My brows furrow.
“This was not a Navajo standard,” she clarifies. “This was the rule in my house and the small tight-knit community of full blood Navajos that my parents kept us sheltered within on the reservation. They disowned my oldest sister, Winona, when she eloped with her British boyfriend. The fact that they were both medical students studying at Harvard made no difference to them.
“Anyway,” she focuses back, “I met Miguel on a day trip into Flagstaff with a friend’s family. I was fourteen and he was fifteen.” They exchange a smile. “We started sneaking around to meet up with each other. After several months together, I wound up pregnant just before my fifteenth birthday.”
Fifteen and pregnant.One sister already disowned, I can’t imagine the fear she must have felt in that situation. Fear of disappointing her parents. Fear of abandonment. I fight to keep my expression neutral as she goes on.
“When I finally got the courage to come clean to my parents, well, you can imagine how they reacted. They tried to get me to terminate, but I refused and it was too late anyway.”
Connor squeezes my shoulder as the grimness of this revelation settles over the room. In an alternate scenario, I would have never been.
Miguel clears his throat and moves the conversation along. “My parents tried to arrange a meeting with her family to discuss options about what the future could look like, but they wouldn’t talk to us.”
“So, I called Winona,” Cheyenne supplies. “She was across the country at school, but she became my rock. My parents pushed for the adoption and, given how young we were and the conflict with our families, we both knew it was the right decision. Besides that, they weren’t really involved other than setting the adoption terms and pushing it through.”
“When you say ‘adoption terms’, what does that mean?” Connor interjects.
“There are federal adoption laws in place designed to keep Native children within the tribe as much as possible. It’s all an effort to preserve our culture. Under more normal circumstances, Gretchen, you would have most likely been adopted by a member of my extended family or another Native living on the reservation.”
“But yours weren’t normal circumstances?” I ask.
“No, they weren’t. My dad planned to run for President of the Navajo Nation and having one disowned daughter married off to a British man and another pregnant by a Mexican boy at fifteen was too scandalous for his campaign, or so he said.” The hurt in her eyes turns to righteous indignation. “My pregnancy was kept a secret. When I started to show, they transitioned me to homeschooling and a tribal doctor made house calls for all my prenatal care. I relied on Winona to keep Miguel and his family up to date on the pregnancy because my parents wouldn’t let me leave the house.”
My head swims. Tidal waves of thoughts and questions run every which way as I listen to their story—mystory.
“You were due the last week of June. My sister and her husband came back to Arizona and got a temporary apartment in Phoenix for that summer. My parents refused to see her, but they allowed me to spend the last few weeks of my pregnancy living with her so that I could deliver at a small private birthing center in Phoenix that my parents had selected for its discretion.”
Because my grandfather couldn’t have an unplanned, half-blooded grandchild, my mother was forced to give birth in secret.
“I’m sorry, I know this is a lot to absorb,” Miguel says, reading the distaste on my face.
“No, it’s okay. Um…yeah, I’m trying to understand. Can you go back to the adoption terms you said your parents set?”
Cheyenne bobs her head. “Yes, sorry. In extreme circumstances, a judge can approve, at the request of the parents—or in my case,myparents, since I was a minor—to have a child placed with a family out of state. Since my parents rubbed shoulders with all the higher-ups in the tribal government, they pretty much got anything they asked for.”
Cheyenne reaches for another tissue.
“So, neither of you got any say in where I ended up?”
“No. It’s always been my understanding that at least one of your parents has some Navajo blood which I suspect is why my mom selected them. On paper it was a more respectable choice, even if you wouldn’t be remaining on the reservation itself.”
Mom. She’s told me that she has a small amount of Native American blood and that, when they were pursuing adoption, they added their names into every adoption database they could qualify for across the country. This must have been what compelled Cheyenne’s mom to select them.
“And you didn’t know their names or where they lived?” I ask.
Cheyenne shakes her head. “It was a closed adoption, so names and distinguishing information were all kept confidential.”
These are widely known facts about closed adoptions that I’d come to understand well in my own research. It’s how I know my parents couldn’t have possibly known any of this.
“You said you weren’t at the birth?” I ask Miguel.
“No.” He squeezes his wife’s hand, a silent apology for not being there. “When Cheyenne moved down to Phoenix, my family and I went to see her as often as we could that summer. As much as I wanted to be there for her when she went into labor,” he pauses to regain his composure as a lone tear slides down his cheek, “they were worried her mom might show up during the birth and well…we all agreed it was best to avoid that confrontation.”
“Did she come?” Connor asks.
“Not for the birth, no,” Cheyenne croaks out on a shaky breath. “It was just my sister in the room with me.”
“Winona’s husband, Arthur, stayed in the waiting room and called me a few times, though, to give me updates,” Miguel adds.
