From Turtle Talk--a guest post by Bridget Mary McCormick.

Turtle Talk also has a link up to an obit of Betty Binns Fletcher–a woman to admire.

In the article, she stated that she had a hard time getting hired as an attorney after graduation because of the prejudice in law firms.  Yeah, well, I wish I could say that it has changed, but it’s still there…at least if you’re an assistant.  I took paralegal courses and got A’s.  However, when I and a couple of classmates went to look for a job afterward…nothing.  There were several attorney’s assistants taking the course–all of them blond and in their twenties and high school graduates.  The classmates that couldn’t get a job?  In our forties.  And two of us had Bachelor of Arts degrees.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Also on the blog is this link to a case of a non-Indian mother who gave birth to a child of a Cherokee father, who did not assert his parental rights…at first…but after finding out the child was to be adopted, he filed a case to block it.  It’s ridiculous that this dragged out for two years while the child was becoming attached to the adoptive parents–the father had indicated he did not want her to be adopted by strangers at four months of age–at that point, he should have been custody of the child.  This would have made her life so much more easier than to drag it out.

The father was not abusive, according to the document (I only read to page 26), and other than his initial reluctance, he stepped up and that should have been considered a positive for this little girl.  I mean, the details are scant about the people involved in the case, but something that leaped out at me was  the implication that it was a negative against the father because the father was going to be aided by his parents in caring for the child–the Native Americans raise children differently than Europeans–the entire tribe looks after the little ones.  At least, that is the traditional way…not sure if they still adhere to this, but it wouldn’t be abnormal for the father’s parents to help raise the little girl.  What is seen as a negative by white folks (assuming that the professionals involved were white folks) is seen as positive by the Native American culture.  Lastly, there is the elephant in the room of whether the adoptive parents were Christian and the Native American father practiced traditional tribal spirituality.  The Mormons used this angle to kidnap Native American children from their parents and adopt them legally.