I was scared, I was always scared.

Every time I bled I would hold it in, if I cut myself or scraped myself.

I didn't really think about my adoption.

I would walk down the street and be like "This Indian that could be my mom."

No, I can't bleed out like, the Aboriginal blood because then I'll stop being Métis.

I didn't have an answer.

I think I was one of the luckier ones.

My name is Sean Clear Sky Davies, I'm 36 years old.

What is your mother's background?

She's Ojibwe.

Okay.

Yeah, she's Ojibwe Indian, full blood. So yeah, I'm full blood Indian too.

So your biological father is

Full blood too.

I'm going through another little bit of a transition in my life right now. I'm trying to recollect myself, I'm going through some lifetime issues that I'm trying to work through and that I have to work through.

Actually we were fortunate enough we got actually her picture right from the hospital

My name is Nicole Desnoyers, I'm 23 years old. I don't remember a moment of finding out that I was adopted. It was just something I always knew and something my parents always like, talked about very openly. My biological mother is Métis. I remember like, I'd be as young as four and I'd go around being like "Hi, my name's Nicole and I'm adopted" because it was just like this thing I knew about myself.

My name is Jay Lomax. I'm Dakota, I come from a Dakota community. I was two, I started to see what was happening, I started to see the comings and goings of of people, Native kids coming into the foster home and there would always be this big brown station wagon with a buffalo on it. Manitoba, you know, Children's Aid on on the side. But I met my parents when I was three and they came and met me and they took me overnight. That was really, that was good. I knew what was happening, I knew that I was in a foster home at an early age. I don't know how but I knew that that these weren't my parents.

I do remember one day asking like "Oh, what am I?" and I was never able to participate in those conversations because I didn't know but I knew I was adopted so I knew I couldn't say Italian, like my mom or I knew I couldn't say, you know, necessarily French Canadian because I didn't, I just didn't know.

I never really wanted to start off being a social worker. I wanted to be a police officer and I wanted to do that for at least five years. But there was always this little voice and I call it my protector, that I always hear in my mind or a whisper "Children's Aid." 
I would always hear a whisper of "Children's Aid."

You know, I suffer from alcoholism. I'm, you know, I was a drug addict. I had to go to rehab, trying to get in touch with my cultural but most of it's about going through all the struggles that I've gone through. I think it's the same as my culture, I mean, they've been going through struggles ever since, you know, they've been discovered. There's been nothing but you know, struggle after struggle after struggle.

Schools have this really like interesting focus on wanting to have kids make family trees. I like, didn't have enough information on my biological family to feel like I could submit what they were asking for because they wanted us to go back a certain number of generations and stuff. So I did the family tree on my adopted family. Well, "You don't look Italian, so you're lying. You must be lying" and I said "No like, I'm adopted."

So when I was adopted or when I was given up, I stayed with my foster parents, here they are now, and then I got adopted by this other, by this Native family. So I went all the way up, I think it was like, Thunder Bay or somewhere where they were at. So I stayed up in Thunder Bay, I don't remember how long it was, I don't believe it was for that long at all. Yeah, I didn't do too well there.

I don't know, I don't really remember the reason why I was brought back but I was brought back.

There are more children in care than there ever was in residential schools. So if you think about it, that's that's an enormous number of children and an enormous number of children who are who are not involved with their families, who are not involved with their communities, who are losing their culture, losing their spirituality and losing their language. So that in itself is alarming.

The Aboriginal people are roughly five per cent of the population in Ontario, yet the number of children in the welfare system are probably closer to 20 per cent and so, an enormous disproportionate number.

It's hard to be adopted into a home where nobody is like you. Where in a lot of cases, nobody nobody looks like you. Where you're not represented in any kind of a way.

It's not good enough to simply provide a home for an adopted Indigenous child because that child brings with them, right, all of the history that has happened, plus their own history and whatever their trauma might be, so these things can be very complicated. But I think a lot of it has to do with how do you form your identity when you're not around people who aren't like you, so to speak?

My own personal like, growing process has also involved like, a recognition of everything down to my adoption and my life experiences were influenced by colonialism, were influenced by like, what has happened to the Indigenous nations of this land.

One day I was eating my lunch down here on Yonge Street and I noticed there was a young kid, a young First Nation kid, about 15 years old. He was being followed by a man in his car, heavy set, white male and he was telling him to get into the car and "Let's go" and and I thought "Oh my God, I'm going to see an abduction." Like, "I've never seen this before and you know, I'm just going to follow them." So I put my sandwich down and I went over to follow them and what I picked up from the dialogue was this was a father who adopted this boy and he came from from Waterloo to see if he'd come home and he was yelling out the window "Your mom misses you and loves you! Call her!" You know, something. He was telling them "Just leave me alone, I don't want to come home yet." You know, "Tell her I love her but I'm staying here." So for me that was pretty, you know, impacted me because I actually saw it firsthand of a breakdown. I mean, you hear about it and you read about it but to see it happening in front of you, it's really, you know, it's incredibly sad.

So I came home one time

and my mom, she saw me in the bathroom and I was like, I was just sitting there and I just, I was scrubbing myself and you know, she didn't know what I was doing in there for so long. I just, because I thought I was dirty, I was just sitting there, I don't know. I just thought I was dirty, that's all. So yeah, like you know, growing up, getting teased and not really knowing, you know, not too much about where I came from.

So passing is if you look like me. Of course, there's a stereotype of what an Indigenous person in Canada is supposed to look like. So if you don't look like that then you're not, it's not assumed that you're Indigenous, right. So that means a whole lot of things in terms of everyday life. People, if they can pass, they will because of the repercussions and the racism and the bullying et cetera, et cetera, that's often comes with identifying as being Indigenous. So many people throughout history have hidden that if they can and chosen not to pass on anything to their children.

You know, I went through a phase where I felt uncomfortable kind of naming the fact that I was Métis because I felt like I didn't want that to be used again as a way to erase the fact that I'm also white or carry white privilege or all these things. I know when I was a kid, I always like hated, hated, hated my nose because it's like a big thing. But like, when I started looking up the family tree Leanne gave me, I actually found like, photos of certain ancestors and this one ancestor in particular, who is from the Saulteaux Nation, he had the exact same nose as me and she has the same nose as me. So what started out when I was a kid as something I hated actually became of like "Oh no, this is actually passed down from an ancestor that like, when I look at his photo, he has the same nose" and so that was really cool.

On our back of her jerseys we had whatever name, you know, usually our last name but I wanted to get 'Clear Sky' just because I just thought it would be, I don't know, I would stand out a little bit more than any of the other runners. I think it was just something I was good at and I didn't think I was really good at too much stuff, so it was like something I took pride in, you know.

I intentionally wear certain signifiers to kind of identify myself as Aboriginal. Most of my jewelry and accessories come from Pow Wows or from Aboriginal vendors, things like that to try and support the community but also be able to identify myself as a member of the community.

When I did first see First Nation people was at Six Nations Reserve and I was looking for the stereotype from the movies. I was looking for the feathers, I was looking for the outfits that they wear on tv and I said "No there's not, those are just regular people mom" and they said "No they're not, they're Native, they're Native they're you" that's – "They're you" and I didn't see it, I didn't recognize it. So we grow up in in stereotypes.

So you go to a Pow Wow but what do you see? You see Indigenous people dancing and drumming as though it's some kind of entertainment for people, right and the children aren't necessarily taught about what is this really about and they're not really engaged with any of the people there. So it's very superficial and it just gives them this little blink of what Indigenous people are supposed to look like.

My parents just encouraged us to always be kind of open to anything and everything. Like, they wanted us to be always open to taking on new experiences and so, you know, if we came in and said "Oh, I like, I want to learn more about Métis stuff" like, my parents might not necessarily have had the tools to facilitate that but they definitely always encouraged it. You know like, "Oh, well read your books then" or like "Maybe email Leanne if you have a question," Leanne's my biological mother. You know, or "Maybe try Googling it." Once I got to university, they were very encouraging around taking on Aboriginal studies as a minor and so, yeah, that's that's kind of what we grew up with.

I always make, you know, I kind of tease my mom because I always say she's more Indian than me, you know. She wears my my reservation jacket and she wears that all the time, you know. She, you know, she's tried to make me feel as comfortable as I could in my surroundings at all times. She always wanted me to be in like, engaged in my culture like she was, you know, she always like tried her hardest to do whatever she could do like, you know, keep up the Native culture still with me.

I guess as an adoptee, you don't really, you don't really have a category for what you're going through but you're constantly going through a puzzle of putting your life back together, of reclaiming your past, reclaiming traditions that you never grew up with. Some of our identity has to do with attachment with our parents, right, and it's easy not to you to have a First Nations identity for just looking at the people around us.

I think it's a big thing when when the child is born to be close to their mom, you know. I think there can be a lot of stuff that's lost in between, you know, that kind of time to connect. Even when I went and saw my dad, it was like, it was up on this ridge and I remember like, I couldn't see where his home was, I had no idea what it looked like. This is just – I want to know who my dad was. I didn't really look at it as being anything to do with culture or anything. I mean, I think it was just, I just want to know who my dad was. He didn't have much to say to me, I wasn't really impressed with – I didn't know what to expect, I guess. Maybe I was expecting too much. He hasn't really tried to keep in contact since. We don't talk. He says he wants to help me but he's never helped me.

What really needs to be done is that those connections not to be broken with the children's families and communities. To create community for kids, right, with other Indigenous people around them and so on and so forth.

No, it's really hard when people are like "Hey, just talk about why you love yourself" and you're like "Oh my God, okay, let's go deep."

Yeah, I don't know it just these spaces are always, they're just, there's no words. Like,

you're engaging in these these traditions, you're engaging in these ceremonies, you're speaking in your language, you're getting these teachings from your elder and it just brings up all of this emotion that like, I believe spans from generations, you know. That just like, you can feel your ancestors wait within you when you're trying to like process that.

I'm going to go do my makeup so that I can participate in the social and not feel embarrassed about probably the mascara tracks that I've got running down my face.

It was in Cannon Ball, North Dakota and we're driving to the Pow Wow and just before

you get to the Pow Wow you have to go down this big hill and then it goes all the way up.

I can see all this dust – and it was like two o'clock in the afternoon – kicking up and I remember seeing all of these First Nation kids in the water in the Missouri River swimming unsupervised in the water and I just thought how awesome that was. Then as we went up the hill, I could see all of these eagles flying around and that's my animal, my power animal, my spirit animal. After that, I could see buffaloes in a pen and they were running around in circles. There must have been a hundred of them and that felt like home.

So I started like, as soon as I got out of rehab. I needed something else to get back in shape with, so I looked up a club that I knew where they used to be and then I ran into these guys. They've seen me when I was sober before when I was training with them and you know, they supported me back then so I think it's different for them to see me now or try to understand like, you know, my struggles right now. But you know, they do everything they can to make me feel comfortable and have a place to train, which is which is why I wanted you guys to come here because this is like, definitely a part of my well-being, stuff that takes me off my mind. Like you know, if stuff bothers me during the day, this is a like a different kind of home I can come to and you know, kind of like, beat each other up and stuff and you know, learn things and yeah, it's a good environment, it's a safe environment for me to be at.

Right now, I'm noticing that there isn't much in terms of a ceremony for children at lead care. So right now, I'm working on an adoption ceremony and this ceremony, we have an elder, we have a dancer, a drummer. When I first started this ceremony, it was kind of a celebration ceremony. I put on my traditional outfit and I was dancing to someone drumming and we had a circle like this. When we're in the circle, everybody gets a chance to speak about their experience in a positive light. About the family and about the child that they're adopting because what's happened in our past is that children were placed really rather quickly, so they don't have the attachment. They weren't really sure what was going on.

I was trying to see if you've ever looked at your story and related it to that bigger picture or to Indigenous issues at large.

No, I don't think so. No, I don't look at it like, in that sense, I don't think. Yeah, I mean sure, if I broke it down maybe but I've never actually thought about it.

I'm still learning that too. So you know, even with the sash, when I show people around tying the sash, I get nervous because "Oh my God, am I doing it right? Did learn it right? Am I forgetting this step? Do I look totally silly?" and feeling, you know, like feeling nervous and worried about just like, talking about being Métis. Because like, sometimes I feel like my experiences are so specific to being adopted, to being white, to being all these things and where I'm at in my own learning that I feel like I can't always answer the questions people have around like "Well, what does it mean to be Métis?" or like "What's your history? What's your language?" or "What does this specific thing in your culture mean?" or whatever. It's like, I sometimes just don't always have the answers to that.

When we have a ceremony, we have foster parents there, we have the new family, the adopt family there. So they see that they're leaving their old home and going into a new one. So that's closing and that's providing closure for that old experience, into the new one.

I think like, as long as we're not at least looking at ways in which that, you know, Aboriginal children the system can be connected to their cultures and communities like, that will always can be a continuation of assimilation. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, you're ripping people away from their histories and their culture and it's a culture that's been under attack since, you know, 500 years ago when Europeans first arrived and that's just the reality.