Cekpa (A Memoir in Beaded Essays)

For Leah Altman, growing up as an adoptee outside of her culture meant growing up without her cekpa, the Lakota connection to family and homeland. Now an adult, Leah departs her life in Portland, Oregon, to seek out her birth family and reconnect to her heritage—each chapter of her journey a bead in this literary cekpa crafted for her own children.

Born “Baby Girl Blackfeather,” Leah Altman was separated from her birth family through placement by the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to be adopted and raised by a family in Portland, Oregon. At twenty-one, she journeys across the West twice to rediscover her roots—to her father's Lakota family in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and to her mother's Persian relatives in Denver, Colorado.

As an adoptee, Leah felt the hole in her heart where her cekpa was missing. Lacking this tradition so essential to Lakota culture manifested in a troubled youth of reckless decisions, substance abuse, and struggling to fit in at school. A child without a cekpa is left unanchored, and without hers, Leah was at a loss in life. In an intimate portrayal of self-discovery, Leah’s memoir tells a painstaking construction of her search for identity, written to ensure her own children grow up with an understanding of their roots.

In this collection of personal essays dedicated to her two daughters, Altman masterfully weaves together her own literary cekpa in a coming-of-age story about transracial adoption, tribal enrollment, motherhood, and what it truly means to be connected to one’s culture, homeland, and family.