BEFORE EUROPEAN CONTACT and continually since, the Native peoples of the North American continent practiced adoption. They decided among themselves which children should be raised in families different from their biological families. This customary or traditional adoption, one without legal papers, is still practiced in some communities, particularly where property is communal, so inheritance doesn't depend on wills and legal divisions.
On a visit to Arctic Bay, Nunuvik, Canada, I listened to my teenaged friend, guide, and interpreter as she pointed to a busy, twelve-year-old neighbour, “that's my cousin. Actually he's my brother, but he was adopted as a baby by my aunt and uncle.” Customary adoption here seemed simple, co-operative, frank, and useful. There was no secrecy about the children's origins and all the children knew where they belonged.
This is in stark contrast to adoption in southern urban centres where lawyers, welfare agencies, and medical staff are involved in adoption, and where adopting parents seldom know the birth parents. How did we establish such a different view of adoption?
The practice of sending children to families other than their family of origin probably occurred in the society of early Britons as it did in aboriginal society, but organized adoption as an institutionalized social movement is documented as far back as 1618 in English history when orphans were sent to Richmond, Virginia. Over the following 350 years, 150,000 children were transported by boat to the colonies. The last orphan boatload left Britain for Australia in 1967. Many of the children sent out to the colonies were not adopted into a family in any sense, but were used as labour. Children did not have rights and the abuse of children was not generally considered to be a social offence. Christian brothers in Australia tortured their orphans, and farmers in Canada treated girls like slaves and beat them. No one took any responsibility for the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of those thousands of children. Anyone—parents, teachers, neighbours, instructors, religious leaders, employers—beat children without legal or social consequences. Not all the children who were sent out were abused, but few were adopted as a member of a family. People had large families, sometimes twelve children, many of whom died in infancy or early childhood. Society did not invest much in a child who may not live to adulthood—children were not considered valuable social assets in the white North American population. In some families they were loved, perhaps, but not legally important. Adoption in these early years among the white population was not common. In any case there were, in the British legal system of North America, no adoption laws. You could register a non-biological child as chattel, but you could not adopt.
A new look at children came with the writings of Swiss-born Jean Jacques Rousseau. In spite of his personal failure as a parent—he placed all five of his infant children in foundling homes where the death rate was so high that survival was unlikely—he wrote a book that influenced the way society viewed children. In Emile (1760), Rousseau pro-posed the unusual idea that humans were born “good” and, if carefully educated, a child would be joyful, productive, and moral. This was at odds with the prevalent attitude that children were born bad, full of evil and sin, and needed to be disciplined in order to become “human.” As well, Rousseau contributed to the romantic notion that children in their innocence could be examples to adults and be of benefit to humanity. While this does not seem a very startling idea today, it was revolutionary in Rousseau's time. Rousseau's writings were read world-wide and his ideas gained a hold on the popular imagination so that, in time, children began to be viewed as valuable in themselves. This changed attitude influenced official policies.
Still, in spite of changing attitudes, the treatment of children didn't improve a great deal. Bad educators and parents still routinely caned children. Children worked in unsafe conditions for long hours. They were poorly fed and neglected. Charles Dickens, writing in the 19th century, did not report great philanthropic movements to rescue children. But the romantic notion that children were “jewels” and “precious angels” contributed to some improvement in the coming years. People may have continued to abuse and neglect children, but society was beginning to view this as not the fault of the children, and to feel some responsibility for rescuing them.
Capitalizing on this attitude during the middle of the 19th century, Marie Rye and Annie McPherson organized homes for British orphans in Canada. Playing upon the public image of philanthropy, Rye and McPherson successfully ran a child-transportation business that moved children from Britain to Canada, promising better opportunities for them and, incidentally, netting the two women a profit of 100 percent. This with the full approval of both the British and Canadian governments. When an inspector from the British government investigated their business in 1874, he found that the children were often mistreated. Collective public attitudes of philanthropy and care were countered by individual tolerance of child abuse and maltreatment. Between 1870 and 1925, approximately twenty-five organizations were sending children to Canada.
Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister, was not in the business of transporting children in order to make himself a fortune. He was truly philanthropic, although certainly misguided. He helped to establish the Children's Aid Society of New York to improve life for children of the poor. Between 1854 and 1929, the Children's Aid Society moved over 100,000 children, called orphans but often not orphans, from the streets of New York City to homes across the U.S. Some of the children were adopted as members of a family, but many were used as child labour. At this time most children were still not seen as valuable for their potential contributions to society, but for there contributions to farm life. The question was not whether to adopt, but how much work they could perform. Few were adopted.
In England, adoption was not legal until the 20th century because social class was inherited and only blood children had a right to their class. To adopt a child from a lower class meant risking all the problems of the lower class, a view that has persisted with surprising tenacity to the present time. “Bad blood”—the blood of the poor—seemed to carry moral faults. In the U.S. and Canada, the notion of class was of much lesser importance. The American ideal promoted the concept that an adopted child had as much chance of “becoming President” as any child. Brace and the Children's Aid Society saw them-selves as philanthropists serving the great democratic ideal of equality, giving abandoned and orphaned children new homes across America, and new hopes. In reality, those children were often picked off the trains like slaves at an auction, used and abused by their “foster parents,” and suffered greatly. The Society did not advocate legal adoption, because most of the children were not legally orphans, and the only form of legal adoption at the time was the process of registering the child as a possession.
By 1929, most states in the U.S. had enacted adoption laws that gave children some protection, and, at least, established that they were indeed orphans before they could be placed.
Canada's most famous orphan was fictitious. Anne of Green Gables was an orphan in Prince Edward Island in the early 19th century. The attitudes of the community and her foster family at her arrival to the home were typical of the time. She had been chosen to work on the farm. The foster parents, particularly Marilla, felt virtuous and practical when they asked the orphanage for a strong boy, but, after originally planning to send her back, decided to keep her. Fortunately for the reading public and for the story, love was much more important than labour.
The purpose of adoption laws during the early part of the century was not simply to allow for the disposing of family property—the right of adopted children to inherit and the right of adoptive parents to bequeath property to their adopted children—but also to provide the child a good home. Rousseau's notion of the essential goodness of the child had by now replaced the ideas that a child is born wicked, and that the children of the poor are born more wicked than most. In view of this changed attitude, every child deserved a good home. Agencies recognized by the courts were set up to match children to “good” homes. The notion that children needed protection, and that the legal system needed to ensure they were placed in a home where they could be well-cared for, evolved in the early 1920s and has been part of the adoption placement system with greater and lesser effectiveness since.
Infant formula was discovered in the 1920s, making early adoption much more possible. Until then the adoption of infants was not practical unless the family could afford a wet nurse. After the invention of formula, infants could be placed into a family at birth, and the family could pretend that the child was born to them. And so the substitute child, “as if born to,” arrived in the family and the secrecy around the birth of an adopted child began.
Before this, there was little importance placed on secrecy. By the 1930s and ‘40s, the identification of birth parents and adoptive parents was screened by bureaucracy. The original notion of privacy and confidentiality around adoption served the idea that the child should be protected from being branded illegitimate—a social stigma that was real and disenfranchising at the time. As well, the confidentiality laws protected adoptive parents from being harassed or blackmailed by unscrupulous birth parents. Because of a few, all birth parents were blocked from knowing where their children were placed. Psychologists, social workers, and others involved with the children believed that it was in the best interests of the child and adoptive parents to deny their child's birth parents, family, and situation in order to create a new life for the child. An amazing amount of hubris, including a belief in the superiority of the adoptive family, went into this attitude.
The years of the Second World War and those immediately following saw many more babies available for adoption. Brief encounters and the desperate intimacy of the war years produced many babies without families to care for them.
During the 1950s, while an increasing number of babies were being placed for adoption, Jean Paton wrote a book, The Adopted Break Silence, in which she related her own experience and propounded the notion that adopted children should know who their birth parents are. She established a reunion organization called Orphan Voyage and began the movement that advocated the right of adopted children to find their biological families. This movement had slow beginnings. Her point of view had to wait twenty years before the increasing numbers of adopted children placed in the ‘50s reached adulthood and could embrace her ideas.
The 1950s were a time of great change in adoption. As well as many more babies being placed and more social acceptance in the mainstream culture of adoption, changes occurred in the placement of non-white babies. Children who were not white had experienced great difficulty in being legally adopted. The continued customary adoption in aboriginal groups and within the black communities of the U.S. was not recognized by law, but certainly it was recognized by families. At this time agencies began to make efforts to place non-white babies. The 1950s and ‘60s brought a concerted and organized effort by both U.S. and Canadian adoption agencies to increase the number of placements of aboriginal and other children of colour with white families. This occurred at a time when there were fewer and fewer white babies available for adoption. It was also a time of the Civil Rights Marches in the U.S., with the public becoming more and more aware of the dangers of racial prejudice and the necessity of opening hearts and minds to inter-racial acceptance. So, with practical and altruistic motives, the “Big Scoop” of Native children began.
When the issues of poverty, social prejudice, and disenfranchisement resulted in difficult lives for the children of the poor, particularly the poor of the many reserves and reservations of North America, the social agencies' response, in retrospect, appears appalling. They ignored the customary adoption processes of the communities, rounded up the children and, like the orphan trains of the 19th century, displaced these children by the car-load or bus-load from their home communities to adoptive or foster homes across the country and into other countries. Britain received plane loads of aboriginal children from Canada in the 1950s, and many aboriginal children were taken from Canada between 1958 and 1967 by the Indian Adoption Project of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Child Welfare League of America in the U.S. The parents of these children were often coerced or assumed to be uncaring, and at times the children were stolen, that is, taken when the parent was sick in hospital or away gathering supplies. There are many stories of social workers taking the children “for now, while you are sick” and never returning them. This was part of an inexplicable assumption of the superiority of the white race, and given that astounding belief, children were assumed to be better able to have a good life away from their families. Unstated in this “Big Scoop” was the notion of genocide, the assimilation of aboriginal people into the white society and their eventual disappearance. Not all adoptions of aboriginal children at this time took place under these circumstances. Some birth mothers voluntarily placed their children in non-aboriginal families and do so today, but many did not sign consents, or were coerced or tricked into signing consents.
The residential schools of the time, which thousands of aboriginal adults had attended, left many incapable of parenting. The residential schools, with the same motivations of assimilation and even genocide, had robbed them of the experience of being a child in a family home. When they grew up and had children, parenting was difficult. Instead of addressing this need to learn to parent, social agencies removed their children. It has taken thirty years to reveal the extent of this problem, and the consequences are likely to challenge generations to come.
Prior to the 1950s, black children were not placed in white homes, but by 1967 there was a concerted effort by adoption agencies to change this. In the 1960s, agencies advertised to white families through religious organizations and public appeals to adopt interracially. These were successful in increasing the number of adoptions of Asian, black, and aboriginal children, but primarily into the homes of white families. In British Columbia between 1961 and 1971, agencies placed many more aboriginal children in non-aboriginal homes than they had before. This was alarming to the aboriginal communities and, in 1972, in response to pressure from aboriginal communities and organizations, the provincial government put a moratorium on the adoption of aboriginal children by non-aboriginal families. They feared another “Big Scoop.” This moratorium stayed in effect for three years.
In the U.S., increasing demands for Indian homes for Indian children were being made by the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America at the same time that adoption agencies were sending aboriginal children out of the area and out of the country. In 1979, 339 children, many of whom were aboriginal, were sent from Canada to the U.S. for adoption, because aboriginal children could move across the border without legal hindrance. This situation was both astounding and horrifying to First Nations and Native American groups. Most aboriginal communities in the U.S. and Canada are clusters of family constellations that have endured for centuries. Every child has a place and is valued as a member of a family cluster. Adopting the child out does not change this. The child is valued simply because he or she is a member of a family. The child belongs. Losing the children, especially in such great numbers, caused emotional pain and horror and created huge problems for family reunification and tribal affiliations. In an effort to reverse this drain of children away from their home communities, aboriginal associations demanded Indian homes for Indian children.
In 1972, representatives of black communities in the U.S., the National Association of Black Social Workers, objected to the placing of black children in white homes for much the same reasons as the aboriginal people had. They cited problems of psychological adjustment for these children, believing that such a placement resulted in difficulties in establishing a personal and secure identity. The children would not know who they were.
As a consequence of these efforts by representative organizations, agencies now try to place children in a family of their own race. However, children are still placed trans-racially. This does not mean that such racially different homes are second-rate homes, but it does mean that parents in these placements now are more aware of the importance of race. Parents today realize that race plays an important part in a child's life, particularly during the teen and adult years, and that they must not deny this difference and must address it directly. Parents are far less likely today to ignore the impact of race on their child than they have been in the past.
By the 1970s, the number of babies available for adoption had been reduced, substantially due, among other reasons, to increasingly effective birth control, legalization of abortion, reduction of the stigma of illegitimacy, and the infertility of couples who were waiting longer to have children. The attitude toward adoption moved from placing children in order to meet the needs of adopting families, to selecting families to meet the needs of the adoptable children. When the scarcity of adoptable children emerged in the mid-'70s, families who wanted to adopt included couples who were infertile, couples who were fertile but chose to adopt, those who already had biological children, single men and women, lesbian and gay singles and couples—a greater diversity of adoptable families, or a greater frankness about that diversity. These families began to look across national borders for children. They now considered children of other races and “special” children, those with physical and psychological needs, as suitable. These were the same children who had a decade before been considered unadoptable.
The fantasy of the “matched” family began to fracture when adoptive parents searched for and accepted trans-racial children into their homes. Families now looked different, not just in hair colour and physical features, but also in skin colour. Such an obvious difference advertised “adoption,” and families began to find the notion of secrecy somewhat absurd.
With this new attitude toward frankness within the family, parents were advised to tell their children very early that they had been adopted. With this information children would not feel, when they discovered the fact, that they had been lied to. The lie was considered to be more detrimental to the child's mental health than the fact of adoption. The changing social attitude toward greater acceptance of adoption, and the increasing frankness within families about it, made adoption a more obvious part of society.
As the children who had been adopted in the age of secrecy (the ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s) grew up, they began to protest the former secrecy and to organize advocacy groups to agitate for their right to know their heritage. In response, institutions—not without protests and counter organizations from threatened adoptive parents—began to make changes in law to accommodate the demands of adopted adult children. Established in Britain before moving into North America, the changes in legislation gradually made finding birth parents more and more possible. The need to know one's biological roots began to seem legitimate, especially when it was expressed by adopted adults who had very strong ties with their adoptive families and who appeared to have rational reasons for searching. Looking for birth families became a goal not only for the abused, the disturbed and the unstable; it became a legitimate and common need.
The “need to know” became the “right to know” and developed into the notion of Open Adoption, which meant that all parties—the birth parents, adoptive parents, and children—could know each other. So we circle back to the ways of our ancestors where children were placed in homes that had the ability to care for them, and everyone knew where the children were.
Not everyone wants this, and, at this time, there is a combination of Open Adoption, confidential adoption, and passive adoption, where interested parties can request information and other interested parties can permit or refuse contact. There is now more choice at the time of adoption and both birth parents and adoptive parents can consider more options for their child.
From the early days in North America, when aboriginal people accepted children into families as valued and equal members on the witness of other tribal members, we moved to registering children as legal members of a family with legal rights while we devalued and often hid the child's heritage. From the attitude that the child was a possession that was given up by one set of parents and owned by another, we moved to a view that the child has two sets of parents—the biological and the nurturing/legal parents. Today's views of adoption may include the concept that two sets of co-operating parents provide the child with a secure environment. Legal conditions need to be in place to protect the child, but as readers encounter the teens in this book, they will see that it is not always clear what the protection should be, or what connections should be maintained. We learn as we grow and now under-stand that the needs of adopted children are unique and must be considered, so that we no longer disenfranchise children from their right to a sense of belonging in society. It is my hope that the teens who speak in this book will encourage an adoption process that includes their views.