Local resident recounts adoption from Navajo Tribe, reconnecting with roots

BY SHEILA HARRIS sheilaharrisads@gmail.com

“Sometimes I feel like a fake Indian,” said Margie Sterling, of rural Exeter.

A member of the Navajo Nation, Margie was adopted by a caucasian couple in June of 1958, just shy of her 5th birthday. She believes she is one of the first children who was allowed to be adopted from the tribe.

“Navajoland,” the nation’s reservation, encompasses over 27,000 square miles of land across portions of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. With over 400,000 tribal members, the Navajo Nation is the largest of 574 federally-recognized indigenous tribes in the U.S., achieving that status in 2020, after surpassing the membership of the Cherokee Nation.

At 70, Margie still has difficulty believing the story of her adoption, one she learned of only 20 years ago.

She remembers, as a child, how excited she was when making the trip from a foster home in Albuquerque, N.M., to the Stones Prairie community, west of Purdy, to live with her adoptive parents, Edgar “Red” and Virginia Sterling. The Sterlings did not disappoint.

Virginia and her mother had a room prepared, one decked in pink-and-white gingham, with furniture painted a pearly pink: a fairy-tale world for 4-year-old Margie.

When the Sterlings discovered they were unable to have children of their own, they began checking into the possibility of adoption in early 1957. Because Virginia’s father was of Native American descent, she set her heart on adopting a Navajo girl, and wrote a letter of inquiry about the possibility to the Navaho (or “Navajo”) Mission in St. Michaels, Ariz.

She learned that tribal and federal law were not open to such adoptions at that time. However, the friar who responded to her inquiry told her the law preventing such adoptions could soon be changing. He would be praying for Virginia’s success in adopting a Navajo child, he said.

Shortly after that February 1957 letter, which Margie still has in her possession, the law did change. Beginning in 1958, the doors swung open for the U.S. federal government’s controversial “Indian Adoption Project.”

Administered by the Child Welfare League of America and funded by a federal contract from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the Indian Adoption Project continued through 1967, when it was followed by a similar program that ran through the early 1970s.

With legalities for transcultural adoption in place, Margie was sent on her way to Purdy.

“My new parents and the entire Stones Prairie community greeted me with open arms,” she said. “They treated me like a princess. Instead of a baby shower, members of St. John’s Lutheran Church (across from our house) hosted a 5th birthday party for me.”

“Mom and Dad always made me feel special. They told me I was chosen, and, because I knew it was so, I always felt loved.”

With her bronze skin, coal-black hair and dark eyes, Margie was an anomaly in the all-white rural area, but it was a difference that she paid no attention to until she began attending school at St. Joseph (now St. Lawrence) Elementary, in Monett. There, Margie first became aware that her difference could bring negative repercussions.

“There were a few kids – one boy, especially – who made fun of me because of my race,” Margie said. “He was really mean.”

However, Margie added, when they were both in high school, she had the impression that he felt bad about his earlier treatment of her.

Overall, Margie said her childhood years were happy ones.

Margie’s adoptive father, Red Sterling, a mechanic at Bill Hailey Ford in Cassville, died when Margie was 10 years old, leaving Virginia Sterling on her own to raise Margie and her younger sister, Kathy, whom the Sterlings had also adopted from the Navajo Nation.

Virginia was proud of her Navajo daughters, but Margie wasn’t prepared to embrace her Native culture when she was young.

“Mom used to buy traditional Native apparel for me, but I refused to wear it because I was embarrassed,” Margie said.

Virginia also encouraged Margie to look for her birth mother if she ever wanted to. In high school, Margie decided she did want to begin a search. She said, though, she had a lot of well-meaning friends who tried to discourage her from doing so.

“They told me I’d get my heart broken if I found out my mother had purposely abandoned me and didn’t want anything to do with me,” Margie said.

Although it took years to learn it, Margie’s story didn’t follow that negative arc.

In high school, she began her search at the Barry County courthouse, after petitioning the court to release her adoption records.

“I ran into a roadblock right away,” she said. “All of the names of towns and people associated with my birth family had been redacted, based on the law at the time, so I put the project on hold. Then, I got busy raising a family: one son and three daughters.”

Some 30 years later, after the advent of the internet, Margie started her search for her birth mother again. Her adoptive mother, Virginia, was her strongest cheerleader.

“I contacted an attorney whose name I found online, who specialized in Native American adoption cases,” Margie said. “He accepted my case, pro bono, and put me in connection with an intermediary named Kat, who helped me chase down leads. I was told that Kat could only help me for a year. If we hadn’t located my mother by then, I’d be on my own.”

Information came trickling in.

Margie learned that her mother’s name was Margaret Martinez Lopez and that she gave birth to Margie in San Rafael, N.M. She discovered that there had been a serious car crash a year later in which one of her aunts had been killed, and that, as a toddler, she’d been abandoned in a cemetery in Gallup, N.M. From there, she was placed in the New Mexico foster system.

Key questions remained unanswered, including the whereabouts of her mother, and whether she was the one who had abandoned Margie as a toddler.

Kat chased down lead after lead in the search for Margaret Lopez, but each of them fizzled. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. With the one-year deadline looming, Kat offered a last-ditch suggestion.

“Put an ad in the local newspaper and see if you get a response,” she said.

Kat and Margie crafted a notice for the Cibola Beacon, a newspaper in Grants, N.M. The notice included key phrases: Margie’s city of birth, the car crash in which her aunt had been killed, and her own abandonment in a cemetery.

“The notice appeared in the Beacon on a Friday,” Margie said. “By noon the next day, I was talking to my mother.”

Margie said one of her half-siblings (she had six, she learned, all younger than her; some have since died) and one of her mother’s sisters had spotted the newspaper notice and reached out.

Margie said one of the first things Margaret Lopez said to her was that she didn’t sound like a Navajo.

“No,” replied Margie, “I speak hillbilly.”

The two laughed. They did lots of laughing together during the years that followed.

The following week, Margie, her then-husband and her youngest daughter traveled to Grants, N.M., where she saw her mother for the first time after a 50-year separation. The reunion was a joyous one. Not only did Margie discover that she looked like her mother, she quickly realized that they had the same sense of humor.

Margie learned that her birth father, Domingo Diaz, was Spanish (like the Conquistadors, she said), and that he died six months before she reunited with Lopez. He had spent years searching for Margie, her mother told her.

Margie also discovered that she had been stolen from Margaret Lopez by New Mexico social workers, after they tricked her into signing paperwork that relinquished her parental rights.

“Mom didn’t know how to read or write, and English was her third language, after Navajo and Spanish,” Margie said.

Lopez filled Margie in on the loss of her first child.

“Margaret’s legs were mangled in the car wreck that killed her sister,” Margie said. “I was in the wreck, too. We were all taken to the hospital, but I was released several months before Mom was. Another one of Mom’s sisters promised to take care of me until Mom could leave the hospital, but it didn’t happen. My aunt abandoned me in the cemetery in Gallup, N.M., where I was found and taken into child protective services.”

When Margaret Lopez was released from the hospital, her baby girl was nowhere to be found.

The federal Indian Adoption Project was just gearing up, and state authorities, concerned by what some viewed as “the Indian problem,” were eager to participate, in part because federal funds would be doled out in connection with the program. Per tribal requirements, however, parental permission had to be obtained before children could be adopted.

When a well-dressed social worker who comported herself with authority knocked on the door of the humble apartment behind a liquor store where Margaret lived — a gross misunderstanding transpired.

Records revealed because of Lopez’s unsteady gait (what would be a lifelong handicap from the car accident), the social worker assumed she was drunk. She presented Lopez with paperwork and asked her to sign it “for Margie.”

Because Lopez could neither read nor sign the paperwork, the social worker held out an ink blotter and asked her to sign with her thumbprint, emphasizing again that her signature was “for Margie.”

Unknown to Lopez, her thumbprint that day – which she thought would bring her little girl back — set in motion wheels that rolled in the opposite direction.

In southwest Missouri, Red and Virginia Sterling were told that transcultural laws had changed, and that there was a Navajo girl available for adoption.

Although Margie may have been one of the first children stolen from a Native American tribe, she wasn’t the only one. A quick Google search of “Indian Adoption Project” will reveal stories of state strong-arming and adoptions gone wrong.

According to “The Adoption History Project” by the University of Oregon, proponents of the Indian Adoption Project called the program “an example of enlightened adoption practice, made possible by a decrease in a climate of racial prejudice.”

However, said the report, some people believe the project aspired to “systematically place an entire child population across lines of nation, culture and race.”

Native American activists and their allies denounced the project as “[one] in a long line of genocidal policies toward native communities and cultures.” (https://pages. uoregon.edu/adoption/ topics/IAP.html) The latter argument may have merit.

The Indian Adoption Project was preceded by the U.S. government’s practice of removing Native American children from their tribal communities and placing them into federally-funded, church-operated “Indian Boarding Schools,” where they were systematically robbed of their tribal identity. The mandatory boarding school era was in place for almost 100 years.

One of the first boarding schools was instituted by Lt. Richard Henry Pratt, whose motto, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” provided justification for numerous recorded abuses in the name of obliterating Native American culture.

While the Indian Adoption Project and its successor, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA), were received with joy by many well-meaning caucasian adoptive parents from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, the trauma they induced among Native populations can still be felt today, say critics of the programs.

Because Margie had a good life with her adoptive parents, and successfully reconnected with her birth mother, she doesn’t necessarily feel a loss of her Native identity, something many adopted Natives have experienced.

However, Margie said she did experience a certain sense of loss, for a time, after hearing her birth mother’s story. It’s natural to wonder what might have been, she said.

“After our reunion, Margaret told me that, during the years after losing me, she would look out the window, watching for me and pray that I would knock on her door,” Margie said.

Margie’s adoptive mother, Virginia, looked forward to meeting Margaret Lopez one day.

“We were on our way home from the reunion in New Mexico, when my daughter called me and told me Mom (Virginia) was in the hospital in Aurora,” Margie said. “She died one month later.”

“Mom was thrilled when I found Margaret,” Margie said. “’Now, you’ll have someone to look after you when I’m gone,’ she told me.”

That memory is poignant for Margie.

She kept the road hot between Grants, N.M., and southwest Missouri over the years that followed and developed a close relationship with Lopez that continued until her death in September 2024.

When Lopez began developing dementia, she moved to Margie’s southwest Missouri home for a time, where Margie was able to introduce her to all of her children, and, at the time, her nine grandchildren and first great-granddaughter (she now has 11 grandchildren and eight greats).

Margie said she is especially proud to have a coveted five-generation photo from the time Lopez lived with her.

Lopez’s stay in southwest Missouri was of short duration. Unable to acclimate to the change in her environment, she asked to be taken back to New Mexico.

“She wanted to go home, back to the reservation and her culture,” Margie said. “So, we moved her back.”

After finding her birth mother, Margie began to learn more about her Navajo heritage, an ongoing process. Her first lesson centered on her appearance.

“When I first visited the Walmart store in Grants, N.M., I was stunned to find that everyone looked like me,” she said.

It was a revelation to Margie, who had adapted to being an Ozarks anomaly.

“’Are you Native?’ A clerk asked me, but then she wondered why I didn’t speak Navajo or sound like a Navajo,” Margie said.

Margie encountered that same sense of belonging, but not belonging, when she began attending Native American powwows in Oklahoma.

“For a while, I felt out of place, like a fake Indian,” she said. “Everyone looked like me, but I didn’t know any of their traditions.”

Margie is learning, though. She said, in some ways, she’s had the best of two worlds, including two mothers, and she is good with that.

In 1978, in response to tribal advocacy, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, making it difficult for Native American children to be adopted by non-native parents.