Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir, Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

2012; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Trace L Hentz,

Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

In 2012, Trace A. DeMeyer published a newly revised updated 2nd edition of One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir. One Small Sacrifice, a stunning new memoir by Shawnee-Cherokee journalist Trace A. DeMeyer, explores the history and practice of closed adoption as a form of ethnic cleansing of North American Indians. The author opened her sealed adoption file at age 22, hoping to find birth family and her tribal ancestry and meet other adoptees called Split Feathers. One Native adoptee told her, “I couldn’t put your book down, even after I felt like I had been kicked in my gut.” Another thanked her for writing it,”…only another adoptee can know what another adoptee feels. Only another Native American can understand the double loss and know how it hard it is to search year after year.” DeMeyer understands pain and writes, “That’s me standing in front of an Ojibwe wigwam with my adoptive mother Edie and my adopted brother Joey. I’m the only Indian in this family. It was 1969. I’m 12 and attending the famous Lumberjack Festival in Wisconsin. The Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe powwow was being held on the same grounds. The sound of the drum, the men singing filled me, like my heart opened up and the sky fell in. I knew I was an Indian girl just like the other girls I saw but no one could tell me anything. I knew little to nothing about being adopted or Indian, just that I was.” “It’s awful scary not to know who you are. My first goal was discovery – then how I lived a mystery and solved it, and I survived remarkably well. Other Split Feathers need to know how this is possible. Our secret adoptions had a purpose - the break-up of Indian families,” she writes. “I guess the idea was to assimilate us, tame red devils and dirty savages. So what is known about the Indian Adoption Projects and the aftermath, it’s pretty much been secret.” Until now.