In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died.

In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. In this haunting memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died.

This “powerful and chilling” (Publishers Weekly) account of a young girl taken from her native land in South Dakota after the 1890 massacre of Lakota men, women, and children describes the story of Lost Bird and the destruction of life for a Native American orphan being raised as a white child outside of her tribe. When Lost Bird was found alive as an infant under the frozen body of her dead mother following the December 1980 massacre at Wounded Knee, a general from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry made the choice to adopt her. While the general, Leonard W. Colby, who would later become the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, swore to provide Lost Bird with a good life, his true meaning of adopting the Native American infant was to exploit her to bring in prominent tribes to his law firm. After growing up a lonely child with no true meaning of belonging, Lost Bird lived a brief but harsh life filled with sexual abuse, painful marriages, tribe rejection, and prostitution before she died at young age of twenty-nine. In the words of a former social worker that was instrumental in the moving of Lost Bird’s remains from an unmarked grave in California to her homeland at Wounded Knee, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee is a remarkable biography examining the life of woman who became a symbol of the warring culture that entrapped her. Through the story of Lost Bird’s life, Flood sheds light on the heartbreaking microcosm of the Native American children who have lost their heritage through adoption, social injustice, and war.

A little bird gets separated from his family

The Tale of a Lost Bird is a story that is aimed to evolve through the eyes of our children. It sheds light on the topics that are too sensitive to talk about but too important to ignore. At one, it's of a journey of a bird pure and innocent. At five, it's the chaos of a world. At seven, it's the fight for what's right. And at ten, it's the dream of what will never end.