In whose best interest?
Cross-cultural
adoption is condemned by Canada's First Nation leaders, but whose interests are
they looking out for?
By MARGARET WENTE
UPDATED AT 3:25 AM EDT
Saturday,
Sep. 13, 2003
Twenty-four years ago, Carla Newman
was adopted at birth by a white couple. Her birth mother was a Cree from the
Nisichawayasihk reserve in northern Manitoba. The adoption turned out to be a
success, and she feels blessed to have been raised by such warm and loving
parents. "I was lucky," she says.
Today, there are tens of thousands
of native kids whose parents aren't able to raise them. But
"cross-cultural" adoptions, as they're called, are no longer allowed.
Phil Fontaine, the national grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, calls
them "a form of genocide." Across the country, native bands are
taking children away from white foster families in an effort to block adoptions
and repatriate children to the bands, even if there is no family to adopt them
there, and even if the kids don't want to go.
Ms. Newman got in touch with me
after she read about Lisa, a 14-year-old part-native girl whose mother's band
is insisting that she go back to live with them. Lisa is fighting to stay with
her foster parents, the only family she's ever known. "If the reserve
couldn't take care of these kids in the first place, how can they ever take
care of them now?" she asks passionately.
Good question. And Ms. Newman's
own journey back to her roots is a cautionary tale for anybody who thinks
repatriation is the answer.
Carla's birth mother was an
alcoholic. She was only 16 when Carla was born, and she already had another
child. She gave up Carla willingly, and Carla always knew about her origins.
She even met many of her relatives before her adoptive family moved away. Carla
lives in Moncton now. She has a degree in business administration from the
University of New Brunswick, and works with the government.
"I never thought of myself as
being native," she says, a statement that would probably curdle the blood
of Phil Fontaine. "Maybe I didn't have as much curiosity as some people
because I knew my native family were only a phone call away."
In 1999, Carla got married, and
she asked her native relatives to the wedding. (Her mother, who was still
drinking, didn't come.) A dozen or more of them showed up, and urged her to
come "home." Soon after that she flew to the reserve to attend the
funeral of an aunt. "I was curious to get a glimpse of how my life could
have been," she told me.
What she saw distressed her
deeply. The sewage overflowed, the water was unsafe to drink, the lawns were
mud. "The poverty sickened me," she recalls. "I listened to the
cries of my young cousin looking at her mother in a casket." The girl's
mother had died of alcohol poisoning, as had her father a few weeks before.
"I wanted nothing more than to grab my young cousin out of that reserve
and take her to the safety of my real home, to show her that that was not what
life was about."
A major argument against
cross-cultural adoptions is the high incidence of breakdown. Native activists
argue that most of these adoptions are doomed. Typically, as the adopted child
gets older, she starts acting out. She fails in school and gets in trouble with
the law. Eventually, she runs away and winds up estranged from her adoptive
family.
There are a thousand stories like
this (the story of the Chrétiens' adopted son is one of them), each one sadder
than the last. The standard explanation is that loss of culture is the cause of
these disasters. The native child feels lost and adrift in a world that doesn't
welcome him. Trapped between two worlds, he flounders. This is the case made by
native leaders against cross-cultural adoption, and it is accepted wisdom among
the social-work establishment. Undoubtedly there is some truth in it. Carla's
brother is also adopted, and he had a harder time than she did, partly, she
believes, because he knew nothing of his origins.
But there's another factor. It's
so obvious, and so threatening to the project of repatriation, that even native
social workers who believe it don't dare say so publicly. The real problem
isn't loss of culture. It's FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome.
FAS kids of any race are
brain-damaged. They have poor impulse control and a multitude of behavioural
problems. They struggle in school. FAS is caused by maternal drinking during
pregnancy, and on some native reserves the incidence of FAS or FAE, fetal
alcohol effect, is upward of 30 per cent. The grotesque overrepresentation of
natives in the prison system is also a product of FAS.
Carla spent a lot of time with her
orphaned cousin, trying to help her with her homework. She was puzzled that the
girl was so needy and so behind in school, until someone told her the girl had
FAS.
Above all, FAS children need
stability and structure. But what happens to native kids with FAS is guaranteed
to make them worse. Their home lives are often violent and chaotic. If they're
taken into care, they're bounced around from foster home to foster home. Any
foster family that offers a stable home by way of adoption will be blocked by
band politics. It is a recipe for ruin.
Currently, two Ontario families
are fighting to adopt two half-native girls they have fostered since shortly
after birth. But the birth mother's native band, 4,000 kilometres away in
Squamish, is fighting, and the fight is messy, costly and prolonged. The band
has deep pockets. Now it has launched a constitutional challenge in an effort
to block the adoptions. The local children's aid society wants to send the kids
back, too (where they will be placed with a single white woman with band
connections), and this week Phil Fontaine weighed in with a letter to the judge
that cited the usual "loss of culture" arguments. The constitutional
challenge could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight, and the girls'
would-be parents are out of money.
Three years ago, Ms. Newman went
back to the reserve again, where she spent the summer working in the band's accounting
office. Everybody told her how lucky she had been. They admired her success in
life. She tried to talk to some of her cousins about going away to college.
"Imagine what you could do if you went away and got educated," she
told them. "Imagine how you could help First Nations people." But she
couldn't connect. "It's really hard for them to grasp the concept of
leaving the reserve."
Carla Newman embodies Phil
Fontaine's worst fears. She will never go back to the place she came from,
because she's found a better life. She has seen the life she would have had if
her mother hadn't given her up. And she doesn't think that children who have
found loving homes and parents should be made to suffer that fate either.
"Leave culture out of
it," she says fiercely. "You're talking about people's lives."