My entire life I was trying to be white, but I’m not white! As a result I have experienced a lot of racism over my lifetime. When I was born the nurse told my mother not to put my father on the birth certificate because he was native. At age ten I met a new friend at school but later discovered that her mom wouldn’t have let us be friends if she knew I was native, but she thought I just had a tan from a recent vacation. At age 19 I was working at a restaurant, the manager pulled me aside and asked me to tell my Dad to leave, I confronted the man to discover that he was an unrelated drunk native man. These stories built up my entire life, and I chose to run away from it [my culture and my pain] because I didn’t know what else to do.
I was running away from my aboriginal indigenous side because I didn’t know the truth of who they were. The stereotypes I heard from society, were everything my family was.
My grandmother left residential school when she was 16 and went back to Northwest Angle, which is the reserve. She wasn’t getting therapy for her physical and sexual abuse from the residential school. She went on to have eight kids, my dad being one of the oldest. Soon she became a huge alcoholic because she was masking the pain of her youth. My dad eventually left the res and went to Thunder Bay where he met my mom and had me. Throughout those years has his own problems with alcohol. Additionally I have a brother who died by suicide, my other brother just got out of prison, i’m an alcoholic and my other brother is an alcoholic. But now I’m like this is who we are and I’m not ashamed of it. Now I have a full understanding of history. I learned that this pattern has a name, generational trauma. It’s the reason why so many Inuit, First Nations and Metis families struggle with all of the same battles. When I learned about that I learned how to cope.
This cycle has got to stop. I know stereotypes can change, we don’t have to keep living that stereotype.
To anyone experiencing this I would say self-awareness is key, realize that someone else’s perception of you is not the truth, that’s not who you are. Don’t take ownership over what they think about you or your culture. We have the power to decide how we are going to feel and react about what people say about us. A quote that really resonates with me in regards to this topic is by Theodore Roosevelt;
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
This quote reminds me that even though our society is critical, other people’s opinions don’t matter. They don’t know anything because they haven’t walked in your shoes
