5-Month-Old Girl’s Well-Being Develops Into International Imbroglio : Custody: An Aleut woman from Cypress has given her baby to a Canadian family, angering the mother’s tribe, which wants to keep the baby.

Attorneys on the East and West coasts and in Canada geared up Wednesday for an international legal struggle over an Orange County baby born to an Aleut teen-ager.

The baby’s mother, Jodi Argleben of Cypress, has gone into hiding and has apparently taken 5-month-old Rebecca to a family in Vancouver, Canada, for adoption, rather than give her up to the Aleut tribe, a branch of the Eskimos.

A flurry of legal paper work and research began Wednesday among lawyers in Orange County, New York and Canada who are trying to resolve the increasingly complex custody battle over little Rebecca.

Papers filed in Orange County Superior Court on Wednesday showed that attorneys have been appointed in Vancouver to represent Rebecca and the Ministry of Social Services and Housing, which oversees adoptions in the province of British Columbia. The Ministry has reportedly filed papers in a Canadian court seeking guidance on how it should handle the Argleben adoption.

Argleben, 18, a single mother and high school senior, was born into the tribe in the tiny town of Akhiok, Alaska, but was adopted when she was 3 and raised by non-Aleut parents. She has sought to give up Rebecca for adoption but said she does not want the child reared in the poor village of her youth. The Aleut tribe has entered the case, seeking to have the baby placed with an Aleut family, citing a 1978 law designed to stem the breakup of American Indian families.

Rebecca’s court-appointed lawyer, Harold F. La Flamme, said he has been unable to find Argleben to discuss the case. At a closed hearing Wednesday before Superior Court Judge Robert J. Polis, La Flamme was allotted money to hire an investigator to find the baby and assess her circumstances, La Flamme said. Another hearing was set for Dec. 4.

Bertram E. Hirsch, a New York lawyer who represents the Akhiok Tribal Council, said he intends to fight for the tribe’s right to place Rebecca with an Aleut family. If a Canadian court rules that the tribe has no standing to press the issue there, Hirsch said he will pursue it in U.S. courts.

La Flamme said his chief concern is ensuring Rebecca’s long-term security. He said he wants to avoid dragging the baby through a “quagmire” of litigation that would ultimately result in yet another placement.

If it appears that the Aleut tribe has a strong case to force the child’s transfer to one of its families, La Flamme said he thinks that it would be best to do so sooner than later, and he would try to begin negotiations to make it happen.

“It’s not in (Rebecca’s) best interests to be bounced around like a pawn between her mother, the tribe and the family in Canada,” La Flamme said. “(The Canadian family) has got to be worried that here they are with the best of intentions and they find themselves in the middle of an international incident.”

Jane A. Gorman, an attorney who earlier represented Argleben in her bid to win the power to influence the selection of Rebecca’s adoptive family, said she is frustrated because the current trouble could have been avoided. Gorman said there are Aleut families in Orange County and other parts of Southern California who might have welcomed the baby, but Argleben dismissed her lawsuit and disappeared before Gorman could discuss it with her.

Among the many questions that remained unanswered Wednesday was whether Argleben’s actions were illegal. He said he will also investigate the possibility that she “conspired to defeat the intent of” the Indian Child Welfare Act.