[L-I] Cross Racial Adoption Controversy: Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [my father]

Cross Racial Adoption Controversy: Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [my
father]

NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR:

Although I posted most of this recently, this version is now somewhat
expanded and I am sending it out more widely.

This is hard to write about.

This is not an argument against sensible and committed cross racial
adoptions.

This page, now on our Lair of Hunterbear website at
http://www.hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
deals with my Native father's adoption by a well-known liberal activist
family, William
Mackintire Salter and Mary Gibbens Salter.  Their brother-in-law, Professor
William James of Harvard, initially opposed the adoption -- not because Dad
was an Indian but because of the limitations of the Salters.

"I can't help from expressing the feelings which have been besetting me
throughout the day, and growing hourly stronger, about the Salters' project
of adopting a child. The plan seems to me fraught with terrible risks for
the remoter future and with a present inconvenience which I should think
would be fairly disastrous. If they were younger, securer in health, and if
they dwelt in the country or in a rural town it would be different. And it
would be different if, being as they are, they were richer. It would be
different also morally if they were now leading merely selfish lives and not
devoting themselves to arduous public ideals."   William James, to his
mother-in-law, Eliza Putnam Webb Gibbens, June 20, 1900.

Among his several liberal affiliations, William M Salter was active in the
almost all-white Indian Rights Association -- which, during this era, was
mistakenly pushing the cultural assimilation of Native people.  The IRA
was encouraging its members to adopt Indian children.

Dad was essentially a full blood.  His mother, Mamie E Gray
[Wabanaki and Mohawk] and his father, Thomas Taylor [Micmac
and Maliseet] were Northern Maine Indians.  [A portion of
Thomas Taylor's family became closely involved with the
Penobscot Nation,  near Old Town, Maine.]

When the adoption did occur, William James and his family got
vigorously behind it.  William M Salter, however, soured badly on it
 -- although  Mary Gibbens Salter remained a kind and loving person.

The shadow of this adoption hung -- and in a very real sense still hangs --
over our family. I -- a consistent supporter of my father always -- have had
a very tough time coming to terms with it.  Yet I can see how, in the
strange way in which the cards often fall out, Dad benefited from
the travail.

In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted -- providing considerable
protection for Native children and working actively to keep them within
their extended family, or the tribe itself, or in the Indian community.

THE STORMY ADOPTION OF AN INDIAN CHILD -- MY FATHER
[HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER, JR] JUNE 11 2004
NOTE BY HUNTER BEAR:

Amy Kittelstrom, has been doing a PhD
dissertation on William James [with substantial mention of W. M. Salter and
some
mention of Dad]. She interviewed me almost two years ago. Her
work is now finished, will be published as a book, and here are a few very
salient excerpts. Our assumption has always been that Louise
Annance died quite young at Greenville, Me. [She is my great grandmother and
grandmother Mamie's mother.] But, as per these recently opened James
letters, she worked for the James family at Cambridge-- as several other
Annances did. The Massachusetts state agency to which Dad wrote for more of
his background details in 1950, providing bureaucratic confirmation of the
essence of which we already knew, referred to his mother, "Mamie E. Gray"
[born in Maine], and to Mamie's parents, "Louise A. Gray" and "John E.
Gray." John E. Gray is not to be confused with our other direct ancestor,
John Gray [Ignace Hatchiorauquasha], Mohawk fur hunter in the Far West.

[John E.  Gray was a violent and abusive person.  Louise's relationship with
him was short lived and centered almost completely in the Moosehead Lake
region.]

We don't know when Louise died but it was still very probably at a
relatively young age. Ms. Kittelstrom found this material on Louise -- a bit
of which we have not known before today.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
FROM THE DISSERTATION - Democracy Upon Its Trial: Pluralism and Categories
of Difference

"Not until the Shaw oration did James use language that advocated mixture.
Until that point he expressed distinct squeamishness about social mixing
across categories of difference. In 1880 he wanted to design his home's hall
to avoid "the disagreeableness of servants going through to the door when
there are guests," thinking aristocratically-for he wrote up his new plan
while in England-of a way to separate the household by "a lower kitchen." In
1881 James was pleased enough that his wife was retaining two Wabanaki
servants, although "with every allowance made for natives on sentimental
grounds, how poor a pick of them there seems to be." Yet he could not see
how his wife could keep Louise Annance, the Wabanaki female, as well as "one
white [female] servant." He seemed to fear the possible dissatisfaction of
his white servant, were her race not in the majority, over the Wabanaki's
desire for employment. . ."
* * *

"When William Salter and his wife, a decade after the death of their only
child from measles, moved to adopt a ward of the state, the two-year-old
grandson of James's Wabanaki servant Louise Annance, the character of the
adoption is unclear. Were they taking the young Frank Gray to be their
son,just as though he were flesh of their flesh? The legal formality of the
adoption and the changing of his name to John Randall Salter would seem to
suggest so. So does the fact that he played with William James's kids-the
children of his adoptive mother's sister, and therefore his cousins-on terms
of equality, eventually receiving a wedding present "from your cousin Alice
and me," that is, from William James, Jr., and his wife. But he often did
not live with the Salters in Chicago, mostly staying back east in Chocorua
near where the rest of his extended family ranged. The Salters did not make
sure he attended school every year, extending such little oversight that he
never attended any high school at all. If they viewed him as their own son,
wouldn't they have taken him along when they spent a year in Europe? Instead
they placed him with a family in Evanston, Illinois. But John Dewey and his
wife also left their sons behind when they traveled in Europe, with
heartbreaking consequences: two of their three sons died while the Deweys
were away.

It could be that the Salters wanted John to remain near his extended family
to cultivate his Indian culture. William Salter was apparently open to
talking about John's background, although he made no effort to help him
retain the language or the Catholic religion to which his ancestors had long
since converted. But Salter mostly seemed quite distant from his adopted
son. Acrimony increased between them until 1913, when John was fifteen, and
Salter dragged him to an Army recruiter to try to sign him up and be rid of
him. The recruiter chastised Salter, saying John was "far too young." The
rift, by that point irreparable, led John to escape as a cabin boy on a ship
out of Boston. Salter cut him out of his will. Mary Gibbens Salter set up a
small trust fund for him at the State Street Bank in Boston, and eventually
the James estate paid for John Randall Salter's education at the Art
Institute of Chicago.

Of his years with the Salters, John Randall Salter would remember Mary
Salter's warmth and lovingness, William Salter's emotional reserve, and
sylvan times in Chocorua with the James family. "There was nothing ever even
slightly remote about William James," John would teach his own son. John
remembered sitting by Lake Chocorua with James discussing the possibility of
frogs having souls. He never forgot visiting James's deathbed in Chocorua
with Salter, a day or so before James passed. He also remembered the
contrast between James's children's camaraderie with him and Salter's
brother Sumner's children, who taunted him, calling him "Sitting Bull," and
once accused him of stealing a watch from them. And of John's years with the
Salters, what would William Salter remember? He never wrote of it, left no
record of the meaning of it for him. He would remain a member of the IRA
until 1916, three years after John ran away, by which point he would have
reached the age of majority and Salter could have felt his responsibility
fully absolved."
* * *

Note by Hunter Bear:

In early May, 2003, Eldri and I drove to Chicago where I delivered a major
Founder's Day talk to the Ethical Humanist Society of Greater Chicago.  This
had been founded by William M. Salter.
http://www.hunterbear.org/ETHICAL%20CULTURE.htm

"In my speech at Chicago -- a packed house with a number of non-Society
members present, I spoke of the enduring influence on our family of my
ggg/grandfather, John Gray [Ignace Hatchiorauquasha], fiery and committed
leader of the Mohawk fur hunters in the Columbia and Snake River country in
their disputes with the Anglo fur bosses. I spoke, too, of a maternal great
grandfather, Michael Senn -- Swiss immigrant to Kansas Territory in the
early 1850s, Abolitionist, Civil War veteran, founder of the Knights of
Labor in Kansas, major leader of the Populist Party and a Populist state
senator, denouncer of atrocities against the Indian people, cousin of Chris
Hoffman ["Millionaire Socialist of Kansas" who died of a heart attack while
addressing an IWW rally at Kansas City.] Michael Senn became a Socialist
himself.

But now, for the first time publicly, I also spoke of the very positive
influence of William Mackintire Salter for our family:  his great commitment
to the Haymarket victims and their families, his opposition to American
imperialism, his many endeavours on behalf of Indian and Black people, his
staunch support for civil liberties which never wavered in the several
nefarious periods of spontaneous and concocted fear and hysteria through
which he lived and worked. . .

In the end, however oft-turbulent Dad's adoption, he got the best of both
worlds -- Native and Anglo social activist -- and my parents passed all of
that along to me."

KASS FLEISHER WRITES AN EXCELLENT POST ON JULY 9 AND I RESPOND:
Kass writes:

"hunter, this is painful indeed.  i knew there was strain betw your
father and his adoptive father but didn't know that w.s. had broken
with him entirely.  do you have a sense of the reason?  or should we
conclude the obvious, that racism was eating at him?  anyway.  you
have come a long way, a long walk.  what a miracle you are."  k
_________________________________________________________

I very much appreciate your kind words, Kass.  This is the first anniversary
of our realization that something was seriously wrong with me, medically.
We had gone to ISU to pick up Josie who had just finished her last exam
prior to graduation.  She had no vehicle then but is now a working LSW
Social Worker and she and Cameron [IBEW] have a fine new Jeep Liberty.  The
world seems a bit more distant to me each day!

On William M Salter:  It was an almost total break all the way around --
though there were occasional points of contact, at least with Mary Salter.
Although Mother met both William and Mary, it was only briefly and they died
not long before I was born. They may have been a little frightened by her:
Western horse ranching and Idaho and Washington state mining engineering
antecedents on one side of her family and rambunctious Populism on the
other. Obviously, the reservations expressed [however delicately] by William
James vis-a-vis the Salters are points very well taken indeed.  In addition
to that, Salter's high idealism which had traveled and survived so many
rough trails  apparently could not -- in the instance of a lively child --
avoid the rocks and rapids of the River of No Return.

I definitely don't believe he was a racist -- at least not a conscious one.
With his close colleague, Jane Addams and several dozen others, he signed
the Call to Organization of the NAACP in 1909.  As I've noted, he was, for
better or worse, involved in the Indian Rights Association. He was
consistently opposed to American imperialism. His courage in defending the
Haymarket victims and their families and his advocacy on their behalf with
Governor Atgeld was tremendous. But Salter was old -- well beyond his years
as it turned out -- and brittle.

He took voluminous notes -- his books are full of them -- and, if no written
record of his feelings on the adoption were found, there is at least the
possibility that he destroyed them.  After both William and Mary Salter
died, my parents, visiting their large home [the Hilltop] in the
Chocorua/Silver Lake NH setting, went into their large barn.  There,
partially concealed at least, was a box with two dozen photos of Dad at
various points and some adoption documents.  We speculate that Mary Salter
put them there to avoid their destruction by William.  All of these have
been in my possession for many years.

All best, Kass.  Humans were made to survive and, as I was told when I was
near death from Scarlet Fever at the age of five or six, "Only the good die
young."

H

Kass, I should add, is the author of the excellent,  The Bear River Massacre
and
the Making of History, [Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2004.]
The mass murder of almost 300 Shoshone people -- men, women, children --
by Union affiliated troops in Southern Idaho, January, 1863 and the
wide-ranging chronological and geographical and cultural implications and
ramifications.  H

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk

Among our many Family Links [with genealogy] are:
Personal Narrative  http://www.hunterbear.org/narrative.htm

Family Stuff:            http://www.hunterbear.org/family_stuff.htm

The Gray Family in the Western Fur Trade
http://www.hunterbear.org/GRAY%20LANDS%20AND%20GRAY%20GHOSTS.htm

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]
















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