Kin of Another Kind by Callahan Cynthia;

Author:Callahan, Cynthia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

CHAPTER 5

Captivity and Rescue in the Fiction of Dallas Chief Eagle, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, and Sherman Alexie

By the last decades of the twentieth century, Americans had become familiar with adoption as a practice. The debates over the transracial adoption of African American children in the early 1970s contributed to this consciousness, as did the growth of the adoption rights movement (ARM) that arose in the late 1970s. The ARM identified problems with midcentury adoption practices, particularly the secrecy of closed-records adoptions. Although the movement itself is beyond the scope of this study, it had a profound effect on the way that Americans came to understand adoption by the end of the twentieth century,1 which, in turn, shaped its representation in fiction. Activists often used autobiographical narratives to advocate for the opening of records, and through them, Americans learned that many adoptees wanted information about their birth families and, moreover, that the lack of knowledge could be traumatic for some (Melosh, “Adoption Stories”; Modell). Furthermore, media accounts of adoptees searching for birth families, along with psychological impact studies of adoption, contributed to the public consciousness of adoption practices. As a consequence, adoption became familiar to the general public, and its representation in literature began to be evaluated in terms of its accuracy. But despite the concerns raised about traditional adoptions and the controversy surrounding the transracial adoption of African American children, many Americans still perceived of it as a benevolent act, particularly when the adoptees in question were identified as “children in need” and came from developing nations or, at times, marginalized groups in the United States. These contradictory perceptions of adoption as at once problematic and essentially benevolent made it possible to interpret a single adoption scenario in vastly different terms, depending on one’s perspective.

By the time Barbara Kingsolver wrote The Bean Trees (1988), one of the best-known fictional depictions of transracial adoption in contemporary American literature, readers and critics brought to it this somewhat paradoxical perception of adoption. Many responded favorably to the novel’s depiction of a single woman who adopts an abused Cherokee child, goes to great lengths to maintain custody of her, and develops an awareness of social justice as a consequence of their relationship. This adoption, represented in terms of “rescue,” helps manifest Kingsolver’s vision of multicultural coalition that is a theme in the novel. Others, however, saw in the novel an inaccurate portrayal of the transracial adoption of American Indian children. It failed to acknowledge the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), which prohibits the adoption of Native children without the permission of their tribe. It also failed to consider Turtle, the Cherokee child, in terms of her cultural identity, using her instead as a vehicle for addressing her white adoptive mother’s development.

Several novels that followed The Bean Trees effectively revise Kingsolver’s original depiction to more accurately reflect the cultural history of American Indian child custody. Taken together, The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s sequel Pigs in Heaven (1993), Gardens in the Dunes (1999)

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