In these tumultuous times, there is a heightened demand for authentic leadership. We, as a collective, want to see individual people, especially our leaders, walk their talk and show up in the world with accountability and transparency. It comes from being lied to. It comes from secrets being kept from sight. It comes from shady versions of truth being fed as truth from all our institutions. And the worst part, is that we don’t know who to trust anymore.
I write this blog in response to another recent case of false identity in the Indigenous community. We have learned of another person who has taken on Indigenous ancestry, when they have none. There is nothing more important to Indigenous people than authenticity. It is a deep value, hard earned from a world that has been inauthentic from the start.
In an attempt to be totally transparent, I want to shine light on my own authenticity or inauthenticity along my journey. Many Métis people, and light skinned non-status Indigenous people are uncomfortable in their own skins right now. The recent events have triggered a long-standing fear of not being enough. Not being brown enough. Not being white enough. Not Indigenous enough. Not culturally aware enough. I am no different. And because of this fear of not being enough, there are many moments of inauthenticity. Of trying to fade into the background. Of trying to take the spotlight. Of trying to prove I’m enough. Of trying to hide unflattering aspects of myself. There are too many to name.
So I’m writing this blog.
A blog about tracing these moments of inauthenticity and cleaning up any lingering pieces of shame trapped in my body and spirit. I, as a public figure, must stand in my own skin with pride and authenticity to be of genuine service to others. That’s what I was taught that honourable leaders must do.
When it comes to my identity as an Indigenous person, which is of extreme value in the conversations occurring in our communities, I’d like to proclaim my ancestry here. I identify as a Métis person. I am a mixed blood who has more European ancestry than First Nations ancestry, but I still identify as Métis. And I look Caucasian. There is no hiding it.
My Métis side of the family comes from Red River, and our roots originate in St. Laurent, Manitoba. We are French Michif. My Mémère (paternal grandmother), Delia Bedard, was born in St. Laurent. Along with her mother, Agnes Larence, who was a Lagamodiere. Agnes married Alfred Allard, who died early, and then married Alfred Bedard, who was supposed to have come from the Great Lakes region (Michigan?)
My Pepère (paternal grandfather), George Menard, was born in Woodlands, Manitoba. He was of French Canadian ancestry, with a distant connection to an Algonquin woman, named Marie Miteouawegoutkoue. Four brothers came to Manitoba from Quebec. The Menard’s from Camperville, Manitoba come from Joseph Menard line and the Menard’s from Fisher Branch come from Simon Menard line. We come from the Simon Menard line. My maternal grandfather, William Winterton, was an English-Irish settler born in Dauphin, Manitoba, who settled in Flin Flon, Manitoba. His mother and father came to Canada from England and Ireland. My maternal grandmother, was an Icelandic settler who was born in Gimli, Manitoba (??), we think.
None of this information was known to me or of interest to me for many, many years.
Like many light-skinned Métis people, who did not grow up with deep cultural roots to identity, there are moments of confusion, inauthenticity and misrepresentation along my journey. As well as moments of transparency, profound clarity, and pride. It comes from two opposing, shame-based perceptions that I developed or inherited. One, I felt ashamed of being part Indigenous, and two, I felt equally ashamed of being mostly Caucasian. Shame makes us retreat from our true selves and forces us onto a path of inauthenticity.
As I look back over my life, I see several key events that profoundly shaped my identity and a shift in outlook and behaviour.
The first one took place when I was in Grade 5 (I think.) I don’t remember the teacher’s name. I don’t remember the students sitting next to me in the classroom. But I remember the visceral reaction in my body like it was yesterday. (It could be because I moved around a lot that I’m not sure if it took place was in Thompson, Manitoba or Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.)
My teacher was talking about the Métis and the Riel “Rebellion.” I was one of those kids who knew they were Métis but had no context for what that meant. There was no shame. But there was also no real pride either. The only thing I knew for sure, was that I was Métis and that I was related to Louis Riel somehow. It was just a fact with no consequences. I was not discriminated because of skin colour, or language or accent. I was incredibly privileged to pass for an average Canadian kid, which meant I was as safe as I could get.
When my teacher spoke about Louis Riel, I piped up innocently that I was related to him. With no hesitation or concern for the repercussions of her words, she said, “I wouldn’t brag about that. He was a traitor.”
Silence. Then the other kids laughed and pointed at me, whispering “Traitor. Traitor.” The teacher went on like nothing happened.
But to me, two very important things happened at once. One, I was flooded with shame. Deep shame that filled me from my head to my toes. And two, I was overcome with an inexplicable rage. A heat travelled up my spine but instead of getting released with words or feelings, it lodged in my throat as my voice clamped shut.
In one brief shameful interaction, I became both identified and vilified as Métis. I had spoken my truth and been punished for it. And I wanted to hide. I knew in my soul that my teacher was wrong, but I also knew that I was somehow flawed and if I didn’t shut my mouth, my sense of belonging and safety would vanish. So I decided to hide it. This was my first recollection of inauthenticity.
Little did I know that I was repeating a pattern that has played out in many Métis families since we began as a people.
I don’t remember much about what happened after. All I know is that I buried this profound awakening and proceeded to be as white as I possibly could. It wasn’t hard. I looked the part and most of my family members were white. My white privilege served me very well. For the first time, however, being “white,” which had been just part of my heritage until then, became inauthentic. Now…I was hiding.
The next inauthentic event happened was when I was in the Canadian Armed Forces. I was 19 years old. I was an administrative clerk in the North Saskatchewan Regiment who worked full time in the Sgt. Hugh Cairn VC Armoury as a Recruiting clerk.
It was 1990, and the Oka Crisis was happening. I watched with horror, as members of the Canadian Armed Forces caused harm to people defending their own land. All around me, fellow members of the military, who I considered friends, were condoning these actions and slandering the Mohawk people in vicious ways. I identified with the Mohawk people because somewhere in my lineage I remembered what it felt like to be militarily outnumbered and helpless to stop the slander and hate. I was filled with a rage. And as before, it was accompanied by an all-encompassing shame. I did not publicly criticize the army’s behaviour. I learned very quickly that I was not allowed to have an opinion either way. So I didn’t. I did not defend. I did not speak up. I just continued to recruit for an initiative that recruited Indigenous youth for a 6 week military training program. I was so ashamed. Yet I continued to walk around with an inauthentic smile on my face, refusing to rock the boat to maintain my safety and freedom. Once again, my privilege served me well. But my inauthentic complicit behaviour made me retreat into myself.
Over the years, my courage grew, and I publicly identified more and more with my Métis heritage. Especially through the music. Music and storytelling were in my blood. And I came by it naturally having a dad who was the “King of the Kitchen Party.” This was also something I took for granted. Music was a big part of my life growing up, but the more I talked to relatives, elders, historians, and learned more about my own family, the more I realized that music was our cultural expression. We were French Michif who stopped speaking the language when my dad was born. My dad may not have grown up with the language or stories, but it was my dad who kept the music alive.
At 25 years old, I chose to make the arts my career path. I had chosen to become an actor and a singer. At first I was happy singing other people’s songs and acting in plays written by other playwrights. That changed when I began to be haunted by a wilful character who would one day become the Velvet Laurent. The Velvet Devil was my one-woman musical, about a Métis character from the 1930s who struggled with identity and had turned her back on her people to become a star in the big city. This Métis diva came to me in dreams, visions and nightmares and demanded to be heard. She wanted her story of cultural repression and expression told.
So I told her story. Or my story I guess.
Velvet was a character that could face the shame I felt, and wrestle with the real life struggles I was having trouble confronting. And the song, Halfbreed Blues, was the quintessential healing song about facing one’s internalized racism and shame.
It was my journey back to authenticity.
I spoke my truth. My struggles with identity were now well documented and very public and somehow, The Velvet Devil became my calling card. I was that light-skinned Métis person with tons of privilege and tons of self-doubts. Without planning to, my transparent, reclamation story of pain and shame had created a niche for myself in the theatre and television industries.
So began the chapter of playing Indigenous characters with major identity crises.
Identity and cultural reclamation must have been the subject in our collective conscious during the 1990s and early 2000s, because in both theatre and film, there were many similarly themed projects being produced. I was asked to play one light-skinned Indigenous character after another who struggled with shame, disconnection and self-rejection, or characters who triumphed through cultural teachings and family reconnection.
I was blessed to be a working actor and I was astonished that there was a place for me. But somewhere along the way, my public notoriety gave me access to roles that shouldn’t have been mine. I had stopped being just the self-rejecting halfbreed and ended up playing ordinary First Nations characters. I am not First Nations. And yes, in some cases I was invited specifically by a community to represent them, but in other cases, I was not. Without checking my own privilege, I reached for parts and personas that belonged to someone else. And not surprisingly, I began to suffer more and more from feelings of “not being Indigenous enough.” I wanted to be more culturally connected. I wanted to be more than Métis. And for a time, I was inauthentically over-identifying with First Nations culture.
I had veered off my path of authenticity.
But it was different this time. Now I was running in the other direction. Now I was ashamed of my European blood. This very obvious, light-skinned person was trying to hide her very visible heritage. (Sigh.) Like I said, shame makes people behave in embarrassing ways.
But on my journey back to authenticity, I got my ass kicked. Very soundly!
The ass-kicking occurred in two ways. One, I got a laser-like scolding by a Cree woman who said I was rejecting my white ancestors and I had to smarten up! And two, I had a prophetic dream.
The scolding was profound and life changing because I really respected this Cree woman. She was a pipe-carrier with deep traditional wisdom and a seer. All I wanted was to be accepted by her. To become some version of a perfect Indigenous student of traditional ways, so that I would finally be “enough.”
But that was never the point.
She knew that was enough…if I would just stop trying to be who I was not.
She was the first person to say, “You should go to Europe and find out where your ancestors’ bones are resting. They have a story to tell too.” I didn’t want to hear anything she had to say about the subject of my whiteness. It embarrassed me. But, of course, that was the point! I was missing the obvious.
She also told me that my Spirit was here to clean things up, “Not everyone on this earth has the capacity to walk backwards and heal their lineages, but you are meant to. You are a bridge. You can’t be a bridge if you ignore who you are.”
Like I said, she was very wise.
(Eventually I did go to Europe. And guess what? Those bones did have a story to tell. A painful and important one. A story for another time.)
It took a while for those wise words to sink in and change my behaviour away from inauthenticity. It was the prophetic dream that finally got through to me.
The dream was one of the most important messages I have received from the Spirit World. And it had the power to change the trajectory of my path.
It started with a snow-capped mountain on a bright sunny day.
In the dream, I was walking up a flat but steep, snow-covered mountain with a group of Indigenous people. We were a small community, maybe a few families with only a few children, led by a white haired wizened old, old man. He was wise and deeply serene man with wrinkles like deep caverns on his face and piercing eyes that struck you to the core. His presence was intense. Under the bright sun, in similarly dressed old fashioned hides, each one of us pulled a toboggan up that mountain. It was a difficult climb. For some reason my toboggan had very little weight and was much lighter than everyone else’s. This made me feel uncomfortable. I kept trying to place other people’s loads on mine, thinking I was supposed to carry the same weight as everyone else. But the old man, with the piercing eyes, stopped me and said. “This is not your load to carry.” And he pointed to the very top of the mountain. “That is your path.”
And with a heavy heart, I let my toboggan go. I watched it skid down the mountain back the way we had come. I turned to look up the mountain. I didn’t want to go. Not without the people I knew and loved. Not on my own.
But I had to go. The kindness and sorrow in the old man’s eyes told me it was true. He waited. The all did. They waited for me to have the courage to walk on alone. Without them. It was the saddest decision I had ever made. But on I walked.
I walked and walked. Alone.
When I finally reached the very top, (it looked more like a steeple than a mountain it was so pointy,) I was surprised to discover that there was an indentation that fit my bottom perfectly. I sat on this very convenient seat at the top of this mountain and noticed that I had a 360 degree view of the land around me. Yes, I could see my community slowly making their way with their heavy toboggans up the mountain. But again to my surprise, I could see other communities hiking up that mountain too. There were little pockets of peoples, from all different races and religions, climbing that mountain and none of them knew of the others making that same climb. The terrain might be different. The elements and the direction of the sun may be different but they were all making their way up the same mountain. It shocked me.
And then I got it.
The old man knew what he was talking about. This is the vantage point I was supposed to see. And I wouldn’t have got there had I clung to an outdated, inauthentic version of myself that ultimately served no one. I finally understood.
At that exact moment, an enormous, oversized white snowy owl flew up beside me. Hovering there at eye level, I realized with a start that it was the old man. Piercing me with those knowing eyes. His great wings silently flapping as he hung there staring at me. He held my eyes with a fierce intensity, making sure I understood the message. I took one more look down the mountain at all the peoples climbing their way and turned back to old man in owl form.
“I get it,” I said. “We all have our parts to play. And this is mine. I understand.”
The owl seemed to nod his head, blinked his eyes, and then flew off into the air and returned to our little community.
I woke up. Message received.
Looking back over my journey, I realize that walking an authentic path requires courage to be exactly who you are. There are so many rules to follow, and experts to obey that invite us to choose the collective’s approval over our own sovereign knowing. This is not a healthy system. It is backwards. Only when we discover and express our true natures, can we share our authentic gifts with the world.
Individuals can stumble and veer off the authentic path as many times as needed. But leaders need to be more vigilant. Their journey is in the public eye. So I guess this blog is also an invitation to leaders or public figures of all kinds, who have not yet looked inward or done a thorough inventory of their words, behaviour and actions. Are you being authentically you? Has shame made you hide your light and do things that seem to overcompensate for something amiss? These times of isolation and profound fear-mongering, is a perfect time to do so and answer your own soul’s questions.
I thank you for listening and witnessing my stumbling path to authenticity.