Author: DeMeyer, Trace A
Alternate names: Laura Jean Thrall-Bland, Winyan Ohmanisa Waste La Ke
Born: September 9, 1956
Bio: Through a sympathetic judge in her hometown, DeMeyer opened her adoption file at age 22 in Wisconsin, a sealed record state. Her journey takes her to Illinois to meet her birthfather in 1996 where she learns about her Cherokee-Shawnee-Delaware ancestry.  DeMeyer is former editor of tribal newspapers the Pequot Times and Ojibwe Akiing. She freelances for News from Indian Country, a national independent native newspaper.  DeMeyer’s chapter 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; and she has an essay in the upcoming Foothills Press I Was Indian Before It Was Cool, edited by Susan Deer Cloud.  She read from her highly-anticipated manuscript at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October 2008.  
Known for her exceptional print interviews with famous Native Americans such as Leonard Peltier and Floyd Red Crow Westerman, DeMeyer started research on adoptees in 2004, which lead to this fact-filled 227-page biography that includes congressional testimony, evidence of Indian Adoption Projects and how the Indian Child Welfare Act came to exist. Available as a download (e-book) or paperback at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/one-small-sacrifice/6242298, her jaw-dropping narrative of living as an adoptee, her search, meeting birth relatives, will surely raise eyebrows and question the validity of sealed records and the billion dollar adoption industry.

Her blog: www.splitfeathers.blogspot.com