Daughter of a Lost Bird: Growing up as a Native adoptee of white parents
Brooke Pepion Swaney’s Daughter of a Lost Bird follows Kendra Mylnechuk Potter, a woman of Native Indian heritage who was adopted by a white family as an infant, as she embarks on a journey to finding and reconnecting with her indigenous origins.
The documentary is currently being screened as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and will be available to watch online until Saturday 26th March.
The poignant story of Daughter of a Lost Bird addresses the struggles, particularly the muddled sense of self, that come with being an indigenous adoptee of white parents. The film spans across 7 years, in which time we see Kendra enter motherhood, connect with her biological relatives, and come to terms with her Native identity.
But as well as following the protagonist’s personal battle with her own identity, the documentary hones in on the wider issue of the longstanding mistreatment and cultural genocide of indigenous people by non-indigenous white Americans.
The film opens with Kendra trying to call her birth mother. She is visibly nervous, as she knows that in building this relationship she will start to uncover the part of her identity that she knows nothing about. Later on, Swaney captures a raw, emotional moment between Kendra and her birth mother, April, as they speak for the first time over the phone.
When the pair finally meet in person, they appear to have an instant bond and immediately lock in an embrace. Kendra learns that she has Lummi roots, something April had discovered 20 years after giving birth to her.
April tells Kendra that she is also an adoptee of white parents, and reveals she had suffered a lot of trauma throughout her upbringing. As a result, she fell victim to substance abuse and homelessness.
“There was a piece of me that really loved my adopted family, but at the same time I didn't look like anyone and I didn’t think like any of them. I was a real wildcard. And there was abuse”
April felt like she was always searching for something to fill the void in her life. She so desperately wanted to learn more about her roots and find her birth parents, but she was born at a time when a lot of adoptions had no paper trail. This generation became known as lost birds, hence the title of the film. At that time, around 1 in 4 Native children were removed from their tribes and adopted by non-Native families.
April eventually managed to reunite with her biological father. He introduced her to the Lummi tribe so she could reclaim the part of herself that she had always been searching for. He passed away prior to April’s reconnection with Kendra, but it’s clear he transformed April’s life and made her feel more secure in her Native identity.
Kendra and April venture to the Lummi nation together to meet their relatives and embrace the Lummi culture. The two learn a lot about what it means to be Lummi, but because they were both brought up in predominantly white communities, there is still a part of them that struggles to fully connect with and feel a sense of belonging to their original tribe.
Kendra battles with her cultural whiteness and Lummi roots. As a Native American living in an urban environment, with very little knowledge about her culture or heritage, she asks “What is native anymore?”
The film doesn’t shy away from exposing the issue of transracial indigenous adoption. It depicts the system as problematic, but is also careful not to direct the blame at individual non-native families like Kendra’s adopted parents.
Kendra is very grateful for her upbringing and has a close bond with her parents, but is angry at the system and how it has made her identity so elusive. She realises the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
“I identified as white. This strange confusion of white guilt, and native anger. Where does it sit in me? And how do I sit with both of those things?”
Kendra’s situation is slightly more complicated. She was never removed from the Lummi nation - in fact, neither herself nor her birth mother were born into the tribe. April was 17 when she gave birth to Kendra and chose to put her up for adoption, which makes it difficult for Kendra to enrol for Lummi citizenship. But this doesn’t negate the fact that she is still a Native American, and therefore a product of ‘kill the Indian, save the man’ assimilation policies.
Under the Indian Adoption Project (1958-1967), the adoption and child welfare system intended to completely decimate indigenous communities by forcibly transferring children from their tribes and into boarding schools and non-Native white homes.
But this isn’t just history: ensuring Native children are kept within their communities is a battle that is yet to be won. According to Swaney, the film is particularly important at present because of the assault on the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is intended to protect and help keep native children connected to their cultures and tribes. So, the forced removal of Indigenous children with impunity continues even today.
Daughter of a Lost Bird offers an unsettling insight into the history of cultural genocide and it has caused the ‘lost generation’ and their children. But it also shows that not a lot has changed - first nation people are still treated as uncivilised beings, and continue to be subjected to mistreatment and assimilation into dominant white culture.
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