Lost Without an Identity
This is a story about my mother. Sometime, in November of 1947, a little baby girl was born, supposedly, in Oklahoma. This little baby was taken home by a couple. From my understanding, and recent research into where this place of birth is located, it turns out this hospital was a private military hospital, and was the very first state-of-the-art facility in the United States. My grandfather, was a aeronautical engineer who designed military planes for the United States. He was head of the team who designed the B-Bomber Series Military Planes. In 2000, there was a change in the living, all my grandparents, and mother had passed on. I am one of three offspring, with three children of my own. We do not know what our heritage is about, and these little babies of mine have missed out on a big piece of family. During the holidays, there are not aunts or uncles to visit, no cousins or siblings to visit with. When people ask me where I come from, I can only tell them this story, and that my answer is I do not know. It is really sad to be almost forty-five years old and I do not know who I am. A big piece of me is missing, and my children are missing out, too. From my understanding, it was a common practice to remove Native American Indian children from their parents to mainstream them into society. Lost is I have no body, I have an illness I do not understand, and I am slowly dying, not knowing who I am. I feel like a walking human ghost with no identity. For my whole entire life it has been this way. My Mother died not knowing who she was. I don’t want the same fate, but I do not even know where to start to look for my family from my mother’s side. Maybe they all died during the Native Northern American Indian Holocaust, brought to you by the United States of America, for the purpose of the free. But, not me; I am not free, I am a prisoner in a system that does not want me.
I have degrees and I still get looked over for not being like everyone else, and how can I when I do not even know who I am. It is a horrible crime to be robbed of your personal identity by the form of genocide. Now, with SB1070, I am not free to move about my country without fear of being deported to a country I know nothing about, that puts my life in danger, possible rape and death if this should happen to me. It is a humanitarian crime, and I have suffered, even diagnosed with PTSD from the damage of society. – Desiree V.