Adoptee – Buffy Sainte-Marie

There is no single story about Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adoption. One finds that her parents died suddenly, or that she was abandoned, or that her adoption was a kinship type. What is known is that she was adopted by Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a couple of Mi’kmaq descent, in Wakefield Massachusetts.

“In Canada, we had something that, sometimes, a little bit later referred to as the Big Scoop. But it had been going on for generations, where native children were removed from the home for their own good. But what happens to children who are kind of lost in the system like that, they’re assigned a birthday (she doesn’t actually know her exact birthdate). They’re assigned kind of a biography. So, in many cases, adoptive people don’t really know what the true story is.”
~ Buffy Sainte-Marie

She was born in 1941 on the Piapot 75 reserve in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada. Sainte-Marie began researching her Indigenous heritage in her teens and making trips back to the Piapot reserve and connecting with her Cree community. In 1964, on a return trip to the Piapot Cree reserve in Canada for a powwow, she was welcomed and (in a Cree Nation context) adopted by the youngest son of Chief Piapot, Emile Piapot and his wife, Clara Starblanket Piapot.

Of her adoptive parents, she says – “For the most part, they were wonderful. There were some terrible predators in the neighborhood, and some bully predators in the house.” When asked if her mother noticed anything, she says – “Well, I thought I was telling her what was going on. But little girls don’t have names for what big boys do to them. We don’t have that language, and we certainly didn’t during the ’40s. My mom would say, has he been teasing you again? So I thought that’s what it was called. It is not something that has become my main story. My story is about getting beyond that.”

As a child from an abusive childhood, as a person who was abused by boyfriends and spouses, there’s another kind of song that she writes which she calls empowerment songs. Sainte-Marie set out to address the problem she saw in Indian country, where Indian kids would graduate from high school, want to go to college, but didn’t know how to negotiate the path to college. They didn’t know how to get a scholarship, they weren’t connected by family and friends. She founded the Nihewan Foundation which gave law school scholarships to Native Americans. She says that her biggest honor was to find out that two of her early scholarship recipients had gone on to found tribal colleges.

Some content comes from an NPR interview and some from 75 Things You Need To Know About Buffy Sainte-Marie.

In Praise Of Adoption

An adoptee friend of mine alerted me to this article that is an interview of Scott Simon. It touches upon an interesting tangential or is it potential argument for adopting based upon the environment. The title of the article is NPR’s Scott Simon on Adoption and Environmentalism. Before I go any further, I’ll quickly answer that part – the interviewer mentions reading the book and coming across this passage: “Adopting a child to prove something is not a healthy motivation. I would seriously consider alerting the authorities if I heard a prospective parent say, ‘We want to adopt because it’s the most environmentally responsible thing to do. Don’t want to increase our carbon footprint, after all!’ ”

I give Simon and his wife some credit for trying assisted reproduction first. I don’t know how far that went with that effort beyond the most traditional and conventional method of invitro fertilization. When that effort failed, their next thought was “there are children in the world already who need us, so why don’t we do that ?”

I don’t know how much the couple investigated the whole orphan industry in foreign countries. I know quite a bit that is unsavory and deceptive in those situations and I don’t intend to do more than mention there is more going on there than a gullible hopeful adoptive parent might wish to know and is completely willing to remain ignorant of. The fact that I have issues with transracial adoption generally should come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for very long.

Simeon and his wife adopted from China and to their credit (though it will not actually prove to be enough to offset the loss of native culture for his daughters) they have tried – they see a family therapist and their children go to a weekly cultural class that teaches Mandarin stories and songs.

Simon says, “you ought to have children out of joy, not out of sense of duty.” Yet, I question, is not thinking you are “saving” children some kind of sense of duty, what is often referred to in adoption circles as saviorism.

He perceives adoption as a kind of global warming addressing the needs of 150 million orphaned and abandoned children in this world. I refer the reader back to my previous comment about transracial adoption and these children in foreign countries. I would add here – most are not orphans or abandoned. They do come from poverty stricken families who expect their children to return to them some day after a good education in the United States and that actually rarely is successful, even if the adoptee makes an effort because that child has been severed from their cultural roots and has a difficult time relating.

Simon admits that adoption is “good for those of us who adopt. It’s transforming — literally, physically, emotionally transforming.” I do not doubt the truth of that statement. This does not consider the child them selves. Simeon mentions talking to adoptees for his book “who say they have no interest whatsoever in meeting their birth parents, and I think it’s possible that five months or five years or 10 years after saying that, they may feel differently.”

There are MANY adoptees today constantly doing their best to reconnect with their genetic biological families. This I do know is true. My own mom who was adopted tried and failed to be able to reconnect with her mom as she was deceased by that time, and later on inexpensive DNA testing through Ancestry did not bring her the results she was seeking – though it has been a great assistance to me. My dad (also adopted) never expressed the same interest and in fact seemed fearful of what he might learn.

As a person who became a parent for the second and third time at an advanced age, I do agree with Simon that “Having children is a profoundly personal decision and personal experience, and I can’t put myself in the position of judging.” I stop short of agreeing with him that “[adoption is] a very good thing to do.” because at this point in my own self-education, I don’t believe that – in most cases (honestly, not every possible circumstance – I reserve a strong belief there may be exceptions).

The interviewer indicates the possibility that the Simon’s happy family came about through the unhappy circumstance of China’s draconian one-child policy. His answer is something I need to deeply contemplate as I don’t know everything, though I do know some that troubles me – we did not get our children from a family or a single mother; we got them out of institutions. If we hadn’t adopted them, or somebody else hadn’t adopted them, they would’ve grown up in institutions. They wouldn’t have grown up in institutions in the way that we understand growing up — they would have stayed there until the age of 12 or 13, then they would’ve gone into farm or factory work, or worse, which is too terrible to contemplate. It’s China’s one-child policy that took them away from their families. I don’t think anything would’ve been accomplished by leaving them there. I say a few times in the book, it’s our blessing that began with a tragedy, a tragedy that’s also a crime.

Simon ends on a belief that adoption is preferable to creating a family using the new technologies as adoption is an ancient practice (though until modern times no one profited financially as an industry). I disagree with him on that point as well. That should not surprise anyone as I have two sons for whom my husband is the genetic biological father thanks to a new technology that allowed me to use a compassionate and generous woman’s eggs – twice – years apart, yielding for us two 100% genetically biological siblings.

It Was Not The Easter Bunny

That baby was not brought in a basket by the Easter Bunny. Though I love this one . . .

“I think I’m the Easter Bunny.
I don’t know where the eggs come from,
and I have no idea why I feel a compulsion to hide them.”

Sadly, some adoptees are actually found in a dumpster. It can be hard to understand the world we live in. I believe in Reincarnation and so the Easter Story about Jesus represents an interesting twist. He died but didn’t have to go the usual route of being reborn a baby. However, birth and death are both necessary to human evolution and continuance. Death clears out life that is no longer viable. I (for one) am grateful there is a way out and that I won’t be stuck in a body that is more like a tortured living hell for eternity. I believe each generation of new human beings improves on the previous version.

The stork did not bring babies to a family’s home either. A common meme when I was a child in the 1960s. I heard the birth mother profiled in American Baby by Gabrielle Glaser – the latest in reveals related to adoption talk about “no sex education.” The birth mother says she didn’t know how babies were made. I think I remember my mom saying something similar – that her mother didn’t talk to her about sex. No wonder these women ended up pregnant in high school.

I came of age with early 70s Feminism. Heard a snippet last Sunday on NPR Witness History about Our Bodies, Our Selves. There wasn’t a transcript but I did find something about that extraordinary effort in the NPR archives. The book was the first comprehensive book on women’s issues ever published by women for women.

By middle school, I had boyfriends. And I had been given the nice girls don’t do that (have sex) until marriage talk by then. I’m certain my mom’s only intention was to save me from repeating her own experience. About that same time, I discovered that I was conceived out of wedlock. Clearly, the message had been delivered to me that woman had the sole responsibility of preventing an unwanted pregnancy because I was angry at my mom but not my dad and I think that is why.

Heck, while I may have had more of a birds and the bees talk than my mom had by high school, I didn’t even know how to find my own vagina to insert a tampon. I’m certain that my own young daughter may have questioned my sanity when I felt compelled to demonstrate for her where to find her own. She probably knew much more by then than I gave her credit for. I remember her once saying something about boys having been “dirty” for years by the time she was in middle school.

Happy Easter. Happy Spring Renewal. Happy life ever returning and reminders that it does.

Racially Determined Adoptions

I spent most of last summer educating myself about racial inequality and reform issues. Now I see this advertisement. First of all, $13,000 tax credit for adopters??? Think if poor mothers got $13,000 to keep and raise their own babies. The newborn adoption industry would totally collapse. In Canada, they pay single parents so that they are not burdened with having to find a job and child care. There are no losers in that scenario. This program lasts until the child is 18. The amount per month decreases as the child gets older.

Note that African American babies are less valuable at Everlasting Adoptions. One could ask – Doesn’t this somehow directly violate anti-discrimination laws? Besides the smell of human trafficking in this brochure. No one regulates this business. It’s truly the wild west at this time in human history as regards adoption. This one isn’t even an adoption agency, its like a “travel agent” for people who want to pay someone to find a birth mom for them. If found, the parties then go to an adoption agency to draw up the paperwork but on Everlasting Adoptions website, they proudly take credit for successfully completed matches.

NPR did a story back in 2013 titled Six Words: ‘Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt’. The title for this one came from a Louisiana woman. Other contributors have also addressed the skin-color based fee structure for many adoptions, NPR noted – The intersection of race and adoption has prompted many people to submit their six words to The Race Card Project. Americans adopt thousands of children each year. And as the nation has become increasingly diverse, and with the growth of international adoption in recent decades, many of those children don’t look like their adoptive parents.

One adoptive parent, remembers a phone call with an adoption agency social worker. “And [she] was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child. And … they also had, sort of a different track for adoptive parents.” Moving through the process would be quicker, if the family was open to adopting an African-American (not biracial) child, the social worker explained to her. “And that is because they have children of color waiting,” but adopting biracial, Latino, Asian or Caucasian children could be a slower process because there were more parents waiting for them. “And I remember hearing this and just sort of being dumbfounded that they would sort of segregate — to use a loaded term — segregate these children by ethnic background before they were even in this world,”

It is a profit-motivated, supply and demand business. Thankfully, NPR also found that some states and agencies are using a different formula to make adoption more affordable for families, with a sliding scale based on income rather than skin color. In that system, lower-income families pay less to adopt. Some agencies are also moving toward a uniform cost system where all adoptive parents would pay the same fees. (Though I am still not in favor of adoption in most cases.) Still, back in 2013, the cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. I see upward of $40,000 in Go Fund Me efforts set up by hopeful adoptive parents today in 2021.