Wicoicage Aki Un Ku Pi
Generation After Generation We Are Coming Home
Sandra White Hawk is a Sicangu Lakota adoptee from the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota. She is the founder and Director of First Nations Repatriation Institute.
First Nations Repatriation Institute (FNRI) is the first organization of its kind whose goal it is to create a resource for First Nations people impacted by foster care or adoption to return home, reconnect, and reclaim their identity. The Institute also serves as a resource to enhance the knowledge and skills of practitioners who serve First Nations people.
Sandra organizes Truth Healing Reconciliation Community Forums that bring together adoptees/fostered individuals and their families and professionals with the goal to identify post adoption issues and to identify strategies that will prevent removal of First Nations children. She has also initiated an ongoing support group for adoptees and birth relatives in the Twin Cities Area.
Sandra has become a spokesperson on the issues of the adoption and the foster care system and how it has impacted First Nations People. She has traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Australia and Japan, Alaska sharing her inspirational story of healing.
She is a Commissioner for the Maine Wabanaki State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission and serves as an Honorary Witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools in Canada
She is a contributing author to Outsiders Within, J. J. Trenka, J. C. Oparah & S. Y. Shin (Eds.), Outsiders within: Writing on transracial adoption (pp.). Cambridge, MA, South End Press, Parenting as Adoptees, Adam Chau, Kevin Ost-Vollmers (Editors) and The Kinship Parenting Toolbox, Edited by Kim Phagan-Hansel
Sandra was awarded the Women in Wellbriety Dana Tiger Award for Creating Change in Nations, named one of the Innovators in Color Lines Magazine, named one of the 50 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World, Utne Reader, named Outstanding Native Women Award from the University of Minnesota 2003 and was named one of the “50 Most Influential and Cool People” of Madison, WI, in Madison Magazine, November 2002.
Make No Bones About It 
Homesickness is a universal and profoundly nostalgic yearning. Humans fear loneliness and long for contact and communications with others. The state of being isolated and sequestered leads to lonesomeness when the soul is sadly overwhelmed by negative feelings of separation from significant others who are missing. Knowing nothing about their next of kin, unaware of their point of origin, the orphaned child feels remarkably alienated and surrounded by emptiness. The distress and desolation they endure are sincere and authentic. They are displaced persons by definition. Overwhelmed by a lack of belonging, they feel disoriented and alienated, even in a crowd. They feel the pain of the refugee, disconnected, alienated and separated from their roots—emotionally stranded on a desolate and baron land.
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