When I was 12, I buried my father alive. I dont mean that literally, but sometimes it feels like it. I used to tell people that he was dead. That truth was more digestible and less tragic for people to accept than reality. I imagined him in a burial ground, one of the unmarked ones found at residential school sites, yet buried deep within me. Its a type of grief that I carry with me as I analyze all the systems that destroyed us.

When I was younger, I didnt think in terms of systems just experiences. When I was in college, my father having been removed from my life for years, I started questioning my family history and how my father could have done what he did and began researching the Sixties Scoop.

The Sixties Scoop refers to child welfare policies in Canada from the 1950s to the 80s that forcefully removed tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their families (usually without consent), placing them in white foster homes. My paternal grandfather was one of those children. During my research, I stumbled across a type of personal ad in a newspaper: A boy named Arthur, who was reportedly taken during this movement, was up for adoption. Some childrens names were then changed so that their relatives couldnt find them, and to this day people are reconnecting with their long-lost relatives.

The Adopt Indian and Mtis (AIM) program administrators believed that if the children were removed from their homes early enough, they wouldnt imprint as Indigenous people. John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada and a key proponent of creating and disseminating the residential school system, told the House of Commons in 1883 :

When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.

AIM enforced the belief of Macdonald, creating what is considered a tragic chapter of the Sixties Scoop, further severing Indigenous family ties after the era of residential schools. Families were displaced and disrupted, and the tradition of passing down oral history, language and legends was severed.

When the children were taken, our ties to our identity were ruptured, and that loss still reverberates today. Much like the residential school system, the Sixties Scoop was part of a broader plan to kill the Indian in the child.

But did they kill the Indian in the child, or did they kill something else entirely?

When I read Arthurs ad, which appeared in Canadas Regina Leader-Post newspaper on Nov. 14, 1972, I saw that young boy, and I couldnt help but think of my grandfather. Did he and his siblings have pictures of themselves in newspapers somewhere, too? I think of my father and the disruption in my family. I think of the intergenerational trauma that trickled into my life like the cycle of water. If the residential schools were the groundwater, then the Sixties Scoop would be transpiration, and my father, the direct descendant of a Scoop victim, would be the cloud.

Was I the rain? Releasing all of these inherited violences through my words?

I am a Cree, a Mtis, and I also occupy white spaces in cities. People ask me what I am on a weekly basis. They refer to me as the exotic one and racially ambiguous. But if you are Native, you can recognize me instantly. I was conceived in the Canadian Rockies and ran through canola fields in the plains, and now my feet walk through the bricked buildings of New York City. I am an Indian, a Native, an Aboriginal, an Indigenous. I am a smudger, a listening student, a dreamcatcher weaver, a drum maker, a girl in a sweat and a storyteller.