I Can Make This Promise by Christine Day

 Edie's mother is part Native American but was adopted by a white couple as an infant.  Edie doesn't know much about her Native heritage, but one day she finds a box in the attic that has pictures of someone named Edith who looks a lot like her.  Edie and her friends decide to try to figure out who the woman is and how she is connected with Edie. When Edie begins to ask her parents about her family history they always dodge her questions.  Gradually Edie comes to learn about the mysterious Edith and about how Native peoples where treated in the past.

I read this book in honor of Native American Heritage Month in November, and also because I was featuring it in a display at work, and I never like to put anything in a display that I haven't read yet. It is the first book written by the author and is based on elements from her own family history.  The book is well written and Edie is a sympathetic character.  It is a good introduction for young people about some of the injustices of history.  (spoiler alert) I didn't know that for decades about 1/3 of children of Native people in the US were taken without their parent's consent and put in foster care or up for adoption. The justification was that the homes they were born into were in "indigent" conditions. It seems horrifying to us today, but I can see how people then considered it the right thing to do because poverty was a major issue among Native people. It is ironic that the government condemned them for their poverty, when a generation or two before that same government drove them off of good prosperous lands and forced them onto reservations that were in the worst, least productive regions of the country.  (288 p. 2020)