Susan Devan Harness's Blog: Featured Author - Virginia Festival of the Book

Last April I spoke with Lizzie Hudson, for her podcast Trauma Matters. We spoke about those issues so important to me: American Indian children who have been (and are continuing to be) placed in white homes, and the social memories and cultural structures that make it so difficult for us to lay claim to our heritage. This is a two-part podcast titled Footprints that Don’t Go Away. Part I discusses the brutal history of settler colonialism, and Part II discusses the trauma we adoptees experience(d) in our daily lives moving around this settler colonized space. Yes, it may make you uncomfortable to listen, but I urge you to sit with that discomfort, look at it from a variety of perspectives, and ask yourself if such placements are always “in the best interests of the child.”

 

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post, mainly because I’ve been meeting deadlines!  Here are some events to keep in mind, if you like YA books, are interested in conversations of historical connections, or like podcasts that reveal the inside experiences of a person (me).

Today (First, my YA fiction story, “Shawl Dance”, became part of the YA anthology When We Become Ours, and is being released today, October 24. Edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung, it is a collection of heartfelt writings by adoptees for adoptees. Although this link is Amazon, you can purchase the book wherever books are sold. I highly recommend it for adoptees, adoptive parents, schools, libraries, and anyone interested in our experiences navigating adoptive spaces. Second, the virtual book launch for When We Become Ours happens tonight, October 24. You can join by clicking on this crowdcasting link, crowdcast.io/c/whenwebecomeours .  You will be asked to register, but the best thing is IT IS FREE! It begins at 7 p.m. ET. Hope to see you there! On November 15, from 7 p.m. to 9 .m. ET I will be talking with historian and Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation’s director Christy Coleman at the Director’s Series Fireside Chats at the Jamestown Museum in Williamsburg, VA. Our recent phone call created a fabulous starting point for a very interesting conversation about colonization, assimilation, and American Indian child welfare. Please visit https://www.jyfmuseums.org/events/directors-series/susan-devan-harness for more information. The Fireside chat will also be available virtually, and the registration information is included on the site. I am so honored, and excited, to be part of this conversation! On November 19, at the Loyalty Bookstore on the Marina in San Francisco, amazing author, Kelley Baker, and I will be appearing for an in-person book launch of When We Become Ours.  Readings and discussion will be held at 6 p.m., moderated by Katie Wynen. Again, it is a free event, but registration is requested. I’m looking forward to seeing some familiar faces, and always meeting new people! And, lastly, last April, I was invited to give a workshop at the Speaking of the Children conference in Omaha, Nebraska. While there, I spoke with Lizzie Hudson, a FABULOUS interviewer for the Trauma Matters Podcast about issues of transracial child placement, and more specifically about American Indian transracial adoption. We spoke for over 90 minutes, and that interview was divided into two segments, the first one dropped yesterday, and the second one airs on November 20th.  You can listen to these interviews wherever you get your podcasts.  Please, give a listen. I am SO proud of this conversation, elicited by Ms. Hudson. Who knew that my exploratory research of 20 American Indian transracial adoptees nearly two decades ago, and a memoir  would garner this much interest that become part of larger cultural conversations?  I’m so honored my work has done just that.  

What an amazing day in history!

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a piece of legislation that the Brackeens, a white couple from Texas who felt ‘called’ to adopt American Indian children, fought to overturn. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA).

They weren’t the only foster parents who have fallen prey to becoming pawns in the anti-ICWA lawsuit crowd. They were just the most recent.

ICWA was the legal response to the Indian Adoption Project, a social experiment that sought to measure if American Indian children removed from their Indian families and tribes would thrive when placed into non-Native homes. The study was conducted between 1958-1969, in an informal agreement between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Child Welfare League of America. The CWLA has since apologized for its role in the study.

Early findings of the Indian Adoption Project indicated that children did indeed seem to thrive. Nearly 400 children were in the pool of the project.  The project received over 5,000 adoption applications from white parents who sought to ‘save the poor, forgotten Indian child.’  At that point, the flood gates opened for anyone interested in obtaining or placing an American Indian child. Placements were handled by state social services, private agencies, as well as religious agencies, including Catholic Charities, Lutheran Family Services, the Pentecostals, The Mormons, and the Jews.  By 1972 it was estimated that between 25% and 35% of American Indian children had been placed into non-Native homes. A third of the American Indian child population! 

It should be noted that David Fanshel, the lead researcher, did provide a caveat to the findings. “My study has followed the children while they are still relatively young and just about to embark upon their school careers…It is to be expected that as our Indian adoptees get older, the prevalence of problems will increase… (Fanshel 1972, 323). Because, Fanshel states, that during adolescence the factor of racial difference looms larger (Fanshel 1972, 339).  But his biggest contribution to what would become ICWA was his belief that the United States shouldn’t determine what should happen to Indian children; that should be left to the tribes. “It is my belief that only the Indian people have the right to determine whether their children can be placed in white homes (Fanshel 1972, 341).”

ICWA was established to protect American Indian families, communities, and tribes from the genocidal practice of interracial child adoption. By 1978 their children were flying off the reservation as biased, well-meaning but misguided non-Natives sought, and continue to seek, a home in which to provide a safe haven for the ‘poor, forgotten Indian child.’ Except bringing an Indian child into the dominant culture that has a long history of anti-Indian sentiment, didn’t provide a haven. In fact, that practice is extremely harmful to the child (Harness, 2018). The wounds inflicted by the dominant culture in their racist slurs, long-held attitudes, and beliefs of low academic abilities and achievements, perceived genetic characteristics that make us prone to substance use and abuse, as well as a general perspectives that American Indians are  lazy and government subsidized do so much harm (Harness, 2009).  We carry so much shame on our small shoulders and have for too many decades, thanks to such acts of saviorism.

The dominant culture, which has fanned long-held beliefs about American Indians, is ruled by old white, moneyed men.  This same group is the one that filter insidious information to others in the group about who makes better parents, without telling the whole story of forced assimilation, of the 1,000 wars fought against American Indians on our soil since 1775, of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, of Indian education, which I call cultural re-education, that was implemented through religious schooling and given finesse by the U.S. government boarding school programs.  Don’t forget the Termination and Relocation Acts of 1950s, or of American Indian interracial adoption of the 1960 through the late 1970s. Every single one of these pogroms on U.S. soil was designed to annihilate the Indian. If they couldn’t kill us, they’d make us become one of them. That way, my thinking goes, when they screw us over, we won’t notice because we’ll all be on the same page. This ruling class of old, white, moneyed men stand to benefit the most of our disappearance, in terms of land and acquisition of resources, which is really what the Indian wars and culture wars have always been about. 

The bloody battles with tribes still continue, moving from the grasslands to the courtrooms.

And if you think I’m being dramatic, I want you to consider this one question:

How would you feel if your white children were physically taken from your family, your community and placed with an American Indian family in and American Indian community because it was considered, by the law in the land, to be in the best interests of the child?

 Fanshel, David. 1972. Far from the Reservation. Scarecrow Press.

Harness, Susan. 2009. Mixing Cultural Identities Through Transracial Adoption. Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston.

Harness, Susan, 2018. Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

The world gets so heavy sometimes, like a four-ton truck being lifted by a baby; the violence, the guns, the brainwashing of young minds not for good but for nefarious benefit, the hatred, the anger, the lies, the winning-at-all-costs belief that a system will pay out just to you; I’ve read Eve Ensler’s book In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer, where she describes her cancer arising from the heavy emotional toll of seeing and witnessing the ravages of Congoese men on women, specifically in the form of violent sexual aggression, much of it with the intent of destroying their uteruses. Her life’s work has to been to provide safety and medical care to the victims.  I’ve read A Long Way gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier, by Ismael Beah, an orphan whose only means of survival in west Africa was to the join a military group that fought all other military groups, it’s youth were the pawns and the fodder. They were provided drugs to make killing ok, servicing adult men do-able, live with themselves and their actions just a bit livable. I think of the gun violence that men in this country (and women) are absolutely ok with because without it, “‘they’ might take away our guns!”

Again, children as pawns and fodder.

How dare we hold our heads up, as Americans, when we are willing to turn the other way because someone else’s loss of rights and dignities might be an omen for ours. How dare we believe ourselves to be the upholders of truth when we allow the brutalization of others to exist, in our own communities and families, without speaking out. When did we become such cowards? When did we become so weak? We’ve dropped the morals we declare our ancestors of possessing, within a few generations.

I’m getting older. I feel it, mainly in my bones as my inability to accept the world we’ve been in a process of creating for so many generations it’s hard to count. But am at the tail end of a generation that truly fought for a better world, a just world, a clean world, and that generation who led the fight are aging and dying. Who is going to take their place? Who is caring enough, not frightened of repercussions, strong enough to push forward those goals? Now. Before we as a human species are totally gone, extinct, poof? Who is going to argue and protest and demand a world within which their children will grow, will thrive? Not just survive.

I have a friend; we talk about the horrors. Because they keep me awake at night, sometimes. I look at my granddaughter and tears of overwhelming love come to my eyes. I look at my puppy, and a similar thing happens. I look at my husband, my beautiful family, my gorgeous, passionate, socially involved friends and my heart swells. But it’s like living in an apartment, all of us sharing this same space. Outside, beyond the stoop is a world that scares the shit outta me. And we, these generations living right now, are feeding that beast, and thinking it will go away.

We, as a society, care more about our money than the person who lost their job, lost everything (and didn’t have much to begin with). We grumble about their tent cities, their anger, their lack of bodily care, their inability to deal with a world that would place them in the barrow ditch of society and walk away.  We care more about giving endless money to lying politicians who promise us a profane future instead of sowing that money ourselves into a world we actively want our children and grandchildren to live in, grow up in, thrive in; not merely survive. We prop up religions that damn us to hell for finding love; we give them money to steal people’s babies (read The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce) and give them to someone else (for a price); to hide their violent men in other cities, rural communities or other countries; or to hide them within their own walls surrounded by rites and rituals that make them untouchable.

Shame on us for being so scared and so weak to speak truth to such power. To believe such lies, to be prepared to lose our innocence in our search for wealth.

But, such life of awareness does require balance. And mine comes from the beautiful, deep and thought-provoking writings of women who work to actively see the beauty around us. They don’t advocate magical thinking; they advocate spots of beauty as gardens to grow more such spaces.

Today, my bright moment of hope comes from Sasha Sagan’s book For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World. Sasha is Carl Sagan‘s daughter.

“My parents taught me that universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye. And they taught me that, as they once wrote, “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

I would like to add empathy, compassion, and kindness to that. Perhaps they are the particles, the molecules that create love, the foundational building blocks of a structure that changes our world.

Yes, the world can be a dark place, but we created that darkness.

It can be a place of light, but we need to create that light.

Your job today: find one small, hidden, thing that, upon seeing it, brings such joy as to be nearly overwhelming. And let your mind sit with that discovery.

I am so honored to have been invited to be a presenter at this year’s Speaking of the Children Conference in LaVista, Nebraska.  This conference is heavily attended by people in all aspects of child welfare, including social workers, law enforcement, mental health specialists, lawyers and now a cultural anthropologist!

Historical events and policies, designed to break up American Indian families and communities, have left pain and suffering in their wake.  As a result, for many decades, American Indian children have been removed from their families and placed with non-Native families because it was thought they could be saved from being American Indian.  Unfortunately, child placement professionals, as well as prospective and adoptive parents are unaware of the social structures that exist in our society, and their rootedness in anti-Indian sentiment.  These are the same structures that transracially adopted children attempt to navgate far beyond childhood.

This was a major plank for establishing the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which is currently under scrutiny by the U.S. Supreme Court as it seeks to determine its constitutionality.   

My workshop will discuss why it is important for everyone to understand, child welfare professionals and adoptive families, that American Indian children have a right to their heritage, and a right to know who they came from and where they came from. Creating bonds with first families and first communities will strengthen a child’s identity within themselves and create resiliency that will carry them through a challenging life in the white world.

This is an important aspect of the dominant culture that is overlooked in other disciplines, and whose ideas lay the foundation for how a child views themselves.

The conference is being held April 18-19, at the Embassy Suites Conference Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Sign up now!

Like last year, autumn will be slow in coming.  It will be awhile before we can leave behind the 90+ degree days that we’ve experienced too many times this summer, and last.



I look forward to autumn. There is a change in the air that other seasons don’t convey; autumn encompasses all the senses.  It is a time when the trees and shrubs throw off their cloaks of vibrant reds, oranges, burgundys, yellows, and yes, some are still green.  I breathe and inhale the earth in the early process of decay, when the well-nourished soil is sharp with an edge of mustiness, when the compost pile’s warmth comes from breaking down the biota for next spring.  In the heat of this summer I close my eyes and feel a an autumn breeze brush against my face, I watch as it pulls the leaves from their fragile hold and sends them skittering down the asphalt. I open my eyes and look toward the garden, now promising a bounty beyond measure.  I know in a month or so, the tomatoes will ripen and nearly burst filled with seas which will begin their own glorious attempt at reproduction before the frosts of October. 

But now I’m in the midst of summer, blazing hot with a level of humidity that slacks my hair and keeps my face nearly free of wrinkles!  See?  It’s that awareness of the quick passage of time that continues to follow me through this year of seasons.  Age no longer is just a number, it is a reality.  I’m 63, and I feel its weight in a new way.   In the hot winds that blow, I hear the wind whispering  ‘hurry up,’  ‘accomplish those things you always wanted to do. ‘  It prods me to think about my purpose, which I’ve played with and then place aside as I become a shadow of Scarlett O’Hara – “I’ll worry about that tomorra.” 

Except tomorrow is nearly here, and time is running out.  



That’s not my mind speaking, that’s nature, with her memories and understandings of the seasons as years wax and wane.  Nature’s nemesis is our consumer culture, filled with marketing–creams that magically make the wrinkles  disappear overnight!.  And celebrity images, the 60-year-olds with so much plastic surgery to make them look 30, except when they were really 30, they looked great, now some of them look desperate; and pithy sayings designed to trick your mind–50 is the new 40!  Except we are still 50 and our bodies and minds are telling us to get busy and take care of the important shit. 

But, these mind games are so alluring.  They allow us to dream, to remember a time when we could run with the speed and agility of a gazelle, carry out a list of to-do items in a single day, have sex without additional creams and gels near the bedstand.

The thing is, nature is abrupt and at times flat-out-not-gentle in her reminders that culture’s capitalistic messages are just smoke and mirrors.  They hide the fact that we should feel lucky we are old enough to have wrinkles, around our eyes and our mouths which crinkle and pleat when we smile and laugh. My one-year-old grandson, who died of liver failure in 2013, never got to develop such wrinkles; his laughter was taken away  at much too young of age.  I think of him now because the seasons near the time of year when he sat in a crib, hooked up to so many monitors, his belly growing a little every day, his time quickly running out. He reminds me that we should be happy we lived until 50, or 60, or 80, or beyond, because the lessons we’ve learned, that we’ve been forced to accept as part of life, have taught us (hopefully) humility, compassion, patience, and grace.  These are the lessons that allow us, as a human species, to move forward, to survive.  



Last year I’d arranged to have tea with a woman well into her 80s, who was still writing and publishing books of historical fiction, of life in the prairie, or in the small start-up towns of Colorado.  Her tenacity to move forward despite losing her husband several years before, despite challenges to her health, despite a culture that tells her that she’s too old to worry about stuff like writing  Too closely associated with these great memories are the memories of my disappearance from her life for long periods of time.  I have to say, I am embarrassed I hadn’t been a terribly good friend as we’ve both grown older.   I didn’t visit much, or call her.  I was so wrapped up in my messages of ‘time is passing,’  I forgot hers was passing as well.  We had the tea, a beautiful conversation, and she was gone a month later.  Harsh reminders.

I remember one of my writing professors noted that many my stories contained  conversations with older women.  “That’s interesting,” he said and inclined his head to one side.  “Were you looking for mentors?”

“Looking back, I guess so,” I answered.  “I enjoyed their stories, about how they dealt with aspects of life as they got older.  I think they were important in helping me figure out who I am, and why my exisitance is meaningful.”

Although it was women that he pointed out, I assure you there’s no gender bias.  I’ve learned lessons from older men as well: friends, and my father-in-law, who taught me how to retire gracefully, how to look back at a lived life with precision and acknowledge its valleys and sorrows, and how to voice regrets.  But mainly, how to take the time remaining to bring the things that are out of balance back into balance.

“So, you look for wisdom in these friendships.” 

I nodded.

But like my friend from last fall, so many of them have passed away, their lives captured by old age, cancer, or a body just giving out. So many of these people intersection with my life in profound ways, some of them for years, others for moments. The moments of intersection have the most clarity.  

For instance, the woman who told me of her breast cancer in the fruit aisle, three months before I was diagnosed.  Or the elderly man who kept looking at broccoli as he told me of his prostate cancer. The 60-something year-old man who watched with something like fondness as my two young boys, barely out of toddler-hood, pulled videos off the shelves at the video store.   Perhaps he sensed the height of my frustration, saw it in my actions as I pulled my eldest son away from the shelf, heard it in my voice as I told both of them to sit down and be still.   “You know,” he said gently as he reached down and picked up a few of the videos, “I’d lost both of my children when they were in their early 20s, only two years apart. One died of an illness, the other in a brutal car accident.  I would have loved to have grandchildren.  Even if they did this.”  He gave me a sad smile.  “You never know what’s going to happen; enjoy them.”

There was the woman who sat in the radiation waiting room, her head shaved, barely healed cuts crossing her scalp, her large brown eyes held acceptance and tentative hope. Brain cancer.  She never said it, but the cuts told the stories.  The thing is, I swear, I saw this woman a few months back at the grocery story.  Our gazes met, but neither of us acknowledged the other.  Perhaps it wasn’t her, but I so hoped it was.

By sharing their vignettes, each of these people left me with such wisdom, with such grace, and an and overwhelming sense of gratitude. 

So that torch that lays at my feet–the one they, and my one-year-old grandson Riley, Mom, Evelyn, Gyda, Bill, and Ronni, and so many others, used to light my way through the complexities of a lived life, reveal difficult subjects and murky answers, and show me the important difference between judgements and understanding; the oned who showed me how a steep walk up a rocky hill can reveal the most amazing  views at the top– that torch is mine to pick up, to carry.  My role, as an elder, is to illuminate paths of wisdom gleaned from rocky trails of joys and sorrows, to share my own stories of survival and what that looks like, enroute.  And I will share them with whomever is interested in listening.

So, grab a cup of tea and sit with me and we’ll talk about the things that matter.

I am so honored to be part of James Welch Native Lit Festival, where important conversations of what it means to be Indigenous will be held in Missoula Montana July 28, 29, and 30th.  To be  amid such notable colleagues as Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange, Debra Earling, and so many others is definintely heady and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

All events are free and open to the public.  For dates, attendance information,click here.  Hope to see you there!

 

 

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In 2019, I was interviewed by Huffpost as part of an article that explores the question Who Should Be Allowed to Adopt American Indian Children? Great question as conservatives and religious communities attempt to remove the Indian Child Welfare Act from Legislation. Read the article; watch the mini–documentary, by journalists Jennifer Bendery,Isaac Himmelman, and Lena Jackson.

 

The post U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether ICWA is unconstitutional. Why should you care? first appeared on SUSAN DEVAN HARNESS Author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption.

Recently, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett suggested that child placement through adoption makes Roe V. Wade a moot point. And there are pleny of myths that point to this seemingly painless transaction.  But as Katherine Joyce, a writer for Salon, states, “the suggestion that adoption entails nothing more than several months of inconvenience before women can wash their hands of the entire ordeal profoundly fails to understand how relinquishment affects parents.”   It also fails to convey the trauma that is experienced by adoptees when, even as newborns, they are removed from their first families. And to be so 

In May, the Petrie-Flom Blog at the Harvard School of Health covered the issues of Adoption, Family Separation and Preservation, and Reproductive Justice, tackling such issues as  adoption  reproductive justice, perpetuations of adoption myths, and the racialized history of the practice of adoption among so many other  timely and well focused examinations of the problematic  issues child placement through adoption raises.  

I was honored to be invited to write about Native American transracial adoption, highlighting some of the findings from my research.  And to be part of a triad that dicussed the issues of the Indian Child Welfare Act (author Kathryn Fort) and policies and practices in the Indigenous community from relinquishment to family preservation (Lauren van Schilfgaarde, Cochiti Pueblo) was inspirational.

I hope you take time to read the amazing essays from this really important symposium of adoption and social justice.  Thank you Gretchen Sisson for the invitation to be part of this really important work.

The post Adoption and Reproductive Justice – Petrie-Flom Blog Digital Symposium first appeared on SUSAN DEVAN HARNESS Author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption.

Join me as I talk with three outstanding adoptee writers who have written memoirs about their experience:  I will be speaking with Jan Beatty, author of American Bastard: A Memoir (Red Hen Press, 2021), Megan Culhaine Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Savior (Mad Creek Books–An imprint of Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 2021), and Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related  (McClelland & Steward–Division of Penguid Random House Canada, Ltd, 2019) about their writing, their use of form and technique as well as the complexities of the stories they tell regarding their adoption experiences, among so many other topics.  Please visit Adopteelitfest.com to register – it’s free!

The post Adoptee Literary Festival – Moderating the Memoir Panel first appeared on SUSAN DEVAN HARNESS Author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption.