Badly Licked Bear is a transracial/transcultural adoption survivor. They grew up and live in Los Angeles and work as an educator, mutual aid worker, writer, and artist.
At birth, they were purchased in a private party adoption, and have no contact with their biological family. Like many private party adoptees, their original birth certificate, with their birth parents’ names, is held by the State of California. They struggle with the idea of relation to their adoptive family, have no intention or desire to undergo reunion with their birth families, and have made families of their own.
Badly’s experience of the malleability of identity across racial, cultural, religious, and gender lines informs the whole of their life and work. It has challenged them to question the ways in which their ancestors, blood ancestors and ancestors beyond blood, faced challenges of and to their own identities, beliefs, language, and name. Described as a “professional code-switcher,” they take that role to heart, belonging nowhere and everywhere, straddling and weaving together different worlds.
