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`Looking For Lost Bird'
Yvette Melanson's memoir is an inspirational story for
adoptees seeking to uncover their past.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to the Jewish News
vette Melanson is a woman
who might say the Shema
before going to sleep, and in
the morning light whisper
the Navajo prayer, "May I walk happi-
ly and lightly on the earth."
Both are deeply felt, authentic
expressions of her soul. As she says in
an interview, "I know that I'm Jewish.
I feel Jewish. I've been raised Jewish.
I'm- also Navajo."
Her book, Looking for Lost Bird: A
Jewish Woman Discovers Her Navajo
Roots, written with Claire Safran and
published last year, chronicles her
extraordinary life journey, and was
just released in paperback (Avon
Books; $12).
At age 43, after facing many sad
upheavals but persisting in embracing
life, Melanson — who had been
adopted by a Jewish family as a young
child — learns shocking details about
her identity. She was born in a lean-to
on a Navajo reservation and stolen
from her parents at birth along with
her twin brother. Passed through a net
of underground doctors, nurses and
orphanage officials, she was moved
frequently, until she reached her adop-
tive family in Queens.
"Lost bird" is the name that Native
Americans give to their lost children,
and Melanson says that, from the 1920s
to the 1970s, hundreds of thoUsands of
Navajo children were stolen. Her family
never stopped looking for her.
-
At a time when many memoirs are
being published, this one stands out
for the astonishing true story it
unfolds, written with an open heart.
The narrative moves forward and back
in time, describing Melanson's early
life with Bea and Larry Silverman, the
years after she left their Neponsit,
N.Y., home, her experiences among
her newly found relatives on the
Arizona reservation.
Interwoven with her well-told anec-
dotes are Navajo teachings. One
proverb that particularly speaks to
Sandee Brawarsky is a New York-
based book critic.
2/25
2000
so
•
Melanson: "Walk in harmony
with the universe by being
aware of who you are."
Praised and pampered by
the Silvermans, the fair-
skinned, green-eyed Melanson
grew up in an upper middle-
class world of piano lessons and
art classes, repeatedly reminded
that her parents chose her
because she was so special.
In her early teens, the pro-
tective cocoon was burst when
Bea died; Larry remarried a
woman who cast her new step-
daughter out of their home.
Melanson lived with neigh-
borhood friends until Larry
and his wife offered to send her
to Israel. There, she lived on Kibbutz
Sa'ar in the northern Galilee and flour-
ished, learning Hebrew, falling in love
and marrying a fellow kibbutznik.
During the Yom Kippur War, she was
wounded and her new bridegroom was
killed. Larry convinced her to return to
America. Although she thought she
would return to Israel, she never did.
Still unwelcome in the
Silverman home, she joined
the U.S. Navy, distinguishing
herself for her work. She mar-
ried a naval officer who
proved to be violent, and she
then divorced. When she gave
birth, the Silvermans insisted
that she give the boy up for
adoption, but she resisted,
raising Brad with the help of
a friend's family.
She later married Dickie Melanson,
who had six children, and together
they had two daughters, carving out a
life in Maine.
Like many adoptees, she never
ceased to wonder about her birth fam-
ily, and began to use the Internet to
investigate her background. After her
initial correspondence with a woman
representing the Navajo family (they
had no computer on the reservation),
she was skeptical that she, with her
fair complexion, could be a Native
American. The possibility seemed too
unbelievable.
But the details of their stories
seemed to match, and in a close
perusal of the Silvermans' papers
(Larry had died), she found the names
Betty Jackson and Yazzie Monroe —
the Navajo parents she would come to
claim as her own.
When Yazzie, a Navajo medicine
man, saw her photograph, he knew it
was his daughter. Betty had died eight
years earlier of esophageal cancer ---
the same disease Melanson had suf-
fered from.
At the invita-
tion of the
Navajo nation
and trailed by a
pack of reporters,
Melanson visited
the family in
Tolani Lake and
received a warm
welcome as
though she were coming home.
Although among Navajos, it is consid-
ered impolite to stare, she couldn't help
looking long into the eyes of her
brothers and sisters, "drinking in the
look of my family, looking for little
resemblances between them and me."
She found many similarities. "It
was very uncanny the way I slid into
this family," she notes. "I usually hold
back. But they thought just the way I
did, acted the way I did. It shouldn't
have been — we were raised totally
different. But it was just like putting
on a kid glove."
Melanson, her husband and two
young daughters then moved to the
reservation, eager to get to know their