Grandma and her siblings found a bunch of hay someday, somehow, and they constructed an elaborate hut out of it. Someone, foolishly, decided to light a fire inside the hut and it caught on fire, all the kids scrambling to get out. Her one sister had taken her brand new shoes off while inside the hut, and they burned up with the hay in the yard beside the church where they used to play. She was terrified she was gonna get beat, and she did.

Left to their own devices most of the time, Grandma’s older brother was watching her when she was around 6 years old and decided he wanted to go swimming. She learned to swim that day when he threw her straight in, her doggy-paddling for her life. When she was a little older, they would go swimming by the lighthouse going towards the ferry in front of Aunty Jean’s house. They would climb up the empty lighthouse and jump off it. One time, Grandma cut her foot really badly in the water on something sharp. Her one older brother had been cutting grass nearby and brought the lawnmower over, carrying her up onto it and driving her all the way home. She never went to the hospital, even though she should have.

Some pretty fucked up kids with some big trauma lived in the area, including Grandma herself and her own siblings. Her little brother Horse was known to be mean to animals when he was young, hanging a bunch of live frogs from their feet on the clothesline with clothes pins, peeling snakes. All kinds of horrific things. Grandma mentions the little girl across the street who sexually abused a dog. She doesn’t want to go into details, but she was aged 7 when she walked away from that trauma.

The second foster home was the only one where she actually got to feel like a kid for a while, the parents quite nice to her, but she couldn’t get the older kids to stop touching her. So she made the choice to instead let a woman in Ottawa adopt her, taking her chances with the rich, white, Christian lady.

It went sideways fast. On Sundays the whole family would go to the adopted grandmother’s house to watch sermons on the television all damn day. They had a cockatoo, which Grandma would play with. The school sucked, Grandma the only Native kid in the whole ass school. She says she would bring beautiful lunches that she never got to eat, bullies beating her and stealing it from her. No one did anything about the bullying.

The rich lady lived in a very big apartment building with full amenities. Grandma would have a routine schedule of school, home, eat, dishes, and bed at 630 pm. She was 12 years old and that bedtime pissed her off. The rich lady would at least buy her cool gifts, including a doll that actually looked like her, and cassette tape of the Bill Gaither Trio that she still listens to. They even learned about making apple head dolls together and other crafts. The lady was nice enough.

The problem was she had a much younger brother who would visit. One time, while he was over, the rich lady asked Grandma to take the garbage out to the garbage chute. The brother followed her and sexually assaulted her. She had been there less than a year. Grandma spoke up, but no one believed her. So he assaulted her a few more times. She spoke to Children’s Aid, who she says, despite disbelief at her situation, ended up removing her from the home.

Grandma thinks they blamed her because it had happened to her in all three foster or adopted homes she had lived in. That they didn’t quite believe her. The brother had bought her a record of the song These Eyes Adore You for her little record player, one of her few possessions in this world, a song she can’t listen to to this day.

The outside of her school was whitewashed and huge. Old banisters lining the roof. It was right across the road from where she was living. It wasn’t the only thing that was whitewashed. “A lot of Natives go missing in Ottawa,” she laments.

She was lucky to get out.

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