Category: Biography Publisher: Blue Hand Books
ISBN-10: 0615582153
Type: Non-Fiction
Copyright: December 2011
ISBN-13: 9780615582153
Award-winning journalist Trace A. DeMeyer has published a memoir "One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects," an exposé on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families.
Comments about book:
Paula Benoit, Adoptee Care wrote: I loved this book from the moment I started reading it. It's well written, painfully honest and bold. Thanks for setting the tone for future memoirs and conversations about secrecy Trace. You hit the nail straight on the head with this book. Thanks.
From Linda Orlandi-Johnson: One Small Sacrifice is a must read for all people. It is a powerfully written book by a woman who is Native American by birth and was adopted out to a white family. It is gut-wrenching at times to learn of what in the not-so-distant past occured to Native children. I laughed and I cried. I savored each and every word the author wrote. Amazing are the facts, research and deep hearted feelings she expresses. Fantastically executed this is one book that should be on everyone's "to read" list. Including Oprah Winfrey's!!
Adrian Archambeau Sr wrote: Good Book, Insightful even to myself who has his own story, just finished reading it a week ago..If you really want to know Trace, and gain knowledge into The Adoption Project ,Genocide, etc. It's a good informative easy read...Thanks Trace, always in my heart & prayers....
Excerpt
...Stop for a moment and think... Who are you? Think of your parents, or grandparents, stories of when, where, even how you were born? Imagine you disappear, you’re erased, no longer a part of your family history and genealogy. How would you feel? Grateful? I don’t think so... Unbelievably, children in a closed adoption are the only people in the world without free or unlimited access to their identity or personal history. Someone decided this long ago. Someone decided this for me, that I’d be fine, never knowing my identity. I’m dead without my identity. Without it, I’m gone, erased, not Indian, not anything. To tell my story, I needed more than my adoptive parents story. I needed my own.
Professional Reviews
One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
Book Reviews
By John Christian Hopkins
Tuba City, Arizona (NFIC) May 2010
The Beatles sang of a long and winding road, but they never set foot on the long, treacherous path of a Native American adoptee that is strewn with potholes, deadends and disappointment.
Award-winning Native journalist Trace A. DeMeyer shares the heartfelt journey of loss, loneliness and finding love in her powerful, new memoir “One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects,” an exposé on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families.
One reader told DeMeyer it was like being “punched in the gut.”
Pulling no punches, DeMeyer, who now lives in Greenfield, Mass., with her husband, Herb, rips away the illusion that adoption ends happily ever after as soon as the documents are signed and finalized.
She delves into the dark world of doubts – “Why didn’t my mom want me?” –and the fear that asking too many questions would cause her adoptive parents to throw her away all over again.
She suffered years of abuse – emotionally, sexually and physically – as pain became her constant companion and a pretend happy smile her childhood defense against the torrent of doubts in her life.
DeMeyer has spent years meeting and talking with other “Split Feathers,” Native American children taken from their homes and placed in non-Indian families; she discovered that her experiences weren’t new or unique, that many other adoptees, just like her, had unanswered questions, mountains of sadness and, often, shattered lives.
Conquering that tumultuous beginning felt like the easy part as DeMeyer attempted to find her birth family. Her first obstacle was that her adoption was “closed,” meaning sealed and she had no legal right to view her own file!
A sympathetic judge in her Wisconsin hometown allowed DeMeyer to look at her file when she was 22; she found tantalizing clues about her birth family, and even more questions to haunt her as sought to come full circle and discover who she really was.
“I read this powerful book cover to cover, Trace tells her story with such compassion and truthfulness;” Alutiiq-Cherokee adoptee and author Anecia O’Carroll wrote. “Her memories, feelings and facts are written with such unflinching truth, in my mind and heart she is a warrior and a hero.”
Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native Americans, DeMeyer started research on adoptees in 2004, which led to this fact-filled, 227-page biography that includes congressional testimony, evidence of Indian Adoption Projects and how the Indian Child Welfare Act came to exist.
Available as a download (e-book, $3.00) or in book form ($15.95) at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/one-small-sacrifice/6242298, her jaw-dropping narrative of living as an adoptee, her search, meeting birth relatives, will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion dollar adoption industry.
Her journey takes her to Illinois to meet her birthfather in 1996 where she learns about her Cherokee-Shawnee ancestry.
DeMeyer is former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing. She freelances for News From Indian Country, a national independent native newspaper.
DeMeyer’s chapter on Sac and Fox Olympian Jim Thorpe won critical praise in the 2001 book Olympics at the Millennium (published by Rutgers Press). Her poetry was published in the spring 2009 edition of Yellow Medicine Review; and she has an essay in the upcoming Foothills Press book, “I Was Indian Before It Was Cool,” edited by Susan Deer Cloud.
In the 1870s Ponca Chief Standing Bear had to take his case to court to prove he was a human being; but DeMeyer’s journey took her so much further as she tried to prove to herself that she was somebody, too.
Trace DeMeyer’s blog, updated weekly, can be found at www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com.
MADAME COMPASSIONATELESS Book Review: One Small Sacrifice
Trace A. DeMeyer’s book One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is a marvelous read.
Trace narrates her story of growing up in small-town Wisconsin, US, with her younger brother, Joey and a very dysfunctional adoptive family, yet the only family she knows. What’s interesting about this book is how Trace takes the reader along with her on her journey. At times I felt I was with Trace, in her house struggling with abuse, listening from the back room as her parents and parish priests drank into the wee hours. I was sitting in the bar where she and her band were performing. I was also with her when she relentlessly searched for her family of birth. I pondered with her as she tried to make sense of her home environment – disturbed, abusive adoptive father, distracted adoptive mother – and a deep desire to know her roots and connect emotionally and physically with her sorely absent parents.
One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects, provides a realistic representation of the pieces of identity that are missing year after year for those separated from their parents and tribe, as well as the laws, societal myths and pressures that require adopted children to play the role of daughter or son to those unrelated to them. There is a subtle message to readers how adopted persons, by being adopted and legally forbidden to know who they are adapt to their surroundings, while unwittingly abetting in the crime of secrecy of their own identity and past.
The reader struggles with Trace as she tries to cope with and overcome her constant questioning of all that is strange about human nature, but knowing instinctively not to blame herself for the perverse actions of others. We then share her appreciation for all the beauty in nature that is so often unnoticed. Trace shows us how to unearth the exquisiteness in birds, snakes, water and trees.
Trace is a writer, a very introspective and musical person; she has determination and a untamed spirit that keeps her moving bit by bit to find her truth, and the truth of her Indian-self and of her people who have suffered en masse through the controlling and untiring hands of the white man.
This book will help those who wonder how an adopted person is connected to an adoptive family, simply by “being there” and how complex it is to amalgamate one’s adoptive identity into a found identity, and how the mind plays tricks on you when paradoxically wishing for, yet accepting the life that is and the life that never was.
One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects is available as a download (e-book, US $3.00) or paperback (US $15.95) at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/one-small-sacrifice/6242298 and at www.Amazon.com. Request at your favorite book seller. ISBN: 978-0-557-25599-3
[Source: http://nsbloodline.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-small-sacrifice-lost-children-of.html]
Buy this Book
Sunday, May 16, 2010
I will never, ever, ever blog again
Nah, I lie. I always lie. I can't help it. I just wrote that because in every single blog post I write something along the lines of oh I so hope to get back to blogging soon! and then never do. I mean it's been what, two months since my last post!?
There's so much going on, and I don't even have the energy to blog about it. Just a lot of loss, and the loss has been very loss-y, more loss for any human bastid to endure, really.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that sitting in front of my monitor is a chore for me now. I used to adore what I did for a living, and even though I was in my office many days 12, 13, 14 hours, I loved it so much I had tons of energy. Now, once I'm done with what I need to do on the computer, I just can't stand to sit here any longer. The thought of blogging just makes me grimace, and that causes wrinkles.
So I'm hoping that since I kept posting about how I'd blog soon and never did, perhaps blogging that I'd never ever ever ever ever ever ever blog again would kick my ass.
Oh - that and the fact that I wanted to direct the attention of whatever readers see this to Michelle's blog, because she has a book review I wanted you to read:
Link: Book Review: Trace A. DeMeyer - One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
Please go check it out, and then please go purchase the book. And if when you do purchase it, don't be like me and think, "This is an important book so I want to have undivided time to read it", because life won't cooperate with you. Make the time to finish it, like I'm going to do today. I have time because you know, I'm never blogging again.
[Source: http://ungratefullittlebastard.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-will-never-ever-ever-blog-again.html]
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