International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture Transnational, Transracial and Transcultural Narratives 978-3-319-59942-7, 3319599429, 978-3-319-59941-0

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the USA and Canada (Roger L. Nichols)....Pages 3-26
Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s (Margaret D. Jacobs)....Pages 27-50
“Disastrous Adoption”? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing (Mark Shackleton)....Pages 51-68
Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (Pirjo Ahokas)....Pages 69-97
Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (Bo Pettersson)....Pages 99-118
Front Matter ....Pages 119-119
Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives (Lena Ahlin)....Pages 121-142
The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (Begoña Simal-González)....Pages 143-171
Front Matter ....Pages 173-173
Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s Twin Sisters: A World Apart (Alan Shima)....Pages 175-195
Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s) (Rosemarie Peña)....Pages 197-220
Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction (Christine Vogt-William)....Pages 221-253
“A daughter three thousand miles off”: Transcultural Adoption in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (Jane Weiss)....Pages 255-276
Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America, and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena (John McLeod)....Pages 277-295
Back Matter ....Pages 297-306

Citation preview

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION IN NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Transnational, Transracial, and Transcultural Narratives EDITED BY MARK SHACKLETON

International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture

Mark Shackleton Editor

International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture Transnational, Transracial and Transcultural Narratives

Editor Mark Shackleton Department of Modern Languages/English University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISBN 978-3-319-59941-0 ISBN 978-3-319-59942-7  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944112 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Samantha Johnson Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ulla

Preface

The initial impetus for this volume was the Transnational and Transracial Adoption in North American Culture Conference at Turku University, Finland, in August 2015, but from a wider perspective this volume reflects the increasing interest in the field of adoption studies, particularly over the last decade. The work of Marianne Novy on literary and cultural approaches to adoption should first be acknowledged, the two volumes, Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (2004) and Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (2005), being the starting point for many in this field. Since her pioneering work, more recent work includes Mark C. Jerng’s Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (2010), David L. Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010), Cynthia Callahan’s Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature (2011), and Margaret Homans’s The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (2013). The most recent addition to the field is John McLeod’s Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (2015). This volume contributes to and builds upon the work of these predecessors. The focus is North America, primarily on account of the number of literary works and films that have appeared in recent years which deal with transnational, transracial and transcultural themes, reflecting the interconnections between the North American continent and the world at large. An example of this are the stories in Aimee Phan’s We Should vii

viii  Preface

Never Meet (2004), which have in the background “Operation Babylift,” the airlifting and adoption of 3,000 displaced children from wartime Vietnam (see Simal-González in this volume). This collection of articles also enlarges the notion of transnational beyond the America-world paradigm by looking at the recent history of North America in terms of its internal adoption policies. “Transnational” here focuses on nations within the nation state, namely the Indigenous peoples of North America, who until relatively recently have been regarded as equivalent to “wards of the state.” Adoption and fostering procedures both in Canada and the USA were designed, particularly in the 1960s, to absorb what in Canada are known as “the First Nations” into one nation through forms of compulsory assimilation. The failure of such policies and the negative effects such official adoption procedures had on the Indigenous peoples of North America provide the theme for a number of the contributions to this volume. The division of this book into Native North America, America and Asia, and America and Europe is designed to offer a real-world geographical perspective and context, but readers will soon recognize ­cross-connections between chapters which override geography. As many adoption study scholars (Jerng, McLeod, Callahan) have pointed out, where adoption arrangements seek to provide a solution to social problems, race and culture are always involved, as are inequalities and hierarchies of power. Moreover, far from the comfortable notion of what Marianne Novy has called the “happy adoption” archetype (the Oliver Twist story), adoption is frequently accompanied by anxiety and insecurity in all members of the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees). But having said this, it would be just as short-sighted to frame adoption within motifs of disaster as it would be to be naively optimistic. The recent work by John McLeod acknowledges the inequalities and painful realities which often surround adoption, but at the same time seeks to uncover the positives that transcultural adoption can make possible. It is this tension that underlies many of the explorations of history, film and creative writing in this volume. This collection of articles opens with a historical perspective. Roger Nichols looks at adoption policies for Native people in Canada and the USA over the last fifty years, tracing the changes in how transracial adoption programs were run from the infamous “Sixties Scoop” in Canada to the custody battle over Baby Veronica (a Cherokee girl adopted by a white family) in 2013 in the USA. The governmental policies concerning

Preface

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Indigenous adoption in the two countries are shown to be widely ­different and highly similar. Assimilationist adoption programs in which Native babies were seized and placed in non-Native families were more vigorously carried out in Canada than in the USA during the Sixties, but in both countries such programs were largely halted by the 1980s. This is not to say that foster care issues and social welfare questions among the Indigenous people of North America have by any means been solved. A case in point is provided by Margaret D. Jacobs, who investigates the 1970s’ case of three Métis children in Saskatchewan, who were removed from their foster parents and placed with a white adoptive couple in Michigan on the grounds that the children would then gain more “stimulation” and a stronger sense of “permanency.” The case is highly illustrative of the unexamined class, racial and colonial biases that enabled authorities to intervene and undermine Indigenous families and communities. The child’s “best interests” is still a watchword in current-day adoption, but it is a notion that requires intense scrutiny. Nichols’ and Jacobs’s studies provide a historical backcloth for Mark Shackleton’s literary investigations of the adoption of Native children with intellectual disability. In the USA, the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 aimed to counter the excesses of state adoption programs and to ensure that tribes can exercise their sovereign authority over child custody proceedings. Shackleton sees the spirit of the Child Welfare Act at work in two plays by Tomson Highway (Cree) and in the novel Four Souls by Ojibwe novelist Louise Erdrich. In these works, the tribal community takes care of its own, and even Native children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome and intellectual disability are not “adopted out” or handed over to the authorities, but are brought up either by the birth mother or by the extended family of the tribe. They subsequently play a constructive role in the community at large. These works represent a form of resistance to the notion of “adopting out,” question anxieties about disability, and challenge automatic enthusiasm for transracial and transnational adoption. Pirjo Ahokas’s chapter is also a literary analysis with a historical underpinning. In the USA, the Indian Adoption Project (IAP 1950–1967) promoted the transracial fostering and adoption of Native American children, especially by white American middle-class couples. Ahokas looks at Solar Storms by Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) and Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), whose protagonists suffer from the consequences of the IAP. Ahokas’s article explores how individual

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traumas need to be seen within the context of historical trauma, or in the trenchant words of Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sun Yung Shin and Jane Jeong Trenka, transcultural adoptions are “the intimate face of colonization, racism, militarism, imperialism, and globalization.”1 As Shackleton’s article also points out, tribal homecoming is seen as a means of healing, although the “return to roots” motif so common in adoption narratives is not always efficacious. The protagonist of Hogan’s novel does return to her roots, but for Alexie’s protagonist there is no tribal homecoming, for the scars of cultural schizophrenia are too deep to heal. Bo Pettersson’s chapter concludes the Native North American section with a study of the ways in which tropes of adoption can be utilized for dubious and self-seeking ends. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (1976), the alleged autobiography of an Indian boy adopted by his Cherokee grandparents, has been a highly popular text among non-Native readers. The writer, however, is in fact the white supremacist Asa Earl Carter, and his adoption of an Indian identity and cynical manipulation of the “happy adoption” theme is a classic example of textual deception. Transracial fostering and adoption have not infrequently evoked notions of “compassionate benevolence” and “racial harmony,”2 but Carter’s spurious autobiography, written for fame and fortune, shows how easy it is to sentimentalize adoption and sugarcoat prejudice. The following section, entitled Asia and America contains studies by Lena Ahlin and Begoña Simal-González, which both address the work of Jane Jeong Trenka. Trenka’s works are key texts in transnational adoption literature as they question to what extent transcultural adoption has transfigurative potential, or what John McLeod has called “adoptive being.” Trenka was herself a Korean adoptee in the USA and subsequently repatriated to Korea, and her work ironizes the “rescue” motif, foregrounds the economic inequalities that underpin adoption, and yet (as both Ahlin and Simal-González argue) ultimately demonstrates the restorative potential of the transnational adoptee’s life narrative. Trenka’s work is also significant because it goes beyond the adoptive subject to the larger narratives of racialization and gendered exploitation, and speaks to the collective experience of Korean women. Once again, we see that transnational adoption literature is not a hermetically sealed box, but addresses broad issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and identity. The final section, Europe and America, begins with Alan Shima’s analysis of Mona Friis Bertheussen’s documentary film Twin Sisters, which concerns Chinese identical twins who were separated at birth, one

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living in Norway and the other in the United States. The film is shown to mythologize biogenetic attachment, the ties of blood, a common feature of sentimental adoption narratives. This emphasis has the effect of obscuring the economic, social, and legal contexts and materialities of transnational adoption. Shima’s study contrasts nicely with Rosemarie Peña’s chapter on the emerging socio-political histories of the post-World War II cohort of dual heritage German African American adoptees. Nearly 5,000 children were born between 1945 and 1955 to white German women and African American Occupational troops; many of them were adopted by African American couples in the United States. The emotional challenges these transnational adoptees faced had certain common features, including the trauma of displacement and experiences of racism, but the degree of resilience to these challenges varied from individual to individual. The childhoods of Black German children adopted by military couples were also very different from those of adoptees growing up in civilian families. Peña clarifies that no overarching or monolithic Black German American adoption experience can be posited. Christine Vogt-William’s study of transracial adoption in contemporary South Asian diasporic women’s fiction also emphasizes the range of potential experiences and reactions that can take place within the triad of birth mother, adoptive child and adoptive mother. Vogt-William’s main texts are Bharti Kirchner’s Shiva Dancing and Sharon Maas’s The Speech of Angels, which address the fortunes of two young girls from different parts of India who are adopted by white parents in the USA and in Germany. On the evidence of these texts, transracial adoption further complicates the already complex situation of diasporic life with regard to questions of kinship systems, cultural heritages, and citizenship. The question raised is whether the transracial adoptee can ever find “home,” or whether family alignments and ideas of kinship within transracial adoption should best be understood as a form of “painful unbelonging.” What constitutes “home,” belonging, and identity for the transcultural adoptee is also the focus of Jane Weiss’s study of Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World (1850). Warner’s novel, a bestseller of its time, concerns the compromises and adaptations required of the young orphaned heroine when on the death of her parents she is uprooted from New York and is forced to live with wealthy kin in Scotland. Usually read as a pious Bildungsroman of Christian fortitude, Weiss rereads The Wide Wide World in the light of the notion of “adoptive being.” The tropes of domestic fiction, a genre often dismissed as sentimental or simplistic,

xii  Preface

in fact authorize Warner to complicate and problematize narrative ­conventions of “happy” or “disastrous” adoption and to subvert normative constructions of the family. In the multiple adoptions of the text, the heroine reinvents herself through a web of affiliations that comprise ancestry, spirituality, circumstances, and personal choice. The closing chapter by John McLeod interrogates the Irish-US “adoption industry” through a close comparison of Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Stephen Frears’s film adaptation Philomena. The role of the Catholic Church and the Irish State in the history of Irish-US adoptions has until relatively recently been shrouded in secrecy, and the cruel treatment of unwed mothers and the children they were compelled to relinquish has also been concealed. Sixsmith’s book in particular explores what McLeod calls the “cruel chronology” of this transatlantic adoption, strategically connecting past practices to present pain. Both Sixsmith’s and Frears’s works demand acknowledgement of this sorry transatlantic history of sundering. It is to be hoped that this collection of articles will be of interest in the emerging field of adoption studies. It has aimed to be of value to literary scholars, historians, sociologists, and those working in cross-disciplinary cultural studies. The range of investigations covers Native North American writing, US–Korean writing, South Asian diaspora writing, the narratives of “war babies” who were adopted by American families after conflicts in both Europe and Viet Nam, and representations of transnational and transracial adoption through the medium of novels, short stories, memoirs, creative non-fiction, and film. The range and diversity of issues raised by adoption narratives involve but go beyond notions of family, kinship, and identity, to encompass issues of class, gender, ­ethnicity, and nationhood. Mark Shackleton

Helsinki, Finland

Notes 1.  Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sun Yung Shin and Jane Jeong Trenka, “Introduction,” in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Jane Jeong Trenka et al. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006), 7. 2. Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), xxvii.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who took part in and supported the Transnational and Transracial Adoption in North American Culture Conference that took place in August 2015 at Turku University, in particular Benita Heiskanen, Pirjo Ahokas, John McLeod, Clara Juncker and Jopi Nyman. My thanks go to colleagues at the University of Helsinki, Howard Sklar, Bo Pettersson and Nely Keinänen, who have supported me in this project and taken time out of their busy schedules to read drafts of my contribution to this volume. Special thanks go to Noora Kumpulainen for her invaluable work in helping me edit this volume.

xiii

Contents

Part I  Native North America 1

From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the USA and Canada 3 Roger L. Nichols

2

Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s 27 Margaret D. Jacobs

3

“Disastrous Adoption”? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing 51 Mark Shackleton

4

Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer 69 Pirjo Ahokas

xv

xvi  Contents

5

Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree 99 Bo Pettersson

Part II  Asia and America 6

Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives 121 Lena Ahlin

7

The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth 143 Begoña Simal-González

Part III  Europe and America 8

Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s Twin Sisters: A World Apart 175 Alan Shima

9

Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s) 197 Rosemarie Peña

10 Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction 221 Christine Vogt-William 11 “A daughter three thousand miles off”: Transcultural Adoption in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World 255 Jane Weiss

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  xvii

12 Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America, and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena 277 John McLeod Index 297

About

the

Editor

Mark Shackleton is Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Modern Languages (English), University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published widely on Native North American writing and postcolonial studies, including articles on Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Monique Mojica, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Simon J. Ortiz. Recent publications include the chapter on Canada in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007); Diasporic Literature and Theory: Where Now? (ed. Mark Shackleton, 2008); Canada: Images of a Post/National Society (ed. Gunilla Florby, Mark Shackleton and Katri Suhonen, 2009); and he is a contributor to the volume Thomas King: Works and Impact (ed. Eva Gruber, 2012).

xix

PART I

Native North America

CHAPTER 1

From the Sixties Scoop to Baby Veronica: Transracial Adoption of Indigenous Children in the USA and Canada Roger L. Nichols

From the late 1950s nearly to the present, both the United States and Canada had policies and programs designed to make American Indian and First Nations children available for long-term foster care or adoption by white families. Those efforts grew out of long-held negative ideas about Aboriginal cultures and the perceived inability of Native people to adapt or even survive in the modern world. As a result, many AngloEuropeans saw Indigenous people as having backward and inferior cultures. Rather than contributing anything to strengthen the developing white societies, they were regarded as physical obstacles to national expansion and development by holding the land and its resources while stubbornly refusing to accept the white invaders’ culture. According to this view, they faced extinction unless they entered the mainstream culture in each country, so acculturation became imperative. Even a cursory glance at the history of relations between the two settler societies and

R.L. Nichols (*)  University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_1

3

4  R.L. Nichols

their Indigenous neighbors demonstrates how these ideas permeated white thinking in North American history.1 Previously, those views had provided the basis for the so-called civilization or acculturation programs and the development of schools for Indian and First Nations children in both societies. In 1889 Thomas Jefferson Morgan, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, expressed the ideas that became the basis for American education policy. Calling for schools to assimilate children from the reservations, he stated that “education should seek the disintegration of the tribes […]. They should be educated, not as Indians, but as Americans.”2 A generation later, testifying before a Canadian parliamentary committee in 1920, Duncan C. Scott, head of the Department of Indian Affairs, echoed that idea. He stated that “our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question […].”3 The hearings resulted in new regulations which made it compulsory for all Canadian Indian children between the ages of 7 and 15 to attend a residential school. By the mid-twentieth century, the schools in both countries were coming under increasing criticism for mistreating the students, so the governments looked for new ways to deal with the children while also reducing expenditures on tribal and band programs. Years of widespread negative reporting that had focused on unemployment and abusive home conditions had created widespread public support for some action to help improve Indians’ lives. In these circumstances, concerned religious groups and social workers’ organizations came to support official efforts to replace the discredited boarding and residential schools with transracial foster care and adoption. In doing so they had two broad social motivations. First, they claimed their goal was to protect the children from abuse and poverty. Certainly, those conditions existed on both reserves and reservations in the two countries. At the same time, a second liberal, but more destructive motivation, existed. It sought to eliminate or at least undermine tribal and band cultures, families, and organizations, and gradually erase Native peoples from each nation’s ethnic landscape.4 Today many people in Canada and the USA know adoptees or families that added children not their own, but until the late 1950s the frequency of transracial adoptions remained limited by legal restrictions and negative racial attitudes. In the USA this changed slightly in 1958 when the Child Welfare League of America began its federally funded

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Indian Adoption Project. The program lasted until 1967, and during those nine years placed 395 American Indian children from sixteen western states with white families mostly in the Midwest and East. Although the effort remained small and ended less than ten years after it began, its director concluded that “no Indian child who can benefit from adoption should be deprived of that option.”5 Others agreed, and in the next decade the numbers of Indian children being removed from their families rose dramatically as public agencies moved large numbers of them into non-Indigenous homes. According to Native American activists, by the 1978 passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, US officials had removed between 25 and 35% of all Indian children for foster care or adoption outside the tribe.6 The Canadian practice of interracial adoption also increased markedly during the same period as officials removed First Nations babies from their families and placed them for adoption in Canadian and American middle-class homes. This included an estimated 20,000 children taken from the reserves in a practice known as the Sixties Scoop or the Canadian Scoops. Under this procedure, nurses and health workers often took newborn children directly from their mothers in the hospital, placing them in foster care or up for adoption. The practice continued until the late 1980s when objections by Ontario chiefs and a Manitoba inquiry criticized it harshly. Up to that time authorities had justified this action because of well-meaning objections to the widespread poverty and family abuse existing on the reserves, echoing the reasons given by their counterparts in the USA.7 An examination of recent child welfare practices in both nations suggests that, in theory, they are based on the broad goal of meeting the “best interests” and well-being of each child. Yet earlier that same approach stood as the justification for widespread interracial adoptions. While child welfare policies in the two countries have mirrored, merged, and overlapped repeatedly in the past few decades, two recent major pronouncements on this issue mark how much they have diverged. In the USA, the Supreme Court’s June 13, 2013 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (the Baby Veronica case) upheld the adoption of a part-Cherokee girl by a white South Carolina couple over the objections of the tribe. Two years later, on June 2, 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled its country’s actions toward Aboriginal families and children “cultural genocide” and called for major policy changes.8 These recent pronouncements suggest that the two societies are moving

6  R.L. Nichols

in different directions. Canadian leaders, at least on the surface, appear to want change and redress, while American officials do not consider the adoption of Indian children to be a significant issue. Rather, they have shifted their attention and efforts to dealing with the children of immigrants with questionable legal status.9 In the United States, through the Department of the Interior, the federal government held responsibility for dealing with the Indian tribes. It oversaw reservation activities and the boarding school system, but basically it left local social matters up to the individual states. By the postWorld War II era, three centuries of attitudes that considered Indians physically and mentally inferior people had made interracial adoptions undesirable at best. Yet the postwar impulse to free colonial peoples and end imperial controls around the world helped to change those ideas somewhat. By the 1950s, narrower demographic and funding issues had created a new situation for tribal people. In 1953 the federal Termination Program aimed at getting the government out of the Indian business began. This policy cut funding for reservation programs and shifted many of the costs to some of the states. Its closely related Relocation Program encouraged reservation dwellers to leave home and move to major urban centers with the promise of better housing and jobs.10 When the newly relocated Indian families encountered social and economic difficulties, they turned to nearby relief agencies for help. This forced local officials to find new ways to pay for or to avoid dealing with the growing costs of Indian social services. Whether they remained on the reservations or lived in urban ghettos, many American Indians experienced high levels of unemployment, extreme poverty, alcoholism, suicide, malnutrition, and high infant mortality rates. Often, they became entirely dependent on existing programs that lacked resources to deal with the increased numbers of recipients. When the welfare costs outran state appropriations, officials urged their congressmen to increase funding. After all, they reasoned, because reservation Indians paid no state taxes, the federal government should help fund social programs for tribal members. Obviously, this reasoning ran directly counter to congressional proponents of Termination, and so it failed.11 Instead, by the mid-1950s the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) determined that many of its boarding schools had become dumping grounds for dependent and neglected children. At that time, more than half of all reservation dwellers were minors, and administrators claimed that, because of the poverty and related social problems, children there

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needed outside help. They pointed to cases where even before they left the hospital young Indian mothers had agreed to or been persuaded to abandon their babies.12 Often that placed the children in the state foster care systems for years. When the associated costs strained welfare budgets even further, both federal and state officials looked for cost-cutting schemes for dealing with the issues. This effort to trim costs in the early 1950s coincided with efforts by the BIA’s Welfare Branch to find new ways for handling Indian children. Reports from the agency welfare staff highlighted what officials saw as an inability of many Indian families to care for their children. Reservation poverty often meant crowded housing, lack of sanitation, or abusive or absent parents. Supposedly, high rates of out-of-wedlock births among reservation women only made matters worse. Shocked social workers reported that often these children did not live with their mothers. Rather, they lived with their grandparents, close relatives, or even other families in their community. While Native Americans accepted corporate responsibility for raising the children, white agency workers saw this practice as irresponsible and dangerous for the children. One official reported that many of these children were left unsupervised on the reservation without proper care, and no permanent plan was made for them. In 1957 a nation-wide survey suggested that at least 1,000 Indian children who might be legally free for adoption were living in foster homes or other institutions.13 Responding to what it saw as a crisis in 1958, the Welfare Branch of the BIA asked the Child Welfare League of America to test the feasibility of interracial adoption for some of these children. This resulted in the Indian Adoption Project (IAP), initially designed to place between fifty and one hundred tribal children considered to be “deprived of families” for placement in white homes. Organizers expected that qualified researchers would evaluate the results, and, if those proved acceptable, the bureaucrats proposed creating a permanent interstate program. From its inception, the effort operated entirely without any advice or suggestions from reservation governments or the families it might affect. The new program hired Arnold Lyslo to direct its operations. From the start, the IAP sought to move children from western reservations to families in the East. Of the 395 children involved, one went to California, four to Arkansas, and twenty-four to Iowa, while the others went to eastern states.14 With less than eight percent of the children still in the West, the operation took the earlier boarding school and foster care efforts of

8  R.L. Nichols

disrupting Indian families to their logical conclusion. Now, rather than returning home as partly acculturated older teenagers or young adults, the children would disappear into white society. In 1967 the IAP ended its independent operations and merged into the broad-based Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA). At that point, the IAP director Arnold Lyslo cited the development of adoption programs in twenty-six states and Puerto Rico, a backlog of 5,000 prospective adoptive families, and the fading of prejudice against interracial placements as positive achievements. Of equal importance, he noted the increased social services for unwed Indian mothers as a major result of the program, and pointed to frequent cooperation of tribal courts in the adoption processes. Writing two years after the program ended, he pointed to the families who still hoped to adopt a child and wrote that “no Indian child who can benefit from adoption should be deprived of this opportunity.”15 The effort to place Indian children in off-reservation homes continued, led by ARENA. In 1968 it announced a “New Service for Adoption Agencies.” Clara Swan, its director, wrote that since 1955 it had begun to promote and establish state exchanges, and that forty-seven state or provincial exchanges existed in the USA and Canada. Again, their goal was to find homes for children considered too old, different racially, physically handicapped, or with serious emotional problems. Indian children fell into the “different” category and, according to Ms. Swan, they constituted the largest number of interracial adoptions the state exchanges completed. By the 1978 passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, this effort had placed several hundred more Indian children in white homes. Her report echoed many ideas others had expressed as representing the most advanced thinking of that day.16 While social workers and bureaucrats saw their actions as giving tribal children the opportunity to escape poverty at home and enter the American middle class, Indian families and reservation governments objected repeatedly. They came to recognize correctly that the adoption process was just another white attack on their culture. Yet when Indian families or individual mothers objected to whites seizing their children, they had little legal recourse. Without knowledgeable advisors and lacking money for lawyers, they rarely took their cases to court. When they tried, the legal system and unsympathetic judges often ruled against them. Gradually, this brought the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), a long-time advocate for Indian rights, into the picture. Even

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before their 1969 and 1974 surveys showing large percentages of Indian children living away from their families in white foster care or adoptive homes, the group began to represent tribes and individuals trying to retain or reclaim their children. For example, in 1967, Bertram Hirsch, one of its young lawyers, helped the Sioux couple Louis and Janet Goodhouse block the removal of Ivan Brown, a six-year-old boy, from his grandmother’s home. Although not a blood relative, she served as a grandmother by tribal custom. The local authorities did not charge the sixty-three-year-old Mrs. Alex Funey with neglect, only that she was too old to care for the boy properly. Attorney Hirsch persuaded the county authorities to end their effort.17 During the early 1970s the AAIA worked to focus attention on Indian adoptions. Its data showed that in some states the authorities put Indian children up for adoption ten to fifteen times as often as whites. Their findings pointed out prejudice against and misunderstanding of tribal customs by social service workers and local judges, who saw only that Indian families failed to meet expected mainstream middle-class standards. The AAIA’s quiet legal approach brought significant gains in several states, including Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Often, they demonstrated irregular actions toward Indian families, such as not providing them with legal counsel or placing single parents under duress and demanding that they sign legal documents they did not understand. At the same time, the organization sought national legislation to develop a uniform system to protect tribal and parental rights.18 Their first significant progress came in 1972, when South Dakota Senator James Abourezk introduced a bill designed to clarify the powers of tribal courts and to limit state courts’ jurisdiction over many reservation matters. During the hearings that year, individuals, families, and tribal leaders all testified about the devastating impact of white efforts to remove their children and the negative effects of foster care and adoption programs. Calvin Isaac, Chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, stated that “if our children […] are raised in non-Indian homes” chances for tribal cultural survival are “significantly reduced.” Winnebago leader Louis La Rose echoed that fear. “The cruelest trick that the white man has ever done to Indian children,” he reported, was to place them in white homes. When one of those children returned to the reservation, he did not know his relatives and effectively became “a non-person.”19 While Congress passed several other Indian-related bills, during the hearings for what became the Indian Child Welfare Act, that legislation

10  R.L. Nichols

faced continuing opposition. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormons) had long had its own Indian adoption program, which by the 1970s included at least 5,000 children, so it opposed efforts to change the existing system. National and state social workers’ organizations rejected claims that reservation Indian childrearing and family practices protected the children. Some state welfare bureaucracies saw reform of existing polices as an attack on their operations, while the widespread idea that reservations and urban Indian communities suffered severe poverty and family issues supported demands for removing the children for their own good.20 This opposition only slowed the effort to pass an Indian Child Welfare Act, and in 1975 President Gerald Ford authorized the establishment of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, chaired by Senator Abourezk. A year later, the senator introduced the Indian Child Welfare bill, and in 1977 he reintroduced it. The extensive hearings brought Indian groups, their supporters, and opponents together for heated exchanges. Not unexpectedly, LDS representatives repeated their earlier objections, as did the Child Welfare League of America. In a surprising action, the BIA joined the opposition. Its spokesman, Richard Butler, Acting Deputy Commissioner, claimed that recent changes to the Social Security Act made the proposal unnecessary. He testified that the bill would increase federal control over Indian matters and that it ignored the widely differing circumstances among the tribes. A representative of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) called for broader legislation to restructure the entire child welfare system. She also attacked the bill as racist because it required that Indian children be placed with Indian families.21 The objections from the BIA and HEW infuriated Indian leaders and groups supporting the bill. Representing the National Congress of American Indians, Goldie Denny attacked the BIA sharply. She said that it was supposed to speak for Indians. Instead, “when 130 Indian tribes say, ‘This is what we want,’ the BIA says, ‘We don’t want this for the Indians.’”22 During the hearings, groups on both sides pointed to the bill’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. Some tribes objected to particular sections, while representatives of parents who had adopted Indian children stressed the potential trauma for both the families and the adoptees if the government moved to return the children to their original parents. While admitting some economic and social problems, reservation leaders depicted the issue as related directly to tribal sovereignty and

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cultural survival. In the end, the bill survived, and with strong support from Arizona representative Morris Udall, it passed both houses of Congress. Despite his inclination to veto the bill, on November 8, 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) into law.23 Since its passage, almost no one argues about tribes having exclusive jurisdiction over Indian children living on tribal land, but, in dealing with minors and mixed-race children living elsewhere, legal disputes continue. Cases where Indian courts must share control with state courts have shown how little cooperation exists between the two. For example, in the 1982 In re Baby Boy L case the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of an off-reservation non-Indian mother, preventing the child’s return to the tribe. This decision established the “existing Indian family” doctrine which stated that the ICWA did not apply unless the child was part of an existing family unit. In 2010, eight states continued to use that doctrine, while nineteen had rejected it. Clearly opponents of the ICWA remain active and the legal maneuvering between tribal, state, and federal courts on these issues continues.24 In South Dakota, state courts working with its Department of Social Services continued to push Indian children into white foster care facilities, in repeated violations of the law. The Lakota People’s Law Project described these actions as examples of “state kidnappings” of tribal children. Their actions, combined with a 2011 National Public Radio series on the situation, led to a class action suit in the US District Court for the District of South Dakota. In the March 30, 2015 Oglala Sioux vs. Luann Van Hunnik decision, the court ruled in favor of the tribe. The judge ruled that county and state officials had systematically violated both the ICWA and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.25 Although clearly siding with tribal leaders, this ruling applied only to one county in South Dakota. Nationally, bitter disputes over Indian child care and adoption raged on. The June 25, 2013 US Supreme Court decision Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl showed how complex and contradictory transracial adoption remained. In 2009, a South Carolina family tried to adopt the daughter of Dusten Brown, a Cherokee tribal member, and Christina Maldonado, the child’s unmarried mother. When asked for child support, Brown tried to relinquish his parental rights. At that point Matthew and Melanie Capobianco filed the adoption papers in Oklahoma. The mother’s attorney had misspelled Brown’s name and entered the child’s date of birth incorrectly, so the Cherokee government

12  R.L. Nichols

received no notice of the adoption. The father signed the adoption papers thinking he was surrendering his parental rights to the child’s mother. Learning of his mistake, he managed to stop the process temporarily, but the Capobiancos took the baby to South Carolina. In November 2011, the Charleston County Family Court ruled against the family, and they returned the child to her father. The Capobiancos appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court, but it ruled against them as well. They followed that rejection with an appeal to the US Supreme Court. In June 2013, it ruled that Dusten Brown had never had custody of the child, that some sections of the ICWA did not apply, and sent the case back to the South Carolina courts to settle.26 After some jousting between Oklahoma and South Carolina courts in September 2013, the latter returned the four-year-old Veronica to her adoptive family. The Supreme Court’s decision created much general media comment, inspired the inauguration of Standing Our Ground, a group dedicated to protecting tribal children, and even led to a suit asking more than $1 million for legal expenses, which the Capobiancos filed in Oklahoma.27 Despite these varied and sometimes contradictory court rulings, the ICWA and related federal efforts continue with mixed results. In 2008, the government opened a foster care assistance program to tribal governments, and at first eighty of them expressed some interest. Yet by 2014, only twenty-seven tribes had applied for the funds and only five of those had gained approval for their programs. Bureaucratic inflexibility, cultural insensitivity on the part of federal authorities, shortages of local staff and funding have all hindered tribes’ access to the funds. As in disputes over interracial adoptions, tribal extended-family care practices made it difficult to gain approval for reservation-based programs.28 At the same time, conservative critics of federal oversight of Indian affairs have continued their attacks. The reactionary Goldwater Institute in Arizona filed suit in federal court to declare the ICWA unconstitutional. Its brief questioned federal policies based on blood quantum, race, and the degree of control over non-resident tribal members who chose to leave their home communities. Responding to this at a December 18, 2015 preliminary hearing, Federal Judge Neil Wake seemed to accept some of the Institute’s ideas and raised questions about the authority of tribal courts in deciding foster care and adoption moves related to Indian children.29 Clearly, in the USA the issue remains hotly contested, and Native rights groups continue to demand federal support to keep their cultures alive.

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Meanwhile, north of the border, Canadians have dealt with Indigenous people in ways that both resemble and contrast with actions in the USA. In both countries the federal government held the responsibility for dealing with their Indigenous peoples. Unlike the USA, which recognized Indians and Inuit people, Canada placed its Aboriginal people into four groups: status Indians; non-status Indians, i.e. those racially but not legally Indian; Inuit; and Métis. For reasons too complex for this brief discussion, for much of its history Canada treated each group differently. Operating under the oft-amended 1876 Indian Act, it established the Department of Northern and Indian Affairs, currently the Department of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs. That organization oversaw just over 2,700, usually tiny, reserves and several hundred residential schools, but child welfare services remained entirely in the hands of the provincial and territorial governments. In effect, that meant that twelve welfare systems operated in the country.30 In 1951, Parliament passed a broadly amended Indian Act which remains mostly in place. Under it, the federal government still devolves most Indian social welfare programs to the provinces. Hoping to avoid the costs and often bad publicity, officials at the two levels of government have argued repeatedly over which was responsible for funding various programs. Until after World War II, provincial governments ignored or paid as little attention as possible to First Nations child welfare needs. In fact, until the 1960s the federal government saw the residential schools as the central means for dealing with Native children. As in the USA, the schools focused on cultural change or destruction rather than useful education. By acculturating the children, they served in the forefront of the government’s program to disrupt or destroy band and reserve cultures. Usually the schools failed to obliterate Native culture or to provide the children with an effective education. Officials had long recognized that, and as early as 1904 Clifford Sifton, then Minister of Indian Affairs, had admitted that no Indian could finish school sufficiently equipped to compete with the white man. Over the decades, that changed little, and by the 1950s some of the schools had become little more than “dumping grounds” for troubled or abandoned children.31 When parliament amended the Indian Act in 1951, it heeded the advice of welfare organizations and social workers’ groups and agreed that the provinces should begin offering health, education, and welfare services to the reserves. While this looked like an improvement for band members, it brought long-term negative changes for reserve families.

14  R.L. Nichols

Traditionally, First Nations band members’ ideas of what constituted a family differed substantially from middle-class Canadian norms. It included grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and, like many tribal communities in the USA, assumed that childrearing was a communal responsibility. Illegitimacy, which caused so much consternation among white social workers, carried little if any stigma, and the children simply became part of the mother’s family. Orphaned or abandoned children became a community responsibility. Often children were “given” or placed with their grandparents to help keep the elders from becoming lonely. In some instances “pseudo-grandparents,” unrelated elders living on the reserve, cared for children.32 Under the 1951 Indian Act provisions, provincial social service workers now moved onto reserves and ignored or rejected these accepted community practices repeatedly. The human resources employees admitted looking for excuses to take First Nations children from their reserve homes. For them, poverty-related lack of sanitation, questionable housing, overcrowding, bad diet, malnutrition, or a missing parent all constituted legitimate reasons for moving a child from its home into a foster home or later into the adoption process. This provincial “service” became known as “apprehending” children or seizing them without parental permission or any request for assistance from band leaders on the reserve. The Ottawa authorities negotiated agreements with each province, paying the costs for local officials to carry out the apprehension process. Guaranteed funds for every Native child removed from its reserve, provincial bureaucrats moved quickly, and critics later derided the process as the “Sixties Scoop,” and the children caught up in it as “the Scoops Generation.”33 Often taking newborns from their mothers at the hospital, social workers’ efforts pushed the numbers of First Nations children in the child welfare system to unheard of heights. While the figures varied widely by province, at the end of the 1950s Native children had made up only about one percent of welfare cases in Canada. A decade later they constituted 30–40% of legal wards while numbering less than four percent of children in the country.34 That development brought a virtual explosion of Indian welfare costs, and shocked parliament into authorizing an extended survey of Métis and reserve conditions. In 1966, Harry Hawthorn published the results of this investigation. It blasted the prevailing lack of knowledge and care about the situation. His team reported that “not enough is known of [First Nations problems] to create a call for

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their solutions.”35 In some ways the survey resembled the 1928 Merriam Report a generation earlier in the USA. Like that one, this document brought no immediate shift in Native policy, and seems to have had little or no impact on the process of apprehending children from the reserves. Just a year later, in 1967, authorities in Saskatchewan responded to the skyrocketing welfare costs by proposing a new program they called Adopt Indian Métis (AIM). Whether or not they knew of the IAP begun a decade earlier in the USA, their effort had similar goals. Amid increasing apprehensions about costs, they worked to move children out of the expensive foster care system into private homes. In the process, some social workers happily took credit for gathering large numbers of children for the new program. For example, in British Columbia, Mary Poggemoeller, who worked in the program from 1966 until 1970, recalled apprehending as many as fifty children in a single year. She reported that many of them went to Mormon families in southern British Columbia and in the eastern states.36 Those numbers varied from one case worker or province to another, but many of the children from the reserves were attracting the attention of American adoption agencies into the 1980s. In Manitoba, what was described as a “trade in babies” moved more than 50% of all Native children out of the province, many of them south across the border. One case worker, herself a Native, described the process in two steps. First, “big shiny American cars would come onto the reserve, followed by the social worker’s car.” Later, “when they left, there’d be a little Indian child sitting in the back of the American car, bawling its eyes out.”37 As late as 1980, a majority of the “apprehended” Indian children from Manitoba were moved out of Canada for adoption in the USA.38 Although most Canadians knew little and, according to Hawthorn, cared less, about these actions, there was no effort to keep them secret. Rather than changing their practices, during the late 1960s and immediately following Hawthorn’s report, the provinces continued efforts to cut child welfare costs. In addition to Saskatchewan’s AIM program, other provinces sought adoptive families using newspaper articles and ads, through television spots, and working with Canadian and American Lutheran and Catholic social agencies to place children in adoptive homes as widely separated in the USA as Washington State and Ohio. Regardless of which plan these governments and social agencies used, they all claimed to be acting in the best interests of the

16  R.L. Nichols

children, but rarely did they ask the families or reserve communities for their suggestions.39 Whatever information these programs shared with each other, they differed from those in the USA at the time. Many of the children they moved left Canada to join adoptive families south of the border. In America the children crossed state boundaries, but rarely national borders. During the late 1960s, increasing militancy by First Nations organizations across Canada paralleled similar actions in the USA, as Indigenous people on both sides of the border began demanding larger roles in decisions about their future. By then some American leaders were recognizing that the federal Termination Policy had backfired, often causing far more damage than benefits. In Canada the Hawthorn Report had called for the government to recognize that Native people there deserved to be treated as “citizens plus.” That is, as the original inhabitants, they deserved extra rights and benefits. Despite support for that idea from the National Indian Brotherhood, the Canadian Métis Society, scattered academics, and some social reform groups, those calls went nowhere. Instead, the Trudeau administration rejected them and, in 1969, issued what came to be called the “White Paper,” which proposed a Canadian version of Termination. When he introduced this plan, the Premier stated that “it’s inconceivable I think that in a given society, one section […] have a treaty with the other […].We must all be equal under the laws […].”40 Trudeau miscalculated badly, and his call for Indigenous people to experience equality and individualism in Canadian society met a firestorm of resistance. Attacked as racist, as ignoring long-accepted treaty rights, and as just another example of Canada ignoring the needs and aspirations of Indians, Inuit, and Métis, the White Paper galvanized a massive effort by Aboriginal people and their supporters to redirect national policies. At first, Indigenous leaders and organizations focused their attention on the disastrous effects of the mistreatment of children in the residential school system and the long-term impacts their experiences had on reserve family life and society. That, in turn, led to a slowly growing awareness of the crisis in Indian child welfare and adoption practices, and in 1972 the National Indian Brotherhood issued a report entitled Indian Control over Indian Education, which called for Native control of social programs beyond just the schools. Other Aboriginal organizations followed with demands that the government live up to its social and economic obligations to reserve and other Native groups.41

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Just a year later, disputes over land claims and control of resources between the Mackenzie Valley chiefs in the Northwest Territories brought Native demands for local control to national attention. On April 2, 1973 the chiefs filed a claim to nearly one third of the land in the Territories, and a local judge upheld their claim. When the courts overthrew the decision in 1975, the band leaders embarrassed the government by issuing the “Dene Declaration.” A near declaration of independence, it demanded control over education, justice, health, welfare, and even taxation.42 The Declaration brought some changes as Ottawa authorities began discussing these issues with regional multi-band organizations. At the same time provincial governments in Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta began to reach agreements about welfare practices with individual reserve communities. This half-hearted shift did little to silence critics as the ongoing adoption practice of taking children from their reserve families continued. In 1981, two University of Manitoba social work professors stated that apprehending Native children was just another tactic of white colonialism. In their view, the transracial adoptions had taken over the burden of cultural genocide previously carried out by the residential schools.43 Two new investigations followed. First, the Canadian Council on Social Development commissioned Patrick Johnston to gather statistics for an overall review of Aboriginal child welfare practices. His Native Children and the Child Welfare System gave a scathing analysis of Canada’s forced transracial adoptions that had removed thousands of Canadian Native children from their families, their reserves, and their country.44 At the same time, Justice Edwin Kimelman began a series of public hearings in Manitoba on child welfare issues there. His investigation took several years, and in 1985 his final report, No Quiet Place, echoed what Native and other critics had been saying since the interracial adoption programs had begun. He labeled the practice as “wholesale exportation” of the children that showed “an abysmal lack of sensitivity to children and families.” Often when parents asked social agencies for help, he reported, they saw “their families being torn asunder and siblings separated.”45 Other critics echoed Hudson and McKenzie’s earlier charges that Canadian child apprehension, which forcibly transferred children from one group to another, was another form of cultural genocide under article 2(e) of the UN Convention on Genocide (1948).46 In 1986 the criticisms stung the Department for Indian Affairs and Northern Development into declaring a moratorium on negotiating any

18  R.L. Nichols

new agreements with the provinces to extend social services to reserve communities. Four years later, in 1990, Ottawa established the First Nations Child and Family Services (FNCFS) program. This transferred the administration of child and family services from the Manitoba provincial government to the local reserve band officials. Similar programs have since been developed in other provinces. Not only did reserve and Métis communities and organizations struggle to gain control of child welfare and adoption programs, but in 1981 the Spallumcheen Band in British Columbia began an effort to locate adopted children previously taken by white officials. At first this remained a local British Columbia effort, but two years later David Ahenakew, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, proposed that the provincial Attorneys General and other social service officials act to locate adoptees and inform them of their heritage and family connections. These moves evolved into a broad-based repatriation movement whose goal is to locate and, when possible, reconnect the adoptees with their families and home communities. During the 1990s, many band officials, leaders of multi-band groups, and provincial officers worked together to open formerly closed adoption records and locate the missing individuals in order to help strengthen their community and help heal the wounds from the past. While sounding positive, these actions have had negative results, too. Adoption agencies had placed nearly all of the children in urban, middle-class homes. When the children returned to isolated, rural band villages, they found it difficult to adjust. Psychologists reported some of the repatriated youngsters felt that they had experienced multiple rejections, first by their birth family, then by their adopted family. Many reported feeling neither Indian nor middleclass white. For those being returned from the USA, even such basic issues as citizenship remained uncertain.47 While national attention and band and government efforts to end transracial and transnational adoptions have virtually halted the practice in Canada, Indian child welfare issues remain. A 2008 investigation by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada showed that Aboriginal children remain as over represented in social service programs as ever. In British Columbia they comprised 51% of children in the provincial child care system, while Aboriginal people there are a mere 8% of the total population.48 Across the country as a whole that continues to be an issue. In fact, one researcher has asserted that the “Sixties Scoop”

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has become the “Millennium Scoop” because “Aboriginal social workers, recruited into the ranks of social services and operating under the umbrella of Indian Child and Family services, are now the ones doing the ‘scooping.’”49 Many reserve communities and former adoptees continue to face personal and social difficulties resulting from their experiences. The repatriation process has divided communities, often across gender lines, with reserve women objecting to actions taken by male band leaders. On March 24–25, 2014 Manitoba Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Minister Eric Robinson hosted a two-day “Healing Our Hidden Hurt” roundtable with some of the returned adoptees. More recently, in June 2015 the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its summary of the now defunct residential school system. It agreed with critics who labeled the schools agents of cultural genocide, and, while it did not discuss the child welfare and adoption practices that followed the end of the residential schools in any detail, its conclusions certainly point to those doing the same things to Aboriginal families and communities.50 Despite the investigations, reports, and discussions, Canada has no legislation resembling the 1978 ICWA. In the USA the debate over the best practices to use when dealing with Indian children continues along somewhat different lines. The reservation communities did not have massive numbers of children being dragged off for interracial adoption such as occurred in Canada. Yet because continuing high unemployment, poverty, and other social ills continue to plague many reservation communities, foster care issues continue to disrupt life there. The federal government has made funding available for tribally operated foster care programs since 2008, but few reservation authorities have been able to develop effective procedures and actually get the money. Legal questions about the adoptions of Indian children still occupy court dockets and gain public attention. For example, after the Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl Supreme Court decision in 2013, conservative states’ rights groups continue to file suits against parts of the ICWA, trying to limit tribal court authority in some multiracial adoption cases.51 Up until now, neither country has dealt effectively with these issues. It appears that neither of the two North American countries is likely to reach any satisfactory agreements on the pressing needs to solve social welfare questions involving the Indigenous people in their societies anytime soon.

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Notes









1. To discuss Indigenous people in North America, I use American Indian, Indian, or Native American for groups in the USA. In Canada, Indian remains the official title, but usually I use First Nations or Indigenous people, Inuit or Métis. I also use the generic term Native for both US or Canadian Indigenous peoples. The Canadian government now uses Aboriginal people as its generic label for Indigenous groups, although the legal title for both status and non-status people remains Indian. 2. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, Abridged Edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 239. 3. Quoted in Robert G. Moore, The Historical Development of the Indian Act (Ottawa: Treatises and Historic Research Centre, 1978), 15. 4. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995) examines the US schools, while J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) and John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1877–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), survey Canada’s system. 5.  Arnold Lyslo, “Background Information on the Indian Adoption Project,” in Far From the Reservation: The Transracial Adoption American Indian Children, ed. David Fanshel (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 49. 6. William Byler, “The Destruction of American Indian Families,” in The Destruction of American Indian Families, ed. Steven Unger (New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1997), 1; Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 103; Troy R. Johnson, “The State and the American Indian: Who Gets the Indian Child?” Wicazo Sa Review 14: 1 (1999). 7. Patrick Johnston, Native Children and the Child Welfare System (Toronto: Canadian Council on Social Development/James Lorimer Ltd, 1983), 23. 8.  Mike Gottlieb, “Details: Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl,” SCOTUSblog, June 25, 2013, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.scotusblog. com/2013/06/details-adpotive-couple-v-baby-girl/; Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2016), 1.

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9.  Laura Briggs, “Epilogue,” in Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 10.  Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 11.  Arthur Margon, “Indians and Immigrants: A Comparison of Groups New to the City,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 4: 1 (1997): 17–28; Elaine Neils, Reservation to City (Chicago: University of Chicago Geography Department, 1971); Joan Ablon, “American Indian Relocation: Problems of Dependency and Management in the City,” Phylon 24: 4 (1965): 362–371. 12. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 9–12. 13. Lyslo, “Background,” 37. 14. Lyslo, “Background,” 34–35. 15. Lyslo, “Background,” 44, 49. 16. Clara J. Swan, “The Adoption Resource Exchange of North America—A New Service for Adoption Agencies,” Juvenile Court Judges Journal 19: 3 (1968): 86–88. 17. Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 258. 18. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle, 258–259; Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 132– 133. 19. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle, 259. 20. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle, 259–260; Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 139– 141. 21. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 147–150 analyzes the arguments in detail. 22. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 150. 23. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 157–158. 24.  In re Baby Boy L. 643 P.2d 168 (Kan. 1982) in Native American Rights Fund, A Practical Guide to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (Boulder, CO: Native American Rights Fund, 2007). 25. “Landmark Legal Victory Confirms South Dakota Systematically Violates ICWA,” Lakota Peoples’ Law Project Press Release, March 31, 2015, accessed December 7, 2015, http://lakotalaw.org/March-31st. 26. Gottlieb, “Details: Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl.” 27.  Standing Ground Blog, http://standingground.blogspot.com/; Anon. “Adoptive Parents Sue Cherokee Nation, Dusten Brown for More Than $1 M,” NewsON6, November 5, 2013, accessed December 7, 2015, http://www.newson6.com/story/23886310. 28. Kristen Hwang, “Foster-care plan for tribes,” Arizona Daily Star, March 22, 2015: C5.

22  R.L. Nichols 29. Howard Fischer, “Lawsuit challenges tribal sway,” Arizona Daily Star, December 19, 2015, A2. 30. Roger L. Nichols, Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 22; James Frideres and René Gadacz, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts, 8th Edition (Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008). 31. Johnston, Native Children, 2–3; J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 3rd Edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 197–198; Milloy, A National Crime. 32. Johnston, Native Children, 68–72. 33. Johnston, Native Children, 23; Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), 82–83; Bridget Moran, A Little Rebellion (Vancouver: Arsenal Press, 1992). 34. Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace, 83. 35. Harry Bertram Hawthorn, ed., A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: A Report of Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies, 2 volumes (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966–1967), I: 326. 36. Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace, 86–87. 37. Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace, 89. 38. Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 115–116; Karen A. Balcom, The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 39. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 176–190. 40. Nichols, Indians, 297; Miller, Skyscrapers, 226–227. 41. Raven Sinclair, “Identity lost and found: Lessons from the Sixties Scoop,” First Peoples Child and Family Review 3: 1 (2007): 66–67. 42. William R. Morrison, A Survey of the History and Claims of the Native People of Northern Canada (Ottawa: Treatises and Historical Research Centre, 1983), 69–72. 43. Pete Hudson and Brad McKenzie, “Child Welfare and Native People: The Extension of Colonialism,” The Social Worker/Le Travailleur Social 49: 2 (1981): 63–65. 44. Johnston, Native Children. 45.  Edwin C. Kimelman, No Quiet Place: Final Report to the Honourable Muriel Smith, Minister of Community Services/Review Committee on Indian and Metis Adoption and Placements (Winnipeg: Manitoba Community Services, 1985), 274.

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46. Sinclair, “Identity,” 67. 47. Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2006), 233–237. 48. Canada, Auditor General, “First Nations and Family Services Program,” 2008 Report of the Auditor General of Canada (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada), accessed January 24, 2017, http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/ internet/English/parl_oag_200805_04_e_30700.html. 49. Sinclair, “Identity,” 67. 50. News Release, “Roundtable Discussion Held for ‘60s Scoop Generation,” 680CJOB-Winnipeg’s News & Information Leader, March 24, 2014. 51. Howard Fischer, “Suit challenges law giving tribes absolute power over native kids,” Arizona Daily Star, July 8, 2015, A1, 4; Fellecia Fonseca, “US appeals court revises test on determining Indian Status,” Arizona Daily Star, July 9, 2015, A5; Howard Fischer, “State, feds say law on adoption is valid,” Arizona Daily Star, October 20, 2015, A2, 5; Howard Fischer, “Lawsuit challenges tribal sway,” Arizona Daily Star, December 19, 2015, A2.

Bibliography Ablon, Joan. “American Indian Relocation: Problems of Dependency and Management in the City.” Phylon 24: 4 (1965): 362–71. Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Anon. “Adoptive Parents Sue Cherokee Nation, Dusten Brown for More Than $1 M.” NewsON6, November 5, 2013. Accessed December 7, 2015. http:// www.newson6.com/story/23886310. Armitage, Andrew. Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995. Balcom, Karen A. The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Byler, William. “The Destruction of American Indian Families.” In The Destruction of American Indian Families, edited by Steven Unger, 1–11. New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1977. Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and

24  R.L. Nichols Reconciliation Commission. Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2016. Fanshel, David. Far From the Reservation: The Transracial Adoption of American Indian Children. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972. Fischer, Howard. “Lawsuit challenges tribal sway.” Arizona Daily Star, December 19, 2015: A2. Fischer, Howard. “State, feds say law on adoption is valid.” Arizona Daily Star, October 20, 2015: A2, 5. Fischer, Howard. “Suit challenges law giving tribes absolute power over native kids.” Arizona Daily Star, July 8, 2015: A1, 4. Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945– 1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Fonseca, Fellecia. “US appeals court revises test on determining Indian status.” Arizona Daily Star, July 9, 2015: A5. Fournier, Suzanne and Ernie Crey. Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997. Gottlieb, Mike. “Details: Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl.” SCOTUSblog, June 25, 2013. Accessed July 13, 2017. http://scotus.blog.com/2013/06/detailsadoptive-couple-v-baby-girl/. Hawthorn, Harry Bertram, ed. A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: A Report of Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies. 2 volumes. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1966–67. Hudson, Pete and Brad McKenzie. “Child Welfare and Native People: The Extension of Colonialism.” The Social Worker/Le Travailleur Social 49: 2 (1981): 63–66, 87–88. Hwang, Kristen. “Foster-care plan for tribes.” Arizona Daily Star, March 22, 2015: C5. Jacobs, Margaret D. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Johnson, Troy R. “The State and the American Indian: Who Gets the Indian Child?” Wicazo Sa Review 14: 1 (1999): 197–214. Johnston, Patrick. Native Children and the Child Welfare System. Toronto: Canadian Council on Social Development/James Lorimer Ltd, 1983. Kimelman, Edwin C. No Quiet Place: Final Report to the Honourable Muriel Smith, Minister of Community Services/ Review Committee on Indian and Metis Adoption and Placements. Winnipeg: Manitoba Community Services, 1985. Leslie, John and Maguire, Ron, eds. The Historical Development of the Indian Act. Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs, 1978.

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25

Levit, Ken and Wharf, Brian, eds. The Challenge of Child Welfare. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985. Lyslo, Arnold, “Background Information on the Indian Adoption Project.” In Far From the Reservation: The Transracial Adoption of American Indian Children, edited by David Fanshel, 33–49. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972. Margon, Arthur. “Indians and Immigrants: A Comparison of Groups New to the City.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 4: 1 (1977): 17–28. McKenzie, Brad and Hudson, Pete. “Native Children, Child Welfare, and the Colonization of Native People.” In The Challenge of Child Welfare, edited by Kenneth Leslie Levitt and Brian Wharf, 125–41. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1985. Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Miller, J. R. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada. 3rd Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1877–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999. Moore, Robert G. The Historical Development of the Indian Act. Ottawa: Treaties and Historic Research Centre, 1978. Moran, Bridget. A Little Rebellion. Vancouver: Arsenal Press, 1992. Morrison, William R. A Survey of the History and Claims of the Native People of Northern Canada. Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, 1983. Native American Rights Fund (NARF). A Practical Guide to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Boulder: NARF, 2007. Neils, Elaine M. Reservation to City. Chicago: University of Chicago Geography Department, 1971. Nichols, Roger L. Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Abridged Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Sinclair, Raven. “Identity lost and found: Lessons from the Sixties Scoop.” First Peoples Child and Family Review 3: 1 (2007): 65–82. Strong-Boag, Veronica. Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2006. Swan, Clara J. “The Adoption Resource Exchange of North America—A New Service for Adoption Agencies.” Juvenile Court Judges Journal 19: 3 (1968): 86–89. Wilkinson, Charles. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

26  R.L. Nichols

Other sources Canada. Auditor General. “First Nations and Family Services Program.” (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada). 2008 Report of the Auditor General of Canada. Accessed January 24, 2017. http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/ parl_oag_200805_04_e_30700.html. Frideres, James and René Gadacz. Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts. 8th Edition. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. In re Baby Boy L. 643 P.2d 168 (Kan. 1982) in Native American Rights Fund, A Practical Guide to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Boulder, CO: Native American Rights Fund, 2007. Lakota Peoples’ Law Project. “Landmark Legal Victory Confirms South Dakota Systematically Violates ICWA.” News Release, March 31, 2015. Accessed December 7, 2015. http://lakotalaw.org/March-31st. News Release. “Roundtable Discussion Held for ‘60s Scoop’ Generation.” 680CJOB-Winnipeg’s News & Information Leader. March 24, 2014.

Author Biography Roger L. Nichols is Emeritus Professor of History and Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. His teaching and research focus on Frontier and Western America and Comparative North American Indian history. A former President of the Pacific Coast Branch: American Historical Association, he has held four Fulbright teaching and research awards in Bulgaria, Canada, and Germany, and has received three awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The three most recent of his eleven books are Warrior Nations: The United States and Indian Peoples (2013), American Indians in U.S. History (2014), and Natives and Strangers: A History of Ethnic Americans (2015).

CHAPTER 2

Stimulating and Resisting Transborder Indigenous Adoptions in North America in the 1970s Margaret D. Jacobs

Since the early 1960s, authorities with the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services had been removing increasing numbers of Indigenous children from their families and placing them in foster care. In 1967, the province began to aggressively promote the permanent adoption of Indigenous children, primarily by non-Indigenous families. Most nonIndigenous residents of the province regarded the program as a benevolent solution to the socioeconomic problems that bedeviled Indigenous communities and were unaware that Indigenous people regarded it as a grave threat to their families and communities. In 1975 and 1976, Indigenous protest finally gained widespread coverage in the province and confronted non-Indigenous people, perhaps for the first time, with a profound challenge to their benign views of Indigenous adoption. The occasion was a high-profile case of Indigenous child removal and placement that engendered outrage and official investigation. Authorities had placed three children of Métis heritage (a distinct category of

M.D. Jacobs (*)  University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), Lincoln, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_2

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28  M.D. Jacobs

Indigenous people in Canada, descended from early European fur traders and Indigenous women) with Marcien and Rita Doucette, a working-class family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a community with large numbers of First Nations and Métis residents. Marcien worked for the Canadian National Railway while Rita maintained their home and cared for their children. The couple had raised three biological children of their own and had already taken in three Métis foster children when social workers asked the Doucettes to provide foster care for three more Métis children, Harold, Eileen, and Geraldine Laliberté. The Doucettes willingly, even eagerly, agreed to care for the Laliberté siblings, ages one, two, and three. Eight years later, in 1975, Saskatchewan Social Service authorities decided it would be best for the Laliberté children, now nine, ten, and eleven years old, to be placed for adoption with another family. They advertised the children and found a white family, the Todds, in Michigan, who expressed interest in adopting them. The Department paid for the Todds to come to Saskatchewan to retrieve the three children, against the protests of the Doucettes and the wishes of the children. The Department insisted, however, that the children go with the Todds. The Indigenous community in Prince Albert responded with shock and anger, as did some non-Indigenous citizens of the province, but the Department of Social Services dug in its heels and refused to return the children. Protests led, however, to an official investigation by the provincial Ombudsman, Ernest Boychuk. His report of August 1975 offers a rare glimpse into how authorities promoted and justified the removal of Indigenous children; usually such records are confidential and closed to the public. Boychuk concluded that the Doucettes were a fit and loving foster family, but he upheld the decision of officials to remove the children on the grounds that the children lacked “stimulation” and needed “permanency.” These twin priorities underwrote much of Indigenous child removal in the 1960s and 1970s, and permanency remains a pillar of child welfare legislation today. The ill-defined concept of “stimulation” rested on unarticulated class, racial, and colonial biases and functioned as a flexible tool that allowed authorities to remove Indigenous children and place them outside their families and communities. Officials also prized “permanency,” defined as termination of parental rights and a closed adoption, over ongoing connections with birth families, “impermanent” caretakers, and Indigenous communities. Saskatchewan social service authorities were not alone; other Canadian

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provinces and American states engaged in similar practices and based them on comparable ideologies. What sets this case apart, however, is that official reasoning became public and engendered vehement protest.

Indigenous Child Removal in North America Both the United States and Canada developed boarding (or residential) schools for Indigenous children in the late nineteenth century, ostensibly as a means to educate and assimilate Indian or First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people and to end Indigenous dependence on the American or Canadian governments. Removal of children to distant schools functioned as a means to simultaneously undermine Indigenous children’s ties to their families, communities, and homelands and to usher them into the modern capitalist economy through training in low-wage, unskilled occupations.1 (Contrary to popular belief, then and now, many Indigenous people had long engaged with modern capitalism, but policies in both nations had often undermined their initiative and enterprise.)2 Canada and the United States consulted with one another about schools for Indigenous children, and institutions in both nations had much in common, despite the more prominent role of churches in running the schools in Canada. Government authorities in both countries often forcibly removed Indigenous children to the schools, where children were frequently subjected to harsh discipline and physical and sexual abuse. Children also suffered from inadequate food, disease, and poor health care.3 The institutionalization of Indigenous children continued until the late twentieth century in both countries, but fell out of favor after World War II, in part because of its high cost and because authorities believed the schools had failed in their efforts to assimilate Indigenous people and end their dependency on national governments.4 After the war, a new era of liberalism took hold in North America, and with it a shift in policy toward Indigenous children. Authorities now deemed the institutionalization of Indigenous children as damaging (as they had argued for white children since the turn of the century). Rather than reversing decades of Indigenous child removal, however, authorities now emphasized placement of children within non-Indigenous families. Officials justified this shift in policy and practice with color-blind equality rhetoric, of extending the same opportunities and rights to Indigenous children as to other children.5

30  M.D. Jacobs

In the United States, members of Congress pushed for “termination” and “relocation,” policies designed to eliminate tribal entities and their unique status vis-à-vis the federal government and to encourage American Indians and Alaska Natives to move to urban areas.6 The federal government sought to shift the burden for the education and care of Indigenous children to the states. In so doing, many states from the late 1950s into the 1970s swept up many Indigenous children into their child welfare systems, allegedly for neglect. In 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs contracted with the Child Welfare League of America (an umbrella organization with affiliated agencies in both the USA and Canada) to promote the adoption of dependent Indian children by nonIndian families through the Indian Adoption Project (IAP) and later the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA). The IAP and ARENA were federal programs that transferred Indigenous children from one state to another, but they also encouraged states to make adoptive placements of Indigenous children within their own borders as well. By the 1970s, an estimated 25–35% of all Indigenous children in the United States were living apart from their families, some in institutions, but many in foster care or adoptive placement in non-Indian (mostly white) families.7 Similarly in Canada, officials, in the name of equality for Indigenous children, insisted that provincial governments rather than the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) should take responsibility for Indigenous children. As in the United States, this led to a dramatic increase of Indigenous children within the provincial child welfare systems by the late 1960s. The Indian and Métis population of Saskatchewan constituted only 7.5% of the population, but by 1968– 1969 Indigenous children accounted for 42%, or 1443, of the total 3444, children in care.8 In 1967, Saskatchewan Social Service officials developed a program similar to the IAP in the United States to place Indian and Métis children for adoption. They first called the program AIM, Adopt Indian Métis, but later changed the name to REACH, Resources for Adoption of Children, after protests from Indigenous activists. The name change meant little, however. Program administrators still advertised Indigenous children through an aggressive TV, radio, and print media campaign that aimed to increase interest among white, middle-class families in adopting the children.9 This campaign represented adoption as a win-win situation for Indigenous children, adoptive couples, and the Canadian nation as a

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whole. First, it would bring equality to deprived Indian and Métis children. One adoption proponent declared, for example, “The 32.3% of children in care who are of Métis or Indian extraction have proven they are no different from the other 67.7%, except for the color of their skin. All children have one common denominator, they need secure homes. These children are being denied that basic human right.”10 Second, adoption would be good for non-Indigenous families. One news editorialist wrote: “It is really hard to assess just who stands to gain the most from adoptions under the AIM system. The child gains the love and security of a family of his own. The family in turn gains the opportunity of immeasurably enriching the lives of its members and widening their understanding and scope.”11 Finally, AIM and REACH asserted, adoption would serve as a means to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. “The future for children from such [adoptive] families is bright in its potential for mutual understanding and improved human relationships,” the opinion writer concluded.12 Noticeably absent from this list of beneficiaries were the Indigenous families and communities from which the children came. Soon they would make their voices heard.

The Removal In early 1975, the Saskatchewan Social Services Department decided to advertise the three younger Métis foster children, Harold, Eileen, and Geraldine Laliberté, who had been living with the Doucettes for over eight years. The Todds, a white family from Ann Arbor, Michigan, responded positively to the ad, and officials arranged for the Todds to come to Saskatchewan in June 1975 to meet and become acquainted with the children. According to the Doucettes, when the Todds arrived in Prince Albert, the children were “rushed away by strangers without much p[r]eparations.” At first a social worker told the children “they didn’t have to go [with the Todds] if they didn’t want, too [sic].” Yet after Mrs. Doucette allegedly “refused to cooperate and was abusive toward the [social] worker,” authorities decided that they would not return the children to the Doucettes. When the social worker informed the children they must now go with the Todds, “each put their jacket over their face and had a little cry.” Despite the distress of the children, authorities sent the children to live with the Todds in Michigan while moving forward with adoption proceedings.13

32  M.D. Jacobs

Marcien and Rita Doucette sought every means possible to regain custody of the children while “keep[ing] the children’s rooms as they were before they left.” They gained a meeting with the Minister of Social Services in July 1975, but it proved ineffectual. Rita left the meeting in tears, telling the press that “he doesn’t care a bit about those children … he could have been talking about horses for all he cared.” It was clear that the Minister had no intention of responding to the Doucettes’ pleas for the return of their foster children: he had prepared a press release before the meeting, stating that he still supported the removal of their children.14 The Indigenous community in Prince Albert was outraged, and they rushed to the defense of the Doucettes even though Marcien and Rita did not openly claim to be Métis themselves. Robert Doucette, one of their older Métis foster children, has conducted genealogical research that provides some evidence that his foster father was Métis. Robert, now President of the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, explains that in the 1960s and 1970s many people of Métis background hid their heritage and tried to pass as white because they faced enormous prejudice. This may have been the case with the Doucettes. According to Robert, his foster family maintained close relations with local Indigenous families, and the Indigenous community in Prince Albert regarded the Doucettes as one of their own, offering them their wholehearted support in the effort to regain their foster children.15 About 250 people crowded into the Prince Albert library auditorium to protest just a few days after the Social Services Department had transferred the children to the care of the Todds. The meeting resulted in three outcomes: a resolution to send a caravan to Michigan to enable the Doucettes to see their children and to confront American authorities about the removal; a petition to the provincial government calling for the return of the three Laliberté children to the Doucette home and first priority to the Doucettes in adopting them; and the establishment of “a citizens’ committee […] on native adoption policy.” Attendees used the Doucette family’s struggle to expose and protest the larger collective issue of Indigenous child removal. They unanimously agreed that “native foster children should be adopted by native parents” and that all Saskatchewan children should stay in the province if adopted.16 The case also generated outrage from non-Indigenous people. Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, a Saskatchewan resident, denounced the removal of the three children as “scandalous,” as a “wrong, unjust, cruel, and even dastardly act” and

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charged that “whoever took these children away after eight years with their foster parents has committed a grave injustice.”17

The Investigation As a result of widespread protests and intense media scrutiny, the province assigned their Ombudsman, Ernest Boychuk, to investigate the case and decide whether the children should be returned to the Doucettes. Boychuk identified many irregularities with the case, not the least of which was the social worker’s act of telling the children that they could decide if they wanted to live with the Michigan adoptive family. Boychuk also determined that “the children were well established as part of the [Doucette] family and there was genuine mutual affection,” and that “the foster children seemed to feel quite secure.”18 Yet Boychuk upheld the Department of Social Services’ decision on two main grounds. First, he cited officials’ claims that “the Doucettes had experienced difficulties with their own children in adolescence and the prospects for the foster children ‘may not be too good.’” Boychuk vaguely referred to incidents in the late 1960s when the Doucettes had quarreled with their neighbors and the police had been called. He also raised concerns that one of their older foster children had run away from home. Boychuk subtly condemned the Doucettes by mentioning these accusations against them, but he left no opportunity for them to directly refute his charges, asserting instead that “little purpose could be served here by going into the private lives of the members of this family.” Boychuk never even interviewed the Doucettes or their foster children.19 Rita Doucette complained, “It seems that they just took the social worker’s word for everything without consulting anyone else.”20 Because the authorities had spread rumors about the Doucettes without giving them a chance to defend themselves, the Doucettes went to the press with their side of the story. Rita explained that their biological son had stolen a car as a juvenile, but had since settled down. In the case of her older foster daughter, Rita revealed that social authorities had placed the adolescent girl temporarily in a Saskatoon girls’ home. She had run away from the institution, not from the Doucettes’ home. Many readers empathized with the Doucettes. Liberal Party leader David Steuart, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the Prince Albert area, told the media, “I wouldn’t have too much difficulty finding thousands of families in Saskatchewan which have had a runaway

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daughter or son.” Moreover, Steuart asserted, “if [the Doucettes] were a good enough family for the children for nine years, then surely they were good enough to adopt them.” As for the neighborhood quarrel, Rita claimed that the Doucettes had called the police about a “menacing neighbor.” The Social Services Department threatened to take the foster children away if the Doucettes did not resolve the problem. At their own expense, the family moved to a new neighborhood, after which there were no reports of disturbances.21 The Doucettes believed that they had done everything possible to comply with the demands of the Department of Social Services, only to have the children they had loved and taken care of for more than eight years summarily removed from them. At least the first set of charges that Boychuk made were specific enough that the Doucettes could counter them. Boychuk’s other justification for upholding the removal of the Laliberté children, however, was so subjective that the Doucettes would have found it nearly impossible to refute. Boychuk contended that the Doucette home “seemed to be lacking in stimulation.”22 He never specified exactly what he meant by “stimulation,” but seemed to consider it legitimate grounds for removing the Laliberté children from the home that all officials conceded was loving and secure. Social Service Department officials and many reporters implied that the Todds, in contrast to the Doucettes, would properly stimulate the three children. “The Todds enjoy music,” a reporter wrote admiringly. “Mr. Todd sings and his wife plays the piano. They quickly discovered the three children shared their interest.” According to Mr. Todd, the children “‘really have a lot of potential […]. They have a really good grasp for esthetics. They enjoy music. They have a lot of talent, they really do.’”23 In extolling “stimulation,” the Ombudsman, Saskatchewan’s Minister of Social Services, many non-Indigenous social workers, and several reporters seemed to agree that families needed to do more than meet children’s basic material needs and provide them with emotional support and loving care. Especially when it came to Indigenous children, adoptive families should be able to “stimulate” them with white middle-class ideals such as proper education in western literature, art, music, and “esthetics.” Officials avoided any rationale for adoption that included assimilation or elimination of Indigeneity, but their concern with “stimulation” betrays an ongoing desire to transform Indigenous children into middle-class, white subjects.

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Many social workers and officials who prioritized “stimulation” seemed to possess unexamined middle-class biases and cultural norms that led them to regard Indigenous and/or working-class families like the Doucettes as deficient and even unfit. Child welfare administrators frequently invoked “stimulation.” Adoption ads for Indigenous children often claimed that the children had lacked early stimulation and sought adoptive families who would “provide them with love, stimulation, and guidance.”24 “Stimulation,” though ill-defined, permeated Cold War North America. As the scholar Amy Ogata explains, “in the prosperous years after the end of the war, middle-class, predominantly white families interpreted children’s ‘needs’ to include […] early education, such as nursery school, more personal space, increased opportunities for play, and an unprecedented number of personal belongings such as books and toys.” Ogata contends that, in this era, North American middle-class parents came to value creativity in their children and sought to “stimulate” their children through purchasing special toys, books, furniture, and educational experiences.25 Exalting “stimulation” as a nebulous but necessary ingredient for adoptive placement granted much discretion to authorities to remove children, even though the concept had no precise criteria by which to measure its extent in a home or family. Authorities who dealt with the Doucette case seemed to prioritize “stimulation” over security and stability for the Laliberté children. In 1974, the children explicitly stated to a psychiatrist that they did not want to be placed anywhere else and did not want to be separated. The psychiatrist reported that “there is no problem with any of these three children and so any decision about future placements will have to be determined on the basis of resources that are and can be provided in the present foster home.” He or she concluded, “if the present foster home is adequate, then these three children should remain together in that home-like environment in which they are satisfied, adjusted and happy.”26 Yet the psychiatrist had doubts that the Doucette home was “adequate” on the grounds that it was not sufficiently stimulating. He or she warned that “there is a distinct possibility that the children will regress in terms of overall functioning if they do not receive stimulation from the home environment.” He or she added that “leaving the children in the present home or […] placing them elsewhere would be much easier if these children were of lower mental ability because then they would

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not require as much stimulation and would not be as difficult to cope with.”27 The records available in the Ombudsman’s Report do not reveal that the children had any psychological problems, but the psychiatrist envisioned a future hypothetical situation in which the children might “regress” or become “difficult” to cope with if they were not sufficiently “stimulated.” Just before removing the children from the Doucettes, a social worker reported in 1975 that the children “continue to be so spontaneous and natural it is refreshing. It is easy to see they are a real delight, though perhaps immature for their ages … given a more stimulating environment they should bloom.”28 For officials with the Social Services Department the middle-class ideal of “stimulation” carried greater weight than the children’s security and happiness in their foster home. According to Robert Doucette, Marcien and Rita never saw the Ombudsman’s Report and its vague accusations against them, but in at least one letter they demonstrated that they, too, sought to provide their foster children with stimulation, albeit not the kind sanctioned and prized by the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services. In one letter, the Doucettes pleaded with the head of Social Services, “Please Sir, let them come back to their loved ones here, also their ponies, puppies, bikes and other toys and also little friends they had to leave behind.” Robert Doucette remembered that his foster parents sought to support each of their children’s interests, in his case playing hockey and going to the library.29 The Doucettes may not have exposed their children to a middle-class lifestyle or been able to afford the material objects that supposedly would “stimulate” a child properly, but they seem to have provided their children with plenty of other kinds of stimulation. There was a coded racial dimension to authorities’ use of “stimulation” as a basis for removing Indigenous children and placing them in white homes. Many social critics and observers invoked a color-blind ideal in the postwar years. For example, Winnipeg newspaper columnist Shaun Herron declared in 1968, “We must make enormous efforts to place the Indians in society as people, not as Indians. They must have the same rights, the same opportunities, the same responsibilities and the same rewards as others.”30 Yet a belief that Indigenous cultures (if not individuals) were racially inferior accompanied this rhetoric of racial equality. Postwar social scientists and social workers developed a virtual consensus that Indigenous cultures were inevitably dying out. As a result, Indigenous communities had, according to the Supervisor of the Family Service Department of the Children’s Bureau of Delaware, a “dead-end

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quality,” a “soporific quality,” “a humdrumness.”31 Anthropologist Gordon MacGregor, in his study of the Pine Ridge Sioux in the 1940s, concluded that the “modern Indian way of life is one of emptiness.”32 Canadian social service employees shared these dim views of Indigenous life as utterly lacking in stimulation and a virtual dead-end. Officials, thus, minimized protesters’ concerns that adoption of Indigenous children by non-Indigenous families would undermine Indigenous families and cultures. A three-member Advisory Committee that conducted a second investigation into the Doucette case concluded that “complaints about a loss of native cultural heritage by moving the children out of their Prince Albert foster home were largely unfounded […] and any such loss would be minute and not a major factor in deciding the children’s future.”33 Mr. Todd, too, shared these assumptions. He told one journalist that the children seemed “completely unaware of their Indian heritage.” Mr. Todd claimed in fact that he could better teach the children about their cultural background than the Doucettes and the Prince Albert community because he had been trained in crosscultural communication.34 Mr. Todd, officials, media analysts, and probably most non-Indigenous Canadians and Americans assumed that Indigenous cultures and peoples had suffered irreversible decline. Hence, it seemed entirely plausible that a non-Indigenous person who had merely read about Indians in books and taken some courses on cross-cultural communication could teach Indigenous children about their heritage. Indigenous people in Prince Albert and across the continent in the 1970s refused to accept these reductive views of their communities and cultures. Canadian and American policies, such as assimilation through residential and boarding schools, had, indeed, delivered a blow, but Indigenous peoples had survived and they now asserted their rights to self-determination. Indigenous children, in their views, deserved to learn their heritage through imbibing cultural practices within the web of extended family and tribal relationships. A small group of mostly Métis women activists had issued a statement protesting AIM in 1971 that emphatically declared, “As Métis parents of Saskatoon, we are decidedly opposed to having our children separated from Métis homes and culture and being forced to live in white homes.” The group contended, “We want our children to be brought up as Métis and not as middle class pseudo-whites […]. Those children belong in our Métis culture and nation.”35

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Authorities’ view of Indigenous family life as “humdrum” and “soporific” in contrast to the “stimulation” of white, middle-class families had a strong gendered component. Authorities signaled that the Doucettes failed to conform to modern, white standards by virtue of their overly large family. Even though the Social Services Department had itself placed six foster children with the Doucettes, Department officials criticized the family for having too many children. The Advisory Committee concluded that although “the Doucette home offered a happy and loving environment […] ‘The fact is however that the home environment was not equipped to take care of eight or nine children, particularly those reaching and going through adolescence and the early and midteen years.’”36 As with Boychuk’s investigation, this committee never identified any specific problems in the Doucette family; nor did they accuse the Doucettes of abusing or neglecting the three Laliberté children. Nevertheless, the Doucette household, with nine children, failed to pass muster with authorities, who implicitly upheld the post-World War II middle-class family ideal in which parenthood was carefully planned and mothers gave intensive attention to their properly spaced children.37 Here, too, Social Services officials put greater emphasis on placing Indigenous children in small nuclear families that seemed to exemplify the middle-class ideal rather than keeping children (who had already suffered removal once from their biological families) in loving and stable homes.

The Adoption and the Children’s Return In the meantime, while these investigations played out, the Todds had returned to their home in Ann Arbor with the Laliberté children. Soon reporters began to call and to show up unannounced on the Todds’ doorstep. Feeling hounded, the Todds “packed up and ran” to a remote cabin for several weeks. Here, Mrs. Todd told a reporter, the children told the Todds they had “decided to be part of [their] family.” But once the Todds brought the children back to Ann Arbor, they “decided the adoption would not work.” So after just ten weeks, the Todds now “requested the children be removed from the[ir] home,” allegedly “due to adjustment problems.” The Todds said that, if the news media had not harassed them, the adoption would have been successful.38 Saskatchewan’s Social Services Department returned the children to Saskatchewan in September 1975, but they refused to place them back

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in the custody of the Doucettes. Instead they put them in a foster family in a remote community, North Portal, near the North Dakota border, a day’s drive from Prince Albert.39 The Department continued to search for an adoptive family for the Lalibertés; it even put an advertisement for the three children in the Prince Albert Daily Herald and other Saskatchewan newspapers in January 1976. Rita Doucette and other members of the community were horrified. Rita wrote to the editor, “It was inconceivable to me that the REACH people could be so inhuman as to subject these children to this kind of publicity.” Another reader, Mrs. B. Delorme, also wrote to the editor, “What right do these people have to make a spectacle of these children” and “to place their pictures in a newspaper and to give a resume concerning abilities, disabilities, etc. … These children are not animals in a pet shop to be placed on exhibition.”40 The Doucettes applied repeatedly to the Department of Social Services to adopt their former foster children. It was clear, however, that authorities did not regard the working-class family with ties to the Indigenous community as a suitable permanent home. The Doucettes had already tried to adopt one of the foster children before the ordeal, but Social Services authorities had stipulated that they would have to adopt all the foster children or none. Like all foster parents, the Doucettes received a small governmental allowance that enabled them to afford to care for their six foster children in addition to their own. If the Doucettes had adopted all six of their foster children, it would have meant that the provincial government no longer subsidized their care. This would have been a severe financial hardship for the Doucettes. Authorities subsequently contended that the Doucettes made no serious efforts to adopt the children, and therefore the Department was within its rights to find a “permanent” home for the three youngest children. However, after the Department removed the children, the Doucettes continued to plead with authorities to allow them to adopt all the children, no matter the financial consequences.41 As Indigenous people protested against the loss of their children through adoption, many argued for subsidized adoption, a concept that has since become part of much child welfare legislation.42 Such legislation came too late for the Doucette family. Authorities continued to rebuff their efforts to regain custody of and adopt the Laliberté children. In May 1976, the Department of Social Services sought to find an adoptive family in another Canadian province. They

40  M.D. Jacobs

ran ads for the children in the National Adoption Desk Bulletin, REACH distributed a special bulletin to all provinces about the children’s availability, and Ontario’s “Today’s Child” column featured the children.43 Still no prospective adoptive families responded to the ads. Yet rather than returning the children to the Doucettes, the Department considered placing the Laliberté children with the Todds again. Thinking better of it, they left them in their foster care placement in North Portal.44 By the standards of child welfare work in the 1970s and in our own time, authorities with the Saskatchewan Social Services seemed to be willing to subject the Laliberté children to undue stress and trauma, all in the name of ill-defined concepts based on unexamined cultural, racial, class, and gender assumptions.

The Importance of Permanency Authorities justified such practices in the name of championing “permanency,” that is, formal, closed adoption with termination of parental rights over foster care or long-term guardianship. As Boychuk explained approvingly in his report, “the [D]epartment [of Social Services] is of the opinion that the difference in legal status between a permanent ward and an adopted child in a home is of sufficient significance socially and psychologically to a child to compensate for the trauma of separation involved even in the placement of older children.”45 Boychuk’s own evidence, however, belied the Department’s “opinion.” By all psychological assessments, the Laliberté children had been safe, secure, and happy in the Doucette foster home for more than eight years. They were probably unaware of and unconcerned with their legal status until authorities removed them from the Doucettes. The permanency of adoption would have, indeed, been “of sufficient significance socially and psychologically” to them at that moment, for if they had been legally adopted by the Doucettes, they would have been spared “the trauma of separation” from them. Moreover, if the Laliberté children had been formally adopted by the Todds, it is doubtful that their new official status would have conferred the same sense of security and belonging that they had already possessed in the Doucette home. Like stimulation, “permanency” is another watchword that has permeated the discourse of child welfare, particularly in regard to Indigenous adoption. One AIM report contended, for example, “The short and long-term economic benefits of permanent adoption to a

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society are obvious. As a result of sound adoption placements […] children are in a better position to become productive, contributing members of society.”46 As Allyson Stevenson observes, “The central tenet of ‘modern adoption’ was that the adopted child would, in every aspect, assume the same rights and privileges as the naturally born child. Thus, adoption among Indian people became a method of ensuring the gradual elimination of Indian status.”47 And like stimulation, “permanency” rests on many unexamined assumptions about gender, race, and class. Though adoption supporters rarely stated so explicitly, “permanency” required child placement within a nuclear family, not an extended family, in which a mother was devoted full-time to the care of the child and did not work outside the home. Supporters of adoption for Indigenous children in non-Indigenous families often denigrated Indigenous families because children often had multiple caregivers within their extended families. Social worker Stella Hostbjor, for example, criticized Indian families in which children “frequently pass back and forth between mother and grandmother or some other relative.”48 Arnold Lyslo, head of the IAP, similarly asserted that “many of these children are left to run loose on the reservation without proper care or supervision, and no permanent plan is made for them.”49 Such comments conveyed a gendered critique of Indian women for allegedly neglecting their maternal duties. Since poverty meant that many Indian women had to find employment outside their homes to support their families, concerns with permanency also betrayed a middleclass bias.50 By virtue of their “race” and culture, Indigenous people also lacked permanency in the eyes of adoption proponents. As mentioned above, most non-Indians in this era believed Indigenous culture and old lifeways to be doomed to extinction. A priority on permanency among adoption supporters signaled a widespread but unarticulated dismissal of Indian families and communities. Permanency was anathema to Indigenous people because it required that parental and/or caretaker rights be completely terminated, with no contact between the adopted children and their biological parents, siblings, extended family members, or (as in the case of the Doucettes) their long-time caregivers. Now with greater control over children who are tribal members, many Indigenous courts grant permanent guardianship rather than formal adoption in child welfare cases, refusing to sever family and tribal ties between a child and his or her relatives and nation.51

42  M.D. Jacobs

The Aftermath In the name of permanency, Saskatchewan Social Service Department officials initially barred the Doucettes from all contact with the Laliberté children even after the children returned to the province. The Doucettes violated these orders on several occasions, however. “We will never give up if we have to follow them to the end of the world,” they wrote to the Minister of Social Services. “They will always be in our hearts and on our minds and know they will never forget us and will be back as soon as they get a chance no matter where they are put.”52 The Minister threatened legal action against them, arguing that continued contact would “undermine our efforts to locate the children in a suitable home.”53 In June 1976, the Doucettes hired a lawyer who advocated that they be allowed to correspond with and visit their former foster children.54 The Department finally backed down and allowed the Doucettes to visit the three children in October of 1977 and arranged for three visits per year after that. The Doucettes claimed that their former foster children told them that, as soon as they turned sixteen, they would return to Prince Albert, where they could reunite with the Doucettes and their other siblings.55 Robert Doucette recalls that his parents faithfully made the long drive to North Portal several times a year, and that all three children did return to Prince Albert once they came of age. Marcien and Rita were never the same, however, he says, after losing their three youngest foster children.56 Rita Doucette, even in her grief, hoped that some good would come from the ordeal, that it “will help other children in the future.”57 The case did, indeed, lead the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services to overhaul its Indigenous child welfare practices. It stopped all placements of Indigenous children outside the nation.58 It also established a review committee to take complaints from Indigenous community members and took steps toward a subsidized adoption program, which would enable low-income foster parents to adopt children for whom they had been caring for many years.59 The Doucette case thus generated some change in Indigenous child welfare policy and practice. Nevertheless, authorities still prized “stimulation” and “permanency,” amorphous concepts in which they cloaked their underlying biases against Indigenous families and communities. It remains to be seen whether recent efforts in Canada to make the government accountable for inadequate and inequitable funding for Indigenous child welfare in Indigenous communities

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may unmask these attitudes and lead to a thoroughgoing exposure of such damaging codes of thought and conduct.60

Notes









1. A sampling of the many books on US and Canadian boarding and residential schools includes David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); Andrew Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 2. Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3. See particularly Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment and Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 4.  See Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 7–13. 5. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 18–32, 37–64, 173–175, 216–223; Allyson Stevenson, “Intimate Integration: A Study of Aboriginal Transracial Adoption in Saskatchewan, 1944–1984” (Ph.D. diss., University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 2015), 121–122, 175–178. 6. There is much scholarship on termination and relocation. Some overviews include Roberta Ulrich, American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953–2006 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010) and Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 7. Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 71–74; Karen Balcom, “The Logic of Exchange: The Child Welfare League of America, The Adoption Resource Exchange Movement, and the Indian Adoption Project, 1958–1967,” Adoption & Culture 1: 1 (2007): 1–65; Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 15–32, 103.

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8. Saskatchewan Department of Welfare, Annual Report (1967–1968), 30; Saskatchewan Department of Welfare, Annual Report (1968–1969), 20. Reports available at Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina (hereafter SAB). 9. Jacobs, A Generation Removed, 176–182; Stevenson, “Intimate Integration,” 179–244. 10. Quoted in Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2006), 152–153. 11.  News clipping, op-ed, “Families of Their Own,” Regina Leader-Post, March 21, 1968, Folder I. 49, Deputy Minister Records, R-935, SAB. 12. “Families of Their Own.” 13. “Children Sent to Mich. To Stay with Foster Parents,” Moose Jaw Times Herald, August 2, [1975], III.H.15 (a) and E.C. Boychuk, Press Release Re. “Mr. and Mrs. Doucette—Prince Albert,” August 1, 1975, 22, III.H.15 (d), both in Alex Taylor fonds, R-1298; letter from the Doucettes to Rolfes, received March 1, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Herman Rolfes fonds, R-1100; both fonds are in SAB. 14.  Quoted in John Drabble, “Snyder Still Convinced Adoption was Correct,” Prince Albert Herald, July 23, [1975]; “Snyder’s Mind Made Up Before Meeting Couple,” Moose Jaw Times Herald, July 23 [1975], both in III.H.15 (A) Clippings File, Taylor Fonds, SAB. 15.  Interview with Robert Doucette by Margaret Jacobs, June 14, 2013, Saskatoon, Canada. 16. John Drabble, “Doucettes Going to Ann Arbor to See Children,” Prince Albert Daily Herald, July 17, 1975, Robert Doucette fonds, SAB, Saskatoon; Geoff White, “P.A. Couple Plans Trip in Hopes of Retrieving Three Foster Children,” Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 17, [1975], III.H.15 (a), Taylor Fonds, SAB. 17. Quoted in “Dief Says Action ‘Unjust, Cruel,’” Prince Albert Herald, July 15, [1975], III.H.15 (a), Taylor fonds, SAB. 18. Boychuk, Press Release, 10. 19.  Boychuk, Press Release, 7–10, 16, quote, p. 10; “P.A. Couple Disappointed with Adoption Decision,” Moose Jaw Times Herald, August 5, [1975], III.H.15 (a), Taylor Fonds, SAB. 20. Quoted in “P.A. Couple Disappointed with Adoption Decision.” 21.  Peter Hawley, “Decision Remains Firm in Doucette Case Handling,” Regina Leader-Post, July 23, 1975; Steuart quoted in Tim Naumetz, “Steuart Questions Adoption by Americans,” Regina Leader-Post, July 11, 1975, both in III.H.15 (a), Taylor Fonds, SAB; Boychuk, Press Release, 9. 22. Boychuk, Press Release, 6.

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23. Fred Harrison, “The Adoption that Backfired at Ann Arbor,” Regina Leader-Post, September 27, 1975, III.H.15 (a), Taylor Fonds, SAB. 24. See, for example, Adoption Desk Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Ottawa: Health and Welfare, May 1976), I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes Fonds, SAB. 25.  Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 6–7. 26. Quoted in Boychuk, Press Release, 11. 27. Quoted in Boychuk, Press Release, 11, 12. 28. Quoted in Boychuk, Press Release, 17. 29. Letter from Doucettes to Rolfes, received March 2, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB; interview with Robert Doucette. 30. Shaun Herron, “The Herron Folk,” column, emphasis added, Winnipeg Free Press, May 4, 1968, clipping in Box 2395, Folder 15, Social Planning Council (SPC) fonds, Archives of Manitoba (hereafter AM). 31. Mary Davis, “One Agency’s Approach to the Indian Adoption Project,” Child Welfare 40:5 (1961): 15. 32. Gordon MacGregor, Warriors Without Weapons: A Study of the Society and Personality Development of the Pine Ridge Sioux (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 121, 191, 209. Interestingly, like Boychuk, MacGregor’s evidence did not support his conclusions. His findings showed that members of the Pine Ridge community had sustained traditional extended family structures and methods of childrearing that provided children with a safe and secure upbringing. 33.  Quoted in Geoff White, “Number of Children in Home Led to Decision,” Star Phoenix, Saskatoon, October 18, [1975], III.H.15 (A) Clippings File, Taylor Fonds, SAB. 34. “U.S. Couple Blames Media for Failure of Adoption,” Saskatoon Star Phoenix, September 27, [1975], III.H.15 (A) Clippings File, Taylor Fonds, SAB. 35. Statement from Métis Society, included in Memo from Sinclair to Sihvon, December 3, 1971, Folder I. 49, Deputy Minister Records, SAB. 36. White, “Number of Children in Home Led to Decision.” 37. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 38.  “U.S. Couple Blames Media for Failure of Adoption”; Harrison, “Adoption that Backfired”; “Minister Responds to Advisory Committee Report,” press release, October 17, 1975, with Memo to Herman Rolfes, from Jim Oxman, Director, Information and Public Relations, July 8, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB. 39. Letter from Herman Rolfes to Mr. E. Robert Stromberg (attorney), June 24, 1976; “Rolfes Reviews State of Children,” news release, n.d., ca. June, 1976; both in I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB.

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40. Margaret Lipman, National Adoption Desk, to Gerald E. Jacob, Director, REACH, May 19, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB; Mrs. R[ita] Doucette to Editor, “Outraged by REACH Publicity Format,” n.d. [ca. Feb 1976] and Letter to editor of Prince Albert Daily Herald from B. Delorme, “REACH Tactic Criticized,” January 30, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes Fonds, SAB. 41.  Geoff White, “P.A. Foster Parents Protest Adoption,” Saskatoon Star Phoenix, July 11, [1975]; “Family Isn’t Giving Up,” Regina Leader-Post, July 23, 1975; Naumetz, “Steuart Questions Adoption by Americans”; III.H.15 (a) Clippings File, Taylor Fonds, SAB; Boychuk, Press Release, 6, 7, 13, 22, 29. 42. See for example, G. McRae, “Summary of the Position Paper on the Proposed Child and Family Services Act,” 1984, Box 5055, File 29, SPC fonds, AM; Arthur Lazarus to William Byler, December 10, 1973, Box 75, Folder 3, Association on American Indian Affairs Records; 1851–2010; Public Policy Papers; Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts; Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey (hereafter AAIA papers). The US Adoption Assistance Act and Child Welfare Act of 1980 established adoption subsidies for families who adopted “special-needs” children, which included Native American children. 43. Lipman to Jacob. 44. White, “Number of Children in Home Led to Decision.” 45. Boychuk, Press Release, 26. 46. Department of Welfare, Province of Saskatchewan, “Adopt Indian-Métis Project,” Report 1967–1969, 8, File 8.6.23, Folder 1, Department of Social Services, R-1655, SAB. 47. Stevenson, “Intimate Integration,” 189. 48. Stella Hostbjor, “Social Services to the Indian Unmarried Mother,” Child Welfare XL: 5 (1961): 8. 49. Arnold Lyslo, “Indian Adoption Project,” April 1960, Box 17, Folder 3, 2; Child Welfare League of America papers, Social Welfare History Archives, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis. 50. Carol Williams, ed., Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Mary Jane McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History 1940–1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014). 51.  Barbara Ann Atwood, “Permanency for American Indian and Alaska Native Foster Children: Taking Lessons from Tribes,” Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 08–22, October 2008, accessed June 6, 2016, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1275458.

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52.  Letter from the Doucettes to Rolfes, received March 2, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes Fonds, SAB. 53. Letter from Rolfes to the Doucettes, June 2, 1976 and letter from Rolfes to E. Robert Stromberg, June 24, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB. 54. Letter from E.R. Stromberg, lawyer, to Herman Rolfes, June 4, 1976, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes fonds, SAB. 55.  Garnet Wipf, Member of Legislative Assembly, to Herman Rolfes, Minister of Social Services, October 11, 1977 and Wipf to Mr. and Mrs. Doucette, December 2, 1977, I. 46d-55-1a, Rolfes Fonds, SAB. 56. Interview with Robert Doucette, June 14, 2013. 57. Quoted in Geoff White, “Doucettes Intend to Continue Case,” Saskatoon Star Phoenix, August 2, [1975], III.H.15 (A) Clippings File, Taylor fonds, SAB. 58. Ruth Warick, “Adoption Protests: Native Persons Occupy Office of Deputy Minister,” Regina Leader-Post, March 24, 1976, news clipping, File number 5.2, Department of Social Services records, R-1721, SAB. See also Memo from Cameron to F.J. Bogdasavich, Deputy Minister, October 4, 1976, File III.18.a, Folder I.49, Deputy Minister Records, SAB; and memo from Cameron to Regional Directors and DNS, October 23, 1975, File 58.9, Department of Social Services, R-1406, SAB. 59.  “Adoption Review Committee Begins Work,” news release, May 26, 1977, File 5.5, Department of Social Services, R-1721, SAB. 60.  In 2007, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, under the leadership of long-time Indigenous child welfare advocate Cindy Blackstock, and the Assembly of First Nations filed a human rights complaint against the Canadian federal government, alleging that Canada’s failure to provide equitable funding for culturally appropriate child welfare services to First Nations children on reserves constituted discrimination on the basis of race and ethnic origin. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in January 2016 that “the Canadian government is racially discriminating against 163,000 First Nations children and their families by providing flawed and inequitable child welfare services.” See “I am a witness,” First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada, accessed October 15, 2016, https://fncaringsociety.com/i-am-witness.

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Bibliography Unpublished Sources Association on American Indian Affairs Records, 1851–2010, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey. Child Welfare League of America papers, Social Welfare History Archives, Special Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis. Interview with Robert Doucette by Margaret Jacobs, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, June 14, 2013. Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina:. Alex Taylor fonds, R-1298. Department of Social Services, R-1406. Department of Social Services, R-1655. Department of Social Services, R-1721. Deputy Minister Records, R-935. Herman Rolfes fonds, R-1100. Saskatchewan Department of Welfare, Annual Reports (1967–1969). Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon:. Robert Doucette fonds. Social Planning Council (SPC) fonds, Archives of Manitoba.

Published Sources Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Atwood, Barbara Ann. “Permanency for American Indian and Alaska Native Foster Children: Taking Lessons from Tribes.” Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 08–22, October 2008. Accessed June 6, 2016. http:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1275458. Balcom, Karen. “The Logic of Exchange: The Child Welfare League of America, the Adoption Resource Exchange Movement, and the Indian Adoption Project, 1958–1967.” Adoption and Culture 1: 1 (2007): 1–65. Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Davis, Mary. “One Agency’s Approach to the Indian Adoption Project.” Child Welfare 40: 5 (1961): 12–15. Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.

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Hostbjor, Stella. “Social Services to the Indian Unmarried Mother.” Child Welfare 40: 5 (1961): 7–9. Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Jacobs, Margaret D. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Laidlaw, Zoë and Alan Lester, eds. Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. MacGregor, Gordon. Warriors Without Weapons: A Study of the Society and Personality Development of the Pine Ridge Sioux. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. McCallum, Mary Jane. Indigenous Women, Work, and History 1940–1980. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014. Miller, J.R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999. Ogata, Amy F. Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Stevenson, Allyson. “Intimate Integration: A Study of Aboriginal Transracial Adoption in Saskatchewan, 1944–1984.” PhD diss., University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 2015. Strong-Boag, Veronica. Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ulrich, Roberta. American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953–2006. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Williams, Carol, ed. Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Woolford, Andrew. This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

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Author Biography Margaret D. Jacobs is currently the Chancellor’s Professor of History and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), USA. In 2015–16, she served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. Her research and teaching focus on women, gender, Indigenous peoples, and colonialism in the American West and other settler colonial contexts. Her book White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (2009) won the 2010 Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history from Columbia University, She published A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World with University of Nebraska Press in fall 2014.

CHAPTER 3

“Disastrous Adoption”? Representations of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing Mark Shackleton

Since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 there has been official recognition in US law that out-of-tribe adoption of Native adoptees by white families has threatened the integrity of tribal life, and that counter steps should be taken, wherever possible, to seek within-tribe adoption. The case of children with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), however, raises the question whether there are sufficient resources and funds available to provide adequate support for adoptive children with quite severe special needs. The issue of Native children with FAS came to general attention in the USA with the publication of Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord (1989), the autobiographical account of the adoption by a single father of a young Sioux child with FAS. Dorris’s account could be read in terms of what Marianne Novy has called the archetype of “the disastrous adoption,”1 which, like the story of Oedipus, begins with confidence but then through a series of disclosures becomes a tragic tale of disastrous revelation. Following the initial popular success

M. Shackleton (*)  Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_3

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of The Broken Cord, responses by both Native cultural nationalists like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and from the field of ethics and disability stud­ ies, as in the work of G. Thomas Couser, have questioned what they see as representational biases in this autobiographical work. Briefly stated, critics of Dorris’s The Broken Cord point to the way he has framed his account within tropes of disaster, emphasizing the despair of the disillusioned adoptive father who finds that his son cannot overcome his inherited defects, and de-emphasizing the individuality and worth of his adopted son, notwithstanding his disability. This leads me to discuss representations of disability in two Native North American writers: the intellectually disabled Zhaboonigan Peterson in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters (1988), and two individuals with FAS—Dickie Bird Halked in Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) and John James Mauser II in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls (2004). What is clear in these works is that the disabled or FAS individual is not rejected or adopted out of the tribe. In The Rez Sisters the orphaned Zhaboonigan is adopted within the extended family network of the rez. In Dry Lips, Dickie Bird commits horrendous acts, but is not rejected by the tribal community. In Four Souls, John James is not abandoned by his birth mother, and in fact he provides crucial support at a moment of crisis in the novel. I would argue that these texts emphasize the spirit of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act: implicitly, the notion of out-of-tribe adoption is challenged and the benefits of within-tribe succoring are foregrounded.

Native North American Transracial Adoption: The Historical Background It would be a distortion to talk about transracial adoption in Native North America today without considering it within the context of history. In Canada, the Indian Act (1876), for example, defined status Indians as wards of the state. This, in effect, meant that the entire Aboriginal community were legal adoptees, and it was under the paternalistic care of the state that Aboriginal children were adopted out to white foster homes. In 1997, a well-known study of Canadian First Nations children by Fournier and Crey estimated that, by the end of the 1960s, 30–40% of all legal wards were Aboriginal children (Natives, however, representing only 4% of the national population).2 By the late 1970s, one in four Indian children in Canada were separated from their parents for all or part of their childhood; this figure was estimated as one

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in three if non-status and Métis children were included.3 In the United States some sources estimate that during the 1960s as many as 25–35% of Indian children were removed from their Indigenous communities and placed in non-Indian homes.4 These figures sum up what has been called the “scoop up” of the 1960s. It parallels similar forced assimilation policies for Aboriginals in Australia, whose adopted children became known as the “stolen generation.” The effect of these forced assimilation policies on Native children’s sense of identity, not to mention the pain caused to Native parents, is obvious. Not mincing its words, on June 2, 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission labeled its country’s former policies toward Native families and children “cultural genocide.”5 It is against this historical backcloth that we should not be surprised to see resistance to the notion of transracial and transcultural adoption among Native North American communities. The “scoop up” experience is reflected by key semi-autobiographical texts in First Nations writing, such as Beatrice Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) or Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998). Time and again, the return to psychic health for the estranged Native protagonist is associated with “homecoming,” the return to tribal customs and conventions that have been lost through assimilative policies. The “homecoming” theme is a thread that links the work of virtually all the major Native North American writers, including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and others.6 Moreover, not infrequently, images of violence and rape are used to represent the pressures of a dominant and racist culture, and the psychological effects of cultural assimilation are foregrounded. In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1998), for example, the in-between Native protagonist, John Smith, adopted by a white family, is represented as suffering from extreme schizophrenia.7 For historical reasons, the notion of forced cultural assimilation, transcultural adoption or fostering in Native North American writing is more likely to evoke negative than positive images. Tomson Highway’s bestselling novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen, for example, provides a representation of the sexual abuse of Native children in residential schools, and in Gerald Vizenor’s Father Meme (2008) an Anishinaabe altar boy reveals the abuses of a “sleazy priest” at the Indian Mission church. In both cases, the abusive priest is represented as a windigo, the terrible child-eating cannibal of Anishinaabe legends. As Siobhan Senier has pointed out, “The Weetigo [windigo] is […] often invoked today by indigenous people as a metaphor for colonialism—violent and voracious.”8 The residential school system for

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Native children, which reached its height in the 1960s in Canada and the USA, can certainly be seen as a form of cultural adoption, in which the assumed authority of the dominant cultural group and the assumed inferiority of the assimilated Native could allow abuses to thrive unchecked. In the late 90s, Sherman Alexie, a writer very much in touch with contemporary issues of urbanized and reservation Native Americans, published Indian Killer, ultimately a critical representation of transracial adoption. The white adoptees in this novel, albeit naïve, are sympathetically drawn, but the main emphasis is on the adoptee misfit, whose cultural deracination is shown to have devastating psychological effects. Adoption has been represented in many ways, and recently John McLeod has posited a constructive rethinking of adoption in literature, moving from the passivity and determinism of the notion of “being adopted” to the active world creation of “adoptive being.”9 That said, it would be a hard task to find a single example of a Native North American writer who represents adoption of a Native American child by a white family in positive terms.10 Outside the world of literature, changing attitudes to the extra-tribal adoption of Native children between the 1950s and late 1970s can be shown by the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978. The ICWA represented a reaction against de-tribalization, so that adoption of Native children living on reservations now came within the jurisdiction of tribal courts, with the added understanding that such children should remain within their own families wherever possible.

Michael Dorris’s the Broken Cord: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the “Disastrous Adoption” With this historical background in mind, we can now turn to literary representations of adoption in Native North American writing. According to Marianne Novy, in Western literature, three primary mythic stories have traditionally been used to imagine adoption: the happy adoption (the Oliver Twist story), the happy discovery (The Winter’s Tale story) , and the disastrous adoption and discovery (the Oedipus story).11 Michael Dorris’s autobiographical The Broken Cord, about his adoption of a Native child with fetal alcohol syndrome, can be seen as a narrative of “disastrous adoption.” Much of The Broken Cord can be read as an “educational text” which provides strong warnings about prenatal drinking. Talking with his son, Dorris bluntly puts it this way: “If I write the book this way […]

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maybe what happened to you won’t happen to somebody else.”12 Or, as Couser puts it, The Broken Cord might be read as a memoir which provides “valuable resources for other parents faced with situations that may be especially demanding.”13 Much of the book is given over to detailing the physical, mental, and behavioral problems of the FAS child, including abnormal appearance, low intelligence, and an inability to comprehend social norms. His own son’s “lack of a particular kind of imagination,”14 an inability to foresee possible consequences,15 is stressed. Dorris points out that FAS and the supposedly milder condition of FAE (fetal alcohol effects) are global problems, but in North America there would appear to be a particularly high incidence of both in Native American communities. Many facts and figures are supplied to support this claim. Strangely, FAS and FAE have only relatively recently come to world attention, and, in the States at least, Michael Dorris’s autobiographical The Broken Cord did much to draw attention to FAS as a condition and to create an awareness of what it might be like for a parent to adopt a child with FAS. The Broken Cord was published in 1989, became a New York Times bestseller, and was made into a TV movie in 1992. Michael Dorris, part Modoc on his father’s side, was twenty-six when, as a single father, he adopted a three-year-old Lakota Sioux child, who he was told was intellectually disabled. In literary terms, The Broken Cord can be conceived of as a discovery narrative; it charts the stages by which the adoptive father comes to realize how little he can do to develop his child’s intellectual capabilities. Dorris comes eventually to accept the opinion of experts that “they [FAS victims] don’t learn from experience.”16 The title evokes the umbilical cord, the link that introduces poison into the fetus. The cord is severed at birth, but with the FAS child the effects last a lifetime: “My son will forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company,”17 writes Dorris. Here, in the markedly literary imagery of darkness and threat, Dorris is clearly speaking for and interpreting the “other,” transposing his own disenchantment onto the unknown territory of his son’s thoughts and feelings. The primary arc of the narrative is Dorris’s discovery of his own impotence in the face of biological determinism. Adopting as a single parent with an enormous belief in the positive power of upbringing, Dorris’s “broken cord” is a “broken contract,” the grim acknowledgement of disillusionment and failure, and, thus, on his son’s birthdays, Dorris grieves for what his son “should have been.”18 His initial belief in the power of nurture gives way to a shocked acceptance of the power of nature, a realization that hits

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him “like a Mack truck,” as study after study on FAS weights “‘nature’ as more important than ‘nurture.’”19 The movement of the narrative from optimism to pessimism, from lightness to dark, clearly places The Broken Cord within the “disastrous adoption” paradigm. It is worthwhile at this point to consider some of the criticisms that Dorris’s book has received. Firstly, the rhetoric of the book is curiously close to the archetype or stereotype of the Indian as the “dying race.” Dorris’s realization that his son is “a microcosm of a much larger picture”20 lends the biography an apocalyptic tone. As Cook-Lynn points out, the “broken cord” of the title thus evokes the “broken hoop” of Black Elk Speaks, a symbol which signals the end of Sioux nationhood.21 Margit Stange has also critiqued Dorris’s rhetoric of “epidemic” and “race suicide”22 in The Broken Cord. Dorris’s argument, put bluntly, is that if more and more children have FAS, tribal life as we know it will die out. In his final paragraph, Dorris writes: “He [his son] doesn’t wonder where he came from, where he’s going. He doesn’t ask who he is, or why.”23 The implication is that the damaged individual, a microcosm of a “larger picture,” the tribe at large, exists with no sense of the future or of identity. His son is presented as drowning, or experiencing a kind of living death: “my son, conceived and grown in an ethanol bath, lives each day in the act of drowning. For him there is no shore.”24 Secondly, the main emphasis on “the cure” focuses on Indian women. Both Dorris in The Broken Cord and, in the Foreword to the book, Louise Erdrich, his wife and literary collaborator at that time, state that if alcoholic mothers do not stop drinking, then they should be jailed during pregnancy to prevent damage to the fetus. This, of course, is a short-term measure, but if this is the main emphasis, then the wider picture of historical and political contexts and causes is placed in the background. As Gerald Vizenor has put it, “Indeed, alcohol is a poison, but must tribal women bear once more the moral burdens of manifest manners?”25 The stress laid on the sins of the “irresponsible” birth mother is, of course, a familiar feature of adoption procedures even in relatively recent times.26 Thirdly, Dorris’s “Indian autobiography”27 is an asymmetrical collaboration in which Dorris as a mixed-blood anthropologist speaks for and interprets the thoughts and feelings of his “informant,” his son. Or rather, Dorris interprets what he sees as a lack of thoughts and feelings:

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Don’t talk to him of mountains, of tropical beaches. Don’t ask him to swoon at sunrises or marvel at the filter of light through leaves. He’s never had time for such things, and he does not believe in them.28

In fact, Dorris’s son, called Adam in the biography (his real name is Abel), is given a postscript in which he tells his own life story in just over twelve pages. Adam might not rhapsodize about tropical beaches and light through the trees, but his self-portrait reveals him both as a character and a speaker/writer (the spelling and punctuation are his). Then after that happened I did a very stupid thing while my father and louise was out to dinner that very night . I went into my sister,s bedroom and fell asleep on her bed until my father and mother came home that very night . When they came up stairs to go to bed that night they found me lyeing on madeline,s bed . And I got cought right there . My father asked me over and over and over what I was doing madeline,s room and I made up all these lies . Then finally my father had to answer my question for me which was very very emberssing for me . Then after he had to answer my question for me he pushed me out of madeline,s room and made me go face first into the wall . And at that moment I ended up with a lump on the head . I was really ashamed of myself then . From then on I was no longer allowed into my sister,s bedroom anymore . My father was really mad at me for what I had done . He was not pleased with me at all either . Then after that had happened he one time asked me to go into her room at one time and at that point I said to him that I was no longer allowed into her room then after I said that to him he said that I could go into her room and I said to him that I was not allowed into her bedroom anymore then he started to lose his pacients with me at that very moment . I was in very deep trouble at that moment .29

What is represented here is the voice of the other, a relatively rare phenomenon in the genre of disability literature, where the dominant mode is the parent speaking for the disabled child.30 The passage reveals a great deal and, in effect, demonstrates that Adam is not a “catastrophic” adoptee, but a young man with feelings and an intuitive sense of family dynamics. A range of emotions is expressed, including guilt, embarrassment, shame, and perhaps defiance, and, as in Twain’s Huck Finn, it is clear that naïve narration (both fictional and autobiographical) can be rich in implication. The parental anger, for one thing, seems extreme, perhaps expressing Dorris’s fears that

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Adam could have incestuous feelings for Madeline (the younger adopted daughter). The scene is archetypal: fear of the uncontrolled sexuality of the Native other; Prospero chiding Caliban. It is a very clear example of “speaking for the other,” in which Dorris as father poses “over and over and over” again rhetorical questions that he ends up answering himself, a mode of discourse which represents the book as a whole. Adam, for his part, arguably offers resistant counter discourse, turning the very words of power against themselves (“Go into her room? No, I won’t, you told me not to”), like Caliban using the master’s language to swear at him. So Adam is given a voice at the end, but as the dominant discourse is Dorris’s, Adam’s postscript is framed within that discourse. The final word of The Broken Cord is an appeal for donations to a foundation furthering research on fetal alcohol syndrome. As Couser has argued, in The Broken Cord Adam moves from being an actual individual to being a case study of “preventable disability.”31 The Broken Cord could be read as an account of intertribal adoption in that Dorris was part Modoc and Adam was pureblood Lakota Sioux. However, Dorris’s tribal links before adopting Adam were at best tenuous, and as a Yale-trained anthropologist and later director of the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth College, in Couser’s words: “Dorris was a highly assimilated mixed-blood, whose attenuated relation to his Native American heritage was mediated by his profession.”32 Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, herself, like “Adam,” a Lakota Sioux, strongly critiques Dorris for his blindness to the possibilities of within-tribe adoption and within-tribe healing by traditional methods, arguing that “the adoption of Sioux children by those outside of the specific tribal perspective breaks one of the first rules of tribal sovereignty.”33 It was, she reminds us, out-of-tribe adoption that prompted the enactment of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, an Act with the tenets that Indian relatives “be responsible to one another within the tribal context”34 and that funding should be provided to realize that responsibility. In an angry rebuttal of out-of-tribe adoption and of Dorris’s book, Cook-Lynn writes: “Indian communities deplore the taking of their children.”35 Statistics would seem to support the claim that the extent of out-of-tribe adoption was excessive, and that adoption, like the residential school system, had become a form of forced cultural assimilation.

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Representations of FAS and Disability in Recent Native North American Writing Whereas we have in Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord a biography of a Native child with FAS being adopted out of the birth tribe, representations of disabled individuals in works by Tomson Highway and Louise Erdrich show impaired individuals either being raised and nurtured within the tribal community, or taken care of by the Native birth mother. The underlying implication is that the tribe can take care of their own. In Highway’s first two major plays, we have two portraits of disability: Zhaboonigan Peterson, a young woman with intellectual disability in The Rez Sisters, and Dickie Bird Halked, a FAS victim in Dry Lips. Zhaboonigan’s parents died in a car crash, and she has been adopted within the tribal community by the childless Veronique St Pierre. Dickie Bird has been brought up by his mother but the identity of his biological father has been kept secret. Whereas we have seen the dangers of speaking for the disabled other in The Broken Cord, Highway’s plays attempt to present the unmediated voice of disabled individuals. Thus, in The Rez Sisters, Zhaboonigan alludes to her rape by two white boys and the origin of her name: It was a. Screwdriver. They put the screwdriver inside me. Here. Remember. Ever lots of blood. The two white boys. Left me in the bush. Alone. It was cold. And then. Remember. Zhaboonigan. Everybody calls me Zhaboonigan. Why? It means needle. Zhaboonigan. Going-through-thing. Needle Peterson. Going-through-thing Peterson. That’s me.36

Complex notions are expressed here through highly restricted diction. Names are equated with identity (particularly true in tribal naming), and here Zhaboonigan’s very name continuously returns her to the site of trauma (“Remember […] Remember”). In Dry Lips, Dickie Bird’s name also references the site of trauma, in his case the Dickie Bird Tavern where he was born. Rather than seeing the handicapped adoptee as “lacking imagination” or as source of regret, as in Dorris’s The Broken Cord, Zhaboonigan is represented as having special powers of spiritual insight. It is she (along with a woman dying of cancer) who alone among the rez women can sense the presence of the Anishinaabe trickster-figure Nanapush, who represents in Highway’s work the continuing spirit of tribal survival.

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Highway’s positive portrayal of an adoptee with both an intellectual disability and a victim of violence takes place within a non-idealized reservation environment, which shows both bickering and infighting among the women, but ultimately a solid and supportive community. In Highway’s Dry Lips, the “flip side” play to The Rez Sisters, the rez women form a women’s hockey team and initially deny Veronique St Pierre the right to join by only valuing the essentialist notion of biological motherhood (“the other women wouldn’t let her [Veronique] in on account she had no babies.”) Veronique’s spirited defense, “Zhaboonigan Peterson may be just my adopted daughter and she may be retarded as a doormat but she’s still my baby,”37 actually falls on receptive ears among the other women, and she is allowed to join the team. It is significant, I find, that Veronique is not represented as an allembracing earth mother figure, but is, in fact, generally disliked for her interfering ways. She is neither the idealized nor the demonized adoptive mother, but her role in facilitating tribal continuity is clear when MarieAdele’s death from cancer leaves “14 little orphans”38 to take care of, which (it is implied) Veronique will take on. The theme of tribal adoption, and adoption as a symbol of tribal survival, largely unmentioned by other critics of Highway’s work, is, in fact, central. Highway’s other portrait of disability is 17-year-old Dickie Bird Halked who, despite his FAS-induced extreme violence is neither marginalized nor rejected by the rez community. Dickie Bird’s mother, Black Lady Halked, is an alcoholic, who gives birth to her son in an alcoholic haze in the local tavern. His biological father, Big Joey, is a misogynist who avoids vital assistance to Black Lady when she is about to give birth. Dickie Bird is represented as a deeply disturbed individual, rendered virtually speechless both by his FAS condition and by his desperate search for meaning and identity. Primarily, his search is for the absent biological father; indeed, one of Highway’s major points in Dry Lips is the need for both male and female responsibility, a theme conveyed through the playing of Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” on the jukebox as Dickie is born.39 Dickie’s inarticulacy is a physical manifestation of psychic and spiritual confusion, culminating in his rape of a young Native woman, Patsy Pegahmagahbow, with a crucifix. In the play, Patsy is clearly represented as both a female character and as an incarnation of the Ojibwe trickster Nanapush. In this scene, a violent image of the psychic effect of colonizing Christianity, Highway overloads the FAS victim with symbolic

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significance. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called this “narrative prosthesis,” that is, the use of sick and disabled characters as “opportunistic metaphorical devices.”40 But what I wish to emphasize is that even this deranged and violent individual is not represented as being outside the tribal community. Indeed, the arc of the narrative shows him to be, if anything, reintegrated into the tribe, and he even acts as an integrator himself. Thus, one of the key scenes in the play is when Big Joey acknowledges that he is in fact Dickie Bird’s natural father. Nor is there any tribal reproof of Dickie Bird on account of the rape. As one of the men says to him: “Don’t you worry a wart about that court appearance, Dickie Bird Halked. I’ll be right there beside you tellin’ that ole judge a thing or two about that goddam jukebox.”41 In other words, Dickie Bird is not made responsible for his birth beside the jukebox. His extreme actions and disturbed behavior are understood as the result of FAS. Or, in symbolic terms, Dickie is represented as the product of the twin colonial “gifts” of alcohol and Western religion. Another representation of a child with FAS is found in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls, and again the same point can be made: the Indigenous child with disability is not “adopted out” or marginalized, and can even play a significant role within the fabric of the tribal community. Four Souls begins with the protagonist, Fleur Pillager, leaving her tribal home intent on murdering the lumber baron, John James Mauser, who destroyed the trees on her land. To fully exact revenge, she marries Mauser after he promises to bequeath her his estate. Finding herself pregnant, and after a near miscarriage, she is prescribed whiskey by Mauser’s well-meaning sister-in-law, Polly Elizabeth, a treatment that the doctor supports. The resulting child, John James Mauser II, is willful, mute, addicted to sugar, and prone to sitting on the floor, his fist in his mouth, rocking endlessly backward and forward, staring at nothing.42 In Erdrich’s portrait of a child with FAS, the link between alcohol and mental disability is not made by the characters in the novel themselves, but this is historically accurate in the sense that the link between maternal alcohol intake and FAS was only established relatively late in the twentieth century and the novel is set in the 1920s and early 1930s. Medical ignorance is, in fact, part of the tragicomic theme of the novel, for John James’s condition is diagnosed by the doctor as “a tragical mistake, the effect of an aberrant spermatozoa deformed by the long practice of Karezza [the withholding of ejaculation].”43

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Louise Erdrich’s own perspective on FAS is worth pondering here. As an adoptive parent with Michael Dorris of a child with FAS, and someone who, in the preface of The Broken Cord, advocated incarceration for alcoholic pregnant women to avoid potential FAS damage to their unborn children, it is difficult not to factor the biographical into the literary text. The events of Fleur’s pregnancy and birthing are focalized through the medically naïve narration of Polly Elizabeth, and there is no editorializing about the mother-to-be’s responsibilities to the unborn child. Thus, in Four Souls, no direct blame is attached to Fleur as the alcoholized mother, for she is unaware that alcohol could affect her unborn child and is, in effect, taking alcohol under doctor’s orders. The scenes where the young child is given small quantities of alcohol as the only way to stem his cries are also represented without reproof by Polly Elizabeth as “medicinal drinking.”44 What is stressed, however, is the steadfast bond between mother and child, “She [Fleur] had a heart […] a heart that stood both fast and passionate when it came to defending those she loved.”45 There is no thought of adopting out the child, despite his disabilities, and indeed, after Fleur’s and Mauser’s divorce, the narrative sees mother and child becoming increasingly integrated into the tribal community. The theme of the homecoming return of the Native in order to heal appears once again, and this change in focus is foregrounded by the shift in narration, for the last section of the novel is narrated in alternate chapters by the tribal patriarch Nanapush and his common-law wife, Margaret. Towards the end of Four Souls John James’s special qualities, rather than his disability, are foregrounded, for it is his exceptional card skills that enable his mother to “come home.” Just as Zhaboonigan in Highway’s Dry Lips is shown as almost uniquely in touch with the Cree/Ojibwe spirit world, so, too, John James in Four Souls reveals exceptional gifts and, in effect, takes on the role of the Anishinaabe trickster culture hero. In Ojibwe legend, the trickster Nanapush saves his people by outwitting the deadly gambler. In Four Souls, John James’s idiot savant skills in poker win back Fleur’s land from the hands of the white former Indian agent Jewett Tatro. John James’s disability throughout the novel has been categorized by all as “vacancy,” and now the boy’s “idiot’s trance”46 convinces Tatro that the game is his, although he soon finds out that “vacancy” can be an enormous advantage in poker, making him “unreadable” as an opponent. Disability scholars, like Michael Bérubé, have been critical of the potential romanticization

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of the “linkage of exceptionality with disability.”47 However, as Lavonna Lovern has recently pointed out, in the Native American worldview, exceptionality, even disability, can be of social and personal value within the community, and this notion is something that might be more widely accepted within dominant cultures.48 The final full chapter of Four Souls, narrated by Nanapush’s long-term companion, Margaret Kashpaw, is titled “The Healing.” Healing is associated with tribal homecoming and tribal values, and Margaret provides an Ojibwe perspective on John James’s condition by assuming that his unusualness is the result of Fleur not following tribal practices concerning naming: “You haven’t named your own son […]. He’s strange in the head because the spirits don’t know him!”49 John James’s “strangeness” can be seen as a blank canvas on which different perspectives are writ large. The quackery of the medical profession is represented by the doctor’s diagnosis that the boy’s vacancy is the result of the unnatural sexual practice of Karezza, while Mauser’s guilt at his business rapacity and illtreatment of Native peoples means that he sees his son’s condition as a punishment from God. The medically informed reader, of course, is most likely to ascribe the child’s behavior to FAS. However, because of the shift in narrative perspective, the reader at the end of the novel is likely to be swayed by Margaret’s Ojibwe worldview. Fleur is disrobed of her stylish Western clothing, bathed and rerobed in a medicine dress, which she must wear as she undergoes an eight-day purgation alone without food on a rock at the side of the lake. Fleur’s obsession with revenge can, then, be purged, and she can more readily open herself to love and her children’s needs: “your first child [Lulu] does not love you and your second child [John James] doesn’t know how. How can they love a woman who has wasted her souls?”50 Notably, the closing focus is not on a child’s disability (as in Dorris’s The Broken Cord), but on the kind of openness that is required of a parent to fulfill a child’s needs, perhaps particularly a child with special needs. The novel closes with Fleur earning the right to be given her mother’s name, Four Souls, and the suggestion that she (and her son) will become more fully integrated into the tribal community. As with all Erdrich’s novels, the reader is permitted to see how her characters evolve in later life as, much like Faulkner, she develops her creations in other novels. John James is represented as an adult in Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2002). He has been given the tribal name of Awun (The Mist), which reflects both his size and his

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strange vacancy. His behavior, though unusual, is not found unacceptable by the tribal community. His abduction of the nun Mary Kashpaw ends in a marriage of mutual affection and they have a child, the wildly irresponsible trickster-like Jack Mauser who appears in Tales of Burning Love (1996). In Erdrich’s fiction, therefore, it is possible to have FAS and a full life, the unpredictability and strangeness of such individuals (and their offspring) being only a matter of degree within the larger chaos and unpredictability of everyday life either on or off the reservation. In my study of different representations of FAS and adoption in three Native North American writers, Michael Dorris’s autobiographical work can be viewed within the paradigm of the “disastrous adoption,” centering on the author’s realization that “nature” will triumph over “nurture.”51 However much time and effort is spent, the unwieldy clay of a child with FAS can never be transformed into a fully fulfilled and creative self. In the emotive tones of Dorris’s closing words, his adopted son will “forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company.”52 Highway and Erdrich, by contrast, present figures with disabilities who play an integral part within the tribal community and may even offer special gifts. There is no implication that the tribal community cannot take care of their own. Thus, I would argue, they represent a form of resistance to the notion of “adopting out,” and imply an alternative stance to disability and to transracial and transnational adoption.

Notes

1.  Marianne Novy (ed.), Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 1. 2. Susan Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1998), 83. 3. Fournier and Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace, 88. 4. Legislative History for the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), accessed February 16, 2017, http://caicw.org/family-advocacy/legislative-history/#.WKU1U3rl-XA. 5.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, TRC Final Report, June 2, 2015, 1. Accessed November 1, 2016, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=26. 6. See Mark Shackleton, “The Return of the Native American: The Theme of Homecoming in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” The Atlantic Literary Review 3: 2 (2002): 155–164.

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7. See Pirjo Ahokas’s chapter in this volume: “Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer.” 8. Siobhan Senier, “Rehabilitation Reservations. Native Narrations of Disability and Community,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32: 4 (2012), accessed February 15, 2017, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1641/3193. 9. John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4. McLeod writes: “I fashion the term ‘adoptive being’ to capture the distinct and transfigurative rendition of transcultural adoption possibilities as it emerges across a range of creative texts.” 10. A positive representation by a non-Native writer of the adoption of a Cherokee child by a white woman is found in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993). For an analysis of the problematic nature of these novels, see Kristina Fagan “Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners,” and Chap. 4, “Bearings,” in John McLeod’s Life Lines. 11. Novy (ed.), Imagining Adoption, 1. 12. Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 197. 13. G. Thomas Couser, “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy: The Ethics of Parental Life Writing in The Broken Cord,” Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, G. Thomas Couser (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 57. 14. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 201. 15. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 245. 16. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 138. 17. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 264. 18. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 262. 19. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 230–231. 20. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 76. 21.  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “The Broken Cord,” in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 11. 22.  Margit Stange, “The Broken Self: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” in Body Politics, Disease, Desire, and the Family, ed. Michel Ryan and Avery Gordon (Boulder: Westview, 1994), 129. 23. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 264. 24. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 264. 25. Gerald Vizenor, “Postindian Warriors,” in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 31.

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26. See John McLeod’s chapter in this volume: “Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena.” 27. Couser writes: “in the fact that Adam’s narrative is preceded and introduced by his father’s, the book as a whole is akin to what Arnold Krupat calls ‘the Indian autobiography,’ which is ‘jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the form of the text in writing, and by an Indian who is its subject and whose life becomes the content of the ‘autobiography.’” Couser, “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy,” 64. 28. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 264. 29. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 275–276. 30. Couser, “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy,” 63. 31. Couser, “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy,” 73. 32. Couser, “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy,” 62. 33. Cook-Lynn, “The Broken Cord,” 15. 34. Cook-Lynn, “The Broken Cord,” 15. 35. Cook-Lynn, “The Broken Cord,” 15–16. 36. Tomson Highway, The Rez Sisters (Calgary: Fifth House, 1988), 47–48. 37. Tomson Highway, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Calgary: Fifth House, 1989), 29–30. 38. Highway, The Rez Sisters, 111. 39.  Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” is an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” Thompson’s song puts the blame for failed marriages on women’s infidelity; Wells’s reply rejects double standards, requiring men to acknowledge their own responsibilities: “Too many times married men/Think they’re still single/That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.” 40. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. 41. Highway, Dry Lips, 123. 42. Louise Erdrich, Four Souls (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), 120. 43. Erdrich, Four Souls, 121. 44. Erdrich, Four Souls, 68. 45. Erdrich, Four Souls, 122. 46. Erdrich, Four Souls, 197. 47. Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120: 2 (2005): 569. 48.  Lavonna Lovern. “Native American Worldview and the Discourse of Disability.” Essays in Philosophy 9: 1, Article 14 (2008). Accessed February 13, 2017. http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol9/iss1/14/.

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49. Erdrich, Four Souls, 200. 50. Erdrich, Four Souls, 206. 51. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 231. 52. Dorris, The Broken Cord, 264.

Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. London: Vintage, 1998. Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120: 2 (2005): 568–76. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “The Broken Cord.” In Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, 11–16. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Couser, G. Thomas. “Adoption, Disability, and Surrogacy: The Ethics of Parental Life Writing in The Broken Cord.” In G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, 56–73. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Dorris, Michael. The Broken Cord. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Erdrich, Louise. Tales of Burning Love. London: Flamingo, 1997. Erdrich, Louise. Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. London: Flamingo, 2002. Erdrich, Louise. Four Souls. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Fagan, Kristina. “Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners.” In Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, edited by Marianne Novy, 251–66. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Fournier, Susan, and Ernie Crey. Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1998. Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Calgary: Fifth House, 1989. Highway, Tomson. The Rez Sisters. Calgary: Fifth House, 1988. Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday, 1998. Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Legislative History for the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA). Accessed February 16, 2017. http://caicw.org/family-advocacy/legislative-history/#. WKU1U3rl-XA. Lovern, Lavonna. “Native American Worldview and the Discourse of Disability.” Essays in Philosophy 9: 1, Article 14 (2008). Accessed February 13, 2017. http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol9/iss1/14/.

68  M. Shackleton McLeod, John. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press, 1999. Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Novy, Marianne (ed.). Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Senier, Siobhan. “Rehabilitation Reservations. Native Narrations of Disability and Community.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32: 4 (2012). Accessed February 15, 2017. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1641/3193. Shackleton, Mark. “The Return of the Native American: The Theme of Homecoming in Contemporary Native American Fiction.” The Atlantic Literary Review 3: 2 (2002): 155–64. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 2006. Stange, Margit. “The Broken Self: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” In Body Politics, Disease, Desire, and the Family, edited by Michel Ryan and Avery Gordon, 126–36. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Vizenor, Gerald. “Postindian Warriors.” In Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, 1–44. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Vizenor, Gerald. Father Meme. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

Author Biography Mark Shackleton is Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Modern Languages (English), University of Helsinki, He has published widely on Native North American writing and postcolonial studies, including articles on Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Monique Mojica, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Simon J. Ortiz. Recent publications include the chapter on Canada in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007); Diasporic Literature and Theory: Where Now? (ed. Mark Shackleton, 2008); Canada: Images of a Post/ National Society (ed. Gunilla Florby, Mark Shackleton and Katri Suhonen, 2009); and he is a contributor to the volume Thomas King: Works and Impact (ed. Eva Gruber, 2012).

CHAPTER 4

Indigenous Identity, Forced Transracial Removal, and Intergenerational Trauma in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer Pirjo Ahokas

Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) are two intriguingly different Native American novels written in the aftermath of the passing of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a law that protects American Indian children from being unnecessarily removed from their families and communities in order to be adopted or placed in foster care in non-Indian homes or institutions. The forced removal and relocation of Indian children had resulted from the previous Indian Adoption Project (IAP). Operated from 1959 until 1967,1 the IAP promoted the transracial fostering and adoption2 of Indian children especially by married white American, middle-class couples. In Solar Storms and Indian Killer, Hogan and Alexie, respectively, delve into the problems of their fictional protagonists of Native descent, who suffer from the consequences of the IAP.

P. Ahokas (*)  University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_4

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Solar Storms and Indian Killer are not only retrospective narratives in regard to the forced removal of Native American children, but are also topical in light of the fact that custody issues related to the fostering and adoption of Indian children can still generate fierce public controversy in the United States.3 In Solar Storms, Hogan’s female protagonist was sent to a series of foster homes as a young child. She manages to return to her ancestral lands at the age of seventeen in 1972. The protagonist of Indian Killer was adopted soon after birth. Due to the practice of the so-called “clean-break” adoptions of that time, his adoption records were sealed. In the narrative present, Alexie’s main character is a 27-year-old man who lives alone in Seattle. The high demand for adoption by childless white couples in postwar America was in part linked with their desire to form nuclear families, which were socially greatly valued in postwar America. The good experiences of white American couples with Korean adoptees contributed to the success of the IAP.4 The poor living conditions on some Indian reservations were one of the overt motivations behind the establishment of the project,5 and, consequently, white adoptive parents were expected to be able to offer a middle-class standard of living to their adoptees. In effect, the IAP represented transracial fostering and adoption as supreme acts “of compassionate benevolence” and made the supposedly good-hearted adoptive parents into “harbingers of racial harmony.”6 For American Indian families and communities, however, the loss of large numbers of their children was not only a source of deep mourning, but was also experienced as a violation of their rights. Hogan (b.1947) hails from mixed Chickasaw-Anglo ancestry. As a political activist and an environmental theorist, she draws on Native traditions and “the traditional indigenous view of and relationship to the land”7 in her writing. These commitments also play an important role in the protagonist’s identity process in Solar Storms. Alexie (b.1966) is of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene descent and, for him, Indianness is “the primary determinant of his writing.”8 In their creative work, both Hogan and Alexie employ a pan-tribal or a pan-Indian approach.9 While Hogan believes in an Indigenist worldview that transcends tribal borders,10 Alexie uses pan-Indian metaphors rooted in Indian traditions and history. The placement of children of Indian descent in white middle-class American families usually not only entailed a break from tribal values and traditions, but also either hampered the formation of their Indian

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identity or led to its erasure. Hogan and Alexie are keen on social issues, which inform their views of transracial adoption and identity formation in Solar Storms and Indian Killer. Despite the two novels sharing the same subject matter and similar themes, they approach their central topic in a very different manner. The structure of Hogan’s novel embodies the paradigm of “homecoming” or “return,” which is common in novels by Native American writers.11 In contrast, Alexie’s Indian Killer functions as a kind of detective novel or murder mystery, and is regarded as his most controversial and angriest work. While the protagonist of each novel aspires to develop what they conceive as Indigenous identity, their trajectories could hardly be more divergent. Like the protagonists of other homecoming novels, Hogan’s main character ultimately succeeds in reconciling her Native and individual identity.12 Through her close interaction with her Indian “grandmother” figures and with nature, she is transformed into a Native healer and an environmental activist. In Alexie’s urban novel, the transracially adopted protagonist’s attempts to construct a “real Indian” identity increase his sense of alienation, which subsequently leads to his demise. In this chapter, I will discuss the identity processes of Hogan and Alexie’s protagonists by drawing upon critical race studies. My reading of the two novels will pay attention to the intertwined and intersecting identity categories of “race,” gender, and class. Attention to intersectional identities is important, because it offers insights about simultaneous privilege and oppression.13 It is also useful in taking into consideration multiple historical realities and, in so doing, entails a redefinition of the past.14 Furthermore, Hogan’s novel invites an ecofeminist approach, which combines resistance to injustices based on the abovementioned, hierarchical identity categories with resistance to “the ideologies which sanction the exploitation and degradation of the natural environment.”15 Moreover, when discussing Indigenous literature, it is necessary to keep in mind that the colonization of Native Americans is the primary form of their historical oppression.16 In my examination of the two diverse identity processes related to transracial fostering and adoption, I argue that, in spite of their different political aims, Solar Storms and Indian Killer link the individual trauma of their protagonists to various forms of intergenerational traumas17 which were collectively experienced by Indian people at different time periods and which are ultimately connected to the traumas of colonialism and colonization.

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Forced Removal and White Captivity in Solar Storms and Indian Killer The prologue of Solar Storms depicts a mourning feast. It is told in the voice of Agnes, the protagonist’s great-grandmother, but the protagonist, Angel Wing, functions as the focalizer of the narrative. The feast is given by Bush, the former wife of Angel’s grandfather, to a large group of guests in her house. Bush is Chickasaw, and had arrived in the local Native community from the outside in order to marry Angel’s grandfather. According to the informal (not state) adoption practices in tribal communities, grandmothers, in particular, took care of their grandchildren.18 Bush was Angel’s informal adoptive mother until Angel’s forced removal, and the feast is arranged in her honor. It not only expresses Bush’s deep grief over her loss, but also becomes a ritual that unites her with the local people. As such, the feast foreshadows Angel’s reintegration into this small Native community. Angel’s first-person narration is interspersed with stories that her female relatives tell her about the past. The grandmother figure’s storytelling in ordinary, everyday situations is suggestive of the term “communicative memory”19 advanced by Aleida and Jan Assmann. Even the prologue underlines the significance of this interactive practice in Solar Storms. While communicative memory is estimated to include from three to four generations of oral storytellers,20 the third and the oldest transmitter of communicative memory in the novel is Agnes’s mother, Dora-Rouge, who represents the earliest generation. Throughout Solar Storms, the three grandmother figures impart tribal memories and ancient myths to the young protagonist-narrator. Communicative memory not only enhances the importance of the oral heritage in strengthening Angel’s sense of belongingness, but it also illuminates the storytellers’ animistic relationship with nature and their experience of collective trauma. When listening to the grandmother figures and living in proximity with them, Angel appears to undergo a metaphorical adoption process, which begins to reverse the negative effects of her traumatic experience of transracial fostering. Like Alexie’s adoptee, Angel had been taken away from her immediate kin, and in the foster homes she is taken to she is renamed Angela Jensen. After her years in foster care come to an end, she manages to find her great-grandmother’s name in a court record, and great-grandmother Agnes sends money for her return trip to the small town of Adam’s Rib in the north. Captivity narratives about Europeans who had been

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“adopted” by Native peoples were one of the earliest genres of literature developed by European settlers. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Native authors began to use the same structures in order to render their negative experiences as children in government boarding schools or missions.21 In Solar Storms, Angel’s years in foster care are evocative of captivity. One of the reasons contributing to the passing of the ICWA was the fact that forcibly removed Indian-born adoptees faced many identityrelated problems during adolescence.22 In retrospect, Angel describes her life in her foster homes as having inhabited two rooms, a room of the darkest fear and a fire-red room of anger. These emotions had made her into a girl who constantly ran away, never cried and “was strong enough to tattoo her own arm and hand.”23 This description invokes an American mainstream identity that stresses individuation and individualism. In the north, Angel, nevertheless, concludes: “I was nothing more than emptiness covered with skin.”24 Instead, Solar Storms puts forward an alternative, relational model of identity formation. According to Claire Kidwell and Alan Velie, the source of Native Americans’ identity is their association with the natural environment, which is “the physical manifestation of spirituality.”25 Under the influence of her female relatives, Angel begins to construct a new identity that is not understood as an individual’s property but as something that is born and maintained in interaction with other Native Americans and the natural world. When trying to compensate for loss of identity during the years she spent in her foster homes, Angel closely observes the behavior of her Native relatives. Water is a central symbol in Solar Storms, and its multiple meanings in the novel are connected to the protagonist’s identity process. In Adam’s Rib, Angel watches how Agnes visits each evening the place where a local river flows into Lake Grand. She returns from there singing and visibly refreshed, which makes Angel aware of the significance of water as a physical manifestation of spirituality. DoraRouge’s story about Agnes’s bear coat illustrates the existence of animal spirits. The coat was made from the skin of a glacier bear, which had been abused by its white owner. When Agnes mercifully kills the bear, it reciprocates by lending its spirit power through its skin to her.26 On her arrival in the north, Angel thinks: “I was traveling toward myself.”27 Native spirituality is associated with the healing of the division of body and soul.28 In Solar Storms, Angel perceives the beginning of her inner transformation also as the gradual strengthening of her body.

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In Solar Storms, Angel’s foster families are depicted only metaphorically in terms of their houses,29 whereas in Indian Killer the white adoptive parents of Alexie’s protagonist, Olivia and Daniel Smith, are introduced in the first chapter of the novel’s non-linear narrative.30 Entitled “Mythology,” it depicts the protagonist’s, John’s, birth in an Indian hospital on a reservation and his forced removal from there in a helicopter. Narrated in the third person, the events are presented as the product of John’s imagination. Repetition is a frequently used narrative device in Indian Killer. By reiterating that the sheets on the hospital beds are dirty and by describing the reservation as “this reservation or that reservation,”31 the narrator not only underlines Indians’ poor health care and the squalor of the hospital, but also insinuates that a violent abduction of a newborn baby by a man in a white jumpsuit could have happened any time on any reservation in the late 1960s.32 The narrator also adopts imagery associated with war: there is “blood everywhere” in the delivery room, and as the helicopter takes off a gunman bombards the reservation from the helicopter. Clearly, the protagonist constructs the fantasy of his violent separation as a traumatic story of loss. Notably, the scene of John’s relinquishment is reminiscent of the historical atrocities and bloodshed that marked the colonization of Native American tribes.33 The contrast between the reservation, where the inhabitants are said to “have been through much worse”34 than the gunfire, and the adoptee’s new home is striking: “Five acres of green, green grass. A large house. Swimming pool.”35 Adoption has been depicted as both rescue and captivity, but, in spite of the Smiths’ affluence, the narrator’s satirical intent is unmistakable here: both the squalid reservation and the Smiths’ wealthy home are forms of white captivity.36 The couple is portrayed as well-meaning, but their incapability of providing adequate nurture to aid their adoptee’s identity formation is foreshadowed by Olivia’s inept gesture of offering her empty breast to the crying baby. For good reason, the Smiths’ unfortunate choice of their adopted son’s name has been criticized in the existing scholarship on Indian Killer.37 Ostensibly, Daniel names his adoptee after his immigrant grandfather,38 but “John Smith” is also a generic American name, which hides the child’s ethnic origin. Moreover, even here, Alexie plays with captivity narratives. Apparently unwittingly to the fictional Smiths, the name invokes the historical Captain John Smith and his involvement in the colonization of America.39

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Critical race scholars define whiteness as a racial category that is socially and historically constructed, internally differentiated, and “always in the process of being made and unmade.”40 The lifestyle of John’s adoptive parents reflects their upper-middle-class white ideals and white standards. The intersecting identity categories of gender and class are inextricably intertwined in their performances of their gendered and classed versions of whiteness. Olivia Smith’s most distinctive feature is her exceptional beauty, which corresponds with the upper-class norms of attractive white female appearance. Her normative looks further correspond with her normative way of life: except for producing a child, Olivia “had fulfilled the obligations of her social contract.”41 Daniel Smith, “a handsome, successful architect,”42 follows a masculine variety of the same script: he is a dutiful breadwinner, never raises his voice and dresses in tailored suits with a tie “slightly out of fashion, his style of expressing his individuality.”43 As a product of this environment, John grows into an obedient boy who teaches himself to swallow his anger. A new color-blind racial ideology emerged in the postwar era in the United States, epitomized in the IAP rhetoric of the 1960s.44 Accordingly, in the adoption process the liberal Smiths view themselves as racially neutral, and racism would appear to be a taboo subject in the course of John’s socialization into white society. As the only Indian student at a private Catholic school, John, as “a successfully integrated Indian boy,”45 is regarded as a prestigious trophy for the school. However, as Ruth Frankenberg argues, it is almost impossible to separate whiteness from racial dominance.46 A cruel episode from John’s adolescence conveys how anti-Indian racism lurks beneath the surface of the school’s veneer of successful integration. A huge white bully called Michael asks John if he does not sexually desire his adoptive mother, adding: “Don’t Indians always want to fuck white women?”47 John cannot suppress his rage and attacks Michael. When the boys are sent to the principal’s office for fighting on the floor, John learns a bitter lesson in a racially hierarchical social order: the principal asks him to brush Michael’s offense under the carpet. Racism is not only an individual but also a societal issue in the seemingly pleasant, white-dominant city of Bellevue, Washington. In fact, John has been painfully aware of his racialized difference as non-white since he walked into his parents’ bedroom at the age of five without knocking. Seeing them nearly naked, apparently after they had

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had sex, John “first realized his parents were white and he was brown, and understood that the difference in skin color was important.”48 Christina Judith Hein fittingly calls the scene “a racialized version of the primal scene.”49 Referring to the Freudian primal scene, she points out that if the experience of the primal scene is not properly resolved, according to Freudian theory, the child is liable to develop neuroses later in life. When John subsequently rubs at his face wanting to wipe the brown away in order to look like his parents, the narration more than hints that the scene has contributed to the psychic difficulties he will encounter later on. By the late twentieth century, American adoption discourse had begun to emphasize adoptees’ multiple identities and their need to learn about their “birth cultures.”50 The Smiths reluctantly admit to themselves that, as white Americans, they are unable to hide their brown baby’s adoption in a shroud of secrecy. In tune with the times, Olivia and Daniel begin to construct a simulacrum of John’s “birth culture” by decorating his bedroom with Indian objects and exposing him to different kinds of snippets of Native American culture. Olivia, for instance, teaches herself certain words in different Indian languages and repeats them to John “in Navajo, Lakota, Apache.”51 At their best, the Smiths manage to transmit only a confusing mishmash of information about various Indian tribes to John. Therefore, when Daniel takes John to see Indians of various tribes play basketball, he suffers an identity crisis.52 John realizes that the young players are “nothing like the Indians he has read about”53 due to their group similarities and differences. Furthermore, the Smiths’ decision to allow Father Duncan, an eccentric Spokane Jesuit priest, to act as John’s mentor appears to be another misguided attempt to help him to construct a bicultural identity. Significantly, Father Duncan is depicted as: “An irony, an Indian in black robes.”54 He takes the 6-year-old John to the Chapel of the North American Martyrs in Seattle. When they look at the stained-glass windows depicting scenes of Catholic missionaries being martyred by Indians, Father Duncan is torn between his white and Indian loyalties.55 Helplessly, he admits his inner conflict between his Native American and white selves to John, which increases his identity confusion. A year later Father Duncan disappears in the desert, but he keeps haunting John throughout the novel. The new North American adoption discourse since the late 1970s even described an adoptee’s lack of a genetic source of likeness as “a

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gaping hole, a primal wound, an incomplete self.”56 The only fact known about John’s birth mother in Indian Killer is that she was an Indian girl of fourteen. John’s keenly felt alienation from other Indians makes him create a happy fantasy in which he not only recovers his lost birth mother, but also lives harmoniously together with her and his extended family on a reservation. Undoubtedly, John’s story about his achieving an emotionally satisfying tribal identity in an idealized Indian community is generated by his need to belong. However, the picture he fabricates betrays his white middle-class upbringing and ignorance about the harsh realities of poverty-stricken reservations. Eventually, John gets an idea of how to change his life when he reads in high school about Mohawk iron workers who have been building skyscrapers in Manhattan for generations. He figures that working on a skyscraper is “the Indian thing to do”57 and challenges the normative white expectations in Bellevue after graduation by becoming a construction worker in Seattle, where he attempts to constitute a new Indigenous masculine identity at the intersection of gender, race, and class.

Sites of Adoptive Trauma in Solar Storms and Indian Killer Alexie’s Seattle is a predominantly white urban jungle where the whiteIndian relations are exacerbated by the scary news about a serial killer who murders arrogant white men at random. The mysterious murderer’s nickname is “Indian Killer,” because the victims are scalped and two owl feathers are left at the murder site. The intentionally ambiguous name “Indian Killer” implies the status of the murderer either as an Indian killer or killer of Indians. Moreover, as Nancy Van Styvendale astutely observes, the name invokes “the intercomplication of colonial genocide and Indian vengeance.”58 In Solar Storms, the history of Adam’s Rib is inextricably connected with the arrival of European colonists to the Great Lakes. Unequivocally, the town’s name alludes to the biblical story of creation. Geoffrey Stacks argues that the biblical reference implies violence against Adam59 but, as Andy Smith points out, the colonization of tribes necessitated the subordination of Native women,60 which is why the town’s name can instead be interpreted as connoting the intersecting gendered and racial oppression of Indian women.

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The colonists of North America are associated with one of the central myths in American literature, the idea of the “New” World as a new Garden of Eden. As Annette Kolodny contends, from the earliest settlers and explorers on, the New World landscape was experienced as an ideally “beautiful and bountiful terrain” and gendered feminine,61 and Native women emblematized this eroticized white male fantasy.62 Solar Storms focuses on the reverse side of this fantasy: in agreement with ecofeminist theory, it links the unequal position of women to the devastation of nature.63 The first inhabitants in Adam’s Rib had been Indian women, who had followed French fur trappers and called themselves “the Abandoned Ones.” This was because after having emptied the region of valuable fur animals the white men moved on, abandoning the Indian women with the children they had fathered. Gradually, the entire history of the region inhabited by Anishinabe, Cree, and “Fat-Eaters”64 emerges from Angel’s narration. The French trappers and traders were followed by the British, Norwegians, and Swedes, all benefiting from the natural resources of the north. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma is usually described “as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events.”65 It is difficult to understand a traumatic event when it occurs, but it will return belatedly in nightmares, flashbacks, and other kinds of repetitive phenomena, which disturb the individual psyche’s relation to reality.66 In Solar Storms, Angel suffers from several trauma symptoms, but the scars on the damaged right side of her face are also related to trauma. They are the external sign of her inner trauma, and, thus, any attention to them provokes her repeated sudden rages. As Ann Fisher-Wirth has pointed out, in Western culture, women are generally classified according to their looks, and mirrors contribute to their narcissistic dependency on mirror images, maintaining a gap between people.67 As a foster child, Angel had felt that her face defined her identity: “Scars had shaped my life.”68 In accordance with Hogan’s ecofeminist view, Angel gives up on looking at herself “on all surfaces”69 as her relationship with nature deepens. The lingering effects of traumatic history return in one of Angel’s dreams. She dreams of mixed-blood women, who are reminiscent of the Abandoned Ones, but, with their red hair and dark skin, they also look like her. The mirrors that the colonists had originally brought with themselves are linked to the historical oppression of Native women. Mirrors used to symbolize wealth, and the women have decorated themselves

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with mirrors as well as carrying Christian symbols. As they suddenly turn against one another, the dream changes into a nightmare, in which the women are associated with Angel’s mother and grandmother. Thus, the dream connects her personal trauma of the consequences of forced removal both to the intergenerational trauma suffered by the two women and to the trauma of colonization. Autobiographical memory is one aspect of communicative memory, and, according to Harald Welzer, it, too, is constituted “far more from the ‘outside’ than from the ‘inside’” of an individual.70 Angel understands that the damaged half of her face has something to do with her mother, but she does not know what. Importantly, communicative memory imparts fragmented memories that link Angel to her mother, Hannah, and her grandmother, Loretta. The same stories also connect the two women with the windigo myth. The windigo is a dangerous, cannibalistic spirit known to the northern Algonquian tribes. Capable of transforming human beings into soulless monsters, it is associated with hunger, envy and greed, caused by the harsh winters in the north.71 Like the windigos, Loretta and Hannah are linked to cold water and its more solid forms, snow and ice. Hannah’s ruthlessness also reminds Agnes of old stories about the windigo’s heart of ice. Indeed, the reason why Angel had lived with Bush was her mother’s cruelty: Hannah had tucked Angel as a newborn baby into the branches of a birch tree in the middle of winter,72 and her scarred face also bears evidence of her mother’s windigo-like behavior. In Indian Killer, the child John’s unconscious trauma also finds its expression in his repeated nightmares, which not even the gigantic dreamcatcher the Smiths have suspended over his bed can banish. As an adolescent, John changes into a “stranger” with “too dramatic” mood swings,73 reminiscent of the previously mentioned identity-related problems experienced by teenaged transracial adoptees when they realized that the white identity they thought they had was denied to them.74 John’s strangeness increases when he struggles to form a “real Indian” identity in 1990s’ Seattle. The episode in which John believes he is pregnant Hein regards to be his “most radical attempt at community building.”75 The episode can also be linked to John’s recurring traumatic imaginings of his own birth and abduction. Thirdly, his pregnancy fantasy is suggestive of an effort to challenge the rigid dominant gender roles, for he finds his white co-workers’ constant need to assert their masculinity by graphic talk about women to be disturbing. It is as if John is trying to construct a more flexibly gendered Indian identity.

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New Encounters with Whites and the White Power Structure in Solar Storms and Indian Killer In Solar Storms and Indian Killer, the traumatic experiences of transracial adoption and foster care are evoked in their protagonists’ new encounters with white people and the white power structure, albeit in different ways. Contrary to John’s expectations, all the other men working on the skyscraper are white. As time passes, he isolates himself by staying alone on the fortieth or top floor. Critics contend that John’s mental problems, caused by his internalization of his identity conflict, develop into schizophrenia.76 The signs of John’s mental illness include his hearing imaginary voices and fearing that his food has been poisoned. At times, he believes that there are different sets of Olivia and Daniel. On the day when he suddenly quits his job, he no longer understands what his foreman says to him. At this juncture, John fears that when provoked he can no longer control his suppressed anger and rage engendered by his adoption trauma. He had earlier decided to kill the white man who “was responsible for everything that had gone wrong,”77 but remains undecided about this man’s identity. Through its narrative strategies Indian Killer refuses its readers to fully identify with the characters.78 The narrator plays with the conventions of detective fiction and murder mysteries, managing to make some of the characters and even actual readers79 suspect that John, among others, is the Indian killer. He has grown his hair long and his tall physical appearance reminds people of stereotypical cinematic Indian warriors, marking his otherness in the white-dominant city. However, the narrative device of using the killer as the focalizer in two chapters should question such assumptions.80 On the other hand, with his new appearance John can sit in a crowd of Indians, pretend to be “a real Indian,” and be taken for one. Sooner or later, however, he is always asked about his tribe by Indians and whites alike, which causes new problems. Marie is a Spokane Indian student, the leader of the Native American Students’ Alliance at her university, and a social activist whom John meets at an illegal powwow she has organized at her university. Impressed by Marie, his opposite in many regards, John perceives her as an Indian role model. Moreover, John’s decision to kill a white man is echoed in Marie’s murderous revulsion against powerful white men, Jack Wilson, a mystery writer, and Professor Clarence Mather, the white teacher of Marie’s Native American literature class.

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The discourses of color-blindness and postethnicity remained dominant in 1990s’ America. Linked to neoliberalism and consumer culture, they emphasized voluntary individual choice, even leading people to believe that they are free to choose their ethnic identities.81 Whilst John’s choice to be an Indian is tested in an Indian bar, Marie complains that for her, white is not an option. Wilson and Mather, however, freely choose to be “wannabe Indians,” white Americans who want to be Indians. Philip J. Deloria links white Americans’ playing Indian to their identity crises and argues that the phenomenon has a long tradition in American culture, stretching from the Mohawk Indian disguise at the Boston Tea Party into the present and even further into the future.82 The satirical narrator demonstrates how easy it is for Mather and Wilson to publicly perform Indian identity. Each poses as a specialist in Indian culture. Mather bolsters his dubious claim to Indian identity by sporting a gray pony-tail and a turquoise bolo tie. Wilson, in turn, wears a turquoise ring as an outward sign of his “Indianness.” As wannabes, Mather and Wilson strengthen their social standing in a white-dominant society. In Mather’s definition, Native American literature consists of three purportedly autobiographical works by Indians, which were edited by whites, and the other books on his reading list include works such as Forrest Carter’s infamous The Education of Little Tree and even a murder mystery by Jack Wilson. When Marie challenges the professor’s selection, he does not shy away but contends that he is speaking for Indians. After weeks of confrontation Marie is asked to leave the class. In the past, Mather similarly silenced Marie’s cousin, Reggie, by using his white privilege and relying on the university’s white power structure. Wilson similarly claims to be on the Indians’ side, although his literary creation, detective and medicine man Aristotle Little Hawk, encapsulates a number of Indian stereotypes. Nevertheless, Wilson is praised by Mather for his “authentic and traditional vision of the Indian world.”83 According to Deloria, “[f]rom the very beginning, Indianwhite relations and Indian play itself have modeled a characteristically American kind of domination in which the exercise of power was hidden, denied, qualified, or mourned.”84 This applies to two wannabe Indians’ exercise of power. Mather and Wilson’s adoption of elements of Indian culture to their advantage is further linked to the novel’s central themes of transracial adoption and to the intergenerational, historical traumas suffered by American Indians. It is highly ironic in light of John’s adoption trauma

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and identity crisis that both the white men favorably refer to the Indian custom of raising children communally, which enabled their construction of tribal identities. Ghost dancing is a central pan-Indian metaphor for Native resistance in the novel.85 It links the collective trauma of transracial adoption to intergenerational, historical traumas and to the trauma of colonization. Ironically, Jack Wilson has been given the white name of the Pauite prophet, Wovoka, who revived the Ghost Dance spiritual movement in the 1880s. One of the purposes of the Ghost Dance was to banish the invading whites.86 Tellingly, the movement is powerfully invoked against the novel’s two wannabe Indians as pretentious white authority figures. Indian Killer connects homeless urban Indians both with John and with the cumulative intergenerational trauma of Native American dislocation. In the United States, a new federal program called “the Indian freedom program” (1953–1968) purported to “free Indians from federal supervision” by the imposition of termination politics, which, in effect, continued former policies of Indians’ forced assimilation.87 Together with the IAP, the Indian Relocation Act was part of Indian termination policy. It urged Indians to leave reservations for large cities and to assimilate into mainstream American society. Like many other Native authors, Alexie critiques these 1950s’ projects, which disconnected Indians from their tribal lands by promising a better life which most did not achieve.88 In Indian Killer, John is frequently drawn to the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, which provides a home for disenfranchised, homeless Indians. They call him “cousin” and he regards them as real Indians. As I will show, the homeless people whom Marie helps with her food deliveries are the only human beings in the novel who give John a fleeting sense of community. In Solar Storms, the trauma of dislocation linked to transracial removal of Native children is also connected to decisions made with disastrous consequences by the representatives of the white power structure. According to Troy R. Johnson, gaining access to Indian lands characterizes much of American history.89 It is noteworthy in this light that during the federal termination and relocation era, in the 1950 and 1960s, it was discovered that many of the lands still “in Indian hands” were rich in natural resources, such as water.90 In the early 1960s, the US government began to build dams and reservoirs in Indian country, which displaced entire Native communities.91 Linda Hogan stresses in a disclaimer on the copyright page in Solar Storms that the novel is “a work

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of fiction,” but literary scholars assert that it has been influenced by the events surrounding the construction of the monumental James Bay hydroelectric project in northern Canada. The early phase of the project was begun in 1971 by Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest publicly owned electronic utility, in league with the provincial government, with the aim of selling electricity to the city of New York and to the northern parts of Canada and the United States. The construction of all in all over 200 dams and reservoirs caused comprehensive damage, including flooding and mercury poisoning, to vast areas in the region inhabited by Cree and Inuit people.92 This led to the relocation and urbanization of those who lost their homes in the submerged towns and villages, which also happens in Solar Storms. In reality, the construction of the hydroelectric plant had begun without the permission of the Cree and the Inuit.93 Similarly, when the news about the impending disaster reaches Adam’s Rib, the local inhabitants learn that the first flooding had already occurred and that the government agents had insisted that the Native “people had no legal right to the land.”94 In the 1960s, a new generation of Native activists perceived the building of dams and reservoirs as the federal government’s “failure to honor its treaties and manifestations of its ongoing imperialism in Indian country,” which animated Native protests against white Americans.95 In Solar Storms, Bush is galvanized into environmental activism, because the level of the lake that surrounds her island sinks and she finds dead fish and otters buried in mud. The four central female characters’ mythic canoe trip to the far north where Dora-Rouge’s tribe, the Fat-Eaters, live lies at the heart of Hogan’s novel. While Bush accompanies the others in order to join the protest movement, Angel’s goal is to meet her biological mother, who lives in a remote area in the far north. Like Alexie’s protagonist, Angel had created fantasies about her birth mother. As a child, she used to dream that “my mother was beautiful and kind and her love went deep.”96 The long and dangerous trip is significant in bringing Angel closer to the recesses of lost Indigenous cultures and further contributing to her understanding of the interconnection of all living things, which strengthens her Indigenous identity. This not only helps her to recover from her trauma of transracial fostering, but also prepares her to find a new community in the protest movement and to fight the white power structure, epitomized by the representatives and defenders of the fictional BEEVCO corporation in the novel.

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Forced Removals: Individual and Historical Traumas in Solar Storms and Indian Killer In Solar Storms, the collective trauma caused by the ecological disaster is not only linked to Angel’s individual trauma, but is also reminiscent of a historical misfortune suffered by former generations of her maternal relatives. Communicative memory serves to link the present environmental poisoning, created by the BEEVCO corporation, to earlier poisoning crises also brought about by whites. The French had named the road leading from the ferry toward Agnes’s house Poisson Road, “fish street,” because the local Indians always used to fish. The new name, however, is Poison Road, because Euro-American settlers had poisoned wild animals in order to protect their cattle. On Elk Island, from where Angel’s maternal family descends, famished Indians ate carcasses which white settlers had poisoned with cyanide and left as baits. Loretta and Hannah are Elk Island descendants, and this affected their mental health. Like Freud, Caruth emphasizes the importance of reading individual trauma in the context of historical trauma.97 Clearly, Angel’s individual trauma caused by her forced removal not only goes back to an intergenerational trauma of her forebears, but ultimately also to the entire trauma of colonization. A traumatized individual’s characteristics and social supports are among the factors that aid her recovery from trauma.98 Throughout, the grandmother figures’ guidance and Angel’s holistic identification with nature support the progress of her transformation process. Eventually, she feels empathy toward her mistreated birth mother. Afterwards, the reconciliation she makes in her mind at Hannah’s deathbed frees her to join the environmental movement. In Indian Killer, John’s individual trauma of transracial adoption is linked to the whole history of the conflict between white and indigenous people on the American continent, when an atmosphere of terror tightens its grip on Alexie’s imaginary Seattle. As hate speech and murderous white-Indian violence increase, Wilson refers to the situation as “a race war.”99 Van Styvendale usefully notes that chapters depicting the attacks and fights are given titles “of historic-sounding battles,”100 which reinforces the association of these developments with the trauma of colonization. The turmoil radically affects John’s construction of Indigenous identity. Having been attacked and slightly hurt by the masculinist Reggie at the Indian bar, John falls victim to interracial violence by two white anti-Indian college students. When Marie rescues John with a

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group of street people, he, as Hein suggests, is symbolically released of whiteness.101 Looking in the eyes of his rescuers, John recognizes that the resistance of the homeless Indian women and men is rooted in their mutual solidarity and he no longer feels like an outsider but an accepted member of their suffering community. Nevertheless, John’s inability to express himself in words and his need to reciprocate urge him to leave the newly found fold, and ultimately lead to his final confrontation with whiteness. Once again haunted by his trauma of early separation from his Native American birth mother, John “feeling unworthy and too ill to be healed”102 gets an insight into which white man he has to kill. The target is Wilson, who, for his part, dreams of John being the Indian Killer. At the culmination of the novel, Wilson finds himself tied to a wall frame of the unfinished last skyscraper in Seattle. Identifying his individual suffering with the traumatic history of Native Americans, John pleads with Wilson: “Let me, let us have our own pain.”103 At the end, John only slashes Wilson’s face in order to mark him as guilty of white appropriation of Indian history and culture.104 John’s subsequent suicide by stepping off the skyscraper has everything to do with his adoption and conflicted identity construction. Few critics have expanded on what ensues after John plunges to his death.105 The narrator observes how John feels a tearing inside after hitting the pavement and is miraculously transformed into two different men. The last scene with John is suggestive of his imaginary (re)birth into a new, naked brown body. As symbols of his past life, John tucks a family picture and a clipping about Father Duncan’s disappearance back into the pocket of the fallen man. Leaving the dead body on the pavement, the healed, Indigenous John departs the city, hoping to find a Native mother and father. Throughout the novel, the figure of the Indian Killer defies definition, but the characters associate the figure with a range of cultural and historical notions. Many of the distinctive features of the Killer bring to mind the shape-shifting tricksters of ancient Native American myths.106 The Killer has talons, and the only character in the novel who has seen the Killer face to face claims that the Killer is neither a man nor a woman, but an “it” with wings.107 A homeless Indian man, in turn, explains that the Killer embodies the best characteristics of a long line of prominent, historical Indian leaders such as Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo and Wovoka. Marie surmises that the Killer might be a product of the Ghost Dance. At the conclusion, the Killer is seen singing and dancing

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at a cemetery on “this reservation or that reservation,”108 where he is joined by increasing numbers of Indians. The narrator’s pronouncement that “this dance is over five hundred years old”109 invokes the very beginnings of European colonialism of the Americas as the earliest link in the ongoing traumatic measures of colonizing and assimilating Indians. This, in turn, enhances the novel’s theme of forced transracial adoption as a recent form of trauma in the same continuous sequence of intergenerational, historical traumas. Solar Storms refers to Wounded Knee as a contemporary and historical site of Indian resistance, and incidentally, like Indian Killer, it also invokes Ghost dancing as an image of resistance. In Hogan’s novel, the meaning of the windigo myth undergoes a transformation that mirrors historical changes in interpretation. Shawn Smallman explains that, over time, most Algonquian peoples began to see windigo stories as a metaphor for colonialism.110 The most modern, insatiably greedy, windigos have “assimilated and reincarnated as corporations, conglomerates, and multinationals.”111 Angel similarly compares “those with the money, the investments, the city power”112 with the windigo towards the end of the novel. Significantly, the female bearers of communicative memory also know about a trickster figure called Wolverine, who is the opposite of the windigo. Angel is identified as an agile and unyielding mythical Wolverine in her fight against BEEVCO. Unlike the nearly all-Indian group of the homeless in Indian Killer, the political protest movement in Solar Storms not only consists of local Indigenous women and men, but, in addition to AIM members who come to help, they are also assisted by white environmental activists. Nevertheless, just like the James Bay Cree and Inuit, they fail to end the building of the first phase of the hydroelectric project. Although the Indian characters are subjected to the ongoing oppression of whites, Solar Storms can be regarded as hopeful,113 because it is imbued with a deep sense of solidarity across Native generations, an empowering, holistic relationship to nature and trust in the future, embodied in Angel’s aptly named baby sister, Aurora, as a metonymic representative of new generations of Indigenous people. Despite the fact that Angel’s years in white foster care have deprived her of her Native American identity and cultural heritage, she manages to create a new strong Indigenous female identity. In her words, Solar Storms also proposes that, even if resistance is Native Americans’ only means of survival in a white-dominated society, it gives them self-respect.114 Whilst Ghost

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dancing is used as the central metaphor for Indian resistance in Indian Killer, the escalating masculinist violence and the novel’s uncompromising ending, in particular, hardly leave any hope for the possibility of Indian-white negotiation. Unlike Hogan’s protagonist, Alexie’s alienated male adoptee fails to overcome the trauma of forced removal and to construct a new, viable Indigenous identity, at least within his lifetime. However, as I have demonstrated, both novels link the trauma of forced removal of Native American children to other intergenerational collective traumas grounded in the trauma of colonialism and colonization. Ultimately, what the two dissimilar novels also have in common is that they forcefully emphasize the significance of the past in the present.

Notes









1. Only 375 Native children were officially adopted in the scope of the project, but, as Palmiste points out, “approximately 12,486 children were adopted between 1961 and 1976 out of the scope of the Indian Adoption Project.” Claire Palmiste, “From the Indian Adoption Project to the Indian Child Welfare Act: The Resistance of Native American Communities.” Indigenous Policy Journal XXII: 1 (2011): 5. Johnson concludes that 25–30% of all Indian children were placed in non-Indian homes or institutions between 1969 and 1974. Troy R. Johnson, “The State and the American Indian: Who Gets the Indian Child?” Wicazo Sa Review 14: 1 (1999): 208. 2. Briggs questions the use of the word “transracial” in this context, asking “whether members of Native nations belong to a ‘race.’” Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 58. For more, see Briggs, Somebody’s Children, 64–65. 3. Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), xxvi. 4. Palmiste, “From the Indian Adoption Project,” 2. 5. According to Palmiste, the six major reasons for the success of the Indian Adoption Project are “the high demand for adoption by white couples, the media coverage, the living conditions in some reservations, the high fees for adoption, the covert assimilation policy adopted by the BIA and the benefits of an efficient structure: the Adoption Resource Exchanges.” Palmiste, “From the Indian Adoption Project to the Indian Child Welfare Act,” 2. 6. Jacobs, Generation Removed, xxvii.

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7.  Barbara J. Cook, “Introduction,” in From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, ed. Barbara J. Cook (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 2. 8. Daniel Grassian, Understanding Sherman Alexie (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 7. 9.  Cook, “Introduction,” 3; Jeff Berglund, “Imagination Turns Every Word into a Bottle Rocket: An Introduction to Sherman Alexie,” in Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press), xxviii. 10.  Ernest Stromberg, “Circles within Circles: Linda Hogan’s Rhetoric of Indigenism,” in From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, ed. Barbara J. Cook (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 105. According to Krupat, Indigenism is “a worldview that privileges a spiritual relationship with the land and inhuman nature.” Arnold Krupat, “Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Critical Positions on Native American Literatures,” in MirrorWriting: (Re-)Constructions of Native American Identity, ed. Thomas Claviez and Maria Moss (Berlin: Galda and Wilch Verlag, 2000), 220. 11. See Hartmut Lutz, Approaches: Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures (Augsburg: Wissner Verlag, 2002), 206, 208. 12. Cf. Lutz, Approaches, 204. 13.  Vivian M. May, Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (New York: Routledge, 2015), 4, 20, 21. 14. May, Pursuing Intersectionality, 53. 15. Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23. 16. Ecofeminism has been criticized for not paying enough attention to colonization as the primary issue for Native American women. Andy Smith, “Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 22, 30. Sturgeon points out that “much of ecofeminist discourse about Native women silences their voices even while idealizing them.” Noël Sturgeon, “The Nature of Race: Discourses of Racial Difference,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, 259. 17.  Van Styvendale uses the term “trans/historical” in her analysis of trauma in Jeanette Armstrong’s Slash and Alexie’s Indian Killer in order to stress “the idea that trauma is transcendent of historical and material realities.” Nancy Van Styvendale, “The Trans/historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” Studies in the Novel 40: 1 & 2 (2008): 204. My term “intergenerational” emphasizes the generational aspect in the “inheritance” of trauma.

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18.  See Mark Shackleton, “The Theme of Adoption in Native North American Literature,” in Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies, ed. Ari Helo (Helsinki: Renvall Institute, University of Helsinki, 2007), 157 n. 1. Jacobs writes: “Social workers and court authorities often deemed Indian children neglected and improperly supervised if they stayed regularly with caretakers other than their biological parents. This bias conflicted with Indian notions of proper care, as grandparents, aunts and uncles often served as important caregivers for Indian children.” Jacobs, Generation Removed, 83–84. 19.  See Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 126–127. 20.  Harald Welzer, “Communicative Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 285. Assmann refers to the limit of eighty years. Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 113. 21. Meredith James, “‘Indians Do Not Live in Cities, They Only Reside There’: Captivity and the Urban Wilderness in Indian Killer,” in Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010), 172. 22. Palmiste, “From the Indian Adoption Project,” 6. 23. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 26. 24. Hogan, Solar Storms, 74. 25.  Claire Kidwell and Alan Velie, Native American Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 22. 26. Catherine Rainwater, “Intertextual Twins and Their Relations. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Solar Storms,” Modern Fiction Studies 45: 1 (1999): 105. 27. Hogan, Solar Storms, 29. 28. Smith, “Ecofeminism,” 31. 29. “One of the houses I’d lived in sloped as if it would fall off the very face of earth. Another was upright, staunch, and puritan. There was a house with cement stairs leading to the front door, tangled bramble around it. There was one I loved, a yellow house in the middle of a dry prairie with two slanted trees that made it seem off-center” (Hogan, Solar Storms, 26). 30. Christie regards Indian Killer as a postmodern novel. Stuart Christie, “Renaissance Man. The Tribal ‘Schizophrenic’ in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25: 4 (2001): 6. 31. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 3. 32. See Van Styvendale, “The Trans/historicity of Trauma,” 217.

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33. Cynthia Callahan, Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 124; Christina Judith Hein, Whiteness, the Gaze, and Transdifference in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012), 268. In an interview, Alexie states that the protagonist “goes mad in the course of the book.” Quoted in Van Styvendale, “The Trans/historicity of Trauma,” 210. 34. Alexie, Indian Killer, 6. 35. Alexie, Indian Killer, 9. 36. James, “Indians Do Not Live in Cities,” 178. James also uses the concept of “the reverse captivity narrative.” James, “Indians Do Not Live in Cities,” 172. 37. Callahan, Kin of Another Kind, 124; James, “Indians Do Not Live in Cities,” 172–173. 38. Alexie, Indian Killer, 12. 39.  See, for instance, Daniel Grassian, Understanding Sherman Alexie (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 200 n. 7. This irony does not escape a homeless Indian whom Daniel encounters decades later in Seattle: “Ain’t nobody knows any Indian named John Smith. Ain’t no such thing.” (Alexie, Indian Killer, 219). 40. Ruth Frankenberg, “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 4, 16. 41. Alexie, Indian Killer, 11. 42. Alexie, Indian Killer, 11. 43. Alexie, Indian Killer, 115. 44. Jacobs, Generation Removed, 50, 61. 45. Alexie, Indian Killer, 19. 46. Frankenberg, “Introduction,” 9. 47. Alexie, Indian Killer, 77. 48. Alexie, Indian Killer, 305. 49. Hein, Whiteness, 281–282. 50.  Margaret Homans, “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins,” Narrative 14: 1 (2005): 4; Toby Alice Volkman, “Introduction: New Geographies of Kinship,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman, 2nd Printing (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 5. 51. Alexie, Indian Killer, 12. 52.  Janet Dean, “The Violence of Collection: Indian Killer’s Archives,” Studies in American Indian Literature 20: 3 (2008): 34. 53. Alexie, Indian Killer, 20.

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54. Alexie, Indian Killer, 13. 55. “As a Jesuit, he knew those priests were martyred just like Jesus. As a Spokane Indian, he knew those Jesuits deserved to die for their crimes against Indians.” (Alexie, Indian Killer, 15). 56.  Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption in North America,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman, 2nd Printing (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 97. 57. Alexie, Indian Killer, 22. 58. Van Styvendale, “The Trans/historicity of Trauma,” 211. 59. Geoffrey Stacks, “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 43: 1 (2010): 162. 60. Smith, “Ecofeminism,” 22. 61. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 4–9. 62. Kolodny, Lay of the Land, 5. 63. Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures, 263. 64. Fat-Eaters are an imaginary tribe. Literary scholars associate them with Inuits in the novel. 65. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91. 66. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91. 67. Ann Fisher-Wirth, “Storied Earth, Storied Lives: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Rick Bass’s The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” in From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives in Linda Hogan, ed. Barbara J. Cook (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 63–64. 68. Hogan, Solar Storms, 25. 69. Hogan, Solar Storms, 85. 70. Welzer, “Communicative Memory,” 286, 293. 71. Shawn Smallman, Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History (Victoria: Heritage House, 2015), 21. 72.  Trees were traditional burial places. Birgit Hans, “Water and Ice: Restoring Balance to the World in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” North Dakota Quarterly 70: 3 (2003): 100. 73. Alexie, Indian Killer, 113. 74. Dr Westermeyer quoted in Palmiste “From the Indian Adoption Project to the Indian Welfare Act,” 6. 75. Hein, Whiteness, 279. 76. Callahan, Kin of Another Kind, 123; Christie, “Renaissance Man,” 2–3, 7.

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77. Alexie, Indian Killer, 28. 78. Tina Chen, “Towards an Ethics of Knowledge,” MELUS 39: 2 (2005): 164. 79. See Grassian, Understanding Sherman Alexie, 111, 113, 115, 116, 121, 123, 124; Callahan Kin of Another Kind, 123. Macdonald, Macdonald, and Sheridan refer to John as “a schizophrenic serial killer.” Andrew Macdonald et al., Shapeshifting: Images of Native Americans in Recent Popular Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 249. 80. See Hein, Whiteness, 334. 81. See, for instance, Michael K. Brown et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 11; David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 194. 82. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 83. Alexie, Indian Killer, 66. 84. Deloria, Playing Indian, 167. 85.  Lisa Tatonetti, “Dancing That Way, Things Began to Change: The Ghost Dance as Pantribal Metaphor in Sherman Alexie’s Writing,” in Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010), 17. 86. For more on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, see, for instance, Macdonald et al., Shapeshifting, 248–249. 87. Johnson, “The State and the American Indian,” 203, 204. 88. James, “Indians Do Not Live in Cities,” 173. 89. Johnson, “The State and the American Indian,” 199. 90. Johnson, “The State and the American Indian,” 201. 91. See, for instance, Paul C. Rosier, “‘Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen’: The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” Journal of American History 100: 3 (2013): 716–717. 92. See, for instance, Jim Tarter, “‘Dreams of Earth’: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays on Ecocriticism, ed. John Tallmadge (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 137,139; Laura Virginia Castor, “Claiming Place in the Wor(l)ds: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” MELUS 11: 2 (2005): 157–158; Anon., “James Bay Road—Hydro-Québec Project,” accessed February 2, 2016, http:// www.jamesbayroad/com/hydro/index.html. 93. Tarter, “Dreams of Earth,” 138. 94. Hogan, Solar Storms, 57. 95. Rosier, “Modern America,” 717. 96. Hogan, Solar Storms, 74.

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97. Caruth¸ Unclaimed Experience, 58. 98. Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 14. 99. Alexie, Indian Killer, 338. 100. Van Styvendale, “The Trans/historicity of Trauma,” 220. 101. Hein, Whiteness, 331. 102. Alexie, Indian Killer, 379. 103. Alexie, Indian Killer, 411. 104. Cf. Dean “The Violence of Collection,” 49. 105. See Hein, Whiteness, 288–289; James, “Indians Do Not Live in Cities,” 183–184; Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2010), 101. 106.  See Esa Kostet, “‘They were nothing like the Indians he had read about’—Stereotyyppien ja kulttuuristen traditioiden vaikutus identiteetin muotoutumiseen Sherman Alexien teoksessa Indian Killer” (Master’s thesis, University of Turku, 2015), 55–57. 107. Alexie, Indian Killer, 324. 108. Alexie, Indian Killer, 419. 109. Alexie, Indian Killer, 420. 110. Smallman, Dangerous Spirits, 171. 111. Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2001), 235–237. 112. Hogan, Solar Storms, 343. 113. Tarter regards the ending as “especially optimistic.” Tarter, “Dreams of Earth,” 144. 114. Hogan, Solar Storms, 325.



Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Anon. “James Bay Road—Hydro-Québec Project.” Accessed February 8, 2016. http://www.jamesbayroad/com/hydro/index.html. Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109–25. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Berglund, Jeff. “Imagination Turns Every Word into a Bottle Rocket: An Introduction to Sherman Alexie.” In Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, xi–xxxix. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010. Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.

94  P. Ahokas Brown, Michael K., Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellmann. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Callahan, Cynthia. Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Castor, Laura Virginia. “Claiming Place in the Wor(l)ds: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” MELUS 11: 2 (2005): 157–80. Chen, Tina. “Towards an Ethics of Knowledge.” MELUS 39: 2 (2005): 157–73. Christie, Stuart. “Renaissance Man. The Tribal ‘Schizophrenic’ in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25: 4 (2005): 1–19. Cook, Barbara J. “Introduction.” In From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, edited by Barbara J. Cook, 1–10. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. Dean, Janet. “The Violence of Collection: Indian Killer’s Archives.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 20: 3 (2008): 29–51. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “Storied Earth, Storied Lives. Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Rick Bass’s The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness.” In From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, edited by Barbara J. Cook, 53–66. Boulder: University Colorado, 2003. Frankenberg, Ruth. “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, 1–33. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Grassian, Daniel. Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Hans, Birgit. “Water and Ice: Restoring Balance to the World in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” North Dakota Quarterly 70: 3 (2003): 93–104. Hein, Christina Judith. Whiteness, the Gaze, and Transdifference in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. Tenth Anniversary Edition with a New Postscript by the Author. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Homans, Margaret. “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins.” Narrative 14: 1 (2005): 4–26. Jacobs, Margaret D. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

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James, Meredith. “‘Indians Do Not Live in Cities, They Only Reside There’: Captivity and the Urban Wilderness in Indian Killer.” In Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, 171–85. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010. Johnson, Troy R. “The State and the American Indian: Who Gets the Indian Child?” Wicazo Sa Review 14: 1 (1999): 197–214. Johnston, Basil. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2001. Kidwell, Claire and Alan Velie. Native American Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Kostet, Esa. “‘They were nothing like the Indians he had read about’— Stereotyyppien ja kulttuuristen traditioiden vaikutus identiteetin muotoutumiseen Sherman Alexien teoksessa Indian Killer.” Master’s thesis, University of Turku, 2015. Krupat, Arnold. “Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Critical Positions on Native American Literatures.” In Mirror Writing: (Re-) Constructions of Native American Identity, edited by Thomas Claviez and Maria Moss, 213–35. Berlin: Galda and Wilch Verlag, 2000. Krupat, Arnold. Red Matters: Native American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Lutz, Hartmut. Approaches: Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures. Augsburg: Wissner Verlag, 2002. May, Vivian M. Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. New York: Routledge, 2015. Macdonald, Andrew, Gina Macdonald, and MaryAnn Sheridan. Shapeshifting: Images of Native Americans in Recent Popular Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Palmiste, Claire. “From the Indian Adoption Project to the Indian Child Welfare Act: The Resistance of Native American Communities.” Indigenous Policy Journal XXII: 1 (2011): 1–9. Rainwater, Catherine. “Intertextual Twins and Their Relations. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Solar Storms.” Modern Fiction Studies 45: 1 (1999): 93–113. Rosier, Paul C. “‘Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen’: The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” Journal of American History 100: 3 (2013): 711–35. Shackleton, Mark. “The Theme of Adoption in Native North American Literature.” In Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies, edited by Ari Helo, 137–44. Helsinki: Renvall Institute, University of Helsinki, 2007.

96  P. Ahokas Smallman, Shawn. Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History. Victoria, BC: Heritage House, 2015. Smith, Andy. “Ecofeminism through an Anticolonial Framework.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren, 21–37. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997. Stacks, Geoffrey. “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 43: 1 (2010): 161–76. Stromberg, Ernest. “Circles within Circles: Linda Hogan’s Rhetoric of Indigenism.” In From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, edited by Barbara J. Cook, 97–108. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. Sturgeon, Noël. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997. Sturgeon, Noël. “The Nature of Race: Discourses of Racial Difference.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren, 260–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Tarter, Jim. “‘Dreams of Earth’: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” In Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays on Ecocriticism, edited by John Tallmadge, 128–47. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. Tatonetti, Lisa. “Dancing That Way, Things Began to Change: The Ghost Dance as Pantribal Metaphor in Sherman Alexie’s Writing.” In Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, 1–24. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010. Van Styvendale, Nancy. “The Trans/historicity of Trauma in Jeanette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer.” Studies in the Novel 40: 1 & 2 (2008): 203–23. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Volkman, Toby Alice. “Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption in North America.” In Cultures of Transnational Adoption, edited by Toby Alice Volkman, 81–113. 2nd Printing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Volkman, Toby Alice. “Introduction: New Geographies of Kinship.” In Cultures of Transnational Adoption, edited by Toby Alice Volkman, 1–22. 2nd Printing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Welzer, Harald. “Communicative Memory.” In Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 285–98. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000.

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Author Biography Pirjo Ahokas has been Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland, since 2015. She is the author of Forging a New Self (1991), a monograph on Bernard Malamud’s novels, and co-editor (with Martine Chard-Hutchinson) of Reclaiming Memory: American Representations of the Holocaust (1997). Her current research and recent publications deal with works by women authors of Chinese, African American and Native American descent and new writing by Black British women authors. Pirjo Ahokas was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Yale University and an ACLS grantee at Harvard University. She is the book review editor for American Studies in Scandinavia.

CHAPTER 5

Sugarcoated Prejudice: Adoption and Transethnic Adoption in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree Bo Pettersson

From Playing Indian to Going Native When Forrest Carter published The Education of Little Tree: A True Story in 1976, it was allegedly an autobiographical account of his formative years as a Cherokee boy raised by his grandparents. In 1991, the history professor Dan T. Carter (no relative, or possibly a distant one) disclosed that “Forrest Carter” was a pseudonym for Asa Earl Carter (1925– 1979), an infamous white supremacist and right-wing activist, who had adopted the Cherokee culture when writing his very popular sentimental book (over 1.5 million copies sold).1 This started a controversy that is still not entirely settled: Did Asa Carter, in fact, discard his racist view and pay homage to the Cherokee culture, even though he seemed to know rather little about it, or was his novel (whose subtitle is deleted from the most recent 2001 edition) merely a hoax? Critics, educators, and friends were—and still are—divided on the issue.

B. Pettersson (*)  University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_5

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My paper attempts to settle the issue by demonstrating that The Education of Little Tree is a particularly intriguing case of two interrelated kinds of adoption: the happy adoption of Little Tree by his (mainly) Cherokee grandparents and Carter’s simulated transethnic adoption of the Cherokee. By placing the book within the discussion on adoption, transethnic adoption, and textual deception, I aim to show what its specific features are. In terms of the controversy, I find that although Carter clearly held the Cherokee in high regard, his negligible knowledge of the tribe and his textual and contextual white supremacist views reveal that it is primarily a fraud written for fame and fortune. In fact, a student of mine, Eeva Kuusisto, recently wrote her master’s thesis on how the Cherokees are portrayed in the novel, and even though her analysis proves that Carter has next to no knowledge of the Cherokee tribe, she comes to the conclusion that she “still want[s] to believe in the magic of this novel.”2 Together with the abiding popularity of The Education of Little Tree, this shows how adept Carter is in his sentimental portrayal of the protagonist, not least in combining adoption and transethnic adoption. However, Carter’s novel would not have been such a major bestseller were not transethnic adoption so ingrained in Western culture in general, and such a part of the American grain in particular. Especially in American popular culture, there is a long tradition of ethnic impersonation of both Native Americans and African Americans. The impersonation usually consists of a paradoxical relation between the mainstream and the ethnic cultures, whose foundation is a combination of prejudice and exploitation. This comes across as stereotyping through negligible knowledge of the Indigenous culture and exploitation of that culture for exotic elements, such as an enticing world view or moral code (usually of the Noble Savage variety), ultimately in order to make the cultural artefact more popular. An important study of the various forms this prejudice and exploitation can take in terms of African American culture is Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.3 Lott shows that the minstrel shows in New York in the 1840s affected the American working class in competing but overlapping ways, and ultimately paved the way for Buffalo Bill shows with real or fake Indians4 at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.5 What Lott’s phrase aptly pinpoints is that, despite the fear and stereotyping of‚ and prejudice against‚ minority cultures on the part of the majority of

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Americans, such cultures seem so fascinating that the affection for them comes across in different kinds of influence or theft. Philip Deloria was among the first to study such theft in terms of the ethnic impersonation of Native Americans in some detail in his work Playing Indian, where he demonstrates how, ever since the Boston Tea Party, white Americans have had a perplexing predilection to impersonate Indians. But it is important to notice that this impersonation is performative and short-term, and entails a personality that the performer dons for a particular purpose, while concealing his or her real identity (ethnic and other). For Deloria, this act is “precarious and creative,” since it plays on this double identity.6 Laura Browder has studied the next step, when impersonation is more wholesale and becomes what could be termed transethnic adoption as such. This is when performers and authors actually try to change their ethnicity by claiming to be, for instance, Native Americans. One of her examples is the famous case of the black janitor Sylvester Long reinventing himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; another is Asa Earl Carter claiming to be Forrest Carter of Cherokee extraction. Browder views such “ethnic impersonators” as employing “autobiography as only one tool in the larger project of redefining their identity.”7 But this is still impersonation, since the change may seem wholesale, but is actually done for personal gain. “Going native” is—or can be—the third stage of impersonation, which takes the transethnic adoption to its extreme: people going native are, in fact, trying to change their personality, at least not primarily for any reason other than that they find the target ethnicity so enticing that they want to change into it, in this case, become Indians, not genetically, but culturally. In other words, this may be a long-term commitment. In fact, in her study drawing on the very phrase, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Shari M. Huhndorf explicitly defines going native against Deloria’s playing Indian with her view that it is a more recent phenomenon, stemming from the late nineteenth century. Going native as opposed to playing Indian involves “the more widespread conviction that adopting some vision of Native life in a more permanent way is necessary to regenerate and maintain EuropeanAmerican racial and national identities.”8 Thus, it is “an act that both articulates and denies white America’s history of conquest” and “remains an integral performance of national identity.”9 In short, Deloria, Browder, and Huhndorf all find much ambiguity in transethnic impersonation and adoption. They also maintain that the

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very act of taking on some aspect of another ethnicity is not only based on coupling stereotyping and prejudice with a vested interest, but often also entails—whether intentionally or not—strengthening the white majority’s identity. This is the larger context of transethnic adoption against which the extraordinary popularity of The Education of Little Tree must be seen. In fact, the ground for transethnic crossings had been covered for hundreds of years in American culture before the book was published in the mid-1970s in the aftermath of the counter-culture movement, when going native was one facet of the liberal American outlook. Since both Browder and Huhndorf exemplify their respective short-term and long-term view of adopting a Native American identity with reference to Forrest Carter and his fake memoir (now viewed as fiction), it can be instructive to see where Carter should be placed on the scale from playing Indian to ethnic impersonation to going native. But in order to do so, we must first try to understand why and how Asa Earl Carter became Forrest Carter.

The Making of Forrest Carter How do you go from a fanatical white supremacist to an author writing a seemingly liberal fictional and sentimental memoir of a Native American boy, a veritable Bildungsroman targeted at young adult readers? And how do you do it so convincingly that liberal educators even today— some of them well aware of the controversy surrounding Carter’s past— continue to give this novel to their students to read, precisely because it is such a moral story? When Dan T. Carter exposed Forrest Carter as Asa Earl Carter in his 1991 article, the history professor had done his legwork: he notes that the Calhoun County High School yearbook from 1943 expects Asa Carter to return to their Alabama town as “a famous movie star.”10 Thus, even in high school, Carter’s acting talent was seen as his distinguishing feature: he could make himself seem what he was not. Dan Carter summarizes his life after high school, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, as follows: he “carved out a violent career in Southern politics as a Ku Klux Klan terrorist, right-wing radio announcer, homegrown American fascist and anti-Semite, rabble-rousing demagogue and secret author of the famous 1963 speech by Gov. George Wallace of Alabama: ‘Segregation now […] Segregation tomorrow […] Segregation forever.’”11 This suggests many aspects about Asa Carter, not least that

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he was a firm white supremacist, who had a way with language, both spoken and written. But times changed. By the late 1960s, even Senator Wallace had noticed that racism was not selling so well, even in the South. In fact, he was re-elected after a change of policy, now catering for all Alabamans, black as well as white, and therefore had no use for a violent and fanatic henchman and speech writer such as Asa Carter, as radio producer Joe Richman recently maintained on the popular radio show This American Life.12 In other words, Asa Carter had to find a new career and, having had an interest in Westerns, he turned to writing. Carter’s first novel—published under the name Bedford Forrest Carter—The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales sold so well that it was republished by Delacorte Press as Gone to Texas two years later and made into the film The Outlaw Josey Wales by Clint Eastwood in 1976. A reading of that novel suggests that, even though he does not voice any white supremacist views, Carter does not stray far from them. As Richman points out, white supremacists hold Native Americans in high regard, since they are supposedly Noble Savages of sorts and thus respected even by Ku Klux Klan members. Hence, in the novel, Josey Wales befriends a Cherokee called Lone Watie, for whom the vigilante Josey is “a like warrior with a common cause, a common suffrage […] a respect for courage.”13 The common cause is apparently based on the fact that the Yankee Cavalry has killed his wife and baby boy and that the Cherokees have been dispossessed of their land by the US Government (leading to the infamous “Trail of Tears”), thus they both have a grudge against the (Yankee) government.14 What is more, Josey becomes the blood brother—or, as he puts it, “kin”—of the Comanche chief Ten Bears, who also hates the government, telling Josey: “It is sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.”15 This novel—The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales or Gone to Texas, depending on the edition—includes the dedication “For Ten Bears,”16 an actual Comanche chief, while its lesser sequel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, in which Josey finally ends his vengeance and befriends Apache warriors, is dedicated “To the Apache.”17 Thus, it is clear that Forrest Carter even in these novels started to blur the line between fiction (Josey Wales) and fact (Ten Bears, fictionalized in the novel, but real in the dedication), and retained his respect for vigilante action and his Southern right-wing hatred of the government. Similarly, in Carter’s last novel, Watch for Me on the Mountain (aka Cry Geronimo!), a fictional retelling

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of the Apache chief Geronimo’s life, the friendship between the white scout Tom Horn and Geronimo is revered by both, since, as a rule, whites and their government are not to be trusted. As Horn tells Major Morrow, Geronimo will surrender, because he has given his “Word. Suthin’ the goddamn army guvment can’t understand, as they ain’t got one.”18 By the mid-70s, then, when he started to write The Education of Little Tree, Carter was a trained rhetorician in speech and writing, with two novels under his belt. Also, as his friend Ron Taylor puts it in This American Life, he had changed his habitus, lost weight, got a tan, grown a mustache, become soft spoken, and claimed on TV that he was “the storyteller of the Cherokee nation.”19 Asa Carter had become Forrest Carter—that is, the white supremacist was now a full-blood Cherokee, who was ready to write his memoir, his “True Story.”

Adoption and Transethnic Adoption as Rhetorical Strategies In Forrest Carter’s transethnic adoption, the genre was crucial to his book’s initial credibility. The subtitle “A True Story” and its initial dedication “For the Cherokee,”20 together with Carter’s media appearances, seemed to corroborate that The Education of Little Tree was indeed the memoir of Little Tree, who had grown up to become Forrest. Still, such contextual validation would not have secured its popularity without its key interplay between adoption and transethnic adoption. On the first page of the book, the five-year-old Little Tree’s parents die and it is his own decision to be adopted by his Granpa, half Cherokee (whose name, readers soon learn, is Wales),21 and Granma, full-blood Cherokee, in the countryside of Tennessee before World War II. Although other relatives try to take Little Tree away, he “held onto his [Granpa’s] leg and wouldn’t turn loose even when they tried to take me away” after his mother’s funeral.22 On the bus to his grandparents’ home, they encounter discrimination as the bus driver, lifting his hand, greets them with “How!” but Little Tree as a naïve first person narrator is simply happy that the people in the bus are in such a good mood that they laugh. When they walk home from the bus and Little Tree is tired, he notices that “Granpa had slowed down, so I figured he was tired too.”23 As they

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sing a song to him about Little Tree, he receives his Cherokee name and is “happy that they loved and wanted” him.24 In this short first chapter, Carter skillfully sets the tone for the entire novel. As Charles Dickens well knew, few things appeal to readers’ feelings as much as the portrayal of an orphan child. The tacit kindness and love the grandparents harbor for Little Tree is crucial in this romanticized depiction of a happy adoption. But Carter also shows the discrimination the Cherokee encounter through Little Tree’s naïve narration, which makes it even more touching. Thus, the idyllic adoption tableau is colored by discrimination, but since its import escapes Little Tree (if not his readers), it is even more moving. In this way, the scene is set for Little Tree to start his Cherokee Bildung under Granpa’s tutelage, by which Forrest Carter’s not only fictional, but fictitious, transethnic adoption is portrayed. Furthermore, there are other indications that the story of Little Tree is fiction. For instance, in many ways, Little Tree seems like a younger Huck Finn: he is only 5 to about 9 years old in the course of the story. But whereas Huck on the first page of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn clearly comments on the truth tongue in cheek—in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, supposedly “Mr. Mark Twain […] told the truth, mainly”25—Carter stuck to his claim that his book was a “True Story.” Still, Little Tree even gives the perhaps most famous phrase in Twain’s novel a twist, when he paraphrases his boarding-school friend Wilburn, saying “he didn’t care if he did go to hell, like I was.”26 That is, according to the Reverend in charge of the boarding school, Little Tree, and by implication all heathen Indians, are “born of evil,”27 just because Little Tree understands that deer are mating in a picture his teacher shows the class, and tells her so. Here, much like Huck Finn, Little Tree and his fellow Native Americans are supposedly going to hell simply because of their race, which is shown to be more stoic and honest than that of white Americans. Thus, even though the narrative, rhetorical, and thematic means seem to imply that this is not a “True Story,” that is, an autobiography, the very means and motifs employed—naïve narration, sentimental portrayal, stoicism, truthfulness, love, and care—have seemed so touching to readers that the genre change from memoir to fiction is overridden by the moving narrative. The naïve narration is particularly effective. Being younger than Huck, Little Tree is even more naïve, in both outlook and, in part, diction.28 Once, when tired and carried home by Granma, he brags that

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“I could of made it, more than likely.”29 Little Tree also often defamiliarizes what he perceives, as when depicting the sky in a way that gradually suggests he is watching lightning: “From the cabin porch we would watch the big bars of light that stand for a full second, maybe two, on the mountaintop, running feelers or lightning wire in all directions before they’re jerked back to the sky.”30 Throughout, he also precociously and poignantly comments on the teachings by his grandparents with a final: “Which is right”31 or “Which is reasonable.”32 All this makes him learn the Native American way of life as a stand-in for the readers, who also get their Native Bildung in a way that suggests that they, too, might go native, at least morally and ecologically. But what kind of teachings do readers actually get about the Cherokee way of life? In fact, next to none. Granpa starts with the most crucial concept, “The Way,” “Take only what ye need,”33 which sounds like a sound piece of Native American advice—except that it is not Cherokee, but Arapaho. As Kuusisto shows in her thesis, almost everything else that Little Tree is taught as the customs of the Cherokee has little or nothing to do with that tribe: the Cherokee have no Mon-o-lah, or earth mother,34 and no marriage stick (the most beloved possession of the grandparents, which symbolizes their close relation),35 although Cherokee wives did have the right to beat disobedient husbands.36 This is related to the fact that, contrary to Granpa’s (humane) patriarchal stance, traditional Cherokee culture is‚ in fact, matrilineal. Also, Granpa’s account of The Trail of Tears is vague and distorted, to say the least.37 Moreover, the novel’s teachings on reincarnation, rattlesnakes, and birds have nothing to do with the Cherokee worldview, and—to top it all— apparently not a single actual Cherokee tale is included. Ultimately, stereotyping is the rule: the Cherokee are Noble Savages, except for a few minor characters who are depicted through another Native stereotype, the drunken Indian. Nevertheless, once again it seems, the grandparents’ humane teachings tend to overrule the fact that they are inaccurate. The moral and ecological transethnic adoption that readers have eagerly taken on is based on a non-existent or vague understanding of Native American tribes and their different traditions; on age-old stereotyping of Native Americans; and on a willingness to believe that some moral and ecological teachings are Native American (based on a version of the Noble Savage). Readers have simply thought they have found such compassionate teachings in the novel that they have not stopped to confirm what

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is  taught. Hence, the supposed education is in fact miseducation grounded in ignorance.

Text versus Context in Assessing Moral Values This brings us to an intriguing question: How do adoption and transethnic adoption (for Little Tree, the author, and his readers) relate to the alleged morals of the novel? It is a question that goes to the heart of literary studies, because different literary theories propose various ways of dealing with literature and its morals. To put it simply, should one rely only on the text, possibly including its intertexts (as many scholars reliant on new criticism, Russian formalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism have claimed), or should one view the meaning of a literary text in context (as, for instance, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theorists and critics have held)? Textual scholars might say that a thorough reading of the novel may, in fact, give clues as to its actual morals. I have already pointed out quite a few, more or less evident, clues, if you have some knowledge of generic, narrative, and rhetorical issues as well as, in this case, of Cherokee culture. As we have seen, the naïve narration, the sentimental situation of the happily adopted orphan, and the high regard for Cherokee culture (however incorrectly portrayed) are established from the start. But we could dig more deeply into the text. More pointedly, are there any signs of Carter holding on to his white supremacist view? In fact, a careful reading can unearth quite a few such signs. What seems like a homage to Native Americans in general and the Cherokee in particular is rather undercut by views of white male supremacy. The (supposedly Cherokee) “Way” that Granpa first teaches Little Tree also has a “survival of the fittest” logic: when hunting deer, “[t]ake the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat.”38 Similarly, the superior whites have subdued the Indians, so when Little Tree, after his grandparents have passed away, finally goes west (apparently from Tennessee to Oklahoma) to find the Indian nations, he discovers “there was no Nation.”39 The Indians themselves have fallen prey to and have had to accept the social Darwinist view inherent in the very “Way” they abide by. This goes for poor Southerners in relation to politicians, their “Regulators,” and especially the “guvmint” in Washington; for non-Caucasian ethnicities and other disenfranchised segments of the population (Indians, mountainfolk, African

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Americans, and to some extent Jews) in relation to affluent whites; and for women in relation to men. In this way, the nostalgia for the Cherokee way of life does not entail questioning white supremacy. The chapter “The Farm in the Clearing”40 outlines much of this social hierarchy. As a young boy in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, Granpa watches what happens on a little farm run by a poor exConfederate soldier and his wife. They have an old black man as their help. A Union soldier, who has been a farmer, gives them a mule and a sack of seed corn, so they can farm the land. The farmer’s wife tries to catch the mule, but the black man comes to her aid and wrestles him down. The Union soldier is shot when trying to defend the farmer against the Regulators,41 who “had fancy uniforms and guns, and represented the politicians who passed new-set laws and raised taxes” and who finally shoot the farmer, too.42 This incident is called “an uprising” by politicians, who are “going to have to be reelected to handle it,” and later the valley is taken over by a rich man.43 Similarly, according to Granpa, Lady Macbeth, like women in general, should be “doing what a woman was supposed to do and kept her nose out of the business that ought to have rightly been done by Mr. Macbeth,”44 that is, they should know their place. The old black man does, as he is happy to be the handyman for the farmer. The moral seems to be that Southerners and Union soldiers might get along—especially if they have common interests, such as farming—but politicians with their vigilante helpers and alliances with the rich destroy that potential bond. Later, the Jewish peddler Mr. Wine may be considered thrifty by Little Tree, but a store owner voices the stereotypical racist view of him at his death: “Stingy. No money left over. Just like a damn Jew.”45 The Way clearly entails the supremacy of the white male as against other ethnicities and women. Huhndorf makes an even stronger claim about the white supremacist stance, “despite the Indian sympathies” The Education of Little Tree and Gone to Texas contain: “going native […] serves to regenerate white society and to naturalize its power.”46 The point she makes is based on the fact (noted above) that, by abstracting and falsifying Indian mythology, the Ku Klux Klan had positive views of Indians as the original Americans, including a kind of Aryan notion of their supposed heritage.47 This demonstrates how Indian teachings can be sentimentalized and adopted by post-counter-culture Americans looking for down-toearth and supposedly natural ways of life. The same goes for the government and American politics. As a typical right-wing extremist, Carter

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lets Granpa sing the praises of George Washington, and the fact that he fought Indians and imposed whiskey taxes (abhorred by Granpa as a distiller) is swept under the carpet, so that Washington remains the only allegedly “good man” in American political history.48 Christianity, too, is dismissed as hypocritical, since the church officials have “a choke-hold on religion” and determine “who was going to hell and who wasn’t,”49 much as in Huckleberry Finn. Even segregation is implicitly accepted, as Little Tree detests the non-segregated orphanage he is sent to, and goes back to live with his grandparents.50 As Browder puts it, “Asa Carter skillfully employed his knowledge of racialist thinking to create an Indian self who could appeal to the masses” from the counter-culture 1970s to the New Age 1990s.51 Such historical contextualization of The Education of Little Tree explains much but, in my view, not all, of its popularity. What is missing is a broader understanding of its uncritical acceptance. For Carter’s transethnic hoax to have become a bestseller, and to remain a steady seller even today, this does not suffice. First, we must recognize that the interest in the Indian way of life had to be coupled with ignorance of how multifaceted and varied it can be. The interest in The Education of Little Tree was based on its allegedly Native American spiritual guidelines. Second, this interest was most likely fueled by an awareness of the guilt that the mainstream population felt for what they and their ancestors had done to Indians and their way of life. Pro-Indian sentiments had also been kindled by the non-Indian author Dee Brown’s bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a retelling of the history of the American West from an Indian perspective. By showing an interest in Indigenous mythology, Americans could, as it were, at least show their respect for what they had all but eradicated. Third, since the connotations of white male supremacy are rather evident, even the liberal segment of the population that mostly lauded the book was—perhaps unawares—clearly not entirely free from social Darwinism. Still, perhaps the most evident reasons for the success of The Education of Little Tree have been mentioned above: the theme of the orphan being adopted and learning an allegedly natural and spiritual way of life, coupled with Carter’s naïve narration, deadpan humor, and sentimental portrayal of Cherokee culture, is adeptly handled by an author accomplished in the rhetoric of fake autobiography, in other words, fiction. So much for textual clues in reading The Education of Little Tree and its overt and covert morals. How about the context? Forrest Carter took

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his new first and middle names from Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, for The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales / Gone to Texas, where his name was spelled Bedford Forrest Carter, and later only kept Forrest, of which Little Tree seems a diminutive.52 As early as 1976, when The Education of Little Tree first appeared in print, The New York Times published an article claiming that Forrest Carter was, in fact, Asa Earl Carter, but this fell on deaf ears. As I have noted, when the book was reprinted in 1991, the historian Dan T. Carter exposed the hoax, which was now heeded by some readers. In the following year, Dana Rubin, in Texas Monthly, gave an account of how Carter in a drunken state had acted in blatantly racist ways in the late 1970s, that is, after his supposed change into a suave fiction writer.53 Notwithstanding, The Education of Little Tree was made into an animated film in 1997 (directed by Richard Friedenberg), and it was not until 2007 that Oprah Winfrey withdrew the book from her list of recommended reading (the first and only book she has removed). Even recently, on the talk show This American Life, some of Carter’s friends from the 1970s refused to believe that he had been a racist in his former life, so taken were they still by his charming personality as Forrest Carter.54 Thus, for quite some time—even after his death in 1979—Carter’s ethnic impersonation was successful for quite a few of his friends and thousands of readers, despite both textual and contextual clues that the transethnic adoption in real life and the “True Story” of The Education of Little Tree were merely feigned.

Adoption, Transethnic Adoption, and Literary Forgery When scrutinizing why The Education of Little Tree has become such a bestseller, surprisingly much seems to hinge on its manifest adoption motif and its transethnic adoption through the genre of fake autobiography. I have noted that the book’s popularity is in part based on guilt felt by readers over the treatment of Indians in American history. This was particularly acute in terms of Indian adoption in the 1970s. In the 1950s, the Indian Adoption Project had exacerbated the discriminating adoption procedures in place since the 1890s (in practice, Indian children adopted by white parents), which led to the Indian Child Welfare Act motion in 1968 that was finally passed in 1978.55 The media coverage of this discussion was considerable and, when Carter published his book in 1976, the debate was at its height. What also inflamed the liberal

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segment of the population in particular was the growing awareness of how boarding schools were used for “civilizing” Indians and separating them from their family and tribes.56 Thus, on the one hand, the adoption of Little Tree by his Cherokee grandparents must have seemed a kind of poetic (or moral) justice to many readers, especially since Granma and Granpa take such good care of him. On the other hand, as Little Tree close to the end of the book is sent to a boarding school with an abusive and racist headmaster, such unfair treatment struck a chord with the growing awareness of the plight of the Indians throughout the twentieth century in North America. Since Carter’s motifs seemed to illustrate the abuse of Indian children in the media at the time, perhaps readers were less prone to seek out the truth or even care about whether his novel was autobiographical. It simply may have seemed true in a general sense. Furthermore, as Mark C. Jerng has argued, the orphan has “a prominent place” in American literature “as a figure through which fiction both elaborates a certain Lockean notion of the individual and connects this mode of individualism to a larger national narrative.”57 Thus, Carter was simply able to make use of current pro-Indian sentiments, while drawing on an age-old motif in American literature that combines the individual ethos (Little Tree being educated and forging his own way) with the nation’s embarrassment over the history of its Indigenous people. Another motif related to adoption may also have played some part in The Education of Little Tree’s popularity. “Adoption,” Margaret Homans has recently noted, “has long been seen as a fictive or ‘as if’ form of family making, fabricated or figurative instead of biological or literal.”58 Such a view can be contested, but it may have rung a bell for Americans in the post-counter-culture climate of the mid-70s and the subsequent New Age spirituality. For one, adoption and transethnic adoption were acceptable: you could adopt babies from abroad or go native across cultures. If Carter really had renounced his racist views (which of course he had not), why could he not go native (even if he did so by an autobiographical hoax)? For another, such a stance comes across in Granpa’s view of the notion of kin: for him and for Little Tree, to whom it is taught, kin means both loving and understanding another person.59 But it is important to note that, in their view, a person need not, in fact, be a relative (in the original sense of kin), or even human.60 Hence, the motif of kin in the book itself seems to advocate a broad sense of kinship, just as in The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales.

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The Education of Little Tree also raises complex issues of authorship in relation to transethnicity. Sue Vice ends her study Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era by maintaining that “[t]he process of reading and discovery of a false testimony is itself significant and revelatory, and one that readers and critics would not wish undone.”61 What is more, in an interview by Ian Johnston, she makes the point that “it was important not to disregard books because they had unexpectedly changed genre.”62 She is in good company in making her claims, since K.K. Ruthven has argued that “we should start thinking more positively about literary forgery,” since forgeries “exhibit a carnivalesque irreverence towards the sanctity of various conventions.”63 Such statements may fit some cases, but The Education of Little Tree shows how fraught the issue of false memoirs can be when transethnic adoption is involved. More specifically, from a non-Indian perspective, Mark McGurl can claim that The Education of Little Tree in its positive portrayal of Indians espouses an “ethic of sympathy,”64 whereas David Treuer (Ojibwe) comments wryly that “[s]adly, until we break the habit of reading Indian lives as necessarily ‘Indian tragedies’ […] there will be more Indian fakes.”65 That is, for Treuer, Carter’s very use of sentimentality in his portrayal of Little Tree is what makes his fake transethnic adoption so effective. To employ Brian McHale’s useful term, The Education of Little Tree is no entrapment hoax, the effect of which depends on the hoax being uncovered.66 On the contrary, its author did his utmost not to be discovered as having counterfeited his autobiography. Thus, most Native American readers would, in fact, not appreciate the change in genre and most likely wish his false portrayal of the Cherokee undone. What Treuer suggests is that it is by the very sentimental sugarcoating of The Education of Little Tree that the misinformation about and prejudice against Native Americans is perpetuated. We have seen how successful Carter was in changing his lifestyle, demeanor, and speech when turning into Forrest Carter and how astute his rhetoric is when thematizing adoption and faking transethnic adoption. In fact, the foreword to the edition now in print was written by an academic of mixed Indian extraction (Osage/Cherokee), Rennard Strickland, who claims that “[s]tudents of Native American life discovered the book to be as accurate as it was mystical and romantic.”67 In fact, he is wrong on both counts: the book is far from accurate when it comes to Carter’s autobiography and his knowledge of Cherokee

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customs, and what may seem mystical or romantic comes from a deft handling of sentimental Bildungsroman-like naïve narration of adoption through transethnic adoption. That is, despite his efforts to the contrary, in his life and writings, Carter was simply impersonating Indian, not going native. Thus, the sociocultural context during and after its publication can help to explain much of the popular appeal of The Education of Little Tree. But if anything, its publishing history should teach us, critics and readers alike, to be more wary of what lies behind sugarcoated rhetoric, in literature as well as in politics. Anthony Grafton may be right in maintaining that forgery and criticism are “tightly intertwined strands in the Western tradition,”68 but that does not mean we should not do a better job at calibrating our readings of transethnic adoption.

Notes





1.  Dan T. Carter, “The Transformation of a Klansman,” The New York Times, October 4, 1991, accessed August 16, 2016, http://www. nytimes.com/1991/10/04/opinion/the-transformation-of-a-klansman. html. 2.  Eeva Kuusisto, “The Portrayal of Cherokees in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree” (Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki, 2015), 53. 3. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4. I mostly use the term Indian for ‘Native American,’ since it is used in Carter’s text and it is still widely in use in criticism, also by Native Americans, even though most people consider Native American more politically correct. 5. Bob Dylan famously acknowledged how apt Lott’s phrase is for his own borrowings of African American culture by calling his 2001 album “Love and Theft” (with quotation marks). 6.  Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 7. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7. 8.  Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 8. 9. Huhndorf, Going Native, 202.

114  B. Pettersson 10. Carter, “The Transformation of a Klansman.” 11. Carter, “The Transformation of a Klansman.” 12.  This American Life, 180 Degrees Transcript [Episode 527], aired June 13, 2014, accessed April 7, 2015, www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/ episode/527/transcript. 13. Forrest Carter [Asa Earl Carter], Gone to Texas [orig. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales], in Josey Wales: Two Westerns, written by Forrest Carter (1973; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 64. 14. Carter, Gone to Texas, 4–5, 58. 15. Carter, Gone to Texas, 179. 16. Carter, Gone to Texas, ix. 17. Forrest Carter [Asa Earl Carter], The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, in Josey Wales: Two Westerns, written by Forrest Carter (1976; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 209. 18. Forrest Carter [Asa Earl Carter], Watch for Me on the Mountain [aka Cry Geronimo!] (1978; New York: Delta, 1990), 292, emphasis original. 19. This American Life. 20.  Forrest Carter [Asa Earl Carter], The Education of Little Tree (1976; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), ix. 21. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 3. 22. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 1. 23. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 3. 24. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 5. 25. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Works of Mark Twain 8, eds. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (1884; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1. 26. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 193, emphasis original. Carter’s The Education of Little Tree draws on Twain’s novel in other ways, too. However naïve in some respects, Little Tree can be rather streetwise; the satire of organized religion is very similar; and Mr. Chunk and Mr. Slick in the chapter “A Night on the Mountain” (123–137) are most likely modeled on Twain’s con men, the King and the Duke. 27. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 191. 28. Little Tree’s diction is not as colored by Southern dialects as that of Huck, nor is it very consistent: at times, the narrator speaks as the young boy he is depicting; at others, his language seems that of an adult. 29. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 75. 30. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 101. 31. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 57 et passim. 32. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 64 et passim. 33. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 9. 34. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 7.

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35. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 43, 46. 36.  See Kuusisto, “The Portrayal of Cherokees in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree,” 10–35, 39–41. 37. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 40–42. The Trail of Tears did not concern only the Cherokee but at least four other tribes, and it was not a single event‚ but took place from 1830 to about 1850. 38. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 9. 39. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 215. See also Huhndorf, Going Native, 151–161. 40. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 114–122. 41. Here, too, Carter’s historical knowledge seems rather vague: in the history of the American West, there were different kinds of groups (mostly vigilantes) called Regulators, but apparently not during the aftermath of the Civil War. 42. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 121. 43. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 122. 44. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 15. 45. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 175. 46. Huhndorf, Going Native, 132. 47. See Huhndorf, Going Native, 132 n. 11. For a similar view, see Joe Richman in the transcript of This American Life. 48. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 16 quote, 16–19. 49. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 146. 50. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 183–199. 51. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 139. 52. See Huhndorf, Going Native, 136, 152. 53.  Dana Rubin, “The Real Education of Little Tree,” Texas Monthly, February 1992, accessed July 7, 2015, www.texasmonthly.com/content/ real-education-little-tree. 54. This American Life. 55.  See Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 59–65, 77–93. 56. See Briggs, Somebody’s Children, 65–77. 57. Mark C. Jerng, Claiming Others: Transnational Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxv. 58. Margaret Homans, The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (2013; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 2–3.

116  B. Pettersson 59. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 38–39. 60. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 113. 61. Sue Vice, Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 193– 194. 62. Ian Johnston, “Fake memoirs: Academic says we should not disregard books because they unexpectedly change genre,” The Independent, August 24, 2014, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/fake-memoirs-academic-sayswe-should-not-disregard-books-because-they-unexpectedly-changegenre-9687842.html. 63. K.K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3, 4. 64. Mark McGurl, “Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18: 2 (2005): 263. 65. David Treuer, “Going Native: Why do writers pretend to be Indians?” Slate.com, March 7, 2008, accessed April 7, 2015, www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/03/going_native.single.html. 66. See Vice, Textual Deceptions, 2. 67. Rennard Strickland, “[Foreword:] Sharing Little Tree” in Carter, The Education of Little Tree, vi. 68. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London: Collins & Brown, 1990), 7.



Bibliography Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Carter, Dan T. “The Transformation of a Klansman.” The New York Times, October 4, 1991. Accessed August 16, 2016. http://www.nytimes. com/1991/10/04/opinion/the-transformation-of-a-klansman.html. Carter, Forrest [Asa Earl Carter]. Gone to Texas [orig. The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales]. In Josey Wales: Two Westerns, written by Carter Forrest [Asa Earl Carter], vii–xii; 1–206. 1973. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Carter, Forrest [Asa Earl Carter]. The Education of Little Tree. 1976. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

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Carter, Forrest [Asa Earl Carter]. The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales. In Josey Wales: Two Westerns, written by Carter Forrest [Asa Earl Carter], 207–419. 1976. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Carter, Forrest [Asa Earl Carter]. Watch for Me on the Mountain [aka Cry Geronimo!]. 1978. New York: Delta, 1990. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. London: Collins & Brown, 1990. Homans, Margaret. The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. 2013. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015. Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Jerng, Mark C. Claiming Others: Transnational Adoption and National Belonging. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Johnston, Ian. “Fake memoirs: Academic says we should not disregard books because they unexpectedly change genre.” The Independent, August 24, 2014. Accessed August 15, 2016. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/fake-memoirs-academic-says-we-should-not-disregardbooks-because-they-unexpectedly-change-genre-9687842.html. Kuusisto, Eeva. “The Portrayal of Cherokees in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree.” Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki, 2015. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. 1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. McGurl, Mark. “Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18: 2 (2005): 243–267. Rubin, Dana. “The Real Education of Little Tree.” Texas Monthly, February 1992. Accessed July 7, 2015. www.texasmonthly.com/content/real-education-little-tree. Ruthven, K.K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Strickland, Rennard. “[Foreword:] Sharing Little Tree.” In The Education of Little Tree, written by Forrest Carter [Asa Earl Carter], v–vi. 1976. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. This American Life. 180 Degrees Transcript [Episode 527], aired June 13, 2014. Accessed April 7, 2015. www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/527/transcript. Treuer, David. “Going Native: Why do writers pretend to be Indians?” Slate. com, March 7, 2008. Accessed April 7, 2015. www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2008/03/going_native.single.html.

118  B. Pettersson Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Works of Mark Twain 8. Edited by Walter Blair and Victor Fischer. 1884. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Vice, Sue. Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Author Biography Bo Pettersson is Professor of the Literature of the United States and former Head of English at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published widely on Anglo-American literature and beyond, narratology, cognitive literary studies, literary theory and interpretation, interdisciplinarity, interarts, and popular culture, including the co-edited volumes Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice (2005) and Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses (2008). His most recent monograph is How Literary Worlds Are Shaped: A Comparative Poetics of Literary Imagination (2016).

PART II

Asia and America

CHAPTER 6

Writing and Identity in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Life Narratives Lena Ahlin

In Fugitive Visions, the second of Jane Jeong Trenka’s two life narratives, the author muses: “Maybe someday I will wake up and find myself in the right story.”1 This articulation of displacement and desire indicates Trenka’s recognition of the transformative potential of narrative which forms the starting point of my reading of her texts. Fugitive Visions and its precursor, The Language of Blood, depict the author’s childhood and adolescence as a Korean adoptee in the USA and her subsequent repatriation to Korea. This paper explores whether putting herself in the “right story” can provide a solution to the alienated selfhood that for Trenka is the result of transracial adoption. In the following, The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions are seen as a diptych: read together, the two texts reveal the complexities of the autobiographical subject. They also illustrate how, as Smith and Watson observe, life narrative “inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body.”2 My analysis focuses on the body/text nexus in Trenka’s narratives and considers the body as a site of knowledge about the past. Here, the body functions at once as a receptacle of repressed memories of loss and abandonment, L. Ahlin (*)  Kristianstad University, Kristianstad, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_6

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and as a possible arena for restoration. Trenka’s own story is deeply intertwined with that of her Korean mother, in what I see as an attempt to articulate not only her own experience of adoption, but that of the silenced birth mother. The violence and marginalization faced by mother and daughter connect the private, domestic story of adoption with larger narratives of racialization and gendered exploitation and speak to the collective experience of Korean women. Like several other contemporary narratives by Korean adoptees, such as Katy Robinson’s A Single Square Picture (2002), Khara Niné’s Cries of the Soul (2013) and Soojung Jo’s Ghost of Sangju (2015),3 Trenka’s texts also bring up the search for roots and a return to Korea, including the reunion with parents and siblings; the revelation of hidden facts or distorted truths surrounding their adoption; and a critical look at the patriarchal structure of Korean society. Common adoption myths, such as the discourse of rescue, and the myth of color-blindness, are debunked in all these texts. Mark C. Jerng observes that very often “the life-stories of transracial adoptees restlessly seek closure by staging the recovery of origins and the act of racial or cultural recognition.”4 While Trenka’s texts may seek such closure, it fails to take place. Instead, I argue that the idea of reunion as a prerequisite to a sense of closure is another myth with which Trenka’s texts engage. My analysis suggests that, when her two texts are read together, it is possible to see that they participate in a dialogue in which questions that were raised in the first work are revisited and reconsidered in the second. The result is a multilayered and, at times, conflicted life narrative, which offers no simple solutions to the complex questions of identity raised. While Trenka’s texts address the unspeakable aspects of adoption in connection with the inability to recover parts of the past, they also address the materiality of adoption. My analysis suggests that there is in her texts a tension between the representation of adoption as trauma with individual as well as societal implications, and adoption as a productive site generating questions of identity and origin of universal relevance. Consequently, I concur with Margaret Homans’s observation that “[a]nyone might recognize that identity and the origins that supposedly ground it are artifacts, but the adopted and those who think about them are particularly well positioned to do so.”5 For adoptees writing their own history, the adoption narrative may function as an empowering imaginative space for the production of identity.

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Trenka’s texts indicate the difficulty of rendering adoption as a coherent, progressive narrative and draw attention to John McLeod’s observation that “matters of narrative form are a central concern when it comes to capturing the particularities and possibilities of transcultural adoption experiences.”6 The following analysis centers on the form and act of narration, and traces how sensory experiences are used to re-enact the past—or even instill new memories to replace the perceived gaps in the narrative of the past.

Finding the ‘Right Story’: The Craft of Self-Representation Autobiographical writing occupies a generically ambivalent space between fact and fiction, which affects our understanding of the protagonist of the text. It is relevant to recall Paul de Man’s discussion of the need to recognize both “the author of the text and the author in the text who bears his name.”7 Smith and Watson use the terms “narrating ‘I’” to designate the “remembering agent who creates the story,” while the “narrated ‘I’” is “the version of the self that the narrating ‘I’ chooses to constitute through recollection for the reader.”8 Recognizing that the author herself, the “historical ‘I,’” exists outside of the text and is “unknown and unknowable by readers,”9 I will in the following use the name “Trenka” to refer to the writing self (or narrating “I”), while “Jane” designates the written self (or narrated “I”). Trenka’s desire to find herself in the right story, quoted at the beginning of this article, indicates a recognition of the discursive nature of identity, and that it is through the act of storytelling that she may find a cultural script enabling her to understand herself differently. Writing is fundamentally a meaning-making act and, as Julia Straub observes, it is significant that “writing about one’s life has nothing to do with charting one’s acutely and precisely remembered experiences. The decisive aspect is not the authorial act of putting experiences onto paper, but the act of interconnecting memories, the weaving of a web of unforeseeable, unheard-of correspondences.”10 Trenka indicates her awareness of this relationship through a similar imagery of crafting: “I will sew a new quilt of memory and imagination.”11 Textual self-representation thus includes self-reflection and narrative emplotment, often with the purpose of creating a sense of teleological development. In this way, “the materials of the

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past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness.”12 However, Trenka’s recognition of the fictional nature of self-representation does not mean that her texts lack political force. When reading Fugitive Visions alongside The Language of Blood, it becomes clear that her personal testimony of her adoption amounts to an incisive critique of the global inequalities that sustain transnational adoption.13 The two pieces of autobiographical writing enter into dialogue in a way that affects the formation of the subject. In cases of multiple autobiographies, the “narrated ‘I’ returns, to be put under a new definition, given new identities, set in a new relation to history. Serializing the ‘I,’ then, asserts the condition of mobility, as one version follows another.”14 This observation helps pinpoint the distinction between the two texts and the narrating and narrated “I” that appear in them, as well as the fundamental mobility of the subject. As Trenka’s life narratives demonstrate, subject formation is an ongoing process that takes place within certain temporal and spatial limits. Furthermore, the mobility of the “serial ‘I’” not only undermines the idea of a stable self, but casts doubts on the possibility of establishing a fixed point of origin for that self. This insight has profound implications for our understanding of the search for roots that is a common motif in adoption narratives, found in the texts of Trenka, Robinson, and Jo, among others. As Margaret Homans observes, for many adoptees it is often not possible to find out the truth about the original separation, a circumstance which leads to partially fictional narratives of self. However, she contends that this is not necessarily a deficiency. Recognizing that an element of trauma is present in many adoption narratives, she builds on Ruth Leys’s discussion of trauma,15 in which recovery can be sought through self-understanding, rather than the verifiable truth about one’s past. Narrative plays a vital role in this process, and Homans suggests that “[r]ather than expecting to retrieve the veridical origin (either the traumatic moment of relinquishment or maternal and cultural origins prior to that moment), the adopted and their families might do better to understand themselves as inventing helpful fictions about those irretrievable historical moments.”16 These fictions, then, should not be thought inferior because they are not entirely based on facts, but instead we must see them as useful for the adoptees’ attempt to reconstruct their past. Even if the past is filled with gaps and inconsistencies, plausible fictions go a long way towards building self-knowledge. In other words, the right story that Trenka yearns for turns out to be the one that she crafts for herself.17 Her texts suggest

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that adoption narratives are about the present rather than the past, as the past can never be fully recovered. The connection between narrative and identity is expounded by Paul Ricoeur, who observes that “knowledge of the self is an interpretation and [that] the interpretation of the self finds narrative a privileged form of mediation.”18 Thus, knowledge of the self inherently rests on a symbolic, interpretive activity in which language and the subject are intimately bound up with one another. Writing enables the writer to look at herself at some distance in order to comprehend her actions and motivations. Along the same lines, Paul John Eakin points to “the intimate interdependency of the capacities for language and for reflexive consciousness,”19 implying that self-reflection takes place through language. He discusses autobiography as a form of self-invention, meaning that the self is created—rather than simply reflected—through the narrative act.20 This observation offers further support for the idea that writing a life narrative has a particular resonance for the adoptee who is seeking to construct a helpful fiction of her origins. In addition, rather than positing an autonomous subject, Eakin uses the term “the relational self” to designate the context-dependence of the subject, and its cultural and historical embeddedness.21 The multivocality of Trenka’s texts indicates the multiple sources by which the “I” is constituted and tells another story than the one centered on biological origins. Not only does the narrating voice frequently change, for example, between accounts of childhood confusion and fear22 to indignant reports on modern Korean history,23 the narrative is also interspersed with external voices and lapses into different genres. There are quotes from the International Social Service and official documents about adoption mixed with plays, spirituals, letters, and even a recipe for bread. The multiple voices of her texts point to “the multidirectional lines of connection that are knotted in the figure of the transracial adoptee,”24 and emphasize the mobile and relational position of the subject. At the heart of The Language of Blood is another duplication: as Jane hunts for her origins, she is prey to a stalker, who pursues her for years with the apparent aim of taking her life. In the end, the man is apprehended, but for his victim the experience gives rise to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) requiring clinical treatment. This ordeal is connected to adoption as it originates in Jane’s exotic otherness: an interpellation of the Asian woman in the West that calls up ghosts of the past.

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The stalker is finally put in prison, but his message to Jane is clear: “You’re nothing but a Korean in a white man’s society. You’re a gook; you’re a chink.”25 The story of male violence toward women prompted by the stalker is only too familiar to Jane as it comes to serve as a reenactment of her Korean parents’ violent story together.26 Not only did her birth father accuse her mother of adultery when Jane was born, but he also tried to smother the newborn baby. Unable to get along without a husband in the androcentric Korean society, her mother finally saw no other solution than to send her daughter overseas. The daughter’s experience of the “scopic sexist racism”27 of the stalker in the USA, thus, reiterates her mother’s experiences in patriarchal Korea. The chapter in which the stalking is depicted is framed by a quotation from a personal ad by someone seeking a submissive Asian girl “for fun,” which serves to reinforce stereotypes of how Asian women are viewed in American society. In addition, there is a quotation from a letter by Jane’s birth mother describing how she had to flee and hide from Jane’s father to avoid further abuse. Thus, the links between the mother’s and daughter’s experiences are established, and significantly linked to a general perception of Asian women as racialized and sexualized objects.28 It also serves to question the notion of her adoption as a form of “salvation”: even though she has been transported from Korea to the USA, she is unable to get away from gendered violence. However, in Fugitive Visions, Jane begins to see parallels between herself and her stalker as well. Following her repatriation to Korea, she is not only at a safe distance from her stalker geographically, she is also able to look at him from a different perspective. Finding that he is obsessed by women who look like his mother, she recognizes that they are both abandoned children looking for a home. At this point in the narrative, Jane is no longer a passive object defined by another’s gaze; her ability to turn the gaze back on her pursuer and even find a measure of sympathy for him instead suggests that the narrativization of the trauma of stalking offers a sense of control. In this way, the second text displaces the subject position of the first: as Jane is able retrospectively to consider the episode of the stalker at a mental and geographical distance, her perception of him changes. This development functions as a narrative re-enactment that leads to a new, empowered subject position. The form of Trenka’s texts can also be usefully related to Eli Park Sorensen’s identification of a common tripartite structure in Korean adoption narratives corresponding to a home-away-home movement.

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At first, the adoptee in the West is depicted as feeling confused about her identity; this is followed by the search narrative which includes going back, or ‘away,’ to find roots; and finally there is a return home, at which point the adoptee feels wiser and is able to reaffirm her belonging in the USA. This traditional Bildungsroman structure, argues Sorensen, is a way to contain and neutralize “transgressive questions and fantasies about identity.”29 While The Language of Blood roughly follows this safe structure, Fugitive Visions overturns it. There is no affirmation of her belonging in the West, and no endorsement of the salvation narrative. As Trenka’s second life narrative ends, loneliness has taken the place of familial reunion, and she decides to stay in Korea, living in a “state of non-kinship.”30 In this state, Jungha Kim sees “a new possibility of social critique opening up in the form of the adoption narrative itself.”31 Rather than reinforcing the narrative of development, the ending serves as a negation of this traditional form of narration and of the redemption it offers. Instead, “the structure and progress of developmental narrative, whether personal or historical”32 is disrupted. My analysis of Trenka’s narratives supports this reading of them as interrupted developmental narratives, further illustrated by their fragmentation, multivocality, and concern with representing the unspeakable. When close attention is paid to the form of Trenka’s narratives, certain narrative tensions emerge: between the search for fixed origins and the multiple sources of a relational self; between narrative empowerment and the limits of language; between the physical and the symbolic. In the following, the role of narrative in the re-enactment of the past will be further examined.

Body into Text The Language of Blood is constructed around a striking number of repetitions and duplications. It is perhaps not surprising that a story of adoption should include the sense of a double identity, in this case a Korean, pre-adoption identity, which figures as the constant foil for her childhood life in rural Minnesota, and an American post-adoption identity, illustrated by the transformation from Kyong-Ah Jeong to Jane Brauer. This double—what she could have been had she stayed in Korea—hangs like a shadow over Jane’s childhood in the Minnesota wheat fields.33 Gradually, it becomes evident that there is another double that haunts Jane: the ideal child—the white boy that her parents really wanted. She calls children like herself “replacement children” and explains that they

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were “Last resorts, consolation prizes in the fertility lottery; the children who came into the family to replace the biological child, the child who was really wanted.”34 She goes on to describe a situation in which “What they want from you is for you to be someone you’re not. They’ll never say to your face, ‘You are not the child we wanted. You were second choice, second best.’ But that’s the truth.”35 As a result, Jane lives her life trying to be someone else; someone she can never be—the truly wanted white boy. Her quest for selfhood is thus based on being the object of someone else’s desire, leading to a deferral of subjectivity. Most significantly, in her attempt to be what her adoptive parents want her to be, Jane constantly tries to “do the impossible,”36 that is, to become “white.” David Eng and Shinhee Han describe the predicament of the Asian American adoptee in terms of “racial melancholia,” which is the result of simultaneously trying to negotiate Asianness and whiteness, and which causes mourning that remains unacknowledged in the adoptee’s new American life. Eng and Han in fact claim that Asian American racial melancholia should not be seen as a pathological condition, but rather as an everyday “structure of feeling” that the Asian American subject has to negotiate in the process of assimilating into American society. It is particularly difficult for the transnational/transracial adoptee to deal with this melancholia, because, as Eng and Han observe: while transnational adoptees identify with their parents’ whiteness, the parents do not necessarily identify with their children’s Asianness. Such a failure of recognition threatens to redouble racial melancholia’s effects, severing the adoptee from the intimacy of the family unit, emotionally segregating her to negotiate her significant losses in isolation and silence.37

This psychic isolation of the adoptee makes her particularly vulnerable to growing up in a family where her racial identity is erased. The resulting reinforcement and normalization of whiteness give rise to a simultaneous sense of nullification and duplication. The paradox of “color-blindness” is that, “by racializing these children in ways that insisted on their proximity to whiteness, advocates of Korean adoption did not disrupt the black-white binary, but carefully heeded it.”38 In other words, to deny the children’s difference is to uphold the ideal of whiteness. For the adoptee, the denial of racial difference is often compounded by the concomitant repudiation of history, culture and language.39

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In The Language of Blood, racial reparation is sought through reunion with the birth mother. In Fugitive Visions, this reunion has been disrupted by her mother’s sudden death from cancer. Here, as Margaret Homans observes, Trenka manages “the heartbreaking absence of her birth mother by positioning her as the authorizing ground of her writing,”40 bringing the mother even closer to her daughter even after her death. Both texts thus place the birth mother in a central position. In The Language of Blood, the return to Korea is a journey to maternal origins. The description of Jane’s first trip to the country of her birth establishes this link as Jane meditates on the repetitions of the mother’s heartbeat, “Thump-thump. Thump-thump”41 that the infant has heard in its mother’s womb, but that are later forgotten “in a pool of childhood amnesia on no particular day.”42 The connection to the mother’s body in these ruminations on the plane signal the central significance of early, wordless maternal memories to her subsequent experiences in Korea. Unable to communicate in a common language, Jane’s intimacy with her mother is to a great extent wordless and constituted by bodily interaction, such as hugging and hand-holding. The communication between mother and daughter evokes Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic,43 taking them back to their shared past: a past in which the rhythms and gestures of the mother’s body are transmitted to the child. This early past is, in fact, re-enacted in a few central scenes, such as the one where her mother, Umma, gives Jane a bath: The water is warm as birthwater. Umma squats, her legs turned out like a patient onion picker reaching through dust to find the smooth, satisfying fruit of labor, the daughter she believed lost. She washes me hard and quickly, with so much ardor it hurts, and I become a child again.44

The passage makes it clear that this is a primal scene: the water is likened to “birthwater” and Umma’s squatting position, which is here compared to that of an onion picker, also resembles a mother giving birth. The description of the daughter as “the fruit of labor” further endorses such an interpretation.45 So, Jane is born again in Korea and Umma repeatedly tries to do for her the things that she could not do in her childhood: giving her a bath, bringing her food to make sure she eats right, holding her close and reaffirming their kinship. When Umma is struck with cancer, Jane and her sisters are there to take care of her until the end

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and, on one occasion, Umma, in her delirium of pain and drugs, takes the adult Jane for her newborn baby: I imagine that in her delirious mind it is 1972, and she is forty years old and I am an infant. She has given birth to me, her third daughter—not a source of shame or a disappointment to her, not an investment or an expense, but a source of love […]. Ipun eggi, says the mother. Pretty baby.46

The scene highlights how the daughter gradually takes on the representation of the mother, speculating on the mother’s feelings for her daughter(s) and, at other times, on the motivation for the adoption. In this way, her story of loss is reframed as a story of attachment and intimacy. Through Umma’s hands and words, abandonment is recontextualized as love. These two examples of the interaction between mother and daughter constitute acts that serve to redeem the past. We may, in fact, read the scenes as attempts to implant new memories in Jane, memories that will replace past separation and provide sustenance for the future. In this reconstruction of the past, the textual and the corporeal are significantly linked. Through various bodily re-enactments of these maternal memories a new story can emerge. Hence, Trenka’s narratives speak to the possibly healing capacity of memory, while suggesting that “the body [plays] a crucial role in resurrecting the past.”47 Sensory experiences are deeply entwined with memory and complement writing as a strategy of recreation. The bathing scene quoted earlier illustrates how the tactile sense serves to connect Jane with her elusive early past, and the gustatory sense plays a similar role. Proust’s famous description of the madeleine underlines that taste is one of the most participatory forms of body memory. Going to the restaurant Koreahouse in Minneapolis during her college years to stuff herself with kimchi and bibimbap, eating is, for Jane, not only an act that links her to her cultural and family origins, but an act of transformation: “I made it my project to eat what I wanted to become, as if to reverse the effects of all I had eaten before, all those pallid noodles drenched in cream of mushroom soup.”48 This is a very concrete example of how Jane through a physical act tries to reach a dimension of her past that has been repressed. The scene can be read as a first attempt to distance herself from the whiteness of her adoptive family in favor of connecting with her Korean heritage. In fact, here it is as if

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one part of her identity—her Americanness—must be driven out to make room for the other, Korean part. In the end, however, it will not be simply one or the other, as she comes to accept the differences within her: her identity must finally encompass both cream of mushroom soup and kimchi; both whiteness and Asianness. To put this another way, she will finally be neither simply Jane Brauer nor Kyong-Ah Jeong. Instead, Jane Jeong Trenka is the name she chooses for herself after her marriage in a gesture of recognition of all parts of her past.49 The imagery of eating as a physical act providing mental sustenance also appears in a letter written by Jane to Umma after the birth mother’s death: “when I eat the kimchi, the bulgogi, mandu, bibimbop [sic], all of the things that I love, I am filled for a moment with a reminder of you and the things that were taken from me. I take you back, and I take back all the things that were stolen, back inside my body.”50 Again, we see how Jane seeks healing and transformation through feeding on the past and the physical connection to the mother. Trenka’s use of alimentary images also serves to inscribe her work within the Asian American literary tradition. Various images of food and eating, along with the previously discussed figure of the double, are key features of twentieth-century Asian American fiction, as identified by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong.51 The employment of these tropes, thus, aligns Trenka with this tradition, and function as an acknowledgement of both parts of the author’s cultural background. In Trenka’s second life narrative, the extra-linguistic register is sounded again as the auditory senses are evoked to provide a full understanding of her physical and psychological journey. The title, Fugitive Visions, refers to Sergei Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives, a series of twenty very short piano pieces (some taking only forty-five seconds to perform), which Jane struggles to master. They function as a structural device, as sections of the book bear the titles of Prokofiev’s movements, like Lentamente, Andante, Allegro, and so on. The linguistic reproduction of her search for origins and selfhood is characterized by syntactical and semantic ruptures, and in Fugitive Visions music, a non-verbal signifying system, reminds us that a significant part of this life narrative remains unspeakable. Prokofiev’s twenty pieces are characterized by “dissipating endings,” that is, endings that are not emphatic or conclusive, and the work does not require performance “in its entirety nor in numerical order.”52 To translate these observations on the music into text, the inconclusive endings emphasize the lack of closure of the

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text. Similarly, the open structure of Prokofiev’s composition is echoed by the fragmented nature of Trenka’s text. There is no chronological progression between the various sections, and it would be quite possible to read them in a different order without loss of basic comprehension. Instead, the musical references invite us to hear what is behind the words on the page: to hear the dissonance and ruptures, as well as the beauty of her life and her art. Jane’s return to Korea in Fugitive Visions does not represent the smooth and happy homecoming that seemed possible in The Language of Blood. Seeing herself through the eyes of the Koreans, she describes herself as a version of Freud’s unheimlich: In a country where “American” is used synonymously with “white,” my inability to speak fluent Korean combined with my inability to be white is a deformity. I am a sort of monster, a mix of the familiar with the terribly unexpected, like a fish with a human face or a chicken that barks.53

The passage articulates her feelings of estrangement and lack of belonging in her native country. In this journey back, Jane is both foreigner and returnee, haunted by feelings of “unhomeliness,” a condition which Homi Bhabha54 envisions as a sense of dislocation caused by the breakdown of the boundaries between home and the world: “In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.”55 Transnational adoption is here the social phenomenon that invades the private space of the home, displacing and disorienting the adoptee, who is confined to remaining a “translator”56 between languages and cultures. We can thus see that the maternal reunion does not lead to the desired sense of closure, but instead a possibility for imagining another mode of existence opens up. As the second life narrative ends, Jane conceives of herself as part of a group of “denizens of a single future fashioned by our own words, by our own hands.”57 What emerges here is a forward-looking and self-reliant writer who is able to envision the new prospects that narrative empowerment permits. However, the encounter with the mother forms the basis of a critique of the historical inequalities of Korean-American adoption. In the following, we will see how the personal, intimate story of a daughter’s reunion

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with her birth mother resonates with an understanding of transnational adoption as a gendered, racialized experience.

My Adopted Life was Supposed to Save Me from Being Myself Together, Trenka’s texts shed light on a number of issues that are relevant to transnational adoption more broadly. Korea assumes a special position as the country in which the practice of international adoption began. Arissa Oh traces the origins of American adoption from Korea to the interracial GI babies that were the offspring of American fathers and Korean mothers during the Korean war: “International adoption across racial lines was intimately connected to the prolonged presence of US occupation troops and shaped by military policy.”58 The military “actively discouraged interracial marriages,” leaving these babies and their mothers in a difficult position as they suffered the consequences of social exclusion and illegitimacy. These mixed-race GI babies were among the first American adoptees from Korea. However, Korean adoption would change and grow during the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to the work of Harry and Bertha Holt, founders of the Holt Adoption Program. They tapped into an existing desire to adopt babies by American families, and the Korean government’s wish to remove not only GI babies, but other unwanted, or “illegitimate” children. Under the aegis of the Holts, Korean adoption would soon include not only mixed-race children but also full Koreans, and it would serve as a role model for other countries establishing transnational adoption programs.59 Eun Kyung Min observes that “[t]ransnational adoption is fundamentally about women’s bodies and their reproductive labor, about the social and economic value not only of children but also of maternity.”60 The story of the birth mother is thus implanted within the story of her adopted child. Children’s and mothers’ bodies are intimately bound up with one another as the birth mother’s physical, social, and economic deprivation is transferred to the child. Trenka’s own story is deeply intertwined with that of her Korean birth mother, suggesting that “[a] doptive identity […] is embedded in the ways we are traversed and crisscrossed by stories, histories, and relations that both precede us and are outside of us.”61 In Trenka’s life narratives, the stories of mother and daughter merge into one collective story of Korean womanhood:

134  L. Ahlin I came to understand the beautiful, terrible culture of my mother, learned that her experiences were not so unique in a land where boys are more valuable than girls, where women carry the weight of duty on their backs, as they do their babies, so that by the time they are old they are permanently bent over, eyes to the ground. I know you now, Mama.62

This is one example of how Trenka connects the private, domestic story of adoption with larger narratives of racialization and gendered exploitation. Here, she is quite outspoken in her critique of an androcentric society that systematically downgrades women from birth to old age. The experiences of her mother are conceived as representative of the collective subject of Korean womanhood, exploited and cowed by patriarchal structures. Furthermore, the personal stories of birth mother and child are embedded in a larger framework in which “[c]ompeting narratives characterize international adoption as either profit-driven baby trade or highly sentimental love story.”63 While transnational adoption is on one hand a “love story” in which new families are made and children are given a new future, it can also be seen as a monetary transaction in which other families are torn asunder and children become commodities on a global market. In her discussion of contemporary transnational parenthood, Ann Anagnost finds that many adoptive parents see “adoption as the necessary ‘completion’ for becoming a fully realized subject in American life.”64 The adopted child in this description serves as an object needed to confer subjecthood on the American parents. Put differently, the adoptees “perform an ideological labor, serving to make the heterogeneous nuclear family complete.”65 These observations reveal the vexed nature of the “love story,” while pointing to the complexity of the discourse of rescue. The notion of salvation that has been integral to Korean adoption—as in saving a poor orphan by transporting her to a faraway country where she can grow up under materially better circumstances—coexists uneasily with the discourses of consumerism and imperialism.66 Salvation, in fact, seems to work both ways: transnational adoption may be as much about “saving” parents from childlessness and deprivation as about better life opportunities for the child. As has been discussed above, Trenka questions the discourse of rescue, and she captures the intricacy of the issue as she notes: “my adopted life was supposed to save me from being myself.”67 This reflection reveals the ambiguity of the adoptee’s “salvation,” which is here closely tied to

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loss—of self, of family and of history—and to the simultaneous nullifications and duplications involved in transnational adoption. In fact, many of the assumed orphans put up for adoption were not orphans at all. As in many other cases, the information in Trenka’s adoption papers was fabricated, stating that her parents were not married and that her mother abandoned the family after Jane’s birth. The autobiographical memories of mother and daughter in Trenka’s life narratives, thus, serve as a historical corrective as they revise the official, falsified history of her adoption. The depictions of transnational adoption in Trenka’s texts, and other contemporary adoption narratives, illustrate how transnational adoption is ideologically embedded in a discourse where nation and family intersect. “People want real orphans,” Trenka writes,68 and the belief in the Korean orphan was instrumental in the discourse of rescue and the construction of Americans as benefactors, offering citizenship and opportunity to the poor and homeless. For the Americans, “the Korean orphan offered a new image of Asians in the United States: anticommunist, assimilable, conforming to American values, and therefore contributing to a stronger nation.”69 The popularity of the Korean child thus depended on her/his perceived ability to fit into the domestic and national American family. The Korean adoptee allowed an enhanced American self-image, while illustrating how the values and attitudes that have shaped transnational adoption resonate with her own navigation of an Asian American identity. For example, the adoptee’s assimilability and conformity to American values feed into the ideal of the “model minority,” while underscoring how this stereotype serves American social and familial needs.70 Contemporary narratives of Korean adoption fill an important function in highlighting the downside of adoption and the falsifications that have all too often been part of the process. For example, Soojung Jo’s Ghost of Sangju offers similar descriptions of a birth parent who, in need of temporary assistance, leaves her baby at an orphanage only to be told a little later that she can no longer visit or hope to bring her child back as she has been sent abroad for adoption. A version of the same story appears in Khara Niné’s Cries of the Soul as well, where it is the father who, upon the mother’s death, seeks help, but ends up being bereft of his child whom he never stops searching for. The parents in these stories are fundamentally marked by the experience, claiming that they never for a minute stopped thinking of their lost children, hoping and more or less actively seeking to find the lost family member.71 The myth of adoption

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as rescue is, thus, debunked and replaced by sinister stories of families who are forced to relinquish their children instead of receiving social welfare. Revolving around bodies—bodies that are separated from one another; bodies transported around the globe; bodies “whitened” and denied as a process of assimilation—Trenka’s texts address the nexus of the corporeal and the textual. The symbolic figuration of bodies marked by transnational adoption and the memories they carry are here able to provide a sustaining connection to the past. The Language of Blood and Fugitive Visions suggest that an engagement with and translation of the non-verbal aspects of identity into text can provide acts of self-authorization that demonstrate the restorative potential of the transnational adoptee’s life narrative.

Notes





1. Jane Jeong Trenka, Fugitive Visions (St Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009), 52. 2.  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd Edition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 49. 3.  Trenka is also, together with Julia Chinyere Oparah and Sung Yung Shin, the editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transnational Adoption (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), an anthology of writings by transracial adoptees. 4.  Mark C. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” MELUS 31: 2 (2006): 60. 5. Margaret Homans, The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 113. 6. John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 29. 7.  Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 72. 8. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 72–73. 9. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 72–73. 10.  Julia Straub, “Richard Wollheim’s Germs: Life Writing as Therapy, Despite Theory,” in Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma, ed. Gabrielle Rippl et al. (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 93. 11.  Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood (St Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003), 150.

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12. Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5. 13. Khara Niné’s Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive (USA: CreateSpace, 2013) constitutes an even more direct call to action in order to limit transnational adoption and instead create conditions in which families can stay together. 14. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 75. 15. See Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 16. Homans, The Imprint of Another Life, 122. 17. This belief in the power of narrative to transform one’s sense of self is echoed in Jane’s reflection on how, after their reunion, Umma keeps telling the story of Jane’s relinquishment, as if the “act of storytelling would redeem her” (Trenka, The Language of Blood, 115), and that finally “she would have mastered her life through storytelling” (Trenka, The Language of Blood, 116). 18. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” Philosophy Today 35: 1 (1991): 73. 19. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 213. 20. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography, 6. 21. Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 57. 22. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 23–25. 23. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 46–48. 24. McLeod, Life Lines, 46. 25. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 83. 26. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 116–117. 27. Margaret Homans, “Adoption and Return: Transnational Genealogies, Maternal Legacies,” in Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 188, and Homans, The Imprint of Another Life, 166. 28. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 79, 98. 29.  Eli Park Sorensen, “Korean Adoption Narratives and the Politics of Representation,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12: 1 (2014): 166. 30.  Jungha Kim, “‘I’m Still at War with Myself:’ Transnational Adoption and Endless Labor in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Fugitive Visions,” Amerasia Journal 40: 3 (2014): 86. 31. Kim, “I’m Still at War with Myself,” 86. 32. Kim, “I’m Still at War with Myself,” 99. 33. For an extended discussion of the “racial shadow” in Asian American literature, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American

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Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 34. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 207. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37.  David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transnational Objects,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 7: 2 (2006): 156. 38. Arissa Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 12. 39. For an extended discussion of the concept of “racial melancholia” as a fundamental aspect of American racialization, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 40. Homans, “Adoption and Return,” 197. 41. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 104. 42. Ibid. 43.  Julia Kristeva distinguishes between the semiotic and the symbolic (“Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 92), or preverbal and verbal stages of infanthood. The first few months of an infant’s life are characterized by a close relationship, even fusion, with the mother, which precedes the rupture that marks the entry into the symbolic order and the use of language. This preverbal state, which has begun already during pregnancy, “precedes the establishment of the sign; it is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject” (Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” 95). Kristeva’s term, the semiotic, describes “the memory, the inscription of this state in language” (AnneMarie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London and Sterling, VA.: Pluto Press, 1998), 16). Language may reflect and reproduce these early maternal memories, for example, by disturbing the rules of the symbolic order through grammatical ruptures and gaps in meaning. 44. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 122. 45. Homans discusses the meeting between mother and daughter in similar terms, calling theirs a “womblike contact” (“Adoption and Return,” 192; The Imprint of Another Life, 169). 46. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 172. 47. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 106. 48. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 51–52. 49. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 238. For more about the significance of names and naming in The Language of Blood, see Mark C. Jerng, Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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50. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 222. 51. Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, 12. 52. Steven Moellering, “Vision Fugitives, Opus 22: Insights into Prokofiev’s Compositional Vision,” (Ph.D. diss., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007), ii. 53. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 110. 54.  Bhabha here builds on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unheimlich/ uncanny. To Freud, “the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other—the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden. Unheimlich is the antonym of heimlich only in the latter’s first sense, not in its second […]. [Unheimlich] applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away and has come into the open” (The Uncanny (London: Penguin, [1922] 2003), 132). 55. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141. 56. In the essay chapter “The Love of Another Language,” Kristeva starts out by positing that it is a “tragedy” to lose one’s maternal language, which renders one a foreigner doomed to translation. However, even if the translator is “intrinsically wounded” by the tragedy of the loss of her mother tongue, the “border position” she occupies is also a privileged one as “the new language is a pretext for rebirth: new identity, new hope” (Intimate Revolt, 241). 57. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 194. 58. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 5. 59. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 9. 60. Eun Kyung Min, “The Daughter’s Exchange in Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood,” Social Text 94 26: 1 (2008): 118. Similarly, Ann Anagnost sees adoption as “a global system of ‘stratified reproduction’ in which the bodies of children embody a value that is caught up in transnational circuits of exchange” (“Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” Positions 8: 2 (2000): 394). 61. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee,” 63. 62. Trenka, The Language of Blood, 117. 63. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 207. 64. Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition,” 392. 65. Kim Hyunsook, “Abstract,” Journal of English Language and Literature/ Yǒngǒ Yǒngmunhak 57: 1 (2011): 147.

140  L. Ahlin 66. For example, Tobias Hübinette claims that “the countries supplying the most children for international adoption to the West, and primarily to the United States, almost all fall under the American sphere of influence and have been exposed to American military intervention, presence or occupation” (“From Orphan Trains to Babylifts: Colonial Trafficking, Empire Building, and Social Engineering,” in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transnational Adoption, ed. Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sung Yung Shin, and Jane Jeong Trenka (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 149). In addition, Eng points out that “it is crucial to link transnational adoption not just to humanitarian or religious narratives of love, altruism, salvation, and redemption but also to specific pre- and post-World War II histories of imperialism, immigration, racialized exploitation, and gendered commodification” (“Transnational Adoption,” 9). 67. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 187. 68. Trenka, Fugitive Visions, 92. 69. Oh, To Save the Children of Korea, 174. 70. In The Language of Blood, Trenka mocks this stereotype (97), while juxtaposing it with that of the exotic, sexualized Asian woman. The inability to resolve these conflicting terms of American life arguably contributes to her repatriation to Korea. 71. Soojung Jo, Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation (USA: CQT Media and Publishing, and Gazillion Strong, 2015), 132–6; Niné, Cries of the Soul, 129.

Bibliography Anagnost, Ann. “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption.” Positions 8: 2 (2000): 389–421. Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2001. Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141–53. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Eng, David L. “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies.” Social Text 52/53 (1997): 31–52.

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Eng, David L.“Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas.” Social Text 76 21: 3 (2003): 1–37. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives 10: 4 (2000): 667–700. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. “Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transnational Objects.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 7: 2 (2006): 141–72. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1922. London: Penguin, 2003. Homans, Margaret. “Adoption and Return: Transnational Genealogies, Maternal Legacies.” In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, 185–99. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Homans, Margaret. The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Hübinette, Tobias. “From Orphan Trains to Babylifts: Colonial Trafficking, Empire Building, and Social Engineering.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transnational Adoption, edited by Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sung Yung Shin, and Jane Jeong Trenka, 139–49. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006. Hyunsook, Kim. “Abstract.” Journal of English Language and Literature/Yǒngǒ Yǒngmunhak 57: 1 (2011): 147. Jerng, Mark C. Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Jerng, Mark C. “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life.” MELUS 31: 2 (2006): 41–67. Jo, Soojung. Ghost of Sangju: A Memoir of Reconciliation. USA: CQT Media and Publishing, and Gazillion Strong, 2015. Kim, Jungha. “‘I’m Still at War with Myself’: Transnational Adoption and Endless Labor in Jane Jeong Trenka’s Fugitive Visions.” Amerasia Journal 40: 3 (2014): 82–101. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Kristeva, Julia. “Revolution in Poetic Language.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 89–136. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Min, Eun Kyung. “The Daughter’s Exchange in Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood.” Social Text 26: 1 (2008): 115–33. Moellering, Steven. “Visions Fugitives, Opus 22: Insights into Sergei Prokofiev’s Compositional Vision.” Ph.D. diss., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007.

142  L. Ahlin Niné, Khara. Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive. USA: CreateSpace, 2013. Oh, Arissa. To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today 35: 1 (1991): 73–81. Robinson, Katy. A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots. New York: Berkeley Books, 2002. Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Sorensen, Eli Park. “Korean Adoption Narratives and the Politics of Representation.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12: 1 (2014): 155–79. Straub, Julia. “Richard Wollheim’s Germs: Life Writing as Therapy, Despite Theory.” In Haunted Narratives: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma, edited by Gabriele Rippl, Philipp Schweighauser, Tiina Kirss, Margit Sutrop, and Therese Steffen, 85–100. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Trenka, Jane Jeong. The Language of Blood. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003. Trenka, Jane Jeong. Fugitive Visions. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2009. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Author Biography Lena Ahlin is Senior Lecturer in English at Kristianstad University, Sweden. Her field of specialization is Asian American and African American literature. In addition to writing about issues of transnational/transracial adoption in Asian American life narratives, she is working on a study of fictional representations of the Japanese American internment after Pearl Harbor, which focuses on the interconnectedness of remembrance, forgetting, silence, and race. Recent publications include “‘All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget’: On Remembrance and Forgetting in Julie Otsuka’s novels” (2015) and “Feedback and (self-) assessment” (2016), which testifies to her interest in academic writing and teacher feedback.

CHAPTER 7

The (T)race of Trojan Horses: Transracial Adoption and Adoptive Being in Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth Begoña Simal-González

All families were an invention. Some families were machines. Some were gardens. […] Others were Trojan horses. (Truong, Bitter in the Mouth)1

Although transracial and transcultural adoption narratives are expected to be of interest primarily to those close to or inside the adoptive triangle (biological parents, adoptees and adopting parents), such texts are garnering more and more attention among those not directly involved in the process of adoption.2 This is probably due to the fact that adoptions across ethnicities and nations have a significance that exceeds mimetic This publication is the result of the research project “Literature and Globalization” (Ref. FFI2015-66767-P), funded by the MINECO/FEDER, UE. B. Simal-González (*)  Universidade da Coruña, (University of A Coruna), Coruña, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_7

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representation and reach out for allegorical value. As several critics have pointed out, transracial adoption has become a privileged symbolic site from which to explore and challenge not only normative understandings of family, but also the constructs of race and ethnicity that lie at the foundation of American identity politics. As such, adoption narratives can be thought of as Trojan horses that subversively introduce disruption into the so-called norms of everyday life. In one of the first critical studies of adoption narratives in America, Barbara Melosh explained the “proliferation of adoption memoirs” in the late twentieth century, and their popularity outside of adoptive families, by linking this phenomenon with the persistent appeal of genres such as autobiography or detective fiction, which are concerned with the disclosing of secrets and the process of tracing.3 More importantly, Melosh claimed, the success of these adoption stories among the general public might ultimately respond to their speculative—if not explanatory—power as regards identity formation and “family ideologies.”4 In Kin of Another Kind, Cynthia Callahan similarly argued that “adoption embodies some of our biggest individual and collective concerns about belonging,” because it “defies the rules of kinship by which most people understand themselves” and those “closest to them.”5 In The Imprint of Another Life, Margaret Homans teases out the ways in which adoption narratives “reimagine human possibility by questioning” all sorts of essentialisms.6 In his recent Life Lines, John McLeod intimates that the wide appeal of such texts is caused by the immense possibilities proffered by “adoptive being,” a new system of “transpersonal relations that orient[s] us all towards alternative and empowering forms of human possibility”.7 Two fictional narratives of transracial adoption that have drawn attention and praise both inside and outside the adoption community are Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth and Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet.8 Phan’s debut book, which can be considered a short-story cycle, revolves around the massive adoption of Vietnamese orphans known as Operation Babylift. As we shall see in more detail later, half of the eight stories in the book are set in the Viet Nam of the 1970s while the other half focus on the adoptees who have grown up in America. The opening story, “Miss Lien,” follows a young Vietnamese mother who has no choice but to abandon her child in a Mekong Delta orphanage. “The Delta” is precisely the name of the third piece in Phan’s book, which focuses on Phuong, one of the Vietnamese nuns from that orphanage,

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as she manages to transfer some of the babies to the better-equipped city orphanage. In “Gates of Saigon,” the protagonist and focalizer is another Vietnamese woman, Hoa, who works for the Saigon child center. As the fall of the city becomes imminent, she has to make a difficult decision: either leave for America on the last plane that carries the orphanage employees and the babies involved in Operation Babylift, or else stay in Viet Nam with her children and her husband, a South Vietnamese soldier. A similarly hard choice assails the protagonist in “Bound,” Bridget, an American doctor who leaves her husband and young child and travels to Viet Nam in order to look after the war orphans. What starts as a temporary visit of two months becomes a three-year sojourn that threatens to fracture her American family, while it offers Bridget the opportunity to get to know Huan, the abandoned baby that she is determined to adopt. The remaining stories in Phan’s collection focus on the adoptees’ life in California. Of the four Vietnamese Americans around which the contemporary chapters revolve, only one, Huan, can be strictly considered a transracial adoptee. The other three Vietnamese orphans have all lived in foster homes until their formal emancipation; while Mai manages to have a relatively happy life, her “foster siblings” Vinh and Kim cannot cope with a difficult past and end up in a gang. Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, follows the fictional life of a girl growing up in North Carolina who experiences synesthesia. The fact that she is a transracial adoptee remains a secret during the first part of the narrative, “Confession,” and the particulars of her adoption will not be disclosed until the end of the novel. It is then that we will learn how, as a young child, Linh-Dao (later Linda) had lost her Vietnamese parents in a fire and had subsequently been adopted by a white couple belonging to a wealthy Southern family. The first section of the novel reads like a Bildungsroman, depicting Linda’s close relationship with her great-uncle “Baby” Harper and with her adoptive father, Thomas, until his untimely death, her friendship with Kelly, and their difficult adolescence. The narrative also describes how, after Thomas’s death, Linda feels more and more estranged from her adoptive family, especially her distant mother, DeAnne, and her disapproving grandmother, Iris. Only as an adult, on the occasion of Harper’s death, does she go back to her Southern town in search of answers about her biological parents and the circumstances of her adoption. The peculiar narrative architecture encountered in both Bitter in the Mouth and We Should Never Meet is indicative of the ghosts haunting transcultural adoption stories.

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From Being Adopted to Adoptive Being Life stories tend to feature, and often start with, an account of birth or provenance. Deconstruction notwithstanding, many people continue to hunger for origins, an atavistic impulse to anchor oneself to the very few certainties one has in life. The phrase “I was born…” may be recurrent in autobiographies and fictional life stories, but, in adoption narratives, it is often rendered incomplete, either because the facts are not known or, more frequently, because they are not to be disclosed. It is no wonder, then, that most adoption stories published in the last few decades can be described as search and reunion narratives, where the protagonist, prompted by what is known as “genealogical bewilderment,”9 tries to “recover” her “lost” identity by discovering her birth parents.10 In doing so, adoptees more often than not respond to what John McLeod describes as “a discursive milieu fixated on biogenetic primacy and normative modes of identity, where consanguineous confluence and the place of one’s birth are regarded as constituting the true origins of self.”11 Even the main character in Truong’s novel is explicitly critical of people “fixated on provenance.”12 In terms of narrative architecture, this obsession with origins or “provenance” usually translates into narratives with a linear chronological structure whose climatic end coincides with such a discovery. And yet, as different critics13 have claimed, recent stories of transcultural adoption have downplayed—or even omitted—the moment of anagnorisis, or else they have chosen to linger on the adoptees’ post-reunion life. The uneasy dichotomy of fiction versus nonfiction, that is, whether these narratives are fictional accounts or memoirs, may also have some import for our discussion here. In “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee,” Jerng states that, in comparison with autobiographical renderings of transracial adoption, fictional accounts appear to be “[l]ess confined by […] the demand to construct a narrative of identity that is peculiar and particular to the experience of transracial adoption.”14 This flexibility or latitude is most visibly translated into narrative strategies that do not necessarily privilege the “return” to or the “discovery” of roots as the core of identity formation.15 As McLeod contends in Life Lines, real-life adoptees should likewise work towards a new “sense of selfhood” derived from “a perpetual questioning and indeed questing,” which is at the same time “devoid of secure origin or terminus.”16 In order for this new model of identity

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formation to emerge, transcultural adoptees need to move “from the exclusionary tidiness of being adopted to the edgy, imperfect, challenging and taxing productivity of adoptive being.”17 In his insightful book, McLeod describes in detail the transition from the fact of “being adopted” to the achievement of attaining “adoptive being.” This concept builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s theorization of Being as ever “singular and plural,” which, while not dismissing the relevance of origins, emphasizes the multiplicity of anchoring points behind identity building.18 Following Cynthia Callahan’s call to address “both the mimetic and symbolic functions of adoption in literature,”19 McLeod is concerned not only with the metaphorical uses of transcultural and transracial adoption, but also with its materiality. He has this in mind when he clusters his analysis of transcultural adoption texts along four thematic threads: secrecy, history, traces, and bearings. In the first chapter, he focuses on the abundance of secrets both in adoption narratives and in the adoption procedures themselves. In “Secrets”, he highlights the insertion of transcultural adoption in a specific historical context, always already traversed by inequality. The “Histories” section of the book is devoted to narratives where the search for the birth parent(s) is paramount, and the reunion that follows may or may not “empower new possibilities of adoptive being.”20 Realizing “the harms that emerge when transcultural adoptees attempt to fix the compass-points of their personhood in terms of the predominant bearings of self: race, nation, birthplace, ‘birth culture’, consanguinity, biogenetics, heritage, resemblance, distinctive sameness,” McLeod closes his book by focusing on texts that broker the possibility of “chart[ing] new bearings of personhood,” allowing adoptive being to emerge.21 In what follows, I will interrogate Phan’s We Should Never Meet and Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth following these four axes—secrets, histories, traces, and bearings—in an attempt to elucidate whether these narratives ultimately embrace the new horizon of adoptive being.

Secrets Although adoption experts concur that open adoptions may be more salutary than the “strong” adoptions of yore, where birth records were sealed, it is true that in transnational adoption procedures, even nowadays, the information that the adoption agencies receive is scant and not entirely reliable.22 While having all the facts may not always be feasible

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for adoptees and adoptive families, this does not justify canceling the truth by resorting to silence or worse. It is in this sense that we should understand McLeod’s insistence on dispelling secrets and lies not only in adoption procedures but also in adoption narratives, for “[s]ecrecy […] amplifies feelings of fraudulence, powerlessness and insubstantiality.”23 Truong’s and Phan’s texts, like the novels and memoirs analyzed in McLeod’s book, “mobiliz[e] narratologically the much-contested mechanics of secrecy in adoption contracts”; however, it remains to be seen whether their “narrative design” renders them “ethically suspect”24 or whether secrets can be ethically deployed. Phan’s narrative reflects the scarcity of details that continues to exist in many real-life transcultural adoptions, especially in transnational adoptions involving non-Western countries. The stories in the book intimate that the circumstances of adoption and, in particular, one’s biological parents may not ultimately be known,25 so one has to learn to live with that uncertainty. At the same time, Phan’s narrative attempts to symbolically fill the gaps that result from sheer lack of information rather than pernicious secrecy. This is most obvious in the opening piece, “Miss Lien.” The way that Lien, the young Vietnamese girl, abandons her baby, at the door of a rural orphanage, certainly keeps her anonymity sealed up in official records. In order to circumvent this (in)voluntary anonymity, the author invents a name and a life story for this character. In doing so, Phan uses what McLeod calls “the productive agency of storytelling” as “a way of crafting being from the painful possibilities” of material adoption.26 By being given a name, the young birth mother recovers her individuality; not only that, but in choosing “Miss Lien” for the title, I would argue, Phan is not stressing the fact that she is a single mother but endowing her with the respect implicit in this formal address. Finally, by heralding the rest of the stories, “Miss Lien” is not only, chronologically speaking, the first but also the foremost in terms of relevance. Without her and the other mothers giving birth to Amerasian children, the rest of the stories stories would not even exist. Interestingly, in both Bitter in the Mouth and We Should Never Meet, narrative secrecy revolves around racial markers. In real life, the fact that adoptions across racial lines are visible and conspicuous would make it impossible to hide the very fact of adoption and would prompt the disclosure of secrets at an early stage. However, as McLeod shows in his analysis of Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, full disclosure remains difficult and problematic precisely because of the discourse of race by

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which transracial adoptions are conditioned. In their respective texts, both Truong and Phan play with the secrets of transracial adoption, but in a different manner from that encountered in Leigh’s film, probably because written narratives can camouflage visual clues more smoothly than cinematic narratives. As literature, Phan’s and Truong’s texts can play with the readers’ expectations by resorting to a strategic use of “color-blindness,” a move that is certainly harder to achieve in films. The most conspicuous tracing in Truong’s novel, and, to a lesser extent, in Phan’s collection, may be readerly “(t)racing,” that is, establishing the racial categories in which the main characters have been placed. In Truong’s novel, the very fact of transracial adoption is kept secret for half the novel but only to the reader, not to the characters; in fact, Linda is an oxymoronic “open secret” for the people of her town.27 And yet, Truong’s decision to keep Linda’s racialized body a secret for half the novel effectively highlights the very issue—race—that had been diegetically hidden until the end of the first part.28 From Linda’s initial fantasy of disembodiment to her vain attempts at self-fashioning, racial categories seem to haunt Truong’s narrative.29 Although the discourse of race subtends the book’s leitmotif, Operation Babylift, issues of race do not appear to be as important in Phan’s We Should Never Meet as in Truong’s novel. As we shall see later, Operation Babylift owed its very existence to the “racial trace” left by American soldiers in Viet Nam. And yet, for the Vietnamese Americans described in the book, race does not seem to be so much the determining factor as the fact of being adopted or living in foster families. Even the pent-up resentment we find in those orphans, Vinh and Kim, who end up finding surrogate families in Vietnamese American gangs, is not racially exclusive.30 True enough, the author reserves a “racial surprise” for the last story, “Motherland.” It is only at the end of the book that we know about Huan’s racial makeup, and then only indirectly. Withholding this information until the very end can be construed as a strategy that analeptically highlights racial difference, as was the case in Truong’s novel. Huan’s black skin and Asian eyes, as we learn in the last story, confirm that his birth father was an African American soldier and his birth mother a Vietnamese woman. His adoptive mother’s looks, her natural red hair and very pale skin, contrast with the external signs of Huan’s non-white genotype. However, in spite of this racial discrepancy, Huan seems to be at ease in his American family, and does not show many symptoms of genealogical bewilderment.31

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Histories As we have seen, the attention to the symbolic usage of transracial adoption should not make us neglect its real and historical materiality. Indeed, the dynamics of transnational and transcultural adoption has often been a result of, and complicit with, (neo)colonialism, and the historical inequities underpinning (neo)colonial regimes cannot be forgotten when approaching adoption narratives. In particular, the “conjoined genealogies of cold war imperialisms in Asia and transracial adoptions out of Asia,” as Jodi Kim points out, make it imperative “to reckon with the complex politics and affects of transracial adoption as not simply or solely an individual private matter motivated by altruistic desires to form new kinships and to provide better lives for orphaned and abandoned children.”32 Hence, one has to go beyond or through the individual narrative and see the overarching framework of historical and political context. In this sense, then, the personal can be political. Probably the main blind spot in Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth is this neglect and omission of the historical context in which its narrative is embedded. As I have argued elsewhere, grounding the adoption historically seems to be of secondary importance for Truong: “The contrived (and highly improbable) explanation of how Linda became an orphan and came to be adopted by the Hammericks is less relevant than is transracial adoption’s potential as a cultural metaphor.”33 When narrating the events leading up to Linda’s adoption, Truong prefers to indulge in a version of the “exotic” romance rather than negotiate the fraught history behind the American adoption of Vietnamese children in the 1970s. Although a passing reference is made to the TV broadcasting of the “fall of Saigon” in April 1975 and the subsequent search for lost relatives in South Vietnam, for the most part, Truong conceals the larger historical frame. Instead, when Linda’s birth mother is introduced to the reader, the author chooses to focus on the love story between Thomas and the young Vietnamese girl, Mai-Dao. We learn that, when she goes back to her country and her Vietnamese fiancé, their romantic attachment gradually fades away. We know nothing of her until 1975, when Thomas receives a letter from Mai-Dao announcing that she, her husband, and their child are now living in North Carolina. By placing Linda’s birth parents at a remove from their country of origin, as immigrants in America, Truong does not have to deal at length with the American involvement in the war. That is why, unlike most Vietnamese adopted in

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America, Linda may be a transracial adoptee, but, strictly speaking, she cannot be considered a transnational adoptee. From a historical point of view, much more illuminating than the romantic entanglements of Thomas and Mai-Dao is a seemingly passing reference that Linda makes to the war veterans. At one point in the novel, Linda describes how, when she walked past those former soldiers in the Southern town where she lived, the men tried not to look at her: “They knew that if they saw my face they would fixate on my eyes, which some would claim were almond-shaped and others would describe as mere slits. […] If they saw my unformed breasts, the twigs that were my arms and legs, the hands and feet small enough to fit inside their mouths, how many of the men would remember the young female bodies that they bought by the half hour while wearing their country’s uniform in the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, or South Vietnam?”34 Arguably, Linda here is like the fabled Trojan horse bringing in its belly or, rather, signifying through her body, a host of embarrassing memories. As such, she constitutes an effective indictment of American neo-imperialist involvement in Asia, not least because of the explicit reference to the soldiers who sired most of the children that would become “adoptable” in Viet Nam. Such “orphans” would arrive in America by means of a controversial rescue operation that constitutes the background and underlying script of Phan’s short-story cycle: Operation Babylift. In comparison with Truong’s novel, We Should Never Meet is much more attentive to the particularities of history that rendered many Vietnamese children adoptable during the 1970s. While Truong opts for the safe option of exotic romance and the unusual orphanhood of a Vietnamese immigrant in America, Phan engages with the specific historical event that shaped the adoptability of Vietnamese children: the military-humanitarian operation known as Babylift. In “Bound,” Phan recounts Operation Babylift in an interesting way; she uses Bridget, a white American physician, as the main internal focalizer.35 The facts behind Operation Babylift are simple. At the beginning of April 1975, as the war was coming to an end, American authorities orchestrated a campaign to evacuate thousands of children: “On April 2, 1975, President Ford announced that $2 million would be directed from the Special Foreign Aid Children’s Fund to fly 2000 South Vietnamese orphans as soon as possible to the United States for adoption by American families.”36 Despite the fact that one of the planes crashed soon after

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take-off, Babylift flights continued to depart from Saigon, taking with them the orphans and American personnel. With the benefit of hindsight, Operation Babylift clearly emerges as “one last desperate publicity ploy or photo opportunity to gain sympathy” on the part of the American government,37 an accusation that is also present in Phan’s book.38 However, at the time the operation was launched, the official rationale behind it adhered to the rescue narrative.39 Many of these children, it was said, were Amerasian, and, bearing as they did the (t)race of American intervention in the country, they were not expected to fare well in unified Viet Nam. Certainly, Bridget, like the other workers in the center, believes this explanation and does not doubt the righteousness of Operation Babylift.40 In highlighting her somewhat naïve understanding of the evacuation, Phan’s book may appear to be complicit with the polemical “rescue narrative” used to support transcultural adoption. However, Phan intelligently offsets this reading by having one of the Babylift adoptees complain about the patronizing discourse of rescue later in life. As a teenager, Huan becomes critically aware of the national script whereby American adoptive parents “saved” Vietnamese children from a terrible fate. In particular, he resents being viewed “like a charity case.”41 The fact that he accuses his adoptive parents of parading their “trendy Vietnamese baby whose life they rescued”42 speaks to the persistence of the damage inflicted by the narrative of rescue so commonly found in the official discourse on adoption. Operation Babylift remains controversial to this day. The simple fact that it has occasionally been renamed “Operation Babysteal” points to the dubious nature of its humanitarian claims: after the evacuation was over, it transpired “that many of the children were not orphans at all, and about 200 were later reclaimed by their Vietnamese families who had subsequently immigrated to the United States.”43 To the certainty that not all the evacuated children were orphans, one has to add the concomitant suspicion that some of them had been taken without the consent of their relatives. Even in those cases where the children were voluntarily surrendered, the term “voluntarily” is rendered suspect by the simple realization that most of these birth parents had little choice in war-torn Viet Nam.44 It is in this historical context that we must frame our analysis of the opening story in Phan’s book, “Miss Lien.” In this story, Lien is described as giving up the baby willingly, so that her child is “safe” and does not “have to suffer.”45 However, the text never elides or bypasses the material pressures to abandon the child that Lien, like

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other Vietnamese mothers, endured at the time, namely neocolonial exploitation and extreme poverty. The latter forces Lien, almost a child herself, to leave the family farm and earn her living in the dangerous city. Before too long, she faces an unwanted pregnancy: “She hadn’t asked for this.”46 Here, the pernicious effects of neocolonialism take the form of sexual predators: although never explicit about it, the text suggests that one of the American GIs who approaches Lien by addressing her suggestively as “little thing” is probably the baby’s father.47 Unable to terminate her pregnancy and knowing that mixed-race babies may have a chance in America, she decides to abandon her child at a Christian orphanage. Towards the end of the story, as she waits for the nun to take in the infant, Lien bitterly proclaims the unfairness of it all: “It wasn’t fair. So many open mouths and outstretched hands, expecting her to fill them. She could not have another.”48 The personal is indeed political, and it is political decisions and historical forces that have made Lien a birth mother ready to abandon her child, thus enabling adoption by another family in wealthy America. If, in Toby Alice Volkman’s apt words, “all adoption that crosses borders—of culture, race, ethnicity, nation, or class—is shaped by profound inequities in power,”49 Lien’s surrendering of her child echoes a larger surrender, that of the powerless to the powerful.

Traces While some adoption scholars decry the obsession with origins still visible in most adoption narratives, others continue to confer vital significance upon the process of tracing and reunion with one’s biological parents, which they deem necessary in order to exorcize the ghost of genealogical bewilderment. After years of obscurantism and enforced secrecy, “tracing the identities and whereabouts of birth-parents” has become “an inevitable and necessary step along the road to emotional completeness and well-being that can only be delivered through reunion.”50 However, this injunction to search for and reunite with one’s biological parents can also become a stifling mandate, as McLeod convincingly warns: “tracing has been transformed from a task which those inward of the triad must be legally prohibited from pursuing to an activity which adoptees in particular often feel under pressure to perform.”51 This may be the reason why recent adoption narratives, in McLeod’s apt phrase, have “begun to call time on those prodigal narratives of the lost

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and found”52 that identified reunion with happy ending. Even if not to be entirely dismissed, tracing and/or reuniting with one’s birth parents may not be enough to reach the ideal of adoptive being. Truong’s and Phan’s narratives might seem to point in that direction: the fact that no single adoptee ever meets her/his biological parents pre-empts the expectations of readers and effectively resists the “romance of family reunion.”53 At the same time, the architecture in both books is far from transparent: while departing from the narrative convention of tracing, these texts still seem to structurally privilege biocentric paradigms. By choosing to end at the beginning, Phan and Truong may be reinforcing the discourse of the discovery of roots that, for Jerng, continues to haunt adoption narratives.54 Although We Should Never Meet does not follow a chronological order but, zipper-like, alternates between the past (odd stories) and the present (even stories), the first and last story do coincide with the earliest and latest events. Significantly, Phan’s book ends with “Motherland,” a story that, as the title suggests, portrays the reunion of the grown-up adoptees with Viet Nam, the figurative motherland. In this way, Phan manages to join or “zip up” both narrative strands: the Vietnamese setting of the odd chapters and the Vietnamese American protagonists of the even ones finally come together. Therefore, for all its back-and-forth movement, Phan’s pendular narrative can still be considered a typical trace narrative: from an imagined birth mother who leaves the baby with the nuns at the rural orphanage, to the nun who takes the abandoned children to the wealthier Saigon orphanage, to the workers at the Saigon center who struggle with difficult decisions and put those children on a plane bound to America, until the final story, when adoptive mother and adopted son travel to the motherland and close the circle/zipper. Paradoxically, the very title of Phan’s short-story cycle, We Should Never Meet, conjures up a certain reluctance to facilitate tracing and reunion. The phrase is ambivalent enough to allow for two possible interpretations: either the birth parents feel they should not meet their lost children or else the adoptees prefer not to trace their lost parents. A last possibility emerges when we realize that none of the four Vietnamese Americans featured in the short-story cycle is reunited with lost relatives: history has intervened and parents and children cannot meet, because the birth parents are either anonymous or long dead. Only two of the young characters in We Should Never Meet, Kim and Huan, engage in the actual process of tracing. Unlike Huan, a fellow

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Amerasian orphan from Operation Babylift, Kim was returned by her adoptive parents and ended up in a series of undesirable foster homes, where she was either neglected or sexually molested. As a result of her grim childhood, Kim idealizes her unknown Vietnamese mother and projects such a need onto a Vietnamese immigrant who runs a store in Little Saigon. Intrigued by the possibility that the immigrant that treats her so kindly may be her birth mother, Kim asks the social worker for her file, only to learn that there is no information about her mother in her adoption archives.55 Kim does not give up and turns to the Vietnamese store owner for financial help, but, once more, she only finds disappointment: “through every blink of her eyes the woman was changing into something else. Once familiar, the woman became a stranger again. Her features were not so similar to Kim’s, her face, body language not so loving. She’d been wrong. Kim hated being wrong.”56 As the end of the story shows, for Kim this impossibility of knowing her birth mother becomes a failure that defeats her spirit and makes her harbor a vengeful resentment. Similarly, in the story “Visitors,” Kim’s foster brother, Vinh, seems to build some affective bond with an old man recently arrived from Viet Nam. However, just like Kim, Vinh also ends up betraying and attacking the very Vietnamese immigrant who reminds him of the relatives who abandoned them back in Viet Nam. Apparently, then, Kim and Vinh still seem plagued by a feeling of genealogical bewilderment, which is rendered more visible in their anger at surrogate Vietnamese kin. Their stories would appear to confirm the widespread belief that not knowing one’s biological parents “may endanger one’s capacity to formulate a fully functional sense of self.”57 And yet, I would venture to say that it is not so much the need for biological parents, but a more general emotional privation, that has rendered them dysfunctional. As children, Kim and Vinh, needed somebody—not necessarily a (birth) parent—to protect and love them, but they had no one to turn to. To compensate for such lack of affection, they bonded with “foster siblings” and built family-like ties within a Vietnamese American gang. Huan’s tracing process is different from Kim’s. Although Huan does not devote much time to thinking about his birth mother, he still acknowledges that she is a “small part” of him.58 And yet, it is not until the very end that he becomes genuinely interested in learning about his past and his biological parents, and this feat is accomplished by the joint effort of his (ex)girlfriend59 and his adoptive mother.60 At the end of the narrative Huan, who has reluctantly engaged in this “quest for roots,”

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seems to eventually embrace the rhetoric of origins, albeit not in entirely biocentric terms, as I will explain. Since reunion with his birth mother is not possible, for her identity remains unknown, Huan can only visit the Delta orphanage that he has been traced back to. Interestingly, the only personal reunion we can witness is that of Huan and Phuong, the Vietnamese nun who had taken care of him at the orphanage. The central position and unusual nature of this encounter effectively undermines the biocentrism that usually accrues to reunion narratives. Mai is the only Vietnamese orphan who becomes a close friend of Huan’s, despite the obvious racial and ethclass differences.61 Although she knows she was given in adoption when her mother died, Mai, more than any other adoptee, is aware of “the counterproductive consequences of persistently dwelling on the losses of the past rather than mobilizing that past for productive future-facing purposes.”62 Mai has vague memories of her birth mother before becoming an orphan, at the age of five, but she does not really miss her. Still, she exaggerates the significance of this loss in order to get a scholarship and be able to study at a good college. Consciously playing the card of American guilt, Mai resorts to the discourse of victimhood, embellishing, or rather, worsening the account of her life: Her situation turned out so fortunate that she had nothing to write about. It was strange, realizing her life had to be worse to count for something. So she played it up. Remembering all the sympathies people had projected on her all her life, Mai wrote of her longing for her dead mother and native land and her resolution to return to Vietnam one day and help her former countrymen.63

Still, even though her white foster parents, the Reynoldses, have always been good to her, Mai resents not being formally adopted: “Mrs. Luong had told Mai long ago that the Reynoldses were interested in foster care, not adoption. They wanted to help as many children as they could. Mai understood this, most of the time. But there were other times she thought she could change their minds. She did everything to demonstrate she’d make a nice daughter […].”64 For most of the narrative, and especially in the chapter “Emancipation,” we witness how her loyalty is divided between the Reynoldses and the other Vietnamese orphans, especially Kim, her foster sister, with whom she had spent her first years

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in the USA. In contrast with Kim’s obsession with her lost biological mother, Mai’s dead mother does not seem to be a real concern for her, as she explains in a conversation with Huan: […] I lied. In the essay. Huan stared at her for a moment. I don’t think so. I know you. I read that essay, and I believe you. Everyone believed me, but it isn’t true. Do you miss your biological mother? Huan looked out his window. They never talked about it, their shared history as orphans. They were always too busy with plans for the future, their new lives. When he didn’t say anything, Mai believed she had her answer. Well, neither do I. I made it all up. I’m an opportunist. It’s pathetic. I do miss her, Huan said. It’s a small part of me, but it’s there. I think that part of you wrote the essay. Mai shook her head. I never think of her.65

Despite this reiterated denial, however, the fact that Mai chooses to accompany Huan on his trip to Viet Nam is rather telling, especially because it is Mai who encourages him to visit the orphanages he has been traced back to. To conclude, then, we can claim that, despite Mai’s explicit disavowal, both the narrative structure and the closing story seem to confirm the familiar circular pattern whereby the resolution of the story coincides with the return to the origin: both the lost motherland, here Viet Nam, and the traces of his birth mother. Thus “zipped up,” the end of the story seems to put an end to the genealogical bewilderment that had driven these characters to go back to the Vietnamese orphanage from where Huan had originally come. In this sense, the return to the “motherland” in the last story effectively closes the circle initiated by “Miss Lien,” for the book opens and closes with the same setting and, apparently, with the same character, Huan, first as an abandoned baby, and later as a young American adoptee. Thus, the book’s narrative architecture would only underscore the pattern that Jerng

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described as most common in international adoption memoirs, with a strong emphasis on the adoptee’s conciliatory “return” to “roots,” here both the mother and the motherland.66 If we now turn our attention to Bitter in the Mouth, we perceive that, for most of the novel, Linda does not show any symptom of genealogical bewilderment. In fact, her resistance to racial discourse and her indifference to Vietnamese culture in general indicate that she has never been interested in searching for her birth parents. True enough, by securing the death of both of her birth parents, Truong effectively preempts any possibility of reunion. At the same time, we cannot forget that Linda’s adoptive family had always refused to talk about Linda’s biological parents,67 and that pact of secrecy had conditioned her life. Still, even with these caveats, Linda does not seem to feel the pull of biogenetic strings. However, the fact that the ending of the novel recounts Linda’s beginning complicates the way we interpret Bitter in the Mouth as an adoption narrative.68 In general, to repeat Jerng’s argument above, non-autobiographical novels would be less mimetically constrained and would not necessarily privilege the “return” to or the “discovery” of roots.69 Truong’s narrative stance throughout the novel apparently wavers between such a need to fill the “void” in the protagonist’s past—the primordial “fixed origins”—and the narrator’s silence about the actual fact of her transracial adoption, of which she is aware from the beginning. Truong hesitates between an acceptance of our lack of knowledge and a resolute quest for answers. The revelation that closes the novel, much like the end of Phan’s book, seems to privilege a return to the origin: “We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.”70 Right after the adoptive mother breaks the secret of Linda’s origin, the narrator mentions the grandmother’s initial prophecy again, thus closing the circle: “The story of my birth parents’ final days in Chapel Hill was what my grandmother Iris […] had thought would break me in two.”71 The privileged position that both the secret and its revelation acquire in the novel says much about its narrative hierarchy. Ultimately, the book, through the way this revelation is textually crafted, would seem to highlight the necessity of having such narratives of origin and belonging. Taken at face value, then, those concluding words would indicate that Truong apparently embraces the biocentric “fixation on provenance”

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that Linda had criticized in others. However, in a final narrative twist, the author turns what seemed to be a wholehearted endorsement of the narrow script of “fixed origins” into something much more elusive. The fact that “[w]e all need a story of where we came from” is attenuated by the preceding sentence: “I had thought […] that [my mother] could be making this all up. I decided that it didn’t matter. At least it was a story, I thought.”72 Linda is prepared to live with the radical unknowability of origins. In this way, Truong’s text effectively explores what Homans calls “the difficulty both of establishing origins and of doing without them.”73 Ultimately, the novel proclaims that it is possible to find a compromise between the legitimate aspiration to look for one’s (lost, obscure) origins and the need to accept that, ultimately, origins may not be fully knowable in other than fictional (re)constructions. And yet, I would argue that Bitter in the Mouth can indeed be read as a reunion story, albeit an unconventional one. The reunion that takes place here is not that between the child and her lost birth parents, but between the adoptee and her “lost” adoptive mother. By the end of the novel Linda is finally ready to know and understand her mother: “I met DeAnne Whatley Hammerick for the first time when she was sixtysix.”74 Day after day, Linda and DeAnne try to get to “know each other the same way that any two strangers who meet in a foreign city would have.”75 This conciliatory move, I contend, buttresses Linda’s journey towards adoptive being at the same time that it salvages the figure of the adoptive mother. If birth mothers have often been maligned in official adoption discourse, adoptive mothers have not fared much better in contemporary adoption narratives, which implicitly or explicitly accuse them of complicity with the exploitation of birth parents and their culture.76 Linda’s (re)discovery of her adoptive mother as an important anchor in her life confirms that, while the very compulsion behind tracing “prioritizes biocentric particulars in the achievement of consciousness and agency,” trace stories can also “take us through and far beyond the geneticist expectations which adoptees are schooled to accept.”77 If Phan suggests this path by having Huan reunite with his first, non-bloodrelated carer, the trail becomes even clearer in Truong’s novel. In the end, Bitter in the Mouth rewrites the conventional script of trace narratives not only by privileging provisional storytelling over “fixed origins,” but also by replacing the conventional reunion with birth parents with the recovery of adoptive ones.

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Bearings In the last chapter of Life Lines, McLeod explains the harmful consequences for adoptees who try “to fix the compass-points of their personhood in terms of the predominant bearings of self,” such as race, nation, birthplace, and so on.78 Transcultural adoption narratives, however, can also propose new ways to construct our selfhood by looking for bearings outside the normative discourse of identity; most notably, such texts facilitate the “multidirectional attachment”79 characteristic of adoptive being. Do Truong’s and Phan’s narratives of transracial adoption broker the possibility of new bearings for the adoptees? As shown above, Phan’s We Should Never Meet vindicates the value of the past, the need not to forget the painful histories behind transnational, transracial adoption. Its zipper-like structure, intercalating as it does past and present stories, secures this interpretation.80 Phan opts for alternating between the young adoptees’ and adults’ points of view, and, within the stories focalized through the adults, the writer includes the perspectives of birth parents (Lien), adoption workers (Hoa, Bridget, and Phuong) and even prospective adoptive parents (Bridget). I would argue that the intercalation of narratives with character-focalizers across the wide range of the adoption triad, and beyond, resembles the proliferation of Nancy’s “singular plural” that, according to McLeod, underlies adoptive being.81 In addition, the ties built between foster sisters (Mai and Kim) may point at alternative models of family formation. There is no denying that a few stories, most notably those built around Kim and Vinh, lead to ineffective dead ends, thus refusing to delete “the imposed harms of being adopted.”82 In “Bound,” Phan also pays attention to the frustration of prospective adopters, who usually undergo as much uncertainty and pain as the adoptees themselves. However, despite the fact that Phan shows the suffering and the difficulties encountered by all of the agents involved in adoption, the book ends on an optimistic note: Huan’s and Mai’s “futures are pure,”83 cleansed of the blemishes of the past. The closing scene seems to suggest that Mai and Huan are at peace with themselves, that they have moved beyond an understanding of “adoptive life […] as forever split or fractured,”84 and they have learned to see it, instead, as an opportunity to rethink the moorings or bearings we choose for our construction of selfhood. In exploring new bearings, McLeod argues, adoptive being does not privilege filiative over affiliative relations, but considers both as

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co-participating, together with other threads, in fashioning the “knot” of identity.85 In fact, one of the most common pitfalls that the critic finds in transcultural adoption narratives is that of upholding blood lines to the detriment of other life lines, a bias that disqualifies such texts as proponents or exempla of adoptive being. I would argue that in Truong’s novel we can find evidence of biocentrism. In Bitter in the Mouth, Truong turns Thomas, Linda’s adoptive father, into the perfect surrogate of biogenetic family, not in the figurative sense most often associated with real-life adoption, but in a more intriguing and problematic way. Although Linda is the product of a later relationship, that between MaiDao and her Vietnamese husband, the narrator situates her “origin” in Thomas and Mai-Dao’s meeting at Columbia University: “The story of my life, according to DeAnne Whatley Hammerick, began in the fall of 1955, thirteen years before I was born,”86 at the moment when Thomas met and fell in love with Mai-Dao. When, a few months after their arrival in America, Mai-Dao and her husband die, their child is adopted by Thomas and his wife, DeAnne. Even though, in strict biological terms, Thomas is not Linda’s father, his intimate, loving connection with the birth mother, Mai-Dao, does hint at a symbolic perpetuation of biogenetic lines. At the same time, this narrative ruse can be read more productively as privileging genuine love over blood: Linda would then be a “love child” not so much in the conventional sense as in a broader, metaphorical one. Despite the uneasy conflation of consanguinity and adoptive lines suggested above, I would argue that Bitter in the Mouth ultimately offers a “tentative reformulation of family,”87 not only by salvaging DeAnne, as we have just seen, but also by emphasizing chosen families—Linda’s synesthete “siblings”—over imposed ones. Before disclosing the fact of transracial adoption, Truong’s novel leads us to some other secrets which constitute not so much a red herring as an attempt to construct Linda’s identity with recourse to personality traits that have nothing to do with race, thus finding multiple anchors for her personhood. At the same time that Truong endows race with a pivotal role in the novel, her narrative manages to split the seams of racial discourse. In the end, Bitter in the Mouth, through its “progressive envisioning of post-racial collectivity,” including Linda’s new synesthetic family and her beloved Baby Harper, resists the consolidation of “filiative notions of genealogical attachment beloved of modernity’s models of identitarian categorization.”88

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While the meanings associated with Linda’s synesthesia, such as exchange and combination,89 provide the author with a potent tool to dismantle univocal visions of identity building, it is the image of the spider web that proves especially revealing. Looking back at her first classes at Harvard, Linda explains the analogy given by one professor, who “declared that the Law was a spider web,” implying that “there was no easy and obvious starting point. Everything about the Law was interconnected, interdependent, interwoven.”90 The fact that Linda remembers this simile just as her adoptive mother is about to tell her about the particulars of her adoption is highly significant. As the character herself acknowledges, “the professor’s words” plagued her “every morning as DWH [DeAnne] and I had inched closer to the center of our web,”91 the details of Linda/Linh-Dao’s birth and adoption. By introducing the spider web trope, Truong is suggesting an alternative, non-linear account of identity formation. Even though there is an apparent “core” which mother and daughter are gradually approaching, the weaving that creates the spider net immediately conjures up a sense of interconnectivity. In fact, the image of the spider web approximates McLeod’s textile metaphors of adoptive being92 in their shared stress on interweaving and conjoining threads. More importantly, a spider web needs several “anchoring” points before being woven into a whole; for this reason, this image constitutes an apt figure for the condition of adoptive being, with its emphasis on multiple attachments. By choosing the spider web as the trope presiding over the tale of origins, the narrative effectively highlights the issues of interdependence and multiplicity of bearings so central to adoptive being.

Conclusions Transracial adoptees disrupt cultural imaginaries. They may not ignite or fuel a war, but they do trigger powerful rethinking of what families are, of how we as individuals are constituted within them. Adopted children render visible the struggle of two major competing or “warring” paradigms that McLeod pithily summarizes as the “biogenetic and adoptive models of kinship.”93 There is also an insidious quality in the deployment of Trojan horses that taints adoption and its narratives. This has partly to do with the secrecy that accrued to Western adoption procedures until quite recently and that many contemporary adoption narratives fiddle with and often attempt to dispel. Last but not least, let

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us remember that, through the ruse of the Trojan horse, the Greeks famously broke into an apparently impregnable fortress or bastion. Here, the apparently watertight bastion that the “disruptive adoptee” seeps through is the biogenetic structuring of kin, and, by extension, of the larger families of “race” and “nation.” Some transracial adoption novels, like Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, make tracing the race of the main characters a serious game. More commonly, transracial adoption narratives focus on other types of trace, usually in the form of traveling to the site of “origins,” as happens at the end of Phan’s We Should Never Meet. In the preceding pages, I have explored the ways in which these two narratives confirm or disrupt bio-normativity in family making. I have also tried to ascertain whether the different adoptees peopling these books eventually move from the fact of being adopted to the feat of adoptive being. “Adoptive being,” McLeod claims, is not “gifted” but “forged.”94 For adoptive being to be “forged,” one needs to confront “adoption’s vexed material histories” and allow for a “narrative creativity”95 that proffers alternative bearings. It is not easy to diagnose whether Phan’s and Truong’s texts fulfill the task entirely. Phan’s We Should Never Meet is quite ambivalent in this respect. On the one hand, it is difficult to decide whether its zipper-like structure dismantles or confirms biocentric normativity. Closing as it does with the return to the “Motherland,” the zipper model seems to perpetuate the centrality of “origins” over the image of an “ongoing journey” that McLeod considers an apt description of adoptive being.96 On the other hand, We Should Never Meet resembles McLeod’s model of adoptive being in its proliferation of perspectives, a multiplicity created by intercalating past and present episodes replete with the voices of birth parents, adoptees, adopters, and those outside the adoption triad. It can be claimed that, on the whole, Phan’s stories “neither deny nor forget the painful disposition of being adopted.”97 Huan and Mai, the two adoptees who appear in the closing piece, prove that life can be fully lived after a significant loss, instead of being “imagined as forever split or fractured.”98 In this sense, Phan’s book can be said “to release adopted life from the unceasing condition of grieving for the loss of origins and others.”99 Even the inclusion of characters, such as Vinh and Kim, who seem to be either lost or traumatized can be read not so much as an indictment of transracial adoption as an accusation of the governmental failure to provide a good adoptive family. Concomitantly, the presence of characters, like Kim, who are still prey

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to genealogical bewilderment can also serve as a denunciation of a discourse that perpetuates the centrality of blood lines in identity building, a discourse that “would have us believe that each of us should be ever moored to a single, rather than singular plural, condition.”100 Last but not least, Phan’s book displays the necessary concern for the “referential specifics” of transracial adoption,101 not only by recounting Operation Babylift from the point of view of the people involved in it, but also by contextualizing the moment of child surrender in the opening piece. Through her inclusion of the stories of the Vietnamese women left behind, Phan seems to respond to the ethical imperative not to neglect the particular historical circumstances that made transcultural adoption possible. It is precisely this careful attention to the “referential specifics” of transracial adoption, so central to the model of adoptive being, that is missing in Bitter in the Mouth. In fact, the novel can be accused of complicity with neocolonialism by failing to address the historical specificities that rendered most Vietnamese children adoptable. Truong’s narratological deployment of secrecy can likewise be problematic. In dehistoricizing Linda’s adoption and delaying the disclosure of the adoption secrets, the ethical integrity of adoptive being may be compromised. And yet, postponing is not the same as failing to give the news. While Truong’s choice of leaving out the particulars of Linda’s adoption until the final revelation of the last chapter can also be construed as reiterating “the much-contested mechanics of secrecy,”102 the opposite can also be argued: by placing the details of the adoption at the most privileged narrative site in a novel, its ending, Truong is trying to endow the disclosure of such secrets with a calculated centrality. Should we accept this interpretation, Truong’s strategic deployment of secrecy would be hard to contest from an ethical standpoint. I would go further and argue that Bitter in the Mouth hoards unexpected treasures for the purposes of adoptive being. First, the novel offers an alternative reunion, that of Linda and her adoptive mother, in the concluding chapter. It also demythologizes the discourse of race explicitly and implicitly, by playing (t) race with the “racial trace.” In addition, it emphasizes the diversity of family models, families that we can create “with our bodies or with our will.”103 And, finally, it proffers an alternative pattern to explain the construction of selfhood, the spider web, an image that, with its multiple anchorages and interconnectivity, conjures up the promising model of adoptive being.

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Notes











1. Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth: A Novel (London: Vintage, 2011). 2.  On the term “transracial adoption,” see Cynthia Callahan, Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 6; John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 10. 3. Barbara Melosh, “Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity,” in Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Wayne Carp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 240. 4. Melosh, “Adoption Stories,” 240. 5. Callahan, Kin of Another Kind, 166. 6. Margaret Homans, The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 1. 7. McLeod, Life Lines, 225 (emphasis added). 8. Aimee Phan, We Should Never Meet: Stories (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004). 9. H.J. Sants, “Genealogical bewilderment in children with substitute parents,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 37 (1964). 10. As Kimberly Leighton explains in “Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity: Lessons from Genealogical Bewilderment,” Adoption and Culture 3 (2012), the “argument behind the claim that adoptees necessarily suffer from genealogical bewilderment is that a child needs to know the genealogy of his genetic family because only with knowledge of heredity can a child develop into a normal adult with a healthy psyche,” and yet, “rather than addressing the feelings of those who are distraught over what they do not know about the genetic relatives in a way that might resolve those feelings, the diagnosis ‘genealogical bewilderment’ is itself generative of the very conditions of such suffering” (66). 11. McLeod, Life Lines, 14–15. 12. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 169. 13. Mark C. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” MELUS 31: 2 (2006): 45; McLeod, Life Lines; Homans, The Imprint of Another Life. 14. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee”, 45. 15. Similarly, Eli Park Sorensen, in “Korean Adoption Literature and the Politics of Representation,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12: 1 (2014): 155–179, identifies a tripartite

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structure in Korean adoption narratives (home-away-home) and notes that this familiar Bildungsroman structure is a way to contain and neutralize transgressive questions and fantasies about identity. I thank Lena Ahlin for this observation. 16. McLeod, Life Lines, 218. 17. McLeod, Life Lines, 72. 18. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 37. 19. Callahan, Kin of Another Kind, 166. 20. McLeod, Life Lines, 36. 21. McLeod, Life Lines, 180–181. 22. McLeod, Life Lines, 39–40. 23. McLeod, Life Lines, 43. 24. McLeod, Life Lines, 66. 25. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 238. 26. McLeod, Life Lines, 217. 27. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 171. 28. In Bitter in the Mouth, Truong’s choice of titles for each section of the novel, “Confession” and “Revelation,” confirms the centrality of dispelling half-truths and revealing secrets. 29. Linda is “often asked by complete strangers what it was like to grow up being Asian in the South,” strangers who could not tell the difference between being and looking Asian (Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 169). Even her boyfriend reads her according to the racial scripts that have been pre-written for her (Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 173). See my analysis of these aspects of the novel in Begoña Simal-González, “Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39: 2 (2013): 7–32. 30. The anger seething in teenagers like Kim is aimed as much at the white, successful families, as at adults in general: “Except for her old foster brothers and sisters, she wanted nothing to do with the rest, the adults who were supposed to look after her and instead screwed everything up. Especially the social worker” (Phan, We Should Never Meet, 45). Most shockingly, as will be discussed later, Vinh and Kim target and attack vulnerable Vietnamese emigrants who remind them of the parents or relatives who have given them in adoption. 31. What remains an intriguing issue is Huan’s apparent disavowal of his Asianness. Huan, much like Linda in Bitter in the Mouth, resolutely tries to “expunge any connectivity with Asian life as an anchor of identity” (McLeod, Life Lines, 71). Not only that, but he avoids Vietnamese people, although his distance from them can be attributed as much to his

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mixed heritage as to his being adopted transracially. Huan was “nervous” when he met them because he believed that, “since he was only half [Vietnamese] and raised by white parents, he wouldn’t know how to talk to them” (Phan, We Should Never Meet, 159). However, something contradicts Huan’s purported alienation from Asians and Asian Americans: he only dates girls with Asian features. While this preference for Asian (American) girlfriends may be caused by his need to assuage the anxiety generated by racial ambiguity, it can also be read as a problematic attempt to “recover” the lost Asian mother. 32.  Jodi Kim, “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics,” American Quarterly (2009): 857. 33. Simal-González, “Judging the Book by Its Cover,” 26. 34. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 171. 35. As a voluntary pediatrician, Bridget has had close contact with many of these children, but only has eyes for Huan (Phan, We Should Never Meet, 182). We can safely trace this adoptee character as far as this particular moment, although earlier stories have hinted at this. 36. Kim, “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers,” 870. To the first arrivals in April, when the operation was launched, Earl E. Huyck and Rona Fields, in “Impact of Resettlement on Refugee Children,” International Migration Review 15: 1–2 (1981), add the unaccompanied minors who arrived in the months that followed: “Most of the 2000 children flown to the U.S. in Operation Babylift in April 1975 were placed with adoptive American families. By the end of 1975 some 1800 additional unaccompanied children had come or were anticipated” (249). 37. Kim, “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers,” 870. 38. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 195. 39. Callahan, Kin of Another Kind, 36. 40. When faced with a reporter who is critical of the massive evacuation, she explains that these Amerasian orphans are “products of this war” (Phan, We Should Never Meet, 194). To the reporter’s question of whether they wouldn’t be better off “living in their own culture,” Bridget retorts that these children are already “outcasts” in Viet Nam (Phan, We Should Never Meet, 194). Arguably, memoirs like Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted confirm that this might be true to a certain extent (Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001)). 41. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 241. 42. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 241. 43. Kim, “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers,” 870. 44. For an excellent analysis of the commodification of children in transnational adoption, see Homans, Imprint, 28–33.

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45. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 23. 46. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 23. 47. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 19. 48. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 23. 49. McLeod, Life Lines, 6. 50. McLeod, Life Lines, 134–135. 51. McLeod, Life Lines, 135. 52. McLeod, Life Lines, 231. 53. McLeod, Life Lines, 159. 54. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee,” 46, 48, 50. 55. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 48. 56. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 50. 57. McLeod, Life Lines, 134. Alternatively, one can think that both Kim and Linh, in their tough muted manner, have unconsciously accepted the discourse that “pathologize[s] adoptees in terms of emotional and mental precariousness” (McLeod, Life Lines, 140), even if Mai or Huan prove the opposite, that you can lead a full, healthy life as an adoptee or as someone raised in a foster family, as long as there is enough love and respect. 58. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 159. 59. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 223, 228. 60. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 217. In contrast with Huan, his adoptive mother, Gwen, is adamant about keeping the Asian connection alive from the beginning, Gwen has encouraged him to go back to Viet Nam and visit the orphanage where he originally came from. With her insistence on retracing Huan’s steps back to Viet Nam, Gwen reverses the discourse of color-blindness that used to plague adoptive parents. 61. In Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), Milton M. Gordon coined the term “ethclass” to refer to “the social space created at the intersection of the vertical stratifications of ethnicity with the horizontal stratifications of social class” (51). Paradoxically, class and generational differences contribute to turning Huan more “desirable” as an adoptee than Asian-looking Mai. In a society where, according to Sara Dorow, “model minority” Asians are valued and chosen over African Americans (quoted in McLeod, Life Lines, 13), it would have made more sense for any of the other orphans to be placed more securely and successfully than Huan, whose racial features were halfblack half-Asian (see Homans, Imprint, 27). In this case, however, historical contingencies intervene so that earlier arrivals are favored over

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later ones. While Huan was among the babies adopted after Operation Babylift, his friend Mai arrived in America a few years later, one of the many boat people of the late 70s and early 80s. The situation of the later arrivals, of refugee children like Mai, was rather different from that of the first Amerasian adoptees (see Phan, We Should Never Meet, 242). 62. McLeod, Life Lines, 146. 63. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 147. 64. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 158. 65. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 159. 66. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee,” 48. 67. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 165. 68. For a more detailed analysis of the structural pattern and the game of secrets that the novel engages in, see Simal-González, “Judging the Book by Its Cover.” 69. Jerng, “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee,” 45. 70. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 282. 71. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 279. 72. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 282. 73.  Margaret Homans, “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins,” Narrative 14: 1 (2006): 22, 13. See Homans, Imprint, 124. 74. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 244. 75. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 245. 76. Homans, The Imprint of Another Life, 250–255; McLeod, Life Lines, 18, 54. 77. McLeod, Life Lines, 136, 177. 78. McLeod, Life Lines, 180. 79. McLeod, Life Lines, 224. 80.  Hikaru Fujii, Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), maintains that the structure chosen by Phan proves the persistence of the past in the present: “the characters’ present lives always refer back to the history that defines their identity” (111). 81. McLeod, Life Lines, 27. 82. McLeod, Life Lines, 181. 83. Phan, We Should Never Meet, 243. 84. McLeod, Life Lines, 210. 85. McLeod, Life Lines, 27. 86. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 268. 87. McLeod, Life Lines, 198. 88. McLeod, Life Lines, 198–199. 89. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 255. 90. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 266.

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91. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 266. 92. McLeod, Life Lines, 173–175. 93. McLeod, Life Lines, 27. 94. McLeod, Life Lines, 231. 95. McLeod, Life Lines, 82. 96. McLeod, Life Lines, 222. 97. McLeod, Life Lines, 225. 98. McLeod, Life Lines, 210. 99. McLeod, Life Lines, 162. 100. McLeod, Life Lines, 210. 101. McLeod, Life Lines, 132. 102. McLeod, Life Lines, 66. 103. Truong, Bitter in the Mouth, 265.

Bibliography Callahan, Cynthia. Kin of Another Kind: Transracial Adoption in American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Fujii, Hikaru. Outside, America: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary American Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gordon, Milton M. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Homans, Margaret. “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins.” Narrative 14: 1 (2006): 4–26. Homans, Margaret. The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. 2013. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Huyck, Earl E., and Rona Fields. “Impact of Resettlement on Refugee Children.” International Migration Review 15: 1–2 (1981): 246–54. Jerng, Mark C. “Recognizing the Transracial Adoptee: Adoption Life Stories and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life.” MELUS 31: 2 (2006): 41–67. Kim, Jodi. “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics.” American Quarterly (2009): 855–80. Leigh, Mike, dir. Secrets and Lies. Film Four, 1996. Leighton, Kimberly. “Addressing the Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity: Lessons from Genealogical Bewilderment.” Adoption and Culture 3 (2012): 63–107. McLeod, John. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Melosh, Barbara. “Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity.” In Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, edited by E. Wayne Carp, 218–47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nguyen, Kien. The Unwanted: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. Phan, Aimee. We Should Never Meet: Stories. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004. Sants, H.J. “Genealogical Bewilderment in Children with Substitute Parents.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 37 (1964): 133–41. Simal-González, Begoña. “Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39: 2 (2013): 7–32. Sorensen, Eli Park. “Korean Adoption Literature and the Politics of Representation.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12: 1 (2014): 155–79. Truong, Monique. Bitter in the Mouth: A Novel. 2010. London: Vintage, 2011.

Author Biography Begoña Simal-González is an Associate Professor at the English Department‚ University of Coruña, Spain. She has written extensively on contemporary American and diasporic literatures, particularly on the Asian diasporas. Her publications include Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures (2009; with Benito and Manzanas), and Selves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing (2011; editor). Her articles have appeared in journals such as MELUS, JTAS, and REN, as well as in essay collections published by Routledge, Brill-Rodopi, and Palgrave Macmillan. Her most recent research has focused on environmental and transnational studies, including transnational adoption.

PART III

Europe and America

CHAPTER 8

Mythologizing Transnational and Transracial Adoption in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s Twin Sisters: A World Apart Alan Shima

“Who speaks?” “What things are said?” “What remains silent?” These simple questions were forcefully raised when Michel Foucault probed the discourses that support structures of human knowledge. His critical inquiry consequently altered, for example, our understanding of clinical medicine and the penal system by suggesting that their legitimacy was based on corresponding networks of statements rather than evidentiary truths and rational thinking. Similarly, these same questions seem meaningfully appropriate when considering accounts taken from the discourse on transnational and transracial adoption. From this perspective, the cinematic “statements” embedded in Mona Friis Bertheussen’s documentary film Twin Sisters1 provide striking examples of what things are said and what remains silent about transnational and transracial adoption. At an emotional level, the tension between a biogenetic origin and an ongoing adoptive transnational life is the central theme in Twin Sisters. Obvious questions are raised in the film. Why were identical twin girls

A. Shima (*)  Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_8

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separated in China? Why weren’t they adopted by the same family? Will growing up in different cultural environments estrange the twins who would otherwise have developed a natural bond with each other? To use a term from Roland Barthes, Bertheussen’s cinematic narrative is a mythical naturalization of content into form, where the economic, social, and legal aspects of transnational and transracial adoption are diminished, though never completely hidden.2 Applying Barthes’s critical view, it can be argued that Bertheussen’s film “organizes a world which is without contradictions […] a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.”3 This “blissful clarity” conspicuously relies on a color-blind montage of who speaks, what things are said, and what remains silent. To paraphrase Foucault, there are secretive movements of thought in Twin Sisters, which take the form of undisclosed and under-­ acknowledged dimensions of an adoptee’s life. The film’s “undisclosed” element is not simply an oblique allusion to an unknown birth mother. The film’s unnamed secrecies are complex and paradoxically most marked by the cinematic staging of “what things are said.”4 The film’s scripting of transnational adoption promotes a drama lifted by heartfelt desires and steadfast affection while obscuring the material contexts and actualities of transnational and transracial adoptive families. What follows is a critical reimagining of Twin Sisters and its semiotic systems of articulation and silences, its uncanny dispersion of meaning; it ultimately directs attention to the film’s cinematic exchange of diverse histories for a mythologized form of desire. In the BBC-produced documentary The Secret Life of Twins,5 a portion of the film recounts a story about twin girls who were born in China and later adopted as 18-month-old toddlers by two different families. One twin, Alexandra, lives with her adoptive family in Norway. The other twin, Mia, lives with her adoptive family in the USA. Their biological kinship was confirmed only after both families had settled into their new adoptive lives. The Norwegian filmmaker Mona Friis Bertheussen learned of this story and was determined to make a movie about the sisters, but from her own particular cinematic vision.6 After four years in production, Bertheussen’s documentary Twin Sisters: A World Apart was released in 2013. For those who have not seen this film, a short, partially annotated summary follows. Twin Sisters begins with a long shot that depicts Alexandra leisurely jogging while leading a trotting pony. Girl and pony

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are centered and moving directly towards a constantly receding camera. This opening shot is framed by majestic mountains to the left and right in the background. A mesmerizing score of piano and woodwind adds lyrical ambiance to this visual image. In the accompanying voiceover, Alexandra articulates her deep yearning to be with her distantly located twin sister Mia. This intimately expressed confession functions as a prologue and thematically establishes desire as the structuring emotion of Bertheussen’s documentary. The film’s initial portrayal of a fundamental absence is then placed within two parallel plots. One is set in the Norwegian village of Fresvik, where Alexandra lives. The other is set in Orangevale,7 a suburb of Sacramento where Mia lives. The climax of the film occurs when these two story lines intersect. Mia’s family arrives in Fresvik and the sisters are reunited once again. Twin Sisters ends, however, on a somewhat somber note. Mia’s family will soon board a departing flight. The two families are visibly saddened as they exchange teary-eyed hugs at the gate. This scene fades and an edited cut to a scene with Mia on a sandy beach looking west across the Pacific Ocean appears. This scene is match edited with a scene where Alexandra is looking over the bay in Fresvik. The film’s final scene is provided by grainy home movie footage. Viewers are transported back in time. A pre-school Alexandra stands before the camera while singing a verse from the traditional Scottish folksong, “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” At the time of its original filming, Alexandra’s “recital” charmingly captures a particular moment in her childhood. However, when this footage is appropriated and edited into the final narrative position of Twin Sisters, it takes on a mythologized significance. For Bertheussen, the song’s lyrical call for the return of a loved one, “bring back, oh bring back my bonnie to me, to me,” serves to express what Alexandra felt after Mia’s departure in the earlier airport scene. If, however, we were to think beyond the continuity editing that connects the longing expressed in the ballad to the grief Alexandra felt over the departure of Mia, one could argue that a previously unspoken heartache is being signified here. Alexandra’s singing of the Scottish ballad can be perceived as a call across the chasm that separates her from her birth mother and from a pre-adoptive past. Just as the word “bonnie” in the ballad can serve as a coded reference to the exiled “Bonnie” Prince Charles Edward Stewart, banished for his role in the religious wars during the Jacobean uprising, so Alexandra’s performance of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” inserts an ambiguity into the semiotic meaning

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about her yearning. Her singing can be interpreted as a coded way to articulate a longing and an interminable devotion to a birth mother that is otherwise never acknowledged in the film. As mentioned above, an unnamed secrecy is paradoxically marked in the cinematic staging of “what things are said.” The affective elements of Bertheussen’s film are present from beginning to end. The emotive dimension of the film is already signaled beforehand in its promotional advertisement: “A true story of inspiration, Twin Sisters follows Mia and Alexandra through an uplifting parallel journey until they reunite in Norway when they are 8 years old. This is one of those feel-good stories that will make you cry, laugh, and think about the people you miss in your life.”8 Moreover, destiny is cited as the force that brought these abandoned and separated girls together again. Bound by blood, their biogenetic ties providentially preserve their family connection despite their separate adoptive paths. General assumptions about the nature of identical twins additionally reinforce beliefs about biogenetic legacies. At one point in the film, Mia’s mother Angela Hansen says that “even though they [Alexandra and Mia] are being raised in different parts of the world, totally different environments, their personalities are very, very similar […] that’s when I really knew that the genetic part of it is really a strong part of who they are.” Keeping Angela Hansen’s statement in mind, it is insightful to consider questions raised by Margaret Homans: “Does an adoptee’s identity derive from her DNA, her ‘blood,’ her ‘birth culture,’ or instead from her upbringing? If identity is innate, and her body is its principal carrier, can an adoptee’s social identity livably diverge from the social meaning of her appearance?”9 Moreover, by placing these questions in a transnational and transracial adoption context, Homans asks: “Is an adoptee’s origin her destiny? Do innate physical traits, including racialized features, determine identity?”10 With its focus on identical twins born in China and adopted by separate white families living in two separate parts of the world, Bertheussen’s documentary is in a prime position to address what Homans outlined as the tension between genetic essentialism and the culturally contingent aspects that shape human identity. Based on its affective impact on most of its viewers, Twin Sisters is regarded (and marketed) as a deeply moving narrative that sides with the sovereignty of genetic origins. Despite living in different families and embedded in different social and cultural environments, blood bonds remain pure and

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intact. It is the twins’ shared DNA that essentially provides the common core of who they are, as expressed by Angela Hansen in the quote cited above. However, the film is quite silent regarding the transnational and transracial aspect of their adoption. Throughout Twin Sisters, the girls appear seamlessly assimilated into their respective white families and communities. The film’s narrative engagement focuses on the universalized longing for blood relations while the visibility of race is instead glossed over by color-blind representations of Alexandra and Mia.11 This principal theme of desire is reinforced in separate interview scenes with the American adoptive parents, Angela and Andy Hansen, and the Norwegian adoptive parents, Wenche and Sigmund Hauglum. Angela’s husband Andy already has a son, Steven, from a previous marriage. But Angela and Andy have not been successful in having their own child. Wenche has two daughters, Michele and Marlene, from a previous marriage. Wenche has had two miscarriages with her husband Sigmund. As recounted in the film, it was the lack of a shared blood offspring that prompted both couples to seek adoption as their “other option.” Interlaced with these interviews are handheld-camera images and the diegetic sounds that originate in the scenes of the families’ 2004 China adoption journey. The extra-diegetic parental commentary clarifies the story that we see unfolding before our eyes. Both adoptive couples express euphoria upon having their newly received children placed in their arms. However, a troublesome quandary arises when, a day later, a highly improbable yet “destined” event takes place. Because the Norwegian father Sigmund had been ill, he chose to remain at the hotel while the Norwegian mother Wenche, along with Alexandra, returned to the China Civil Affairs Office to complete adoption paperwork. This, however, could not be done without the presence of Sigmund, who later arrives at the office. Because of this delay, the Norwegian group of adopting families had left and an American group entered the same room for the purpose of completing adoption forms and documents. In this American group were Andy, Angela, and Mia, who was wearing a red gingham dress, which Angela had bought in China. In the excited bluster of couples and their newly adopted children, Angela says in a voiceover: “I was walking around and something caught my attention. And I looked over […].” At this point in the film, as a way to replicate what caught Angela’s attention, the scene changes to a cropped image of Wenche carrying a red-gingham-dressed Alexandra over her shoulder. In a voiceover, Wenche continues where Angela left off: “While I was standing there,

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suddenly an American woman comes toward me with a girl on her arm with the exact same dress.” As Wenche recalls this moment, the camera pulls back from the still image of Wenche holding Alexandra and slowly reveals another section of the photo. Mia in her red gingham dress, slumped over Angela’s left shoulder, is now in full view. The voiceovers continue. Angela declares: “It was just incredible. And she [Alexandra] is wearing the same red gingham dress that Mia’s wearing.” In interviews and in award acceptance speeches for Twin Sisters, Bertheussen has openly declared that it was this remarkable moment “that hardly any Hollywood scriptwriter could come up with,”12 which drew her to this story. However, a remarkable fact has been left out from the film’s retelling of this extraordinary encounter. Prior to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television premiere of Twin Sisters in the USA, The Sacramento Bee, the largest newspaper in Sacramento, ran a lengthy article based on a visit and interviews with the Hansen family. Journalist Carla Meyer’s article recounts the unexpected discovery of resemblance and connection from a different angle: The next day, when they [Angela and Andy] returned with Mia to the busy office to sign paperwork, a Chinese nanny who had accompanied some adoptees from country to city drew Andy’s attention to a baby who was with her Norwegian adoptive mother. The babies, the nanny indicated, looked alike. Making the resemblance more noticeable were the girls’ nearly identical red gingham dresses […]. Andy Hansen alerted his wife to what the nanny had said. Angela Hansen approached the Norwegian woman Wenche Hauglum. The two mothers discovered the lookalike girls shared a birthday. The Hansens asked their adoption-agency guides to inquire with the orphanage from which their daughter had come. The answer came back no, she was not a twin.13

Bertheussen’s film does not disclose the fact that it was a Chinese nanny who first spotted the similarity between the girls. Why keep this fact a secret? In the commotion and excitement of families waiting to complete paperwork in a crowded and animated space, attention would most likely be focused on your own child. In Twin Sisters, the home movie scenes from the first day show that the Chinese nannies are each holding toddlers who are being comforted before being received by their adoptive parents. These toddlers are all about the same size and age with similar short haircuts. At a casual glance, they appear quite alike in their observable facial features. In the emotional rapture of just

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becoming a parent, it would be difficult to focus clearly on any other child but the one that has just become yours. In the home movie footage of mingling parents and children, determining one particular child from another is very difficult. Conversely, it is not surprising that a Chinese nanny would be able to spot the resemblance between two faces among a homogenous group of Chinese toddlers, whereas a white adoptive family might be oblivious to matching resemblances in a group of similarities. The exclusion of this fact is a striking example of color-blindness for the following reasons. Regardless of their appearance, the Hansens and the Hauglums immediately see Mia and Alexandra as their children. The question of race has no relevance because both parents instantaneously embrace these girls with their hearts. The reticence about the Chinese nanny’s observation seems deliberate and powerfully enables Bertheussen’s vision to make this a story about destiny and enchantment. Bertheussen’s documentary thus makes itself memorable through precise choices of inclusion and exclusion. This extraordinary moment is mythologized through poetic liberties rather than through a cinéma vérité mode of representation. As in all movies, filmmaker Bertheussen creates meaning through formal arrangements. Camera angle and camera lens choices, the mix of Steadicam and stationary shots, lighting and location selections, artistic application of sound and thoughtfully composed set designs, the use of family home movies and special effects, editing and post-production effort as well as the contingencies of financing, film production, and film distribution all contribute to the confluence of meaning in Twin Sisters.14 Another way of illustrating how the management of facts and creative formal arrangements convey meaning can be realized by critically looking at the Twin Sisters movie poster. A movie poster can be considered a synecdoche where a visual condensation represents the whole of the movie. The film’s full title is Twin Sisters: A World Apart. The qualifying subtitle “A World Apart” is a clever choice because the phrase’s idiomatic meaning of “being completely opposite” is overturned by the perceived similarities of identical twins. At the same time, the literal reference to the enormous physical distance that separates the identical twins cannot be ignored; the Atlantic Ocean and the entire breadth of the US continent lie between Alexandra and Mia. In the poster, however, we see Alexandra and Mia standing back to back, holding hands and looking jointly into the camera lens. The image of the twins is placed prominently in the center of the poster.

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The important point to make here is that the poster’s composition consists of repurposed images to strikingly convey the film’s mythologized meanings of time, distance, difference, and ultimately of blood kinship.15 In order to produce a visual symmetry between Sacramento and Fresvik, the photographs of each location site were rescaled so the tall skyscrapers of Sacramento match the height of the mountains that surround Fresvik. The other repurposing of an actuality is that the Fresvik we see in the montage is the real-life place where Alexandra lives. The skyscraper bank buildings of downtown Sacramento is not where Mia lives in reality. Mia and her family live in Orangevale, a middle-class suburban community 40 km northeast of the downtown Sacramento that is depicted in the movie poster. However, when contrasting an urban American lifestyle with a pastoral Norwegian one, the film’s use of Sacramento as Mia’s home city is a strategically important choice. The iconography of the Twin Sisters poster effectually redefines distance, alters perspectives, and repositions the original history of actualities. The poster thus creates, paradoxically, a dreamlike clarity about what it means to be twin sisters, a world apart. Likewise, the film replicates the same non-realistic aesthetic used in the poster when portraying the adoptive lives of Alexandra and Mia. The cinematic outcome of such arrangements is a dreamlike clarity about transnational and transracial adoptions, which arguably is far more complex and potentially far more distressing than meets Bertheussen’s filmmaking eye. Carla Meyer succinctly describes the film’s primary narrative strategy: “Sisters—which Bertheussen decided to make after seeing the BBC documentary—contrasts Alexandra’s make-your-own-fun lifestyle with Mia’s more organized activities.”16 Given the fact that Bertheussen is a Norwegian filmmaker and the film’s production costs were financed through a major Norwegian television company and other Norwegian funding institutions, the documentary’s attention seems to logically gravitate towards Alexandra’s character. As noted earlier, Alexandra plays a defining role in the opening and closing scenes of the film. For example, Alexandra’s interior monologue from the first fifteen seconds of the film is thematically crucial when she expresses a deep desire to meet her sister. More specifically, Alexandra says she wishes Mia were in Fresvik so she can see “hur jag ha det.” The film’s subtitled English translation of the Norwegian describes Alexandra’s wish in terms of “where I live.” This places emphasis on the physical features of Fresvik. A more idiomatically accurate translation of hur jag ha det is “what my life is like”

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(my translation). The slippage between these two translations marks the potential pitfalls in trying to negotiate transnational meanings of what is said and meant in the film. A Scandinavian audience would understand the existential dimension of Alexandra’s desire whereas those reliant on the flawed English translation cannot.17 In one of the establishing shots of Fresvik, we see a rustic shoreline of buildings against the backdrop of snow-covered mountains. This visual is accompanied by Alexandra’s voiceover: “I live here in Fresvik. There are not so many who live in this village. Only 234 people […]. It’s not easy to come up with things to do here.” The following scene shows Alexandra scuffling in her rubber boots down an unpaved lane. Other scenes consist of picnicking with her mother and father in a pastoral landscape, a waterfall and a small flock of sheep nearby; finding an injured field mouse and caring for it, at least until it escapes from its hayfilled, storage-bin home; searching with her parents for a fir tree to fell and take home so it can be decorated for Christmas; composing a message on a card to be sent to Mia; and walking to school on her own in the cold, morning darkness of winter. There is also a school classroom scene, shot during an English language lesson, which I will return to in more depth later. Parallel to the initial shots taken in Fresvik, the first shots of Sacramento show a panoramic view of a city skyline from the west bank of the Sacramento River. We are also shown a wide-angled view of a Sacramento downtown street, sparsely trafficked because of the early morning hour. Accompanying these images, we hear Mia in a voiceover: “I live in Sacramento. It’s a big city with lots of people so you have to watch out. We live in a nice neighborhood, but my parents don’t let me out on my own.” Subsequent scenes show the parents driving Mia, as Angela puts it, “to the places she needs to go.” At one point, Andy fills in: “You know it’s America. You never know who is out there or you never know what’s gonna happen.”18 Mia’s life is represented in a rapid flow of activities. We witness a “Girl Friendz” studio visit where Mia and a playmate are dressed up in pop-star glamour outfits, given make-up treatment, coached in a dance routine and later instructed to strike a celebrity pose as a “Girl Friendz” staffer snaps a photo. Other scenes include Mia playing in a soccer match, selling Girl Scout cookies, standing in a half-circle with other children during violin lessons, eating a meal with her parents at a fast food restaurant, and signing a log-in book at a Montessori school.

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The filmmaker’s mythologized contrast between the girls’ social environments and their everyday lives is made quite evident through matched edited scenes. Both girls are shown early in the morning getting ready for school. One scene shows Angela brushing Mia’s hair in front of a mirror. A similar scene shows Sigmund brushing Alexandra’s hair in front of a mirror. Mia is driven to her school. Alexandra walks to hers. Alexandra’s family picnics outdoors with a homemade lunch. In this scene, we see Alexandra and sheep cautiously approaching each other. Contrastingly, Mia and her family are depicted eating hamburgers at a Red Robin fast food franchise and later Mia is shown hugging a costumed Red Robin character. Other contrasts highlight differences in lifestyles. For instance, Alexandra’s family practices a longstanding Scandinavian tradition of felling your own Christmas tree. We see the Hauglums hike into a snow-covered area to select a suitable tree. Alexandra labors with a handsaw to remove a lower branch in preparation for cutting down the tree. Later, we see her pulling the felled tree by the base of its trunk. She says: “It is a little heavy, though, dragging the tree through the forest.” From this wintry scene in Fresvik the narrative shifts to the Hansen home. We hear Mia’s voice: “My mom fixes everything for Christmas. She just gets the tree from the garage.” To illustrate Mia’s statement, a medium-range shot of Angela standing in front of a richly decorated Christmas tree accompanies Mia’s voiceover. Looking at the tree, Angela says, “I guess its plastic. Plastic […]. I don’t really know exactly what it’s made of. But they do a pretty good job of making them look real.” These selected film snippets starkly contrast the social environments in which Alexandra and Mia are raised. The more subtle difference, however, is the fact that Alexandra thinks of her twin sister Mia more than Mia thinks of Alexandra. In an interview segment with Andy and Angela, the parents attempt to explain the reason for this. Andy says, “She [Mia] has a lot of distractions […] things […] you know normal things in her everyday life that keep her distracted […] with school, and violin, Girl Scouts […] and play dates […] um […] I just think she has more distractions.” Andy’s use of the word “distractions” is quite unexpected and, in my opinion, raises questions about what meaning is being signified here. In the film, Andy seems compelled to explain the asymmetrical emotional pull the twins exert on each other. Without it being directly said, there is the feeling that fewer “diversions” or “disruptions” in Mia’s life would open a wider emotional path to her blood sister. In

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this particular sequence, Angela makes an important remark: “There are times when she [Mia] will say something […] for instance, she recently talked about getting her hair cut. And then she said, ‘No, I can’t get my hair cut because then I won’t look like Alexandra’s twin.’ So I think she thinks about it more than we realize. She doesn’t verbalize it that much, though.” If Mia does think more about Alexandra than Angela and Andy realize, are there such signs of this in the film? No, not directly. But Angela’s remark that Mia does not want to cut her hair so that she will continue to be recognized as Alexandra’s twin serves as an intertextual reference to a scene shot in the privacy of Mia’s bedroom. The scene I am referring to is the one where we see Mia sitting on her bed trying to fit a pair of white winter boots onto the feet of her doll. Mia says: “I have a doll and it’s called ‘a-look-like-me doll.’ She’s got long black hair just like me. And we have the same dresses” (emphasis mine). Many American girls Mia’s age would immediately recognize this doll as belonging to the “American Girl” doll series.19 Scores of videos depicting American Girl dolls and their proud owners can be seen on YouTube, a convincing testimony to the widespread popularity of these dolls. The most innovative feature of the American Girl dolls, when they were first introduced to the market, was the fact that they each had historical back stories. For example, the now “archived” (discontinued) Swedish pioneer girl Kirsten had the following thumbnail biography: “In 1854, Kirsten Larson encounters a different culture as her family settles in the New World. In time, she learns the richness of the land—and the true meaning of home.”20 However, the doll that Mia owns does not have a historical biography. Doll experts would tell you that Mia’s doll is namelessly listed as the American Girl model #54 doll, released in 2011, from the “Truly Me” product series. In the context of Mia’s “look-like-me” comment, it is relevant to note that a Chinese-American doll named “Ivy Ling” (nicknamed Poison Ivy) was available for purchase at the time. In contrast to the model #54 doll, Ivy Ling did have a very specific personal history. According to her character description, Ivy is a second-generation Chinese American who lives with her family in San Francisco during the 1970s. She feels split between going to Chinese language classes on the weekends and devoting more time to gymnastics.21 For a Chinese girl adopted by a white family, Ivy Ling does not offer a “look-likeme” narrative. On the other hand, the model #54 American Girl doll is “unscripted” and provides the blank pages upon which Mia might

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imaginatively and silently read her own Chinese heritage as well as see her Chinese twin Alexandra.22 Thus, playtime with her “look-like-me doll” could secretively allow Mia to “face-time” with her twin sister without her parents realizing it. The composite issues of race and transracial adopted identities that are implicitly present in the example given above are not a primary concern in Bertheussen’s film. The filmmaker consistently sticks to the universal theme of blood kinship. Questions regarding the specific historical and social conditions that shape our sense of who we are remain outside the camera frame. A color-blind lens depicts multiracial adoptive family life in harmonious tones of social assimilation. The film displays no signs of Chinese heritage in the girls’ adoptive home environments. In Bertheussen’s narrative, Alexandra’s and Mia’s cultural transformation begins once they are transferred from their Chinese nannies’ care and placed into the loving arms of their adoptive parents. On the second day of their adoptive lives, their adoptive mothers dressed Alexandra and Mia in red gingham dresses.23 In the USA and Europe, gingham is commonly associated with a rustic, down-to-earth tradition. From a semiotic perspective, dressing the newly adopted toddlers in red gingham dresses is an effective way to naturalize them into the “homespun” fabric of Western culture. The image of twins in similar red gingham dresses is a key signification in the film. Moreover, the image symbolically reinforces the identical DNA connection between Alexandra and Mia. It also stands for the incredible event of their fateful meeting; had that not occurred, they most likely would have been lost to one another. On the other hand, it resignifies them into the semiotic meanings of being a Westerner. Re-dressed, they are “ceremoniously” removed from their birth culture and affectionately initiated into Western familial bonds. In contrast to semiotic significations of the red gingham dresses, I want to acknowledge another set of images. Prior to the PBS premiere broadcast of Twin Sisters in the USA, a Sacramento television station, the ABC affiliate Channel 10, ran a two-and-a-half-minute news report that led with the headline “Twins Separated at Birth, Reunited Years Later.”24 Asian American journalist Suzanne Phan composed the report after visiting Mia and her family at their Orangevale home. It is not surprising that Phan, a speaker of four languages, including Mandarin, was interested in the story of the Chinese identical twins. While the broad strokes of the story are recounted, Phan’s cameraman pans across a

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framed photo held in Angela’s hand. It is a photo of Mia, presumably taken shortly after the Hansens returned from China in 2004. A shortclipped Mia is dressed in a red Mandarin jacket. As Phan’s voiceover recounts the story of the twins, the TV camera pans upward across another framed photo. This time we see Alexandra and Mia (approximately 6 years old) standing together, holding hands, smiling directly into the camera lens. Both girls are wearing cheongsams, Chinese bodyfitting dresses with cross-collar wrapping. Alexandra wears a red cheongsam and Mia is dressed in a blue cheongsam. Phan says, “They had the same mother in China but they never knew it till years later.”25 The photo of the twins in their cheongsams fades and the report continues with images taken from Bertheussen’s film. In a highly condensed fashion, Phan covers the informational points about the girls’ respective adoptions rendered in Bertheussen’s film but uses additional images which underscore Alexandra’s and Mia’s birth-culture heritage. In one segment of Phan’s report, the television audience is told that Mia is now 11 and her twin sister lives in the tiny Norwegian village of Fresvik. We hear the sound of piano playing. There is a shot that tracks down from photographs on top of the piano to Mia fingering a melody on the piano’s keys. At the start of this tracking shot, we see a framed photo of Mia as a young child. The picture frame actually contains two images. On the left side of the frame is a photo of a toddler-aged Mia dressed in a blue Mandarin jacket. On the right side of the frame are three Chinese characters. Translated, these characters mean “I love you.”26 Such visual references never enter the cinematic statements of Bertheussen’s film. Similarly to what was described above, there are dimensions of Fresvik life that are conspicuously absent or left undocumented in Twin Sisters. On September 15, 2013, the Norwegian newspaper Sogn Avis ran a story after the documentary’s nationwide television premiere in Norway. The article’s headline reads: “I Am No Celebrity” and refers to Alexandra’s response to the fact that an estimated 576,000 Norwegian television viewers saw the documentary earlier in the week.27 The article is accompanied by a photo that shows a close-up shot of Alexandra in the foreground with five of her schoolmates sitting in the background. One of the children in the background appears to be Asian. In the caption, she is identified as “Amalie.” Who is Amalie? On Alexandra’s public Instagram page, a recent photo of Alexandra and Amalie was posted. The two girls are standing next to each other. Alexandra is wearing a black leather jacket. Amalie is dressed in a Norwegian bunad, the traditional folk costume

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worn by females during festive occasions. The accompanying Instagram text reads “gratulera med dagen” (happy birthday).28 In an online news service feed from Norway’s 2016 May 17 Independence Day celebration, a series of photos was published from different parts of the country. In one of the photos taken in Fresvik, we can see Alexandra and Amalie together, each wearing the same clothes worn in Alexandra’s Instagram photo. Where was Amalie during Bertheussen’s filming of Alexandra’s life in Fresvik? I would claim that Amalie was present in the film but made “invisible.” I am referring to a scene that takes place when Alexandra is shown in her village school classroom. It is a scene that seems to be staged for the particular shoot. Desks have been moved in a way that clears an open path for the camera to film the teacher sitting at her desk and when she writes on the chalkboard behind her. The teacher runs a mini-English language lesson, though English is not listed on the day’s agenda, which is handwritten along the left margin of the blackboard.29 The teacher asks the class how you would tell someone your name in English. Alexandra excitedly raises her hand, is called upon and answers: “My name is Alexandra.” The next question is, appropriate to the purpose of the scene, “What if you had a sister? How would you say that?” In a mid-range shot, the camera is trained on Alexandra. Her hand again shoots up with enthusiasm but she is not called on. The teacher instead calls on “Amalie,” another pupil sitting in the classroom. The camera angles used in this scene are such that we never get a good look at Amalie. There is a moment, however, when Amalie turns sideways to look at Alexandra during the lesson. In my opinion, this blurred profile reveals the face of a younger version of the Amalie who appeared two years later in the background of the previously discussed Sogn Avis newspaper photo and is the Amalie Bøtun dressed in a bunad in Alexandra’s 2016 Instagram photo. If Alexandra and Amalie were classmates during the time the film was shot in Fresvik, why was this fact obscured in Twin Sisters? If the film’s primary focus is on Alexandra’s longing for her twin Mia, including the presence of another Asian girl in the picture frame would indeed be a narrative diversion. The fantasy of a socially and culturally rustic Norwegian village, remote and removed from the rest of the world, would be more difficult to sustain if another Asian girl’s presence were acknowledged.30

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In her adoption memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? ,31 Jeanette Winterson recalls an excruciating past, one riddled by an adoptive mother who was maliciously manipulative and inventively hurtful. Winterson’s book is a painful and humorous read. But above all, it is hopeful, for it speaks about ways through which we can evolve out of unspeakable experiences: “Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can ­continue, can be retold.”32 Bertheussen’s film is one story that exercises control over an unknowable world. Inside the frame of the film’s cinematic statements, viewers are placed in a state of enchantment over transnational notions of belonging` and being. In a memorable staging of this wonderment, the film shows the twins in an underwater scene. Holding their breath in a subterranean realm of aquamarine, Alexandra and Mia stroke and kick weightlessly in their own separate world. Momentarily detached from all external references, the scene evokes a prenatal state of proximity, a return to an unknown mother’s womb, unaffected by economic inequalities, racial hierarchies, or the discourses that define children as adoptable. These submerged shots signify a mythologized innocence of being, wholly harmonious with its identical (adopted) other. Alexandra and Mia are now 13 years old, an age when questions about identity become more numerous and more persistent. In contrast to the simulacra of the underwater scene, what are the realities of Alexandra and Mia growing up in white families?33 A Twin Sisters sequel is currently in production. According to Bertheussen, filming will take approximately three years.34 In the interim, the ambiguities of transnational and transracial adoption will continue to exist alongside the mythologized narratives of indivisible blood ties. “In relation to all these possibilities of recurrence, memory and oblivion, the rediscovery of meaning or its repression, far from being fundamental, are merely unique figures.”35 If the meaning of memory remains elusive rather than fundamental, as speculated by Foucault, to what degree will the Twin Sisters sequel “rediscover” the meanings shared between identical twins? My guess is that Bertheussen will continue to mythologize the twins. Alexandra’s and Mia’s transnational and transracial lives will be paled. What linger instead are Bertheussen’s unique figures.

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Notes









1. Twin Sisters, directed by Mona Friis Bertheussen (2013; Oslo: Moment film, 2015), DVD. 2. The mythologizing that takes place in Twin Sisters is not a matter of replacing truths with lies. My point is that the film’s mode of signification is reliant on the reduction of historical actualities to produce meaning. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Wang and Hill, 2012) and his discussion in “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1973). 3. Barthes, Mythologies, 143. 4. My critical perspective is in part shaped by Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary discourses and how “various modalities of the unsaid,” when viewed from a different angle, can nevertheless be sensed as a “proximity” within the process of signification. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), 110–112. 5. The Secret Life of Twins, directed by Diene Petterle (2009; London: BBC One), documentary, accessed October 2, 2016, https://vimeo. com/58546351. 6. According to Carla Meyer, “From California to Norway, twins have an unmistakable bond,” Sacramento Bee, October 15, 2014, accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/tv/article2814105.html, Mia’s adoptive mother Angela “joined an online group devoted to separated twins. Through the group, she met Nancy Segal, a psychologist and researcher doing a twins study, which in turn led to the Hansens’ and Hauglums’ participation in a BBC documentary. Mia and Alexandra met for the first time, at 6, as part of filming.” This first encounter is only fleetingly mentioned in Twin Sisters. The sisters’ earlier 2009 reunion can be labeled as one of the under-acknowledged histories in Bertheussen’s film. 7. In opposition to what is stated in the documentary and advertisement blurbs, I choose to refer to Orangevale instead of Sacramento as the place of Mia Hansen’s family home. Orangevale is the more precise location of where Mia lives. On the other hand, Sacramento serves as a symbol for big-city life in contrast to the tiny village of Fresvik. 8.  See “Twin Sisters,” Moment Film’s web site, accessed September 25, 2016, http://www.momentfilm.no/twin-sisters. 9. Margaret Homans, The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 1. 10. Homans, The Imprint of Another Life, 5.

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11. A film review of Twin Sisters was posted on Broken Red Thread Blog. In contrast to an overwhelmingly positive review of the documentary, the review is critical of the film’s color-blind insensitivities regarding race. See Broken Red Thread Blog, November 1, 2014, https://redthreadbroken. wordpress.com/2014/11/01/twin-sisters-response/comment-page-1/. 12. See Mona Friis Bertheussen, Huffington Post blog Why Hollywood Can’t Beat This True Story, December 9, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/mona-friis-bertheussen/why-hollywood-cant-beat-t_b_6192386. html. 13. Meyer, “From California to Norway,” emphasis mine. 14. Bill Nichols, Engaging Cinema (New York: Norton, 2010) and Introduction to Documentary, 2nd Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) have been an invaluable help in understanding the formal intricacies of filmmaking. 15. The most glaring repurposing of an actuality is how this back-to-back image of the twins is emptied of its historical origins. The actual photograph was taken when the Hauglums visited the Hansens in 2009. The photo is used on the cover of an album that Mia holds in Meyer, “From California to Norway.” In contrast to Twin Sisters’ subtitle, “A World Apart,” the photo album held in Mia’s hand is titled “Two Families Come Together.” 16. Meyer, “From California to Norway.” 17. Related to the subtitled emphasis on the physical rather than the existential aspects of living in Fresvik, Andy and Angela Hansen are overwhelmed by the beauty of Fresvik. Andy says to Sigmund: “Back home this would be a national park. You’d have to pay to come in here.” When walking through the village of Fresvik, Angela says “This looks like a storybook town you wouldn’t think exists anymore.” While Mia’s parents are in Fresvik, the focus is on “what it looks like” and not on what Alexandra’s “life is like.” On the other hand, Mia is in the emotional zone of her twin Alexandra. Being together supersedes where they are. 18. This is an eerie comment in the context of the Hansens’ visit to Norway in July 2011. This was the month that Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people, including 69 individuals he shot dead at a summer youth camp on the idyllic Norwegian island of Utøya. 19. The American Girl doll was the invention of teacher-turned-entrepreneur Pleasant Rowland. Rowland wanted to create a doll that had the physical features of a girl aged between 8 and 12, a doll that could serve as a playmate rather than an adult beauty stereotype as was the case with the Barbie doll. 20. See “American Girl Archives,” American Girl, accessed August 8, 2016, http://www.americangirl.com/corporate/archives.

192  A. Shima 21.  See “Ivy Ling,” American Girl Wiki, accessed September 25, 2016, http://americangirl.wikia.com/wiki/Ivy_Ling. 22. In 2015, American Girl doll #54 was modified around its eye sockets to make it look similar to the Ivy Ling doll, which was discontinued in 2014: “Despite the efforts to reflect different historical time periods and ethnicities, diversity of features is limited to a small number of eye and hair color and skin tone variations.” See “Just Like You,” American Girl Wiki, accessed September 25, 2016, http://americangirl.wikia.com/ wiki/Just_Like_You_54. 23. Of note, this distinctive checkered cotton fabric was first imported into Europe in the seventeenth century from the Dutch colonial manufacturing mills in Indonesia and Malaysia. It is speculated that the Malaysian word gengang, meaning “striped,” is the etymological root for gingham. 24. “Twins from China Separated at birth are reunited years later,” YouTube video [Channel 10 News], 3: 10, posted by Suzanne Phan, January 30, 2015, accessed September 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dfLkwB-Zj_A. 25. “Twins from China.” 26. I would like to thank Yang Tzu Hsin for the translation of Chinese into English. 27.  See Gunnar Kleven, “Jeg er ingen kjendis,” Sogn Avis, accessed October 2, 2016, http://www.sognavis.no/nyhende/eg-er-ingenkjendis/s/1-105-6864607. 28. In Twin Sisters, this is the same Norwegian congratulatory greeting Alexandra offers Mia over the phone on their eighth birthday. 29. Other oddities appear in this Twin Sisters scene. There are two clocks located on the right at the front of the classroom. One clock shows the time to be 8.40, the other 9.20. A date is written on the blackboard: Monday 14 December. Checking “Months and Years having Monday the 14th,” time and date.com, accessed September 25, 2016, http://www. timeanddate.com/calendar/weekday-monday-14, no such date occurred during the years when Twin Sisters was in the making. These incongruities, minor as they are, cast a surreal aura around what we see and hear in this scene. 30. In addition to the fact that Amalie Bøtun is a contemporary of Alexandra, there are other girls of Asian descent who live in Fresvik. Scanning through the regional newspaper Sogn Avis and local church newsletter, I discovered the presence of Ann Bøtun and Riita Bøthun, both of whom are of Asian descent and reside in Fresvik. Obviously, this is not an actuality that Bertheussen wanted to include in Twin Sisters. In the film, Asian heritage is obscured, though it is paradoxically always in plain sight every time we see the faces of Alexandra and Mia.



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31. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Vintage, 2012). 32. Winterson, Why Be Happy, 8. 33. There are a number of socio-anthropological studies that offer insightful views on the complexity of transnational adoptive identities in Scandinavia. See in particular Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Sigalit Ben-Zion, Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity: Adoption and Belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Regarding historical and policy aspects of transnational and transracial issues, see Kay Ann Johnson, China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the OneChild Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 34. The documentaries The Invisible Red Thread, directed by Maureen Marovitch (2011; Montreal, Picture This Productions, 2012, DVD) and Somewhere Between, directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton (2011; Stamford, CT: Long Shot Factory, 2013, DVD) have already sensitively explored the lives of teenage girls from China who are navigating their transnational and transracial adoptive identities. It will be interesting to see how the Twin Sisters sequel measures up in the company of these two films. 35. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 124.

Bibliography American Girl. “American Girl Archives.” Accessed August 8, 2016. http:// www.americangirl.com/corporate/archives. American Girl Wiki. “Ivy Ling.” Accessed September 25, 2016. http://americangirl.wikia.com/wiki/Ivy_Ling. American Girl Wiki. “Just Like You.” Accessed September 25, 2016. http:// americangirl.wikia.com/wiki/Just_Like_You_54. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Wang and Hill, 2012. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” In Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Paladin, 1973. Ben-Zion, Sigalit. Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity: Adoption and Belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

194  A. Shima Bertheussen, Mona Friis. Huffington Post blog Why Hollywood Can’t Beat This True Story, December 9, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mona-friisbertheussen/why-hollywood-cant-beat-t_b_6192386.html. Broken Red Thread Blog. https://redthreadbroken.wordpress.com/2014/11/ 01/twin-sisters-response/comment-page-1/. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1989. Homans, Margaret. The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Johnson, Kay Ann. China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Kim, Eleana J. Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Kleven, Gunnar. “Jeg er ingen kjendis.” Sogn Avis. Accessed October 2, 2016. http://www.sognavis.no/nyhende/eg-er-ingen-kjendis/s/1-105-6864607. Meyer, Carla. “From California to Norway, twins have an unmistakable bond.” Sacramento Bee October 15, 2014. Accessed August 8, 2016. http://www. sacbee.com/entertainment/tv/article2814105.html. Moment Film web site. “Twin Sisters.” Accessed August 9, 2016. http://www. momentfilm.no/. Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema. New York: Norton, 2010. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. “Twins from China separated at birth are reunited years later.” YouTube video, [Channel 10 News], 3:10. Posted by Suzanne Phan. January 30, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dfLkwB-Zj_A. Somewhere Between. Directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton. 2011. Stamford, CT: Long Shot Factory, 2013. DVD. The Secret Life of Twins. Directed by Diene Petterle. 2009. London: BBC One. Accessed October 2, 2016. https://vimeo.com/58546351. The Invisible Red Thread. Directed by Maureen Marovitch. 2011. Montreal: Picture This Productions, 2012. DVD. Twin Sisters. Directed by Mona Friis Bertheussen. 2013. Oslo: Moment Film, 2015. DVD. Yngvesson, Barbara. Belonging in an Adopted World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage, 2012.

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Author Biography Alan Shima is Docent in American Literature and lecturer at the Center for Modern Languages at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. His research critically examines the narrative strategies of non-fictional and professional writing and how they influence readers through imaginative force. His publications include “Writing Histories: Lingua Franca English in a Swedish Graduate Program” (2014) co-authored with Thomas Lavelle, “The Fictive Force of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father” (2009), “Reading Ethically: Teaching and Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River” (2007), and “Lessons for a Larger Context: Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights” (2004). He continues to explore the heterogeneous expressions of identity.

CHAPTER 9

Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s) Rosemarie Peña

Postwar Black German Adoptees: A Complex Mosaic The finite cohort of postwar Black German American adoptees re-emerge from history in 2002 through the groundbreaking work of Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, who estimates that 4776 children were born between 1945 and 1955 to white German women and African American Occupational troops.1 More children were born after 1955 and precise numbers vary on how many thousands were transnationally adopted to the United States by African American couples.2 As a member of this subject group, an adoption scholar, and as the founding president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA), for nearly two decades I have represented the interests of the Black German American adoptees to a multidisciplinary, international public. Life narratives from adult adoptees are just beginning to appear in multidisciplinary scholarly discourses. Recurring discursive themes have emerged in my private conversations with Black German adoptees over many years. A collective experience

R. Peña (*)  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey–Camden, Camden, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_9

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situates this adoptive cohort both apart from and within the context of a broader transnational/transracial adoption experience. I propose a view that Black Germans are also transracial adoptees since many comment that as foreign-born, biracial children coming of age in 1960s’ America, they experienced race and racism differently in the United States than do their African American generational peers. Adoptee testimonies suggest this difference impacts identity and one’s sense of cultural belonging. The aim of this chapter is to bring into focus the complex mosaic of historical, political, and social systems within which Black German adoptees have negotiated their individual identities. Exploration of their collective experiences and concerns will contribute to a more nuanced look at the constructs of race, nation, and culture—key topics in the intersectional discourses in Childhood, Adoption, Migration, and Black German Studies. Black German adoptees indeed share a sociopolitical history that is specific to their cohort, along with the ubiquitous emotional challenges inherent in transnational adoption. There is, however, no overarching narrative or monolithic Black German American adoption experience. Despite the organized exodus of the dual-heritage children of color from Germany to the United States more than a decade earlier, the establishment of intercountry adoption as a legal instrument is generally attributed in adoption literature to the Act of September 26, 1961, an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), initiated by Harry and Bertha Holt. The Holts challenged existing immigration law, and by a special act of Congress, adopted eight children designated as war orphans from Korea. On the heels of their achievement, they facilitated many more Korean adoptions for American families. The foreign adoptions of children from Asian sending countries, therefore, dominate transnational adoption discourse emanating from the memoirs, testimonies, and cultural production of adult Korean adoptees and later cohorts from Viet Nam and China. Asian adoptees participate in the knowledge production not only as research subjects, but also as scholars, advocates, activists, and clinical professionals. The public conversations about Asian adoptions are robust and often contentious since many who write and speak on the topic are white adoptive parents, advocates, and practitioners, who view the adoption through uniquely invested lenses. Not all members of the Asian Adoption Kinship Networks (AKN)3 are equally represented in the literature. Birth parents and other first family members are notably underrepresented in adoption research that focuses primarily on the psycho-social consequences of adoption on adoptees’ lives.

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The literature reveals that trauma and grief are ubiquitous in adoption as are many cohort-specific challenges that distinguish transnational experiences. Recurring themes in adoption research across cultures and countries reference debates on children’s rights to an “authentic” ethnocultural heritage and the potential impacts of transracial adoption on the identity development of adoptees of color who grow up in exclusively white families and communities. Black German adoptee testimonies reveal that they struggle with the same universal grief and losses that Asian adoptees articulate. However, in contrast to the Asian adoption experiences, the dual-heritage, biracial children from Germany were systematically expelled from their homeland simply because of the color of their skin.4 This historical reality distinguishes Black Germans from all other known adoptive cohorts. They experience race and racism differently in the USA than do Asian transracial adoptees, and Black Germans are the only cohort of foreign-born children who were adopted primarily by African Americans. Children born to parents belonging to two previously warring enemy nations, Germany and the United States, were airlifted from the loser to the victor at a time when their very existence in the receiving country was still a crime. As the children arrived on US soil in the 1950s, their very presence was evidence of an illegal act since interracial relationships were prohibited in many US states until the landmark Loving vs. Virginia Decision in 1967. The Black German children began approaching adolescence during the Civil Rights Movement and Cold War years and, therefore, much of value can be gleaned from their experience about how race and politics played out uniquely in the lives of foreign-born biracial children growing up in the United States during the 1960s. Race is often conflated with culture in adoption scholarship, and both constructs are central to contentious debates. Asian narratives overwhelmingly reveal adoptees’ resentment of the color-blind attitudes of their white adopters, who avoided addressing race matters by redirecting their efforts toward mediating the children’s loss of their original culture. Thus, adoptees argue they feel unprepared for and unsupported when they encounter everyday racism as they simultaneously mourn the disconnect between themselves and their ethnic peers.5 Race is integral to the Black German experience. There is a dearth of analyses of diverse Black experiences in adoption literature that explores the varied ways of negotiating anti-Black racism, globally and historically, that are the foci of an ever-expanding body of knowledge in Diaspora Studies.

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An in-depth look at the transatlantic politics of race during the Civil Rights and Cold War eras as explicated in the works of Yara Lemke Muniz de Faria, Heide Fehrenbach, and Maria Höhn, among others, is essential to grasping the contemporary ethos in which Black Germans were adopted and from which the adult adoptees today continue to negotiate individual and collective identities. The salience of a racialized adopted identity in adulthood, however, varies from one Black German adoptee to the next and is often fluid and contextually derived. Some Black German American adoptees appear visually different in complexion from their parents. Consequently, their biracial identity and adopted status is more readily discernible. In contrast to most Asian adoptees, Black Germans do not physically resemble the majority population in their country of origin. Locating a collective identity and achieving a sense of cultural belonging for Black Germans living in the USA is complicated by the contention that Black Germans living in Germany are also culturally dislocated.6 Race and racism manifest differently over the lifespans and adoption journeys of individual adoptees. Black German Americans articulate that they endure insensitive comments and questions from extended family members and strangers alike, as adoption psychologist Amanda Baden describes in “‘Do You Know Your Real Parents?’ and Other Adoption Microaggressions.” Microaggressions, Baden contends, include, “microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations, and they depict the racial messages, comments, behaviors, or attitudes that are sent either in innocent, unintentional, ignorant, veiled ways or in overt, aggressive, blatant ways.” Baden further coins the term adoption “microfictions,” which, she argues, occur organically, “as a result of merging and mixing personal and collective histories and heritages to incorporate new family members and separate other family members.”7 Microfictions also occur as a result of the secrecy inherent in closed adoption. The micro and macroassaults that challenge Black Germans, and that set the adoptive group apart from Asian-born adoptees, specifically reflect the racial stereotypes and stigma that surrounded their births and informed the rationale for their adoptions in the first place. Black German adoptees testify that comments made by relatives and strangers often insinuated that their birth mothers were impoverished and vulnerable young girls, incapable of mothering, who, in exchange for chocolate and stockings, gave their love to predators who targeted them for sexual recreation and then willingly abandoned them and their children.

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Transitioning from Afro-German Orphan to African American Citizen The dual-heritage Afro-German children were social orphans since most had at least one living, biological parent who voluntarily, or under social pressure, relinquished the child for adoption. German law stipulated that all illegitimate children were wards of the state. Thus, social workers greatly influenced the decisions that were made in the children’s “best interests,” with lifelong implications. All Black German American adoptions were closed and, upon finalization, new international birth records were issued in English certifying each child’s birth, suggesting the adoptees were the genetic offspring of the adoptive parents. Identifying information pertaining to the children’s genealogy was sealed both in Germany and in the United States. Children were assigned their new family’s surname and many adopters also changed the child’s first given name. Once original birth and adoption records were sealed, it appeared as though the child’s former life in Germany and genetic kin never existed. All legal and social ties between the children and their original families were permanently and irrevocably severed. The adopted children became immediately eligible for United States citizenship, but testimonies revealed that adopters were unequally informed about the naturalization process and some adopters neglected to follow up with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some adoptees still worry about the precariousness of their US citizenship status since they do not have possession of all their original birth documents or the US Naturalization Certificate. A few, like Rudi Richardson, a Black German adoptee brought up in the States who returned to Germany in his late 40s, are known to have been deported back to Germany for committing relatively minor criminal acts.8

Trauma and Resilience in Adopted Black German Childhoods Displaced childhoods are inevitably traumatic with lifelong implications. Whether adopted at 6 days, 6 months, or 6 years, an adopted child experiences a disrupted childhood through abandonment, separation, and loss, and will also suffer some emotional after-effects.9 Black German children were adopted in infancy, directly from their mothers; also as infants and older children from German foster homes and orphanages.

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Psychologists concur that all adopted children experience trauma when they are first separated from their mothers, and some are more resilient than others. Nancy Verrier calls the psychic injury that occurs upon separation “the primal wound.” She writes, “The severing of that connection between the adopted child and his birth mother causes a primal or narcissistic wound, which affects the adoptee’s sense of Self and often manifests in a sense of loss, basic distrust, anxiety and depression, emotional and or behavioral problems, and difficulties in relationships with significant others.”10 David Brodzinsky and Verrier agree, however, that some adoptees are more resilient than others. They suggest that children adopted from foster care and orphanages likely experience more difficulty adjusting to a new family than do those adopted in infancy. I propose that the salience of a racialized adopted identity and the overall well-being of individual Black German adoptees, over a lifespan, is contingent upon a constellation of factors unique to each personality, situational context, and life experience. Most Black German American adoptees I have encountered are comfortable with their adoption-constructed, national, social, and cultural identities and are simultaneously curious about their genealogies and German culture. As middle-aged adults, they enjoy healthy family relationships, successful careers, and fulfilling lives. With few exceptions, adoptees affirm David Brodzinsky’s assertion, that “the vast majority of adoptees do perfectly well in all the ways that society measures success. They grow up, they marry, [and] they have families of their own. They relate well to their friends and adoptive families.”11 Many accept that adoption, given the circumstances, was in their best interest at the time, despite the emotional challenges inherent in adoption. They report growing up in warm and loving families and characterize their dynamics as “normal”—that is, no different from how one imagines traditional family dynamics. The adoptees are often interested in learning more about their personal histories, but with realistic expectations in terms of establishing vibrant social relationships with biological relatives. That many Black Germans consider their adoptions to have been successful is remarkable considering the limited information with which their African American adopters came to the task of adoptive parenting. Most parents loved the children as their own and raised them as best they could. The parents managed without access to the myriad resources available to contemporary adoptive families. Adopting couples had no pre-adoption counseling and, pursuant to the child’s transfer, institutional follow-up

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was minimal to non-existent. Since the 1960s, adoption policies and best practices have changed dramatically. Secrecy in adoption, for example, is now understood to be detrimental to children. African American adopters of Black German children, however, were afforded no training in adoption-specific nurturing techniques, which are now recommended to encourage bonding. Discussion of adoption psychology or diagnoses such as Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) were non-existent. Renowned adoption psychologist, Mary Dozier, argues that the child-nurturing skills that are especially critical to facilitating healthy child-to-primary-caregiver attachment in adoption are not naturally occurring and must be acquired through learning.12 Unfortunately, the adopters of Black German children had no access to this knowledge. There was no concern expressed for the children’s identity rights or for language retention and cultural preservation. On the contrary, adoptees relate that rapid English language learning became a measure of healthy adjustment and cultural assimilation as it was with other immigrant children. Couples who adopted Black German children were often older and infertile with no biological children of their own. Adoptive mothers were relatively secure economically, more mature, and, potentially, less stressed than the birth mothers who were struggling to make ends meet and relying upon the German state for economic support. The adopters enthusiastically welcomed a chance to parent, and Mabel Grammer, an African American journalist working for the Afro-American in Mannheim, Germany, was particularly instrumental in placing many Black German children in permanent African American homes. Criticisms were leveled against Mabel Grammer’s so-called “Brown Baby Plan,” the highly celebrated initiative through which, from 1950 to 1954, Grammer administered “by proxy” adoptions for willing couples waiting in the United States. It was alleged that the adopters were not properly vetted and follow-up was inadequate once the children arrived in the USA. One “Grammer Baby,” as they were called at the time, adoptee Daniel Cardwell, reveals in his memoir and in two adoption documentaries that he believed that his paperwork was mishandled, resulting in a discrepancy between his actual identity and that given in his legal record.13 At one point, the adoptions were halted.14 Scholars vary in their estimation of how many adoptions Mabel Grammer actually facilitated—from 50 to 500, out of the approximately 7000 actual adoptions of Black German children to the United States from 1952 until the early 1960s.

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The transnational adoptions from Germany to the USA were concurrent with a surge in parentless African American children who were available for domestic adoption. Ebony Magazine reports in 1948 that more than 10,000 African American children needed permanent homes.15 Some children, rejected by segregated orphanages, were placed in reform schools. According to Ebony, highly restrictive and invasive domestic adoption policies discouraged potential African American adopters. Interested couples were required to verify they were younger than 40, and financially stable, and were asked to provide medical proof of infertility. It was easier for some potential adopters to adopt foreign children through Mabel Grammer’s initiative than to adopt domestically, for adoption procedures through Grammer’s Brown Baby Plan were less invasive and more relaxed. Opening their homes to children in need of families and informal kinship adoption had been a feature of African American communities since Reconstruction times. As Jillian Jimenez explains, the practice of grandmothers caring for the children of single mothers, kin and fictive kin, is rooted in African culture and was reinforced under slavery. All women were held responsible for the children with whom they shared living quarters. During the period between Reconstruction and the New Deal, this practice was “central to the [families’] economic survival.” As Jillian Jimenez points out, “African culture emphasized the importance of identification with the larger kinship group outside the immediate family, as well as the assumption of kinship obligations to symbolic kin and a willingness by families to absorb children of kin and nonkin.”16 Woods and Lancaster contend that African American couples who sought to adopt through legal channels during the 1950s were emulating whites and anticipated achieving social equality by exemplifying social respectability. The Woods and Lancaster study also reveals that middle-class African American adopters preferred girls and were complexion conscious.17 “‘I read in the paper where homes are wanted for Brown Babies,’ wrote Mrs. Joseph Samuel in 1948 after an Ebony article brought the shortage of ‘Negro’ adopters to her attention. ‘We both want children so badly, hoping this will be an answer to our prayer. Our choice of color will be brown (light).’”18 The biracial German children Grammer advertised were especially desirable to adopters who thought like the Samuels. In Regina Griffin’s documentary, Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story (2011), Peter Grammer, one of Mabel’s twelve adopted children portrays his mother as heroic for her role in “rescuing” so many Black German children. Mabel Grammer was unable to bear children and

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considered herself a socialite, a member of the African American elite. She sacrificed this lifestyle when she married a naval warrant officer who was stationed in Germany and was moved to find homes for the children she saw in German orphanages.19 Both Lemke Muniz de Faria and Ellen Herman suggest that Grammer’s social justice aspirations informed her charitable works. Muniz de Faria writes, “undoubtedly Grammer’s fight for a better life for these Afro-German children was simultaneously a fight for the recognition of African Americans as equal Americans.”20 Scott Smith, who interviewed Mack and Rose Grammer, shows that Mack and Rose recalled their adopted childhoods in the public eye differently than did their brother Peter. It seemed like the children were treated more like showpieces and less like family members. They were micro-celebrities in the Washington area, and Mabel used the group to further her goal of retrieving the rest of the abandoned kids. She dressed her children alike, and the family did its share of newspaper and television interviews. […] Rose says, “everybody went through the experience differently. Some rebelled, some didn’t.” For Mack, it was simply a continuation of a life devoid of love. […] “I don’t ever remember being on anybody’s lap,” he says. “I don’t remember ever having a mommy. I think my parents had good intentions, but they overdid it—they didn’t know what they had gotten themselves into. We were a very unhappy family.”21

Concluding the interview published in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Mack Grammer eventually expressed gratitude, “No matter how I felt about the Grammers, I’ll always be grateful to them. […] They gave me a chance.” Another of Mabel Grammer’s adopted children, Major General Nadja Y. West, was appointed to the esteemed position of Joint Staff Surgeon at the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. “She serves as the chief medical advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, providing advice to the Chairman, the Joint Staff, and the Combatant Commanders.”22 In a 2012 military press release from Wiesbaden, Germany, Nadja spoke reverently and at length about her adoptive mother and recalled her childhood fondly. Her depiction of what it was like growing up in the Grammer family was overwhelmingly positive.23 The Grammers’ adopted children’s contradictory testimonies are evidence that adopted children within the same family experience childhood differently, as do children who grow up in traditional families.

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Crafting the Adopted Self in Adolescence Identity development is a lifelong process, yet much of the critical work of identity formation occurs during adolescence. Evidence suggests that adoption does not alter the developmental process, but adoption brings unique challenges to the task of identity negotiation. Fitzhardinge writes: “Adolescence brings into focus some of the most troublesome implications of adoption. At no other time in life are questions of identity and belonging so pressing, dilemmas at the very core of adoption.”24 Throughout the development process, adopted adolescents work to construct a sense of self by exploring who they believe they are, how they are perceived in the world, how they can individuate themselves from others, and how they fit into kinship networks and society. Transnational adoptees have no genetic role models in their homes. They do not always see themselves reflected within their local communities and find it difficult to identify others with whom they can compare or align themselves. Adopted adolescents often experience intense emotional conflict as they wrestle with issues of attachment and belonging and begin to wonder about their genetic kin and the circumstances that led to their adoptions. They may fantasize about their first mothers and begin thinking about reunion during their teen years. Adoptees often hesitate to ask questions of their adoptive parents or share their thoughts about searching with them, out of feelings of guilt and fear of a second abandonment. Fitzhardinge writes: “If the adoptee feels love and belonging towards the adoptive family, does this mean that they are forgetting their birth family? If they feel curiosity or grief about the birth family, can they still remain connected to the adoptive family? These can be difficult dilemmas to make known within the adoptive family.”25 Many Black Germans delayed searching until after their adoptive parents’ deaths, only to discover they had insufficient identifying information or their mothers had already passed away. Some adoptees believe they experienced race differently in childhood than did their African American peers. Lemke Muniz de Faria writes: “In the late 1940s and 1950s an interracial couple with or without a mixedrace child faced countless obstacles, many of which seemed insurmountable. In thirty out of forty-eight states of the Union during this period, interracial marriage was legally prohibited by anti-miscegenation laws.”26 When the children arrived on US soil in the 1950s, their very presence was evidence of a criminal act. Peggy Blow, the primary adoptee

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protagonist in Michaela Kirst’s documentary, Brown Babies: Germany’s Forgotten Children (2011), noticed early on that she was much lighterskinned than her parents and, on that basis, she began to ask questions. When her parents denied that she was adopted, she was confused. Her fairer skin and straighter hair, Peggy claims, elicited jealousy from her African American peers and this disconnect contributed to her social isolation.27 Daniel Cardwell, one of the most prominently featured Black German adoptees in the transnational press, recalls being bullied as a child in his memoir28 and in Regina Griffin’s Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story: “I was called kraut, black, white and every other darn thing.”29 In her testimony given to journalist Nancy Vessell, adoptee Bonnie Childs says, “Finding a place to fit in has been a lifelong challenge. […] I’ve always felt I’m kind of in the middle. I’ve really never been accepted as either black, and certainly not as white […]. People just put too much emphasis on race.”30 The public expression of a socially ascribed racial identity is an individual matter that is unrelated to skin tone; rather, it is a personal response to structural and historical racism and a myriad encounters and life experiences. For many adoptees, racial identification is fluid and contingent upon a given situational context.

The Postwar African American Family The primary adopters of the Black German children to the USA were middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans or those serving in the US Armed Forces. Military status and residential location contributed significantly to the diversity of the Black German adoptees’ childhood experiences. A child adopted by a civilian couple in the rural South experienced a different childhood from another raised in an upper-middle-class home in Washington D.C., or in an army household in New Jersey. Andrew Billingsley explains that, in the 1960s, 40% of all African American families were middle class—divided into three distinct subgroups: upper, solid, and precarious middle class. These were distinguished by education, income, and occupational achievement. Most African Americans shared a sense of “peoplehood” and historical identification, according to Billingsley, but based on class and residential community, they may, on an everyday basis, share more of a participational identification with whites of the same class.31

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The specific social context into which a Black German child was adopted was especially relevant when considering whether he or she experienced de jure or de facto segregation, or attended private, public, segregated, or integrated schools. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision of May 1954 ordering the desegregation of public schools was slow to be implemented, especially in Southern states. Consequently, some adoptees who grew up in the South attended segregated schools. Other adoptive parents sent their children to private schools nationwide that could be either segregated or integrated. Upper- and middle-class African Americans sought to shelter their children not only from racist whites, but also from lower-class blacks whom they considered socially inferior. Selective membership organizations such as Jack and Jill, initially set up by African American mothers in 1938, were places “where elite black kids were separated from the rest.”32 They were intended to provide social and cultural opportunities for African American children and youth, in order that they should fulfill their parents’ expectations to become respected professionals and educators, and intermarry.33 Jack and Jill prioritized black history education that celebrated their own families’ prominence as members of the Black aristocracy. Graham writes, “Whether they began as free people of color or enslaved house servants, those blacks who came to make up the Black aristocracy were typically those who were able to gain an education and various professional skills.”34 Similarly, Black German adoptees who grew up in elite African American families were expected to attend college and, as embodiments of their parents’ aspirations, join exclusive clubs, sororities, and fraternities.

Black German Military Brats Black German children who were adopted by military couples experienced vastly different childhoods from those of adoptees who grew up in civilian families. These children experienced one of two childhood scenarios. Adoptees who routinely relocated with their parents’ military assignments recall different childhoods from those who were left behind with their mothers, often living with or growing up near extended family members. In such instances, where mother and child(ren) stayed behind, the benefits of social stability were often challenged by household instability. Military families who relocated together usually lived isolated from the local civilian population in residential quarters on fortress-type

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military bases. The children, affectionately labeled “brats,” routinely attended integrated military schools. The military lifestyle prepared the entire family, including the children, for war. Mary Wertsch in Military Brats writes: “The militarization of childhood […] the coaching that directs military children to assume their proper roles in the theatrical company of the Fortress begins quite early. […] As childhood progresses, the coaching intensifies for the part of little warrior.”35 Morten G. Ender in his study writes, “The highly structured society of the military requires that all members of the family be accountable for their actions. […] The patriarchal military community requires soldiers and their families to follow certain codes of conduct. The behavior of a brat is a direct reflection on the military member, so the child’s identity and self-worth are directly tied to the family.”36 Subsequent to President Harry Truman’s declaration in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces, by 1954, black and white families lived side by side in government housing. Military personnel who held the same rank received equal pay and government-funded benefits regardless of race. Children attended integrated schools, and their families often worshiped together at military chapels. However, race often influenced career advancement in the recently desegregated military, so it was more likely that Black German adoptees, while experiencing integration, at the same time also experienced residential segregation because they grew up as children of noncommissioned officers (NCOs) or of low-ranking officers. Residential segregation was based only on rank. Commissioned officers’ living quarters were separate from and superior to those of NCOs, and they also received higher pay and socialized separately from NCOs. The social separation eliminated any discrepancy over who gave and who followed orders in the eventuality of war. Nonetheless, all military families enjoyed the amenities that a selfcontained military campus, overseas or in the USA, provided, regardless of rank or race. Black and white families shared public spaces. All recreational facilities, shopping, health and social service centers, libraries, churches, and theaters were integrated. Food, clothing, and household goods that were not general issue were available at significant discounts in military shopping centers. There was little cause to interface with the local economy for daily living essentials. For African Americans, this arrangement was ideal since venturing off the military campus risked

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exposure to more overt racism in some locations, and they were better shielded from within the confines of the military. Black German “brats,” like African American “brats,” share fond memories of military childhoods and comment that the social transition from military to civilian life was emotionally difficult. Wertsch writes: “[They] spoke of their childhood nostalgically, and described their fathers with obvious pride. […] some black military children grew up acutely conscious of the contrast between their safe, secure life in the military and the tenuous existence of their civilian relatives in small rural towns or big city ghettos.”37 Military parents often sheltered their children from the harsh realities of racial politics in the civilian world: “Black military brats generally described the racial attitudes of their parents as open-minded and egalitarian, quoting them in almost the same words white military children reported from their parents.”38 Military life also provided African Americans with the economic security and semblance of social equality that was otherwise elusive for many Blacks who lived in rural and urban areas in the United States. Young, under-educated Black men, along with their wives, earned high school diplomas and college degrees while serving in the US Armed Forces. Arguably, growing up in African American military families, the adoptees enjoyed an overall sense of stability and social equality they likely would not have had growing up with their unmarried mothers in Germany. A Black German “brat” experience, on the surface, exemplified Martin Luther King’s dream. However, many Black troops were involuntarily retired as soon as they returned to the United States as part of a reduction in forces, and did not enjoy the military benefits long-term. Moreover, the problem with short-term military careers is that the work skills acquired on the inside are not always directly transferable to the civilian economy. Middle-class status, then, was precarious for early retirees and, for those with longterm military careers, economic security did not guarantee marital harmony even when their families relocated from post to post as a unit. Constant relocation impacted children’s ability to develop and nurture valuable social relationships which, according to adoptee testimony, exacerbated the sense of isolation that Black Germans frequently express. As Morten G. Ender demonstrates, children who move from place to place never establish social roots.39 Moving after each tour of duty, they argue, frustrates academic progression and dims extracurricular aspirations. Advancing from one level to the next on a sports team or in a band is improbable if a child relocates ahead of the next season or school year.

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Searches and Returns Adoptees who search often begin by looking for their German mothers. Respected adoption psychologists David Brodzinsky and Nancy Verrier agree that deciding whether and when to search is an anxiety-ridden process and some adoptees take years, even decades, to decide, vacillating, weighing the pros and cons. Some consider searching unnecessary or too emotionally risky and prefer instead to come to terms with the cards they have been dealt. Others cannot abide the not knowing, feeling somehow less than human without the facts of how they came into existence and devoid of the intimate details of their former lives.40 In her study investigating the perception of social stigma on adoptees’ motivation to search and reunite, Karen March writes, “to date, no specific sociological category or personality type has been found to help determine which adoptees are most likely to search or which are most likely to engage in contact with birthmothers.”41 To search or not, then, I argue, is a personal preference and not necessarily indicative of adoptee well-being or evidence of a happy adopted childhood. Adoptees who elect to search must first resolve the problem of locating and obtaining documents and legal records, which, as Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin note: may be complicated by the possibility that the papers—birth certificates, passports, and court records—that compel movement and authenticate identity will assume multiple and contradictory forms or not even exist. The lack or proliferation of forms produces tensions between papers (which should authenticate a self that preexists its documentation) and the de facto experience of a self that exceeds its documentation.42

For some Black Germans, the papers come too late. Peter Grammer was given his identifying information in early childhood, but had no interest in searching. When Mabel Grammer offered Peter his original documents, he says he told her, “I know who my mom is, you are, and that is the end of the story.”43 Searching adoptees often anticipate rejection and, for Black Germans, race matters raise the stakes. As Verrier points out, “The fear of a second abandonment is everpresent in the minds of each adoptee who contemplates searching.”44 So-called “search angels,” volunteers who provide search help free of charge, alert Black German adoptees at the outset to the reality that racism may complicate their reunion efforts and suggest they temper

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idealistic expectations. Sadly, rejection sometimes happens. Many Black Germans, like other adoptees, express concern over how their adoptive families will view them if they decide to search. Verrier writes: “Although many people now acknowledge the validity of searching, there are still those in our society who feel that searching adoptees are ungrateful and uncaring about their adoptive parents’ feelings.”45 Black Germans sometimes wrestle with the racial implications of searching for a white mother. Will this offend my black adoptive mother? Will she feel that I am rejecting her, or my own blackness? Most Black Germans are aware of their adopted status since early childhood, but have little or no details. Some discover documents after their adoptive parents are deceased. If an adoptee’s given name was changed, only the new name is specified on passports, and on naturalization and revised birth certificates. Without original German birth and adoption documents, adoptees may never know their first given names or the identity of either biological parent. Language is also an obstacle to searching. Translators and search consultants with bilingual capabilities and knowledge of German bureaucracy can be costly and hard to find. Adoptees who are unable to cope with the emotional aspects of searching can easily become discouraged. In many cases, adoptees are the initiators of search and reunion efforts, but not always. Sometimes their German families look for them. In May 2012, I received an email from a woman named Brenda who was hoping to find her adopted cousin, Maria. Brenda’s male cousin, Hermann, who lives in Germany hoped to find his half-sister who had been relinquished for adoption nearly 60 years before. Although she had little memory of Maria, Brenda knew that the three of them—she, Hermann, and Maria—had lived together for a while as children in Aachen, Germany. Brenda was very young when Maria, whose mother died from complications related to childbirth, was placed in an orphanage and was ultimately adopted in the United States. The maternal grandparents had been left to raise Maria and Hermann alone when Brenda and her mother moved to the USA. The elderly couple loved Maria, but under pressure from social services and extended family members to consider their advancing age and failing health, reluctantly released her for adoption and kept Hermann. Maria was a toddler when she was first placed and, after she had spent an indeterminable amount of time in an orphanage, Mabel Grammer arranged for her “by proxy” adoption. Maria was sent to the Browns, an African American

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couple living in North Carolina who were adopting a boy at the same time. Maria and her new brother arrived together in New York City from Germany in the summer of 1955. The children were left in the custody of a relative of Mrs. Brown who taught at Winston-Salem Teachers College, and was away on a European tour at the time. The children spoke only German when they arrived in the United States. On Maria’s birthday, May 21, 2012, after about two weeks of searching, Brenda found a phone number online that she hoped belonged to her cousin and asked me to act as intermediary and initiate the first contact. A woman with a Southern accent finally picked up after several unanswered calls. Maria was excited to be found and spoke freely about her adoption experience, explaining that she always felt she had a brother and a grandfather who loved her and would find her someday. “I couldn’t shake the feeling in the vagueness of my spirit,” she said and shared further that a mother figure never came into her mind. It was her vision of a brother and grandfather that Maria held onto in childhood for comfort. The feeling that she was sought after and loved from afar helped Maria to endure the sense of abandonment and emotional abuse she describes growing up in her adoptive family. Since reuniting with her cousin and half-brother, the three are in constant contact and Maria looks forward to someday visiting Hermann and other relatives in Germany. As of this writing, this objective has not been realized. Hermann made travel arrangements for Maria to celebrate her birthday in Germany in May 2014, but she was unable to obtain a passport. Maria’s adoptive parents had died without providing her with original birth and adoption records. She hopes to someday meet her first family but, for now, finds the bureaucracy involved in obtaining these documents overwhelming. Peggy Blow and Daniel Cardwell, two adoptees who penned their memoirs, concluded their respective birth-mother searches at graveyards. Peggy finds comfort in learning about her mother from the half-sister and nieces she met in Germany while filming a documentary for public television about her first return. Relatives of the dead woman whose grave Daniel discovers at the end of his search embrace him, but Daniel reasonably doubts that he is the actual child whose name appears on his adoption paperwork.46 Black German adoptees report mixed and varied reunion experiences. Some, like Henriette Cain, find their first mothers in the United States and enjoy pleasing social relationships.47

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As Yngvesson suggests, adoptees return “haunted by the canceled persona,” attempting to locate an “original, less encumbered, more authentic self—or with an alien but nonetheless real self. […] There is an origin ‘waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against.’”48 Some Black Germans describe their journeys back as healing, others are disappointed. Nothing magical happens, the experience is not as profound as they imagined. Yngvesson writes: “The possibility of return is predicated on a single origin, an original self, and a transparent account of becoming, when, in fact, relocation may be a moment when one self is officially constituted and another is cut away.”49 There is no going back, no recoupment of the past, even when social relationships begin anew.

Reuniting in Diaspora Reunification and belonging are critical and complex concepts in adoption scholarship. For Black German Americans, reunification with Black Germans in diaspora, via the internet, in academic discourse, and in actuality, is often restorative, and storytelling is an act of resistance against erasure. For nearly twenty years, adoptees have been exchanging stories with other Black Germans living globally in online social networks. The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) provides a space through its conventions for Black Germans from disparate backgrounds to contribute to the ongoing academic conversations concerning them, while celebrating their collective history and cultural production. The inaugural event was held in 2011 at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., the conference theme, “Strengthening Transatlantic Connections,” reflecting the organization’s vision. The first keynote speaker, Noah Sow, explained to the audience that, “Ours is a ‘Geteilte Geschichte’—something that is shared and at the same time separates us: It is our geteilte Geschichte, our shared history, which also divided us.” Sow reminded the audience that the mass removal of the postwar generation of Black German children from Germany has had transnational implications. She addressed the adoptees directly when she spoke about the nature of belonging and what it means to be Black German, with or without a German life experience, emphasizing how the adoptees had been missed and how their absence directly impacted the lives of those left behind and the generations that followed. Sow explained: “You would have been our sisters, our mothers, our aunts, our teachers, our deans, our doctors, our librarians, our social workers, our

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judges, our pilots, our nurses, our neighbors. We’ve been missing you a great deal.”50 Sow’s statement is significant since, for some adoptees, getting to know other Black Germans with a German life experience is nearly as important as finding their genetic relations. It is within this space that the adoptees are actively recrafting a collective sense of identity. At this historically symbolic event, and at the two subsequent conventions in 2012 and 2013, at Barnard College, Columbia University and Amherst College, respectively, Black Germans with diverse backgrounds shared their life experiences, flanking the academic papers. In this way, the conferences make possible inclusive, multilayered conversations while encouraging productive academic and restorative interpersonal relationships. Importantly, within this space, Black German Americans, adopted or not, are reinscribing themselves into Black German genealogy and in interdisciplinary academic discourse.

Conclusion The topic of the dual-heritage children adopted from Germany to the USA has only recently emerged in multidisciplinary academic discourse, especially in the burgeoning fields of Adoption and Black German Studies. Aside from limited historical accounts and two documentary films based on memoirs that depict the most tragic cases, there is a relative dearth of literature on the lived experiences of the now middle-aged Black German Americans who are creating and documenting their own history. Many of their birth and adoptive parents, whose voices are nearly absent in the ongoing discussions, are already deceased. There is a compelling and urgent need for further research, given the advancing age of the adoptees and their adoptive kinship networks. Much can be learned not only from the Black German American adoptees but also from members of their adoptive kinship networks and generational peers who grew up in their original families in Germany and in the United States, or in institutions, foster, and adoptive homes in postwar Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. Far too many Black German voices remain unheard.

Notes

1. Yara-Collette Lemke Muniz de Faria, Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: afrodeutsche “Besatzungskinder” im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Berlin: Metrool, 2002), 344.

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2.  Nancy Rudolph, “Black German Children: A Photography Portfolio,” Callaloo 26: 2 (2003): 383–400. 3. Amanda Baden, “‘Do You Know Your Real Parents?’ and Other Adoption Microaggressions,” Adoption Quarterly 19: 1 (2016): 1–25. 4. Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, “‘Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?’: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950–1955,” Callaloo 26: 2 (2003): 342–362. 5. Baden, “‘Do You Know Your Real Parents?’” 1–25. 6.  Molefe Kete Asante, “Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location,” Dr Molefi Kete Asante, May 17, 2009, accessed June 10, 2014, http://www.asante.net/articles/17/afro-germans-and-the-problems-of-cultural-location/. 7. Baden, “‘Do You Know Your Real Parents?’” 6. 8. Stephanie Siek, “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs,” Spiegel Online, October 13, 2009, accessed November 21, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-brown-babies-the-difficult-identities-of-post-war-blackchildren-of-gis-a-651989.html. 9. See David M. Brodzinsky, Marshall D. Schechter, and Robin Marantz Henig, Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self (USA: Anchor, 1993), and Nancy N. Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (USA: Verrier Publishing, 1993). 10. Verrier, Primal Wound, 21. 11. Brodzinsky, Schechter, and Henig, Being Adopted, 9. 12. Mary Dozier, “Attachment-Based Treatment for Vulnerable Children,” Attachment & Human Development 5: 3 (2003): 253–257. 13. Daniel Cardwell, A Question of Color: A Brown Baby’s Search for Identity in a Black and White World, 2nd Edition (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). 14. Lemke Muniz de Faria, “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies,’” 357. 15.  “Brown Babies: Homes Needed for 10,000 Brown Orphans,” Ebony, October 1948, accessed November 11, 2016, http://darkwing.uoregon. edu/~adoption/archive/EbonyTTBO.htm. 16. Jillian Jimenez, “The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community,” Social Service Review 76: 4 (2002): 526. 17. Sister Frances Jerome Woods and Alice Lancaster, “Cultural Factors in Negro Adoptive Parenthood,” Social Work 7: 4 (1962): 21. 18. Ellen Herman, “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,” Journal of Social History 36: 2 (2002): 347, accessed February 7, 2017, doi:10.1353/jsh.2003.0017. 19. Regina Griffin, Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story, Documentary, Biography, Drama, History, 2011, accessed November 11, 2016, http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt1884263/.

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20. Lemke Muniz de Faria, “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies,’” 357. 21. Scott Smith, “Grammer’s Lesson—Determination Helps Principal, Civic Leader Overcome Past,” The Colorado Springs Gazette, February 25, 1999. 22. “Lt. Gen. Nadja Y. West,” accessed October 24, 2016, http://armymedicine.mil/Pages/Nadja_West.aspx. 23. “General Pays Tribute to Woman Who Fought for Civil Rights, Started Adoption Program,” Targeted News Service (USA), February 29, 2012. 24. Helen Fitzhardinge, “Adoption, Resilience and the Importance of Stories: The Making of a Film about Teenage Adoptees,” Adoption & Fostering 32: 1 (2008): 58. 25. Fitzhardinge, “Adoption, Resilience and the Importance of Stories,” 62. 26. Lemke Muniz de Faria, “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies,’” 345. 27. Michaela Kirst, Brown Babies: Deutschlands Verlorene Kinder (Germany’s Forgotten Children), Documentary, 2011, https://www.planet-schule. de/sf/php/sendungen.php?sendung=8764. 28. Cardwell, A Question of Color. 29. Griffin, Brown Babies. 30.  Nancy Vessell, “Seeking an Unusual Kinship,” Jefferson City News Tribune, July 16, 2000. 31. Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families, 1st Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 9–10. 32. Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. 1st Edition (New York: Harper, 1999), 19. 33. Graham, Our Kind of People, 19–23. 34. Graham, Our Kind of People, 9. 35. Mary Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (St Louis, MO: Brightwell Publishing, 2010), 3, 4. 36. Morten G. Ender, Military Brats and Other Global Nomads: Growing Up in Organization Families (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 69. 37. Wertsch, Military Brats, 338. 38. Wertsch, Military Brats, 340. 39. See Wertsch, Military Brats and Ender, Global Nomads. 40. Verrier, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, 153. 41. Karen March, “Perception of Adoption as Social Stigma: Motivation for Search and Reunion,” Journal of Marriage and Family 57: 3 (1995): 654. 42.  Barbara Yngvesson, and Susan Bibler Coutin, “Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories, and Return,” American Ethnologist 33: 2 (2006): 179, accessed February 7, 2016, doi:10.1525/ae.2006.33.2. 43. Griffin, Brown Babies.

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44. Verrier, Primal Wound, 153. 45. Verrier, Primal Wound, 154. 46. Griffin, Brown Babies, and Kirst, Deutschlands Verlorene Kinder. 47. Griffin, Brown Babies, and Kirst, Deutschlands Verlorene Kinder. 48. Barbara Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010) 176. 49. Yngvesson, Belonging in an Adopted World, 177. 50. S. Marina Jones and Priscilla Layne, “Conference Report of the Inaugural Convention of the Black German Heritage and Research Association,” BGHRA, 2011, accessed February 7, 2017, http://www.bghra.org/ docs/2011conference_report.pdf.

Bibliography Alvah, Donna. Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965. Annotated Edition. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Asante, Molefi Kete. “Afro-Germans and the Problems of Cultural Location.” Dr Molefi Kete Asante, May 17, 2009. Accessed June 10, 2014. http://www. asante.net/articles/17/afro-germans-and-the-problems-of-cultural-location/. Baden, Amanda. “‘Do You Know Your Real Parents?’ and Other Adoption Microaggressions.” Adoption Quarterly 19: 1 (2016): 1–25. Billingsley, Andrew. Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of AfricanAmerican Families. 1st edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Brodzinsky, David M., Marshall D. Schechter, and Robin Marantz Henig. Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self. USA: Anchor, 1993. “Brown Babies: Homes Needed for 10,000 Brown Orphans.” Ebony, October 1948. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://darkwing.uoregon. edu/~adoption/archive/EbonyTTBO.htm. Cardwell, Daniel. A Question of Color: A Brown Baby’s Search for Identity in a Black and White World. 2nd Edition. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Dozier, Mary. “Attachment-Based Treatment for Vulnerable Children.” Attachment & Human Development 5: 3 (2003): 253–7. Ender, Morten G. Military Brats and Other Global Nomads: Growing Up in Organization Families. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Fehrenbach, Heide. Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Fitzhardinge, Helen. “Adoption, Resilience and the Importance of Stories: The Making of a Film about Teenage Adoptees.” Adoption & Fostering 32: 1 (2008): 58–68.

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“General Pays Tribute to Woman Who Fought for Civil Rights, Started Adoption Program.” Targeted News Service (USA), February 29, 2012. Graham, Lawrence Otis. Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. 1st Edition. New York: Harper, 1999. Griffin, Regina. Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story. Documentary, Biography, Drama, History, 2011. Accessed November 11, 2016. http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt1884263/. Herman, Ellen. “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption.” Journal of Social History 36: 2 (2002): 339–85. Accessed February 7, 2017. doi:10.1353/jsh.2003.0017. Höhn, Maria, and Martin Klimke. A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jimenez, Jillian. “The History of Grandmothers in the African‐American Community.” Social Service Review 76: 4 (2002): 523–51. Jones, S. Marina, and Priscilla Layne. “Conference Report of the Inaugural Convention of the Black German Heritage and Research Association.” BGHRA, 2011. Accessed February 7, 2017. http://www.bghra.org/ docs/2011conference_report.pdf. Kirst, Michaela. Brown Babies: Deutschlands Verlorene Kinder (Germany’s Forgotten Children). Documentary, 2011. https://www.planet-schule.de/sf/ php/sendungen.php?sendung=8764. Lemke Muniz de Faria, Yara-Colette. “‘Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?’: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950– 1955.” Callaloo 26: 2 (2003): 342–62. Lemke Muniz de Faria, Yara-Collette. Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung: afrodeutsche “Besatzungskinder” im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Berlin: Metropol, 2002. “Lt. Gen. Nadja Y. West.” Accessed October 24, 2016. http://armymedicine. mil/Pages/Nadja_West.aspx. “Major General Nadja Y. West : Joint Chiefs of Staff.” United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. Accessed August 28, 2014. http://www.jcs.mil/Leadership/ ArticleView/tabid/3893/Article/5131/major-general-nadja-y-west.aspx. March, Karen. “Perception of Adoption as Social Stigma: Motivation for Search and Reunion.” Journal of Marriage and Family 57: 3 (1995): 653–60. McMillon, Doris, and Michele Sherman. Mixed Blessing. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985. Rudolph, Nancy. “Black German Children: A Photography Portfolio.” Callaloo 26: 2 (2003): 383–400. Siek, Stephanie. “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of PostWar Black Children of GIs.” Spiegel Online, October 13, 2009. Accessed November 21, 2016. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-brown-babies-the-difficult-identities-of-post-war-black-children-ofgis-a-651989.html.

220  R. Peña Smith, Scott. “Grammer’s Lesson—Determination Helps Principal, Civic Leader Overcome Past.” The Colorado Springs Gazette, February 25, 1999. Verrier, Nancy N. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. USA: Verrier Publishing, 1993. Vessell, Nancy. “Seeking an Unusual Kinship.” Jefferson City News Tribune, July 16, 2000. Wertsch, Mary. Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. St. Louis, MO: Brightwell Publishing, 2010. Woods, Sister Frances Jerome, and Alice Lancaster. “Cultural Factors in Negro Adoptive Parenthood.” Social Work 7: 4 (1962): 14–21. Yngvesson, Barbara. Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Yngvesson, Barbara, and Susan Bibler Coutin. “Backed by Papers: Undoing Persons, Histories, and Return.” American Ethnologist 33: 2 (2006): 177–90. Accessed February 7, 2017. doi:10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.

Author Biography Rosemarie Peña is a Ph.D. candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University–Camden in the USA and is founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA). Her research explores the intersections of international adoption and migration, and visual and filmic portrayals of international adoption. Her chapter essays have recently been published in Kinder Der Befreiung: Transatlantische Erfahrungen Und Perspektiven Schwarzer Deutscher Der Nachkriegsgeneration (2015) and Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space (2016). She is also a contributor to the 2014 bibliographic edition of Adoption & Culture: The Interdisciplinary Journal of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture.

CHAPTER 10

Girls Interrupted, Business Unbegun, and Precarious Homes: Literary Representations of Transracial Adoption in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Fiction Christine Vogt-William

South Asian diasporic women’s writing foregrounds aspects of diasporic life, where families and homes are the pivots of greater negotiations of cultural and national identities which oscillate between ancestral spaces of origin in South Asia and the transplantations to other geophysical and cultural spaces. In such navigations of spaces, histories, citizenship, and belonging, the intersections of race, class, gender among other salient categories like educational background and religion, have been instrumental in shaping homes in public and private contexts, rendering the boundaries between these spheres porous. This essay focuses on a particular form of diasporic identity based on transnational adoptions of subcontinental Indian children by white European and US American

C. Vogt-William (*)  University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_10

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parents, as represented in two contemporary novels by diasporic women writers. Bharti Kirchner’s Shiva Dancing (1999) and Sharon Maas’s The Speech of Angels (2003) address the fortunes of two young girls from different parts of India who are adopted by white parents in the USA and in Germany. These texts can be considered coming-of-age novels, reminiscent on some levels of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna (1913), with regard to how the protagonists work to recreate their sense of self in new home environments that are not only unfamiliar, but in many ways strange and intimidating to them. David Eng has noted that, while “transnational adoption is one of the most privileged forms of diaspora in the later twentieth century,” the transnational adoptee has not been accorded much attention in literary works and critical scholarship till recently.1 In my engagements with these texts, I will focus on the moments of adoption and transnational movement to the new adoptive home spaces in both novels, where the birth mother, the adoptive child, and the adoptive mother are the key actors in staging a range of feminized diasporic experiences. While I do not discount the positions of the South Asian birth fathers and the white adoptive fathers in these transracial adoptive narratives,2 I read the mothers as the pivotal figures around whom the adoptive daughters learn to negotiate particularly feminized forms of citizenship and belonging in German and US American cultural spaces. Here I have recourse to a set of questions posed by David Eng which resonate throughout my readings of transracial adoptive motherhood and daughterhood: […] is the transnational adoptee an immigrant? […] How is the transnational adoptee absorbed into the intimate space of the family? How are histories of imperialism and globalization, as well as disparities of race, gender, class and nation managed or erased within the privatized sphere of the domestic?3

Similarly, I ask if the implementation of the adoption narrative as a literary device in these diasporic novels alludes to the (im)possibilities of the transracial adoptee of ever being adopted by her new home space. This would be contingent on how the adoptee herself adopts the new home space in order to render herself commensurate with her white adoptive parents who are themselves affiliated with this space; in other words, the adoptee’s “adoption” of the new home space entails her adaptation to these surroundings.

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The home is one of the spaces where forms of personhood are “codified, contested, transformed and reproduced in relation to specific national-racial crises in the construction of a people.”4 While the grand narratives of “national-racial crises” are not immediately apparent in the two stories addressed here, I consider the postcolonial South Asian subcontinental as well as European and US American contexts and their positions towards South Asian women and girls a salient aspect to be taken into account, with regard to intersectional readings of how race, gender, class, and lived spaces mark the South Asian female diasporic characters. Navigating the vectors of geographical, kinship, and cultural differences embodied by transracially adopted children, thus, contributes to constructions of families and homes. Rosemary George’s ruminations on the psychic and political nuances of making home point out how the politics of location have relevance for contexts of diaspora: […] the basic organizing principle around which the notion of the “home” is built is a pattern of select inclusions and exclusions. Home is a way of establishing difference. Homes and home countries are exclusive. Home, I will argue, along with gender/sexuality, race and class, acts as an ideological determinant of the subject. […] The politics of location come into play in the attempt to weave together a subject-status that is sustained by the experience of the place one knows as Home or by resistance to places that are patently “not home.” Locations are positions from which distance and difference are formulated and homes are made snug.5

George’s discussion of home is noteworthy when one considers the normative understandings of homes as inclusive, stable, and secure spaces for the families that inhabit them. One notes, however, how such understandings of home are not always contiguous with transracial adoption contexts, where the transracial adoptee struggles with readings of her difference often imposed on her—while trying to find places where such difference can actually find rest. The novels demonstrate the adoptive children’s negotiations of the expectations imposed on them by their adoptive mothers, who have chosen these young girls as the cores of the homes and families that they have long desired. My choice of these two narratives to address the initial phases of diasporic life for the two transracial adoptees is based on certain structural similarities in the ways the female adoption triads are staged in negotiating diasporic questions of citizenship, belonging, and

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homing. Both these contemporary diasporic texts share a number of characteristics: (a) The young protagonists witness the deaths of their birth mothers and are traumatized—thus their ruptures with the natal spaces in India (the city slums of Bombay and a desert village in Rajasthan) are contiguous with the losses of the birth mothers;6 (b)  both girls are taken in by white couples in India, whom they encounter shortly after their losses; they are then officially adopted by these white parents and taken to their new homes, where their navigations of these spaces are contingent on their white mothers’ identities as constitutive of the new home spaces;7 (c) once tenuous emotional attachments have been consolidated with these white mothers, and new self-perceptions are set up, both children experience the deaths of their adoptive mothers.8 These losses engender further traumas that require them to renegotiate their own places in the world, which have hitherto been informed by the meanings they had for their adoptive mothers. (d) Neither girl has contact with South Asian diasporic groups in her adoptive country, due to constraints set up by their white adoptive parents. The affective relations between white-identifying and racialized positions are based on evaluations of the transracial adoptees’ bodies in contexts of ambiguous parent-child attachments. These relationships oscillate between the white mothers’ perceptions of the child on the one hand as a commodity to cater for the white parents’ desires for intact families, and as reinforcing constructions and perceptions of first world white altruism on the other.9 The aspect of the commodification of the girl child is one that bears scrutiny with regard to reinforcing stereotypes about subcontinental cultures as being inherently misogynist and backward, while at the same time recognizing that there are real problems concerning the subordinate position that women and girls often still occupy in South Asian contexts. The Speech of Angels by Guyanese German writer Sharon Maas is set in the mid-1990s, in three different countries, one of which is Germany—this cultural space is the first site of transracial negotiations in the adoptive context, where the adoption triad of birth mother, adoptive mother, and child adoptee is prioritized. A young girl named Jyothi

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from the Bombay slums is adopted at the age of 6 by a white couple from Germany, after her birth mother dies. Traumatized by this loss, and by an attempted kidnapping by her stepfather, Jyothi is rescued by the Kellers, who take her to Germany to begin a new life. Monika Keller, Jyothi’s adoptive mother, is German, and Jack Keller, her adoptive father, is Irish American—both identities are coded as white. The child proves to be a musical protégée—a circumstance that increases her attraction for the Kellers, who are unable to have children of their own and are both musically inclined themselves. A significant aspect of the German section of the narrative is the foregrounding of the adoptive mother’s perspective in the first half of the novel. Jyothi’s perspective in her first experiences of Germany is presented in the third person, often through reported speech, marked by italics in the text.10 Thus, while this provides the reader with access to Jyothi’s private thoughts during the initial phases of her adoptive life, it sets her voice apart from the rest of the narrative. At the same time, this demonstrates her traumatized silence in her inability to access adequate language to make herself known to, and to know, her new parents and home. The initial bracketing of the adoptive child’s perspective from the “mainstream” of the narrative itself, on a structural level, begs the question of whether just such perspectives can be included in the German cultural imaginary, as viable forms of citizenship. In a space of seven years, Jyothi manages to build a functional relationship with Monika and her new life in Germany— the girl’s perspective is given a first-person narrative voice and direct speech is implemented to demonstrate her interaction with the greater social contexts. However, this acquisition of voice that is contingent with her developing relationship with her adoptive mother is interrupted yet again when Monika dies in a car accident. This catapults Jyothi into a second traumatic loss of a mother, and interrupts her narrative of becoming an Indian German daughter of a white German mother—and perhaps attaining citizenship and home. This interruption of a South Asian German subjectivity in the making leads to Jyothi’s moving on to England with her adoptive father and his new partner. England is thus represented as a space more commonly associated with South Asian diasporic life—thus begging the question as to whether South Asians can ever be imagined as part of the German cultural imaginary and social landscapes, either in the diasporic sense or as full citizens. South Asian American writer Bharti Kirchner’s Shiva Dancing, also set in the early to mid-1990s, tells the story of Meena Gossett, a

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successful South Asian American computer analyst from San Francisco. Meena had been kidnapped as a child by bandits from her childhood home in Rajasthan immediately after her wedding to her childhood friend; this key incident takes place in the 1960s. Kirchner uses the tradition of child marriage11 to create even more solid emotional attachments for this protagonist to the subcontinent. One notes that Kirchner seems invested in subverting readings of child marriage as a misogynous cultural practice which contributes to pathologizing and stereotyping Indian cultural contexts in diasporic situations as backward and inassimilable. At the same time, the trope of child marriage, like adoption, serves as a site to interrogate other non-normative methods of creating family structures and homes not based on blood kinship. Seven-yearold Meena manages to escape the bandits and meets Abby and Charlie Gossett on a train from Bikaner to Delhi. The white American couple decide to adopt Meena and take her to the USA. The narrative then fast forwards to adult Meena’s life at the age of 35, while she deals with Abby Gossett’s death—another traumatic loss of the adoptive mother in this narrative. The narrative of the intervening years and, in particular, of her developing relationship with her adoptive mother is filled in through flashbacks in the adult Meena’s memories. In contrast to the space given to Monika’s perspective in The Speech of Angels, Abby Gossett’s perspective as an adoptive mother is accessible in a space of just a few pages through the adult Meena’s reading of Abby’s diary entries from the year of the child’s adoption and move to America. The adoptive mother thus remains unknowable in this narrative—indeed, she seems a caricature of the well-meaning but cold and distant figure of altruistic “First World” Christian duty. The interruption by death of this transracial adoption relationship allows Meena to pursue the older interrupted narrative of her life in India—the fates of her mother, extended family, her child bridegroom, and the home space of her village Karamgar in Northwest Rajasthan. This death allows the adult transracial adoptee to embark on a search to fill in the blanks of her interrupted story.

Adoption, Arrival, and Ambivalence As diasporic identities are always in process, “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference,”12 I consider diasporic adoptive identities as states of flux and fluidity in light of John McLeod’s reading of adoption as “business unbegun,” as

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incomplete narratives, where “the new identities both forged and denied by the act of adoption are never far from a ghostly sense of the unestablished and the unbegun.”13 Thus, in attempting to navigate new home spaces for themselves with their white adoptive parents, the adoptees in these novels resurrect ghosts—of their birth mothers, of the lives they might have had in India, of the biological children these adoptive mothers might have had or had lost. A notable commonality in these two texts is that both the protagonists wrestle with the loss of their birth mothers and their personal histories in their natal Indian contexts. While the identities of these Indian protagonists are represented as “unbegun business,” their lives in India could be considered unfinished business based on the losses they have incurred. Just as the adoptive daughters wrangle with their ghostly traumas, the German and the American adoptive mothers wrestle with their own lacks and losses—i.e. their childlessness: Monika is barren, while Abby mourns the death of her son Lance: […] Monika could not bear to look at the children, […]. So many homeless, so many undernourished children: surely God had made a mistake, giving them to parents who could not afford to keep them—and leaving her own womb empty. […] She looked away. Why! Why! Why! She cried to an unhearing God. Why can’t I have my own!14 March 25: […] We have wanted to adopt a child ever since Lance left us. […] April 15: […] I have so many different sentiments when I hold her close. I feel motherly, but also a little worried that we don’t seem to connect well. Meena dulls my craving for a child, though I doubt if she could ever take the place of Lance.15

The adoptive mothers’ investments in family alignments and home spaces mobilize white perspectives on the abjection of the Indian child as an inevitable cultural feature, while simultaneously underscoring the same child’s value for the adoptive mothers to satisfy their desires for children. Monika alludes to poverty-stricken people having children they cannot afford in a “Third World” country, while she, a white Christian woman, has not been granted the boon of a child. Abby fears the inevitable distance between herself and the adopted daughter—due to her difference, which is insurmountable to her since she is not her biological child and could never replace the birth son she had lost. Both mothers

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articulate the divide between themselves and these children—which is made contingent on their physical appearances which denote distance in contexts, conditions, and experiences that stamp the children as different. Both women either “look away” or doubt if the adopted child can ever function as a replacement for the lost or non-existent biological child—the distances thus set up then have repercussions on the adoptive child’s attempts to “home” herself in the new family matrix. Diasporic experience has implications for identity with regard to race and ethnicity in diasporic communities as well as those communities’ relationships to the other (local or diasporic) ethnic groups of the host countries.16 Of the tensions generated by attempts at situating racialized selves and communities in new matrices far from natal spaces, Claire Alexander notes: […] the recognition of the unequal and the often traumatic circumstances of migration and dispersal, along with the minoritization, marginalization and exclusion of diaspora peoples in the “host” societies, and the power of the myth of return are defining features […] that set diaspora theory apart from more politically neutral, elite or casually celebratory versions of social and cultural encounters across national borders.17

The social and cultural encounters transcending national and cultural borders that the transracial adoptee has to work through in these novels do not necessarily coincide with the euphoric celebratory attitudes that white adoptive parents entertain once the adoption is in place, despite their private fears and doubts. The marginalization and exclusion in these particular racialized diasporic situations acquire complexity and ambiguity, due to the traumas of loss of home and birth parents and the actual process of migrating with new parents to a new cultural and geophysical space that has yet to become “home.” Concepts of home, belonging, and family are sites of self-reinvention, a process often fraught with ambivalence, fear, and shame, as well as strength and resilience. Thus, alongside more obvious understandings of adoption as a realignment of family patterns without recourse to blood kin relations, I read adoption in the light of metaphorical interpretations of home in diaspora in the context of postcolonial critique.18 Here the dynamics round diasporic spaces, imaginaries, and sensibilities are intrinsic to the shaping of multiple locations of home and abroad as well as to contested relations between people with diverse subject positions.

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Thus, such contestation of belonging and otherness “[…] includes the entanglement […] of the genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put.’”19 Both Shiva Dancing and The Speech of Angels articulate questions of belonging and unhoming as constants for the two young protagonists, newly transplanted to predominantly white-identifying sociocultural contexts where white privilege is clearly notable. In The Speech of Angels, one notes a distinct refusal of the white adoptive German mother Monika to even consider that her adoptive daughter Jyothi may be traumatized and cannot immediately embrace her new and more fortunate material circumstances on her arrival in Germany: […] Jyothi sat stiffly […] clutching her doll. She had not smiled at Monika nor shown the least sign of recognition. Monika, walking beside Jack, whispered furiously, “Sie erkennt mich nicht! She doesn’t recognize me!” in German and English in case Jack didn’t understand, and as if it was his fault. “Give her time,” said Jack. “Everything is a shock for her. I mean, compare this place to Bombay.” Don’t be ridiculous, Jack. It’s all new, of course, and different but it can’t be a shock! A shock is something negative! I mean she must be feeling she fell asleep and woke up in heaven! Don’t exaggerate!20

Here the child’s unresponsiveness and unease towards the new environment unnerve the adoptive mother, who had invested considerably in creating a new home for the girl, in order to compensate for the loss the child has suffered. I note that, in Jyothi’s case, Jack, her adoptive father, translates the child to Monika, and also helps Jyothi make sense of her new home space, in which Monika is a predominant factor of unknowability for the child. Monika exhibits a form of cultural condescension that expects the child to embrace her new environment as the ultimate improvement of her situation and will not entertain the child’s memories of her home as a valid strategy in navigating the new home space. Similarly, in Shiva Dancing, Meena, too, is silent during her first months in the USA, while trying to come to terms with her new environment and dealing with her losses: Those first six months in San Francisco were a time of terror. Meena had difficulty eating, drinking, sleeping, even playing. She’d run from room to room, from the front of the house to the rear, as if being chased, but

230  C. Vogt-William refused to answer a question if asked. Years later she’d know she was still dealing with the anger and fear of being kidnapped, of being displaced from her home and her country. Mom gave up on her. It was the infinitely patient Auntie Bimla who murmured Hindi phrases of comfort in her ear and tried to make sense out of Meena’s every syllable. Because of Mom’s strict orders, Auntie Bimla spoke only English the rest of the time.21

Abby Gossett cannot handle Meena’s desperate attempts to deal with her trauma. Instead, the nanny Auntie Bimla takes on this task, while Abby retreats behind a strict demeanor, dictating how Meena has to adapt to her world, i.e. by speaking English (Monika too is highly invested in Jyothi’s learning German to successfully assimilate). One notes that the nanny helps the child with her trauma work, accepting the child’s silence and seemingly erratic need for movement. Auntie Bimla also translates Meena’s new environment for her, taking on the more troubling aspects of helping the child come to terms with her loss while adapting to her new home and parents. The adoptive mother’s tasks of engaging with the child’s difference during her first contact with the new home space has been displaced onto third parties (Jack and Auntie Bimla) in both novels, thus depicting these white adoptive mothers’ ability to surmount their daughters’ racial and cultural differences (and traumas) as highly questionable or even unattainable. The reactions of shock that both protagonists display on arrival in their new home spaces of Germany and the USA demonstrate the children’s moment of realization that they are no longer in familiar spaces associated with their birth mothers and families. Their moments of arrival in the new home spaces present sites of rupture with older contexts and attachments. These are illustrative of what South Asian American poet and novelist Meena Alexander describes as the “shock of arrival”: A time of literally explosive possibilities, we must figure out how to live our lives. The shock of arrival forces us to new knowledge. What the immigrant must work with is what she must invent in order to live. Race, ethnicity, the fluid truths of gender are all cast afresh. Nationality, too, that emptiest and yet most contested of signs, marks us. The old question “Who am I?” returns—I am what others see me as, but I am also my longings, my desire, my speech.22

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Alexander’s understanding of migration is salient to constructions of South Asian diasporic identity, whereby her observations on the body, language, and voice pertain to postcolonial identities as shaped by memories as well as new ways of thinking. The young adoptees in these two adoption novels are not aware of these “literally explosive possibilities” that Alexander addresses—they are caught in “the shock of arrival,” which manifests itself at first in a refusal or a lack of language to articulate their traumas of loss and bereavement. At the same time, the children very often also lack the resources to deal with implicit kinds of exclusionary violence that may be contingent on their marked differences in appearance, behavior, outlook, and affective reaction which are marked as different from mainstream white German and US American contexts. Thus, in dealing with the strange and the unfamiliar of their new surroundings, they, too, are rendered strange through their behaviors to their adoptive parents. Indeed, the question “Who am I?” is writ large in the stories of these adoptees. Alexander’s “explosive possibilities,” as I read them, might allude to the potential of cultural hybridity as a positive force for integration. I posit, however, that these young girls do not entertain the prospect of cultural hybridity, nor celebratory notions thereof in these moments of the shock of arrival—which can be read as an in-between space, a cultural “waiting room” of sorts. The two adoptive daughters in the novels are not invested in putative forms of Indianness that they ostensibly embody. Indeed, as John McLeod has pointed out: Adoptees, especially the very youngest do not mystically or reliably bring with them the inventories of one culture into another. They do not carry natal culture innately nor act as infant ambassadors for remotely headquartered domains. As many adoption scholars have pointed out, the idea of “birth culture” is an oxymoronic one which assumes the cultural provenance of one’s birth constitutes an ever-present authentic origin of personhood.23

And yet, the children’s cultural provenance has been read by their white adoptive mothers in both novels as inscribed into their racial identities marked by their physical appearances. The children themselves, however, work with parameters that are not immediately marked by racialization— until they have to navigate and interact with the greater social contexts. Both children negotiate their differences, which, while seemingly

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irrelevant in their domestic spheres, are thrown into stark relief in more public spaces, like school. In The Speech of Angels, the 6-year-old Jyothi notes her difference and feels displaced on her first day at a German school: She looked down and saw thin brown arms. The strangers around her were all white as chalk. She felt odd, awkward, different. She wanted to go home, where it was safe, be with Jack, or Monika […]. Her mind reeled back, away from the present, groped for familiar memories. She remembered Bombay […] and music. She remembered Ma […] safety: all far away, all gone. She was in the company of strangers. She was all alone.24

Jyothi’s memories of Bombay, her birth mother, and music stabilize her in this situation, while affirming her own difference among strangers. Similarly, in Shiva Dancing, Meena is made conscious of her difference when her new classmates react disbelievingly to her description of her lost home in the desert of Rajasthan: Mom had dropped her off at school. Mom—Meena used the word, though she asked herself how Mrs. Gossett could ever be her mother. But at that moment, even that stern woman seemed like a bosom buddy. Meena’s teacher […] made the introduction. “This is Meena Gossett,” she said, then turning to Meena, added, “I want you to tell the class where you are from.” […] Meena shot up from her chair and in her limited formal English vocabulary, replied “I come from the desert of Rajasthan, where there are camels and bandits […].” “Baloney,” said the class clown […]. The other kids snickered and whispered. The teacher tried to restore order. Meena sat down, but that episode dampened her spirit. How could they make fun of a newcomer? She was glad when the day was over.25

The young adoptees become aware of their Otherness once they encounter the greater social matrices of their adoptive home spaces. The consciousness of these differences hits home through their peers’ perceptions of their physical appearances, and their use of the language of the new home spaces, as well as the reactions of their surroundings towards them—all of which contribute to loneliness, insecurity, a sense

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of displacement and exclusion. Thus, attempts to engage with these new cultural spaces, introduced to them as their new homes, present challenges for these young adoptive protagonists. The private domestic dwelling spaces—marked by the presence of their white adoptive parents as both unfamiliar and familiar—are suddenly perceived as spaces of security; the distance to this initially strange new circumstance of white parents in white homes is collapsed. Thus, the forms of inclusion and exclusion that become evident in both narratives are dependent on how the adoptive child sees herself positioned as an object of desire by her adoptive parents, while she may not be able to articulate her own needs or yearnings. At the same time, the child notes that her difference may not be a quality that is desired outside the parental space. Diasporic (un)belonging is negotiated then in attempts to navigate both the new family and the new society the adoptee is meant to designate as “home.”

Stereotypes, Difference, and Distance—Running in (or from) the Family? Diaspora and transracial adoption narratives share similar concerns in that both explore cultural tensions in family and community alignments and the relevance of these for cultural negotiation. Marianne Novy observes that “adoption plots dramatize cultural tensions about definitions of family and the importance of heredity […] that is at the same time a way of thinking about the self, exploring distance from the family.”26 Family alignments and the positioning of the self are tropes dealing with the concept of distance and difference, both metaphorical and physical, as imagined on the site of the racialized transnational adoptee’s body. Helen Grice points out how race27 functions in the shaping of families based on non-biological ties: Since the majority of parents who adopt across racial lines are white, concerns about differences between white perceptions of the world and the experiences and worldviews of children of color become particularly acute. Among other issues of identity are thrown into especially sharp focus: visible differences in appearance between adoptees and their parents; the question of how to cope with racial stereotyping and racial slur; the chasm between an Anglo-American family heritage and an alternative ethnic ancestral heritage and cultural background. Together these narratives

234  C. Vogt-William document a unique perspective on transglobal relationships and the meeting and connecting of cultures.28

The chasms between Anglo-American and European family heritages marked as white, middle-class, and Christian in context and the South Asian positions of the adoptees are staged in both narratives, marked by racial and class differences, alongside different forms of historical contact between the subcontinent and Germany and the USA. Obviously, there are differences in how race is dealt with in Germany and in the USA, and these different approaches are to be traced in both novels.29 While experiences of racism are not openly addressed in Shiva Dancing, the sections of The Speech of Angels set in Germany do depict disturbing racist undercurrents, thus begging the question as to whether racism is to be understood as systemically endemic to German mainstream society, which is nevertheless invested in disavowing the same in contemporary contexts.30 The racialization of the transnational adoptive child in both narratives is contiguous with the cultural stereotypes of abjection based on race, gender, and class imposed on Indian women in the course of India’s colonization by England—which Gayatri Spivak has acerbically commented on with her succinct adage “White men saving brown women from brown men.”31 Both these transracial adoption narratives demonstrate that this particular colonial stance (also held by white women) still informs current interactions with white European and American cultural spaces. At the same time, the migratory moment of the transracial adoptee serves to fulfill a certain purpose in the service of white desire, while she begins to see herself as a citizen, as Eng observes: “The movement of the transnational adoptee from ‘over there’ to ‘over here’ and from public charge to private family, individuates her while simultaneously working to encrypt colonial histories in the domestic space of family and kinship relations.”32 While Grice and Eng address the Anglo-American context, I see their concerns as relevant in the German context to different degrees, especially when one takes into account how the category of race is treated in German ideas of cultural identity33—a cultural position that perceives itself and is often perceived as monolithically white. Marianne Novy has noted how diasporic experience and cultural heterogeneity come together in discussions of adoption in European and US American national and cultural spaces:

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The fact that France and Germany, for example, each included heterogeneous ethnic and cultural groups, has not been part of the French or German national mythology in the way that diversity has been in the United States, though in this time of global migrations both European countries are struggling with it. […] if immigrants have often been referred to as America’s adopted children, their teachers and their government deal with issues of accepting difference that are related to those that face adoptive parents (though the situation is even more complicated for the parents of children internationally adopted).34

I agree with Novy that Germany’s cultural imaginary is not quite elastic enough to include non-white Germans, who are immediately associated with distance and non-belonging in this cultural space—transracial adoption in German contexts, then, still poses a challenge to its mainstream perception of itself.35 At the same time, while the cultural space of the USA seems at ease with practices of transracial adoption, there are still challenges in how difference is perceived and treated—not just for US American societies but also for transracial adoptive parents themselves, who have to navigate their children’s obvious differences, as well as see how this is dealt with in the larger sociocultural contexts. Often white German attitudes to South Asian cultures and people have been noted to be at once condescending, Othering36 and exoticizing, whereby the discourse of the model minority has frequently been conferred on diasporic Germans with South Asian backgrounds. One prominent stereotype is that these groups exhibit levels of assimilation based on their economic successes and seeming acceptance of and ostensible indifference to the racism and xenophobia extant in contemporary German society, thus constructing them as the less threatening Other compared to many other non-white German groups.37 This German stance resonates in the depiction of the white German adoptive mother Monika; her reaction when she discovers that her adoptive daughter is dyslexic is a fraught moment: The Sonderschule. Sonder: different, strange. […] For Monika the phrase “Special Needs Education” was synonymous with “below standard”, “not quite good enough”, […]. She felt it as a personal reproach, as keenly as if she herself had created a less than standard being, she who could abide nothing less than perfection. […] Her children would go to the Gymnasium, and later to university; they would study Medicine, Law or Philosophy. Why not Jyothi? Indians were often highly successful in

236  C. Vogt-William those professions. […] True, Jyothi was adopted and she, Monika, was not genetically responsible for her brain, but still it was a letdown. Monika was a staunch believer in Nurture over Nature: she was convinced that environment played a stronger role than genetics in the development of a child. She still believed this. But it was obvious: they had found Jyothi too late, taken her away from her negative environment at a stage when it was no longer possible to undo the past. […] her hapless years of growing up in the slums had stamped their mark on her for life, and there was no reversal of their influence. The shadow of the past would reach far into Jyothi’s future […].38

This representation of Monika’s stance on the racialized Other from India illustrates an attitude towards a diasporic group which is tolerated with a “benign” form of racism based on stereotypes of abjection and barbarity conferred on subcontinental contexts. The adoptive child’s racial and cultural differences are conflated, and found lacking; she is Othered as uneducable, her learning disability is pathologized as a mental disability—read as an imperfection. At the same time, Monika seems to work with model minority stereotypes about Indians, while evaluating Jyothi’s past as an Indian slum child as a negative cultural influence with far-reaching consequences. Here in addition to the categories of race and gender, the rubric of class is salient in Monika’s evaluation of her child. Indeed, one cannot discount the possibility that Monika’s evident disappointment is symptomatic of her love for the child for whom she wants to ensure every possible success in her new home environment, after the deprivation the child had been subject to in her former home in Bombay’s slums.39 This adoptive mother fears that her child’s failures or weaknesses will be read by society as reflective of the decisions she herself has made and perhaps raise doubts as to her own abilities to cater for the needs of a child who is visibly marked as different from her. Such readings could underscore the lack of biological kinship and hence a lack of connection which ostensibly affects her capabilities to produce a “proper” German citizen. In Meena’s case, while Abby does not have cause to worry about Meena’s educational prowess,40 she is invested in inculcating cultural value systems and practices that are coded as “white American” in her daughter through imparting her own tastes in art, fashion, and social etiquette. At the same time, she realizes the value of Meena’s Indian

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cultural context, and tries to cater for this aspect of the child’s past by hiring a nanny: A handsome woman, not much for clothes or ornaments, her best feature was the gentleness that exuded from her face. One would hardly expect Auntie Bimla to be so serene, for her life had been filled with misfortunes. […] Like many in her predicament, she migrated to New Delhi and joined the Women’s Auxiliary […] Fluent in Hindi and several other Indian languages, Bimla soon acquired a working knowledge of English as well and in her spare time functioned as an interpreter for an American family as well. The Gossetts who were stationed in New Delhi at the time, met her through friends and hired her as Meena’s nanny. Later when asked to accompany the family to San Francisco, Bimla agreed readily. Only seven then, Meena’s heart still ached for Mataji, and she told Auntie Bimla all about her. […] Mataji, poor and not schooled but happy and loving, her lean silhouette outlined in a long flowing skirt, a play of colors, and a veil coming down to her nose. […] She was well spoken; her words were precise, with boundaries around them. Not a stray hair on her temple, not a silly notion in her head, very little laughter. That was Mom. And she was all for form. […] Little by little Auntie Bimla became her surrogate mother. Meena was the child she could never have. Like Mataji, she was strong and protective, always there in time of need. Meena began to trust her.41

Meena’s first years in the USA are, thus, shaped by the presence of this Indian woman who functions as her surrogate mother, while Abby’s own role as an adoptive mother is invested in ensuring Meena’s successful integration into US society. Abby distances herself from Meena’s natal context, in that she does not attempt to engage with the child’s past in order to help her deal with her traumatic losses. Instead, Auntie Bimla resurrects memories of Meena’s birth mother, speaks languages that Meena understands, and teaches her aspects of Indian culture that help Meena acquire some sense of her place of origin, while helping her to cope with the new home space. While the trope of diaspora may seemingly be embodied by Auntie Bimla, she is portrayed as a rather flat character, whose own negotiations of US cultural space are confined to her nanny’s role in the Gossett household (Auntie Bimla and Meena are cut off from other diasporic Indians). The Indian birth and surrogate mothers are set in contrast to Abby Gossett, who in her last words to Meena on her deathbed claims: “I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter than you.

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I know I made a lot of mistakes raising you, but I tried, Meena. At least I had sense enough to hire Bimla.”42 Apparently, this transracial adoptive relationship could only function up to a certain point, due to the work done by the Indian nanny to translate the child to her adoptive mother, while transmitting cultural knowledge to the child in order to give her a context to work with. Auntie Bimla’s flat characterization is underscored by her own death when Meena becomes a teenager.43 Just when the young girl plans to travel to India with her nanny to search for her past, this guide is removed from the narrative. With this second death (which takes place before Abby Gossett’s passing when Meena is 35), Meena reexperiences a trauma similar to the loss of her birth mother—which in turn interrupts her agenda of returning to India to piece together her past. My readings of these two examples from the novels are an attempt to engage with David Eng’s question: How do generalized narratives of salvation—from poverty, disease and the barbarism of the third world—often attached to narratives of transnational adoption, displace global and local histories of colonialism, military intervention, capitalist exploitation, racism and gender subordination?44

The narratives clearly articulate colonial stances that are based on intersectional readings of the transracial adoptees’ raced, gendered, and classed bodies. The white adoptive mothers’ perspectives in the texts represent highly ambivalent positions towards their adoptive children: although shot through with discourses of salvation, they do not displace global histories of colonialism, nor racist stereotyping. Abby revives the colonial figure of the Memsahib who depends on her Ayah to look after her children, while she enjoys the social recognition of her generosity to the young Indian girl, who fits in with her ideas of an acceptable and attractive form of abjection. Monika is caught up in her personal tragedy as a mother of a dyslexic daughter, which dovetails with her sense of herself as a savior for this adoptive child, who was to fill the childless void in her life. At the same time, she is disillusioned to note that the child’s abjection—aligned with Monika’s attitude towards Indians in general— is exacerbated by the learning disability which dashes her hopes for the child’s success, and hence her own.

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The Racialization of Intimacy and the Recognition of Motherhood Transracial adoptive children face constant vacillations between interpellations of “us” and “them” while dealing with what David Eng calls the racialization of intimacy—that is, the “simultaneous reinscription and containment, a whitewashing and effacing of this difference.”45 Such intimacy is constitutive of how the narratives stage the interior landscapes of the adoptive protagonists who are made conscious of their differences and the constant navigations by their adoptive parents and others, of their cultural, racial, gendered, and class positionings—well into adulthood. At the same time, the racialization of intimacy, where the transracial adoptive child’s position is submerged by white parental agendas which paint the transracial adoptive family situation as a successful culturally hybridized altruistic space, is contiguous with what Mark Jerng calls an ethics of recognition. The recognition of both the child’s needs and attempts to help shape the home space for herself may often be contiguous with, or may run counter to, the adoptive mother’s attempts to do the same while catering to her own need to be recognized as a mother. Jerng describes the ambivalence of such recognition: […] we see how the parents’ struggle for recognition of themselves is inseparable from their desire to construct a socially recognized identity for their child. Both these attempts collapse the parents’ desire to provide the conditions for their child’s recognition of themselves (in terms of their cultural origin) with their desire to recognize themselves as parents. Recognition exists in this way as a struggle between parent and child.46

While I do not discount the well-meaning intentions of providing orphaned or abandoned children with homes, security, and love, I am aware that a certain rhetoric of third world abjection attached to perceptions of India allows for white European and American self-constructions of altruism in these narratives. The narrative of abjection thus consistently accompanies personal desires for familial modes of belonging, where a transracially adopted child can prove a valuable accessory for white adoptive parents.

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Monika’s yearnings to be a mother are contingent on her desires to be recognized as the “normal” mother of a “normal family,” where this recognition is invested in effacing Jyothi’s racial and cultural difference: Above all, Monika had hoped for them to be a perfectly normal family. In the beginning, she simply refused to believe that Jyothi’s presence in their midst could make a difference: other people adopted children; adopted children belonged as much to the parents as biological children, it was the love and the attention that children received that made them an integral part of the family or not […]. Certainly Jyothi arrived with a real deficit on account of her lack of German, and her socialization in the Bombay slums. She had a lot to catch up with. But that’s what Monika and Jack were there for, for goodness sake, to help her with that effort, and the final goal of that combined effort was to assimilate Jyothi completely into their lives, to eradicate all traces of her unhappy past, and to be a living example to all the world of what gelungene Integration could be, a ‘successful integration’. Monika had harbored images of a happy, laughing little girl who just happened to be Indian playing in the midst of a throng of German neighbourhood children—how much more normal could you get? […] it was greatly to Monika’s chagrin when it became obvious to them and to the world at large that they were anything but a normal family. It just wasn’t working according to plan.47

The tensions raised in this portrayal of the white German adoptive mother oscillate between her love for her adopted child, and her anxious equating of the child’s past in the Mumbai slums with the girl’s ‘imperfections’ and her traumatised state. One notes in the concern with a “successful integration” that the child’s difference must be disciplined, erased even, so that the German mother can be validated both as a cultural subject and as a mother, to be neatly realigned in the normative discourses surrounding the nuclear family ideal.48 Thus, the child’s difference is represented as a problem that Monika needs to surmount in her bid for recognition (note how from Monika’s perspective Jyothi “just happened to be Indian”—an accidental ingredient thrown into the mix). Monika is convinced that Jyothi’s integration can be guaranteed by rendering her musical talent more visible than her “deficiencies.” The notion that success is the only way to construct a viable German self in this German context is troubling, in that Jyothi’s exceptional musical talent49 is considered the means by which all inferiorizing discourses can

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be refuted—thus other problems raised by racism, classism, ableism, and sexism, for example, are rendered invisible. Unlike Monika’s perspective which has been foregrounded in a thirdperson narrative voice in the main flow of the narrative in the German section, Abby Gossett’s perspective is accessible to the reader in diary entries (in the space of a few pages) that the adult Meena finds after her adoptive mother’s death. Patterns of cultural Othering can be found in Shiva Dancing, where the white adoptive mother’s desire for Meena is couched in language that constructs herself in the savior role; this representation of Abby Gossett’s desire also underscores her own loss of her son: There is something about Meena that draws me to her. I think I am coming to love her. Maybe in time she’ll feel differently. I must be patient. I’m not the cold person she thinks I am. […] Maybe I have forgotten what it’s like to raise a child. […] Maybe my heart has hardened since Lance’s death. […] What’s going to happen to this beautiful child? She’d have to live in a primitive village with bandits running around nearby. No, we can’t take her back. It would be like abandoning her. Besides Charlie and I have grown terribly attached to Meena and the thought of letting her go is simply unbearable. I don’t think I can stand to lose another child. We also think we can offer Meena a much better future. So we decided in the end that it’d be best for all concerned if we didn’t take her back. I know we are doing the right thing. […] I’m a little more relaxed now that I’ve hired Bimla as a nanny for Meena. […] What’s most important is that she’s multilingual in English, Hindi and Rajasthani. […] Meena’s still having difficulty adjusting […]. But who could blame her? But she doesn’t cry. She’s got to cry. I asked Bimla to talk to Meena. Bimla tells me Meena is a Rajput and Rajputs don’t cry. There is so much about this culture that I don’t understand. I feel like an alien, helpless and on the sideline. […] The police officer paid us a visit today. […] I told Charlie to tell the officer, “The girl doesn’t want to go back.” […] The officer accepted our answer and didn’t argue. […].50

These diary entries demonstrate Abby’s private struggles with Meena’s cultural differences, which seem insurmountable – note the irony of Abby’s feeling ‘like an alien, helpless and on the sideline’ which mirrors Meena’s own displacement and disorientation, but which do not seem to register with her adoptive mother. Abby places great importance on Meena’s proficiency in English, believing that this will provide her with access to the child—at the same time, Hindi and Rajasthani are recognized as part of her cultural heritage. As mentioned earlier, Bimla is the conduit through which Abby tries to engage with Meena

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on psychological and emotional levels—with little success. Despite these proactive measures, however, one notes that Abby withholds the option for Meena to return to her hometown when the police manage to find her village. Abby lies to the officer—and, thus, interrupts Meena’s Indian narrative. Abby’s own desire for Meena as a replacement for her dead son, as well as her own relief in hiring Bimla, illustrates, yet again, how her dreams of an intact, “normal” family are contingent on maintaining silence with regard to the child’s past. The two women’s reactions show, to varying degrees, how gendered identities of women hinge on continuities between how female selves are experienced according to expectations that shape women’s relationships with themselves and to others in their immediate and wider surroundings. Judith Rosenberger has remarked that discontinuity between such experiences and social expectations can raise conscious and unconscious conflicts in a woman’s self-perception, and her relations to the world around her, as well as her self-representation of “self-with-other.”51 I read such discontinuity with regard to the adoptive mother’s position in this adoption triad as resonating particularly with McLeod’s observation that “The adoptive mother lives in fear of the spectral hollowness of her claim to being a mother which would deny her right to fully embody this selfhood”52—a circumstance that is all the more fraught in the context of transracial adoptive motherhood. Such haunting fear in the white adoptive mother is imbricated in her perception of the relationship between her adoptive daughter and herself, based on the constructions of racial differences as cultural differences (that echo colonial cultural stereotyping, e.g. poverty-stricken, abject, incommensurably different). In the face of this fear of spectral hollowness, both white mothers in these novels, I note, retreat behind masks of severity and efficiency in their chosen methods of childrearing, which then reinforce existent forms of discontinuity and create forms of distance between their adoptive daughters and themselves. I read these distances in light of Sara Ahmed’s reading of race and space: The alignment of race and space is crucial to how they materialize as givens, as if each extends the other. In other words, while the “other side of the world” is associated with “racial otherness,” racial others become associated with the “the other side of the world.” They come to embody distance. […] This embodiment of distance is what makes “whiteness” […] the starting point for orientation. White becomes what is “here” […]

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which also makes what is “there” on “the other side.” […] whiteness is invisible and unmarked, as the absent center against which others appear only as deviants […]. We can ask how whiteness gets reproduced through acts of alignment […]. We can do this by thinking of whiteness as form of bodily inheritance.53

One notes that whiteness—as an indicator of racial and cultural belonging in Germany and the USA—is set up as the norm, from which “the other side of the world” (India, for my purposes here) “deviates.” Following Ahmed, then, the concept of movement and ideas of genealogy can be linked to the construction of whiteness as a normative racial vector marking the bodies of the adoptive mothers. Such embodied whiteness is subjected to scrutiny in these novels as a racial identity alongside the raced bodies of the adoptive Indian daughters—who are perceived as desirable in their appeal as children for these women, in order to construct themselves as mothers. This, then, begs the question as to whether the embodied maternal whiteness can be bequeathed at all to these adoptive daughters as a legacy of cultural (symbolic, if not material) capital.

Concluding Remarks I read these adoptive protagonists as being in a condition of perpetual diaspora, a constant oscillation between spaces which are ostensibly “home” and, yet, also “unhome.” Such precarity about homes has been articulated by American feminist scholars Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty: “Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within one’s self.54

In light of this more cautionary attitude to the concept of home, I am struck by the ever-present subterranean stamp of “unbelonging” through the marginal positioning of these children based on racialized readings of their bodies by their adoptive mothers in the home spaces into which they are inserted. I note that the questions of racial stereotyping,

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in the context of transracial adoption, are implicit in both novels’ conflation of racial and cultural difference, where tension is set up between white (German and American) family heritages and cultural backgrounds and the Indian cultural contexts of the adoptees. These texts are, thus, interesting exercises in imagining how transracial adoption further complicates the already complex situation of diasporic life with regard to questions of kinship systems, cultural heritages, and citizenship. Jyothi’s narrative of being a diasporic Indian in Europe is transplanted to England after Monika’s death—the potential of this mother-daughter dyad producing a viable South Asian German identity is interrupted. While displacement seems to be Jyothi’s lot in life, she adapts to this, since her musical talent on the violin provides her with a viable metaphorical and creative home space in which to root herself. She returns to India as a visitor in her adult years to reconnect with childhood memories and spaces; learning Indian music on the sitar provides her with yet another metaphorical belonging through music. As an adult, Meena works through and with her precarious Americanness as a form of productive displacement, while accessing her natal Rajasthani culture made possible through Auntie Bimla’s education. It is notable that her adoptive mother’s demise and the discovery of Abby’s deception in her diary allow Meena to pursue her interrupted Indian narrative and to find the people and the spaces that constitute this story, to reclaim what she had lost. Both these returns are temporary sojourns to reconnect with their interrupted narratives and reconcile with their life trajectories. These losses can also be read as potential beginnings for new narratives, where the adoptees can wield more influence in how such stories of the self can be shaped. Forms of belonging and modes of homing associated with transracial adoption are thus fraught with regard to agency, inclusion, and exclusion. As The Speech of Angels would have it, South Asian German positions are not viable as forms of Germanness and cannot be imagined as such—South Asian Germanness may indeed then be a travelling belonging that has not quite arrived in German cultural space as yet. Shiva Dancing invokes surrogate modes of access to South Asian natal cultural contexts in order to facilitate South Asian Americanness, as well as a regaining and reconstituting of South Asian narratives, lost during the messiness of the adoptive process. Thus, literary narratives about transracial adoption offer viable sites to interrogate diasporic space and the forms of transnational movement (actual and metaphorical) between adoptive and natal home spaces that are in themselves mobile cultural

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hybridities. In considering the productivity of reading transracial adoption as a form of diaspora, family alignments and ideas of kinship need to be re-evaluated and expanded, however vexed they are. These deserve to be acknowledged alongside putatively successful re-memberings of families not biologically related, where love may not be perfect, but interrupted life narratives need room to be reimagined and engaged with to reach some form of consensus within the self and the family.

Notes





1. David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialisation of Intimacy (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 94. I note that more recent novels dealing with constructions of family and home in the context of South Asian diasporic formations through transnational and transracial adoption, as well as related issues, like surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, include Shilpi Sowmaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter (2012), Kishwar Desai’s Origins of Love (2013), and Meera Syal’s The House of Hidden Mothers (2015). Such works broaden the range of literature by South Asian diasporic women writers and demonstrate the pertinence of Avtar Brah’s observation that “at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey […]. The question is not simply about who travels, but when, how and under what circumstances” (Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Gender, Race, Ethnicity) (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 182). 2. Discussions of the fathers’ perspectives would exceed the scope of this piece and will be examined on another occasion. The intersectional considerations of paternity as forms of masculinity representative of heteropatriarchal systems in South Asian and white European and US American contexts would be necessary for a more in-depth engagement with the dynamics of adoptive family politics. 3. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 94. 4. Mark Jerng, Claiming Others: Transnational Adoption and National Belonging (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv. 5. Rosemary George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 2. 6. Sharon Maas, The Speech of Angels (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 54–56; Bharti Kirchner, Shiva Dancing (New York: Plume Books, 1998), 12. 7. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 135–137; Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 59–60.

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8. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 215; Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 26–27, 64–65. 9. The aspect of commodification inheres with the accompanying exoticization of these children by virtue of their racial and cultural differences. Exoticism, contiguous with commodification in a postcolonial context, is defined by Graham Huggan as follows: “exoticism may be understood conventionally as an aestheticizing process through which the cultural other is translated, relayed back through the familiar” (The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), x.). 10. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 102–103; 128–129; 130–133; 196–198. 11. While this tradition definitely merits more attention, this would exceed the scope of this chapter at the present time. For more current discussions on child marriage in Rajasthan, see Syed Intishab Ali, “51% Girls Married Off in Rajasthan before Attaining Age of 18,” The Times of India, May 15, 2015, accessed November 6, 2016, http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/51-girls-married-off-in-Rajasthan-beforeattaining-age-of-18/articleshow/47290270.cms; Adrija Roychowdhury, “Rajasthan Hasn’t Grown Out of Child Marriage Traditions: Why Has Law Enforcement Failed?,” The Indian Express, September 22, 2016, accessed November 6, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/ research/rajasthan-hasnt-grown-out-of-child-marriage-traditions-whyhas-law-enforcement-failed/; see also the story of Vijayalaxmi Sharma of Bhojpura, Rajasthan, an activist who fights for the interests of young girls and women against the tradition of child marriage, “Her 13-YearOld Friend Died in Labour. So She Fights against Child Marriages Now,” The Better India, April 24, 2016, accessed November 6, 2016, at http:// www.thebetterindia.com/52998/vijaylaxmi-rajasthan-child-marriagesactivist/. More news coverage on the topic is available at NDTV.com, http://www.ndtv.com/topic/child-marriage-in-rajasthan. 12. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana E. Braziel, and Anita Mannur (Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1993] 2003), 244. 13. John McLeod, “Business Unbegun: Spectral Subjectivities in the Work of Jackie Kay and Pauline Melville,” in Postcolonial Ghosts, ed. Melanie Joseph-Vilain, and Judith Misrahi-Barak (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009), 183. 14. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 37–38. 15. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 87. 16.  Claire Alexander, “Diasporas, Race and Difference,” in Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, ed. Kim Knott and Sean McLoughlin (London: Zed Books, 2010), 112–117. 17. Alexander, “Diasporas, Race and Difference,” 113.

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18. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 19. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 208–209. 20. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 122–123. 21. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 60. 22. Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996), 1. 23. John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 8. 24. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 171. 25. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 83–84. 26.  Marianne Novy, ed., Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 2. 27. In ruminations on the race component in transracial adoption, alongside the awareness that race is primarily a social construct, it would be imperative to recognize that the category does influence the lives of racialized people. Paul Spickard and Jeffrey Burroughs remind us in their 2000 edited volume We are the People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), “the process of racial labelling starts with geography, culture and family ties and runs through politics and economics to biology” (3). 28.  Helen Grice, “Transracial Adoption Narratives: Prospects and Perspectives,” Meridians 5: 2 (2005): 124–125. 29. I do not necessarily advocate reading these works of fiction as forms of sociological evidence, but I do want to note diaspora literary scholar Vijay Mishra’s observation that “[t]he art of story-telling—fiction itself— is given a legitimacy here in so far as the means by which experiences otherwise lost may be captured” (The Literature of Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 180). Since I read these literary works as cultural productions furnishing critiques on sociopolitical contexts, I find myself working in line with another of Mishra’s observations that “the aesthetic becomes a site from which critical thinking can take place” (The Literature of Indian Diaspora, 149). 30. German scholars of color have commented on racism in Germany, noting the typical knee-jerk reaction from the majority white society that is the rejection of the extant operations of racist structures and racialization processes in the German cultural imaginary. For the most part, mainstream German society understands itself as liberal and “outsources” racism to either buried or “almost managed” pasts. Indeed, it is often relegated to right-wing organizations (which bear scrutiny in the current political climate). Just as often racist attitudes and language are packed

248  C. Vogt-William in ostensibly neutral terminology, while generally assuming that racialized Germans will not be able to tell the difference. See Kien Nghi Ha, Nicola Laure al-Samarai, and Sheila Mysorekar, eds. Re/Visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Colour auf Rassimus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland (Re/Visions: Postcolonial Perspectives from People of Color on Racism, Cultural Politics and Resistance in Germany) (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2007), 10. 31.  See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 93. 32. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 102–3. 33. For in-depth studies on racialized power differentials as interpretive perspectives in evaluating how race is operationalized in Germany, see the works of Maureen Maisha Eggers, Peggy Piesche, and others in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weissseinsforschung (Myths, Masks and Subjects: Critical Whiteness Studies), ed. Maureen Maisha Eggers et al.. (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2005). 34. Novy, Reading Adoption, 20, 22. 35.  Paul Mecheril uses the term “Andere Deutschen” (Other Germans) to describe people whose socialization has taken place for the most part in Germany, but who repeatedly experience in their interactions with mainstream German society that they do not correspond to the ideal of the “standard German.” This is because their parents (or one parent) come(s) from other cultural spaces and contexts. See Paul Mecheril, “Rassismuserfahrungen von Anderen Deutschen. Eine Einzelfallbetrachtung” (Experiences of Racism by Other Germans. A Case Study), in Andere Deutschen: Zur Lebenssituationen von Menschen multiethnicscher und multikultureller Herkunft (Other Germans: The Lives of People with Multiethnic and Multicultural Origins), eds. Paul Mecheril and Thomas Teo (Berlin: Dietz, 1997), 177. Urmila Goel locates Indian children adopted by German parents (read as white) in the category of “second-generation Indian.” This group of Indian Germans includes those who did not make the conscious decision to relocate to Germany, but were subject to their parents’ decisions to migrate, as well as those who are of mixed race origins with one Indian parent from the subcontinent. I note that Goel’s research deals with Indians whose religious affiliations are predominantly based in Hinduism and Syrian Christianity. See Urmila Goel, “Ausgrenzung und Zugehörigkeit” (Exclusion and Belonging), in masala.de: Menschen aus Südasien in Deutschland, (masala.de: People from South Asia in Germany), eds. Christiane Brosius und Urmila Goel (Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag, 2006), 127. The essay collection masala.de considers Tamil (Hindu),

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Muslim, Sikh, and Malayalee (Syrian Christian) perspectives from diasporic communities in Germany. 36.  Urmila Goel et al. have shown how the “Green Card Campaign” started by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (formerly of the Social Democratic Party) in 2000 had been designed to attract IT-savvy Indians from the subcontinent to migrate to Germany to help the country update its standards in computer technology and ease it into the internet age. A counter-campaign “Kinder statt Inder” was set up by the CDU/CSU (Christian Socialist Union) which served to shift public focus to Indians migrating to Germany, working with the stereotype of the computerliterate Indian who would accept a five-year visa to work to further develop Germany’s IT sector. At the same time, the campaign spread fears about a possible migration wave from the subcontinent. CDU/CSU minister Jürgen Rüttgers had criticized Schröder’s green card initiative: “Statt Inder an die Computer müssen unsere Kinder an die Computer” (Instead of setting Indians at the computer, our children should be at the computer). Rüttgers’ statement had been evaluated as racist—and is still a byword when discussing racist positions in German political contexts. See Spiegel Online, March 9, 2000, accessed November 5, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/kinder-statt-inder-ruettgers-verteidigt-verbalen-ausrutscher-a-68369.html. The “either /or” stance of the slogan “Kinder statt Inder” rendered second-generation Indian Germans, i.e. children of Indian migrants, invisible and disenfranchised (Urmila Goel, Jose Punnamparambil, Nisa PunnamparambilWolf, eds., InderKinder: Über das Aufwachsen und Leben in Deutschland (InderKinder: About Growing Up and Living in Germany) (Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag, 2012), 10. 37. Sun-ju Choi and Anke Illing describe this particular stereotypical representation of Indians in the German cultural imaginary which still does not recognize second-generation Indian Germans as Germans. These include how they appear “foreign” but are educated; they pursue “proper” professions and most of them have university degrees. They do not cause problems, whereby the obstacles and internal and external conflicts with which they are confronted are effaced, or resolved, in order to be assimilated into the mainstream. See Choi and Illing, “Scattered Wholes and Chosen Bits”: Deutsch-Indische Frauen der zweiten Generation, in masala.de, eds. Brosius and Goel, 209. Nivedita Prasad, Urmila Goel, and others have demonstrated that Indians in Germany occupy a range of positions which cannot be contained by such stereotypes, despite such widespread ideas about Indians. 38. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 175–176.

250  C. Vogt-William 39. A salient example that merits some examination would be the adoption scandal around Rubina Ali, the young actress from Mumbai’s slums, who played the child Latika in Danny Boyle’s award-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The young girl had ostensibly been offered for transnational adoption by her father in return for monetary compensation (see Murray Wardrop, “Father of Slumdog Millionaire Actress Rubina Ali Denies ‘Sale’ Claims,” The Telegraph, April 20, 2009, accessed November 5, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/5184499/Father-of-Slumdog-Millionaire-actressRubina-Ali-denies-sale-claims.html. See also “India Probes ‘Slumdog’ Star Scandal,” Variety, April 21, 2009, accessed November 5, 2016, http://variety.com/2009/film/news/india-probes-slumdog-star-scandal-1118002653/). This scandal which pathologizes poverty-stricken Indian parenthood—paternity in particular—tends to efface other forms of commodification and possible exploitation undertaken by the filmmakers, whereby Rubina Ali and her other child co-stars had to return to this poverty for some years, before they acquired monetary and material remittance. (See Kavitha Iyer, “Years Later, ‘Slumdog’ Child Stars Rubina and Azhar Still Have a Lifeline,” The Indian Express, January 5, 2016, accessed November 5, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ mumbai/rewind-years-later-slumdog-child-stars-rubina-and-azhar-stillhave-a-lifeline/.). 40. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 26. 41. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 58–60. 42. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 65. 43. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 63. 44. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 102. 45. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 117. 46. Jerng, Claiming Others, 172. 47. Maas, The Speech of Angels, 180–181. 48. See Adrienne Rich, “The Domestication of Motherhood,” in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 110–127. 49. One notes, in the course of the narrative, that Jyothi is encouraged to play European classical music to the exclusion of Indian music—this too is a gauge of integration. An interesting aspect in Jyothi’s subsequent development after her mother’s death is that she does not identify in any way as German—her musical proficiency is her only tie to her adoptive mother who had facilitated a temporary form of Asian German belongingness, fraught as it was with this mother’s own insecurities. Despite this particular manifestation of an Asian German identity, effected through her music, which had been encouraged by her adoptive mother, Jyothi

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is nevertheless ambivalent about her music. This one site where she had been able to construct a kind of home is still experienced as a lack—she is only able to compensate this lack later to a certain degree, when she returns to India for a visit and learns to play the sitar (Maas, The Speech of Angels, 414–420). 50. Kirchner, Shiva Dancing, 88–89. 51.  Judith Rosenberg, “Female Kin: Functions of Meta-Identification of Womanhood,” in The Mother-Daughter Relationship: Echoes through Time, ed. Gerd H. Fenchel (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998), 63. 52. McLeod, “Business Unbegun,” 183. 53. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 121. 54. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin, “What’s Home Got to Do with It?,” in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 90.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London and Durham: Duke University Press Publisher, 2006. Alexander, Claire. “Diasporas, Race and Difference.” In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities. Edited by Kim Knott, and Sean McLoughlin, 112–17. London: Zed Books, 2010. Alexander, Meena. The Shock of Arrival. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Gender, Race, Ethnicity). London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Brosius, Christiane, and Urmila Goel, eds. masala.de: Menschen aus Südasien in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Eng, David. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialisation of Intimacy. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Eggers, Maureen Maisha, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, and Susan Arndt, eds. Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weissseinsforschung. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2005. George, Rosemary. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1999.

252  C. Vogt-William Goel, Urmila, Jose Punnamparambil, Nisa Punnamparambil-Wolf, eds. InderKinder: Über das Aufwachsen und Leben in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Draupadi Verlag, 2012. Grice, Helen. “Transracial Adoption Narratives: Prospects and Perspectives.” Meridians 5: 2 (2005): 124–48. Ha, Kien Nghi, Nicola Laure al-Samarai, and Sheila Mysorekar, eds. Re/Visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Colour auf Rassimus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2007. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, edited by Jana E. Braziel and Anita Mannur, 233–47 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1993] 2003). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Jerng, Mark C. Claiming Others: Transnational Adoption and National Belonging. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kirchner, Bharti. Shiva Dancing. New York: Plume Books, 1999. Maas, Sharon. The Speech of Angels. London: HarperCollins Publishers. 2003. McLeod, John. “Business Unbegun: Spectral Subjectivities in the Work of Jackie Kay and Pauline Melville.” In Postcolonial Ghosts, edited by Melanie JosephVilain and Judith Misrahi-Barak, 179–94. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009. McLeod, John. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Mecheril, Paul. “Rassismuserfahrungen von Anderen Deutschen. Eine Einzelfallbetrachtung”. In Andere Deutschen: Zur Lebenssituationen von Menschen multiethnicscher und multikultureller Herkunft, edited by Paul Mecheril and Thomas Teo, 175–201. Berlin: Dietz, 1997. Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, and Biddy Martin. “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” In Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 85–105. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Novy, Marianne, ed. Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Novy, Marianne. Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Rich, Adrienne. “The Domestication of Motherhood.” In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 110–27 New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.

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Rosenberger, Judith. “Female Kin: Functions of Meta-Identification of Womanhood.” In The Mother-Daughter Relationship: Echoes through Time, edited by Gerd H. Fenchel, 63–78. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998. Spickard, Paul, and Jeffrey Burroughs, eds. We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994.

Author Biography Christine Vogt-William completed her Ph.D. on contemporary diasporic ­women’s writing at the University of York, UK. She is the author of Bridges, Borders and Bodies: Transgressive Transculturality in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Novels (2014). Her research interests include diasporic and postcolonial literatures, with especial focus on critical race and queer frameworks, as well as fantasy and gothic literatures. She has taught at the Universities of Münster and Freiburg, Germany. From 2014 to 2017, she was interim professor for Postcolonial and Gender Studies in the English and American Studies Departments at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is currently working on her second book, a study of biological twinship in Anglophone literatures.

CHAPTER 11

“A daughter three thousand miles off”: Transcultural Adoption in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World Jane Weiss

On December 18, 1850, a book reviewer for the New York Commercial Advertiser noted the publication of “an American novel in two v­ olumes with a decidedly religious character, displaying a very considerable knowledge of the world and its many phased people. It will be popular unless we are much mistaken.”1 This novel, The Wide, Wide World, by Susan Warner, won reviewers’ praise for its depictions of domestic daily life in busy New York City, and isolated country villages, pioneering a regionalist strain of realism interwoven with commentary on the theological controversies of the era. Although the religious themes that galvanized American readers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, sectarian and highly technical controversies about election and predestination, have not held up very well for most readers in the twenty-first century, Warner’s study of dislocation and adaptation in the novel continues to strike resonant chords.

J. Weiss (*)  English Department, Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_11

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Notwithstanding its title (and the frontispiece on many editions, an illustration of a sailing ship tossed on stormy seas), three-quarters of The Wide, Wide World is set in the places where the author, Susan Warner, spent her childhood: downtown New York City, and the rural hills of Columbia County, also in New York State, about 100 miles north of the city—not a very wide sector of the world, although for the orphaned heroine, the small geographical ambit comprises vast social and emotional territories. In the last quarter of The Wide, Wide World, Warner inserted a plot twist justifying the literal sense of the title, and adding an exotic flavor for Warner’s American audience: the orphan heroine in adolescence is summoned by wealthy relatives in Scotland, suddenly plucked from America, where she has been living with friends who adopted her, and shipped across the Atlantic where “the little specimen of the backwoods of America” charms the aristocratic Scottish kin.2 The Wide, Wide World became an unprecedented best seller in England and Scotland as well as in the United States, going through 14 editions by the end of 1852, selling some 40,000 copies in its first year of publication and 225,000 by 1860.3 Nor was the book’s appeal limited to American readers; multiple pirated editions appeared in London simultaneously. French and German translations sold briskly and Polish, Danish, and Swedish translations followed, and the novel remained continuously in print for over 100 years.4 With the exception of a few episodes—including the Scottish interlude in The Wide, Wide World—Warner based the settings and descriptive details in her novels solidly on the regions and people that she knew best. Born in 1819, Warner grew up in a wealthy and socially connected family in New York City. When Warner was seven years old, her loving and sympathetic mother died, a shattering blow for a sensitive child. Her family’s social life eventually resumed; she and her sister attended lessons at the house of Elizabeth Jumel and took tea with Julia Lloyd (later Howe). Visits to the family farm in Canaan, New York, near the Massachusetts border, were pleasant interludes; Warner recorded in her diary treats like gathering hickory nuts and chestnuts to roast on a fire. The idyll came to a sudden end when Warner was 18; amid the famous Panic of 1837, Warner’s father’s real-estate investments soured. Further mismanagement bankrupted the family. The Warners sold their New York City town house on St Mark’s Place and moved to their remaining property, a house on an island in the Hudson River about fifty miles north of the city.5 Some twelve lean years later, Warner resolved to write “a book that would sell” to pay the

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family’s debts and earn a living.6 The Wide, Wide World fulfilled those hopes, becoming the first American novel to sell a million copies.7 Warner subsequently produced 28 further novels before her death in 1885. The Wide, Wide World can be categorized as a Bildungsroman, depicting the adolescence of a girl, Ellen Montgomery, who is “thrown upon the ‘wide world,’ to wrestle with various trials and tribulations,” as Sarah Josepha Hale put it in her review for Godey’s Lady’s Book, and who learns to accept and manage the varying situations that providence assigns to her.8 Over the course of the novel, Ellen is taken into several different homes. First, when Ellen’s parents move from New York City to France because of her mother’s failing health and her father’s financial embarrassment, she is bundled off at the age of nine to live with her father’s half-sister. Ellen’s aunt, the wonderfully named Miss Fortune Emerson, is unsympathetic and relentlessly practical. On the farm in upstate New York, Ellen, who has previously lived in urban luxury, deals with deprivation, loneliness, and plain hard work. Miss Fortune dismisses Ellen’s wish for education as “all those crinkumkrankums,”9 affectations that interfere with practical housekeeping and farming. After some years, Ellen’s parents die without returning from abroad. A refined and spiritual young woman, Alice Humphreys, befriends and mentors Ellen; Ellen deeply loves Alice and Alice’s father and brother, who are both evangelical Protestant ministers. Warner conceives the Humphreys family as moderate, Middle Way Calvinism in microcosm; whereas Mr. Humphreys and John teach Calvinist rigor, Alice mitigates their stern theology through unstinting sympathy and gentleness, promising Ellen, “You shall be my little sister, and I will be your elder sister, and my home shall be your home as well.”10 Upon Alice’s death, Mr. Humphreys tells Ellen, “You have been a comfort to me,” and Ellen becomes “the adopted child of the house”11; Alice’s brother assures Ellen, “I will not let you forget that I am your brother.”12 In the last quarter of The Wide, Wide World, Ellen is uprooted yet again at the age of fourteen. Belatedly, Ellen is given a letter from her mother that her aunt had withheld from her for several years, informing Ellen that Ellen’s mother has arranged for her to go to live with her formerly estranged grandmother, Mrs. Lindsay, in Scotland. “She will take you to her heart, to the place I once filled, and I believe fill yet,” Ellen’s mother writes. “She longs to have you, and to have you as entirely her own, in all respects; and to this […] I am willing and he is willing to agree. It is arranged so. The old happy home of my childhood will be yours, my Ellen.”13 Reluctant but obedient, Ellen crosses

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the Atlantic to her wealthy, sophisticated relatives, where she is “the plaything, pride, and delight of the whole family.”14 This Scottish episode that ends the published edition of the novel puzzled some nineteenth-century reviewers and many twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics on a variety of counts. Reviewers contemporary with Warner treated the premise of transatlantic adoption as unexceptionable, but had qualms about the portrait of Ellen’s adoptive family: the reviewer for the New York Daily Times wrote, “The utter worldliness of a family like the Lindsays, in pious Scotland, made us stare.”15 More recent critics have laden the ending with wildly conflicting symbolic freight, generally fitting the episode into the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman while attributing significance to the heroine’s dislocation from her roots and her acclimation to the relatives who adopt her. Marianne Noble interprets the Scottish episode as the climax of the heroine’s quest “to completely subjugate her corporeal self”: the geographically far-flung ending, Noble claims, “exemplifies how masochism is a way of finding erotic pleasure within the oppressive confines of true womanhood.”16 Stacey Margolis argues that Ellen’s ordeal is “marked by a kind of spectacular disorientation and equally spectacular need for judgment” in which “Ellen demands punishment as a part of an ongoing process of self-analysis.”17 Similarly, Cindy Weinstein says that Ellen’s “virtual incarceration in Scotland represents the culmination of her experiences of abjection (some of which produce pleasure, others pain) which begins with the maternal embrace of Mrs. Montgomery, proceeds to the icy handshake of Aunt Fortune, and moves on to the confusing adoration of the Lindsays.”18 Conversely, Grace Ann Hovet and Theodore R. Hovet argue that Ellen both “wants to assert her right to a private life” and “also wants to extend the relational ethos to the Lindsays,” learning to negotiate these contradictory imperatives.19 Elizabeth Fekete Trubey, setting the Scottish episode in the context of the theological debates that run throughout The Wide, Wide World, perceives the ending as opportunities for the heroine to test and vindicate her faith.20 Sharon Kim associates Ellen’s travels with the paradigm of the title character of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who must rebuild his life from scratch in exile following a shipwreck: Warner structures The Wide, Wide World utilizing a complex typology, Kim notes, to vivify the theological argument that “supplies its bones and blood.”21 In each of these interpretations, the Scottish episode underscores Warner’s interpretation of American domesticity rather than being about international adoption per se.

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Yet issues specifically relevant to transnational and transcultural adoption are the crux of the Scottish section of The Wide, Wide World; the novel both reflects and critiques a long literary tradition of adoption narratives. As Marianne Novy remarks, adoption plots in canonical literature and mythology have hewed to relatively few formulaic story arcs. In the longest-established tradition of classical myth and drama, Novy writes, “adoption is a fiction and the biological family is real.”22 Such narratives can only culminate either in disaster or in a happy reunion of the “real” family. In more recent literary works, Novy observes, authors acknowledge the possibility of the “happy adoption,” in which “the ending is the confirmation of adoptive parenthood.”23 The Wide, Wide World complicates these conventional plotlines through the multiple and sometimes simultaneous adoptions that run through the novel. The immense complexity of the family that Warner has imagined for Ellen speaks to John McLeod’s vibrant conceptualization of “adoptive being,” an active, creative construction of a self that expands beyond the “prevailing scripts.”24 Warner’s narrative exemplifies McLeod’s assertion that “transcultural adoption stubbornly puts back in play theoretically thorny and discomfiting discussions of roots, race, and natalism.”25 Ellen’s family becomes one in which, to borrow McLeod’s words, “‘being with’ can be thought of as textile, like a firm knot with many strands.”26

“It is well you have come from the Americans”: Transnational Adoption versus National Identity The test of Ellen’s sense of self in the Scottish episode hinges on the Lindsays’ insistence that she “belongs” to them, foreshadowed in her mother’s letter: “She longs to have you, and to have you as entirely her  own.”27 Ellen’s initial response is consternation, feeling “as though her head would split. She took up that letter, gazed at the strange name and direction that had taken such new and startling interest for her, wondered over the thought of what she was ordered to do with it.”28 Her filial duty collides with her sense of “belonging” to people whose love she has earned: “‘I have promised Alice,’ thought Ellen;—‘I have promised Mr. Humphreys—I can’t be adopted twice. […] What ought I to do? These people in Scotland must have given me up by this time; it’s— let me see—it’s just about three years now,—a little less,—since these ­letters  were written. I am older now, and circumstances are changed;

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I have a home and a father and a brother. May I not judge for myself?” Filial compliance—“my mother and my father have ordered me”—­ competes with the adoptive family Ellen has already chosen for herself. Ellen decides that duty lies in obedience to the letter, but resolves to stay with the Lindsays only “till I am old enough to choose for myself […] and then I shall come back.”29 In his farewell, Mr. Humphreys assures her, “My dear little daughter, you cannot be so glad to come back as my arms and my heart will be to receive you. I scarce dare hope to see that day, but all this house is yours, dear Ellen, as well when in Scotland as here. I take back nothing, my daughter. Nothing is changed.” Ellen thinks, “He called me his daughter!—He never said that before since Alice died! Oh, so I will be as long as I live, if I find fifty new relations. But what good will a daughter three thousand miles off do him!”30 Ellen’s arrival in Scotland exacerbates the tangle of familial loyalties and confusion of identity. To her Scottish grandmother and uncle, adoption does not simply mark consanguinity but rather confers absolute possession: “Along with the joy and tenderness arising from the finding a relation that so much loved and valued her, and along with the sympathy that entered into Mrs. Lindsay’s thoughts, there mixed other feelings. She began to know, as if by instinct, what kind of a person her grandmother was. The clasp of the arms that were about her said as plainly as possible, ‘I will never let you go!’”31 This embrace endows Ellen with an entrée into the Lindsay family’s country seat near Edinburgh, which is “handsome, comfortably, luxuriously furnished; but without any attempt at display. Things rather old-fashioned than otherwise; plain, even homely in some instances; yet evidently there was no sparing of money in any line of use or comfort; nor were reading and writing, painting and music, strangers there.”32 For a twenty-first-century reader, such frank acknowledgment of the material benefits of life as the Lindsays’ adopted child may be disconcerting. In the unflattering contrast between Ellen’s affluent adopters in Scotland and the rustic aunt Fortune Emerson and Mr. Van Brunt, Kristin Van Tassel perceives an erosion of the Revolutionary-era appreciation for yeoman agrarianism that had been championed by Thomas Jefferson—“those who labour in the earth are the chosen of God”—and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who praised “good substantial independent farmers.”33 Warner’s pragmatic narrative challenges romantic rhetoric in which a wealthier, more privileged adoptive family is no consolation for loss of one’s “own” family.

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The trenchant complication is that the luxuries the Lindsays provide for Ellen are in some ways authentically satisfying. Warner, scarred by poverty and isolation herself, was willing to call into question the literary idyll casting agrarian toil as invariably more virtuous and edifying than urban sophistication. Through adoption by the relatives in Scotland, Ellen revels in “[school] masters and mistresses, books and instruments.”34 Like Washington Irving, irresistibly drawn by Europe’s “charms of poetical and storied association […] where every mouldering stone was a chronicle,”35 Ellen is enraptured by the historic sites in Edinburgh, including Holyrood House, which she had envisioned through literature: “isn’t that where Queen Mary’s rooms are? where Rizzio was killed?” Meticulous details articulate Ellen’s fulfillment when she steps into the Old World; Warner, whose father’s bankruptcy destroyed any chance of a “grand tour,” writes that Ellen “pored over the old furniture, the needle-work of which she was told was at least in part the work of the Queen’s own fingers; gazed at the stains in the floor of the bed-chamber said to be those of Rizzio’s own blood; meditated over the trap-door in the passage, by which the conspirators had come up; and finally sat down in the room and tried to realize the scene which once had been acted there.”36 Even better is the old chapel: “this was much older still than Queen Mary’s rooms. Ellen admired the wild melancholy look of the gothic pillars and arches springing from the green turf, the large carved window empty of glass, the broken walls.”37 In the Lindsays’ own house, the possibilities for culture and education, and the physical comforts, also far exceed anything available to Ellen in the hardscrabble country village she has come from. As the Lindsays’ adoptive daughter, Ellen takes “great joy” in “a pretty little room” outfitted “for her special use as a study and work-room” with “a small bookcase, a practicing piano, and […] her beloved desk took its place on a table in the middle of the floor, where Ellen thought she would make many a new drawing while she was by herself. Her workbox was accommodated with a smaller stand near the window.” She arranges her room “with marvellous satisfaction,” wanting only a “glass of flowers.”38 As Sara E. Quay notes, the missing “glass of flowers” connotes Ellen’s memory of Alice Humphreys and Ellen’s sense of loss.39 Yet Ellen adds, “I will have that too, some of these days,” and resolves “to deserve her pretty room by being very busy there.”40 Ellen enjoys “intelligent, cultivated, well-informed, people, whose conversation was

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highly agreeable and always useful to her.”41 So enthusiastic is Warner’s prose in describing the material and cultural riches of the Lindsays, in fact, that Warner’s contemporary, Sarah Josepha Hale, in her review of The Wide, Wide World in Godey’s Lady’s Book, exclaimed, “Has our author never met with refined, educated, well-bred people in America? Or has her lot been cast in some border settlement, where the inhabitants are still struggling with the first elements of civilization, obliging her, if she wished to paint elements of an elevated stamp, to select them from foreign models?”42 But even Hale concedes that the “Scottish relations, although lacking in vital religion, are not persons to call forth our contempt.” Moreover, Warner makes clear that luxury and sophistication certainly exist in the United States. Rather, the possibilities available to Ellen in the United States have been constrained by her particular and complicated circumstances, duties, and affections, and this transcultural adoption realizes some of her deepest yearnings. The transatlantic adoption juxtaposes national loyalties in a comedy of manners, anticipating Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, and several of the works of Henry James (who reviewed Warner’s novels for The Nation early in his career), and like those works carries some darker undertones.43 Confident of the superiority of first world culture and their own riches, the Lindsays denigrate Americans as primitives, condescendingly voicing their surprise that Ellen is literate and speaks proper English: “To think,” said the latter the next morning at breakfast—“to think that the backwoods of America should have turned us out such a little specimen of”— “Of what, uncle?” said Ellen, laughing. “Ah, I shall not tell you that,” said he. “But it is extraordinary,” said Lady Keith, “how after living among a parcel of thick-headed and thicker tongued Yankees she could come out and speak pure English in a clear voice; it is an enigma to me.” “Take care, Catherine,” said Mr. Lindsay, laughing, “you are touching Ellen’s nationality; look here,” said he, drawing his fingers down her cheek. “She must learn to have no nationality but yours,” said Lady Keith somewhat shortly.44

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Does adoption require erasure of one’s prior nationality? The Lindsays believe that Ellen must shed her American identity, but patriotic fervor validates Ellen’s resistance to their authority. Mr. Lindsay tells Ellen, “It is as well that you have come out from the Americans, you see, Ellen; your aunt does not like them.” When Ellen asks why, her uncle says with mock gravity that Americans are “a parcel of rebels who have broken loose from all loyalty and fealty, that no good Briton has any business to like.” He accuses her in jest of being “one of those who make a saint of George Washington,” and Ellen rises fervently to Washington’s defense, calling him “a good deal better than some of the saints.” Her uncle calls her “a little rebel yourself”; Ellen assures him, “If I had been in the American army, I would have fought you with all my heart.” Mr. Lindsay replies, “You fight! You don’t look as though you could do battle with a good-sized mosquito.” The banter is good-natured, yet there is a level of truth to Mr. Lindsay’s mock reproach; Ellen’s American “rebel” identity fortifies her against absorption into her uncle’s clan. Ellen’s aunt “discontentedly” remarks, “I hope Ellen will get rid of these strange notions about the Americans.”45 Lady Keith’s discontent is rooted in what Warner presents as an Old World, antidemocratic culture of caste and hierarchy. In her prior life in America, Ellen has performed manual work that Lady Keith believes is demeaning. She is appalled at Ellen’s blushing admission that in Aunt Fortune’s household, “I had to sweep and dust,—and set tables,—and wash and wipe dishes,—and churn, and spin,—and—.”46 Ellen is nonplussed to discover that her hard-earned expertise at tasks such as skimming cream, patching clothes, and darning stockings, chores that she herself has disliked and resented when she lived with her aunt in upstate New York, is a subversive trait for an adoptee in the Lindsays’ aristocratic milieu because her proficiency at menial tasks is seen by the Lindsays as obnoxiously American, an echo of Benjamin Franklin’s injunction that “According to these opinions of the Americans, one of them would think himself more oblig’d to a genealogist, who could prove for him that his ancestors and relations for ten generations had been ploughmen, smiths, carpenters, turners, weavers, tanners, or even shoemakers, and consequently that they were useful members of Society; than if he could only prove that they were gentlemen, doing nothing of value, but living idly on the labour of others.”47 The same skills that Ellen had struggled to master in order to fit into her earlier adoptive situation now mark her as an Other, a stranger. Ellen further confirms Lady Keith’s misgivings

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by democratically preferring the company of the Lindsays’ housekeeper, whose Presbyterian beliefs fortify Ellen and who, in yet another adoption, refers to her as “my ain bairn.”48 Because they consider manual labor and education mutually exclusive, Ellen’s aunt and uncle also express surprise that she has read historical accounts by Burke and has studied French and equitation, dubiously asking, “So you did read in the backwoods?”49 Expecting the deficiencies of a rudimentary or primitive education, the Lindsays discount Ellen’s level of intellectual cultivation in America. The specifically American character of Ellen’s studies has enabled her to appreciate and utilize her advantages, even as her “backwoods” identity arouses her new family’s misgivings. One evening, Ellen listens to a discussion between Mr. Lindsay and two French-speaking gentlemen “about Lafayette; from him they went on to the American Revolution, and from them to other patriots and other republics, ancient and modern;—M. M. Villars and Muller taking the side of freedom and pressing Mr. Lindsay hard with argument, authority, example, and historical testimony. Ellen as usual was fast by his side, and delighted to see that he could by no means make good his ground.”50 Ellen is “much engrossed” by the discussion because it is “on a subject very interesting to her; for America had always been a darling theme; Scottish struggles for freedom were fresh in her mind.” The Swiss gentleman forgets the name of “the noted battle” in Switzerland’s liberation from Austria; Ellen volunteers it, “Morgarten, monsieur,” and Mr. Lindsay is “little less astounded than the Duke of Argyle when his gardener claimed to be the author of a book on mathematics.”51 M. Muller becomes Ellen’s tutor and friend: “Ellen soon found she might ask him as many questions as she pleased, that were at all proper to the subject they were upon; and he, amused and interested, was equally willing and able to answer her. Often when not particularly busy he allowed her hour to become two. Excellent hours for Ellen.”52 Another of Ellen’s Americanstyle skills—her ability as a horsewoman—also proves, to her surprise, a valuable currency in the Lindsays’ society. When given a placid mount, she says candidly, “I don’t call this riding”; when “mounted on a fine animal, and set by herself to have her skill tried,” she distinguishes herself by recognizing that her horse takes the wrong lead at a canter, and jumping her horse “with standing and running leaps, higher and higher.”53

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“Am I beginning to lose my truth?” Challenging Cultural Norms as a Transcultural Adoptive Subject Triumphs such as this equestrian display compete in Ellen’s psyche with the recognition that the opportunities afforded by the transnational adoption are contingent on her acquiescence that she “belong,” as an object, to her grandmother and uncle, who requires that she refer to him as her father. Unlike many transcultural adoptees, Ellen does not suffer from a sense of not belonging. Rather, she has mixed feelings about the fact that she is a belonging: “You are my own child now, you are my little daughter, do you know that, Ellen? I am your father henceforth; you belong to me entirely, and I belong to you; my own little daughter!” “I wonder how many times one may be adopted?” thought Ellen that evening; “but to be sure, my father and my mother have quite given me up here, that makes a difference; they had a right to give me away if they pleased. I suppose I do belong to my uncle and grandmother in good earnest, and I cannot help myself. Well! but Mr. Humphreys seems a great deal more like my father than my Uncle Lindsay. I cannot help that, but how they would be vexed if they knew it!”54

They are indeed “vexed”; Ellen’s devotion to the Humphreys family who have already adopted Ellen as “theirs” and to her nationality remains a sore point. Her uncle commands, “Forget that you were American, Ellen, you belong to me; your name is not Montgomery any more, it is Lindsay; and I will not have you call me ‘uncle’—your father; you are my own little daughter, and must do precisely what I tell you. Do you understand me?”55 The demand that Ellen renounce her history and her memory crosses a line. Acknowledging the request, Ellen thinks, “I shall do precisely what he tells me, of course, but there are some things he cannot command; nor I neither; I am glad of that! Forget indeed!”56 Ellen’s quiet, internal insubordination is a major turning point in the novel, the first time that Warner justifies Ellen in resisting a legitimate human authority, because, as Ellen recognizes, she cannot be required to annul her affection for those who have earned her love. One adoption, Warner concludes, does not cancel a prior one.

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Cultural and societal norms, parental authority, and personal conscience next collide when Ellen’s uncle, now her adoptive father, requests that she drink wine: “That glass of wine looked to Ellen like an enemy marching up to attack her. Because Alice and John did not drink it, she had always, at first without other reason, done the same; and she was determined not to forsake their example.”57 After her uncle repeats the command, she consumes the wine; her uncle then invites her to look through the bookcases and portfolios of fine art prints, or explore the house freely. Ellen muses, “I have called him my father—I am bound to obey him after this. I wonder what in the world they will make me do next.” Like the command to discard her affection for Mr. Van Brunt and the Humphreys family, this line of reasoning leads Ellen not to acquiescence, but to at least a possibility of refusal: “If he chooses to make me drink wine every day, I must do it!—I cannot help myself. That is only a little matter. But what if they were to want me to do something wrong?—they might;—John never did—I could not have disobeyed him, possibly!—but I could them, if it was necessary,— and if it is necessary, I will!”58 Obedience and command are a part of what is at issue: Ellen’s biogenetic yet adoptive family expect a level of unquestioning, unreasoning obedience that her previous adoptive family never demanded. But an equally significant aspect of Ellen’s bewilderment is the different, foreign set of cultural norms that the Lindsays take for granted. Temperance, which in upstate New York has been the standard set by the people Ellen has admired and loved, is suddenly and incomprehensibly a faux pas, a breach of convention marking Ellen as an outsider. Traumatized, she has a wild nightmare: “She thought that John was a king of Scotland, and standing before her in regal attire. She offered him, she thought, a glass of wine; but, raising the sword of state, silver scabbard and all, he with a tremendous swing of it, dashed the glass out of her hands; and then, as she stood abashed, he went forward with one of his old grave kind looks to kiss her. As the kiss touched her lips, Ellen opened her eyes, to find her brother transformed into Mr. Lindsay, and the empty glass standing safe and sound upon the table.”59 The wild metamorphosis indexes the level of Ellen’s disturbance. The history of Scotland, the iconography of Protestantism, and the violence of the shattered glass merge in a Gothic moment as Ellen’s norms fracture and reset. In this intersection of conflicting familial and societal traditions, even a subject so seemingly benign as church attendance is a minefield. The Calvinist beliefs which the Humphreys, Ellen’s foster family in New York, have nurtured in her, mesh poorly with the Lindsays’ Old World emphasis

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on formal religious gesture. Mr. Lindsay is startled by Ellen’s desire to attend afternoon church services: “You have been once today, haven’t you?” To win Mr. Lindsay’s permission, Ellen implies that she wishes to sight-see in Edinburgh, then bitterly regrets the small deceit, which according to the Humphreys’ Calvinist theology constitutes grave sin. Accordingly, confession and repentance rapidly ensue. In consternation at her lack of moral moorings in the new environment, Ellen cries, “Am I beginning to lose my truth? Am I going backward already? Oh, what shall I do? What will become of me?”60 In the environment in which the Lindsays’ adoption has deposited Ellen, every decision based on her former knowledge now seems wrong. After attending the church service, Ellen apologizes to Mr. Lindsay for her misleading remark. He responds with incomprehension, and rebukes her when she confides that she is “feeling sorry” because she misses John Humphreys. Mr. Lindsay asks, scornfully, “Who is that?” Ellen answers, “You know, sir,—you say I must not call him—.” This stammered response reiterates her claim that John is her real brother, her real kindred. Mr. Lindsay’s incredulous query, “This person you call your brother—do you mean to say you have the same regard for him as if he had been born so?” elicits a rare defiant outburst: “No, but a thousand times more!”61 He asks, “What shall I do to make you forget these people? I am not satisfied to have your body here and your heart somewhere else,” and Ellen rejoins, “I must have a poor little kind of heart, if it had room for only one person.”62 She negotiates again when her grandmother demands that Ellen sleep in the grandmother’s room to prevent Ellen from engaging in prayer and reading; Ellen resolves, “I will do what I think right, come what may”63 and “after a while” is “restored to her own sleeping-room again, and permitted to return to her former habits.”64 The confusing nexus of consanguinity and adoption, multiple family affiliations and spiritual compasses, replaces verities with ad hoc decisions. Ellen’s acculturation gives birth to a hybrid version of herself. While she revels in elegant clothes, savory food, a carriage that “rolled smoothly” and fine horses, even a “beautiful little watch,” she recognizes that the amenities provided by her new (or rather old) family entail acquiescence toward the Lindsay family’s mores, and suspension if not outright sacrifice of her previous family. The fine watch has been proffered by Mr. Lindsay as a consolation prize after he has confiscated a book of Ellen’s which has aroused his suspicions because “it is from that person that seems to have obtained such an ascendency over her—it is full of his notes—it is a religious work.”65 The confiscation precipitates

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another struggle and negotiation. Ellen “with some difficulty bore herself as usual throughout the next day and evening, though constantly on the rack to get possession of her book again.” The following day, Ellen and Mr. Lindsay both attempt appeasement: Ellen came behind him, and, laying both her arms over his shoulders, said in his ear, “Will you let me have my book again, father?” A kiss was her only answer. Ellen waited. “Go to the bookcases,” said Mr. Lindsay, presently, “or to the book-store, and choose out anything you like, Ellen, instead.” “I wouldn’t exchange it for all that is in them!” she answered with some warmth, and with the husky feeling coming in her throat. Mr. Lindsay said nothing. “At any rate,” whispered Ellen, after a minute, “you will not destroy it, or do anything to it? you will take care of it, and let me have it again, won’t you, Sir?” “I will try to take care of you, my daughter.”

Ellen pleads, “I will do anything in the world for you, Sir,” she said, earnestly, “if you will give me my book again.” Mr. Lindsay’s ­smiling (and chilling) reply is, “You must do anything in the world for me without that.” When Ellen cries, “But it is mine,” Mr. Lindsay retorts, “and you are mine, you must understand.” Ellen protests: “O it’s not right! It’s not right!”66 The outcry refers both to “her lost treasure” and Mr.  Lindsay’s reference to her as his possession. Mr. Lindsay then presents Ellen with the watch, a metaphorically ambiguous gift with its connotation of time passing. Although she takes “great delight” in the watch, Ellen frankly rejects Mr. Lindsay’s implied purchase either of the book or of her spiritual direction. “Why,” said he, smiling, “do you mean you would rather have that than this?” “A great deal!” “No,” said he, hanging the watch round her neck,— “you shall not have it; but you may make your mind easy, for I have it safe, and it shall come back to you again some time or other.” With this promise Ellen was obliged to be satisfied.67

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Hildegard Hoeller criticizes “the Lindsays’ worldly possessiveness,” reading their gifts as a substitution of material value for spontaneous and therefore genuine love. Hoeller writes, “This negotiation highlights the differences between the Humphreys and the Lindsays. While the Lindsays want to buy Ellen and sever all ties with her other family by forbidding Ellen to speak of the Humphreys and by trying to deny her private Bible hour, the Humphreys insist on the spirit of the gift and its less defined boundaries of authority and possession.”68 In Hoeller’s analysis, in fact, the Lindsays are abusing the terms of transnational adoption: they have simply bought a child, and, as owners, feel entitled to erase the child’s pre-existing affinities and culture. Courtney Weikle-Mills also reads such transactions as Warner’s critique of the “unchristian habits of the rich.”69 But the complication that Warner creates here is that the Lindsays are in fact Ellen’s “own” family, her biological relatives, even if she prefers her chosen, non-biological family. Ellen has deep, valid allegiances to both families. Moreover, Ellen does not despise what the Lindsays can offer her. Her pleasure in the Lindsays’ generosity is real even while it is ambivalent, and she values their affection even while missing her other “family”: The summer passed in the enjoyment of all that wealth, of purse and affection both, could bestow upon their darling. Early in the season the family returned to the Braes. Ellen liked it there much better than in the city; there was more that reminded her of old times. The sky and the land, though different from those she best loved, were yet but another expression of nature’s face; it was the same face still; and on many a sunbeam Ellen traveled across the Atlantic.70

Yet at the same time that Ellen’s imagination bears her back to New York and the Humphreys family, she enjoys “many a happy day that summer” with Mr. Lindsay, and “many an odd pleasure in the course of them did he find or make for her. Sometimes it was a new book, sometimes a new sight, sometimes a new trinket.”71 Moreover, he makes good on the promise prompted by Ellen’s equestrian skills; presented with a “fine horse,” Ellen regains the freedom to ride about the countryside freely.72 Quotidian pains coexist with quotidian pleasures. In the odd juxtapositions and compromises within Ellen’s heart, Warner inscribes the psychic price of transnational and transcultural adoption: removal from the people Ellen loves, suppression of her

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sense of nationality, isolation from religious authority figures and other sources of guidance she has previously relied on, her profound sense of difference, and, ironically, loss of freedom to travel about locally and to manage household tasks. At the same time, Warner limns the benefits of this adoption: luxury, wealth, beauty, comfort, access to educational resources unavailable in a small country town in the USA. Finally, John Humphreys himself arrives in Scotland, and assures Ellen that “in a few years,” she will be old enough to decide with whom she will live. To Ellen’s amazement, moreover, John wins Mr. Lindsay’s respect and grudging approval; in “half an hour’s chat,” Ellen’s sense of repletion is “renewed and confirmed.” She marvels, “I did not dream that he would ever make them like him!”73 In the novel’s bizarre closing line, “three or four more years of Scottish discipline wrought her no ill; they did but serve to temper and beautify her Christian character; and then, to her unspeakable joy, she went back to spend her life with the friends and guardians she best loved, and to be to them, still more than to her Scottish relations, ‘the light of their eyes.’”74

“There are varieties of excellence in the world”: Adoptive Being and Multidirectional Affiliations The ending of The Wide, Wide World disrupts the conventionalized categories of adoption catalogued by Marianne Novy. Ellen’s return to her biogenetic family, the Lindsays, has not been a disastrous tragedy. Nor has it been a wholly joyous reunion of blood kin fulfilling a quest for family; in fact, Ellen’s joyous reunion is with the non-biogenetic brother who had already adopted her, not with her mother’s “real” family. And yet the novel does not wholly reject biogenetic origins in favor of “happy” adoption; Ellen’s stay with the Lindsays has “wrought her no ill.”75 No one adoption occupies a central place in the narrative. Ellen is first taken in by a relative, then adopted by non-relatives whom she loves when she is already an adolescent and her parents have died, then adopted somewhat less successfully by blood relatives. Her transnational adoption is not the event that defines her life, but an event along the course of her life. The ending line of The Wide, Wide World promises that Ellen is to cross the Atlantic again to return to “the friends and guardians she best loved.”76 Is this another adoption? The reader has by this point lost count, or rather has no fixed rule to judge what counts as

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adoption, inscribing still more deeply Ellen’s earlier question, “I wonder how many times one may be adopted?” She, and we, may well be bewildered by the multiple strands of Ellen’s family and her growing web of affiliations and affections. For all its peculiarities, Ellen’s response to her transnational adoption by the Lindsays has something of the quotidian, provisional quality of real life, in which we have to improvise on the script of being a parent or a daughter, friend or relative, adopted or native-born as we go along, day by day. The truth in The Wide, Wide World is that no one actually has the fantasy “regular family.” As Cindy Weinstein candidly avers, “consanguinity is a vastly over-rated determinant of family stability and happiness. Affection is a better bet.”77 The form of closure that Warner envisions for Ellen—Ellen Montgomery, Ellen Lindsay, and, eventually, Ellen Humphreys—affirms “real” affiliations both to the Lindsay and the Humphreys families. The sheer multiplicity of the ties and intersections in Ellen’s life evokes the pluralism of “adoptive being,” the dynamic that John McLeod defines as “personhood […] wrought from textual and transpersonal fusion, and not just biogenetic transfusion, legitimated by shared memories.”78 At Ellen’s reunion with John in The Wide, Wide World, Ellen admits, “I do love my father—very much, and my grandmother too, though not so much. I cannot help loving them,—they love me so. But they are so unlike you!” John replies, “That is not so much to the purpose, after all. There are varieties of excellence in the world.”79 Thus, to Mrs. Lindsay’s dictum, “We do not wish to claim kindred with all the world,” Warner counters that we may indeed claim our kindred from possible friends all over the world. Whether consanguine, adoptive, or some combination thereof, families inevitably reconfigure over time; children grow older and form ties of their own, and eventually they grow up and have to go on to their next adventures, wherever these adventures might take them.

Notes

1. Review, “The Wide, Wide World,” New-York Commercial Advertiser, December 18, 1850, 2. 2. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (New York: Putnam, 1851), Vol. 2, 257. 3.  Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 122–125.

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4. Dorothy Hurlbut Sanderson, They Wrote for a Living: A Bibliography of the Works of Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner (West Point: Constitution Island Association, 1976), 17–20. 5.  Jane Weiss, “‘Many Things Take My Time’: The Journals of Susan Warner” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1995), 339–341. 6. Anna Warner, Susan Warner (New York: Putnam, 1909), 263. 7. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes, 122–125. 8. Sarah Josepha Hale, “Editors’ Table,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (September 1851): 185. 9. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 1, 169. 10. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 1, 271. 11. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 200. 12. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 59. 13. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 237. 14. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 284. 15.  Nemo, “Notices of New Publications,” The New-York Daily Times, October 11, 1851, 1. 16. Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98. 17. Stacy Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 68. 18. Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130. 19. Grace Ann Hovet and Theodore R. Hovet, “Identity Development in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World: Relationship, Performance and Construction,” Legacy 8: 1 (Spring 1991): 8. 20. Elizabeth Fekete Trubey, “Imagined Revolution: The Female Reader and The Wide, Wide World,” Modern Language Studies 31: 2 (Autumn 2001): 57–74. 21.  Sharon Kim, “Puritan Realism: The Wide, Wide World and Robinson Crusoe,” American Literature, 75: 4 (2003): 790. 22. Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 4. 23. Novy, Reading Adoption, 5. 24. John McLeod, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 21. 25. McLeod, Life Lines, 26. 26. McLeod, Life Lines, 25. 27. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 237. 28. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 238.



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29. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 239. 30. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 247. 31. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 253. 32. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 252. 33. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina 2006), accessed July 17, 2016, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html; Chap. 19, and Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale University 2008), accessed July 17, 2016, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ 18th_century/letter_02.asp, Letter 2. 34. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 283. 35. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1901), 12–13. 36. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 266. 37. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 267. 38. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 283. 39. Sara E. Quay, “Homesickness in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18: 1 (Spring 1999): 50. 40. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2. 283. 41. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 277. 42. Hale, “Editor’s Table,” 186. 43. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869); Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (New York: Scribner, 1885); Henry James, “Daisy,” The Nation, July 16, 1868, 55. 44. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 257. 45. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 257–258. 46. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 259. 47.  Benjamin Franklin, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” 1782 (The Founders’ Constitution, Volume 1, Chap. 15, Document 27, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/ v1ch15s27.html. The University of Chicago Press. 48. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 304. 49. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 259. 50. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 277. 51. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 278. 52. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 298. 53. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 294–295. 54. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 255. 55. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 263. 56. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 263. 57. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 271.



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58. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 273. 59. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 287. 60. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 288. 61. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 298. 62. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 291. 63. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 300. 64. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 307. 65. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 312. 66. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 313–314. 67. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 316. 68. Hildegard Hoeller, From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 108. 69. Courtney Weikle-Mills, Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 160. 70. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 316. 71. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 317. 72. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 317. 73. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 332. 74. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 334. 75. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 334. 76. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 334. 77. Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 131. 78. McLeod, Life Lines, 233. 79. Warner, The Wide, Wide World, Vol. 2, 324–325.

Bibliography Burnett, Frances Hodgson. Little Lord Fauntleroy. New York: Scribner, 1885. Dielman, Frederick. Illustrations. The Wide, Wide World. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1892. Foster, Edward Halsey. Susan and Anna Warner. New York: Twayne, 1978. Hale, Sarah Josepha. “Editors’ Table.” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (September 1851): 185–6. Hoeller, Hildegard. From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012. Hovet, Grace Ann and Theodore R. Hovet. “Identity Development in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World: Relationship, Performance and Construction.” Legacy 8: 1 (Spring 1991): 3–16.

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Kim, Sharon. “Puritan Realism: The Wide, Wide World and Robinson Crusoe.” American Literature 75: 4 (2003): 783–811. Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book. 1819. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1901. James, Henry. “Daisy.” The Nation, July 16, 1868, 55. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina 2006), accessed July 17, 2016, http:// docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html. Margolis, Stacy. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Margolis, Stacy. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. McLeod, John. Life Lines: Reading Transcultural Adoption. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States. New York: MacMillan, 1947. Nemo. “Notices of New Publications.” The New-York Daily Times, October 11, 1851: 1. Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Novy, Marianne. Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Quay, Sara E. “Homesickness in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18: 1 (Spring 1999): 39–58. Sanderson, Dorothy Hurlbut. They Wrote for a Living: A Bibliography of the Works of Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner. West Point: Constitution Island Association, 1976. St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector. 1957. Letters from an America Farmer, [by] Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. Yale University, 2008, accessed July 17, 2016. http://avalon. law.yale.edu/18th_century/letter_02.asp. Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete. “Imagined Revolution: The Female Reader and ‘The Wide, Wide World.’” Modern Language Studies 31: 2 (Autumn 2001): 57–74. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869. Van Tassel, Kristin. “Nineteenth-Century American Antebellum Literature: The Yeoman Becomes a Country Bumpkin.” American Studies 43: 1 (Spring 2002): 51–73. Warner, Anna. Susan Warner. New York: Putnam, 1909. Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 2 volumes. New York: Putnam, 1851. Weikle-Mills, Courtney. Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640–1868. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

276  J. Weiss Weinstein, Cindy. Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Weiss, Jane. “‘Many Things Take My Time’: The Journals of Susan Warner.” PhD diss., Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1995. “The Wide, Wide World.” Review. New-York Commercial Advertiser, December 18, 1850: 12.

Author Biography Jane Weiss  is the Literature Program Director, English Department, Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York in the USA where she teaches American Literature and composition courses. Her Ph.D. dissertation, “‘Many Things Take My Time’: The Journals of Susan Warner,” was an annotated edition of Susan Warner’s diaries. Recent publications include “‘In the Mills We Are Not So Far from God and Nature’: Nature, Industrialization, and Spirituality in Nineteenth-Century New England” in Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (2011); “Manufacturing Eden: The Canals and Rivers of Lowell 1820–1870” in Waterways and Byways: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Ed. Peter Benes, 2014); “The Invisible Adjunct: Inverse Panopticism in the English Department” in Reading the American University (ed. Jonathan Silverman and Meghan Sweeny, 2016).

CHAPTER 12

Cruel Chronologies: Ireland, America, and Transatlantic Adoption in The Lost Child of Philomena Lee and Philomena John McLeod

The next time you visit Dublin, head to St Stephen’s Green, not far from Trinity College, and look for somewhere to sit down. Amidst the many statues celebrating key figures in Irish history that punctuate the park square—Wolfe Tone, Countess Markievicz, Robert Emmet—you may find a bench on which there appears a small tarnished oblong commemorative plaque (although you might miss it too). The copper-colored plaque depicts ten small humanoid figures with featureless faces whose c­ ollective bodies blend to form a kind of placard, on which the following s­entences appear: “To the women who worked in the Magdalen laundry institutions and to the children born to some members of those communities— reflect here upon their lives.” Like Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, the Magdalene laundries incarcerated unwed mothers and women of perceived ill repute, often against their will, alongside their children whom they were often compelled to surrender for adoption, thousands of whom were sent overseas. The bench constitutes a slight yet significant

J. McLeod (*)  University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7_12

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acknowledgement of those women oppressed by postcolonial Ireland’s chauvinist nationalism and Catholic hierarchy throughout the twentieth century, at least since Independence but particularly in the postwar decades (the last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996). The reference to the “children born” to many of them points opaquely to Ireland’s twentiethcentury adoption industry, which depended upon Church and state colluding in compelling vulnerable women to surrender their children for adoption while signing documentation that perversely declared this act a choice freely made. In its innocuous dimensions and unspectacular appearance, the bench offers the briefest visible admission of a practice which preoccupied the Irish Republic’s cultural and administrative heart. In addition, and with cruel irony, the location of the bench suggests the unhappy and continuingly uneasy position of Ireland’s history of incarceration and adoption. Just a few minutes’ walk takes you to the Government Buildings and the National Museum of Ireland, so that the bench in St Stephen’s Green spatially expresses the proximity of the story of Ireland’s adoptions to the central concerns of Ireland’s government, history, and culture. The bench’s whereabouts, then, concretely captures the ways in which this history is both sighted and slighted by Irish officialdom in the twenty-first century, at the heart of national matters but often passed by without comment. As Mike Milotte concludes in the updated edition of his exposé of Ireland’s transatlantic baby export business, Banished Babies (2012), those affected by the country’s adoption practices continue to find it extremely difficult to gain information about their biogenetic relations, because Ireland’s culture of secrecy which characterized these practices remains alive today—not least due to the dubious legality of the behavior of many in the Catholic Church. “It may seem astonishing,” he writes, “that fifteen years after the American adoption story first broke [in 1997], putting the whole adoption information issue onto the political agenda as never before, there has been so little advance.”1 Despite the fact that, as Milotte has clearly evidenced, the Church and the Irish government debated and legislated for the adoption of children at length and with particular scrutiny, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when tensions between Church and state were never far from the surface, the everyday business in Ireland of consigning vulnerable pregnant women to mother-and-baby homes or the laundries has yet to be acceptably addressed by those in the realms of government and national history.2 But if this history is an important national one, yet to be embraced fully, it is at the same time, as Milotte

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shows, distinctly, definitively international. It involves not only the heart of Irish authority but also—in very important ways, as I will consider in this chapter—reaches across the Atlantic to America. If there is a lack of acknowledgement of an important national story at large, then there is also a fundamentally transatlantic context to Ireland’s adoption history which also needs bringing into the picture. With Irish officialdom reluctant today to deal with the consequences of the adoptions it sanctioned and supported historically, the determined job of unearthing and exploring Ireland’s half-hidden history of adoption has been undertaken primarily in the cultural realm since the mid1990s: by journalists, artists, theater practitioners, writers, and cultural critics, often working supportively with birth-mothers who survived their incarceration, and as part of the wider exposé of the immoral and criminal activities of Irish Catholic institutions. We find a growing critical consciousness of these concerns in novels such as Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), Dermot Bolger’s A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (2010), and John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness (2014), or films like Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014), and Stephen Frears’s Philomena (2013). Indeed, Bolger recounts that his decision to revise A Second Life (originally published in 1994, before much of the scandal about the priesthood broke) was in part propelled by the news of a chilling exhumation that took place in High Park Magdalene Laundry in Drumcondra in 1993. The bodies of 155 women were exhumed from its cemetery, but the order of nuns could produce death certificates for only 75 of them. In the novel’s preface, Bolger describes the day he took the manuscript of his “renewed” novel to the General Post Office on Dublin’s O’Connell Street and noticed, coincidentally, three laundry survivors “defiantly collecting signatures for a petition to have a monument erected to the nameless women cremated and transferred [from Drumcondra] to that mass grave at [Glasnevin Cemetery].”3 Like the faceless figures on the plaque in St Stephen’s Green, these eighty women will remain forever indistinguishable, lost to an obscene history which itself remains uneasily sat upon by Irish politics in the twenty-first century. It is important to understand the particular cultural and political ­ pressures on these vulnerable pregnant women—usually unwed, often sexually exploited or assaulted, always failed by families and their faith—as definitively, peculiarly Irish. While Ireland was by no means the only country in which women suffered greatly for conceiving

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children in contexts deemed immoral or transgressive, such as “outside” of ­marriage, the Irish production of adoptable children distinctly characterizes the deeply chauvinistic manner of post-Independent Ireland’s pursuit of postcolonial statehood within which women were instrumentalized in relation to national and gendered precepts. As James M. Smith explains in his excellent account of the way in which the Magdalene laundries formed part of the nation’s “architecture of containment,” the representation of Irish women as the bearers of both religious and national piety was embedded in a deeply sexist and chauvinistic cultural nationalism that sought to sculpt Ireland’s postcolonial distinctiveness. The country’s “sense of modernisation and progress,” Smith argues, “was increasingly vested in notions of social and moral respectability,” very much at odds with the colonial rendition of the Irish as corrupt, backward, and bacchanalian.4 This project, buttressed by both religious and cultural nationalist designs, had particular consequences for women: “[the state] promoted a national identity that privileged Catholic morality and valorised the correlation between marriage and motherhood while at the same time effacing nonconforming citizens who were institutionally confined.”5 The incarceration of vulnerable pregnant women and the compulsion they experienced to surrender their children for adoption is one significant consequence of Ireland’s post-Independence nationalist ambitions, and places this little-acknowledged history at the heart of, not as an adjunct to, the decolonizing nation’s core business. Just as important were the international dimensions of the consequences of adoption in Ireland. In confecting a significant number of adoptable children normatively racialized as white, Ireland was quickly identified by American adopters, usually white and middle-class, as an important source for white infants. As Kim Park Nelson has explained, the landscape of US adoption practices has always been highly racialized, with “white infants […] most in demand” both domestically and internationally.6 Catholics in the USA, and those willing to engage with the precepts of the Catholic Church, exploited this source of white adoptees, to the extent that the international dimension of Ireland’s adoption history is overwhelmingly American. According to records cited by Milotte that date from 1950, a total of 1962 Irish-born children were adopted by families overseas, across 17 countries, of which 1911 were from the United States. Additionally, he notes that 170 entry visas were issued by the American Embassy to Irish adoptees

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between July 1949 and the end of 1950, although it is not clear how many such children actually traveled. In sum, as Milotte records, “[t]he overwhelming majority (98%) of the recorded foreign adoptions were to America,” making the USA by far the single biggest receiving nation of Irish-born adoptees.7 The transnational adoption of the Irish-born is, then, a distinctly American story, one that owes as much to the postwar cultural and political climate of the United States as regards its history of adopting internationally as it does to the constrained conditions of post-Independent Ireland. If Ireland was keen to articulate itself as a self-confident new nation characterized by a laudable, pious morality, then its hypocritical trading in children as exportable cargo accentuated not just its economic austerity in the emerging world system but its fiscal as well as moral impoverishment, very much against the claims of state-sponsored cultural nationalism. Ireland’s postcolonial subservience to the will and wealth of a powerful new imperium found ready expression in its willingness to supply white infants in exchange for lucrative remuneration; as Laura Briggs reminds us, “stranger adoption” nearly always involves the transfer of children from the disenfranchised to the wealthy: “[t]he relative power of these two groups, and the fact that stranger adoption almost never takes place in the opposite direction, sets the inescapable framework in which adoption is inserted.”8 These power relations continue to play out in the lack of equivalence between Irish and American rememberings of this transatlantic trade. While the presence of America has preoccupied adoption researchers in Ireland of late, from an American perspective the significance of Irish-American adoption appears much less weighty, especially when compared to the numbers of transnational adoptees who have arrived in the USA from Latin America, Russia and, in greatest numbers, from Korea and China. Ireland is infrequently registered in current American conversations about adopting from overseas because, from an American standpoint, the number of children involved can seem slight by comparison with those from other locations. My focus in this chapter upon Ireland and America’s transnational adoption history hence has a double purpose. On the one hand, it assists in the acknowledgement and exploration of the specifics of Ireland’s institutionalized practices of constraining mothers as “birth-mothers” and confecting infants’ adoptability. At the same time, it embeds the Irish-US history of transatlantic adoption firmly within current research into US international adoption that is nearly always focused elsewhere.

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Indeed, and by way of illustration, we might note that Vilna Bashi Treitler’s recent fascinating edited collection, Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption (2014), which focuses in eye-opening detail across a range of US contexts, makes no mention at all of Ireland’s place in the historical provenance of that country’s transnational adoptions. This, then, is the context within which I intend to explore two firmly linked yet quite distinct texts that together deal with one instance of an Irish-US adoption: Martin Sixsmith’s book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009) and Stephen Frears’s film adaptation Philomena (2013), starring Judi Dench as the Irish birth mother Philomena Lee and Steve Coogan as the journalist, Martin Sixsmith, who helps Lee discover the fortunes of the son she was forced to surrender by Irish nuns.9 These texts compel us to note that the lucrative business of Ireland’s adoption rested upon wider international relations and inequities which underwrote Ireland’s pernicious state- and Church-supported adoption culture, as well as understand better the particularly Irish character of “closed” or stranger adoptions as they were generally practiced across the Euro-American Anglosphere until relatively recently. Both Sixsmith’s account and Frears’s film portray the attempt by an Irish birth mother, Philomena Lee, to discover the fate of her child, Anthony, who was born at Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, in July 1952. Anthony was adopted by an American family in December 1955 and renamed Michael A. Hess (the family also adopted at the same time another Roscrea infant, Mary). As was usual for birth mothers and their children cloistered at the Abbey, Lee lived with her son in Roscrea for over three years prior to his adoption.10 His departure, enforced and administered by the Abbey’s nuns, especially Sister Hildegarde McNulty, wounded Lee for life, and both the book and film dwell upon the horrendous conditions and experiences which she suffered at the time, as well as their life-long emotional consequences. While it might be tempting to regard Sixsmith’s book as a wellresearched documentary—one written by a respected journalist and former BBC Washington correspondent—and Frears’s film as its dramatic, fictional adaptation, one which plays openly with the particulars of what happened, in truth this distinction is hard to sustain. Sixsmith’s book is distinctly self-conscious about the story it tells, and it strategically eschews any illusions of documentary objectivity which one might expect in a book of its nature—indeed, this is part of its intelligence, significance, and interest. As well as shaping a detailed narrative account of

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Anthony’s post-adoption life in the USA, where he is raised by Marjorie and “Doc” Hess—in many ways a credit to Sixsmith’s investigative and research talents—it also indulges freely in moments of creative ­writing. With an eye on the political climate of the postwar years, Sixsmith fictionalizes the lives of those involved in pursuing and legislating for Ireland’s international adoptions in the 1950s, such as Joe Coram, who ran the Department for External Affairs’ policy on passport and visa issues. In the book’s early moments, such as when Coram and his ministerial boss have a tense meeting with Dublin’s infamous Archbishop John Charles McQuaid to attend to the legalities of transnational adoption, the narrative takes a distinctly novelistic turn. In addition, at several moments Sixsmith adds short chapters which self-consciously turn attention to himself as researcher and the many challenges he faced in tracking  down the information that allowed him to find out about Michael Hess’s fortunes and untimely death in 1995 from an AIDS-related ­cardiac arrest before Lee could discover his whereabouts. Although it is not at all a work of innovative writing, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee importantly keeps in play a tension more generally between discovering lost histories and the impossibility of full retrieval. Too many documents have been destroyed, too many people have blocked (and continue to block) access to information, too many people have died since the adoption contracts of the 1950s and 1960s were sealed. As Sixsmith acknowledges, for “all the research and detective work, there must be a black hole at the centre—where a man once stood and is no longer. His form can be surmised: the testimony of those who knew him offers a series of spotlights against which his silhouette emerges in dark, fleeting relief.”11 Like the narrativized figure of Hess, who must always remain partly in shadow no matter how much research might uncover about him, the history of Ireland-US adoptions in no small part has been lost along the way too. In conveying Hess’s story, then, Sixsmith enables a partial recovery of this wider history by telling a highly personalized tale. As Sixsmith imagines it, Hess’s adoption was on the one hand highly specific and life-changing for those within this particular adoption triad, but also typical, insofar as Sister Hildegarde used the leverage of international adoption to procure substantial financial donations from wealthy Americans in exchange for receiving adoptable children. Indeed, both Sixsmith and Milotte cite a 1957 memo circulated by Ireland’s Department of External Affairs which describes this nun as “one of the three most important people in the Irish adoption picture.”12

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Later, Hildegarde would own up to the fact that “donations coming back from American adopters had constituted the largest single source of income for Sean Ross Abbey” and “admitted to removing and destroying documents from individual adoption files which related to these American payments.”13 Sixsmith carefully intercalates Hess’s story with this wider history of the Catholic Church’s strategic fundraising through the US adoption market, so that his account is both highly personalized and broadly instructive, and highlights those moments when the Church’s daily business of procuring funds through exporting children impinges on Lee and her child. In one scene, he imagines a 1955 phone call between Hess’s soon-to-be adoptive mother, Marjorie, and her brother Loras, a Catholic bishop. Loras was instrumental in helping source possible adoptees in Ireland through his contacts with Monsignor O’Grady, secretary of the USA’s National Conference of Catholic Charities (NCCC), whose sister happened to work at Roscrea. During the telephone conversation, he reads out some instructive passages from a letter he has recently received from O’Grady: “There would of course be expenses involved […]. While neither the NCCC nor Sean Ross Abbey charge any fees, it is customary for the adopting party to make a donation to the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the size of which may be determined in consultation with the Superioress of the Order.”14 In portraying this history of transnational commerce through the prism of one specific adoption, Sixsmith exposes the sly maneuvering by which the Catholic Church, in the full knowledge of the hierarchy and the government, maintained an edifice of moral propriety and altruistic compassion while profiting greedily from others’ loss, often with little proper attention paid to the character of prospective American adoptive parents, some of whom were clearly unfit to parent and became a danger to the children discharged to their care.15 As the title of the original edition indexes, Sixsmith’s book for the most part primarily focuses upon the fortunes of Hess in the USA, where he grew up in St Louis and Rockford, Illinois, and forged a successful career working for the Republican Party before his untimely death. Unlike Frears’s film, it is Hess’s lost life, not Lee’s or Sixsmith’s challenging search for information about it, which takes center stage. Lee emerges most fully at the book’s end when she receives the upsetting news of her son’s death and learns that Hess had asked for his ashes to be interred at Roscrea, where he knew he had been born. To make matters worse, Sixsmith discovers that Hess had long been seeking his

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birth-mother and in 1993 had even traveled, when he was ailing, from the USA to Roscrea in search of her, only to be told (falsely) by an elderly Sister Hildegarde that she had no memory of Lee and that no pertinent records existed. Sixsmith imagines Hess’s increasing frustration with Sister Hildegarde’s intransigence and locates the book’s pervasive condemnation of Ireland’s transnational child trafficking in its central character’s adoptee standpoint: Sister Hildegarde seemed to grow impatient. “Many of our records were destroyed in a fire. You could possibly try the Irish Passport Office, but I can help you no further.” “Well, what about the money?” Mike [Hess] was desperate now. “What about the money you took from the Americans who came here looking for babies? The money you took from my parents? Is there no record of all the graft and corruption that went on over that?”16

There is an important conflict here between two adoption chronologies. The first, Sister Hildegarde’s, attempts to dismiss transatlantic adoption as lost to a concluded past, beyond “help.” Hess’s chronology stresses continuity and equivalence between past and present, making past happenings accessible to both contemporary questioning and judgement (we will return shortly to the further significance of constellating past and present for adoption). His presentation as an American subject seeking to remember an Irish-born past challenges American amnesia as well as Irish officialdom’s reluctance to remember Ireland-US adoption. In aligning the book’s opprobrium of the financialization of transatlantic adoptions with Hess’s censure of Sister Hildegarde’s behavior, Sixsmith positions the American adoptee significantly as the bearer of both a vital historical awareness and a critical moral conscience that will not be quickly silenced. Hess’s outburst underlines how the culture and consequences of t­ransnational adoption remain firmly present at the century’s end and that attempts to set up a conclusive chronology of these adoptions as no longer of consequence are cunningly pernicious. This is an important point upon which we should dwell. Appallingly, the nuns do not tell Hess that Lee had also been in touch with the Abbey in the hope that she might discover news of his whereabouts. Birth mother and adoptee remain deliberately kept apart by those who knew well that each was searching for the

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other, long after the moment of birth-mother surrender. But as Sixsmith tells it, Sister Hildegarde is happy to assent to Hess’s dying wish that he be buried in the Abbey’s grounds as part of a familiar financial transaction which repeats the initial contracting of his adoption across the Atlantic in 1955. “‘I can see it means a great deal to you, Anthony,’ she says, ‘so if you are willing to make a donation to the abbey—and we would need to discuss the size of that donation—then I believe something may be possible […].’”17 In this vile moment of emotional exploitation for financial gain, Sixsmith crucially traces a cruel culture of continuity that weds past practices very much to present business, in defiance of those who would wish firmly to separate an intolerant Ireland of yesterday from its allegedly progressive contemporaneity. That chronological distinction is both highly suspect and characteristic of the Church’s unimpressive response to the scandal of Ireland’s adoptions, registered elsewhere through the passive mode of its apologies. For example, on June 10, 2014, the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference apologized to unwed mothers who were forced to live in mother-and-baby homes: “Sadly we are being reminded of a time when unmarried mothers were often judged, stigmatised and rejected by society, including the church. […] We apologise for hurt caused by the church as part of this system.”18 The temporal reference here subtly but surely seeks to make exactly the breach between “a time” since past and today’s allegedly different social and political milieu. Simultaneously, it seeks to distance the Church from full responsibility for its deliberate actions by citing its activities as “part” of a “system” rather than as a primary vehicle that firmly drove, asserted, shaped, defined, and propelled systemic, industrialized violence against unwed mothers and their children. In Faulknerian terms, and as Hildegarde’s response to Hess’s plea testifies, this history is neither dead nor even past19: the occasion of international adoption to secure American dollars to fund Irish Catholic institutions has continued apace. As Sixsmith presents it, the Church’s culture of commerce, which entirely propelled their contracting of transnational adoptions, is as much a reality in 1990s’ Ireland as in previous decades, part of a cruel chronology of chilling continuity. For these reasons, then, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee plays an important political role in exposing not just the past of Ireland’s imperious transatlantic trade in adoptees but also its ongoing existence on both sides of the Atlantic, represented by the thwarted quest of Irish Philomena Lee and the exploitation of the ailing American Michael Hess for fiscal reward. The culture, practices, and consequences of this

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trading in human lives are not at all completed. Ireland’s transatlantic adoptions cannot be annexed safely to a recently, conveniently concluded chronology when the Church did things differently. The political efficacy and value of Sixsmith’s book reside in its refusal of any significant shift between past and present and its determination to expose instead some cruel continuities. Its ethical value, meanwhile, is housed in the highly detailed, if forever partial, portrait it paints of Hess for his birth-mother, almost in lieu of the son which Lee can never now meet. Sixsmith’s detailed account of Hess’s life articulates as acutely as possible his complex personhood, his relationships and frustrations, almost as a gift to the grieving Lee, in the full knowledge that no account can ever substitute for the missing person. In his impressive cinematic adaptation of Sixsmith’s account, Frears sustains the sensitive understanding of Hess’s unrecoverability: the fact that from all the documents, interviews, and photographs Sixsmith assembles, Hess will remain beyond any capacity to know him fully. In the film of Philomena, Hess appears always posthumously, as a photograph on a computer screen, or depicted in home movies, or captured fleetingly through the memories of his friends and lover. In consequence, the position in which the film places the viewer is akin to the deeply upsetting standpoint of Philomena Lee as birth-mother, and of many birth-mothers more generally, whose entire lives are often framed by the pain of not knowing the fortunes of their offspring and who have to come to terms with the irretrievability of the lost child. It is a highly significant and laudable maneuver. As Margaret Homans has written, the birth-mother often receives a deeply troubling representation, if she is represented at all, so that the specifics of her experience find little illustration: “The requirement of her non-existence, which is at once legal, social, cultural, and narrative, had made it particularly hard for birthmothers to speak or write, much less make their stories known. […] In the cultural logic of adoption, the birthmother cannot represent herself, and she is representable by others only as an absence.”20 In making the focus of his film the experiential horizon of Philomena Lee—the gravitas of which is emphasized by the casting of the distinguished actor Judi Dench as Philomena and the shortening of the title of Sixsmith’s book to Lee’s given name—Frears fundamentally refuses the erasure of the birth-mother by making her a central presence, and presents her as ultimately in charge of whether Sixsmith will be allowed to tell her story. Given the history of birth-mother representation, as Homans describes

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it, we must not underestimate the importance of Frears’s sensitive cinematic depiction of a birth-mother as principal character. Such sensitivity permits us to approach with generous curiosity the several liberties which Frears takes with Sixsmith’s account. Many of these concern location and chronology. Most controversially, the climax of the film features a confrontation at Roscrea between an extremely angry Martin and an aged Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford) in which Philomena intervenes by telling the unrepentant nun that she forgives her for all the terrible things she has done. This conversation could not have taken place: Sister Hildegarde died in 1995, nine years before Sixsmith was approached by Lee’s daughter and asked if he could help locate her son’s whereabouts. In changing things around, Frears makes Philomena’s forgiveness occupy a definitive thematic place in the film, one which contrasts with Martin’s refusal to exonerate the nuns for their “disgusting” behavior.21 But just as interesting, especially for the present discussion, is the other major change to Lee’s story which Frears makes. In Sixsmith’s book, Lee frequently travels from England, where she has lived for many years, to Roscrea, at first in search of news of Anthony, but eventually to visit the grave of her son; Sixsmith travels to the USA to pursue research leads, but always alone. In the film, however, Philomena accompanies Martin to Washington D.C., and several important exchanges between the two characters take place at key US sites. Why, we might ask, does Frears take Philomena to America? In The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, Sixsmith’s research acumen is greatly assisted by his experience of Washington D.C. gained when he was a BBC correspondent; at one point, he even discovers that he was once present at a political event which Hess had also attended. He has a number of contacts and he uses his knowledge of American officialdom to help him further his inquiries. In Frears’s Philomena, Martin’s ability to pursue his research in America is presented as much more limited. Philomena’s presence in the USA is premised on the argument that only she will be able gain access to certain information. “I can only get so far speaking on your behalf,” Martin tells Philomena, “but as his mother they would be legally bound to provide you with the information.” After a little hesitation, Philomena movingly agrees: “I think I would like to go. I would like to know if Anthony ever thought of me. Because I’ve thought of him every day.” Running within this highly personalized scenario we might detect the subtle but certain projection of the imbalance between Irish and American memories of Irish-US

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transnational adoptions, something which hints at one of the wider consequences of Frears’s deeply sensitive exploration of Philomena’s predicament. Philomena’s thoughts have always been with her lost child, and those concerns now direct her attention towards America. But just how much America knows about Irish transatlantic adoptions, in general as well as in particular, remains to be seen. What memory does America have, or want to have, of this traffic? In fictionally relocating Philomena to Washington D.C., Frears’s film visually addresses the imbalance of memory about Irish-US adoptions by strategically situating Philomena physically amidst some of the key iconic sites of US governance: looking out at the Capitol Building from her window in the Washington Court Hotel or wandering at night through the Lincoln Memorial. We see Martin, too, jogging on the National Mall past the Smithsonian Building at one point, further emphasizing the importance of an optical rendition of iconic, monumental Washington D.C. In other words, Frears’s decision to make Philomena’s story a visibly American one, and not just a matter of post-Independent Ireland’s nationalist chauvinism, seeks to expose and confront a range of imbalances concerning how this particular transatlantic connection is remembered today. One central imbalance, at once intra- and international, concerns wealth. On more than one occasion in Philomena, Frears shapes moments of gentle if pointed humor from the class imbalance between Martin as the middle-class journalist and Philomena, a mother of modest means from Ireland who has settled in England. They first meet at the humdrum dining establishment of a Harvester Inn and enjoy an “allyou-can-eat buffet,” where Martin seems amused by Philomena’s enthusiasm for the tray of salad croutons (which she misnames as “toast”). While these details risk a certain mocking representation of Philomena, for the most part they function instead to expose the Knightsbridgedwelling Martin as somewhat snobbish in his responses to Philomena’s tastes and enthusiasms. In sending Philomena to America, Frears accentuates these markings of economic positioning also in transatlantic terms, reminding us of the major divergences of wealth, already noted previously, which made possible the ready trade in Irish-born children and which continue apace. Repeatedly our attention is drawn to just how uncomfortable international travel makes Philomena. On the plane to Washington D.C. she seems unsettled and has to be reassured that she will not be charged for the bucks fizz with which she is served—“you have to pay for everything on Ryanair,” she remarks. At the Washington

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Court Hotel she is genuinely taken aback by the number of TV channels she can enjoy in her room, charmed by the free chocolates left on her pillow, and delighted with the extensive breakfast service offered each morning. These incidents collectively remind us that the translation of Anthony Lee into Michael A. Hess was very much one of class as well as nation, and of class operating across and beyond national boundaries. The adoption was (and remains) framed by the imbalance of, specifically, the wealthy Hess family and Philomena’s birth-mother impoverishment. It would, for example, have cost Philomena over £100 to have bought herself out of Sean Ross Abbey, for her an impossible sum.22 But, more generally, the adoption is situated between an economically buoyant America in the immediate postwar decades, and the relatively austere Ireland of the times, where migration overseas often presented the best opportunity for securing financial security for many, not just adoptees. As Treitler reminds us, part of the attraction of transnational adoptions for some adopting parents was its alleviation of a subsequent “fear [of] contact from the birth mother,” safely siloed in another country, so that “the distance and closure of adoption makes such contact less likely.”23 In these terms, it is highly significant that Frears visibly propels Philomena as birth-mother across the Atlantic and makes America, not Ireland or England (where Philomena has settled), the site of revelation of Michael Hess’s fortunes and the wider history which made them possible. Consequently, he puts America in direct optical contact with the phenomenon of Irish-US adoptions. The film emphasizes its inflecting of the grandeur of American nationhood with the dark history of Irish-US transnational adoptions at the scene in Lincoln Memorial, through which Philomena and Martin wander while discussing her story. The importance of the scene as a specifically visual moment of haunting historical crossreferencing is emphasized when Martin asks to take Philomena’s photograph at the Memorial. His picture effectively synchronizes in the same frame Philomena’s particular “human interest” story, the wider unhappy matter of Ireland’s provision of children for US adopters, and the grand narrative of American history rendered through its monumental self-presentation. By having an iconic manifestation of American self-representation make visual contact with the transatlantic history which Philomena indexes, Frears’s cinematography opens a space where that unhappy history might find recognition at the heart of the American imperium and subsequently contests the amnesia which has collected around the Irish-US rendition of transnational adoptions in America more generally.

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In a similar vein, and with parallel consequences, Frears significantly  changes the pivotal encounter between Philomena, Martin, and Michael Hess’s partner, Pete Nilsson, during which Philomena learns a great deal about her lost child and discovers, to the shock of all concerned, that he had sought to find out her identity by visiting the nuns at Roscrea. In Sixsmith’s book, Lee learns of her son’s death while in England and she meets Nilsson at Sixsmith’s home in London, where he appears very keen indeed to furnish her with as much information about Hess as possible. He has responded to Sixsmith’s telephone message promptly, is immediately “willing to talk” to his former partner’s birth mother, and he travels to the UK to share his “photographs and momentos of Michael.” His visit provides much of the key detail about Hess’s life upon which Sixsmith’s account is based. It also empowers an emotional experience of immense value for the grieving birthmother: “it gave Philomena the cathartic reassurance that her actions had not blighted her son’s life—that he had never stopped loving his birth-mother and had never stopped searching for her.”24 In Frears’s film, Philomena discovers her son’s death at a moment of near banality, while eating breakfast in the Washington Court Hotel; while Pete appears a great deal less willing to speak to herself or Martin about his former lover’s life and unhappy demise. When Martin tracks him down to his home in a wealthy neighborhood—an American flag can be discerned flying proudly outside his large, expensive residence—he initially refuses to speak to Martin on his doorstep and threatens to summon the police. Pete lets them enter only when Philomena makes a scene at the front door. Her persistence gets herself and Sixsmith inside the building, where at last they have a chance to watch home-movie footage of Michael through the years, as well as see evidence of his visit, while ailing, to Sean Ross Abbey. This staging of a reluctance, not an enthusiasm, on the part of an American to admit and open up to figures concerned with Ireland’s transatlantic adoption history might be taken, again, as pointing to a wider filmic demand that this specific history be given proper place in the context of American transnational adoptions and the wider realm of Irish-US relations. Philomena’s semi-forced entry into Pete’s house symbolizes the film’s modest if stubborn attempt to bring a grim transatlantic adoption history to the heart of American consciousness. Philomena opens a space for this acknowledgement and contemplation as part of Frears’s ethical commitment to Philomena (and the many other Irish birth-mothers in similar positions). The film insists that

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her suffering and her life-long love for her lost child be duly acknowledged right at the symbolic center of American life, and received as an American story as much as any other—not just a tale of exploitation and immiseration that belongs solely to the Old World back across the Atlantic. The importance of emphasizing the transatlantic history of Irish-US adoptions that I have been tracing in both book and film is perhaps best symbolized by one recurring image that attracts attention in each. In his book, Sixsmith discusses two photographs of Michael Hess of particular note. One is taken on his arrival at Chicago airport, the other just before his departure from Roscrea, when he was still Anthony Lee, in which he is cradling a toy plane as wide as his shoulders […]. This last photograph has stayed with me. It is in black and white, of course, but I know that the plane is a red-and-yellow lithographed tin GE 270 Sparkling Space Rocket with friction drive and a ten-inch wing-span, and that it was made in Germany between 1955 and 1965 by a toy manufacturer called Technofix.25

The toy plane reappears in the photograph taken at Chicago airport, at the point of arrival: Michael holds it to his chest as he stares sternly towards and just above the camera. I read the toy as an unintended symbol of adoptive connectedness and continuity, a vehicle which indexes not just the means of transport (the aircraft) through which the Irish Anthony will become the American Michael but also the specifically transatlantic life line which will be ever flexed at the knotted center of his traversed personhood, inviolable and uncut. The presence of the plane in the photographs keeps before us the inerasable particulars of transnational passage, the fact that Michael Hess has and always will have something to do with a place elsewhere. To understand the flight which made his personhood possible, we must be prepared to learn the wider story of Irish-US adoptions that implicates America centrally, not marginally, in the production and commercialization of Irish Catholic adoptability. Frears, too, focuses on the image of Philomena’s son grasping before him the toy plane as a sign of unbreakable transatlantic connectedness. Philomena’s time in America thematically redeploys these vital signs of flight, as in those moments shot on an airplane (with Philomena struggling to accept her free drink) or at Washington Dulles Airport, where she significantly decides not to return across the Atlantic having learned

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the news of Michael’s death, but to stay on and uncover as much information as possible about his life and loves. And as she sits with Martin in Pete’s house, eyes fixed motionless upon the home movies on the TV screen, the image appears again: of a tired, baffled, unnerved child, clutching to himself as if for comfort a tin plaything which unwittingly stands for the traded adoption passage of so many exported transatlantic infants. Those complicit on either side of the Atlantic with the circumstances that frame Philomena’s lost child would no doubt prefer this history to be lost to the past, thinly acknowledged and quietly concluded. But as testified by Sixsmith’s and Frears’s intelligent and sensitive engagements with the history and hurt of Philomena Lee’s predicament and Michael Hess’s frustrated quest to find her, the lives of those changed by Ireland’s lucrative transatlantic baby trade will not be conveniently, nor quietly, benched.

Notes











1. See Mike Milotte, Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business, Expanded and Updated Edition (Dublin: New Ireland, 2012), 226. 2. See Milotte, Banished Babies, esp. 3–136. 3. Dermot Bolger, A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (Dublin: New Island, 2010), xi–xii. 4.  James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 25. 5. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, 47. 6.  Kim Park Nelson, “Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace,” in Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, ed. Jane Jeong Trenka et al. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 98. 7. Milotte, Banished Babies, 230. 8. Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 4–5. 9. Sixsmith’s book was republished in 2013 with an introduction by Judi Dench to coincide with the release of Frears’s film, and was also newly titled as Philomena: A Mother, Her Son and a Fifty-Year Search (London: Pan, 2013). 10. For reasons of clarity, when discussing Philomena Lee as she appears in Sixsmith’s book I shall cite her surname, “Lee,” but when engaging

294  J. McLeod with her characterization in Frears’s film, I will use her given name, “Philomena,” as in the film’s title. I shall do the same too with “Martin” (film character) and “Sixsmith” (book author). 11. Sixsmith, Philomena, 308. 12. Milotte, Banished Babies, 126; Sixsmith, Philomena, 78. 13. Milotte, Banished Babies, 128. 14. Sixsmith, Philomena, 55. 15. See Milotte, Banished Babies, 55–8, for one such harrowing account of an Irish-born adoptee who was abused by her American adoptive father. 16. Sixsmith, Philomena, 410. 17. Sixsmith, Philomena, 410. 18. Cited in Colin Gleeson, “Apology for stigmatisation of unmarried mothers,” The Irish Times, June 11, 2014, accessed November 11, 2016, http://:www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/apology-for-stigmatisation-of-unmarried-mothers-1.1827556. 19. The famous quotation “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” occurs in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951). 20. Margaret Homans, The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 252. 21. Stephen Frears (dir.), Philomena (Pathé, 2013). All cited dialogue from the film is taken from this source. 22. See Sixsmith, Philomena, 19. 23.  Vilna Bashi Treitler, “Introduction: Race is a Fiction … Coloring Children and Parents Nonetheless,” in Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption, ed. Vilna Bashi Treitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6. 24. Sixsmith, Philomena, 448. 25. Sixsmith, Philomena, 92.

Bibliography Bolger, Dermot. A Second Life: A Renewed Novel. Dublin: Island Books, 2010. Briggs Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951. Frears, Stephen (dir.), Philomena. Pathé, 2013. Gleeson, Colin. “Apology for stigmatisation of unmarried mothers,” The Irish Times, June 11, 2014. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://www.irishtimes. com/news/social-affairs/apology-for-stigmatisation-of-unmarried-mothers-1.1827556. Homans, Margaret. The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

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Milotte, Mike. Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business. Expanded and Updated Edition. Dublin: New Ireland, 2012. Nelson, Kim Park. “Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace.” In Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, 89–104. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006. Sixsmith, Martin. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. London: Pan, 2009. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Treitler, Vilna Bashi, ed. Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Author Biography John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (2015), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), and Beginning Postcolonialism (2nd ed. 2010). He is an Editorial Board member of the international journal, Adoption and Culture.

Index

A Abandonment, 121, 130, 193, 201, 206, 211, 213 Abjection, 227, 234, 236, 238, 239, 258 Aboriginal, 3, 5, 13, 16–20, 22, 43, 52, 53 Abourezk, James (US Senator), 9, 10 Adolescence, 33, 38, 73, 75, 121, 145, 199, 206, 256, 257 Adopted, 10, 18, 32, 39–41, 46, 52–55, 58–61, 64, 69, 71, 73, 74, 87, 99, 104, 107–110, 122, 124, 133, 134, 145, 147, 149, 150, 154, 156, 160, 161, 163, 167, 169, 176, 178, 179, 185, 186, 189, 197–208, 211, 212, 215, 222, 224, 225, 227, 235, 236, 239, 248, 256, 257, 259, 260, 265, 270, 280, 282 Adopted children, 18, 41, 53, 162, 179, 201, 202, 204, 205, 223, 235, 240 Adoptee “salvation”, 126, 134, 238 Adoptees, 4, 10, 18, 19, 51, 52, 54, 70, 73, 76, 79, 122, 124, 128,

133, 134, 136, 143–148, 152– 154, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 180, 197–203, 206–215, 223, 224, 227, 231–234, 238, 244, 265, 280, 281, 284, 286, 290 Adopt Indian Métis program (AIM), 15, 30, 31, 37, 40, 41, 46 Adoption disastrous adoption, 51, 54, 56, 64 happy adoption, 54, 100, 101, 259, 270 out-of-tribe adoption, 51, 52, 58 Adoption industry, 278 Adoption narratives, 124–127, 135, 143, 144, 146–148, 150, 153, 154, 159, 161, 162, 233, 234, 259 Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), 8 Adoption triad, 160, 163, 223, 224, 242, 283 Adoptive being, 54, 144, 147, 154, 159, 160, 162–164, 259, 271 Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl case (2013), 5, 11, 19

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 M. Shackleton (ed.), International Adoption in North American Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59942-7

297

298  Index Adoptive families, 8, 15, 34, 35, 40, 144, 148, 176, 202, 212 Adoptive mothers, 75, 159, 186, 189, 203, 223, 225, 227, 230, 231, 238–239, 243 Adoptive parents, 70, 74, 75, 128, 134, 152, 155, 160, 179, 180, 186, 198, 201, 206, 208, 212, 213, 215, 222, 224–225, 227, 228, 231, 233, 235, 239, 284 Adoptive triangle, 143 African American, 100, 107–108, 149, 197–198, 199, 201–209, 212 Ahenakew, David, 18 Ahmed, Sara, 242–243 Alexander, Claire, 228 Alexander, Meena, 230 Alexie, Sherman: Indian Killer, 53–54, 69–72, 74–77, 79–82, 84–87 Anagnost, Ann, 134 Asian Adoption Kinship Networks (AKN), 198 Asian American, 128, 131, 135, 186, 225, 230 Assimilation, 34, 37, 53, 58, 82, 136, 186, 203, 235 Assmann, Aleida and Jan, 72 Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), 8 Attachment(s), 130, 150, 160–162, 203, 206, 224, 226, 230 Australia, 53 B Baby Veronica case, 5 Baden, Amanda, 200 Barry, Sebastian: The Secret Scripture, 279 Barthes, Roland, 176

Belonging, 40, 127, 132, 144, 158, 189, 198, 200, 206, 214, 221–223, 228, 233, 235, 239, 243, 244, 259, 265 Bertheussen, Mona Friis: Twin Sisters , 175–189 Bérubé, Michael, 62–63 Bhabha, Homi, 132 Bildungsroman , 102, 113, 127, 145, 257, 258 Billingsley, Andrew, 207 Biocentric, 154, 156, 158, 159, 163 Biogenetic ties, 147, 158, 163, 178, 270 Biological parents, 41, 143, 145, 148, 153, 155, 158 Biracial children, 198–200, 204 Birth culture(s), 76, 147, 178, 186, 231 Birth mother(s), 52, 56, 59, 77, 83–85, 122, 126, 129, 131–134, 148–150, 153–155, 157, 159, 161, 176, 177, 200, 202, 203, 222, 224, 227, 230, 232, 237, 238, 279, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 290, 291 Black Elk Speaks, 56 Black German-American adoptees, 197–215 Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA), 197, 214 Blood/Blood-lines, 9, 12, 59, 103, 161, 164, 178, 179, 182, 184, 186, 189, 226, 228, 258, 261, 270 Blow, Peggy, 206, 213 Boarding school, 6, 7, 37, 105, 111 See also Residential school Bolger, Dermot: A Second Life, 279 Boychuk, Ernest, 28, 33–34 Boyne, John: A History of Loneliness, 279

Index

Brauer, Jane, 127, 131 Briggs, Laura, 281 Brodzinsky, David M., 202, 211 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 222 Browder, Laura, 101 “Brown Baby Plan”, 203 Brown, Dee, 109 Brown, Dusten, 11 Brown, Ivan, 9 Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), 208 Buffalo Bill, 100 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 6, 7, 10 Burnett, Frances Hodgson: Little Lord Fauntleroy, 262 Butler, Richard, 10 C Cain, Henriette, 213 Caliban, 58 Callahan, Cynthia: Kin of Another Kind, 144, 147 Canada, 3–6, 8, 13–19, 28–31, 42, 52, 54, 83 Capobianco, Matthew and Melanie, 11 Captivity narratives, 72, 74 Cardwell, Daniel, 203, 207, 213 Carter, Dan T., 99, 102 Carter, Forrest (Asa Earl Carter) The Education of Little Tree , 81, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 109–113 The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, 103, 110, 111 The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales , 103 Watch for Me on the Mountain , 103 Carter, Jimmy, 11 Caruth, Cathy, 78, 84 Catholic Church, 278, 280, 284

  299

Cherokee, 11, 99–101, 103–109, 111, 112 Cherokee Trail of Tears, 103, 106 Chief Joseph, 85 Childs, Bonnie, 207 Child Welfare League of America, 4, 7, 10, 30 China, 176, 178, 179, 187, 198, 281 Citizenship, 18, 135, 201, 221–223, 225, 244 Class, 11, 18, 28, 37, 40, 41, 71, 75, 77, 153, 207, 221–223, 234, 236, 239, 289 Colonialism/Colonization, 17, 53, 71, 86, 87, 238 Colorado Springs Gazette , 205 Color-blindness, 29, 36, 75, 81, 122, 128, 149, 176, 179, 181, 186, 199 Consanguinity, 147, 161, 260, 267, 271 Coogan, Steve, 282 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 52, 56, 58 Coram, Joe, 283 Couser, G. Thomas, 52, 55, 56, 58, 66 Coutin, Susan Bibler, 211 Crazy Horse, 85 Crey, Ernie, 52 D Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe , 258 Deloria, Philip J., 81, 101 de Man, Paul, 123 Dench, Judi, 282, 287 Dene Declaration, 17 Department of External Affairs (Ireland), 283 Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), 30

300  Index Diaspora, 199, 214, 222, 223, 226, 228, 236–237, 243, 245 Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist , 51, 105 Diefenbaker, John, 32 Difference, 75, 128, 131, 149, 198, 223, 226, 227, 230–236, 239–243, 265, 269, 270 Disability, 52, 57, 59–64, 236, 238 Discovery, 54, 55, 112, 146, 154, 158, 180, 244 Dorris, Michael: The Broken Cord , 51–59, 62–64 Doucette, Marcien and Rita, 28, 31–42 Doucette, Robert, 32, 36, 42 Dozier, Mary, 203 E Eakin, Paul John, 125 Eastwood, Clint, 103 Ebony , 204 Emmet, Robert, 277 Ender, Morten G., 209, 210 Eng, David, 128, 222, 234, 238, 239 Erdrich, Louise Four Souls , 52, 61–63 Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse , 63 Tales of Burning Love , 64 Ethnic impersonation, 100, 102, 110 Expectations, 77, 159, 202, 208, 212, 223, 242 Exploitation, 71, 100, 122, 134, 153, 159, 238, 286, 292 F Family, 5, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 28, 31–37, 39, 41, 52, 53, 84, 85, 111, 128, 130, 134, 135, 144, 145, 149, 154, 158, 160, 161,

164, 176, 178, 180–181, 184, 186, 198, 200–202, 204–206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 226–228, 233, 234, 237, 239, 240, 244, 245, 256, 259, 260, 264, 266, 267, 269, 290 Faulkner, William: Requiem for a Nun, 286, 294 Fehrenbach, Heide, 200 Fekete, Elizabeth, 272 Fetal alcohol effects (FAE), 55 Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), 51, 52, 55–56, 59–62, 64 First Nations Child and Family Services program (FNCFS), 18 Fisher-Wirth, Ann, 78 Fitzhardinge, Helen, 206 Ford, Gerald, 10 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 110 Fostering/Foster care, 3–5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 19, 27, 40, 53, 69, 72 Foucault, Michel, 175–176, 189 Fournier, Susan, 52 Frankenberg, Ruth, 75 Franklin, Benjamin, 263 Frears, Stephen: Philomena , 279, 282, 287–293 Freud, Sigmund, 76, 84, 132 Friedenberg, Richard, 110 Funey, Alex, 9 G Gender, 19, 40, 41, 71, 75, 77, 79, 221, 222–223, 230, 234, 236, 238 Genealogical bewilderment, 146, 149, 153, 155, 157, 158, 164 Genocide, 17, 19, 53, 77 George, Rosemary, 223 Germany, 198–201, 203, 205, 207, 210, 212–215, 222, 224, 225, 229, 230, 234, 235, 243, 292

Index

Geronimo, 85, 103–104 Ghost Dance, 82, 85–87 Godey’s Lady’s Book , 257, 262 Goel, Urmila, 248, 249 Goldwater Institute, 12 Goodhouse, Louise and Janet, 9 Grafton, Anthony, 113 Graham, Lawrence Otis, 208 Grammer, Mabel, 203–205, 211, 212 Grammer, Mack and Rose, 205 Grammer, Peter, 204–205, 211 Grice, Helen, 233 Griffin, Regina: Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story , 204, 207 H Hale, Sarah Josepha, 257, 262 Han, Shinhee, 128 Hansen, Andy, 179, 180 Hansen, Angela, 178–180 Hansen, Mia, 178 Hauglum, Alexandra, 179–180, 184, 188 Hauglum, Sigmund, 179 Hauglum, Wenche, 180 Hawthorn, Harry, 14 Hawthorn Report (Canada), 15–16 Healing, 58, 63, 73, 130, 131, 214 Health, Education, and Welfare, U.S. Department of (HEW), 10 Hein, Christina Judith, 76 Heritage, 18, 27, 32, 37, 58, 72, 86, 108, 130, 147, 186, 187, 197, 199, 200 Herman, Ellen, 205 Hess, Michael A. (Anthony Lee), 282–284, 286, 290–293 Highway, Tomson Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing , 52, 59–61 Kiss of the Fur Queen , 53

  301

The Rez Sisters , 52, 59, 60 Hirsch, Bertram, 9 Hoeller, Hildegard, 269 Hogan, Linda: Solar Storms , 69, 82 Höhn, Maria, 200 Holt Adoption Program, 133 Holt, Harry and Bertha, 133, 198 Homans, Margaret, 111, 122, 124, 129, 144, 159, 178, 287 Home, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 28, 31, 33, 35, 38, 40, 42, 61, 70, 72, 74, 104, 126, 132, 177, 181, 183, 185, 186, 201, 204, 207, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228–230, 232, 233, 243, 244, 257, 260, 277, 278, 287, 291, 293 Homecoming, 53, 62, 63, 71, 132 Homeless, 82, 85, 135, 227 Horn, Tom, 104 Hostbjor, Stella, 41 Hovet, Grace Ann, 258 Hovet, Theodore R., 258 Hudson, Pete, 17, 256 Huhndorf, Shari M., 101 I Identity, 53, 56, 59, 60, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76–82, 84, 86, 101, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136, 144, 146, 156, 161, 162, 164, 178, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206, 207, 211, 215, 228, 233, 239, 244, 260, 263, 264, 280, 291 Immigration and Nationality Act, 198 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 201 India, 222, 224, 226, 227, 234–245 Indian Act (Canada), 13, 14, 52 Indian Adoption Project (IAP), 7–8, 15, 30, 41, 69, 82

302  Index Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) (1978), 5, 8–12, 51, 52, 54, 58, 69, 110 Indian Relocation Act (1956), 6, 82 Indian Termination Policy (U.S.), 82 Indigenous child removal, 11–12, 27–33 In re Baby Boy L case (1982), 11 Interracial adoption, 5–8, 12, 17, 19 Inuit, 13, 16, 29, 83, 86 Ireland, 277–293 Irish Catholic Bishops Conference (2014), 286 Irving, Washington, 261 Isaac, Calvin (Choctaw Chief), 9 J Jack and Jill of America, 208 James, Henry, 262 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 260 Jefford, Barbara, 288 Jerng, Mark C., 111, 122, 239 Jimenez, Jillian, 204 Johnson, Troy R., 82 Johnston, Ian, 112 Johnston, Patrick, 17 Jo, Soojung: Ghost of Sangju , 122, 135 Jumel, Elizabeth, 256 K Kidwell, Claire, 73 Kim, Jodi, 150 Kim, Jungha, 127 Kim, Sharon, 258 Kimelman, Edwin, 17 King, Martin Luther, 210 Kingsolver, Barbara, 65 Kinship, 111, 127, 129, 144, 150, 162, 176, 182, 186, 198, 204,

206, 215, 223, 226, 234, 244, 245 Kirchner, Bharti: Shiva Dancing , 222–238, 241 Kirst, Michaela: Brown Babies: Germany’s Forgotten Children , 207 Kolodny, Annette, 78 Korea, 121, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133, 151, 198, 281 Korean-American adoption, 132 Kristeva, Julia, 129 Ku Klux Klan, 102, 103, 108, 110 Kuusisto, Eeva, 100, 106 L Lakota People’s Law Project, 11 Laliberté, Harold, Eileen and Geraldine, 28, 31 Lancaster, Alice, 204 Larson, Kirsten, 185 Laura, Briggs, 281 Lee, Philomena, 282, 284–291, 293 Leigh, Mike, 148 Lemke Muniz de Faria, Yara-Colette, 197, 200, 205–206 Leys, Ruth, 124 Lloyd, Julia, 256 Lott, Eric, 100 Lovern, Lavonna, 63 Loving vs. Virginia decision (1967), 199 Lyslo, Arnold, 7, 8, 41 M Maas, Sharon: The Speech of Angels , 222, 224–227, 229, 232, 234–236, 238, 240–241, 244 Magdalene Laundries, 277–280 Maldonado, Christina, 11

Index

March, Karen, 211 Margolis, Stacey, 258 Markievicz, Constance Georgine, 277 Martin, Biddy, 243 McDonagh, John Michael: Calvary , 279 McGurl, Mark, 112 McHale, Brian, 112 McKenzie, Brad, 17 McLeod, John, 54, 123, 144, 146– 148, 153–154, 160, 162–163, 168, 226, 231, 242, 259, 271, 277 McLoughlin, Sean, 246 McNulty, Sister Hildegarde, 282–286, 288 McQuaid, Archbishop John Charles, 283 Mecheril, Paul, 248 Mekong Delta, 144 Melosh, Barbara, 144 Merriam Report (1928), 15 Métis, 13, 14, 16, 18, 27, 29–32, 37, 53 Meyer, Carla, 180, 182 Milotte, Mike: Banished Babies , 278–281, 283 Min, Eun Kyung, 133 Mitchell, David, 61 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 243 Momaday, N. Scott, 53 Morgan, Thomas Jefferson, 4 Mormons, 10 Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton: In Search of April Raintree , 53 Motherhood, 60, 222, 242, 280 Mullan, Peter: The Magdalene Sisters, 279 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 147 Narrative prosthesis, 61

  303

Nation, 4, 7, 30, 32, 37, 41, 42, 104, 107, 111, 135, 147, 153, 160, 163, 198, 222, 280, 281, 290 National Conference of Catholic Charities (NCCC), 284 National Indian Brotherhood, 16 Native Americans, 7, 54, 71, 73, 85, 86, 100, 101, 103, 105–107, 112 Naturalization, 176, 201, 212 Nelson, Kim Park, 280 Nilsson, Pete, 291 Niné, Khara: Cries of the Soul , 122, 135 Noble, Marianne, 258 Norms, 14, 35, 55, 75, 144, 266 Norway, Norwegian, 176–180, 182, 187–188 Novy, Marianne, 51, 54, 233, 234, 235, 259, 270 O Oedipus, 51, 54 Ogata, Amy, 35 Oglala Sioux v. Luann Van Hunnik case (2015), 11 Oh, Arissa, 133 Ojibwe, 60, 62, 63, 112 Operation Babylift, 144, 149, 151, 152, 155, 164 Orphan(s), 60, 105, 107, 109, 111, 134, 135, 144, 149–152, 155, 156, 198, 201, 256 Orphanages, 157, 201, 202, 204, 205 P “Permanency”, 28, 40–42 Personhood, 144–145, 147–149, 151–158, 160, 163–164 Phan, Aimee: We Should Never Meet, 144–145, 147–149, 151–158, 160, 163–164

304  Index Phan, Suzanne, 186 Placement, 7, 8, 27, 29, 35, 40–42, 70 Playing Indian, 81, 101 Poggemoeller, Mary, 15 Porter, Eleanor H.: Pollyanna , 222 Postcolonial, 107, 223, 228, 231, 278, 280, 281 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 125 Prokofiev, Sergei: Visions Fugitives , 131 “Provenance” (obsession with origins), 146, 158, 231, 282 Punnamparambil, Jose, 249

Return, 10, 11, 28, 31, 32, 42, 53, 62, 70, 72, 78, 102, 127, 132, 146, 156–158, 163, 177, 183, 189, 213, 228, 242, 267, 270, 292 Richardson, Rudi, 201 Richman, Joe, 103 Ricoeur, Paul, 125 Robinson, Eric, 19 Robinson, Katy: A Single Square Picture , 122 Rosenberger, Judith, 242 Rubin, Dana, 110 Ruthven, K.K., 112

Q Quay, Sara E., 261

S Sacramento Bee, The , 180 Saskatchewan Department of Social Services, 27, 36, 42 Scotland, 256–262, 266, 270 Scott, Duncan C., 4 Secrecy/Secrets, 76, 147, 148, 153, 158, 162, 164, 178, 200, 203, 278 Secret Life of Twins, The , 176 Senier, Siobhan, 53 Shackleton, Mark, 64, 89 Shakespeare, William: The Winter’s Tale , 54 “The shock of arrival”, 230, 231 Sifton, Clifford, 13 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 53 Simal-González, Begoña, 166 Sixsmith, Martin: The Lost Child of Philomena Lee , 282–283, 286–288 “Sixties Scoop”, 3, 5, 14, 18, 53 Smallman, Shawn, 86 Smith, James M., 280 Smith, Scott, 205 Smith, Sidonie, 123

R Race, 12, 41, 71, 77, 105, 144, 147– 149, 152, 153, 160, 161, 163, 164, 179, 181, 186, 198–200, 206, 209, 221–223, 228, 230, 233, 234, 236, 242 Racialization, 122, 134, 231, 234, 239 Racial melancholia, 128 Racism, 75, 103, 126, 198–200, 207, 210, 211, 234–236, 238, 241 Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), 203 Relocation(s), 6, 30, 69, 82, 83, 210, 214 Removal, 9, 27–29, 32, 34, 38, 69, 72, 74, 79, 82, 84, 87, 214, 269 Residential school, 4, 13, 16, 17, 19, 37, 53, 58 Resistance, 16, 53, 64, 71, 82, 85, 86, 158, 214, 223, 243, 263 Resources for Adoption of Children (REACH), 30–31

Index

Snyder, Sharon, 61 Sogn Avis , 187, 188 Sorensen, Eli Park, 126 South Asian diasporic women’s writing, 221 South Vietnam, 150, 151 Sow, Noah, 214 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 234 Stacks, Geoffrey, 77 Standing Our Ground, 12 Stereotypes/Stereotyping, 81, 102, 106, 126, 140, 200, 224, 233, 234, 236, 238 Steuart, David, 33 Stevenson, Allyson, 41 “Stimulation”, 28, 34–36, 38, 42 St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector, 260 Straub, Julia, 123 Strickland, Rennard, 112 Surrogate, 149, 161, 237, 244 Swan, Clara, 8 T Taylor, Ron, 104 Ties, 29, 39, 41, 155, 160, 178, 189, 201, 233, 269, 271 Todd family (Michigan), The, 28, 31–32, 37–38 Tone, Wolfe, 277 Tracing (and reunion), 149, 153–155, 159, 163 Transcultural adoption, 53, 123, 143, 145–148, 150, 152, 160, 161, 164, 259, 262, 269 Transethnic adoption, 99–102, 104–106, 110–113 Transnational adoption, 18, 64, 124, 132–136, 147, 150, 176, 198, 204, 221, 238, 265, 269–271, 281, 283, 285–293

  305

Transracial adoption, 3, 4, 11, 17–18, 52–54, 64, 71, 80, 81, 84, 86, 121, 143–147, 149, 150, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 175, 176, 178, 182, 189, 198, 199, 223, 226, 233–235, 244, 282 Trauma, 10, 40, 59, 71, 72, 78–82, 84, 86, 87, 122, 124, 126, 199, 202, 224, 227, 230, 238, 240 Treitler, Vilna Bashi, 282, 290 Trenka, Jane Jeong Fugitive Visions , 121, 124, 131– 132, 134–136 The Language of Blood , 121–132, 134, 136 Treuer, David, 112 Trickster(s), 59, 60, 62, 64, 85, 86 Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete, 258 Trudeau, Pierre, 16 Truman, Harry, 209 Truong, Monique: Bitter in the Mouth, 143–151, 158–159, 161–164 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada, 5, 19, 53 Twain, Mark Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 57, 105, 109 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , 105 The Innocents Abroad , 262 Twin(s), 175–189 U Udall, Morris, 11 UN Convention on Genocide (1948), 17 Unheimlich , 132 V Van Styvendale, Nancy, 77 Van Tassel, Kristin, 260

306  Index Velie, Alan, 73 Verrier, Nancy N., 202, 211 Vessell, Nancy, 207 Vice, Sue, 112 Viet Nam, 144, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 198 Vizenor, Gerald Father Meme , 53 Manifest Manners, 56 Volkman, Toby Alice, 153 W Wake, Neil, 12 Wallace, George, 102 Wannabe Indians, 81, 82 Warner, Susan: The Wide, Wide World, 255–271 Washington, George, 109, 263 Watson, Julia, 123 Weinstein, Cindy, 258, 271 Wells, Kitty, 60 Welzer, Harald, 79

Wertsch, Mary: Military Brats , 209 West, Nadja Y., 205 White/Whiteness, 75, 85, 128, 130, 132, 242, 243 Windigo (weetigo), 53, 79, 86 Winfrey, Oprah, 110 Winterson, Jeanette: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? , 189 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 131 Woods, Sister Frances Jerome, 204 Wounded Knee, 86, 109 Wovoka, 82, 85 Y Yngvesson, Barbara, 211, 214