Bitterroot Valley, Montana, June 29, 2013.
Two days ago, over breakfast, I’d asked Uncle Albert for another favor: could he please take me to a place he felt it was important for me to see, to know. He was my guide, talking about my birth father, sitting with me at Vic’s funeral, walking with me as we visited the homestead. I felt there was at least one more place, but I didn’t know what it was.
“Well,” he chuckled, his eyes bright. “What do you want to see?”
“I don’t know anymore. You pick.” My smile was slight and my words limited because I was tired. This place has worn me down. I need him and his wisdom to help me rebuild the person I thought I was.
As if reading my mind, he said, gently, “Well, let me think about it.”
He’d telephoned last night and, without preamble, asked me to pick him up at seven thirty the following morning. My mind flew with the possibilities.
“Are we going a long ways away?” I asked, trying to figure out why we were leaving so early. Maybe to visit the sacred pine tree? A place on the Jocko? Somewhere in the Missions?
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said, laughing. “It’s a surprise. It took me a while, but I’ve finally thought about what I think is important for you to know about yourself.”
At seven in the morning the highway is quiet; I meet only a few cars on their way to work. With my eyes acting as a camera, I snap memory images as I drive through the Mission Valley, noting its fields, its houses, its graveled roads that intersect every mile or so with the highway. I want to capture this landscape, take it home with me to review on a cold winter night.
The Missions have not yet released the sun, so it is with a quiet beauty that the kettle ponds of Ninepipes National Wildlife Refuge reflect the peach sky in their still waters. By the time I am near the Bison Range, the sun is awake, but it disappears again as I drive the deceptively sharp curves of the canyon that follow the Jocko River.
I pull into Albert’s drive just a bit past seven thirty and watch as he, deliberate in his movements, checks the spaces around his house, opening and closing car doors, locking storage doors, checking the house door. When he climbs into the passenger seat of my car, he looks at me, smiles, and says one word. “Ready?”
It turns out we are on our way to Hamilton. In the last five years I’ve driven this corridor several times, either by myself or with a member of my family, blood and legal. As we head south, time collapses until I am young, driving with Mom and Dad by the towns of Florence, Victor, and Stevensville, watching the cottonwood trees along the Bitterroot River blur as they fly past my window. But I am not young. I am fifty-four. I notice that many of the farmhouses that occupy sizable acreages haven’t changed in the past fifty years, except for a new coat of paint or maybe some repairs. They still stand stalwartly on the land. I recognize the bars that Vern pointed out five years ago and the campground whose dirt road snaked down toward the river, the one they’d stayed at. The one of many.
Roads take off from the highway like irrigation tubes, twisting and turning their way toward the Bitterroots. We turn off on one of these roads, a one-lane paved asphalt ribbon, and follow its convoluted path. Overgrown shrubs and brambles blind the corners, so it’s kind of an exciting drive. As we near the base of the mountains, the road undulates, and we drive by the remains of almost-forgotten orchards that stand bent and gnarled on the brilliant green landscape of late June. Dark, plowed earth releases bursts of color, as vegetable and flower gardens vie for attention, the cottage-like homes nearly lost in the visual cacophony.
“Okay,” Albert says, his voice tinged with excitement. “We’re almost there.” He scans the landscape. After a few moments he raises his index finger near the glass and says, “Slow down. I think it’s near here.” I allow my car to creep up the steep incline until the fork on the road, then I pause. Albert hesitates only for a moment. “Yes, here. To the right. Slow down because it’s coming up.” We catch a rise and follow a gentle L, and as we round the corner, Albert says, “Okay, stop here.”
Even though I pull over as far as I can, my car still occupies a good part of the lane. I lower the power window and cut the engine, and silence descends. After a moment I make out the buzz of insects that dive-bomb our car and, a little farther away, the hum of bees as they dip and sway over the nearby garden. Beyond the garden sits three small, white, dilapidated buildings, each perhaps fifteen by twenty feet. Each has a door flanked by a couple of windows. Albert is silent as he studies this space. A few moments later, when he speaks, it is with deliberation.
“See those sheds there?” he asks, pointing at the buildings. “That’s where we used to live in the summer. Your folks and you kids would stay in the middle shed; my mom and dad would stay in the front one; and I’d stay with some of my older brothers or sisters in the one in the back.” He turns and looks at me. “We’d come here every summer to pick strawberries, and this whole hillside was filled with strawberries. Those were long, hot days.” He pauses, then gestures to the adjacent white house. “The guy who owned this field lived right up there.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, somewhere around there.”
I do the math with what I know. He is fourteen years older than I am. If I was here, he was probably fifteen. “Were you here all summer?”
“As long as the berries produced. But once they stopped, we worked fields all over this valley. We picked berries, apples; we worked the potato fields. And sometimes my brothers and sisters and I would walk into town, maybe three or four miles, and go to the movies or to the skating rink, when it cost a quarter. But that money was hard-earned.” He looks back to the field, and his voice becomes strained. “We were so poor then.” When he turns toward me I see sadness in his eyes, on his face, and I hear almost an apology in his words.
“I used to be embarrassed of the life we lived,” he continues. “Of the places we lived, this being one of them. I was embarrassed at how poor we were. I was embarrassed for a long time. I had no reason to be ashamed of who I was or the work I’d done; it was honest work. But I was ashamed for a long time. But at some point I stopped being embarrassed and accepted that this was the life I was given.”
He grows silent again. His gaze blankets the scene once more before it returns to me. His voice is strong, sure, and the smile is filled with compassion; I think for both of us. “This is what I wanted you to see because I thought it was important for you to know that you lived here, with your folks. With us. Even if it was just a little while.”
The tribal council never did anything about the resolution for the homecoming for adoptees or fostered people separated from the tribe. I was also never able to obtain my full adoption records, but I doubt I’m done fighting for them. They are my Rosetta stone, allowing me to interpret my whole life, not just the life that started on chapter 3 but is now, somewhere, on chapter 2. But really, I want to read the prologue, the writing of how everything came to be.
The morning before Rick is to arrive at the condo, I see several gray shapes through a gap in the blinds. It is the three pairs of Canada geese with their seventeen goslings, spread out on the lawn, pulling at the new grass. They panic when I pull open the shades, the adults pushing the adolescent goslings ahead of them, into the water. They wag their tails in agitation and their voices in protest at my presence. Only when all the goslings are safely in the water do the adults follow them.
How I wish my reservation family had watched us children as carefully as this group of geese. But they didn’t, for whatever reason. But other adults attempted, with varying degrees of success, to fill that role. Although Dad started out trying to do the right thing, he was haunted by his own demons, who chased him relentlessly down his alcohol-induced path. After the damage had been done, I wouldn’t let him fully return. I don’t know how I feel about that now.
Mom’s number-one interest was raising me to be confident, successful, generous, and kind; I think for the most part, she was successful. But there was a whole society out there that undermined much of what she tried to do. Children, I realize, are raised in a society, not just a family, and families need to prepare them for that. As I’ve become older, I’ve also become more confident, and in looking back I see that I have surrounded myself with warriors fighting for the best interests of children in all kinds of ways.
Vern Fisher, my brother who works for Tribal Law and Order, could have fallen into the patterns so many of our siblings did. Instead, he chose a path that guides and protects the people of our tribe. I asked him once how he wanted to be remembered. “I am sure I will be remembered as a firm, but fair, police officer. . . . I have an impact on a lot of lives. . . . Most of the impact is viewed as negative at first . . . but I think people will remember that I was trying to help them and their families. And I would like my kids to remember that I love them.”
Evelyn Stevenson, a lawyer for the Salish Kootenai tribes, passed away in March 2015. Over our ten-year friendship, she was, in a very real sense, my surrogate tribal mother. One story stands out, over the many we shared around her dining table: “I remember my grandma would how say proud she was that she’d never lost any of her kids to the social worker. And then when I got older and left home, I thought, people don’t normally say that. People don’t even think about losing their kids to the social worker. But every Indian family in the history of time has worried about losing their kids to the social worker.” This insight led her to not only become a lawyer but, after listening to testimony in Washington DC from tribal people whose families had been shattered, begin crafting what would become the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
Judge William Thorne has presented with me on a few occasions at conferences hosted by the Casey Family Foundation’s Indian Child Welfare Division. I met him for the first time at the conference held in Great Falls, Montana, in 2013, recognizing him from a video created by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges used to educate judges, lawyers, and social workers about the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. His interest is in promoting “customary adoption”: “If a child needs new parents, we can replace their parents, but that doesn’t mean we have to replace aunts and uncles, cousins, or their siblings.” As soon as I heard his argument, I knew this was the kind of adoption I wanted to advocate for. At the end of the conference, I approached him and shook his hand, telling him, “You are my hero.” I wasn’t able to stop the tears. He hugged me and thanked me for telling my story; it gave context for his argument for policy change.
Uncle Albert’s strength and his careful and thoughtful way of speaking, as well as his concern for the welfare of the people, captured my attention immediately. Heavily grounded in his traditions and spirituality, he is a man with a strong sense of self and purpose. As a result, I turn to him for advice, solace, and answers. I think if my parents had met him in an age where that was not just acceptable but encouraged, they would have, like me, been drawn to his quiet ways and strong values, his gentle sense of humor, and his compassion. Like Albert, I felt different, inferior, not good enough to walk upright in the world. Except I had the additional complication of feeling like I couldn’t walk upright in the Native world either. In both realms I was expected to be invisible.
Yes, parents lost us as adoptees, but we have lost our entire family, entire tribes, who could have helped us navigate the dangerous waters we crossed, in ways our adoptive families could not. We needed them in our lives.
But even members of my family don’t fully understand the complicated betweenness of being. In one of our early conversations about this topic, Vern told me, “You think too much about being Indian.” That was easy for him to say, with his unquestioned and unchallenged tribal and family membership. Plus, he had an identity of which he was proud, but it didn’t define him; it was taken for granted. But me? I was made to think all the time of what I was allowed and not allowed to be by entire groups of people. Their applied pressure didn’t stop the bleeding but instead became a tourniquet, where I almost lost a piece of myself in the process. In this pressurized system bounded by race and ethnicity, I allowed other people’s problems to become mine.
But somewhere along the line I changed. I no longer accepted responsibility for how other people thought or behaved. I no longer feared the spaces around me. I no longer accepted my placement in the societal space to be determined by others. I like to tell people that my master’s research in cultural anthropology was the most successful, and expensive, counseling session I’d ever attended. Through this I understood the social hierarchy, the ways we, as adoptees, acquire and exchange material goods, cultural characteristics, and social networks that increase, or decrease, our perceived human value. I also understood the role social memory plays, by determining what is remembered but, more important, also what is forgotten. Social memory is what ties all these perceptions together, allowing them to be regifted from one generation to the next.
I was not responsible for not fitting in. Society holds that responsibility.
I am able to breathe a sigh of relief to put down that burden.
I have been invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the American Indian Council in Kansas City, Missouri. Before the program starts I stand and watch the color guard, a group of American Indian veterans, enter the hall, their feet moving to the rhythm of the traditional drummers and singers that occupy one of the corners. One of the veterans in particular captures my attention; he looks the most “Indian” of the group. His skin is dark, and his black hair is pulled back into a ponytail that falls halfway down his back, revealing a sharp, angular face. He moves with such pride, as if he knows exactly who he is and where he’s come from. And to be honest, I feel a sense of envy at his unquestioned confidence.
It is time for my presentation, and I climb the steps, walk behind the podium, and draw a calming breath. Then I begin to talk about my adoption experience, with all its beauty and all its ugliness. I tell the audience about how I grew up, of finding my family, and of still feeling ungrounded. And I tell them why: I carry the burden of colonization. I don’t belong; I find myself on the outside looking in, no matter where I am. Tears drift down my face, uninvited. I tell them that transracial adoptees carry a lot of baggage, and I want people to understand how much that burden weighs. I want people to understand how their words, their actions, have far-reaching consequences.
Their applause tells me they heard my message.
After my talk the man in the color guard, the one I noticed, approaches me. Up close I can see he is about my age. He leans toward me and shakes my hand, talking quietly in a conversation for my ears only. “I am giving you this gift in a traditional way, so you understand how much I appreciated that you told my story. That was my story you told up there. All those things happened to me. And people need to know that. But I wasn’t able to tell them. So thank you for telling them.”
He presses something into my palm.
I wait until he disappears into the crowd, then open my hand to see what had been exchanged: a carefully folded bill.
The amount is not important.
The message is.
12. Susan, Ronni Marie, and Vern. Photo by Rick Harness. Courtesy of the author.