Andrea Currie writes as a survivor of the Sixties Scoop
Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of Sixties Scoop survivor Andrea Currie and her journey to finding her Métis roots and reuniting with her birth family. It's a tale of survival, identity, family and culture in the face of colonial practices and Indigenous erasure.
Currie is a writer, healer and activist. She lives in Cape Breton where she works as a psychotherapist in Indigenous mental health.
She spoke with The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about finding a way back to her heritage.
You start off the book by saying, since nobody has written what I need to read, I'll have to write it myself. Why do you think the Sixties Scoop has remained in the shadows?
Given what we're talking about in terms of the history of all these colonial interventions, I really feel like we could flip that question and ask settler folks why so much of the history of what has happened to Indigenous peoples on our homelands remains in the shadows.
We are still, in so many places and communities and regions, some of us just surviving. Others are prioritizing healing and finding ways to strengthen our Indigenous cultures and to live as well as we can in our communities, or wherever we choose to be.
So I'd kind of like to ask our settler listeners, why is it that it's taking so long for this history to become just a part of our understanding, our collective understanding as a country? I do think there's a lot of difficult feelings that this history brings up for people, right? There's a human response to want to deny, avoid, not get into that, but we have to move forward to repair and create the relationships that we could have had and could still have if we don't acknowledge this history.
You reunite with your younger brother Rob, who the book is dedicated to. Can you tell us more about him and your life together?
I would love to. Rob and I were the youngest two of three adopted children. We were both Métis Sixties Scoop kids, although we had no idea of that at the time, but what we did know is that we did not feel acceptable or that we belonged in that family. It seemed like our adoptive mother was always disappointed in us and there was some way that we were supposed to be that we just couldn't measure up to.
That created an incredible bond between us.
- Andrea Currie
But we also knew that there was something not right about this, you know? And I think because we both shared that experience, we were able to guard each other's perceptions about that ... and that created an incredible bond between us. I honestly think it helped us survive our childhoods.
He was sent back to Children's Aid when he was 15, which changed the trajectory of his life forever and was a devastating loss to me. So I included parts of Rob's story in my book to resist that erasure of him and his truth and to honour him.
In the book you reflect on the concept of blood memory. What is blood memory and your relationship to it?
Blood memory is the knowledge that is present in us both spiritually and genetically. It's our ability to know things without ever having consciously learned them. So I had a number of moments in my childhood that I recall vividly when I knew how to do something without ever having been taught or shown, like weave a mat out of reeds, for example.
Or when I clearly had beliefs that were unlike the rest of the family members that I was growing up with, that I now see were aligned with Métis core values and ways of thinking. In fact, later on, after I'd met my birth family, I remember sharing some of these stories of disconnection with my oldest sister and her simply saying to me, "You were thinking like a Métis."
When you spoke to your birth mother for the very first time, she mentioned the parallels between your life and the life of your family. Can you tell me more about that?
I come from a family of writers. For instance, my grandmother is a celebrated Métis writer, Marie Therese Goulet Courchaine. I have always loved to write and I've been a musician. When I met my family and we were just sharing information and stories about what we'd been up to for, you know, 38 years, I sent my mother some CDs that I'd been part of recording. She sent back CDs recorded by my brother and his band and my uncle and his band.
I can't even tell you how profound and just joyful it was to realize that in many ways, in much of my life, I had been living a parallel life that was still in some ways connected to the lives of my birth family members.
I had been living a parallel life that was still in some ways connected to the lives of my birth family members.
- Andrea Currie
You were 38 when this journey of reconnecting with your birth family began. What place do you see this book in that journey?
I have had the opportunity to do a lot of healing in the 26 years since I found my family and to really do some of the work of integrating all of this. It's a lot, as you can imagine. And so this book really isn't for me.
This book was written to contribute to the conversation that I think needs to happen in our country, and in particular, it's written for other Sixties Scoop survivors so that we don't feel alone. I want other Sixties Scoop people to be able to find things to read or stories to hear and to connect with that help them feel less alone.
