sexual, mental and spiritual abuse.

“So much of our lives has been taken from us, so to ever be in a moment where we don’t have to be afraid of who we are, that we’ve been given our meeting, it just feels like it’s the beginning of something new — not just for us but for the country,” Brandy said. “I only wish our mom was still here to see it with us.”

’60s Scoop advocate Colleen Cardinal on challenges reconnecting to birth communities

 

Nita and Brandy are the daughters of Linda Quill, a Sapotoweyak Cree woman from Manitoba and a residential school survivor.  Linda was abused and malnourished at residential school, eventually contracted tuberculosis and was placed in a sanitorium without her family’s knowledge, Brandy told Global News.

Brandy was born in Edmonton, placed in foster care at the age of five and eventually shipped off to an Ontario group home where she aged out of care and has lived independently since then. Nita was born in Winnipeg, taken from Linda at 18 months of age and adopted by a family in Scotland.

“I’ve always known there’s more to me, there’s more to who I am, there’s more to my story,” said Nita, who also met her niece — Brandy’s daughter Taylor — at the station last week.

“Blood memory goes very deep so I’ve been nervous for the last 24 hours. Meeting my sister definitely calms me. It’s a relief. It’s the end of an era but it’s also the beginning.”

View image in full screen

Linda Quill is seen with her youngest daughter Brandy Quill in an undated photo. Courtesy: Brandy Quill

Brandy said she and her mother “cried for years” wondering what happened to Nita, the eldest sister.

Nita eventually left her adoptive family in Scotland with no knowledge of her Sapotaweyak and Wuskwi Sipihk family in northern Manitoba, but through a Facebook post, connected with Brandy.

Both she and Brandy said they were told false stories of their mother having tried to leave them after their births.

“My story — it’s always been a journey of identity, of belonging, understanding. My story is one that’s repeated so much within a lot of families. It’s a story of being lost,” Nita said.

“The bigger picture is we are together and there’s a lot of hope … for a lot of the pain to go away and a lot of the happiness to come in. This is a promising day.”

The Manitoba government apologized for its role in the ’60s Scoop in 2015.  The Alberta government followed suit in 2018 and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe did the same in 2019.

In 2022, the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Alberta pressed the B.C. government to follow suit. No such apology has been delivered at the B.C. legislature.

“In B.C., we are committed to a respectful and genuine dialogue with the survivors, families and communities impacted by these historical wrongs on how best to move towards an apology that will be part of the healing process,” wrote B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development in a Tuesday statement.

“We recognize an apology must also address the continued impact of colonization on Indigenous families, especially in terms of the child welfare system. This process must be sensitive and trauma-informed in order to reach a meaningful apology.”

‘Our children have an inherent right to know who they are’: Sts’ailes former chief on new legislation in MCFD

Nita, Brandy and Taylor shared many tight hugs in Vancouver before going out for a meal and getting to know each other better. They credited their mother for their reunion and said they know she was watching, smiling from the Spirit World, as her daughters and granddaughter reunited.

“We’re just so blessed to be able to continue the next bit of our path together so we’ll see where that takes us,” Brandy said.

The family said they hope their story inspires others who have been through similar experiences and fosters empathy among those who haven’t.

— with files from Cliff Shim and Aaron McArthur 

The Hope for Wellness Help Line offers culturally competent counselling and crisis intervention to all Indigenous peoples experiencing trauma, distress, strong emotions and painful memories. The line can be reached any time toll-free at 1-855-242-3310.

I was taken from my home and raised as a “nice Jewish girl,” but I’m Indigenous...

 

👆Nakuset's story is in the anthology Stolen Generations (book 3). Did you read it?  It's like LITTLE BIRD but it's true. Manitoba was a huge place where First Nations children were put in catalogues and placed with non-Native families across the US and Canada and Europe.  

 

What does history tell us about adoption

By Trace Hentz (Blog Editor and adoptee) REBLOG

The Dakota expression for child, wakan injan, can be translated as “they too are sacred,” according to Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktonwan Dakota and a member of the Elk Soldier Society on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

“To us, children are as pure as the holy, moving energy of the universe,” he says, “and we treat them that way.”

What does history tell us about adoption? Most telling is the timeline of adoption history: https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/timeline.html

Can you see the curve American Adoption took to become a profitable industry after seeing that timeline?  Do you notice how some states stepped in and made laws? Can you see the influence of the religions and their judgements of single parents? What role did poverty and racism play? Can you see how secrecy and laws protects the industry and the people who adopt?

Twenty years I've studied adoption in my own investigations and I think 20 years later... adoption is not about child care at all but has morphed into child trafficking, a response to an infertility epidemic, lawyers and judges, billions of dollars, propaganda and bad history.

Supply and demand requires: Where do you find an available baby for an infertile couple in America?

What was born of this curve in 20 years: there are camps.  The two most common camps for adoptees are "be grateful" and "the activist."

Not everyone wants to hear adoptees in any camp.  I simply cannot believe the adoption debate has gone on as long as it has.

If adoption hurts anyone, then it should be abolished. Period.

When you see how adoption was used against Native people, then it was a criminal act. (This was important to document in the five-part book series LOST CHILDREN OF THE INDIAN ADOPTION PROJECTS)

My adoptive parents were miserable people, very sick. I cannot begin to calculate the source of their behaviors but their infertility and religion resulted in my being adopted by them through Catholic Charities and then abused by both of them.

If there had been careful awareness by the adoption industry's social workers prior...maybe it would not have happened. But the social workers never returned.

Who would create a system for children that would not check on adopted children?

Child trafficking via adoption is profitable. That seems to be why it won't go away.

I'm not bitter because that was the system and how it was created. But when you see the harm, and the trauma and the lifelong issues for the child in a closed adoption, how does adoption exist in any form?

Caring for children who are true orphans, without any biological family is so rare, a community could step in and care for the orphan.  It would not require a bureaucracy to do that. The decision could be made by tribal leaders. If you are a member of a tribe, the entire tribe is your family. Kinship care always worked for children who had lost their parents.

I was not an orphan. I had two biological parents who were in their 20s.  Relatives told me later they could have and would have raised me.

But someone created a system that didn't allow that, and instead the adoption industry chose strangers to raise me.

I was born before the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978. I do not have my Original Birth Certificate.

I will never stop fighting for Native children. They deserve our protection.

Read my earlier post: What Being Adopted Cost Me.

Toni Morrison says that “facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”

In the new book ALMOST DEAD INDIANS, you will read history about this ethnic cleansing/paper genocide that will completely shock you.  This new book is not hard to read but hard to put down... Trace

 

 

EARLY REVIEWS: Astonishing!

 

https://a.co/d/aA6GpAg

"... I experience Almost Dead Indians as relatable with bold clear honesty, curiosity, self-and-other-love, and justified outrage.  Again and again, I am blown by knowledge that comes alive with lived experiences and personality.  As I read, a powerful storm blasts through my heart and mind — memories, truths, the appalling and repulsive treatment by entitled bullies upon subjugated children; children who survive become women and men. Whole communities are touched by this: grandparents, parents, siblings, aunties, uncles, cousins, all relatives and future generations in the massive, beyond-ugly, legalized genocidal adoptions. 

 In reading this book, I am eviscerated.  Yet this is a healing thing.  As I stand above my guts laid out, I begin to become aware that not all of those guts are mine but some have been placed within me throughout my childhood; through brainwash surgeries, pedophile manipulations, neglect and the absence of affection and care.  That I grew up thinking they were my guts, as I read, I am enlightened that some actually do not belong to me.  I cry tears from deep in the well at awakening and reawakening awareness with gratitude that I know more and more that I am not alone — that I am a fellow “soul in progress." —ANECIA TRETIKOFF, Alaska Alutiiq Sugpiaq, Lost Bird, poet

EARLY REVIEW:   To call Trace Hentz’s new book, ALMOST DEAD INDIANS a catalyst for future change would be an understatement.  It is a primary source-document within itself as well.  And the information it provides shatters any Pollyanna view of the decades of abuse that have been implemented upon the “American Indian.”  The immense amount of documented information, words, videos, insights and observations is astonishing.  The author focuses squarely upon the outrageous persecution of this population by use of a draconian overlordship meant to destroy the family and the culture of the Native American population in order to “assimilate” THEM into the “White-Man’s-Mind-Set”!  If you take in and study this kaleidoscope of information presented by the author, you’ll be so much more aware of these many episodes of insidious persecution and will be better prepared to fill in a large breadth of U.S. History which has been neglected or deliberately passed over in our history. — Dan Stevenson III, historian, blogger

 

“This new history book, “Almost Dead Indians,” with a lengthy chapter “Disappeared,” is about our history, ties in how these government-funded programs were run by churches and charities and were meant to erase children permanently from tribal rolls, making us dead Indians — almost.”
Hentz (Shawnee and Anishinaabe ancestry) got the idea of a count (of First Nations adoptees) when she could not find reliable information. “I set up a new website: https://thecount2024.blogspot.com. Native American and First Nations adoptees simply fill out a comment form and I will send them a survey.” The COUNT began January 1, 2024.

 

LEARN ABOUT:

Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

Cultural Genocide

American Indian History

Indigenous Slavery

Closed Adoption Controversy

Holocaust Studies

Indian Adoption Projects

North American Indian History