We Don't Tell Stories, We Tell Mountains

This work combines memoir and research to interrogate the white saviorism’s role in my mother’s international adoption from Urubamba, Peru to Oklahoma City in 1964. Through the analysis and contextualization of personal letters, family accounts, and historical and sociological scholarship, this thesis investigates the cultural/religious narrative that motivated and emboldened the Kleppers to open their orphanage, which allowed them to adopt out Indigenous Quechua children to white American families. Dominating narratives, such as the Christian narrative and the American exceptionalism narrative, have been leveraged to overpower less-dominant groups, impacting families and communities. My mother’s understanding of her family was influenced by these narratives: What she saw as a story of abandonment may have, in fact, been what the anthropologist Jessica Leinaweaver calls the practice of the1 circulation of children that many Indigenous groups in Peru use and still use, which involves placing children with better resourced godparents, family members, and even institutions on a temporary or semi-permanent basis in order to better position the child and the family socially and economically. Because this work centers Indigenous people, I have had to engage in alternate methodologies of historical research. Methods that seek to construct narratives from the gaps of information left in the archives of more powerful groups and people. Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ scholars and researchers have invented approaches that address the stories of groups made invisible in mainstream history. I am influenced by scholar Katherine McKittrick work around alterable terrain, the space where “concealment happens” and where “racial-sexual differentiation occurs2”. Using this idea as a framework, this work reconceptualizes the Klepper’s orphanage as a space that was a different geographical site, conceptually, for my mother’s biological parents than it was for adoptive parents. This work is also influenced by what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, which she describes as the method of, “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history3…”.