Native American Journalist Publishes Stunning New Memoir: One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children Of The Indian Adoption Projects

    GREENFIELD, MA, April 13, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Award-winning Native American journalist Trace A. DeMeyer has published a memoir, titled One Small Sacrifice: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects, an expose on generations of American Indian children adopted by non-Indian families.

Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native Americans like Leonard Peltier and Floyd Red Crow Westerman, DeMeyer started research on adoptees in 2004, which led to this fact-filled 227-page biography that includes congressional testimony, evidence of Indian Adoption Projects and how the Indian Child Welfare Act came to exist. Available as a download (e-book) or paperback at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/one-small-sacrifice/6242298, her jaw-dropping narrative of living as an adoptee, her search and meeting her birth relatives will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion-dollar adoption industry.

"I could not put your book down, though it felt like I had been punched in my gut," one adoptee wrote to DeMeyer. Alutiiq-Cherokee adoptee and author Anecia O'Carroll wrote, "I read this powerful book cover to cover; Trace tells her story with such compassion and truthfulness; her memories, feelings and facts are written with such unflinching truth, in my mind and heart she is a warrior and a hero."

Through a sympathetic judge in her hometown, DeMeyer opened her adoption file at age 22 in Wisconsin, a sealed record state. Her journey takes her to Illinois to meet her birth father in 1996 where she learns about her Cherokee-Shawnee ancestry. DeMeyer is former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing. She freelances for News from Indian Country, a national independent native newspaper. DeMeyer's chapter on Sac and Fox Olympian Jim Thorpe won critical praise in the 2001 book Olympics at the Millennium (published by Rutgers Press). Her poetry was published in the spring 2009 edition of Yellow Medicine Review and she has an essay in the upcoming Foothills Press' I Was Indian Before It Was Cool, edited by Susan Deer Cloud. DeMeyer read from her highly-anticipated manuscript at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October 2008. Native America Calling chose One Small Sacrifice as its Book of the Month in March 2010.

Book Synopsis:
"Stop for a moment and think... Who are you? Think of your parents, or grandparents, stories of when, where, even how you were born? Imagine you disappear, you're erased, no longer a part of your family history and genealogy. How would you feel? Grateful? I don't think so... Unbelievably, children in a closed adoption are the only people in the world without free or unlimited access to their identity or personal history. Someone decided this long ago. Someone decided this for me, that I'd be fine, never knowing my identity. I'm dead without my identity. Without it, I'm gone, erased, not Indian, not anything. To tell my story, I needed more than my adoptive parents' story. I needed my own."

For an interview, contact DeMeyer at 413-219-2574 (cell phone) or via email: [email protected].
Her blog: www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com is updated weekly. One Small Sacrifice has a fan page on Facebook.
Her writing credentials and journalism awards can be requested via email.

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