Family secrets, revelations and the journey to reclaim my Anishinaabe identity

[admin]

For many of us, our lives are a puzzle with missing pieces, scattered by historical injustices and government policies designed to erase our identities.

Indigenous people are researchers by nature. We must be to understand our past, where we come from and who we are as individuals.

For many of us, our lives are a puzzle with missing pieces, scattered by historical injustices and government policies designed to erase our identities.

My journey to finding myself came from a determination not to be labelled as someone I was not — in a world where I did not feel I belonged.

I grew up believing I was French-Canadian and British. When my mother passed away, the truth came out about my background.

My mother’s death revealed she was Indigenous, not French-Canadian, and I found out I was Indigenous on my mother’s side and British on my father’s side. My mother told me this half-truth to protect me from the racism she had experienced as a First Nation woman living in Canadian society.

The truth will always show itself in some capacity. Not only did my mother’s death certificate reveal her Anishinaabe identity, but also the birth of a child I never knew about.

In 1963, my mother gave birth to a baby boy. The child welfare system had taken him as a newborn. It turns out my older brother was a victim of the ‘60s scoop, a dark chapter in Canadian history where Indigenous children were forcefully removed from their families and placed in non-Indigenous homes.

My heart still aches for my mother, who carried the weight of this secret throughout her adult life, and for the brother I never had the chance to know. The impact of the systemic injustices my mother faced, and the trauma of separation and displacement, had long-lasting consequences. It is the reason why my mother died at 52 years old.

My mother was always a hard-working, loving mother, but she carried the scars of her childhood. She was not affectionate, and this was probably because she was bounced around seven different foster homes over nine years.

In one of the foster homes, she contracted strep throat and it went untreated. That led to rheumatic fever, which caused her to develop heart disease.

In 1970, she became one of the first women in Ontario to undergo artificial heart valve replacement surgery. The surgery was performed shortly after my birth.

For the first three months of my life, I was raised by nurses in the hospital as my mother was too ill and weak to care for me.

Growing up, I remember her being in and out of the hospital. Then, in the summer of 1992, she developed an internal infection that was misdiagnosed, and she died of sepsis in November of that year.

The grief was overwhelming as it was a pain I had never experienced before.

But I was pregnant with my first child, so I had to be strong for the life inside of me, and I slowly began to heal.

Once I discovered the truth about my mother’s identity and the loss of my older brother to the ’60s scoop, I needed to uncover more truths about the story of where I came from and who I was.

I learned about the Indian Act, a piece of Canadian government legislation that has historically discriminated against First Nation women, stripping them of their Indian Status and rights.

I discovered that my mother and her sisters were taken from their Anishinaabe parents in 1951.

Indian agents came and took the girls from the only home they knew and placed them all in separate foster homes. They never had the chance to return to their parents’ care.

This forced separation left a lasting wound on my family, severing their connection to their culture and each other. It was another cruel consequence of assimilation policies in Canada.

In 2011, and with the encouragement of my aunts, I decided it was time to apply for my Certificate of Indian Status.

In 1985, Bill C31 was passed allowing First Nations women and their children who had lost their status because of discriminatory legislation, to gain it back.

My grandmother and my aunts were given status, however, my mother died before she could regain hers. This did not deter me.

I accumulated all the documentation I could find for the application, such as birth certificates, death certificates and a family tree. I waited almost two years, but the day my Certificate of Indian Status came in the mail, it gave me a sense of profound connection to my culture and nation that had been denied for all of my life.

Read More: https://www.thespec.com/life/family-sec ... ed89e.html