Recent Interviews
Historical Videos
The Dark Secrets of Alaska in the 70’s
Crooked Pictures LLC
Interview with Monica Hall, memoirist and author in Anchorage Alaska 2018. Straight talk about the culture of Anchorage during the 70's oil boom, themes in her memoir while growing up in Anchorage.
Trauma, sexual abuse, adoption.
Adoption Reunions TV Series, 1980
Channel 40
Adoptee Reunion 1980 - Author and Adoptee Monica Hall with her birth father, Harvey Gilbert Letendre, a Métis Cree from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. When Monica was 23, she began searching for her birth family with the help of ALMA (Adoptees Liberty Movement Association). The local news in Sacramento filmed the reunion at the airport, and later, a camera crew interviewed them at Monica's home.
Interview with Daughter, 1991
The Shirley Pickens Show
Adoption Reunion Interview - As an adoptee herself Monica is interviewed with the daughter she relinquished at 15 to a closed adoption in 1973.
Personal Archive, 2006
My children meeting my birth father’s family in Canada
Metis Cree Adoptee, Monica Hall visits her birthfather, Chaps at the Lac Ste. Anne Pilgrimage in Alberta Canada with the daughter she relinquished for adoption (1973) and her other two children.
The Pilgrimage is adjacent to her birth father's land where her ancestors settled in the late 1800s. Lac Ste Anne is known for its healing waters where thousands of people from across Alberta, Western Canada, and North America make the pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne each July.
Personal Archive, 2006
Visit to my aboriginal roots in Alberta
Monica Hall, Metis Cree adoptee and author in reunion takes, her four offspring, Mary Claire the daughter she relinquished for adoption in 1973, granddaughter, son, Quin and daughter, Becca back to The home of her ancestors, Kohkom & Mosom's (Cree for Grandmother & grandfather) dilapidated Farm in Gunn Alberta Canada, located on the on Lac. Ste. Anne 40 minutes out of Edmonton where Monica was relinquished for adoption in 1957.
Excerpt of transcript from this podcast episode:
Monica Hall: I live in Sacramento. I was adopted out of Canada from a foster home with about 10 other babies. I was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, because that's where my parents had been living. That's where a lot of the trauma happened and caused me to write a memoir. We moved to California when I was 16. I'm still in California. It’s been a long journey being an adoptee and relinquishing a child for adoption.
The thing that adoptees most often ask me is, “Being an adoptee, how could you give up your own baby?”