Cekpa - by Leah Altman (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Cekpa by Leah Altman is a series of funny and sad stories of Altman's life experiences as a young Native girl growing up in Portland, Oregon, outside of her tribe. Altman experiences all too familiar events in the lives of thousands of reconnecting Native people, challenged by an adoption system that adopted her out without caring for Native cultural lives. Altman reconnects with her birth families with hope and disappointment, as she works to make herself whole again. Identity, family, genealogy, drug use, youth, belonging, culture, love, sex, growing up, and finding oneself fill this remarkable story of rediscovery, a story that so many Native people today experience in parallel paths.

--David G. Lewis, author of Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley

Cekpa is a memoir of restoration--not just healing, but the pain of handling what's been broken. Altman refuses to sand down the jagged edges, instead holding them up to the light in this tremendous book, carefully setting piece after piece into place to tell her story of making and remaking family.

--Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic

In Cekpa, Leah Altman braids together strands of deep, complicated and sometimes difficult love for her birth family, for her adopted family, for her own daughters, and the family she is building in a world not always inclined to celebrate the multiplicity of traditions she has lived. Fierce, funny, mother, and Mother Earth-centric, vivid and compelling, this memoir will remind you that--in spite of current evidence to the contrary--strong women continue to make the world.

--Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

In Cekpa, Leah Altman bravely maps the terrain of one Native adoptee--from relinquishment to adoption to reunion to her own journey of motherhood. We need more honest, complicated voices like this in order to more fully comprehend this largely unknown experience.

--Shannon Gibney, author of The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be

In this tender and eloquent memoir, Leah Altman takes readers on a lyrical journey into identity, family, love, and culture, asking: What makes a person resilient? Altman carefully weaves together vivid vignettes, tapping into profound moments of pain and beauty. Cekpa: A Memoir in Beaded Essays requires readers to hold multiple truths at the same time. Even when raised in deeply loving families, Altman writes, 'abandoned babies can feel unrooted, always.' But there is hope and honesty in her journey. Altman's brave and beautiful memoir stakes its claim in the growing canon of lasting literature written by transracial adoptees.

--Erika Hayasaki, author of Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family, an NPR Best Book of 2022

In unflinchingly honest and compelling prose, Altman lets us in on a love letter to her two daughters, to her extended family, and to the land. We are endlessly fortunate to bear witness. I could not put Cekpa down.
--Charlie J. Stephens, author of A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest

Raw, honest, and enlightening, Cekpa: A Memoir in Beaded Essays by Leah Altman is an emotionally charged collection of essays that transmutes childhood trauma and loss into enduring self-acceptance. Altman, whose birth father is from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, was adopted into a white family and raised outside of her culture. Her journey to reclaim her heritage offers a powerful testament to resilience and the healing power of cultural identity amidst the trauma of forced assimilation, showing that adoption can at best be mutual, and the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child's ways.

--Terra Trevor, author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir

With admirable honesty and a masterful sense of narrative, Leah Altman shares the story of herself. Cekpa is an empathetic tapestry woven from the tangled threads of ancestry and found family. The generous intimacy of this memoir will make you feel that you've known Altman forever, rooting for her the whole way.
--Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep and Home of the American Circus

A stylistic innovative memoir of trauma, survival, and maternal love. This is a powerful addition to collections on Indigenous identity and transracial experiences.

- Gina Elia, Library Journal

At this precarious moment in our planet's life-as-we-know-it, ironic to think that the Indigenous peoples our European ancestors booted off this land hold the knowledge that we'll need to survive.

- Rebecca Foster, Foreword Reviews Interview

Cekpa demonstrates that sometimes you can locate what you're looking for... But maybe it is the quest itself that builds one's strength to move forward.

- Barbara Lloyd McMichael, The Bookmonger

Leah Altman's bold memoir-in-essays is about reclaiming her Native American identity after a transracial adoption and traumatic upbringing... A raw, confessional memoir, Cekpa models resilience in the face of trauma.

- Rebecca Foster, Foreword Reviews

That's the thing about fear--it doesn't always make sense. It's not always linear. I don't know where my fear of spiders came from, but I know I have never felt pure dread like I do when confronted by a small body with eight legs. I figured if I prepared for the worst, anything better would be a saving grace.

- Leah Altman, excerpt from "Hemblecha," featured in Oregon Humanities