Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation

Copyright © 2024 by The Honourable Murray Sinclair I.P.C., OM

Hardcover edition published 2024

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Who we are / Murray Sinclair, Sara Sinclair.

Names: Sinclair, Murray, 1951- author. | Sinclair, Sara, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240309170 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240309251 | ISBN 9780771099106 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780771099120 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Sinclair, Murray, 1951- | LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Canada. | LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Canada—Social conditions. | LCSH: Canada—Race relations. | LCSH: Canada—Ethnic relations. | LCSH: Indigenous men—Canada—Identity. | CSH: Ojibway—Biography. | CSH: First Nations legislators—Biography. | CSH: First Nations judges—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC E78.C2 S56 2024 | DDC 971.004/97—dc23

What We’ve Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation is a public domain document originally published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2015.

Cover design by Matthew Flute

Cover art by Galit Rodan

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

a Penguin Random House Company

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

a_prh_7.0_148359085_c0_r0

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

Why am I here?

Who am I?

Acknowledgments

A Note on Method

What we have learned: principles of truth and reconciliation

What we have learned: Principles of truth and reconciliation

Introduction

The history

The legacy

Reconciliation

About the Authors

This memoir is dedicated to my family and all the Elders and Wisdom Keepers whose love and influences have helped me become the person I am.

Introduction

In order for indigenous societies to function properly, they must raise and educate children so that they can answer what Elders from all walks and cultures in the world call the great questions of life. These questions are:

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

Why am I here?

Who am I?

Children need to know their personal story. We all need to know the stories of our parents and our grandparents, our direct and indirect ancestors, and our real and mythological villains and heroes. As part of that story, we also need to know about the story of the community of people to which we are attached—our collective story—all the way back to our place in the creation of this world.

We all have a creation story, and we all need to know what it is.

We also need to know where we are going. Knowing where you’re going is not just about where you are going to be next week, or next year, or in twenty-five years. It is also about what happens to us when we die. It’s about the spirit world, and life after death. It’s about belief, faith, and hope.

Knowing why you are here is also related to the other two questions. But the answer to this third question is also about knowing what role you play in the world, including in your community of people. It’s about knowing whether your purpose is fulfilled through being an artist, or a leader or a warrior or a caregiver or a healer or a helper. Clan teachings and naming ceremonies in my own culture provide answers about that, but the answer to that question is also influenced by knowing what your family and community need, and then filling that need, and feeling the satisfaction that is derived from that.

The fourth question, Who am I?, is the most important, because it is the one that we are always asking and always answering. It is the constant question. It is influenced by everything and everyone. We fight to maintain the answer we like, and we fight to change and improve the answer we don’t. We strive to attain the perfect answer by the time we die, not realizing that in fact there is no right or wrong answer. It is a question about understanding our life. It is about identity. It is about what you have become, but it is also about what you want to become. In many ways, the answer to this question derives from knowing the answers to the other three questions. If one of them is unanswered or the answer is in doubt, then this question remains unfulfilled. Your life is not in balance.

For children in residential schools, these questions went unfulfilled. The answers that they were forced to accept ran counter to much of the knowledge they already carried from their early lives as children in their own families and communities. In my culture, as is true for all others, your first teacher is your mother, and your first classroom is your family home. What you learn in those formative years influences you for life, and as you grow, you look for things that reinforce what you learned from your mother, or your grandmother, or your uncles and aunties. Indian residential schools denied all that and tried to squash that curiosity.

The schools were about changing the identities of Indigenous children, but they were doomed to failure. Not only were they delivered with an assimilative agenda, not only did they breed violence, sickness, and death, but they were hypocritical in their essence, teaching a core message that contradicted the information bred in families and communities and inconsistent with the identity children were told they must take on. For every single residential school student, it is impossible to become a white man when a brown face stares back at you in the mirror.

But that only explains one side of the issue. There are others as well. The way that we have all been educated in this country—Indigenous children in residential schools and Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in public and private schools—has brought us to where we are today: to a point where the psychological and emotional well-being of Aboriginal children has been harmed, and the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people has been seriously damaged. This is so not just in terms of what was taught (or not taught) about residential schools, but also in terms of what Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have been taught about each other. And while schools, textbooks, and curricula may have changed over the past century and a half, the core lesson is still the same: Indigenous peoples are inferior and come from deficient communities while Canadians are superior and come from communities with all the answers.

Of all of society’s institutions, education has brought us to the current state of poor relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; but if it is education that created this mess, it will be education that will get us out of it. We know that making things better will not happen overnight. It will take generations. That’s how the damage was created and that’s how the damage will be fixed. But if we agree on the objective of reconciliation, and agree to work together, the work we do today will immeasurably strengthen the social fabric of Canada tomorrow.

Many have heard stories about the horrific abuse suffered at the hands of those who ran residential schools. These are true, legitimate, and frankly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to listen to. But physical and sexual abuse were not the only forms of abuse nor the only sources of trauma. All children who went to the schools were damaged there, many without even realizing it. The separation from parents at such a young age, being subjected to a climate of fear, of loneliness, of hostility and of oppression, would have been enough to cause enormous personal damage to any child, especially when combined with the children’s long-term institutionalization and isolation from family. Such matters dominate the testimony of survivors when they discuss the schools.

Even during the so-called good stories of residential schools—like during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when we heard about how some survivors felt that the schools took them from violent or neglectful home environments and gave them opportunities they would never have otherwise had—we must remember that we are talking about home environments largely created by the legacy of residential schools. Virtually all of the living survivors of residential schools today are invariably intergenerational survivors, the children of parents who went to the schools. It’s also completely inappropriate to use the single experience of a survivor—or if they learned a skill, a sport, or had a good relationship with a teacher—to justify the schools as anything but genocidal in nature. It’s simply illogical to give residential schools credit as saviours when, in the eyes of the Indigenous community, they are the primary perpetrators of trauma.

Residential schools have now been closed for at least one generation—they had pretty much closed by the 1990s—but the legacy of those schools is very much alive. It lives on in the daily experiences of the survivors in this country. It lives on in their attitudes about themselves and in the opportunities that are and are not open to them. It lives on in their children who do not know their languages, or their cultures, and who were denied the chance to gain a sense of self-respect from schools that constantly portrayed their people as savages, heathens, uncivilized, treacherous, sneaky, dishonest, thieving, and irrelevant. It lives on in the lives of Aboriginal parents who spent years living in institutions where they would never have learned to parent properly, and were denied the chance to observe and receive positive parenting from their own parents or to participate in any kind of normal family life. And it lives on in the lives of the children and grandchildren of those parents.

It lives on in the lives of Indigenous people—and non-Indigenous people too—who don’t know much about where they come from, where they are going, why they are here, and who they are. This is why Indigenous languages, ceremonies, and teachings found in our communities are so essential. Non-Indigenous peoples cannot answer Indigenous questions, but they can help facilitate a path in understanding how connected, interdependent, and human we all are and can be. In the same vein, non-Indigenous peoples don’t know that their identities and cultures are partly created by their connections with Indigenous peoples, or that working with Indigenous communities is the most important journey Canada (and, frankly, the world) must take. This is why the creation of strong, healthy, and vibrant Indigenous communities is the only path to reconciliation for all peoples.

A great accumulation of damage has been done to Indigenous cultures, languages, families, and communities by residential schools. But it isn’t just residential schools that bear the blame. The public schools of today do as well. A great deal of damage has been done to the relationship between Indigenous people and all other Canadians because non-Indigenous people have been educated not to respect Aboriginal people. Sadly, even in our public schools, Indigenous children have been taught about this country, about themselves, and about their place in the world in a manner which has caused them shame and humiliation. If you don’t believe this, then you do not understand the implications of suicide epidemics, ongoing poverty, and the continual rise in dropout rates of Indigenous children in all schooling in this country.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission visited hundreds of communities and heard thousands of statements. In almost every community where non-Indigenous people were in the audience, one or more people came up to me and said, I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. I attended school in this province, high school, university even, and I didn’t know any of this. I had my entire schooling in this province and I was never taught a thing about Indian residential schools or the laws that were passed to maintain them.

Most Canadians were taught little or nothing about the Indian residential schools. But they were probably taught something, one way or another, about the history of Canada and the role of Indigenous peoples in that history. They were probably taught, for instance, that the history of Canada began in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, or when John Cabot and Jacques Cartier landed on a small piece of land in the east and claimed the entire place for a foreign power. Nation-building has been the main theme of Canada’s history curricula for a long time, and Aboriginal people—with a few notable exceptions trotted out as if to prove the rule—have been portrayed in textbooks as bystanders, or obstacles, to the enterprise of nation-building.

Many of today’s leading and prominent Canadians attended school and university in an era long before educational authorities began to take their first critical look at curricula as it relates to Indigenous peoples. That education has influenced each and every one of us. As an Indigenous student, it denied me any sense of pride about the role of my ancestors in the history of this part of the world. For my non-Indigenous classmates, it taught them that we were wild and savage and uncivilized, and that given the conditions of Aboriginal people in modern society, we had not advanced very far from that state. My non-Indigenous classmates were taught to be proud of the accomplishments of their ancestors in taming this wild country and wresting it from the savages and establishing this wonderful nation known as Canada.

My education lacked relevance for me, and this was so despite my success at it. That success came at a price. It taught me and others that my people were irrelevant, and, by implication, it caused me to feel that I was too. It taught us to believe in the inferiority of Aboriginal people and in the inherent superiority of white European civilization, and in order to get the grades that I did, I was compelled to repeat that unconscious mantra. The system of my day did not teach us to respect Indigenous people because it never told us anything about the Aboriginal presence in this country that showed the humanity of the people. In public schools, we were all educated to be the same, and if we rebelled, resisted, or rejected that process, we were weeded out or we weeded ourselves out. Of the Indigenous students I started grade school with, few ever graduated from high school. Even my brother and sister did not. But while I and others succeeded in that system, it was not without cost to our own humanity and our sense of self-respect. These are the legacies all of us find ourselves in today.

WHERE DO I COME FROM?

He was just a kid—likely more inclined to checking car doors to see if they were unlocked than robbing someone. But here he was, suddenly popping out of the dark from behind a telephone pole, so small he could easily hide behind it.

Gimme your fuckin’ money! he commanded, in as deep a voice as he could muster.

I didn’t normally park in the lane behind my office, especially in the winter when it got dark early. I preferred the underground parkade at the courthouse, where I had an assigned spot. It made it easier to leave when I finished presiding over a long case load and listening to lawyers argue in front of me all day. That morning I had driven my truck to work though, and it was far too tall to fit in the parkade, so the lane it was. It was not too cold for a Manitoba winter’s day, but I had still started the truck from my office window to warm it up before I went out.

That’s probably how he knew I was coming.

Excuse me? I asked him, although I knew perfectly well what was going on.

I had never been robbed before, besides the time Wally Sinclair took ten cents from me on my way to school in grade 2 after pushing me down and going through my pockets—a story for later.

I told you: gimme your fuckin’ money!

The kid had his right hand in his pocket, and pushed it forward for emphasis. I looked at him closely. I had plans to describe him accurately for the police. I couldn’t make out his features, though. He wasn’t looking at me but around, checking to see if anyone was noticing what was happening.

It was a dark and cold Manitoba day, though. It was just the two of us.

I stared hard at him for a few seconds, and then realized something.

You don’t recognize me, do you?

I took off my hat to give him a better look.

He stared at me for a few seconds, and then realization dawned on his face.

Oh, shit!

You were on my docket a few weeks ago, for running away. I gave you a break. What the hell are you doing this for?

When he appeared before me, the police had charged him for resisting arrest and escape. He had been caught running away from his foster home and, while in the police cruiser, had squirmed past the plastic shield between the front and back seats and taken off again. He was skinny, lanky, and smart. Appearing in my courtroom, he pleaded to the charge of running away from his foster placement, and the Crown stayed the more serious Criminal Code charge.

I had asked him why he had run away. He told me that there were two older and bigger boys in the house who used him as a punching bag. He was constantly scared. He didn’t know where to go but he didn’t want to get beaten up again.

There was no way I was going back, he said to me.

I granted him a discharge and told his social worker to find him a safer place to stay, giving the agency twenty-four hours to do so. I didn’t expect to see him again. But here he was.

My worker picked me up from the police station and put me in a hotel room, he sheepishly told me. I didn’t have any money. I waited for hours for the worker to show up but he was always late. I was hungry. I was surrounded by other kids who were dumped in hotel rooms too. I felt alone. Scared. I didn’t want to be there.

He kept looking around, frightened someone was going to stumble on our back lane meeting. I was willing to bet that if he had had a weapon he would have flashed it by now.

I remembered from his social worker’s report that he was a good kid. He didn’t use drugs or alcohol, had no known family members capable of caring for him, but had been labelled disobedient, so many foster homes wouldn’t take him. He had reported being bullied in school, but no one did anything, he had told me. He had also told me that the other kids were mean to foster kids, and so he refused to go back to school.

He was also sixteen.

Take your hand out of your pocket, I said to him, as if I would speak to my own son. I know you don’t have a gun.

He looked at me, then slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket. His hand was empty but, strangely, he kept his fingers in a gun shape.

Here’s the deal, I said. If you rob me, I’ll call the cops. I know your name, don’t forget. Robbing judges isn’t looked at very kindly. You will be arrested. Then, I’ll have to go to court and testify, which is something I don’t want to do. You’ll be convicted and sent away until you’re eighteen at least, and maybe longer.

His eyes softened, turning downward towards the pavement.

But there is another way.

He looked up.

I don’t want you to rob me, I said, meeting his eyes.

I don’t want to rob you either, he said.

How much do you need?

He shuffled his feet, flustered and confused. What?

You’re still broke and hungry, so you might just go and rob someone else. The next person you encounter may try to hurt you. He may have a gun or a knife. Maybe he will be a weightlifter or martial artist. Maybe you’ll hurt them.

He turned away, looking towards the street. Suddenly, a couple walked by the opening, unaware of what was happening.

Ten bucks, he told me.

Ask me to borrow it, I said to him.

What?

Ask me to lend you ten bucks, I repeated.

I can’t pay you back.

Don’t worry about that. Ask me.

Can I borrow ten bucks?

I dug in my pocket and took out what I had. Here’s forty.

How will I pay you back?

Don’t worry about it. Just promise me you’ll try to stay out of trouble.

I promise.

That means no more trying to rob people.

I promise.

If it’s okay, I want to ask you to do one more thing: go back to school. If anyone gives you problems, tell them I asked you to try. If no one will help you, contact me. I’ll get things sorted out. Here’s my card.

Yessir.

Now, get going.

He put the cash in his pocket and looked back at me. Thank you, he said. Then he walked away down the lane—all the while looking at my card.

I never heard from him again, but from time to time I would check the dockets looking for his name.

I never did find it.

I’ve long since forgotten that young man’s name. Over the years, I’ve met hundreds of thousands of people, almost all of whose names I’ve misplaced but replaced with the circumstances and feelings of meeting and talking. The fact I’ve forgotten his name is not surprising; but I’ve never forgotten this incident.

I hope that young man made it. He deserved to. And if he did, I am glad I had a small hand in it. I hope he knows that the gift he gave me is a beautiful one.

Because that young man could have also been me.

Every time I tell my story, I start earlier.

I used to start by talking about living with my grandparents who raised me. Those were my first memories. But the more I thought about it, the more I connected to the beginning that was much earlier than that.

My aunties, the ones who are the children of my grandparents, and also the big aunties, as I call them, who are my grandmother’s sisters, were my first teachers of the story that begins before my first memories.

The big aunties came and visited every summer, from Manigotagan; five or six of them gathered at our house. They slept inside, so my grandfather would put up a fish tent, a square tent, for my brother Henry Louis Jr.—we called him Buddy—and my older brother Richard and me to sleep in. Sometimes we would sleep outside under the stars. Either way we had a fire, and we could sit by it as long as we wanted, so long as we got up in the morning in time to have breakfast and to do our work.

The big aunties were there for harvest time, and during the day, they would pick potatoes in the farmer’s fields to earn some money. Then they would go pick berries. They’d go pick blueberries, saskatoons, blackberries in the bush. And when they went to pick those berries, they would take Buddy and me; they’d always take us along.

I didn’t realize why they were doing it at the time, but they would make us wear a can on our belts with rocks in them. I thought it was so they could find us if we ever got lost. Maybe it was for that reason, too, but years later I learned it was because they knew we were going to run around and play in the bush and that the noise would scare off the bears. As they picked the high bush berries, we picked the low bush. And then we would go home, and we would clean the berries. And all the meantime, they were telling stories. Drinking tea and telling stories.

This is one of the stories that the big aunties told.

—

My grandfather’s full name was Henry James Jim Sinclair, and he came from two northern Cree communities just off the shores of Hudson Bay: Kihci-wâskâhikan (York Factory) and inland at Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (formerly Nelson House). He was born in 1888 in the St. Peter’s Indian Settlement—the community Chief Peguis and other Anishinaabe and Cree had founded a century earlier from the remnants of a predominantly Cree community at Netley Creek, which had been decimated by the 1783 smallpox epidemic that devastated Indigenous communities along the Red River.

Growing up in one of the most economically powerful communities along the Red River, my grandfather was raised in a bustling economy, driven by Indigenous-run farms a few miles south of the town of Selkirk and forty kilometres north of Winnipeg. In the 1890s, he was sent to Rupert’s Land Indian Industrial School in the parish of St. Paul, Middlechurch, just north of Winnipeg, where he learned carpentry, blacksmithing, and how to farm. He was a good student, finishing the equivalent of the eighth grade, but returned to the land for his livelihood, caring for his trapline at Breezy Point near the mouth of Lake Winnipeg and fishing on the Red River.

Grandpa married a woman, Emma, from Fisher River, and they had three children together: Uncle Melford, Auntie Bertha, and a third who died during childbirth. Shortly after the baby died, my grandfather’s wife passed too. He was in his early twenties, a widower, with two little children.

It was not unusual in those days for a man to go to the local priest or reverend to ask for help to find a woman who would marry him and take care of his children. So that’s what Grandpa did. He went to the Anglican minister and asked for help. The minister approached the congregation’s families to ask if they would allow one of their daughters to marry this man. But nobody was interested in marrying him.

The Anglican minister told him, Don’t you worry. I’ll talk to the Catholic priest. The Catholic priest will find somebody. So the minister went to see the Catholic priest, who then asked around among the Catholic congregation. But of course, no father was going to let their daughter marry an Anglican. It was like marrying the devil.

But the Catholic priest said, I think there’s a chance for you at the convent residential school, up at Fort Alex, as Sagkeeng was known at that time. He said, Once a month, they allow the young girls who want to leave the convent to go, on condition that they marry.

And so my grandfather, with his horse and wagon, rode all the way up to Fort Alexander from our house, about 190 miles. It took him a few days. When he got there, he had to sit outside the gates until the time arrived that he could introduce himself. He had a letter of introduction from the Catholic priest for the Mother Superior. He sat at the walls of the convent until it was his turn to be interviewed by the sisters, and then by the young women who were eligible to marry.

My grandfather waited until the Mother Superior came and allowed him to come inside. He was asked a series of questions, and there were several promises he had to make. One of them was the promise to raise all his children as Catholic. He had to join the Catholic congregation. And he had to support the church, of course, which usually meant giving money.

He had no difficulty making those promises besides pointing out that Uncle Melford and Auntie Bertha were already Anglicans, they’d been baptized in the church, and their mother’s family would not be happy if he took them out of it. He was granted permission for them to continue to be Anglicans.

My grandmother’s name was Catherine Simard. Her family moved from the north to Manigotagan in Anishinaabe territory on the east side of Lake Winnipeg, where she was born in 1895. Granny was Saulteaux-Ojibwe, but she was a non-status Indian because her mother, Betsy Cochrane, married Louis Simard, a French fur trader. In those days—and until the 1980s—Indigenous women and their children lost their status and their treaty rights immediately after marriage to a non-status man.

Even though Granny was a non-status Indian, she was sent to the Fort Alexander Catholic residential school, eighty kilometres south of Manigotagan, which might as well have been a million. After being enrolled, she barely came home again. Due to her work ethic and cooking abilities, my grandmother gained the favour of the nuns, who moved her into the school’s convent. This ended up being fortuitous for Granny. Fort Alexander was rampant with sexual and physical abuse, and living in the nunnery meant she was somewhat sheltered from it.

So my grandfather and grandmother ended up on either side of the interviews taking place at the convent that day. There were several men there, not just my grandfather, but a number of men who were interviewed by the girls looking for husbands. My grandfather was among the older men there. He was somebody they did not know. He was an Anglican. With two children. But he was a good-looking guy.

My grandmother told her sisters that because she was the oldest of the girls in the convent, she got first choice of the men who came calling that day. And that when she saw Grandpa come into the convent yard on a horse and wagon, she said, Don’t any of you pick him! I’m going to marry that man.

And in Grandpa’s version of the story, he said, Boy, I chose her.

She said she picked him; he said he picked her.

Whichever version of events one is inclined to believe, Grandpa then signed a contract document promising to support the Catholic church, and they went through a marriage ceremony at the convent. Then Grandpa took Granny to his home in Selkirk. And of course, it took them three or four days to get there because of the distance.

The aunties loved this story, and they would laugh and laugh and tease my grandmother. They would say, You were such an ugly little girl, you were lucky to get married.

And when my grandmother finished her story and said, So we left on the wagon to go to Selkirk, one of the aunties would always pipe in and say, Yeah. And by the time you got to Selkirk, you were pregnant!!

My Auntie Louise told me the story of how my parents met.

My mother, Florence, was from Fisher River. She was sent to the hospital in the St. Peter’s area, then called the Dynevor Indian Hospital, because she had tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was usually a fatal illness, and they didn’t really treat it; they just let you find your own way through.

Auntie Louise worked at the Dynevor Hospital as a nurse’s aide. She saw this lonely young girl, often sitting in a chair in the yard, and noticed that nobody came to visit her. The girl looked so lonely that Auntie Louise started to bring her home over the weekend. The family house was only about four hundred yards from the hospital. When Auntie Louise returned to work on Monday, she would take my mother, Florence, back to the hospital.

My father’s family had enfranchised so that they could remove their children from residential school. Enfranchisement meant that they gave up their Indian status under the Indian Act. But because the priest kept hassling my grandparents to send the children back, the boys signed up for the army. Uncle Melford was first because he was the oldest. Then Uncle Elmer, and then my dad, Henry, who was about sixteen. Charlie tried to sign up as well, but he was too young. He was only fourteen.

It was on one of my father’s off-duty visits home that he met my mother. He said that she was so beautiful that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her. But he was nervous and didn’t know how to talk to her. He got Louise to act as an interpreter. Louise let my mom know that he liked her, and told my dad that Florence liked him too.

When my dad was deployed to go overseas, he told my mother that he would come see her when he got back; that he wanted to talk to her about getting married. They couldn’t marry before he left because he was not yet of legal age.

Eventually, all the brothers were deployed to Europe, on various missions. My dad was deployed to a mission, a battle, in northern France, in late 1944. Many men were killed in that battle and a bomb landed very close to him, and he was badly injured. He was initially believed to be dead, and he was left on the field. But then, as often happens, the army medical team went in, to look for any survivors, and they found my dad.

He was taken to a hospital in France, and then transported to a hospital in England. The message that came back to the family was, Your son is in hospital here. He’s not likely to make it. We’ll take care of him until he passes. My grandparents were prepared for him to leave this world. My mother cried and cried and cried for days.

But he recovered. Suddenly, he got better. He was back on his feet, and within a short time, he was deployed back to Canada, to Montreal, where they put him on a train. That train brought him to Winnipeg, and in Winnipeg he boarded another to Selkirk, where the family met him at the train station.

Years later, my mother’s matron of honour told me that she was there when my mother and my grandmother saw my dad step down off that train. She said that they immediately ran towards him, and that because she was younger and faster, my mother got there ahead of Granny, but she stopped, and she reached back and helped my grandmother get to my dad so that they could hug first.

My parents eventually married, and my dad built a little house for the two of them, and they started having babies.

I was born in January of 1951 at the old General Hospital in Selkirk. My sister Diane was two and my brother Richard was four when I came along. We had an older sister named Kathleen before that, but she died very young. I still think about her and lay tobacco in her memory.

My mother and father named me Calvin, after my mother’s brother, who lived on the reserve at Fisher River. Uncle Calvin was well over six feet—a giant of a man in my eyes—muscular and with shoulders as broad as a doorway. He was a kind man who spoke very quietly, when he spoke at all. He also spoke very slowly, and seemed to struggle to express himself. But he always seemed to want to tell me things that would help me stay out of trouble, or make me feel safe, or smart.

For one reason or another, my grandmother didn’t like my uncle Calvin. Maybe she questioned his intelligence or wondered if he was mentally challenged in some way. Or maybe she just didn’t like the name; in any event, she refused to use it. She called me Murray instead, my middle name, and that’s how everyone referred to me thereafter.

My younger brother was born just over a year after me, in March of 1952, in the same hospital—one of the many bonds we would share for the rest of our lives. His name was Henry Jr., after my father and grandfather, but everyone called him Buddy. After Buddy was born, my mom suffered a stroke and died within a few of weeks of it. My dad was devastated. He was twenty-seven at the time, and incapable of caring for us. Buddy was a newborn. I was one, Diane was three, Richard was five. That’s really all that needs to be said.

It would be difficult for any twenty-seven-year-old with four children under the age of five to be alone, and it was particularly hard for my father, who had experienced a lot of traumas in his early years. The struggles of those years, the loss of the woman he loved very deeply, and an overwhelming situation proved too much. He couldn’t imagine living without her and considered suicide. Shortly after her funeral, he decided he needed to find a place to put us kids.

The anger that he had at that time was quite overwhelming to him.