Noted New York Times bestselling author Lisa Wingate spoke to a group of over 50 people on Oct. 22 at the Medina Community Library.
Wingate’s natural storytelling talent and bubbly personality entranced the audience and made the presentation fly by. Her vivid descriptions and ease of translating difficult topics into an understandable storyline made her presentation quite engaging.
Wingate has written more than 30 novels dealing with topics both personal to her and to historical fiction.
Her latest novel, Before We Were Yours, is a poignant tale dealing with the incredible scandal of the Tennessee Children’s Home orphanages and the illegal adoptions that happened to those victims.
Growing up in Oklahoma, Wingate was well aware of the scandal in which poor and indigenous children were kidnapped and sold to wealthy families in the early 1900’s. Each indigenous child in Oklahoma was provided with a Dawes allotment parcel of land by the state of Oklahoma.
These children, which were presumed to be orphans, were given guardians who often used this oil rich land to improve their own financial status while the children continued to live in poverty.
Essentially, this novel documents the experiences of those children much in the same way Killers of the Flower Moon documents the stories of Osage women married to Anglos for their oil rich lands and subsequently murdered.
The indigenous children of Oklahoma were forced into a system of illegal adoptions which gave their new Anglo families control over valuable oil rich plots. Some profiteering Anglos had multiple guardianships resulting in one person having control of large blocks of land.
The lack of oversight of these guardianships were a prime breeding ground for graft and corruption in early Oklahoma history. Before We Were Yours takes this theme and crafts a story that takes dark family secrets and sets them in a modern-day world.
Wingate’s enthusiasm and upbeat demeanor were a real hallmark of her presentation. She spoke about how she had a teacher who could see her talents early on and told her she would be an author.
She described how when she moved to Oklahoma, her childhood was marked by horseback riding and adventuring. She truly captured an era in which children were vulnerable, especially those from poor families in rural America.
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