Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects

“TWO WORLDS: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects” is an important contribution to American Indian history. Trace DeMeyer-Hentz and Patricia Cotter-Busbee, the co-editors and adoptees, 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, DeMeyer-Hentz was writing her historical biography “One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir.” 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 her blog on American Indian Adoptees was started in 2009. In 2011, 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. As DeMeyer-Hentz writes in the Preface, "The only way we change history is to write it ourselves... and the truth shall set us free..."