In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. "This is a surprising and extremely moving book...very well crafted...has the suspense of a novel as it engages us in Melanson's struggles...and keeps us wondering whether her lost twin will ever be found". -- Booklist "This memoir of an extraordinary eventful life is crafted like the rugs that Melanson has learned to make in the tradition of her birth family." --- Publishers Weekly"The story of Yvette Melanson is that of an adopted child, loved and raised in a Jewish household, who, when found by her Navajo/Dineh family of origin, packed up her husband and daughters and drove out west to recapture her roots as a "Navajo in training." Her stories of the members of her families -- families from two cultures who had only known each other cliches - is told with much struggle, humor and compassion." --- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, The Gift of Story and The Faithful Gardener"An inspirational story for adoptees, particularly American Indians, seeking to uncover their past." -- Kirkus Reviews"This is a surprising and extremely moving book...very well crafted...has the suspense of a novel as it engages us in Melanson's struggles...and keeps us wondering whether her lost twin will ever be found." --- Booklist   In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. Yvette Melanson was a stolen child who found her origins through the Internet. In her years as a Lost Bird, she served in both the Israeli army and the U.S. Navy. She has now begun a new life on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.
Claire Safran is an award-winning journalist and contributor to major magazines. She is the author of Secret Exodus , a former editor of Redbook and Coronet , and a past president of The American Society of Journalists and Authors. She was a birdlike Navajo woman, spry and smiling, her hair pulled back from her face and woven into a salt-and-pepper braid. She was dressed in a long skirt of black velveteen, high fashion for reservation aunties. I met her on my first trip to Arizona, when newspaper and television reports were spreading the word about a Jewish woman who was really an Indian. In that moment, I was still full of doubts and questions, still fighting the idea that I might be an Indian, still unsure of what that might mean. At that point, everything I knew about Indians had been learned from John Wayne movies. I had so many questions, so much to learn, so much to catch up on. The president of the Navajo Nation, the largest of the surviving Indian nations, had been told about me and had checked the evidence. He'd invited me to come to Arizona with Dickie and the girls, to be welcomed back into the tribe, to meet my Navajo family and then to be flown back to Maine---all in two dizzying weeks. The woman smiled, showing a gold tooth that glinted in the sun. She told me to call her Aunt Despah and then, on the fourth day of my visit, she pulled me away from the rest of the relatives who had gathered at the ruins of the old family ranch. "Come, come," she insisted. Clutching my hand, she led me across a flat stretch of desert to show me the exact place where I was born. It was a pile of broken sticks now, but once it had been a three-sided lean-to set at the edge of a cornfield. My mother had been harvesting ears of blue corn when the labor pains began. They came too suddenly, too quickly for her to walk the mile back to her home. Instead, Despah, my mother's kid sister, helped her to the shelter of the lean-to. My father found them there and then, spurring his horse, rode off to get Aunt Carrie, my mother's older sister. By the time they returned, the pains were coming sharper and closer together. Helped by her sisters, my mother was standing up, in the old Navajo style of childbirth. She held tightly to the mai