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Miiyuyum, notuung, Erica Rose, yaka.
In the language of the Payómkawichum people, that means: Hi, I am Erica Rose. I speak.
This is a story about atonement and redemption. About a mother and a daughter who found each other both too late and just in time. A lost and found story, if you will.
I am Native American—or Indigenous, depending on which term one uses. My tribe is called the Payómkawichum, commonly referred to as the Luiseño people in modern times, named after the Mission San Luis Rey just off the 76 Freeway in Northern San Diego County. The mission was built in 1798, and with it began a long and familiar story of cultural erasure and loss.
My particular clan is called the Wáșxa, or Rincon. We still live in Valley Center, next to the San Luis Rey River, on the same grounds our ancestors once called home—lands that stretched across Southern California from the mountains to the sea. That continuity is remarkable given everything that was done to erase it, and given everything that was done to erase us.
After what I learned while researching my own history, I am quietly amazed that I am here at all.
I am adopted. I was placed into foster care in early 1973. My mother, Rose, was a high school dropout and single mother of three children at 24 years old. Facing an extraordinarily difficult future, she made the most painful decision a mother can make: she gave up two of her three children to foster care in order to start over.
I was taken into foster care on the morning of April 20, 1973. Good Friday.
My brother and I were fortunate. We were placed into a loving home with kind parents, and lived a (mostly) good life as children. Rose’s sacrifice became my redemption, though I wouldn’t understand that for decades.
By the early 1990s, the Payómkawichum people had recognized that children like my brother and I were being permanently separated from their heritage.
Coupled with two hundred years of cultural erasure—the Indian Boarding Schools, the missions, the systematic dismantling of language and identity—the tribe assembled a small, dedicated committee to facilitate the adoption of tribal children into carefully chosen outside homes. It was an act of communal atonement. An acknowledgment that the tribe owed its lost children something, even if it could never fully repay the debt.
I did not know any of this for a very long time.
I met my biological mother, Rose, during the height of Covid. Finally.
Our first phone conversation lasted two and a half hours, ending only when both of our batteries died and she had to go—it was 10 at night, two hours past her bedtime.
Over the conversations that followed, she told me she had spent her entire life wondering if she had made a mistake.
She worried we were criminals. In jail. Forever broken.
I assured her I was well taken care of.
She then told me something I have never forgotten: every year, on Good Friday, for forty-seven years, she went to church to pray for us. Because April 20, 1973—the last day she saw us as children—was Good Friday. And that annual pilgrimage was her act of atonement. Forty-seven years of it, quiet and unwitnessed, carried alone.
Every person in transition needs a rock, a safe harbor. I had been rejected before. But something about Rose—the easy rhythm of our conversations, the life stories exchanged, the lessons offered without judgment, except on Bingo Nights when she was unavailable and unapologetic about it—made me brave enough to try again.
I want to be honest about what that moment cost me—sharing something so deeply personal with a woman I had only just found, someone who was still, in many ways, a stranger becoming my mother. The vulnerability of that conversation is something I will never forget.
Neither will her response.
She simply said: “Do what you need to do to make you happy. Life is too short. I don’t understand it, but I want you to be happy.”
No hesitation. No conditions. Just love—the uncomplicated, generous kind I had always hoped a mother could offer.
In that moment, Rose gave me something I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for my entire life: permission to be exactly who I am.
She died on June 6, 2022, a few months before I became Erica.
I met my half-sister at the hospital in the days before Rose passed. I told her everything—our talks, my secret, and my grief at losing my rock, and the unconditional love that came with her.
We planned the funeral together. She was a lot like her mother—our mother—best friends in every sense. In those few days, we replaced our immense loss with newfound family. Losing a mother and gaining a sister in the same breath is a heavy burden to carry, and a gift you don’t expect.
At the wake, I stood up and introduced myself. I told the room that Rose had always worried about us, but that I was okay. I cried when I said I had only known her for two years—and that they were two of the most important years of my life.
Afterward, one of Rose’s closest friends pulled my sister and I aside.
She had a secret, she said. One she had promised Rose she would keep until after her death.
That tribal committee—the one assembled to make sure children like me were placed into loving homes, the one that gave the tribe’s lost children a fighting chance at a good life?
It was Rose’s idea.
She had built it herself. She had absolute oversight and final say over every placement. She had spent decades making sure other mothers would never spend a lifetime wondering if their children were okay, because she knew exactly what that felt like. The work was revered within the tribe. And she had kept it secret from her own children for the rest of her life.
102 children.
I will always remember that number.
Two for the sake of 102.
Atonement, as I have come to understand it, is a bridge. A path that reconnects us to something greater than ourselves—to community, to love, to the people we have lost and found along the way.
Rose built that bridge quietly, without recognition, without her own children ever knowing. She carried her atonement to her grave, and left her redemption as a gift for strangers.
I am trying to follow in her footsteps, in my own small way. Atonement and redemption, wherever I can, when I can.
I love you, Mom.
I am Erica Rose. I speak.
~
author: Erica Rose
Image: Personal Image of the Author: Painting by Rose.
Editor: Molly Murphy
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