About this Event
MY NAME IS MIMOSA / ARRIVED: Tracing the Adoption Journey Through Archives
Devaki Murch never had a hospital bracelet or a baby book. She had newspaper headlines, news broadcast recordings, and pieces of the C-5A Galaxy plane that crashed with her inside on April 4, 1975.
Then the synchronicities began.
A numbered print titled Babies in Cardboard Boxes. A fat file labeled "Henry's Lists" — and a programmer named Henry who appeared fifty years later. Her own name on passenger manifests. Hand annotations recording the intimate details of her first days of life. Each arrival felt less like chance and more like a summons, as if the archives themselves were choosing their caretaker.
The file told her story before she was her.
MY NAME IS MIMOSA / ARRIVED traces that journey — through the original letters, cables, intake forms, and correspondence that made one adoption possible and permanent. What did the agency record about her before she had a name? What were the circumstances of her relinquishment? What does it mean to find yourself in a folder fifty years later — and who was this guy with her mom?
Drawing from the Operation Babylift Collection, this talk follows the paper trail between a mother on Kauaʻi, a Catholic adoption agency, and the bureaucratic machinery of wartime evacuation. What emerges is not just one child's origin story, but a portrait of how institutions document the most intimate human moments — and what it means to return those documents to the people they belong to.
When you touch a mimosa plant, it folds inward — a protective reflex born from survival. But mimosa thrives in disturbed soil and spreads through invisible underground networks. Touch one, and the entire forest responds.
We were told our names. We were given our stories. Now we name ourselves.
Presented by Devaki Murch, Founder of StoryScope Studio, Operation Babylift adoptee, C-5A crash survivor, and accidental archivist — raised on Kauaʻi.
Free and open to the public.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2500 Campus Road, Honolulu, United States
USD 0.00
