Adopted Aboriginal

Page 12

Angela Latta is looking for a place where she belongs.

Like thousands of aboriginal children, she was adopted as an infant and grew up in a white household. In 1988, she decided she wanted to know more about her people and her Indian culture, so she applied to Ottawa for information on becoming a registered Indian under the Indian Act. In 1989, she applied for status.

"Maybe because it's a sense of belonging somewhere," she said of her pursuit for status. "It's not necessarily the money part - it's the belonging part."

Latta, who was born on Oct. 17, 1964, in Edmonton, learned her birth mother was of Cree and French ancestry and her birth father was Scottish.

In 1991, she learned she was not entitled to status because her birth father and grandfather were not status Indians, although her mother and grandmother were. Despite appeals, she was told again in 1992 that she could not be registered. Shortly after that, she was told her grandfather, grandmother and great-grandfather all took script.

By this time, Latta was determined to find her birth mother. By going through the process to gain status, she found some basic information about her birth parents. Her mother was born on Dec. 11, 1934 and was a member of the Sucker Creek band in Alberta. She was 29 and single when Angela Latta was born. She was 5'4" tall, weighed 122 pounds and her religion was listed as Roman Catholic.

Her father was from Prince Edward Island and was in the Armed Forces. He was 27 when she was born, 5'8" tall and weighted 160 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes.

She also learned she has four uncles and four aunts on her mother's side and three uncles and four aunts on her father's side.

After making numerous phone calls and sending a number of letters, Latta turned to the United Native Nations in Vancouver for help. Lizabeth Hall, who is in charge of the adoption reunion registry there, told Latta that according to the UNN lawyer, Latta had the right to look at the file Indian Affairs used to base their rejection on her status application on. She requested a copy of it.

About a month later, she got 103 blanked-out pages from Indian and Northern Affairs because anything other than information about herself is protected under the Privacy Act.

"Why did they even bother?" she said. "If they eliminated some of the paper-pushing they do, we'd eliminate the deficit."

Her next step was to send out more than 300 letters to bands in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, including all the information she had. Most wrote or called her, but none could really help her.

She did, however, find a sister. Sharon Hemstock was looking for siblings through Alberta Social Services, and she went from her Calgary home to meet Angela in Vancouver in April of 1991.

Latta's story is not unique; many aboriginal people come up against the same bureaucratic blocks when they look for their relatives. But Latta is more persistent than most people.

"Many kids just give up. They just get the royal runaround from every department there is."

Lizabeth Hall at the United Native Nations said her position, originally funded by the government for one year, started in 1985, the year Bill C-31 was passed. The bill restored status to women who lost it by marrying a non-Native man and to their children, and Hall's job was to help them regain it. In 1988 she was referring adoptees to Indian Affairs, which confused most applicants, who returned to the UNN anyway, she said.

In 1989 she began to realize the magnitude of the problem. By the summer of 1992, 700 people had registered; that number is now up to 850, all who heard of the registry by word of mouth in the last three years.

"A lot of them saw Bill C-31 as a link back to their community,": Hall said. "What you're talking about is a group of people who are Native but they don't know what it means or how it feels."

Because so many people applied for status in order to find their birth parents, Hall started to help them ind their families.

Almost all of the children were adopted by non-Indians and some of them are a long way from home. One of Hall's clients is in Scotland, another in New Zealand, and more are in Florida, California, Washington and Pennsylvania. Many of the children were taken without the consent of the parents.

"If you take a look at any of the records, the majority of our children who were legally adopted under provincial law were adopted without legal consent or with coerced consent.

"Social workers were seen as having the same kind of authority as policemen. A lot of people stop searching because they've been told by social workers that it was impossible," Hall said.

"Looking back, they think they could have done many things," Hall said. But at the time, it wasn't possible for them to fight to keep their children. That means the parents feel a lot of guilt as a result, no one talks about it.

In Manitoba, the number of adopted children seeking families is even greater.

"We of all the provinces lost the most children from 1960 to 1981," said Shirlene Parisian, who works for the Manitoba First Nations Repatriation Program, which represents all 61 Manitoba bands.

"From one band alone they list 152 children.

Many of those children were adopted by families in the United States.

"Their thinking at that time was any home would be better than a Native home, especially on a reserve," Parisian said.

"As soon as they were adopted, the province washed their hands off them."

Some of the children were sexually abused, including one girl whose adoptive father fathered her two children. Another boy killed his adoptive father after suffering years of abuse at his hands, Parisian said.

If the adoption didn't work out, often the kids found themselves living on the streets because they had no family to turn to.

In B.C., once the family is found, the first contact is usually discreetly made by a third party, either a social worker, a drug and alcohol counsellor or anothe family member.

It's very unusual for a Native mother to say she doesn't want contact with her children, said the UNN's Hall. Their immediate reaction is often shock and some say

they will have to think about whether they want to meet their children.

Many of the children were told lies about their families. Hall remembers one young woman who was told her mother was an alcoholic who didn't care about her. When she met her mother, she found none of it was true.

Each province has its own adoption laws, but all will release only non-identifying information. That means no names or bands.

In Alberta, the provincial government has started a program to help children who were made permanent wards of the province to reconnect with their families and culture.

Laura Vinson is co-ordinator of the program, dubbed Going Home, at Bend Calf Robe school in Edmonton.

Vinson is working with three young people now, including Laura Nguyen, 25. Nguyen is of white and Native ancestry and she knows the names of her parents: Frank McDermott and Beulah Janine Kennedy, maiden name Daniels. Nguyen was born on Oct. 29, 1967 in Calgary's General Hospital but her mother was from Trehearn, Manitoba and her father was from Quill Lake, Sask.

Her foster parents had four children of their own and six foster children. Nguyen said the foster kids were excluded and made to feel they didn't really belong.

"That's why I say I don't have a family. I don't have parents and I want my children to have grandparents - real grandparents - so they can say 'I have some place in this world'...."

Nguyen has five children. Her first two, a girl born March 3, 1983, and a boy born Sept. 10, 1986, were given up for adoption. She hopes that one day they will want to find their mother. She got married in July of 1984 and the couple have three children.

She has eight siblings, all older than her, and she wants to meet them so she can "be greedy and say MY brother and MY sister."

Nguyen feels a lot of anger towars her mother, who was an alcoholic and a cocaine addict. She has some difficulties with learning because she had fetal alcohol syndrome. She doesn't know what she will feel if her mother is found."

"Happy, sad, mad, glad - I don't know how I'll feel."

Not all the stories have a happy ending, program co-ordinator Vinson said.

"This is the scary part for us, because I know from my past work people expect their parents to be perfect."