Book Title: Two Worlds

Book Description

Tragic, true, heartbreaking and astonishing… those words have been used to describe the narratives in this anthology TWO WORLDS.

One quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed in non-Indian adoptive and foster homes or orphanages, as part of the Indian Adoption Projects….. One study found that in sixteen states in 1969, 85 percent of the Indian children were placed in non-Indian homes. Where are these children now?

“TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects” is an important contribution to American Indian history. Trace L. Hentz located other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative. The adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with their tribal relatives.  Indigenous identity and historical trauma takes on a whole new meaning in this adoption anthology.

This anthology covers the history of Indian child removals in North America, the adoption projects, their impact on Indian Country and how it impacts the adoptee and their families.

Since 2004, Hentz (formerly DeMeyer) was writing her historical biography “One Small Sacrifice.”  She was contacted by many adoptees after stories were published about her work.  More adoptees were found after “One Small Sacrifice” had its own Facebook page and the blog on American Indian Adoptees started in 2009.  In 2010, Trace was introduced to Patricia and asked her to co-edit the anthology.

Two Worlds is the first book to expose in first-person detail the adoption practices that have been going on for years under the guise of caring for destitute Indigenous children.  Every reader will be intrigued since very little is known or published on this history.

Publisher: Blue Hand Books,  Greenfield, Massachusetts

www.bluehandbooks.org

With quotes, poetry, essays, congressional testimony and history interspersed throughout the anthology, this book is a continuation of Trace’s memoir ONE SMALL SACRIFICE.

These unforgettable accounts of Native American adoptees will certainly challenge beliefs in the positive outcomes of closed adoptions in the US and Canada and the genocidal policies of governments who created Indian adoption projects.

As Hentz writes in the Preface, “The only way we change history is to write it ourselves…”