ABOUT L.T.

THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE

“Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like.”

— Maya Angelou, in a 1990 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton (via bookmania)

TL Hentz (who legally dropped the name DeMeyer in 2014) started intensive research on adoptees in 2004.  Her discoveries culminated in a fact-filled memoir One Small Sacrifice first published in 2010, then a second revised edition in 2012. 

I am mixed ancestry (Shawnee-French Canadian-Euro.)

Trace is former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times in Mashantucket, Conn. (1999-2004) and Ojibwe Akiing in Wisconsin (1996-1999).  She also worked and has freelanced for News from Indian Country, a national independent Native newspaper.  Her chapter HONOR RESTORED on Sac and Fox Olympian Jim Thorpe won critical praise in the 2001 book Olympics at the Millennium (published by Rutgers Press). Her poetry was published in the spring 2009 edition of Yellow Medicine Review.  She read from her highly-anticipated memoir manuscript at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October 2008.  In 2009, she started her blog about American Indian Adoptees. Her memoir was chosen as Native America Calling’s Book of the Month is March 2010.

In 2011, she and her friend John C. Hopkins (Narragansett) kicked off a publishing collective Blue Hand Books, and by 2017, the group had published over 20 books by them and other Native writers.

She was a frequent guest and executive producer for Jay Winter Nightwolf’s radio program in Washington DC.

Trace has contributed to adoption anthologies: Lost Daughters, Adoption Reunion in the Age of Social Media, and Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists.  In 2013, she was co-editor of the anthology Unravelling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe with MariJo Moore.

The blog American Indian Adoptees [https://blog.americanindianadoptees.com/] ranks in the top 100 adoption blogs and has reached two million views in 2023. (holy moly!)


In 2017, Trace contributed poetry to Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits and was a finalist in The Poet's Seat competition.

The theme of this blog?

This blog still has the theme: “What you’re not supposed to know” (regarding cracking open Indian history, especially here in New England.)
I have also used this headline: I don’t know why we don’t know this stuff

Author blog: HERE. She lives at the foot of the Berkshire Mountains in Greenfield, Massachusetts with her husband Herb.

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If you’d like to read this entire book series, they are on Kindle. Please ask your local bookstore to order the paperback for you.  BOOKSHOP has my books.

My new book HERE

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