Growing up in the child welfare system, intergenerational trauma, and success.

I believe we all have multiple purposes, not just one. Growing up, I had a lot of adverse childhood experiences. A lot of historical injustices, laws, and policies like the Indian act affected my family for being racialized and being people of color. My grandma was put into a residential school to forget her identity, her language, connection to the culture, and to be ashamed of all of it. The settlers gained access to our lands and the resources and distributed the wealth among themselves through colonization and displacement dispossession. Locating to reserves created a lot of social problems and economic disparity. My grandmother moved to Winnipeg with my mom and my auntie around the 1970s. They lived in poverty and there was a lot of intergenerational trauma passed on. What was missing in my family were coping skills and healing strategies. In Indigenous culture, there is a ton of holistic healing involved in the culture's practices and beliefs. But with the Christian oppression happening, Christianity was forced upon my family and there wasn't any access to our culture at that time. It wasn't until the 1970s that the Indian Act was amended so that people could start practicing their culture again. My mother had a lack of access to public housing and she also developed an addiction.

My mother worked night shifts as a bartender, and a social worker had come after hours and tapped her behind her back. It wasn't in a good part of town so if someone comes up behind you and taps you, you react right because it could be someone trying to start drama. She turned around and she hit the social worker. The social worker used that against her to get a permanent ward. With my mom working night shifts, she would sleep during the day, so I would stay with my grandma. So, it looked like I was being neglected and not taken care of because I was with my grandmother, who also had other kids in the house. I was taken by the child welfare system 14 times. In the records that I obtained, I was first taken when I was two months old. By the time I was about 5, I was a permanent ward in the child welfare system. There is a lot of developmental trauma as a result of that. Our culture believes that the child is the center of the community and everyone needs to look after that child. When you're taken from your family you're not only taken from your parents, you're taken from your community and extended family. I spent 13 years, 6 months, and 6 days in the system. I know the exact timeline, the number of days, and hours.

In my first placement, I was moved away from Winnipeg and out into the countryside to Powerview, Pine falls. I moved away from all I've ever known, my whole community and environment. I didn't have a great experience and now I advocate against the child welfare system because of what happened with me and the effects of it. During this time, my mother had to deal with a lot of the grief and the loss of losing her kids. That's when she started to develop an addiction. She had the trauma of losing her kids, being told that she's not fit to be a parent, that she's transient and she's neglectful, and that she's not able to provide the necessities of life. When you look at the social structure, the history, and the politics around why she was living in poverty, it was passed through the family line and it's linked to Canada's relationship with indigenous people. I didn't understand this as a child. I thought there was something wrong with me, so I couldn't be with my family. A child naturally blames themselves. Because of that, I grew up with a lot of toxic shame and a lot of loss of identity.

I experienced a lot of trauma while I was in care. When you're taken away from your family, your personal boundaries are lost when they place you with strangers and you're told to trust those strangers. Your experience loss of love and loss of connection. I was deprived of love. It took about a year before my grandma got the rights to visit. In Pine falls, I was placed with an older lady who was not fit to be a parent. I didn't learn any interpersonal skills from her and how to emotionally regulate myself, so I had some outbursts and had anger issues. I had undealt with trauma. Through my trauma work, I had to look for where she did show she cared and when she didn't. I was thankful that I got an education, 3 meals, and a home. But it was rough because I experienced sexual abuse while I was in the system. It happens to a lot of youth that is in care. It's horrible not being in the protection of your family while you're in the system, it's heartbreaking. I lived with that family for six years and the abuse stopped after two years when I spoke up about it. From there, I was moved into another family from the age of 13-15. I had a good experience there it was a good time. At this point, I started making friends and I had a social life. Dr. Gabor Maté talks about 'Not why the addiction, but why the pain?' This makes a really good point for me when I was 13 -15, that's when I started experimenting with weed and alcohol. When I was using weed and alcohol, I could finally express myself and I could talk to others, stuff I couldn't do before. And once that undealt with anger started coming out, I started getting into fights and got banned from school. I started fighting because of the bullying that happened over the years, and because of the experience of being in a town by myself, not having anybody protect me, not knowing how to deal with my anger, and not having anyone to talk about the things that I went through. I started kickboxing and I was able to learn how to channel all of that anger. But the family I lived with took on more foster kids, got overwhelmed, and broke down.

At 15 years old, I was moved back to Winnipeg. I didn't grow up in the city, so again, I had to leave everybody that I knew. As a 15-year-old, I still didn't have a connection to my identity, dealing with a lot of shame growing up, low self-esteem, and not having strong connections to my roots or my family tree. I was looking for that belonging and connection. I was put into a group home and the issue there was that we had good staff and we had bad staff where I clearly wasn't in their best interest. There was this one lady who would cook us breakfast every Saturday, she was just the sweetest old lady. And on the other hand, we'd have staff who would teach us how to play poker and give us access to steroids.

In the first 6 months of being back in Winnipeg, I wasn't in school. I started taking Hapkido and just started going to the YMCA. Then, I started hanging out with the wrong people, partying, and I ended up joining a gang. For me, it was a sense of importance. I wanted to feel like I belonged to something, and these people were willing to help me. I started selling drugs and I ended up getting caught and I was sent to the youth center. I felt like I was constrained and alone again. I was scared because I never thought that I'd end up in jail. When I was selling, I didn't know how bad it was. It was the first time I dealt with the law. I was in there for one day, but it was enough to want to do something different. From there, this is where my life actually started to change.

When I got back to the group home after being locked up, I was finally brought to a school called Children of the Earth High School. I always have to give honor to that school because when I went there, I had no idea about my identity, the history, and the residential schools. Residential schools weren't even being taught until about 2008. Stephen Harper made a public apology to the residential school survivors and little did I know my grandmother was one. Later on, I also found out my first foster parent was a residential school survivor as well. In the 1930s women were force sterilized and she was one of them.

It was an indigenous-based school, and it was my first time being in a place full of indigenous people with similar experiences. When I was there, I started learning about sweat lodges, ceremonies, and the language just mixed into a curriculum that helped me develop my character. It was the first time I felt my belonging, empowerment, and sense of purpose. When I started learning these things, I was more in school than I was hanging around on the streets. Before that, I had no idea about my culture. All I knew was that I had a status card, but I didn't know what that was about. I remember asking my family if I was Indian, and they said: "Well what did you think you were?" I never thought of people as a race or a heritage. In the town I grew up in, there was just a mix of people. And I didn't recognize racism, to be honest, but looking back, there definitely was.

When I was 17, I fell in love with this girl and within 3 months she was pregnant. I wasn't taught about relationships or how to be cautious. Growing up in the system, you long for your parents and grieve for your parents. Some ways your mind deals with that is that you hold on to fantasy and you hold onto image. This partner was really beautiful, and I mistaking intensity for intimacy. This was 3 weeks before I turned 18, and 3 weeks before I aged out of CFS. It was quite the dilemma because back then when you aged out of the system, you're given a $1000 check and that's it. So, I had no life skills, no coping skills, I didn't know how to house search, no guarantor, and no long-term job. I was basically told to go out into the world and figure it out. So, it was hard to be a parent. This is something that really helped me dive deep into psychology, sociology, and lots of self-help. You really want to stick closer to the elders and close to the community because I didn't grow up with any of that.

My daughter's mother's family took me in after I aged out of CFS. I got lucky there, but I lived with them for a year and a half before it didn't work out. I didn't know how to keep our relationship together. It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to deal with, still to this day. It took me about 5 years for me to able to let go of the idea of us ever being a family. Especially because we were so young, and it was the family I always wanted and dreamed of having. I wanted to make it right. I didn't want what happened to me as a child to happen again. But it did. My daughter today is 12 years old. 

When I was 19, I signed up for university and went to live with a friend and his mom. His mom was a 60's scoop survivor. In the 1950s up until 1992, the class-action lawsuit against the 60's scoop was that the legislation that passed, allowed provincial laws and the RCMP to go into reserves to take children and adopt them out. It was to further displace them and dispossess them from their treaties. The commonality between both of us was that we were both removed from our families. The fact that I met someone like that at that critical point in my life was really important because I was so close to being homeless.

In university, I didn't know what the hell I want to do. I told myself that I was going to go into business. And if I didn't figure out what I wanted to do; I can always go back. That was my big plan but that failed. In my second semester, I didn't do very well. I thought: 'Well, what am I going to do with my life?' I had an addiction at that point, so I felt purposeless. I remember I kept asking and praying, 'Can you just reveal your purpose for making me? Help me figure out what I was put here to do'. I went through addiction recovery, started learning a lot of life skills that I didn't have, I went to see a psychologist and had a personal mentor and counselor. I did that for about two years, and it was really helpful. Through AA and NA meetings, I started telling my story of how I recovered and what works for me. Eventually, after all the healing and engaging myself in my culture, at 24, I went back to college. I went into this program called family support work through Red River College. 

When I went into the workforce, I felt like I was a powerhouse. When I worked with youth, I worked with a lot of them that had experienced grief, loss, gang involvement, domestic violence, bullying, lack of communication skills, not learning assertiveness, not being able to draw out how their paradigms are, and their environments and their behaviors. I was able to help them with confidence, like skills, and different ways of dealing with situations. When I reached this point in my life, I felt like I was at the pinnacle. I felt like this was my purpose, this is my calling, and this is what I'm here to do. I told myself that I was going to continue to heal, keep learning, and keep passing that knowledge down. But the issue I started having was within a system that has policies that aren't in the best interest of our youth. Children were being apprehended from their families, why not support these families the way that foster families are being supported? If it's a money issue, lack of skills, homelessness, mental health help, or addiction, then help them with that. Later on, I started working with adults with mental health. After that, I went into restorative justice.

Canada has a justice system that focuses on the retribution of individuals who broke the law. This program is focused on repairing the harm that was caused by crime while holding the offender responsible for their actions. I worked there for 2 and a half years and went on to do family violence prevention work as a men's group facilitator.  I taught men how to deal with family violence and ran workshops. A call to justice was created through MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women). Through systemic discrimination, a genocide was created.

If you look at the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, they determine genocide as:

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

My experience of being removed from my family is a form of displacing me. It's really crazy, when I really looked at it, it shocked me. After working in restorative justice, I went on to work with strength in the circle with a friend named Johnny whom I started the group with. It's a group based on educating people on historical injustices and how to continue to be a solution-based system. Along-side another group of people, we got the child and services family act amended, where they can no longer apprehend children in poverty. Now, fewer children are going into care.

The next day, we also got honored on Indigenous Veterans day. Johnny and I had stopped a man from stabbing someone on the bus. We intervened. Later on, we found out that this young indigenous man was in at least 40 different foster homes throughout his childhood. He went to jail at a young age, met the wrong people, had addiction problems, and never had the same opportunity to connect to our culture. We pulled him off the bus, and Johnny got stabbed on the back of his leg, but the man missed his artery. We held him down until the police arrived and protected everyone on the bus. But with my experience being a restorative justice worker and understanding how the law works, I advocated for this young man. He did go to jail for what he did, but he is also someone that went through the struggle and instead of just condemning him as a monster or labeling him as no good, we tried to help him. Now, he's part of strengthening the circle and the men's healing circle.

Currently, I work at the halfway house with men who are in the criminal justice system, integrating them back into society. When I talk about multiple purposes, there are many ways I can help out. One of the things that I found out from my culture is that they have clan systems. I met an elder when I was in Red River College and I was given my spirit name in my clan system. The Ojibwe clan system represents what your role would be in the community. I was given the Hoof Clan, in the dear clan. Their gifts are healing, community, creativity, kindness and they're also speakers and artists. I use my voice to do public speaking. I did a TEDx talk called intergenerational survivor and healing. My healing transcends all the different systems that I've worked in. When you help people heal, your patterns of behavior change, and when you educate people, they can make better choices and healthier decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities. I feel really fulfilled helping people heal from a past that might hold them back.

I try to tell people my story, but I don't ever try to compare my experience to other youth in care because they could have had a completely different experience. One thing I know is that it's a very, very painful experience, a very haunting experience. Even after you're out of care, it still affects you and affects your relationships. It affects your work and affects the way you see the world. A lot of things. The healing doesn't start until you get help, or if you find the right kind of help. This is my experience, all the negative things that happened to me, and this is how I used it to help give back. You don't see that while you're going through it, you don't see that until you heal from it and developed the tools you need. Now, I'm able to connect to so many different people. To the youth in care, you are lovable, tell your story, we need you. Everyone has a gift and a reason to be here. With your gift, you can help the world become a better place.