Savage Meat

In the 1950s, a Catholic Adoption Agency in New York took pity on Native American children because they were savages in a land of incorruptible freedom and God-ordained wealth.

The Adoption Agency decided that the souls of the parents were forever damned but their children could be redeemed. They made it their mission to round up as many as they could manhandle away from the Reservations and matched them up to families in far-away England who took them off their hands for a few thousand pounds. Their new mummies and daddies must have surely loved the freshly created orphans as if they were their very own!

Eventually, tough guys at the Internal Revenue Service realised the Agency hadn’t paid any tax on the money they had made and broke down the door. At roughly the same time, someone in Boston, who had read about the raid in a local newspaper, began to wonder whether it really was God’s will for children, savages or not, to be bought and sold like piglets at a market and wrote a stiff note to the Captain of New York’s Police Department who, under growing political pressure, took some action. The bosses were taken to court and everyone in the Land of the Free agreed that the Catholic Adoption Agency was wicked for selling children and told them to stop.

In the public eye, as if by sleight of hand, justice was seen to be done and moral indignation appeased. Everyone was happy except the bosses at the Catholic Adoption Agency and the orphan’s savage parents most of whom were already dead (from a broken heart probably), so they didn’t count. And most importantly, the Inland Revenue Service got their taxes.

The bosses weren’t thrown in jail for the cruelty they served up to the Native parents or even to their Native children, no, it was for failing to pay the government their blood money! Some years later, though, the now grown-up savage orphans did receive some compensation. It was reported in the Press at the time that it was sufficient money for the “poor savages” to never need a proper job.

Old Dennis, my grandmother’s gardener, also knew the story, he followed these matters very closely indeed being an avid reader of the Sun newspaper. Thereafter, he complained loudly and often that he had to “graft and sweat all hours of the day and night for next to nowt” and had to have a proper job all his life, he said, all because he wasn’t “one of them savage orphans who got themselves adopted.“

Illegal immigrants are words too savage to be used in the context of children, especially orphans, traded like piglets at a market. Freedom should never be bought and sold.

© Rivenrod 2020