Red River Métis man switched at birth receives MMF citizenship

Edward Ambrose is presented his Red River Métis citizen card from Manitoba Métis Federation President David Chartrand. (February 14th, 2024)

SOURCE:  https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/red-river-metis-man-switched-birth-receives-mmf-citizenship

The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF) has welcomed Edward Ambrose as a Red River Métis citizen.

Ambrose, now 68, and another man—Richard Beauvais—were born on the same day in a rural Manitoba hospital and were sent home with each other’s parents.

While Beauvais would be raised as Red River Métis, Ambrose was raised by Beauvais’ biological Ukrainian family.  It wouldn’t be until much later in their lives that they would learn the truth of their identities.

“We read about this story last year and were heartbroken for both men,” said MMF President David Chartrand.  He met with Ambrose, his daughter Eileen and his biological sister Leona, on Feb. 13, when Ambrose received his citizenship card from MMF.  

“This is a tragedy for both families. Giving Edward his citizenship card does not change what happened to him when he was born, but it does give him a chance to look toward a better and brighter future with his people… Welcome home,” said Chartrand in a press statement.

Ambrose said he was honoured to be a MMF citizen.

“My identity is something I lost a long time ago.  I’m 68 now, so being welcomed into the Red River Métis family really touches my heart. I am proud to be with my family, and it feels so powerful and meaningful to receive my card. I will always love my other family too, but I feel like this is where I belong—where I have always belonged.” 

Beauvais, however, has experienced the loss of his Red River Métis identity.

“We extend our sympathies and offer our support if he ever needs us, and wish the best to him and his beloved family,” said Chartrand.

“Our citizens know that many people have been denied their rightful place in our Nation for a variety of reasons, from the Sixties Scoop to residential and day school systems, to the shame and fear that was put into our people by the way Canada treated us in the past, Chartrand said.

“I know (Ambrose) will be embraced by our community, and we will help Edward and his daughter Eileen make up for the time they lost. We will introduce them to our values, our culture, our music and our people. There is so much love and acceptance waiting for Edward and his daughter, and I look forward to seeing them thrive.” 

Dream Teachings

👉PLEASE READ:  In a previous story for Windspeaker titled Reincarnation and the interconnectedness of past lives, Giihlgiigaa (60s Scoop adoptee) explained that after death we return to ‘that village back there.’

Dream teachings: Connecting with Spirit

 

By Odette Auger, Windspeaker Buffalo Spirit Reporter

Haida storyteller and cedar weaver Giihlgiigaa, Todd DeVries, is Tsiij Git'anne (Eagle) clan, Old Massett.  Along with cedar weaving, he teaches how people can use dreams as a powerful tool, both sleeping dreams and waking dreams.

In a previous story for Windspeaker titled Reincarnation and the interconnectedness of past lives, Giihlgiigaa explained that after death we return to ‘that village back there.’

“That ‘village back there,’ or void, is that space between everything, between the molecules, between atoms, between universes,” he tells Windspeaker.

“That's what scientists are trying to call dark matter or dark energy. Scientists say there's something there, but in our view, there's nothing there,” explained Giihlgiigaa. “But scientists still can't believe it. There's got to be something there, right?”

March was Full Crow Moon

“But recall that the void, the darkness, from darkness comes light,” he said. “So we [Haida] call that Raven. Raven is everywhere, but nowhere, yet brought everything into being.”

That void is referred to as the fourth dimension, said Giihlgiigaa.

“When you go into the fourth dimension, there's no need, no relevance to distance anymore. Time is irrelevant because time is a factor of distance and space. That's a formula, so it's not really a dimension in our view,” he explained.

“In most Indigenous views, time is irrelevant in the fourth dimension, and that's where we go when we dream. That's where we go when we die.”

“When we dream and when we die, both can be used to connect with ancestors and receive guidance,” Giihlgiigaa said.

There are four stages of sleeping and they are very similar to the four stages of dying, said Giihlgiigaa.

“First your body goes a little stiff or it gets heavy.” Then “your breathing slows down. It gets harder to breathe through your nose, so you breathe through your mouth.”

“So you got the dissolution of air, the dissolution of fire, dissolution of water, dissolution of earth,” explained Giihlgiigaa. Your body temperature “begins to drop a couple of degrees. And that's why we have a blanket. Then your breathing drops and you're slowing down for the night.” “It's exactly the same stages when you're going—when you're dying. So that's how we dream and how we go through the Spirit World,” he explained.

Reconnecting with Haida dreaming

Giihlgiigaa was one of the Sixties Scoop children, and it wasn’t until he was an adult that he reconnected with his Haida mom, family, and culture.

When he met his mom, he began to dream.

“I started having these wild dreams when I found my mom, all very prophetic. Everything I dreamt about those first two weeks after meeting my mom has been happening for the last 25 years.”

“Everything's aligned right up, just like a prophecy, almost déja vu dreaming,” he said.

While some cultures use psychedelic plant medicines to access visions or guidance, the Haida have other tools, said Giihlgiigaa.

“We don't have any psychedelics up in Haida,” Giihlgiigaa said. “We have mushrooms, but they were never used in ceremony. There's no stories of them being used in ceremony.”

“We have a different way of attaining that dream state,” he said.

“For one, everyone knew it was very common to have dreams, but not everyone dreamt every day because people had to get work done.”

So it was usually the Spirit man that did all the dreaming, Giihlgiigaa said. “You would have visions and he would see things that might happen before they happen and be able to warn the people and make proper decisions to change course.”

Plant medicine, dream aids

Some plant medicines are a cleansing tool, and Giihlgiigaa says one of the most common was Devil's Club, “because it acts like an herbal cleanse. It washes out all the toxins in your body.”

“You do a herbal cleanse once every other month, or four times a year, whatever, twice a year,” he said. Once a body doesn't have all these toxins “inhibiting all your spiritual senses, then you'll have better dreams and you'll be remembering your dreams every night.”

Dreaming is a very powerful tool to guide us, said Giihlgiigaa.

“Every night, even though you may not remember your dreams, you're dreaming and you're planning your next nine months of life. What you're going to do every day.”

“So one night you'd be planning on two weeks. ‘I'll do this next night. Oh, three months down the road, I got to do this’,” he explained. “Before you know it, you're doing those things that you dream about. You have to dream it before you manifest it.”

“Western culture doesn't give dreams a lot of credit,” he said. “It's been pounded out of us.”

There are plant medicines that can be used as dream aids, ”so we can go talk to the Ancestors ‘in the village back there’.”

Giihlgiigaa explained we can ask the Ancestors “if they can guide us through the twists and turns of the pathways to our goals.”

While Devil's Club is the tried and true one, Giihlgiigaa said there is another medicine found all across the country in swamps.

“The swampy, marshy, boggy areas. The name of this plant, ts'áhla, is a word that we use for sinker. The sinker you put on the hook,” said Giihlgiigaa.

“So when you put the bait on the hook, the sinker will take the bait down to the depths of the water where you can't see,” he said.

Ts'áhla is also the word for pillow. “So why would all those three things have the same name? What's the concept here? Haida is a very conceptual language. We try to use one concept to describe many things,” he said.

“That sinker takes the bait to another dimension. We can't see it down there. We know there's fish down there somewhere. And then when your head hits the pillow, your mind goes to another dimension. It dreams, right?”

“So when you make a medicine from that plant, it takes your mind to another dimension so your body can heal,” Giihlgiigaa said.

In English, he says, the plant is called Sweet Gale “and it's a dream key that will help you remember your dreams,” to help impact the length and strength of dreams, so they can be remembered more frequently, he said.

“Dreams are your Spirit talking to you in the dream world, and most people are separated from the Spirit. They call that their inner child because they haven't really given it any attention and haven't really guided it and worked on their spiritual powers. So it's kind of like a child yet not grown up,” he explained.

“Once we start giving it more and more attention, it'll merge with our waking brain and we'll be one again,” said Giihlgiigaa. “It might look like you’re looking back at yourself, but you’re not exiting yourself.”

“Spirit just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Giihlgiigaa. “You are Spirit.”

 

👉Editor’s Note: It’s important to be well informed about any plant medicine that you choose to use and how it will affect your own body. Do your own research.

Our plant guide Carrie Armstrong shared some plant picking tips in a previous column:

When picking plants for your own use, please pick with care, ensuring you correctly identify the plant prior to use. Take only what you need. Break leaves, flowers, stems off gently as opposed to pulling out by roots.

Please be aware that you pick in a safe, chemical-free area and know that some plants can be toxic at certain times of year. Do not gather any endangered species of plants.

In some Indigenous cultures, tobacco is offered to Mother Earth as a way of showing gratitude for the medicines.

SOURCE: https://windspeaker.com/buffalo-spirit/dream-teachings-connecting-spirit

 

Coping with Anger | Wenecwtsin, Wayne Christian’s Secwepemctsín name, means “big voice that speaks truth”

 READ: https://windspeaker.com/buffalo-spirit/ask-water-help-you-cope-anger

 

Buffalo Spirit

Coping with anger Wenecwstin knows a thing or two about anger. He’s walked with it his whole life. As a child he was taken from his mother, family and community during the Sixties Scoop. But he’s learned a few things as a person who has embraced ceremony and a traditional way of being after reconnecting to his home. He shares with us some of what he knows about anger and how to cope with it.

Senate Committee shocked by difficulties faced gathering residential school records from Catholic Church

 October 26th, 2023 

Saskatchewan Treaty Commissioner Mary Musqua-Culbertson

 

By Shari Narine | Local Journalism Initiative Reporter | Windspeaker.com

Saskatchewan Treaty Commissioner Mary Musqua-Culbertson didn’t mince words when she spoke to members of the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples Oct. 25 about the difficulty in accessing Catholic Church records for Indigenous residential schools.

Not only has her office come up against barriers in trying to acquire student records for four of the former Indian residential schools in the Prince Albert diocese, but staff had to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for 21 years in order to access the diocese records they were told were housed at St. Paul University in Ottawa. However, she says, Prince Albert diocese records were never found there.

“Who specifically asks for a 21-year NDA? Who within their organization needs to die within that 21 years that is being protected?” asked Musqua-Culbertson, a lawyer who added that 21 years is not a usual timeframe.

“There is still people who are responsible for sexual abuse and deaths that are still alive that are still out there and they’re walking about within our institutions and in churches and in religious organizations. I do believe that religious organizations are there to protect religious organizations and the people within them,” she said.

Musqua-Culbertson drew the connection between persons of interest (POI) who were named by survivors during the Independent Assessment Process (IAP). The IAP was used as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), signed in 2006. Through the IAP, survivors had to recount how they were sexually or physically abused in order to receive compensation beyond what the base common experience payment was.

Musqua-Culbertson served as legal counsel during the IAP.

“So you have these vast lists of POIs. Where is that database? Could that be a database? Because POIs are still protected…Those are people who were named as abusers,” she said.

She also pointed out that the IAP records will be destroyed unless survivors state otherwise.

Musqua-Culbertson recounted numerous incidents where the diocese gave her staff difficulties as they tried to access residential school records, including promising to release records and then reneging on those promises.

“When we come back up against this (many) barriers when it comes to the graves of missing children, it’s very disheartening,” she said.

The Office of the Treaty Commissioner of Saskatchewan officially built its library and archives in 2020, although documents began to be collected in 1989. In the past few years, the office has started to collect documents and church records relating to the four Indian residential schools of Delmas (west of Thunderchild First Nation), St. Anthony’s (Onion Lake Cree Nation), Beauval (English River La Plonge Reserve) and St. Michael’s (Beardy’s and Okemasis and One Arrow First Nations).

Raymond Frogner, head archivist for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), also recounted the frustrations involved with working with the Catholic Church. Centre researchers are combing through the oblate records housed at Société historique de Saint-Boniface (Manitoba) and Deschâtelets-NDC Archives (Quebec).

“We….are currently funding researchers to go into their archive, go through their records and tell them what records they have that they’ve been holding for decades. Tell them which ones are actually relevant to residential schools…They’re also asking us to pay for the digitization of those records because they aren’t digitized,” said Frogner.

“We all know the Catholic Church did not pay the compensation that they originally were assigned to pay up for the IRSSA.”

Four churches were signatories to the settlement agreement.  While the Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches have paid their agreed-upon negotiated amounts, the Catholic Church has fallen well short.

Frogner said that the archive at the NCTR held approximately four million records largely focused on the daily administration and operation of the schools.

“There is not a single one of the 141 schools that were part of IRSS agreement …that has a complete set of admission records, discharge records or quarterly returns. This is because, partly, the quality of record keeping was abysmal, to put it lightly,” he said.

Frogner recommended moving away from the legal perspective set out for the records to start to search the more expansive Indian residential school experience.

He suggested documentation be collected from five different fields.

Education would document curriculum, development and staffing at the schools, along with a focus on evangelical curriculum development and projects undertaken by the protestant and Catholic missionaries.

He pointed to health care records, much of which fell under provincial jurisdiction. Disease and pandemics forced children from the schools to hospitals where many died.

He noted that records are being held up in the court system because of ongoing or pending legal action. While court proceedings prevented the release of the records, Frogner said, a file list could be requested and then the records acquired when they were no longer restricted by the court.

A list could also be made of where records are being held in semi-active disposition awaiting processing within government offices or Library and Archives Canada, which would eventually be acquired by the National Truth and Reconciliation Centre.

Frogner’s proposed wider expanse could get limited support from the new Residential School Documents Advisory Committee headed by former Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme. The committee has been mandated to work with federal government departments and agencies to scope out their documents in order to identify which are to be transitioned to the NCTR.

Cadmus Delorme

Delorme told the Senate Committee there are “grey areas” when it comes to which records the committee can transition. Records that deal with the 141 Indian residential schools acknowledged through the IRSSA are the targets. Other documents, like hospital records or records in the justice system, both of which will identify children, are not included in the committee’s “main mandate.”

However, Delorme said, “we can identify on the sideline other things that are going on because there will probably be other mandates similar to what we are doing. So let’s make sure we identify those (other records).”

Healthcare records were part of the work undertaken by Anne Panasuk, who was mandated for two years by the Secretariat for Relations with First Nations and Inuit of Quebec, as special advisor for support for families of missing children.

Panasuk told the committee about Bill 79, the Quebec legislation adopted in 2021 that gave Indigenous families the ability to get information about their children who went missing from health institutions in Quebec in the 1950s to the 1980s. This included children who were sent from residential schools to healthcare facilities.

The bill, said Panasuk, “unlocks medical archives and religious archives and it forces institutions to provide medical files…It bypasses the act of protecting information for the health department. Some religious organizations managed hospitals in the past—the diocese, the parishes, the cemeteries. So all these institutions are now obligated to provide information requested by the family.”

However, she said, as the bill is provincial, families do not have access to the records of children who were transferred to health institutions outside of Quebec.

Panasuk suggested that similar bills be adopted by other provinces and territories.

Musqua-Culbertson also suggested legislation that could be useful in addressing “when there is protectionism and when there is barriers put in place.”

Senator David Arnot

Senator David Arnot, former chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission and federal treaty commissioner, referred to what the Senate Committee had heard as a “litany of frustration with the non-compliance truculent stonewalling purposeful barriers” that was being faced by those trying to gather records from the Catholic Church.

What the Senate Committee heard Oct. 25 was in direct contrast with what they were told on Sept. 27 by Father Ken Thorson, provincial superior of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) Lacombe Canada.

See our story here: https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/senator-digging-delay-res…

Thorson said that since the 215 unmarked graves had been identified at Kamloops Indian Residential School, the Catholic Church’s “commitment has been renewed and strengthened” to work with researchers and survivors.

However, Arnot called what they had heard from Musqua-Culbertson and Frogner of their interactions with the Catholic Church as “incomprehensible conduct.”

Other senators described the testimony as “disturbing”, “appalling”, and “shocking.”

The Senate Committee, chaired by Mi’kmaw Senator Brian Francis from Prince Edward Island, is holding a series of hearings as follow-up to recommendations included in their interim report, Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation, released last July.

That report was the result of hearings that took place in March where the Senate Committee heard from representatives from the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, and the NCTR about the difficulty in accessing records that could be used to either identify children who died at Indian residential schools or locate where they were buried.

The Senate Committee has invited specific witnesses to answer questions on why all residential school documents have not been disclosed. 

Windspeaker is owned and operated by the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta, an independent, not-for-profit communications organization.

source: https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/senate-committee-shocked-difficulties-faced-gathering-residential-school

Author’s seminal novel remains relevant even after 40 years

“We knew people don't like us, but we don't know why it could be. You know, because we're brownish and because we're foster kids.” — Beatrice Mosionier, author of In Search of April Raintree

 

By Shari Narine
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Windspeaker.com

 

Little did Beatrice Mosionier expect that her first novel, In Search of April Raintree, would have such a profound impact on Indigenous readership.

But perhaps she should have.

When she was seven or eight years old, she was working in the basement of her second foster home in St. Norbert, a suburb of Winnipeg.

“I got this really powerful knowledge, and it was that I would have these three animals that would guide me: The wolf, the bear and the cougar,” said Mosionier, a Plains Métis woman.

“Later when I finally started talking about it with other people, I was told about guide animals, spirit animals, that give you strength… And it was like I was going to do something special in my life.”

She forgot about the spirit animals until she hit her thirties. In 1980, when Mosionier was 31, her oldest sister Katherine committed suicide. Sixteen years before, her other sister Vivian had taken her own life.

“It was just like things were shifting inside of me. I think that's probably how I came to decide I was going to write a book, and I think that was what led up to this,” said Mosionier.

But when she wrote In Search of April Raintree in 1983, Mosionier never believed it would be published.

Forty years later, Highwater Press is releasing a special 40th anniversary edition of the novel.

Mosionier and her siblings were apprehended in the earliest years of the Sixties Scoop, which saw an estimated 20,000 or more Indigenous children removed from their homes between 1951 and 1984.

Mosionier was taken at the age of three by the Children’s Aid Society of Winnipeg. The loss that resulted from that action was the story she told in the lives of April Raintree and the fictional younger sister Cheryl.

It was a story that resonated mightily with Métis and First Nations readers, as noted in words of praise that accompany the anniversary edition.

“In Search of April Raintree was the first book I read that spoke to the Indigenous experience, and it changed me for the better,” wrote Governor General Award winner David A. Robertson.

“I could feel it in my blood memory. Because it was tender and brutal, authentic and unapologetic, heartbreaking and hopeful,” wrote Rosanna Deerchild, host of CBC Radio One’s Unreserved.

“Reading Beatrice Mosionier’s seminal novel was lifechanging. As a young Indigenous woman, it was the first time I felt seen,” wrote Manitoba NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine.

Those words make Mosionier feel “really humbled.”

She wrote the book “to find answers,” spurred on by the deaths of her sisters.

“I think that’s really hard on a parent…When you lose a child to suicide and then you lose a second child to suicide, there's something majorly wrong,” said Mosionier.

In writing the novel, Mosionier gained personal insight into her own family and into the larger picture of being Métis.

“I was raised in white foster homes since I was three years old. I wasn't connected to—back then we used to call it the Native—Native people,” she said.

“I did get more understandings about the why and everything. Because when I grew up, we didn't know words like ‘oppression’ and ‘racism’ and all the things like that when we're in school…We knew people don't like us, but we don't know why it could be. You know, because we're brownish and because we're foster kids.”

Along with telling the personal stories of April and Cheryl, heartbreaking and uplifting, in turn, Mosionier used Cheryl’s essay writing talent in the book to tell the wider proud Métis history.

Mosionier had to research for Cheryl’s essays. She started watching a Winnipeg television series that had interviews with Indigenous people. Her next-door neighbour, who wasn’t Indigenous, gave her a book by Heather Robertson titled Reservations are for Indians.

“I read that book and then I had a fairly good sense, because back then we didn't have computers and Google and all of that,” she said.

After her book was published, she discovered that St. Norbert had a rich Métis history. She also learned that her father used to play the fiddle.

“I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know. I just didn't know anything positive,” said Mosionier.

While there are brutal scenes in the novel, perhaps the most haunting scene comes in April’s realization near the end, which echoes the words of her broken father: “Baby Anna. Such a small part of our lives. Yet she had changed our lives the most.”

It is when Baby Anna is sick and goes to the hospital that April and Cheryl are wrongfully apprehended, and that single action sets in motion everything that follows.

Forty years later, Indigenous children are still being apprehended at a disproportionate rate.

“In Search of April Raintree is one of the all-time great works of Indigenous literature, and it is still as vital and relevant today as it was forty years ago,” wrote Dr. Warren Cariou, a professor at the University of Manitoba.

Mosionier agrees with Cariou’s observation about the relevance of her novel.

But, “I kind of feel sometimes that (the novel) didn't do its job because a lot has changed but a lot has not changed, and sometimes you think it's getting worse,” she said.

If her novel opened the gates for other Indigenous authors, Mosionier says, “I feel good about that.”

And she encourages Indigenous authors to keep doing their strong work, many of whom are now being recognized with awards.

As for her spirit animals who told her she would do something special in her life, Mosionier firmly believes writing In Search of April Raintree was that act.

The special 40th anniversary edition of the novel will be released by Highwater Press in September.

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada. SOURCE