“The cool thing about Montana is that there’s a federally funded lab here so we have scientists from all over the world, so there are, like, three Indians,” says 17-year-old Antara Mason. She says three as if that’s a lot. Perhaps it is for the town of Hamilton, where, as an Indian girl, she’s one of few faces that stand out in the largely white world around her. This part of her story isn’t that distinct from many other Indian youngsters in the U.S. whose parents may have settled down in places that lack ethnic diversity – that struggle of being different or alone is a theme not unknown to any minority. But Antara doesn’t go home at the end of the day to parents who look like her. Peggy and Larry Mason, together and in varying proportions, are German, English, French, Irish, and Welsh, with a dash of Native American.

“People stare at us. They’re like, ‘Why are these white people with these brown people? Why are these brown kids calling this white woman Mom?’ They think we can’t be related,” Antara says.

She and her brother Tandi were born in Calcutta and came to the U.S. when they were just months old, she in 1996 and Tandi three years later. As a young couple, Peggy and Larry adopted them from the same orphanage, through the same agency, knowing nothing of the circumstances of either of their children’s birth parents. For all the talk of diasporic Indians trying to reconnect with their roots to fully understand their identity, Antara and Tandi’s challenge is a whole different beast.

“I get it to some extent that they maybe are more Indian than I am,” Antara says. “If they don’t get something, they go home and ask their parents. I have to go home and fire up Google.”

Her mother, Peggy, explains the beginning of their story: “We were a five years out of college, still paying off loans, didn’t have much money – we took everything we had to make something like that happen.” They knew nothing of India or being Indian. They have learned together as a family every step of the way.

Antara speaks openly about her feelings on her situation, but more than her candor, her buoyant adolescent girl sass proves that she’s observing and taking in what’s around her with a discerning eye, processing it all in a way that most teenagers don’t do or ever need to. She has risen to the occasion, often with humor, of her somewhat rare challenges: being made to feel that she’s not authentic enough or the right kind or amount of Indian, witnessing an exclusivity among Indians of her age group who seem put off by her difference, experiencing the absence of her birth parents in more ways than one, and not being able to fully share all this with her parents.

“With other Indians, it starts out with that whole camaraderie thing and they’ll be like, ‘Hey! Where are you from?’ and I say ‘Calcutta’ and they’ll get really excited and then my mom will walk over and I’ll say, ‘This is my mom’ and they’re like, ‘Ohhh…’ And I can just feel them take a step back and become distant.” Antara refers to this as the “’oh’ of dismissal.”

Her parents also take note of the unexpected, sometimes appalling reactions the family has received. Larry recalls an incident from when Antara was a little girl – they were out shopping and Antara was hanging onto him when another child approached them and asked if he could see his monkey.

“He was just a kid so I knew he didn’t mean anything derogatory by it,” Larry says. “He had never seen a brown person before so I think that’s just what came to his mind, but it took so much for me not to explode.”

Peggy’s mother, who lives in Wisconsin, was once talking to an Indian co-worker and mentioned that her daughter had adopted from India. The response she got was: “Why would anyone ever want to do that? Those are street kids.”

Antara heard about this story years later. “I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know that stigma was out there, which I guess links back to the whole caste system maybe,” she says. “Like, ‘You deserve to be down there – why would you disturb the natural order of things?’ I guess for some people, probably an older generation, this attitude may exist.”

All things considered, though, the Masons have done well at shutting out the unnecessary noise and frustrating moments. And they have countered this by integrating elements of the kids’ ethnic background into their lives to the best of their ability for not having a rulebook on Indianness. They checked out books from the library about the country and culture to read when Antara was little; they enrolled her in Indian dance classes when they still lived in Oregon; they saved up for years to be able to take her to India through The Ties Program. But probably most significantly, attending the annual Indian Nepalese Heritage Camp has been transformative in their collective ability to connect to India.

Antara has been attending the camp, which takes place in Colorado over four days each summer, since she was in first grade. It’s in this space where she not only bonds with other young people to whom she can relate, but where she says she can merge all parts of her being at once – the Indian part, the white part, and the adoptee part. The camp is meant for whole families, with little kids doing arts and crafts and other cultural activities, older kids taking part in team building and bonding, and parents learning from workshops and panels about adoption issues.

Pam Sweetser, who founded the camp out of the desire to give her own adopted children this kind of supportive place, explains the importance of the INHC. “As an adoptive parent, especially of a child that isn’t of your same cultural background, we of course love them with all our hearts and provide the basics, as well as beyond the basics, as far as education and enrichment and life and love like any parent would do. But the one thing we can’t provide them is their culture and heritage because we don’t share it. And that is at the very core of who someone is: where they came from, who they are. And when you don’t share that with your child, it’s a very big missing piece for them.”

That missing piece can mean different things to anyone removed from a place they call home. Peggy says that while Tandi rejects almost anything that has to do with being an Indian adoptee, Antara has consciously and willfully embarked on what has sometimes been a painful journey of exploring and seeking to fill her empty spaces. She charts her daughter’s progress of mourning the loss of first her birth parents and culture when she was young, but as a teenager, the loss of who she would have been had she remained in India.

“I think Antara has been very courageous and strong,” Peggy says. “I think there was a point when she maybe felt guilty about some of the emotions, but she still let herself go through the full range of emotions. And I think that’s brought her peace. Can I say that honey?” she confirms with her daughter. “Does that sound accurate?”

For Antara, the Heritage Camp has helped tremendously throughout this path of discovering the depths and layers of identity and feeling exiled or uprooted and asking questions that relate to belonging, roots, and family. To keep in touch with the community she’s created there throughout the rest of the year, she has created iDesi Generation 1.5, a group where everyone can share and look for support on problems they might be dealing with, big or small, that relate to being Indian without Indian parents.

“I know I said that I think Indians are tight-knit, but when it comes to tight-knit, no one beats adoptees,” she says. “We’re all trying to understand this culture that we haven’t been raised in but fundamentally know is part of us, and we can’t really get away from that.”

Antara also uses the forum to share her Brown Girl Magazine posts, in which she writes about all of the issues mentioned here. She is using her reflective, sometimes cheeky, self-aware perspective to tell other young people on the Internet what it’s like to be a brown girl in a white family – all the way from Hamilton, MT.

“She is becoming and has already been a strong advocate in the Indian adoption community,” Sweetser says. “She really says it like it is, and because of that, she’s helped other kids who may be thinking these things but don’t want to say them. She’s very poised and confident, and she has very strong feelings. I think it’s good for her, but I also think it’s been good for the other things. I think she’s a becoming a voice for this. Antara’s going to be right in there, leading the charge. She’s been such a bright light.”