During my trip to Finland in September 2023, I visited two ancestral villages of my Finnish kin, Kortesjärvi and Alahärmä, in a rural farming area of South Ostrobothnia.
The region is located inland from the Baltic Sea, east of Vaasa. I went there with my Finnish relative and her husband on September 7, 2023.
On that life-changing trip, I felt a visceral connection to my ancestral home, where a quarter of my biological family traces its historical roots. These are very peasant farming roots. It’s hard to describe the joy I felt. I tried to capture some of that on this video. It only does those feelings partial justice. The feeling was one of utter and total joy. (I will be publishing a story soon about this amazing trip.)
By sharing this video here that is filled with elation, I am not gloating.
I am pointing out a brutal reality of contemporary politics that marginalizes tens of thousands of adoptees born in Michigan, like me. I’ve been raising this issue consistently since 2015, and published my adoption history/memoir documenting these wrongs in detail.
By law in the state of Michigan, I am also denied the information about my ancestral and living kin, like tens of thousands of other born and then relinquished there.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), supposedly a progressive, and the Democrats who control the Michigan Legislature, have done nothing to fix decades of this injustice denying people the right to know their kin/past.
It remains deeply painful to me to know that this joy I had, finding my past, my kin, my ancestral villages in Finland, is denied to tens of thousands of Michigan adoptees, still, by law.
As I continue to share, Gov. Whitmer ultimately owns this failure. She can lead and fix it. To date, she has done nothing and has never communicated publicly she will do a thing to correct a historic injustice. Without a cost to her politically, nothing will change. That is up to those of us who seek reform to exact the leverage to move reform.