Coming Out

I’m adopted. It’s a profoundly non-trivial component of my psyche.
Other people have family, genetics, a history, but adoptees begin
with hearsay, perhaps a story, but often with nothing whatsoever from which to form
a perception of themselves in a biological or ancestral context. I personally found solace in books, in
music, in wrapping fantasy around me like a protective sheath and
from there I interacted with the world. My identity was constructed
from story, my past is derived from the good intentioned
fictions told to me by my ‘real’ parents.

I read Ann Fessler’s recent book “The Girls Who Went Away”
to help fill in my understanding of what birthmothers went through
in the adoption boom years from the end of the forties through to the
mid-seventies, and I highly recommend that book for those
who want to see past the myths of adoption that fill mainstream media.
As far as my own birthmother, I only knew what her first name might have been until
I was about 25 and I started searching. Even now my birth records are
sealed by the courts in Idaho and my adoption was arranged
privately through pastors and a doctor rather than through the social
services (which means I didn’t receive even non-identifying medical information.)
For years I wasn’t even convinced my adoption was entirely
legal, and I’m still certain that my biological father’s family had
no desire to see me adopted. Near as I can make out the truth now, and bear in mind this is after
having hunted down the information on my own, my biological father
was 3/4ths or perhaps even full-blooded Native American. Having been born
on the bank of the Snake River a few miles from Shoshone Falls, its
not too hard to imagine I’m 3/8ths Shoshone, a tribe decimated in
one of the
bloodiest massacres in the history of Mormonism.

There’s nothing quite like the moment when I realized I wasn’t
‘white’, whatever the hell white means. I’m inter-racial, all
I know of my mother’s side is her father was a devout, racist,
illiterate conservative and somewhere back up the family line I’m
related to
Robert Browning (of ‘Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came‘ fame) and Jesse James.
Being told shit like that goes a long way toward explaining why
I’d watched
Dead Man 30+ times and devoured Stephen King’s massive metafictional
Dark Tower series
, but it did a lot more than that.

Going from nothing but conjecture to these few facts has helped
make me insanely hypersensitive to stories involving adoption,
especially the darker stories of child laundering, or organ
farming, of children forcibly adopted, stolen…
especially those which involve infants and young children
from other cultures being uprooted and planted back down in the
states.

That aspect of colonialism itself is fascinating, and it would seem
that the United States becomes a repository after the fact of the
children we orphan through warfare. Colonialism turns a blind
eye to the plight of those who are assimilated, and one can trace this theme all the way back to
Moses being adopted by the ruling elite who had enslaved the Hebrews.
Today it is Korean adoptees
who are spearheading the cultural awareness of Adoption and its
fallout… but in twenty-five or thirty years, it will be Iraqi
adoptees, displaced children from Darfur, children from Eastern
Europe, Central America, and Afghanistan.

So I’m by no means the only adoptee with Native American blood who’s
ancestral ties were obliterated by social institutions. The most chilling
story to come out of the events at Wounded Knee wasn’t the
murder of Bigfoot and the slaughter of some two hundred unarmed
Minneconjou, but the young girl Lost Bird, the sole survivor of the massacre,
who was adopted by Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby as a curio and
raised ‘white’ by his ex-wife Clara B. Colby. Lost Bird’s biographer Renee
Sansom Flood, in an interview on the PBS.org website
, has this to say
on the larger issue that Lost Bird has come to represent:

“The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was a help to Indian tribes because from that point on, if there’s a child out there that is to be placed up for adoption, the different tribes are to be notified. For example, the child is a Lakota child, the tribe is notified and then the tribal court makes a decision whether or not to intercede in this adoption or not, and that was their right. That’s what that law was meant for because too many children were being taken for almost no reason. In the sixties and seventies, it became a fad to take an Indian child, to adopt an Indian child and it was happening too much and it was breaking up Indian families destroying Indian families, and so that act, we hoped would put a stop to that, and it didn’t. There are still people that feel that they can save the Indian, they try to be well-meaning and they are well-meaning, many of them, there’s a lot of missionaries with religious backgrounds, whether it’s Christians, whether it’s Mormons, whether it’s Catholics or Baptists, whatever, they still want the children, they still feel that they can raise children better than Indians can. You have stealthness being done under the rug. A couple that’s childless, they become very desperate to have children which you can understand if you want to have children, and they’ll talk to a doctor near a reservation and say “do you know any mothers who are going to give up their children?” and so the doctor will then talk to a young Indian girl and say “Why don’t you give up your child?” I found a really good family for it, Your child will never want for anything, it’ll have the education, they’ll have toys, beautiful clothes, a wonderful home, and the young Indian mother is made to feel guilty. She may decide to give up her child, wanting the best for her child and feeling that’s better and then she does, sign away the child and the doctor is involved sometimes it’s a religious minister or something or a friend of the family or something. It’s arranged and so it still goes on today, not as much, people know now about the Indian child welfare act and so they know that if they take an Indian child, they’re in for a fight but they still get away with it a lot of times.”

The myth of the ‘good home’ is nearly universal in adoption, and the phrase is used
especially in cases where racism and classist attitudes are present but hidden
behind the shallow mask of ’social justice.’ Sadly
though, all too often the myth of the good home doesn’t just place the child with people determined to evangelize
and assimilate heathens out of their own cosmological insecurities. Sometimes children are placed into environments
where their newly minted ‘parents’ are actively endangering and abusing them, as in the
Judith Leekin case: “Leekin, 62, of Port St. Lucie, is accused of using aliases to adopt 11 children in New York City between July 1988 and April 1996 and is thought to have collected up to $2 million for their care, but instead left them malnourished and bound with handcuffs and plastic ties, investigators say.”

At least the children made it to the home. The myth of being ‘better off’ and in a ‘good home’ persists, most likely because the racism and classism inherent in that debate is somewhat invisible on the surface:

“This “better off” argument is
usually not urged in public, as it lies perilously close to controversial
notions of cultural or national superiority. In private conversations within
and outside the adoption world, however, it is repeatedly whispered, and
perhaps accounts for a certain lack of urgency in responding to the problem.”



Child Laundering: How the Intercountry Adoption System Legitimizes and Incentivizes the Practices of Buying, Trafficking, Kidnapping, and Stealing Children
David M. Smolin, Cumberland Law School, Samford University

Reading through the above text and Amnesty International’s reports on

Illegal Adoption in Guatemala is where we get into the really disturbing stuff. Adoption,
veiled as it is in secrecy, provides a baffle behind which human
farms for organ harvesting, mules for drug smuggling, and child
sex slavery rings appear to have come into existence. This isn’t
Max
Headroom, this shit is really going on. In
Deterring Democracy,
Noam Chomsky states:

“A Resolution of the European Parliament on the Trafficking of
Central American Children alleged that near a “human farm” in
San Pedro Sula, Honduras, infant corpses were found that “had
been stripped of one or a number of organs.” At another “human
farm” in Guatemala, babies ranging from 11 days old to four
months old had been found. The director of the farm, at the time
of his arrest, declared that the children “were sold to American
or Israeli families whose children needed organ transplants at
the cost of $75,000 per child,” the Resolution continues,
expressing “its horror in the light of the facts” and calling for
investigation and preventive measures.”

And this is by no means limited to Guatemala as the news story,

Organ Trafficking in Eastern Europe indicates. With the growing trend toward
forced adoption in the UK these stories of abuse, child slavery,
and organ harvesting are vital to challenge some of the predominant myths that the adoption
industry helps maintain to facilitate their constant supply of infants and children.

There are a number of cases here in the United States that touch on this issue
of forced or coerced adoption where the biological parents are finding that adoption
isn’t nearly the idyllic situation that industry shill sites present to the public.
With that in mind, I wanted to point out some of the stories
online that have been holding my interest as of late.

Allison Quets, charged with international kidnapping for taking her two birth twins, Holly and Tyler, from their adoptive parents and attempting to move to Canada.

Jamie Kiefer, who’s story is almost as confusing:
did she or
did she not kidnap her own child? And lastly, Cletus Miller’s fight for his daughter:
Miller claims Kiley’s biological mother Georgette Fleeger initially told him someone else was the baby’s father. She then claimed she aborted the baby. In truth, she put the baby up for adoption. Miller’s troubles continued when an adoption agency, Family Adoption Center, couldn’t find him. They had the wrong address and went to court to involuntarily terminate his parental rights. Now Miller is fighting back with attorney Jack Haller.

This coerced and forced adoption issue is only one of the innumerable issues that arises in adoption.
Sealed records is certainly a big issue with most adult adoptees. People
have a need to know where they came from, what their history is, and who they are related to…
and the idea that identity is something that can be stripped from an individual by social institutions
should be anathema to members of a free society. Fortunately there is something of a social
movement toward rethinking the enforced secrecy shrouding adoption. There are

new Canadian adoption laws that will soon provide greater access to records, for example.

Meanwhile several states here in the US are also changing their laws back to what they were before
the adoption industry introduced the idea of sealed records in the forties. (For a trail-head into
an in-depth look at the history of sealed records in the US I can think of no better resource than
Bastard Nation.)

Unsealing records might be the most politically visible of all
adoption issues, but it is by no means the most taboo. That’s reserved for
something called
Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) in the literature.
And while it’s not exactly
House of Yes style incest, it is taboo and usually illegal.
And apparently it’s an intense and over-riding impulse when
it clicks on, if this story is any indication:

“McMahan denies that he ever had a sexual affair with his daughter. But he doesn’t explain how his and Linda’s DNA turned up on a vibrator that Linda’s husband uncovered in her luggage. McMahan also hints that Linda may not be his biological daughter, despite a DNA test he paid for showing with 99.7 percent probability that he is her father.”
Daddy’s Girl: Fisher Island millionaire Bruce McMahan loved his daughter so much, he married her.

This is by no means an isolated case. There’s an

online forum
dealing with, understanding, and building a space to discuss implications of GSA.
While researching this, as well as the other issues I’ve mentioned, I ran across a press release
announcing the publication of Unlearning Adoption
which I suspect will be confronting more of these issues in a comprehensive way. I’ve ordered it, and I’m looking forward to reading it. I may be
the only one out there who finds these issues compelling, but I
suspect that there are more people out there who are adopted than most people realize.

In previous a installment of this column, I’ve touched on some of the ways that
adoption was portrayed in comics and film. Today I’ve covered what I feel are the most compelling issues that adoption, as a social institution, has created.
The next installment of The Yellow Sign I’ll be looking at some of the other occulted threads that tie together other works, so if this installment seems a
little light on the esoteric and a little heavy on the pedantic be sure to tune in next time for something completely different.