What started out as a documentary, has quickly become bigger than us. We have come to see this as a movement for Indian (and other South Asian) adoptees; and our liberation is connected to the struggles of all other inter-country adoptees/trafficked/displaced people. But before we get to that.
Core tenets:
- We embrace both “out of the fog” and the Adoptee Consciousness Model. Fog, refers to, for many, the time “before” we realize how everything in our lives has been influenced by our displacement. So much of our behavior and choices are done out of Fear Obligation and Guilt. It’s a bitter taste, and life is never the same after that realization. What happens next is not a linear process, and can be visualized this way, through the work of adoptee scholars of color JaeRan Kim, Susan Branco, Grace Newton, Paula O’Loughlin, and Stephanie Kripa Cooper-Lewter.
2. We cannot pour from an empty cup. This work is hard, and emotional. We have been dealing with every possible oppression* from within our own communities (and families) for our entire lives, and worse, we’ve been denied the known science of our experiences: traumatic neurobiological rewiring, genetic bewilderment, identicide, epigenetic changes, the importance of genetic mirroring, attunement, etc. We cannot do this without help.
3. *Part of the work is also recognizing the ways in which we’ve caused harm. Some of us have been raised with privilege, and live lives of privilege now. It is our responsibility to practice unlearning the harms that we absorbed then, and continue to by living in this white supremacist capitalist world. In order to not harm others while on this journey, we must continue to work on ourselves in ways that are difficult and challenging.
4. It’s okay to take breaks.
We believe India should have a centralized genetic testing data bank.
We believe the Indian government should apologize for forced maternal child separation – as other governments have done.
We believe that the government and many institutions (agencies, religious orders, hospitals) are benefitting from secrecy, and exploiting the shame and stigma our mothers are still feeling, decades later.
Want to join our movement?
