Childhood photos of Chris Stearns, who was born a Navajo, but was raised by white Evangelical parents in New Jersey. Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times.
By Gabrielle Glaser, The New York Times, May 16, 2023
Chris Stearns has two distinct memories from his childhood in the late 1960s. The first is somewhat hazy: a crowded New York City picnic for white families who had adopted Native American boys and girls, somewhere at a hilly park. Mr. Stearns had never seen so many people — he was an only child in a Colonial-style house that backed onto a golf course in South Jersey — and the event was overwhelming.
The other recollection is much sharper. One day, he was paid a visit by a man his parents called Chief Sunrise, who arrived at the front door wearing an eagle-feathered headdress and the white buckskin regalia of Plains Indians. His parents ushered Chief Sunrise into the family living room, where he took a seat on the angular modern couch. Then he turned to the young Chris, perhaps 4 years old, and drew him near. He sang a song, offered a blessing and went on his way.
These events, however well-intentioned to honor Mr. Stearns’s Native American heritage, had another effect: They reinforced to the child that he didn’t fit in the all-white world of his parents. “That feeling of not belonging was a pretty common thread for a long time,” said Mr. Stearns, now 58. “I didn’t look like the other kids, and I couldn’t really identify with them, either. I was always just itching to be somewhere else.”
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