Adoptee activist, award-winning journalist and author Trace Hentz, who created the American Indian Adoptees website in 2009, has announced a new project, “THE COUNT 2024.” It will coincide with the release of a new history book, “Almost Dead Indians,” Book 5 in the Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects series.
When Hentz moved to Massachusetts in 2004 she began to tirelessly investigate numerous adoption programs, such as the Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA (The Adoption Resource Exchange of America). Both involved moving Native American babies and children across North America into adoptions with non-Native families.
After her 2009 memoir, “One Small Sacrifice” and a second edition, which followed in 2012, Hentz met more adoptees and asked them to write their personal narratives, which resulted in three anthologies: “Two Worlds: Lost Children” (2012), “Called Home: The RoadMap,” (updated second edition, 2016), and “Stolen Generations: Survivors of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop” (2016). A poetry collection on the same topic, “In The Veins,” the fourth book in the series, was published in 2017.
“Most people have heard how the governments of Canada and the United States ran residential boarding schools like the first U.S. school, which was Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania,” Hentz said. “Today, tribes are finding unmarked graves at these schools. I realized after 20 years that we deserve to see the numbers on these various federal and state-run adoption programs. We need “THE COUNT 2024” of Native American and First Nations adoptees to solidify facts and see actual numbers of adoptees in these government-funded projects that crisscrossed the U.S. and Canada.”
“Neither government has been forthcoming and some academics who looked at available reports claim nearly 13,000 children were adopted in the U.S., some by force and some by gunpoint,” Hentz said. “In Canada, they have already settled a class action lawsuit with adoptees called the Sixties Scoop.”