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[Music]

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Harv when you think about family, what's your definition? Who do you consider your family?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Well, I consider my wife and my kids as my immediate family, and I include my parents and my siblings and even my uncles and aunts as my extended family. But Elena, I know you are sneaky, so obviously you have because you have some strange definition.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Ha ha ha. Of course! I mean, my definition is mostly like yours, but I do love the idea of chosen family, so incorporating close friends and other kinds of loved ones. But I ask not because I'm sneaky. I don't know if you've noticed this, but with our show there seems to be a trend and that is that many inappropriate questions come from when a family looks different from what people expect.

HARVINDER WADHWA: True, true.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: In a similar vein, this episode, we're talking to adopted people about what it's like to be asked, “Do you know your real parents?”

HARVINDER WADHWA: See, I told you, you're going to be sneaky.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So this is sneaky? OK.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Well, it's never that you ask a straight, you ask a straight question, but the answer is never straight.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, that's what being gay is like Harv, sorry to tell you.

HARVINDER WADHWA: But yes. Now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody who has been adopted, so this never crossed my mind. But I can understand that the family question is going to be a little different for people who are adopted.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, I feel you. No one super close to me is adopted either. So we're here to learn. We're on the case.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Wonderful.

[Music]

TONY HYNES: Who's your real parent?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Do you want to meet your real parents? It's like, well, I've met them, they raised me my whole life.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: What it does is it serves to legitimize birth parents and delegitimize any other type of parent.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I have to be completely honest with you, Harv.

HARVINDER WADHWA: OK?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I am very excited to talk to our first guest. Kristen Meinzer is a podcaster and author and hosts one of my favorite podcasts By the Book. And she's also spoken about being an adoptee.

KRISTEN MEINZER: I was born in Korea and adopted when I was a baby. And after most of my life in Minnesota, I moved to New York after college.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So we're talking this episode about the question, “Do you know your real parents?” Can you tell us about a time you've gotten this question?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, all the time. You know, it's even happened at the corner store. If it's another Asian person who is running the corner store, for example.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Are we referring to Kim's Convenience?

KRISTEN MEINZER: I love that show. I love that show. But, you know, if I'm in a corner store in my neighbourhood and let's say the proprietors are Asian, they might try to speak to me in an Asian language. And I don't speak any Asian languages. So I'll just say I don't understand, I'm sorry. And it has come up more than once where the person will say, “why didn't your parents teach you your language?” And I'll say, “oh, my parents taught me English, which is our language.” And they'll say, “your parents aren't Korean?” or “your parents aren't Chinese?”, or they'll make an assumption “your parents aren't Japanese?” And I'll explain “Oh, I'm adopted. My parents are white.” And they'll say, “well, don't you want to meet your real parents?”

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow.

KRISTEN MEINZER: Or they might even say the right terminology, biological parents. Like “what? Don't you want to meet your biological parents and speak your real language?” That'll come up too sometimes, your real language.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Real language, yes.

KRISTEN MEINZER: I also think that there are a lot of people who just their language around adoption is, I'll just say it, it's antiquated. I'm sure that that was perfectly acceptable language 150 years ago.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So if I'm hearing it correctly, the question “Who are your real parents?”, the antiquated component is the word real?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, yeah, absolutely real is the biggest problem there because what does one mean when they say real? Do they actually mean biological? That's the term I use, biological parents. I know some people who use the term birth parents. I know some people who, depending on the circumstances of their conception, use the term sperm donor. It can vary quite a bit.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right.

KRISTEN MEINZER: You know, I also see versions of it in print all the time. You know, the celebrity rags I see do this constantly. They'll refer to somebody like Angelina Jolie and her adopted children, Angelina Jolie and her real child, so and so. I think it happens quite a bit more when you're a transracial adoptee.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

KRISTEN MEINZER: In my case, my parents were white. They're no longer with us. I have an older sister who is also adopted from Korea and she's Asian as well. I have friends who are white and adopted and they would very rarely get that question. People wouldn't make the same assumptions. Once other people found out they were adopted, they would sometimes ask that question. But it wasn't a daily point of question or fascination for people in the same way it was for me and my sister.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, yeah. Is this question then coming from an idea of what a family looks like, like actually visually looks like?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah. I mean, one thing that does happen quite often as an adoptee who is Asian and who has a last name that is German, people do write in on a regular basis when they, you know, do a search, they see what I look like and they say, “I just have the funniest story for you. I've been listening to your show this whole time, and I just thought it was hilarious. I looked up a picture of you this whole time I was picturing a white person. Isn't that hilarious?” And I get this letter all the time. I'm like, where's the punch line? What part’s hilarious? Your assumption that only white people can have a German last name? Is that the hilarious part?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: That's tea.

KRISTEN MEINZER: And I know they mean it in like a sweet, kind of like, oh, I'm so interested in you. I was looking up more on you and I think it's well intentioned, but maybe that's one you keep to yourself.

HARVINDER WADHWA: But antiquated language aside, why do you think people want to know about your biological parents?

KRISTEN MEINZER: I think a lot of people assume why wouldn't you want to? Don't you want to know your real parents? Don't you want to know what you came from? Don't you want to know this? And to me that’s such a tiny, minuscule sliver of my life and I don't even remember it.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

KRISTEN MEINZER: So it's not particularly important to me, but I totally understand why it's important for other people. And they do want to track down their biological parents. My older sister did at one point and she did try and I'm not of the same mindset. I don't particularly have any interest in that. And every adopted person is different, just like all humans are different. And some of the people who questioned me on it, maybe they love their own parents so much that it's unfathomable that I wouldn't want to, you know, meet my biological parents.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

KRISTEN MEINZER: Or they loved their own children so much, they become parents and they say you really need to meet your biological parents because I cannot tell you how much they love you. Have a little empathy for them, look at what they gave up for you. You should be so grateful to your biological parents. You should go back and thank them, you know? I don't know that they would necessarily want to meet me either. And if they don't, that's fine. I don't want to meet them. And I could totally see where they wouldn't want to meet me and where that would be very disruptive to their lives too.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

KRISTEN MEINZER: And not everybody was conceived in love and not everybody was conceived under good circumstances. Let's be real.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: yeah.

KRISTEN MEINZER: I could have been conceived under the worst possible circumstances. And for me to show up out of nowhere and say I need to know who I am might be completely heartbreaking for somebody else, you know?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. Going back a bit when you mentioned that some white adoptees, you know, don't really get asked this, can you talk a bit more about that? How are transracial adoptees viewed differently?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of people who just assume that whatever I came from was way worse than if I were white, like my parents. “What do you remember about being adopted?” And then I'll tell them I was, you know, a year old and well, what do you remember about that time? And I'll ask them, “what do you remember about being 12 months old?” And they'll say “did you block it out?” I've heard that so many times in my life. It must have been quite traumatic because you blocked it out and you're not remembering. Are you sure you don't remember? And I'm like, I really don't. I don't remember being one.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, who does?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Well, I do, but that's different.

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh shush! Do you really?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Super power Harv over here! Listeners also know that Harv is six foot tall, has six pack abs.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Let me first turn the video off, please. Then we talk.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So when people say things like, oh, this must have been so traumatic that you blocked it out, are they making an assumption that your adoption, heavy air quotes, saved you from something worse?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people assume you're so lucky your parents wanted you. Oh, you're so lucky that you got adopted. Oh, I can't imagine how bad it must have been. And I just hope you are thankful every day that you got adopted. And that's also complicated because, you know, not everybody who is adopted ends up in a dreamy family. My family had loads of problems. My father and his wife were so incredibly abusive, I haven't seen them in 20 years. They're not allowed to see me for good reason. And so all the assumptions that certain people have that like, “oh, adopted kids, they should feel lucky because they were really chosen.” But sometimes you're chosen by assholes, let’s just be real. And not everybody is well equipped to be a parent, whether their kids are homemade or adopted. And more often than not, when people adopt kids, they're not doing it because they're trying to be charitable. They're doing it because they want to be parents. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a more charitable person than everybody else

HARVINDER WADHWA: And off the, completely off the record, but what do you think motivates Angelina Jolie?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I don't know if we can keep that off the record, Harv.

KRISTEN MEINZER: I mean, I think a lot of celebrities have adopted over the years for various reasons. And she just, going to kind of misquote but sort of paraphrase here, that the connection she feels to her kids who are adopted in some ways, she says, is more intense than that to her biological kids because she feels that they were born already within a circumstance where there was struggle and that makes her love them more. It is problematic in its own way. But it's also very Angelina Jolie, right?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Fair enough.Fair enough.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. I feel like now that I think about it, the stereotype is a bunch of white celebrities adopting racialized kids, and that's what we see in media. In your experience, what was it like being raised by white parents?

KRISTEN MEINZER: There are a lot of white parents who try very hard to understand what it's like for their kids being nonwhite, but sometimes their version of trying comes out like “you're just as good as white,” which is something that I heard growing up. Things like this that are just like, hold on. As a kid, I thought that was a compliment. And then the older I got, I was like, “so you're setting the standard of what we should all aim to be is white and I'm as good as that.” Just a second, can't I just be good enough with what I am? So, you know, there's a lot of good intentions there, but I think that there still is work that needs to be done on making sure that people who adopt kids are given the education that they should be given. I think that racism is what it is, where white supremacy is what it is, and white supremacy doesn't disappear just because a white parent loves their Asian child or Black child. Racism still exists in the world. And as much as a white parent may love their kids and assume that their kids are insulated against that or that being white adjacent will make it easier for them, that only goes so far because no matter how white adjacent I was in certain situations growing up, I was never white. And it took a long time to be OK with that because I really hated, for a while there, waking up every morning and looking in the mirror and seeing that I wasn't white. It was so miserable and so sad for me and I just didn't want to be ugly anymore. And just praying, God, what could I do to look more white? And this is me as a kid and then coming into teenage years and young adulthood and realizing like, oh, I look totally fine. This whole time I thought that I was a freakish I don't know, people should cover their eyes so they don't have to look at me. And I look perfectly fine. I'm not saying I'm like I'm not saying I look like a movie star, but I also don't look like an accident either. You know, I look perfectly fine.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Hey, for listeners who haven't seen a picture of you, you could tell them you look like anything you want. This is the power of podcasting.

KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah. I mean, I do want to say my family did do certain things right that I'm really grateful for. So they had a little photo album that I used to love looking through and they would use that to tell me the bedtime story of the day I was adopted. This is the first picture that the agency ever sent to us. This is us driving to the airport excited.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Cool.

KRISTEN MEINZER: This is when we got to meet you for the first time. This is when we brought you home. And this is the first meal we ate together. And having that little story, I just think all parents should celebrate it and not be ashamed of it and not hide it. Making that story something to cherish, something that you look forward to as a bedtime story can be such a sweet thing. So I'm very much in favour of that.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Kristen, I think you have already said it, but to clarify is asking “who your real parents are” an inappropriate question?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, yeah, totally. It's a very inappropriate question. Don't ask that question. Ask yourself, is this information something that makes sense for me to ask for under these circumstances? And if it makes sense for me to ask this question, what is the right way to ask it? Think about the wording of it. What does real mean to you? You know, who's deciding what's real and what's not real? Is it only real if society deems it more valuable? And that's part of what real feels like to me. You're giving more validity to one kind of relationship when it doesn't necessarily deserve more validity.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I believe there was recently a movie about this, I think it was an Indian person who was adopted by an Australian family and then he goes and meets his real parents or something like that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Is this the Dev Patel movie?

KRISTEN MEINZER: Hold on, did you just say real parents?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh, Harv!

HARVINDER WADHWA: I am so sorry. I am so sorry.

KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, my God. Wasn't I brought on here to dispel that word from here?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Biological parents. See, there are the biases! My apologies. My sincere apologies.

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ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Like Kristen said, she isn't interested in meeting her biological parents, but some adoptees are. Here's a voice note from Ryanne Kapp, who shares how this question lands for her.

RYANNE KAP: I'm Ryanne Kap, I'm a grad student studying English. I was adopted from Hunan, China, when I was a year old and I grew up in Strathroy, Ontario. My personal experience with my birth parents is that I have no idea who they are. I have these little details, like I know that they gave me a name. It's Báiyún which means white cloud. But I've never made a formal search. I would definitely be interested in trying to find them at some point, but I've just never had the time or frankly, the emotional capacity to focus on that. It is a disappointing effort for a lot of adoptees, especially when you don't have a lot to work with. When I get the question of “Do you know your real parents?” there's a little bit of sensitivity around that, because I would really love to know. It's like, hey, you know, if you know, my real parents, let me know! Not that they're the real ones but you get what I mean. Getting that question is definitely a reminder of that kind of painful longing for a family and a history that you'll never be able to know. I think it's a great opportunity to have a conversation about adoption, about what family means beyond blood ties. But it's more important to prioritize adoptee experiences. So not necessarily what they don't know, but what they do know that place less emphasis on their origins and more their day to day experience as an adoptee and how they feel about their own circumstances.

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HARVINDER WADHWA: Some people who are adopted never meet their biological parents. Yes Elena, I know that's the term to use!

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: OK, terminology king, he's got it. The narrative we often see in media about adoption is that adoptees, you know, they don't know their birth parents, but then they go on this big journey to reconnect with them. But lots of adoption stories are more complicated than that and don't really fit into this whole idea.

TONY HYNES: My name is Tony Hynes. I'm an interracial adoptee, adopted from Washington, D.C. I have two white parents and these two white parents happened to be two women, which was not something that was a happenstance or normalcy during the mid 90s.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: He's a training specialist focusing on interracial and LGBTQ adoptive families, and he wrote a book called The Son with Two Moms.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Welcome Tony, glad to have you.

TONY HYNES: Thank you, glad to be a part of Inappropriate Questions today.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So, Tony, to start, can you tell us as much as you want to about your adoption story?

TONY HYNES: Yes, yes. Thanks for asking. So I lived for the course of about the first year of my life with my grandmother and with my birth mom. It was during the course of that year that my birth mom, I think realized that it was going to be hard for her to care for me in the way that she really wanted to. And that's because my birth mom happens to be schizophrenic. She would sometimes take me to an orphanage and she would, I don't want to say leave me there, but she would have the caretakers there care for me over a weekend or for a couple of days. And then she would take me back to her house. And it was during one of these times that I'm told that my mom was told, “hey, either you need to leave Tony here in this orphanage indefinitely or you need to take him home indefinitely. But you can't keep doing this, this back and forth.” And so my mom decided to have me stay at the orphanage indefinitely. I think with the thought in mind that she would come back later, that my grandmother would be the one raising me in the future. So I remained in that orphanage until I was about three years old. And it was at this time that Mary and Janet, my two moms, came into the picture. So they were my foster parents. And then when I was five, they decided to formally adopt me. So this is where the story takes a bit of a turn. So that adoption was granted when I was five years old. But three or four months later, the adoption was actually overturned by a panel of judges who said that a white same sex headed household was not the right household to raise a Black child in. And we found out that my birth family had actually appealed the adoption. And so, you know what happens next after that? Well, there were a lot of moving parts going on. So I was kind of figuring out which family should I be loyal to. Because I was actually asked by my mom, my birth mom when I was seven, when the custody battle was still ongoing, “Tony would you prefer to live with them or would you prefer to live with me or with your grandmother?” And I looked at my mom and I said, “Mom, I prefer to live with them, with Mary and Janet” and I remember she started crying and I remember my grandmother being upset by what I had said as well, and I remember how that felt. I remember feeling very guilty, feeling almost ashamed in a way that I had picked another family over my flesh and blood. But at the same time, I knew in my heart for me that it was still the right decision to make at that time. And I still feel that way today. My moms’ decided to appeal that decision and they appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court where it was knocked down to the lower courts who ended up deciding upon this joint custody agreement between birth family and adoptive family. So that means for me that I was growing up with Mary and Janet, my two moms. But on the weekends, particularly on Sundays, I would go and visit with my birth family. And once in a while I saw my birth mom. But it was actually mainly my grandmother who I saw, for the most part growing up, who was attached to that birth family. And so when I talk about my story, I try to get all those nuggets in there because I realized that even for me, sometimes it feels complicated to explain because there's a lot of moving parts to it.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Tony, this is and please forgive me, I am trying to be not rude in any way, but this is a very heart wrenching story for a little child to go through all this. Do you remember a lot of it or it's just that you've heard a lot of it?

TONY HYNES: I remember all of it, you know. Well, I shouldn't say all of it right. Because I obviously don't remember when I was one or two or three years old.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I remember my birth.

TONY HYNES: Right! When they cut the umbilical cord, right I remember that. You know, so I don't remember all of it. But I do remember what this felt like when I was a child. It felt hard. The innocence that a lot of kids have was kind of shattered for me when I was younger because I knew about racial complexity when I was younger than most kids will know about it. I knew about this idea that people weren't as accepting of LGBTQA+ families because I was getting messages that, well, is he going to be able to grow up and have a healthy sense of himself as a Black man? Is he going to be gay as if that was is a negative thing, right?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Negative thing and is it even possible?

TONY HYNES: Yes.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. Like correlation, causation.

TONY HYNES: Exactly. But even having everyone stare at our family when we were out and about having people kind of do that stop and double-take and kind of try to make a connection if we were even in line somewhere, who is this child that's next to you? Is he somebody else's child? Do we take both of you when we're seating you? What do we do? And so these are all things that I was noticing even at a pretty young age.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Tony, you have anticipated ten of my questions.

TONY HYNES: Sorry about that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Sorry for being a great guest.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So, Tony, you have not clearly stated that, but I am assuming that this would have been very traumatic for you.

TONY HYNES: Well, you know, I hesitate to use those words for myself, and here's why. Any adoption starts with loss because that adoptee has been separated at some point in time from their birth family, so that physical memories that they have, the separation there. Obviously, with my situation there were these added layers that were going on. And, yes, there was trauma there. But I hesitate to call it a very traumatic experience, because when we say things like that, the listeners at home have this sense that adoptees are these fragile little things that are only defined by that trauma that they've gone through and that they are only their stories I want to say it was not a normative family experience for me. But at the same time, I will not say that my life was devoid of joy or happiness and that I didn't get valuable things from both my birth family and my adoptive family.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Given all that we've talked about so far, I can imagine the question, “Do you know your real parents?” might have been really tough to answer. What was it like getting that question growing up?

TONY HYNES: Right. So people would ask me that question all the time. Who was your real mom? Who's your real sibling? So when I was younger, I used to say that I'm adopted and my birth family member is this, my birth family member is that. So I would try to correct them right away. But I don't ever remember an occasion in which I asked someone the question back, like, what do you mean real or or why are you saying real or I'm not going to answer that question. And these are all things that adoptees can do if they want to. But a lot of us don't because we've become so used to people having that inclination about our families. So we feel that this is an expectation that we should have for people to be ignorant, for people to not understand that there is this belief that one family is secondary and one family is first.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right. So there's still something I'm trying to understand, and I hope it's a fair question. OK, so. So already your adopted parents, things in the 90s were worse than today and by no means today is perfect, but it's way better. So they were already dealing with a gay couple related issues and now they come and adopt a Black kid. What would have possibly motivated them to add another layer? They had enough trouble of their own.

TONY HYNES: Right, right. That's a great question. And I have asked my mom that question sometimes. I say my mom because my other adoptive mom, unfortunately passed away when I was 12 years old. But I asked my mom that question. Sometimes I say, you know, what's the deal with that? Her response is really well, we thought about it and it didn't hinder us from wanting to adopt. And the other piece of it is that D.C. in the 1990s was nicknamed Chocolate City because over 80 per cent of the population was Black American. So if my moms wanted to adopt in the D.C. area, it was likely they were going to adopt a Black child. And I I do think that they probably underestimated how much work would go into raising a child like me. Now, they did do a good job of educating me about my culture, my roots, my heritage. But as white people, they hadn't lived in my shoes before, obviously. And there wasn't, there wasn't the same type of education for them available as interracial adoptive parents as is available today.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Is that what got you into doing the work you do today, educating adoptive families on these topics?

TONY HYNES: For sure. And that's, I wish that my moms had had some of the same training that I'm giving parents today. I also, though, just want to say that even after giving parents lots of training and stuff like this, this is still a family type that is going to have its unique challenges attached to it. It's not going to take away the feelings from that interracially adopted person that I'm not this enough. I'm not Black enough because I was raised by white people. I'm not Asian enough. I don't speak the language of my birth culture. Other Asians are calling me a banana. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. If I'm Black, I'm being called an Oreo and I can give all the training that I can in the world, but these are still things that interracially adopted people often are going to face. But I think it's important to let kids and interracial adoptive families know you don't have to try to be Black or you don't have to try to be white. You know, be yourself, but educate yourself about your cultural roots and heritage at the same time.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Tony, to conclude, do you think asking adoptees about their real parents is appropriate?

TONY HYNES: “Who's your real parent?” Definitely inappropriate. We should ask people, are you comfortable telling me about some of your adoptive experience? And if you are, please feel free to share that with me. Throughout the course of that answer, you will find out in your own mind, even from your own convoluted definition of who the real parent, who the birth parent is, because that person will tell you that. And if they say that I prefer not to talk about it, respect their space and their privacy in that regard too. So that's how I would respond to that question of someone. If someone wanted to ask it in a nice way, a good way, in a non-inappropriate way.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

TONY HYNES: It's really great to talk about inappropriate questions that people have, because usually if there are questions, especially if the questions from younger people, they're not coming from a place of hate, but of curiosity. And the curiosity is coming from a place of ignorance about things that they don't understand. And the ignorance is coming from places and systems that are creating ways of being that are perceived as ideal or less ideal that people are now internalizing. So it's important that we have conversations about how to respond and answer those things.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh, that was a really great summary of our show, actually. And I think, you know, we're always like, how do we explain the show? And so I think we should just refer to that recording and credit Tony and then we're done!

TONY HYNES: I love it.

[Music]

ANTHONY RISPOLI: My name's Anthony Rispoli, I'm 24 years old. I was adopted from South Korea when I was a few months old. My biological parents, though the way I phrase it actually is I refer to my adoptive parents as just mom and dad. But as far as like my biological parents, I just use the Korean words, which is just eomma and appa. My eomma, she was single. She was a student. She was left by herself. So she had to make a very difficult decision. Being asked, you know, who are your real parents? What happened to your real parents? I think the Internet is what I appreciate because I can't fault people for being curious because 1) it’s only natural and 2) they realize like, hey, this is something very unique about this person. I want to learn more. Something I've actually realized too as I've gotten older is a lot of people, they kind of tiptoe around it or I can tell that they're treading very carefully because they don't know how, like how sensitive I am, how sensitive my story is and the circumstances. So that's something I've actually come to really appreciate and respect about people. And like, if I sensed that, like, they're like not sure where to toe the line, I always stop them, literally stop them mid-conversation, be like ask whatever you want, if you say something that's out of line or that's just not right or, you know, maybe is a better way of saying it, I will tell you.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: As a show based in Canada, we felt it was really important to talk about the Sixties Scoop. Coming off of the residential school system, many Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities and placed in white families. And even today, 52 per cent of children in foster care in Canada are Indigenous when Indigenous children make up only seven per cent of the child population. I'm speaking to Raven Sinclair.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: My name is Raven Sinclair. I'm from George Gordon First Nation in the southern part of Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 area. I'm a professor of social work.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Raven herself was adopted during the Sixties Scoop and has done lots of research and work on this topic. As a heads up, there's discussion of abuse in this interview.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: It's such an interesting question isn't it, to know your real parents?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, what do you think about the question?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: I think that it's kind of insulting. What it does is it serves to legitimize birth parents and delegitimize any other type of parent. Because my other parents aren’t fake. They're not, you know, amorphous blobs.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah!

RAVEN SINCLAIR: They’re skin and bone and blood, they're as real as anybody else.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Real belongs to like differentiating between humans and the cartoons. So I think that when people ask the question, they're actually referring to, you know, who gave birth to you? You know, did you come out of, you know, the mother?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And was she impregnated by the father? And frankly, that's nobody's business, right?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. In only as much as you want to share. Could you tell me about your adoption story?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Sure. I was born in a small town in Alberta. I'm the ninth child of 11. My father died just, he died young. He caught a flu when I was about a month old and he just never really recovered from it. And so my mother, we moved back to Saskatoon at some point and we came into contact with the child welfare system a couple of times. The last time that I can remember was the time that I was removed permanently and we were actually all removed permanently. My two oldest brothers were adopted by a pedophile.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh, that's awful.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: I think that was the purpose for that. And then me and my two younger siblings were adopted as part of the Sixties Scoop as part of the AIM program. My adoption was difficult, but my parents were, they were awesome. My father, you know, he became my best friend and he was a you know, he was a good person, a deep thinker and, you know, advocated for the rights of people. And that was just part of what he did. He cared for the homeless. And so he was a really great role model. And my mother was kind of kind of bad sometimes. She was a bad mommy. But she did the best she could with what she knew. My father and I figured she was probably a survivor of abuse herself. And then later on, as I did my own recovery work, I was able to forgive my mother. And I'm grateful that she was, you know she was in my life for a period of time. So they were my parents. And I do have a birth mom. And I was fortunate to be able to meet her when I came back. And my father remarried so then I had an awesome stepmother. And over time we created a really strong relationship. So I had, you know, five parents or three moms and they're all parents, you know. So someone says that, you know, what was your relationship with your mom? It's like, which one?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So today, would you consider all of these people part of your family?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, without question. And that's got nothing to do with biology.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: My story that I think really sort of highlights this question that you asked of your real parents, because it's ludicrous, that the question is ludicrous.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: You mentioned the Sixties Scoop earlier. Can you give a bit of background into what it is and how it all started?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: When the residential schools started to literally disintegrate. We had five, six generations of residential school survivors and there was lots of sort of turmoil. But social workers getting involved really just exacerbated the problem, I think, because removing a child from an already vulnerable family or removing the children is very punitive. What do you say to a family when you take away all the children? It's like you don't you don't have the capacity to raise these children. Well, how convenient is that when all these generations of kids were raised in institutions where the only role models they had were violent, abusive, lying, thieving “religious” folks. But the Sixties Scoop, I mean, the term itself came about from this BC social worker who in 1960, she said, we're removing these kids for no reason and we're placing them into homes, but which we know nothing, they haven't been vetted.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh wow.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And she said no matter how we cook our words and child welfare jargon. We're putting these kids at risk. And now we have kids, I'm calling it the foster care scoop because our kids are being removed at the same rate.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And it's always the same story, right? It's basically some foster family who wants to keep their child permanently. And for some reason, they think that they can raise an Indigenous child better than their Indigenous family or community can. And it's absolutely, it's not true.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So the same system from like the Sixties Scoop and the same kind of machinations are, from what you're saying, very much present and ongoing. Because it's interesting. We think of this as, you know, a historical moment. Did the moment really end?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Yeah, no, the moment didn't end at all, and in fact, I mean for me now, really, it's purely economics because the whole system really incentivizes the removal of our children. Because in foster care, you know, when I was adopted, my parents didn't have any, we didn't have any other exposure to the child welfare system. They didn't get any support at all for me. So I was financially their responsibility. But when kids are in foster care and they're given permanency, then the foster family is basically guaranteed an income until the child is 18.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And there's so many kids who it's like once you're 18, the family just sort of like, you know, washes their hands of them. They don't have their birth family. They don't have their community. They don't have any supports in place. But the check has stopped coming in. So it's like, OK, here you go, pack your bags, here you go. It's this whole foster care system where people are paid to raise our children, you know, under the premise that, you know, our families can't. I mean, the reality is for foster kids and adopted kids, they’re the most vulnerable children because there's no watchful eyes, right? Like, when I was growing up, my mother was pretty abusive to me.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Sorry to hear that.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: We reconciled our relationship later on and I love her a lot now. But she was mean, man. And to the outside world that looked like an ideal. You know, this awesome family was being benevolent and they were awesome because they rescued this poor little waif. But behind closed doors, it was a different matter. Uh, now that I've thoroughly depressed you. But, you know, this is this is the type of reality that that we live in. These are the truths that need to be told.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And it pisses you off then do something about it.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah for sure. Exactly. Looking into the question, do you know your real parents? It's been interesting because I think we've discovered that there's an assumption about people wanting to connect to their birth parents or reconnect to their birth family in some way. From your experience and your research, do many Indigenous adoptees and Sixties Scoop survivors want to reconnect with their birth families is like, how possible is it?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: It's quite easy in the Indigenous context. If you know the province you're from and if you know your birth last name, your surname or even just the band, I mean one call. I know so many adoptees who called the band office looking for family and they ended up the person that answered the phone was a cousin or an aunt.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh cool!

RAVEN SINCLAIR: For me, it took me 11 days.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: I know. And that was just because back then we were using snail mail, right?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Had you send email and Facebook.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: It would have taken one email and same day service. So it's very easy. But, you know, what I've encountered is the vast majority of adoptees, Indigenous adoptees, do return to family, community and culture. If you haven't been adopted, you might not really understand what that what it means to to need to know who you are and who your people are and where you come from, because that's a given for you. And imagine that you were removed from that. Everyone that you know, everything you know, and raised within a completely different country and an ethnic group and even religion. I think that Indigenous adoptees in particular, when we're raised in a in a white context, you know, my family were very well intentioned, but there was still racism. And for many, many, many, many, it was further socialized through statements like, you have to study really hard and do good, or you're going to end up like a good for nothing drunken Indian. And, you know, it's supposed to be like a deterrent. But really, the message that the kids got was that Indigenous is bad and white is good.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: What was it like then, you know, having grown up with all this messaging, reconnecting with not only your birth family but your culture?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Well, it was awesome. It was awesome. But it wasn't easy. And I came back to Saskatoon in 1988. I applied for my status, started to get curious about my family, and it took about 30 years to really connect and reattach with them. It's really, it's a beautiful gift for me to have my siblings.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: That's awesome. What was that process like of reconnecting after all that time?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Well, it was brutal. You know, you know, I had been socialized a certain way. And, you know, everything about the lifestyles that they lived was foreign to me. And so I was also going through the you know, that whole process of what does it mean to be an Indigenous woman? What does it mean to be a Cree woman and who are my people and what's my purpose? You know, those big, those big life questions that, you know, are pretty essential to ask yourself.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: If someone asks you this question, how do you answer?

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Well, I have five real parents. Which one are you referring to?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: That's a wealth of real parents.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: It is. And so then they would probably say, I mean your birth parents.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And they said, OK, there are two of my five real parents.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Is there something you wish people would ask adoptees instead of this question or in your case, specifically Indigenous adoptees?

RAVEN SINCLAIR:You know be like “I'm interested in your story. Are you willing to share some or any of it with me?”

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: And kind of go from there.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, that's nice and open ended.

RAVEN SINCLAIR: Yeah.

[Music]

HARVINDER WADHWA: So, Elena, this episode made me think a lot and the word real, I would have used it much more loosely before I had spoken to our wonderful guests. And even during the episode, I used the term real parents because we are so, our brain is so tuned to that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: That it will take us a little bit or take me a little bit more time to rewire. Not only the question of who your real parents are, even asking a question who your biological parents are, that is hugely inappropriate.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, I think that's super legit, too. I think we all need time to unlearn things. And that's part of what the show is about.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Absolutely. Absolutely.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So it was cool to hear from someone like Kristen for whom that's, you know, connecting with birth family isn't that important. And someone like Raven who found that connection to be really significant and how it can be totally different for different adoptees.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Absolutely. The amount of layers, right grom explaining the families to to just behaving in a certain way to being thankful or not being thankful or whatever. The whole episode stated the complications.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, for sure. But on top of that, it's interesting that I think a lot of what I got from talking to our guests was that as much as there are so many complications, adoptees are also just normal people. Oftentimes adoptees have been through a lot, but that doesn't necessarily define them.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Boy, I am so glad that I got to this episode before I met anybody who has been adopted.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: We've gotten on the train to Appropriate City!

[Theme]

HARVINDER WADHWA: I'm Harvinder Wadhwa.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: And I'm Elena Hudgins Lyle.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Thanks for getting inappropriate with us.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: A huge thanks to our guests Kristen Mainzer, Tony Hines and Raven Sinclair. You also heard voice notes from Ryanne Kap and Anthony Rispoli.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Every episode has an accompanying webcomic and this week it was illustrated by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. You can find it on Instagram @IQ_podcast. Also, make sure to visit cbc.ca/iqpodcast for a full transcript of this episode.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: The glorious gaggle behind this podcast are Sabrina Bertsch, Cindy Long and myself. The show is mixed by Andrew Norton. Our chase producer is Sarah Melton and our digital producer is Judy Ziyi Gu. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner and our executive producer is Arif Noorani.

[Theme out]

HARVINDER WADHWA: An inappropriate question is like using the inappropriate word in front of your guest after they have spent a whole interview saying why it is inappropriate.

Transcript: Inappropriate Questions Season 3, Episode 6

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