52 ancestors in 52 weeks: (25): On National Indigenous Peoples Day – Nature, nurture, and indigenous adoption

I’m not really qualified to be addressing the subject of adoption or cultural loss, in family trees or otherwise; I wasn’t adopted and my “cultural” heritage is very much of the mainstream variety, sometimes to my sorrow. But these are important topics that are part of many family trees, including ours.

For those of us who weren’t adopted, when someone in your family or someone you know outside your family announces that they’re going to adopt a child, the rest of us normally feel nothing but happiness, both for the adopting family anxious for a child to love, and for the child being welcomed into a family. But, as I’ve come to realize, it’s not that straightforward for the adoptee. There is always the lingering question in the adoptee’s mind as to why their parents didn’t want them in the first place, or why they couldn’t keep them. These are questions those of us not adopted never even stop to think about.

A recent post by blogger Kathy Garland, My Entry into the Adoption Community, left no doubt about the mixture of emotions adoptees navigate, regardless of the love and sense of family they hopefully experience. In describing Fog Lift Chicago, a gathering of adoptees from all over, she says:

The FOG in Fog Lift symbolizes the complicated emotions that adoptees sometimes feel. FOG is an acronym for the fear, obligation, and grief associated with being adopted, interacting with our adoptive families, or reuniting with our birth families. Similar to when I watched Reckoning with the Primal Wound, being in community with other adoptees helped me to feel seen and to face and process the FOG I’d experienced in my own life.

This description matches quite closely with a powerful Facebook post one of my nephews posted last fall, but he has a second, dare I say even more powerful add-on to the complicated emotions Kathy describes above. First of all, let me introduce this nephew. He’s a very special dude in my books. He’s a tall man with what you might call a physical presence. He’s smart, funny, has a ready, engaging smile, and he has enough empathy to share with ten others who could do with more. And he’s Indigenous.

I first met James when he was 9. Because that part of our family tree lives in Saskatchewan, we don’t see each other often (and, boy, Facebook is worth its downsides for how well it helps us stay connected). James was adopted when he was two; he’s just two years older than our older son. For all of us in our extended family, it just seemed like there was a child in need of a loving home, and what a better home to find yourself in. I realized that things in the larger world would always be more difficult for James and other adopted Indigenous children than for their non-Indigenous brothers and sisters, thanks to never-ending discrimination out there in the wide world, but I hoped that the walls inside the walls of his new family could help as much as possible.

If only life were that simple. But I was missing such a huge component of this piece; it’s not just discrimination that’s a societal issue, it’s the trauma, the excruciating pain of enforced cultural loss. Of never-ending colonialism.

James (which of course wasn’t his original name, either) can tell his story best in his own words, as he posted on Facebook last fall. He has given me permission to share his words in this post. I can tell you that when I read these words as an older relative who thinks the world of this man, a man who is so positive and so responsible, my heart dropped. To have had all these terrible feelings of loss of identity and yet to have found a way to make life work for him and his family is testament to his strength of character. As I say, he’s a very special dude in my books. Here is his FB post.

As a 60s scoop child, I grew up feeling angered, hurt, disappointed, and abandoned. I had connection issues that I still have today. I reconciled that my parents just didn’t want me. Then I found that it was a sanctioned kidnapping to rob me of ground connections to my people, culture, and language. I am displaced. The difference between us and the residential schools is that we were not directly killed by our “benefactors”. But I believe that many took their lives. I hope the light is shone on these types of directives. That taking the ‘Indian’ out of the child mindset is stopped. The Saskatchewan government has not taken any responsibility for the Scoop that they played a hand in. What a horrid way to take children. And it continues with Indigenous women, our mothers.

I will teach my young daughter to be a strong cultural person. To bring her diversity to any table that has the good graces to be blessed by her presence. It will be a long road, but reconciliation can be attained when narrow views are overcome. … It will be done when all are equal and differences are celebrated and used for the benefit of all.

I should add that we (his relatives in the east) were shocked to realize that, of course, that James’ adoption had been part of the infamous 60s Scoop we’d vaguely heard of (which continued into the 70s). This just hadn’t crossed our minds for a minute. I should also add that the little daughter James refers to above is technically speaking his step-granddaughter, and the two of them are bonded about as tightly as a father and daughter can be. It’s beautiful to witness (through FB).

As well, despite the anguish that James describes above, which breaks my heart anew whenever I read it, he had a very strong bond with his adoptive father. Physically, you couldn’t find two more different people if you tried. One tall and strong boned, the other short and slight. One Indigenous, one of Scottish ancestry. But one positive part of James’ upbringing has to have been that strong relationship that he had with his adoptive father, our brother-in-law. At his father’s celebration of life, James stood up to speak; he started by standing tall, smiling, putting out first one hand and saying “nature”, and then his other hand and saying, “or nurture.” Clearly there was no nature, but there was plenty of solid nurturing, love, and respect. It’s just that Howie Grant couldn’t provide James with his cultural heritage, or give him the pride in his heritage he was robbed of by the provincial government.

James posted something very recently on FB on this same theme of restoring the roots that were cut from under him.

When I was born, my last name was Bear. I was a 60 scoop child, and that was taken away from me. I now have a bear tattoo. I have strength, and am becoming self assured again. I am protective of my family and friends.

I have gone through a process of rebirth. And this tattoo marks this period.

For me, James and every other adoptee in our extended family is as much a part of my family tree as non-adoptees. His and so many other stories speak to the complicated nature of nature versus nurture.

Especially, on this, National Indigenous People’s Day, James’ story speaks to the responsibility we have to make things better. I encourage everyone to embrace reconciliation and to recognize and celebrate the history, heritage, resilience and diversity of Indigenous Peoples. The egregious treatment of Indigenous Peoples in this country and others is one of the main reasons that, as I said at the beginning of this post, sometimes I am ashamed of my heritage.