Lisa Smith and her two daughters peer out the front windows of their Diamond Bar, California, home.
“We were that anxious,” 49-year-old Smith says, recalling that afternoon in March.
They see a car pull up, and hurry to the curb. Inside are the two boys the family has been waiting for.
Smith immediately takes the younger boy, still a toddler, in her arms while her teenage daughter holds the hand of the older one.
Newly expanded, the family, alongside a pair of social workers, walk into the house and head straight for the boys’ new room. For weeks, Smith, her husband and their three children have been stocking the bedroom with toys, baby clothes and the blankets that the Smith children slept in when they were little.
“This is home,” Smith tells the older boy. “These toys are yours forever.”
Smith cries with joy, overcome.
And while the transition is, on its face, easy, something about it concerns Smith.
The boys don’t ask when they will be going back home.
“They wanted to stay,” Smith explains. “And that’s hard – for them to not have that bond to where they came from.”
For Smith, the boys’ severance from their family strikes a chord. Like them, Smith grew up a member of the Cherokee Nation. She can track her roots back to the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830s, when thousands of her ancestors were marched west from their native lands. For Native children, foster care is often the final tug that forever breaks the strands of shared tribal culture.
Smith wants to turn back the clock, rebuild the boys’ lives and strengthen her tribe. That’s why, only weeks before this bittersweet moment, she decided to become Los Angeles County’s one-and-only Native American foster mom.
“Within, you carry that pride, and you carry that pride onto the next generation,” Smith says. “And that’s what I am hoping, that with the children, I can serve to let them know that you’re a part of something larger, part of our [Cherokee] family here and across the United States.”
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