Editor’s note: Terri Elder gave this statement March 27, 2014, in Bangor, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a statewide effort to acknowledge how the child welfare system used to forcibly remove Native children from their homes. It appears here with some slight edits for clarity and length.
I am what is commonly referred to as a half-blood — part Native American (Black Foot and Cherokee) and half Irish-American. This means that half of me is the oppressor and the other half is the oppressed. Both parts of me need to heal.
On one hand, I am ashamed of my ancestors who took such brutal action against others. I can’t pretend it’s not there. I need to learn from it and make sure there’s no part of it found in me. On the other hand, I have suffered the same irrevocable act of abandonment — the total and irreconcilable loss and pain that my people suffered for generations before me when they were victimized by a powerful society.
My story is about being forced to shoulder the burdens of the world at a time when I was not old enough to recognize them. It’s about what happens to a child when it is taken away from its mother.
Can anyone understand the pain of being uprooted? Somewhere, deep in my psyche, I could always still feel the protection and love of a brother. After I was taken away, I asked for him, and I asked every day for over a year until one day I just stopped. I was told that there was something unbearably sweet in my thinking that he might be there, just across the road where I couldn’t see him.
I don’t remember my Irish-American father and Native mother. I searched for them and my roots for many years, and was only able to learn a few things, either from public records or people who knew them. What I don’t know about my parents, I try to imagine, and I try to think what it must have been like for them. So here is my story.
The ‘handover’
I was what they call a “handover.” Based on documents that I found, I learned that my father was an alcoholic who severely abused my mother. One night, he tried to kill her with a knife. She fled to New Mexico, from Kansas, to get to safety, taking me and my two older brothers with her. I was about 3 years old at the time.
We were staying in a dusty and dark motel and, in the face of a Department of Human Services’ threat to take us kids away, my mother handed me over to a stranger — a pretty, well-dressed white woman who appeared to be a model parent who had a husband and a healthy-looking child of her own.
I can’t remember anything about that day except that I was crawling into the back seat of a stranger’s car and staying as far back as I could get away from them. I remember feeling scared and thinking that I was in trouble. I remember the sinking feeling of abandonment.
Abandonment is like death to a child — a feeling that has remained with me for rest of my life. To this day, getting into a strange car is uncomfortable for me. It takes me back to when I was 3 years old.
The two strangers and their little girl drove away with me in the car and, even though my mother had signed “adoption” papers, no official adoption proceedings had ever commenced. Instead, my new foster mother disappeared and erased my identity. Officials refer to it as “illegal.”
She changed my name, my birth place and my birth date so that I would be younger than her little girl. I became invisible, and I remained invisible until 14 years later. DHS never came looking for me who was now a missing child.
I believe with all my heart that, in that moment, my Native mother was feeling alone, scared and exhausted with no family or resources to help her. I’m certain that while she was trying to get to safety, she also found herself facing the toughest and most loving decision a parent can ever make — to give up her child when she could no longer love or care for it.
Even so, I’ve wondered over the years whether DHS’ threat frightened her. I’ve wondered if she was afraid of them because she had heard about what happened to other Native American children when DHS took them under the auspices of “saving” the children by placing them in white homes where presumably they would have certain advantages, but which more frequently turned out to be homes or schools with sadistic physical and sexual abuse.
I wonder if she knew that a flushing toilet was more important to DHS than a good grandmother. I’ve wondered if she knew these things. I’ve also wondered if she felt too ashamed to face a judge who would only criticize her parenting skills and blast her with accusations that she was too humiliated and much too tired to deny. I didn’t know her, so I can only wonder.
My new foster parents soon moved from Nevada to California. About six months later, they divorced. He left, and my foster mother kept the kids. She later married another man the same year. She remained with him only a short period of time and, due to his conduct, they separated.
Shortly after the separation, she agreed to meet him at a restaurant to pick up her belongings. I was sitting between them when, thereafter, he reached over and choked her. Then he shot her. At the age of 4, I became the “key witness” to attempted murder. I was kept safe in a jail until he was arrested.
During the subsequent court proceedings, a probation officer took an interest in how I came to be with her. He learned that she had me illegally, that I was not who she said I was, that she was unstable, and that I was in danger. He pleaded with the court to remove me from harm’s way, but the judge ordered that I should stay with her. After all, I was clean and fed.
It was unfortunate that he made me stay in the care of a woman who would later render me nearly psychologically crippled. He left me in the hands of a woman who continued to raise me as her own under a false identity, moving me from post to post, town to town. The schools never questioned it. The juvenile court never checked up on me.
What my biological Native mother didn’t know was that the woman to whom she gave me was not well. I soon became her whipping post, with a lot of hard labor thrown in. I was loved one minute and hated the next. She would lavish me with extravagant birthday parties but also enforce a strict code of denial and abuse. It was fine to be tossed against a wall, which often left cuts or bruises on my little hands and legs.
She often commented about my “Indian” blood, which made it feel like she felt the abuse was justified. I was so traumatized by losing my family that I lost my potty training, so she retrained me by rubbing human excrement in my face.
She was a compulsively clean housekeeper. When I thought I had her house in spotless condition, she would find one minute detail that I overlooked and lose her temper. As I grew older, her tantrums grew more bizarre and violent, and I was forced to endure regular sexual abuse.
She would often become enraged and hysterically shave off my eyebrows or cut off my hair, yanking my head so hard that sometimes my neck would snap. A razor and pair of scissors soon became terrifying things to me.
Speaking up or crying out about the abuse was deadly in our home. The one time I dared to tell my teachers why I couldn’t play during recess — a beaten and bruised back — I got beaten more, and all my cherished paper dolls were thrown away. I learned to keep silent and to endure it so I could stay alive.
However, she was intimidated by my silence, and I was beaten more if I became too quiet. The school never checked up on me.
I grew up being told that I was stupid and worthless and would “grow up to be nothing but barefoot and pregnant.” Thus the dreadful reason why I never had children.
I wasn’t allowed to study for school. I wasn’t allowed to join sports, even though I was frequently asked to do so by coaches. When I did do well in school, I was accused of trying to be better than her. Once, on the back of an algebra test, I wrote a letter to my teacher about the trouble I was having studying at home. It was a plea for help, but the school never checked up on me.
When I went to bed at night, I could often hear her talking about me in the other room saying “Terri thinks she’s better than us. I’ll have to do something about that.” She often threatened to kill me.
A happy and quiet moment in our house was dangerous in that it was usually a precursor to abuse. I grew up in perpetual fear and became proficient at walking on eggshells. I had no sense of safety and trust, while I was also struggling with the fear of abandonment — the fear of losing yet one more parent.
By the time I reached my early teens, I attempted suicide. During my mid-teens, after a final beating, I finally got brave enough to run away. It was a warm sunny day. She had spent the morning showering me with gifts for my first date, which is a big event for a young woman. We were poor so I had spent many weeks sewing a beautiful cotton dress to wear that evening.
Just a few hours before my date was supposed to pick me up, she began screaming and beating me. She saw the dress hanging on a hanger. She tore it into pieces and beat me with the hanger and then screamed at me to clean up the mess. I was afraid for my life so I ran away and ran straight to juvenile hall. I told them I couldn’t go home anymore.
The police tried to take me back, but, after talking with her, they moved me out. The system could not find my biological parents, so I became a ward of the court. I bounced from foster home to foster home until I was 18, and then I was on my own before I graduated from high school.
During my last year of high school, my social worker searched and eventually found my birth certificate. It was a surprise to me and an exciting moment in that I had never seen it before.
This good man sat with me as I read about who I really was. The tears flowed as I learned that I was older, that my real mother was 28 when I was born and that I had two siblings somewhere on this earth.
A birth certificate can be a powerful thing to a child that got lost. It can also be heart-wrenching.
Life as an adult
What was appropriate in my childhood became a prison in my adult life, although I didn’t know that right away. At first, I worked hard and developed a good career and tried to forget things that happened years ago. Everything on the surface appeared to be normal (after all, I had learned how to act from the best — my foster mother), but success did not help my self-esteem. It only gave me more ways to find fault with myself.
As I grew older, I continued to feel that it was dangerous to view my foster mother as sick. In other words, loyalty continued to be survival, so it wasn’t until she died 30 or more years later that my past and inner child finally delivered their bill.
It was as if the prison gates had opened. I suddenly realized that the dragon of my past remained alive, but dormant, waiting insidiously to wake and breathe its fire, until I squarely faced the truth of what happened years ago.
It was a tragic moment when as a child I was abandoned and then was so neglected, brutalized and damaged as to cease forever my cries for help. I decided that I must go backwards and somehow rediscover the voice. I had to go back and “live” in my past to make sense of the senseless.
I felt like I died a thousand times as a child but that there must have been a blessing, a resurrection, somewhere in all my deaths, or I would not be alive today.
With the help of a strong therapist, I learned that my childhood — the abandonment, abuse, uprooted and forgotten — had played itself out over and over again in all my relationships throughout my adult life. Whether it was with a difficult man, a difficult friend or a difficult job, I had been reenacting my past with others in hopes of doing something with them that I couldn’t do with my parents and my abuser.
I also realized that I had made choices in which there was always another factor — always a triangle — which only perpetuated my experience that nobody would be fully there for me.
I did not become a liar or an addict or a prostitute or a thief or an unreliable employee or a person who treated or spoke to people badly. Instead, my fear of abandonment, self-esteem issues and trauma from childhood abuse played out in many other ways, and sometimes placed me in danger.
Through professional help, I learned that the very survival techniques that helped keep me stay alive as a child were no longer working for me as an adult, that my fight or flight mechanism was broken, and that I didn’t know the difference between healthy and unhealthy staying, and healthy and unhealthy leaving.
I had become frozen — too afraid to love, too afraid to lose. I had also been living in constant fear that the bottom would soon drop out.
I’ve learned that thinking that I can one day be free of childhood trauma is dangerous thinking because it makes me repeat my behavior and self-destructive thinking. There is no changing the past. It will always remain with me. However, there is honest awareness.
With a lot of deep and personal work, I’ve learned that the difference is that I won’t react to the pain anymore. I won’t let it control me. I will always struggle with feeling unlovable. I have learned that the pain and desire is always real, but not about what is happening in the moment.
I don’t blame anyone for what’s happened to me. With love and compassion, I can now understand why people in my past did what they did. I’ve learned that if I demand perfection from them, I will demand perfection from me and live miserably for all of my life.
But once you’ve had your life burned down, it “takes time to be a Phoenix.” I have had to learn to stand in the stillness long enough for the noise to stop, and to love and forgive myself. At some point in this healing process, I will say, “I made good choices in my life,” and that is when I will find my freedom.
I have been living an endless, desperate marathon, and I’m hoping soon it becomes an endless, peaceful walk. That is when I will stop beating myself up for losing everything and everyone. For now, at 60 years old, I’m good with just me, emerging from the worst years of my life.
Terri Elder lives in Hampden.