Book review: Love, loss and finding your people in Métis memoir

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Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves

Andrea Currie  |  Arsenal Pulp Press

266pp | $24.95

“Neither European or First Nation, the Métis were referred to by the Cree as O-tee-paym-soo-wuk, the people who own themselves.” Kelly Saunders, “No Other Weapon: Métis Political Organization and Governance in Canada.

Reader, imagine armed police and implacable social workers breaking into your home to steal your children. Or imagine being one of the babies stolen and taken away to live among strangers, far from your home and your people.  For Indigenous people, this is not just a scary thought experiment. For the far too many who suffered under a brutal system of child theft known as the Sixties Scoop, this was the agonizing reality of their lives. Andrea Currie was one of those stolen children, and Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of how she found her way home and reclaimed her Métis identity. This is a must-read book for anyone who cares about truth and reconciliation on the broken ground some call Canada, some Turtle Island.

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According to the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential  School History and Dialogue Centre, “Between approximately 1951 and 1984, an estimated 20,000 or more First Nations, Métis and Inuit infants and children were taken from their families by child welfare authorities and placed for adoption in mostly non-Indigenous households.”

According to the Sixties Scoop Settlement website, by October of 2024,  21,210 survivors of the Scoop had successfully applied for settlement payments for the damage done to them. But money can only do so much to heal the stolen children, their parents, and  their extended communities. Many survivors, including the author of this remarkable memoir, suffered the crippling impacts of cultural genocide and their healing remains an open ended and unfinished process.

It is hard to wrap the mind around the heart-numbing statistics. The stories of individual survivors and families are necessary to really grasp what was done to Indigenous children, and to recognize it was done in our names during the Sixties Scoop and the long shameful history of Canada’s attempts to “kill the Indian in the child.” That’s where brave  accounts like Finding Otipemisiwak come in. The author only began her process of return when she was 38 and connected with her birth mother. She has since embraced her Métis roots and trained as a therapist, a skill she dedicates to working with other Indigenous survivors.

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Currie and her cherished brother Rob, another Métis adoptee, suffered cruelty and rejection in their new home in the white suburbs of Winnipeg, and knew the comfort of loving each other; her memoir is dedicated to his memory.

This is a book every Canadian should read.

Highly recommended.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net

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