Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves by Andrea Currie

Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2024. 272 pages.

Seven segments titled Niizhoziibean, Anishinaabemowin for “two rivers,” are interspersed through Métis writer Andrea Currie’s memoir. Readers revisit where the Assiniboine and Red Rivers meet—in what’s now the city of Winnipeg—and recall the Seven Grandfather teachings: love, respect, courage, truth, honesty, humility, and wisdom. We join her geographically, when people gather in springtime as the ice breaks, and metaphorically, “where the rivers become one and where I become whole, reuniting with the people I come from.”

The prelude to her story is a poem: “The Land I Belong To.” Through different forms and cycles, readers witness Currie reassembling her fragmented identity. Statistics about the Sixties Scoop tell part of the story: Canadian authorities seized about twenty thousand Indigenous children and placed them in non-Indigenous homes—with about 70 percent of them officially adopted into white families. Currie’s memories and experiences, in combination with knowledge she later acquires as a psychotherapist, complete the story.

Her storytelling is rich and detailed. She vividly describes waiting in her adoptive parents’ home for two-and-a-half-year-old Rob to arrive and how she felt “incessantly whittled and belittled” by her mother, like a “human bonsai project.” (The second poem is titled “Mothered Othered.”) Even as a child, unaware of her ancestry, witnessing her brother’s cultural dislocation and loss informed her. Then fifteen-year-old Rob is returned to the Children’s Aid Society “like an unwanted item.” (Cree writer Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith writes from the perspective of a “returned” adoptee in These Are the Stories; like residential school survivor narratives, Sixties Scoop memoirs contribute to the healing process.) But gradually she closes the gap between her childhood alienation from her cultural inheritance and her birth family.

Her sense of place is extraordinarily strong, even recounting historical events like the tragic 1870 Red River Rebellion, viewed as the Red River Resistance by her ancestors—her great-great-grandfather specifically, a prominent figure. Whether the Sipekne’katik / Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia or the Château Frontenac; whether the sounds of drumming, CBC Radio, or gravel beneath tires; whether the scents of sage, country cooking, or farm smells on rubber boots, Currie transports her readers.

Like Michelle Porter’s fiction, Gregory Scofield’s poetry, and librettist Suzanne M. Steele’s opera Li Keur (composed in Southern Michif, French-Michif, Anishinaabemowin, French, and English), Currie’s Finding Otipemisiwak refocuses the lens of history on Métis people and insists that the work of decolonization and reconciliation continue.

Marcie McCauley
Toronto