Michael Dorris was warned against adopting Abel, the 3-year-old Native American child he was offered in response to his application to become a single father. Adam was born seven weeks premature. He looked and acted like a much younger boy, was not toilet-trained, had a vocabulary of only 20 words, had been neglected and abused by his alcoholic mother, was considered mildly retarded.
Dorris, part Modoc Indian himself with a doctorate in anthropology from Yale, brushed aside the discouraging prognosis. He believed in the power of love, in the impact of a caring environment, in the healing nourishment of adoring attention. He adopted Abel and brought him to New Hampshire where he was teaching in a small college and later to Hanover when he got a job on the faculty at Dartmouth.
But love–love without stinting, love shown in devoted child care–wasn’t enough for Abel, Dorris discovered, as his son grew older and fell further behind. All the abundant, enthusiastic fathering couldn’t make Abel a normal child. Neither could all the kindly, caring teachers who tried year after hopeful year. Nor could the woman Dorris married, the noted writer Louise Erdrich, who legally adopted Abel and became his mother.
An Ivy League full of experts and research libraries couldn’t explain what was wrong. And what was wrong was worse than Dorris had been led to expect. Abel had grand mal seizures. He couldn’t remember, couldn’t conceptualize, couldn’t understand to put on a jacket when it was snowing, couldn’t tell time, couldn’t learn from experience, could never learn enough to survive on his own.
It wasn’t until Abel was a teenager that Dorris found out the truth about his son. On a visit to a South Dakota Indian reservation, he encountered several boys in a shelter for teens who looked like Abel and acted like Abel. They had, he was told, fetal alcohol syndrome–FAS–irreversible physical and mental abnormalities caused during prenatal life by their mother’s drinking. For all the love and expert help Abel had been given, he differed little from the damaged boys who had spent their childhood in poor, dysfunctional homes on the reservation.
Dorris took a leave from Dartmouth to study fetal alcohol syndrome and its less severe counterpart, fetal alcohol effect. He was particularly appalled about what was happening among Native Americans, who seem particularly vulnerable to alcoholism for social, cultural and perhaps genetic reasons. On some reservations, Dorris estimated, so many children are afflicted with this terrible scourge, so handicapped in their ability to care for themselves, that the future of the tribe is threatened.
He also wrote a powerful book about Abel (using Adam as a pseudonym) called “The Broken Cord.” It has won considerable acclaim including the National Book Award and the Heartland Award.
Abel’s story ended tragically in 1992, when he was 23 and was struck by a car as he walked along a roadside. Earlier, Dorris had adopted another Indian boy and a girl and after their marriage, he and Erdrich had three biological daughters.
Michael Dorris’s life came to its own tragic end last week when he apparently committed suicide in a Concord, N.H. motel, where he had gone after leaving a mental health center where he was being treated for severe depression. He had been on tour with his latest book, “The Cloud Chamber,” which some critics call his best. On the day he died, he was to have been honored at Dartmouth for founding its Native American Studies Program.
After his death, it was reported that he was under investigation in Minneapolis for unspecified charges of child sexual abuse. Dorris and Erdrich, who had had an unusually close relationship as writers and editors of each other’s work, were in the process of getting a divorce and friends said the charges came as part of a bitter custody fight.
Those who knew Dorris best call the abuse allegations “unthinkable,” “inconceivable” and “implausible.” Minneapolis police said files are to be made public next week.
Whatever the demons of depression that beset Michael Dorris and the frustrations he endured trying to help his adopted son who was so damaged in the womb, his death is a loss to the nation. His books and essays were powerful and haunting and much admired by critics and the public.
We have also lost a strong and effective voice in the effort to convince women not to drink when they are pregnant. Dorris was under contract to write another book on the subject to be titled “A Matter of Conscience” when he died.
In “The Broken Cord” he writes that unborn babies suffer from acute intoxication when their mothers drink heavily. “The human fetus has a reduced capacity to eliminate alcohol and therefore concentrations tend to be higher in utero than in the rest of the mother’s system and are likely to endure there for longer period. The baby in the womb becomes more drunk than its mother with every drink of liquor, wine or beer she takes.” The result can be severe brain damage and physical retardation.
No one knows if there is a safe level of alcohol consumption that a mother can drink without harming her infant. It probably depends on the mother’s metabolism, the stage of prenatal life, her pattern of drinking and other factors. The only safe rule is that no one who is pregnant should drink anything alcoholic. The risk of doing otherwise is real and terrible.
The fight to convince women to avoid alcohol during pregnancy has been difficult–first to spread the warning, then to persuade women to heed it in spite of social drinking patterns, cultural influences and some feminist groups who insist it’s a woman’s right to do whatever she wishes with her body even if she is doing permanent harm to her unborn child.
Dorris’ powerful, poignant, provocative voice on behalf of children will be sorely missed.
