The woman her family called "the old aunt" reached up with a warm, dark hand and touched her high cheekbone. "You are so like your mother," Besbah Yazzie told her. Weeping in the baked expanse of the Navajo Reservation, they hugged. Yvette Silverman Melanson, stolen along with a twin brother from her Navajo family 43 years ago, raised rich, white and Jewish in Brooklyn, was finally home.

"One more of us is still out there and a whole lot more of the others," Melanson said in reference to her missing brother and thousands of other Native American children stolen from their families over the years and put on the black market for adoption . "This is not right. We have to find them. We have to find the boy."
Navajo natives had come from across the reservation to welcome her home. 

In a hot gymnasium here, 60 miles northeast of Flagstaff, the Tolani Roadman -- Medicine Man -- had wept as he told her tale in the native tongue. Behind him, Yazzie Monroe, her father, brushed tears from his 
weathered cheeks. The old women of the tribe wore their finest turquoise and silver in her honor. Children danced in a colorful whirl of beads and feathers.

"I don't know my own culture," Melanson told the gathering. "I am going to need your help in understanding. I am humbled. "Teach me, teach my children" she said.

She stood amid the swirling talc-like dust of the reservation, a long way from the cloying green spring back in her Maine home and further still from the life she has lived thus far. As a child, there had been winters 
at a fine Miami hotel, summer camp in Pennsylvania. Later came long trips to Israel where she marched the length of that land and stood military guard at her kibbutz. After her adoptive parents had both died, there were two stints in the Navy and, later, marriage to a retired scallop diver named Dickie, with whom she now lives in Palmyra, Maine.

But forever there had been the question, "Who am I?"  

She had always known she was adopted, but until three months ago that was all she knew. Then one night while exploring on her computer, she found out. On a national website, she saw that a Navajo family was looking for its lost twins. The trails of her search and theirs crossed in the Southwest. A piece of tattered and fading paper she possessed, bearing the names Yazzie Monroe and Betty Jackson, solved the puzzle. They were the mother and father of the large family that was looking for her.

It was an unlikely trinity, ancient and new, that brought her home: the Internet, that scrap of paper, and the mysterious works of the Holy People on her reservation who had held ceremonies to help find her.

This weekend, that family welcomes her home. She will stay here for two weeks along with her husband and daughters, Lori and Heather. Her mother died years ago, but her father was there to take her, looking almost 
fragile, into his great brown arms. Her seven brothers and sisters were there, as were numerous nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, cousins and members of her clan.

"We have always known she was around somewhere," said Nettie Rogers, her sister.  "We want to thank the Holy People for bringing back our child, our daughter, to the center," Freddie Howard, a Tolani Lake official, told a crowd that streamed into a gymnasium for ceremonies welcoming Melanson and her family to her birthplace. 

She had come to the reservation east from Flagstaff, crossing through the Coconino National Forest. The Navajo lands began where the trees ended and a hot, dusty, vastness sprawled ahead. To the South were towns that bespoke stereotypical western violence: Two Guns, Two Arrows; and a place of real cataclysm, a giant crater created when a meteor smashed into the Earth 50,000 years ago.

Across the reservation were the four sacred mountains of her tribe, dark, bruised buttes and colorful mesas that glimmered like poured sand art."I've never seen mountains go straight up," she said as they shimmered in the white light of afternoon.

Her return came as efforts to find the so-called "lost birds" of the Navajo and other tribes across the country have intensified. After Melanson's story made national headlines and television news last month, a website previously set up by the Lost Bird Society, founded by a Lakota woman named Marie Not Help Him, was peppered with inquiries.

And it came as the tribes are fighting a bill in Congress that would make the adoption of Indian children by whites easier. It would weaken a federal law passed in 1978 that requires that Indian children removed from 
their homes be placed with relatives or other Native families.

In welcoming Yvette home, Navajo leaders rose to speak in defense of their children.  "We are more than dances, turquoise and rugs," Genevieve Jackson said in a plea that the outside world understand what is happening to Native children.  "Yvette's story is the Navajo story," Delores Grey Eyes added.  

Melanson's father presented her with a Navajo wedding basket symbolizing Mother Earth, Father Sky and a Navajo people planted in harmony between.  He said, as another sister, Laura Chee, interpreted, that he was "happy to have his daughter home, and now he wants to know if they can get the boy back."

"We must let people know what has happened, what is happening through adoptions," Melanson said, clutching the Navajo blanket the tribe had given her. "My family, my friends back home, were outraged. They had no idea something like this was happening.""The taking of the children has to be stopped," she said.

Later, her family took her to her birthsite and told her how she had been taken.  She'd been born in a hogan and was sickly. A public health nurse came and took both her and her brother to the hospital at Winslow. The family never saw them again.

"Your mother would come to the road here," Desbah Yazzie told her, "and she would hitchhike into Winslow, looking for her children. She never found you, and later all they told her was that the children had been adopted."

Yvette Silverman Melanson, born Minnie Bo Monroe, stood in a ceaseless expanse of her birthplace and marveled."You can see forever," she said. "The sky is endless, the land is so big. If someone disappeared, a baby, how would you know which direction to go to even begin to look for them

The British commercial television station Channel Four broadcast ``Secret Asia, the Dying Rooms'' on June 14, 1995, and ``Return to the Dying Rooms'' (a refurbished version of the former) on January 9, 1996. Using clumsy tricks, the programs stated that in China's children's welfare homes there were dying rooms where children were abused to death. An investigation proved that the so-called dying rooms in the program ``Secret Asia, the Dying Rooms'' refer actually to a warehouse in the Huangshi City Social Welfare Home in Hubei Province and that the major part of the program is fabricated.

Kate Blewett, producer of the program, and others visited the Huangshi welfare home, disguising themselves as staff members of the American Children's Fund. After Blewett, et al arrived, recalled Liu Qiuliang, nurse of the welfare home, she found one of the foreigners, a man, filming in a warehouse at the back of the courtyard. At that time, there were some old beds in that warehouse and some other articles were lying around. The cameraman untied the articles, spread them on the bed and began to shoot. Liu came to the warehouse and asked him what he was doing. He just grunted and came out. This is the warehouse which was later labeled as the ``dying rooms'' in the television program. The ``Dying Rooms'' claimed that in 1994 more than 80 children died in that house. This is sheer fabrication. The welfare home's statistics record and the list of children taken in or identified and adopted shows that there were 161 children in the institution in 1994 and 128 were adopted later in the year. How come more than 80 children died? Claiming that the empty beds formerly used by children who were later adopted or identified and so left the welfare home were the beds of dead children and further referring to the warehouse as the ``dying rooms'' is deliberate distortion of facts.

The ``Dying Rooms'' recounted a story about a ``nameless,'' seriously ill child who was left unattended without any medical treatment, waiting for death. The shots were taken by Blewett and others at Duanzhou District Welfare Home, Zhaoqing City, Guangdong Province. As far as we know, the sick child was found on February 20, 1995 on the street by someone from a local police station; the child was then sent to the welfare home. The child was seriously ill when admitted to the welfare home, and the welfare home immediately gave the child medical treatment. Yang Jinying, the nurse who was responsible for looking after the ``nameless'' child, said that after Blewett and others entered the sick child's room, they told Yang to stay outside. Contrary to fact, the television program claimed that nurses hardly ever went into that room. It was winter and after Blewett and company entered the room, they removed the sick child's warm cotton-batting quilt and unbuttoned the latter's clothes. Yang tried to stop them. She said that it was cold and the child was sick. But Blewett said it did not matter. Wearing a fur coat, Blewett had the sick child stripped to the waist and shot for 15 to 20 minutes. After they finished shooting, they left the child undressed and didn't even cover the latter with the quilt. The sick child later died despite medical treatment. By playing up the condition of the sick child, Blewett and others intended to say that girls were systematically abused to death in the welfare homes. Using wanton fabrication to cheat and mislead viewers cannot but arouse indignation among the people.

The ``Dying Rooms'' made up another ``miserable story'' about a woman's forced abortion. It said that when the police were informed that a certain woman was pregnant with her second child (without having obtained prior permission), she was forced to have an abortion and a sterilization operation. The facts are as follows: The woman, named Xie Lianfeng, lives in Jinyang Village, Yangshuo, Guangxi. Blewett and company followed Xie's mother-in-law to Xie's home and asked Xie how many children she had. When Xie told them she had a boy and a girl, Blewett and others asked if she could have any more children. Xie answered, ``I had a ligation of the oviduct. I cannot bear children now.'' Xie said that she had never had an abortion, nor had her two sisters-in-law who lived with her. When the kind-hearted and honest Xie was told how Blewett, et al distorted her story, she said furiously, ``They are talking rubbish!''

Jiang Zhenghua, council member of the IUSSP, pointed out, ``As far as what we have seen is concerned, of the many things described in the telefilm some are sheerly concocted out of thin air and some are distortions. I felt strange when I saw the film. How could an institution which parades professional ethics for news coverage have produced such a film. Many of my scholar friends are also furious about the film.''

Britt-Marie Nygren, chief executive of the Family Association for Intercountry Adoption, Sweden, said, ``We were furious after we watched this film. There are 130 families in our association that have visited China and adopted children there. Many of them think that this film is an unjust report on China's welfare homes....I have visited many countries and seen their institutions responsible for adoption, so I can compare the conditions at institutions in different countries. That's why I reacted that way to this film's unjust reporting of the situation in China's welfare homes.''

Blewett and others may fabricate lies to cheat some people for sometime, but not for a long time. China, which has opened its door to the outside world, now receives millions of foreign visitors every year. They have opportunities to see the true situation, one which is completely contrary to what's described in the ``Dying Rooms.''