Called Home (ePub)

One quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed in non-Indian adoptive and foster homes or orphanages, as part of the Indian Adoption Projects..... One study found that in sixteen states in 1969, 85 percent of the Indian children were placed in non-Indian homes.

Where are these children now?

This new anthology "CALLED HOME" and the earlier work "TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects" are very important contributions to American Indian history. The editors Trace A. DeMeyer and Patricia Busbee, both adoptees, found other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative. In the part one of Called Home, adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, feeling CALLED HOME, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with tribal relatives. Adoptees who wrote in Two Worlds provide updates in part two. In part three, adoptees still searching for their families share their birth information, date and location. Recent history about the Supreme Court case involving Baby Veronica and The New Normal: DNA is also covered by co-editor Trace DeMeyer.

The new anthology CALLED HOME offers even more revelations of this hidden history of Indian child removals in North America, their impact on Indian Country and how it impacts the adoptee and their entire family.

Since 2004, DeMeyer was writing her historical biography "One Small Sacrifice" and met adoptees after stories were published about her work. In 2008, she began to ask adoptees to send her their narratives. Many more adoptees were found after "One Small Sacrifice" had its own Facebook page and her blog on American Indian Adoptees started in 2009. In 2010, Trace was introduced to Patricia and soon asked her to co-edit both books Called Home and Two Worlds which are the first books to expose in first-person detail the adoption practices that have been going on for years under the guise of caring for destitute Indigenous children. Very little was known or published on this history using closed adoptions as a tool of assimilation and ancestral genocide.

These unforgettable accounts of Native American adoptees will certainly challenge beliefs in the positive outcomes of closed adoptions in the US and Canada and exposes the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects.

As DeMeyer writes in the Preface:

For Lost Birds/adoptees coming after us, when they find this new book and the earlier anthology TWO WORLDS, adoptees themselves documented this history and evidence. We have created a roadmap, a resource for new adoptees who will wish to journey back to their First Nations and understand exactly what happened and why. There is no doubt in my mind that adoption changes us, clouds the mind and steals years of our lives, but there is something non-Indians can never steal and that is our dreams and the truth we are resilient!"