October 22, 2009
Dear Emily,
I am not sure how much you know, but you are adopted. I am sending this message out to God and the universe, hoping it will reach you. I am your mother, the woman who gave birth to you. I was promised an open adoption where we would have visits and a relationship. I have faced many barriers in attempting to reach you, and I will not give up. I am keeping a bogging journal for you and I hope you will be able to respond to my message.
http://emilykogod.wordpress.com
wkgu(1)jal(0)r
October 19, 2009
September 8, 2009
The similarities between Maria Barragan’s story and the many stories told today about continued child trafficking is overlooked in our society today.
Maria Barragan was taken from one family, and given to another, whose political ties were opposite, supportive of the people in power. Her real parents held prisoner until they died, she was given away to another more complacent couple.
How are things similar?
-Maria’s parents were held in captivity until they died, and their infant placed in the hands of a couple.
True, most parents do not die, but in the BSE, babies were literally snatched from the arms of their mothers, against their will. Even today, women are coerced, lied to, and made to feel guilty in order to sign papers giving up their rights. Maternity homes still exist, a form of prison, ripping these babies away from their parents. Many hospitals are also this way.
- Maria Barrigan’s identity was hidden, her birth certificate was falsified, she was lied to, and her past concealed.
Today, people who are adopted in the US face the same problems. Birth certificates falsified, state documents changed hiding the identity of that individual, erasing all ties to their family.
- In both Argentina and the US, there is no protocol for uniting families and their lost children, instead it is being run by people and organizations for those who are directly related to having lost their family. States, adoption agencies and lawyers are pretty ineffective at reuniting people at their request.
Why is it that the current system in the US hides people’s identity? It is to protect themselves. The state, the lawyers, the agency workers who have done these unethical placements, who have lied, coerced, and deceived these families have caused a form of genocide to these families. All because of poverty, because of political persuasion, because they wanted to make a profit. All for the sake of putting dead trees and numbers into bank accounts.
For one, I’m glad that this story had a happy ending. Although Maria was unable to be raised by her family, she has been reunited with them.
September 8, 2009
n a landmark decision, a court in Buenos Aires sentenced a former military officer and the adoptive parents of one of the country’s many babies “stolen” during the dictatorship to prison for concealing the child’s identity and falsifying adoption documents.
Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragán, 30, had brought charges against the three after discovering her true identity seven years ago. Ms Sampallo is one of hundreds of people who were snatched from their parents or born in captivity during the country’s dictatorship of 1976-83, but she was the first to face her adoptive parents in court.
Osvaldo Rivas, 65, and MarÍa Cristina Gómez Pinto, 60, her adoptive parents, were sentenced to eight and seven years in prison respectively. Enrique Berthier, a former army captain who handed Ms Sampallo over to the couple when she was a baby, received ten years.
“These are not my parents,” Ms Sampallo said at a press conference on Monday. “They are my kidnappers . . . there is no emotional bond that binds me to them. These are my parents,” she said, picking up photos of her biological parents.
Argentina’s military regime arrested Leonardo Sampallo and Mirta Barragán, suspected leftist dissidents, in December 1977. Soon after Ms Sampallo was born, her parents died in prison and the infant was given to Captain Berthier to pass on to another family, which hid her real identity.
Ms Sampallo learnt about her past from the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They have found 88 people like Ms Sampallo, children of their own sons and daughters who “disappeared”.
The Argentine military imprisoned tens of thousands of people suspected of being subversives and killed as many as 30,000. The junta also decided to “rehabilitate” its enemies’ children by placing them with families that supported the dictatorship. Many of the children were given to the families of men who may have participated in the torture and deaths of their parents.
The Grandmothers say that up to 500 children were abducted by the military or were born in captivity. During the dictatorship the group kept note of women who suddenly appeared with babies without being pregnant, and began investigations that, with recent advances in DNA technology, have begun to get results. Cases involving abducted children have proved crucial to bringing the dictatorship’s architects and executioners to justice. An amnesty for military and police officers imposed by the first postdictatorship government did not include the theft of babies, jurists contended.
“My hope is that each conviction acts as a step toward building the truth,” said Victoria Donda, an MP and activist who was taken from her biological parents at birth and learnt of her real identity in 2003.
The Dirty War
— Approximately 30,000 Argentinians disappeared during the Dirty War, a campaign of violence and intimidation by a series of governments
— The collapse of the alliance between left and right factions in the Peronist movement is seen as the catalyst of the trouble. A paranoid conservative Argentinian group backed the army in taking extreme action to control the Left
— Most disappearances occurred under the military regimes that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983, after the overthrow of Isabel Perón by Jorge Rafael Videla, then head of Argentina’s army
— Democracy was swept away and the military became increasingly violent. It regarded a “cleansing” of Argentine society as necessary to the country’s survival
— Liberals, trade unionists, and others suspected of less than wholehearted support for the regime were rounded up. After their interrogation and murder, their bodies were never returned
Sources: desaparecidos.org ; nuncamas.org; National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons
May 11, 2009
I miss my daughter.
I think of her every day.
She is 11 now.
I wish I could see her, meet her, hug her.
Tell her I love her.
So many lies I had to uncover.
I want to know my daughter.
I pray that we find each other soon.
May 11, 2009
I have realized something. The more the abusive culture of our society forces us, or convinces us to use their language, the more of a prisoner we are to this abuser.
When thinking about Positive adoption language, there is the key, adoption is a part of that language. According to law, adoption can not be obtained by using fraud, coercion, or while the parents signing are under duress. Anything other, is not adoption, it is kidnapping (ie human trafficking). It doesn’t matter how many people are involved, lawyers, social workers, judges, it does not take away the fact, this is not adoption, this is kidnapping.
Obtaining a signature from a mother in a hospital, while medicated, is duress. Forcing signatures while a mother is pregnant, or just gave birth without having time to recover, is a duress time for her. Any woman who signs without knowing or understanding the consequences of her situation, without knowing the long term effects on herself or her child, or knowing her rights to keep this child and the supports available to her, is coersion.
When we buy into their system, we tell everyone our child has been illegally adopted, we look for adoption lawyers, family lawyers, custody lawyers. Perhaps this is our problem. Perhaps what we should be doing, is discarding their language, and saying what really happened, our child was stolen from us. What if we called 911 saying our child was stolen from us? What if we used the Missing Childrens hotline and the Amber alert? What if we filed charges against the people stealing our children? The lawyers, the social workers, the strangers.
Then we could start realizing, that adoption and kidnapping are two different things. Adoption is when a child truly has no home, and needs people to raise them. Adoption doesn’t have to mean hiding the family names, backgrounds, and information of the family. And, in many other countries, they do not do this. Secrecy in and of itself suggests illness, hiding, lies, corruption.
So, let us call it as it is, and not use the abusers language. Let’s see what happens when we stop using their language and empower ourselves with our own feelings and interpretations of our situations. Our children were kidnapped, and are being raised by strangers.
March 21, 2009
She took my father from my life oh
Took my sister and brothers oh
I watched her torturing my child
Feeble I was then but now I’m grown
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon
Fire
Fire
Fire
She’s taken everything I liked
She’s taken every lover oh
And all along she gave me lies
Just to make me think I loved her
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Look what she did to her son
Fire
Fire
Fire on
Life’s backwards
Life’s backwards
People turn around
The house is burned
The house is burned
The children are gone
Fire
Fire
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon
Fire
Fire, oh
Fire, oh
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Look what she did to her son
Look what she did to her son
Fire, haha
Fire, haha
Fire
Fire
Fire, aha
Fire on Babylon
Fire on Babylon
March 19, 2009
March 16, 2009
Nation of lost souls
TONY BOCK/TORONTO STAR
Marcia Martel calms herself as she tells her story to the Star in Timmins.
Mar 16, 2009 04:30 AM
Linda Diebel
NATIONAL AFFAIRS WRITER
TIMMINS – The last time Marcia Martel saw her mother at home, it was late summer and she was a chubby little Indian kid of 4. She doesn’t remember much because she was crying and clutching the tall grass as strange people pulled her away. She was scared of the police and didn’t understand why she was being taken from Beaverhouse First Nation on Lake Misema in northeastern Ontario.
Forced into a waiting boat, she sat down. She’d been taught “little children rules” for the water. She fixed her gaze on her mother standing alone against the house until the image was only a speck and then, nothing.
She couldn’t stop crying. She felt so worthless, she says, “I knew God Himself didn’t want me.”
Martel, now 45, is part of a multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuit filed recently in Ontario Superior Court against the Attorney General of Canada over the treatment of thousands of aboriginal children from 1965 to 1985. The claim alleges the federal government – with constitutional responsibility for aboriginal people, principally through Indian and Northern Affairs Canada– committed “cultural genocide” by delegating child welfare services to Ontario. As a result, it says, children (there are no precise numbers) were stripped of their aboriginal identity by being placed in non-native foster/adoptive homes.
A Justice Canada official referred questions to Indian and Northern Affairs, while an Indian Affairs spokesperson said officials are conducting “preliminary research” for a statement of defence. Meetings with a class-action judge are expected as early as next month.
Martel lived in foster homes until being adopted at 9. She thought her family didn’t want her. In an exclusive interview with the Toronto Star, she said of her childhood, “I felt like an (abandoned) puppy.”
She battled thoughts of suicide. She says her adoptive mother told her to eat off the floor like the “savage” she was and rubbed her raw to wash off her “dirty” brown colour.
Most Canadians think children are no longer being forcibly taken from aboriginal communities. They’ve heard about the “kill the Indian in the child” regime over the 150 years children were carted off to residential schools under the auspices of Canadian churches. That sordid story of abuse of tens of thousands of children has come to public attention through a $2 billion class-action settlement, a parliamentary apology to survivors by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the creation of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But it’s not over, far from it.
The removal of aboriginal children from their communities dragged on with the “Sixties Scoop” described in Martel’s lawsuit and named for the practice of taking newborns from their mothers on B.C. reserves. It continues today.
Federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser reported in 2008 that 8,300 First Nations children, ordinarily resident on reserves, were in care nationally at the end of March 2007. That’s more than five per cent of all kids living on reserves and eight times the proportion of children in the general population.
Fraser’s report chastises Indian Affairs for, among other shortcomings, failing to monitor the “cultural appropriateness” of child care services for aboriginal children.
“We are still struggling with (child welfare) workers who come into our communities and take our children without consultation,” says Arthur Moore, chief of the Constance Lake First Nation, himself a church school survivor. “They have too much power and think we’re not capable of looking after our own children.”
Adds Chief Keeter Corston, of the Chapleau Cree First Nation: “Marcia’s story isn’t an isolated incident. They didn’t think of her as a person. It’s genocide in terms of breaking down a people morally and hoping they will just disappear.”
IT’S A LATE winter morning and we’re gathered in a Timmins conference room, chiefs, welfare workers and educators, to hear Martel recount her experiences to the Star. Regional aboriginal child services are based in this town, about 800 kilometres north of Toronto, and many of the 49 chiefs from Treaty 9 lands are here for a conference.
Martel, born Sally Susan Mathias, has a strong face, with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose and shiny black hair cut in choppy layers. She places sacred symbols on a table before her – eagle feathers, pouches of tobacco and herbs, a turtle rattle, rocks and carvings. She occasionally flashes an infectious grin. Mostly though, she fights back tears, her lips pursed and eyes squeezed shut behind wire-rimmed glasses.
She massages her temples or the bridge of her nose, pausing often. Elizabeth Babin, education director for Wahgoshig First Nation, fans her with an eagle feather to calm her; the air smells of burning sage, tobacco and cedar.
Martel speaks slowly in a flat monotone, as if describing a trip to the grocery store.
She wasn’t alone in the boat that day. Authorities also took her sister, Doris Lynn, about 6, keeping them together until Marcia went to another foster home. She wrongly believed her sister wanted her gone. (Five other siblings were left with their family in Beaverhouse.)
Martel thought her mother didn’t want her either, discovering only years later it wasn’t true. She describes a happy early childhood and never found out why she was taken. But her mother, when in her late 70s, said she was afraid if she had fought for her children, police would have shot her dead.
“That’s a normal reaction. Indian people are trained to listen to authority,” says Corston. “You’re not a real person and only a real person can question authority.”
Always, Martel wanted to go home. Instead, she bounced around foster homes suffering, she alleges, physical and emotional abuse. She once ran away and told her story to a police officer but he apparently replied: “Aw, it can’t be that bad.”
By 9 when she was adopted, she’d lost her Algonquin language and felt she belonged nowhere. Suicide wasn’t an option because: “God doesn’t like it if you kill yourself.”
She liked school but later saw a children’s aid file describing her as “slow” and not likely to progress beyond the mental capacity of a 10-year-old. Authorities apparently told her family she was mentally handicapped.
Over her protests, an Ontario family with four children adopted her. She says her adoptive father was kindly, if distant. When he died some 15 years ago, he left her a small inheritance. Her adoptive mother, she claims, was cruel.
Martel had been carting around a beloved stuffed tiger. One day, her adoptive mother told her to bring Tigger outside, where she’d lit a bonfire. The woman apparently claimed Tigger was full of bugs – Indian bugs – and made her thrown him into the fire. She says she was forced to watch him burn.
“Your people loved you but they didn’t know how to look after you,” the woman apparently said, as she incessantly went about her nightly scrubbings. In her adoptive father’s absence, Martel alleges: “I got beat until I was black and blue with everything – spoons, hangers, the vacuum cleaner tubing. … But she never touched my face.”
When the couple divorced, she stayed with her adoptive father. Then, the worst. “Okay, um … I would have been in Grade 9, I think … I was 16 and, uh … I got pregnant” by an unnamed boy. Martel went to live with her adoptive mother in Los Angeles, then moved with her to Texas. The woman wanted to keep the baby.
“I would not allow that. I knew enough about human beings that if you know bad stuff is happening and you’re not able to protect yourself, there’s no possible way you can protect a baby,” says Martel. ” So, I, uh … it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done … I gave him up.”
Pause. She’s sobbing quietly. “He was a beautiful boy.” A nurse let her hold him briefly after birth and, “I never saw him after that.”
She has one photo. “Nobody in my family ever saw him … not even my Granny and my Granny loved me.”
A few months later, her adoptive mother took her to the Houston airport, handed her a ticket to North Bay, Ont., and put her on a plane. She was 17. All she had was the suitcase she’d arrived with at age 9, filled with little girl’s clothes.
An older sister met her in North Bay. Martel doesn’t know how her adoptive mother found her sister Nancy; by then, they were alienated and she’s forever lost other precious family connections. She tried to regain her Indian status but was told Sally Susan Mathias was deceased. She eventually won it back.
TORONTO lawyer Jeffery Wilson, who’s handling the case with colleague Morris Cooper, stresses only Ottawa is named in the lawsuit, even though provincial Children’s Aid Society (CAS) agencies were the ones removing aboriginal children from their communities and placing them in care. They did so under the 1965 Canada-Ontario Welfare Agreement.
Provincial legislation in 1985 recognized all services to Indian and native people should be provided “in a manner that recognizes their culture, heritage and traditions and the concept of the extended family.”
However, Wilson argues: “That change (in provincial law) doesn’t correct what happened before. … It’s shameful. You think you can raise a child and that it’s in the best interest of the child to dispense with that child’s culture?”
He argues the federal government was “improper and unlawful” in handing responsibility for child services to Ontario in the first place, thereby ignoring its duty to act in the best interest of Indian children “who are particularly vulnerable.”
There’s a buzz around the lawsuit. Aboriginal leaders see it as potentially precedent-setting and a step toward their goal of ensuring autonomous child care services. Aboriginal child and family services already exist. But many argue the province routinely big-foots them.
Vicky Hardisty, executive director of Kunuwanimano Child and Family Services, based in Timmins, argues all too often the province takes aboriginal children independently, without consulting community leaders. It’s such a mess in the north, five Treaty 9 chiefs have banned provincial child welfare officers from their reserves.
Anne Machowski-Smith, spokesperson for Ontario children and youth services, says the law requires local CAS agencies to consult with bands or native communities in the apprehension and placement of aboriginal children. She adds: “We believe that, wherever possible, aboriginal children in need of protection, should be cared for in ways that recognize their culture and traditions.”
Hardisty counters: “They always say that and we always tell them it’s not happening. We ask them to provide us with proof of this compliance, but they don’t. … There’s a huge disconnect.”
For many aboriginal families, the lawsuit represents closure.
Once news of Star interest circulated, my phone began to ring with calls for help. Aboriginal adults in their 40s, 50s and older describe a nation of lost souls – Ontario’s own “disappeared” – as they search for brothers, sisters and children who vanished into provincial care.
“Can you help me?” asks James Wesley, over a scratchy line from the northern Mountbatten First Nation. One of four kids who were split up, he’s still looking for sister, Emma Lulu, and brother, Raymond Randy. “They kept moving me from home to home. … I pretty much got lost myself.”
Nobody places all the blame on Ontario’s child welfare system or suggests children should never be removed from parents. Robert Commanda, 49, a plaintiff in the class-action suit living in Peterborough, says CAS officials took him after his mother ran off and left her five little boys alone. The oldest was 5 and kept his siblings, including Robert, 2, alive on chips and pop.
“She left us to die,” says Commanda. “I sort of haven’t come to terms with that. … I’m a mess but I’m working on it. I just don’t feel I belong anywhere.”
The issue, rather, is about ensuring children in foster and adoptive homes don’t lose their identity. Aboriginal leaders don’t maintain all non-aboriginal families involved are terrible people. But they are fiercely adamant children receive “culturally appropriate” services and argue communities themselves, with their extended families, can best care for children.
MUCH TO her surprise, Martel found an inner strength. It nurtured her through childhood and, in her 20s, periods of homelessness. She says she never drank or took drugs and when, at age 28, her son, now 17, was born, “I realized survival wasn’t good enough. My life had to be about happiness too.”
She lays two photos on the table. In one, she’s a glowing bride in beaded deerskin, shown almost two years ago on a sacred rock near Beaverhouse after she married Raymond Martel. The couple – he a simultaneous translator, she a social worker – live near Kirkland Lake.
In another photo some 40 years earlier at the same site, a plump little girl with glossy hair holds tightly to her pet black cat. It’s Sally Susan at 3 with big sister, Doris Lynn. She’s smiling with a child’s confidence life will be wonderful.
In a roundabout way, that’s how it turned out. The Star’s Tony Bock photographed Martel against a snowy northern landscape. She’s cuddling another pet black cat and looks, well, happy.
She is, she says. Sally Susan Mathias has come home. And the best part? She believes the lawsuit at last shows her meaning in all those rough times.
March 3, 2009
Families Search For Truth of Spain’s Lost Children
LOMBILLO DE LOS BARRIOS, Spain — The truth, if ever it emerges, will come too late for Emilia Girón.
For 65 years, Ms. Girón, a hard-bitten mother of seven, ached to know what had become of her son Jesús. Born in the early 1940s during the vengeful first years of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 36-year dictatorship he was taken from her to be baptized shortly after his birth. She never saw him again.
“To her last, my mother bore the anguish of not knowing what had happened to Jesús. She yearned to meet the child that they had stolen,” said Antonio Prada Girón, 69, the oldest child of Ms. Girón, who died in 2007 at the age of 95.
Sifting through family documents and photographs in the slate-roofed cottage where his mother once lived, Mr. Prada said his parents were persecuted in the years after Franco took power by the police, who were hunting for his uncle, a fugitive guerrilla. Mr. Prada’s parents, who farmed the vine-covered hills around this northwestern hamlet, were jailed when he was 2. His mother gave birth to Jesús soon afterward.
The story is part of a dark and long overlooked chapter of the repressive decades under Franco that has drawn fresh attention since November, when Judge Baltasar Garzón ordered provincial judges to investigate the “disappearance” of children taken from left-wing families as part of an effort to purge Franco’s Spain of Marxist influence.
Historians and associations that represent Franco’s victims say hundreds of children were taken from families who had supported Franco’s Republican opponents during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 or who were suspected of ties to left-wing groups. The children were adopted or sent to religious schools and state-run homes.
Some were baptized with new names, their birth records hidden or destroyed, they say. Others, sent into exile during the war by the Republicans and brought back by Franco, were given new identities.
“In a sense, this is the most symbolic crime of the Franco era,” said Emilio Silva, head of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, an organization that has excavated the remains of hundreds of people from Franco-era graves. “To steal a child and take away his identity — that’s what Franco did to the country as a whole.”
In his 152-page court order, Judge Garzón wrote, “There was a ‘legalized’ disappearance of minors, who lost their identity, and whose number remains uncertain.” He suggested that there could be thousands of “lost children,” but historians say that figure is inflated.
“There were definitely kidnappings of children in prisons, abuses. But we really don’t know how many,” said Angela Cenarro Lagunas, a professor of modern history at the University of Zaragoza.
Ricard Vinyes, a professor of modern history at the University of Barcelona and the author of a book on female prisoners of the era, said documents and oral testimonies indicated that hundreds of children lost their identities when they were separated from their imprisoned mothers.
The case has some echoes of Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which children of murdered dissidents were secretly stolen and, often, adopted by military families. Mr. Vinyes said Franco was open about his project to re-educate the children of his enemies.
Franco’s top military psychologist, Antonio Vallejo Nágera, claimed that Spain could be saved from Marxism by isolating children from Republican parents. A 1940 decree allowed the state to take children into custody if their “moral formation” was at risk.
“Their logic was that the solution lay in separating children from their mothers,” Mr. Vinyes said.
Catholic schools and the welfare system known as Social Aid became a machine for political reorientation. Social Aid children led a life of fascist doctrine, harsh discipline and Catholic ritual, Ms. Cenarro said.
According to Mr. Vinyes, nearly 31,000 children were registered as being in state custody at some point between 1945 and 1954, a majority of them from Republican families. For many, it was because their parents were imprisoned or executed; for some, it was because their families — partly as a result of Franco’s disastrous policy of autarky — could not support them.
Uxenu Ablaña, 79, said he was tormented because of his leftist background in the Catholic and welfare homes where he lived from 6 to 18. Mr. Ablaña, a retired machinery salesman who grew up in Spain’s north, in the Asturian village of Pravia, went into state custody after the police killed his mother and jailed his father for collaborating with the Republicans. He said that in the homes he was named Eugenio Álvarez, the Spanish version of his Asturian name.
“They called me ‘child of a red,’ communist, devil,” Mr. Ablaña said by telephone. He recalled being made to spit-polish 80 pairs of shoes in a broom cupboard. “It is as if my life ended the day I went to Social Aid.”
Now that Judge Garzón has ordered the investigation into “lost children,” associations representing Franco’s victims say they believe that they may locate some of them. The judge instructed provincial courts in January to collect DNA samples from several aged or sick Spaniards searching for family members.
Fernando Magán, a lawyer for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, said judges could open adoption registers and lists of children in Social Aid homes and religious schools.
Mr. Prada, who settled in France in 1958 but returns each winter to Lombillo, said finding his brother would help close wounds.
“It has left a hole in my life, knowing that I have a brother, not knowing where he is, whether he was brought up by good people,” he said, fingering the yellowed family book, the official booklet in which the Girón family members are listed. Jesús is not registered there.
When Mr. Prada was about 10, he and his grandmother made the 180-mile trip to Salamanca, where his mother had been imprisoned, to look for Jesús. They found nothing, and guards at the orphanage threatened to send his grandmother to jail if she persisted in her search.
“To think, I might have walked by him once in the street without knowing,” he said, his eyes reddening. Even with the new investigation, he said, the chances of finding Jesús are minute. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
