Dislocation and Reclamation: Rebuilding Indigenous Families in Gil Cardinal’s “Foster Child” and Tasha Hubbard’s “Birth of a Family”

“Somewhere there were people who knew the right ceremony, who knew the lost language and spoke the true names, including my own.” — Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer 

“You have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.” — Thomas King  

What does it mean to be in control of our own stories? It means being able to shape the narrative, to have the power to frame events and people to support your own meaning. Politicians run nations and create policies that serve and perpetuate certain narratives within society. In this way, the Canadian government creates the available social narratives for Indigenous people. Through systems built to repress Indigenous peoples, such as the residential school system, the justice system, and the child welfare system, Indigenous people are forced into narratives of loss: the loss of language, tradition, culture, the loss of freedom and lives, the destruction of the family unit, and the loss of so many beloved children. 

The child welfare system in Canada is overwhelmingly populated by Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) children. In Manitoba, for instance, over 80% of the children “in care” are Indigenous. The child welfare system targets Indigenous mothers, labelling them “uncaring” and “unfit”’—continuing the work of the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop in separating the Indigenous family unit, and profoundly dislocating the Indigenous self, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This often creates, in the separated child, a deep need to seek out their biological family. To reclaim something means that it has to have been taken from you in the first place. When Indigenous adults who were adopted or fostered as children seek to meet their biological families it is not merely a reunion but a reclamation—a new narrative, one of re-location, is being written. The title of Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard’s Birth of a Family (2017) captures this depth of meaning; the four middle-aged siblings meeting for the first time—the subject of the film—is not just a coming together but a birth. A breath of new life, even amid the pain of having been denied knowing each other, a choice made for them by child and family services.

Indigenous filmmakers, as storytellers and like all Indigenous people, operate from within layered systems of colonial control and oppression. As Suzanne Methot writes in Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing (2019), her powerful examination of Indigenous trauma and storytelling, “As Indigenous peoples living in a settler state—where a dominant and dominating society controls every aspect of Indigenous peoples’ lives, from the child welfare and education systems to the medical-pharmaceutical industry to policing to the justice system to the Indian Act—Indigenous peoples are under the control of the very systems and institutions that conspired to take their land, re-educate their children, and disempower them […]” 

Indigenous people are also suspended in the Sauron-esque gaze of the film industry, that fraught, colonial medium that helped convince millions that Natives were savage, primitive, dead, and dying—gone. Like Hubbard with Birth of a Family, Métis filmmaker Gil Cardinal uses the medium to tell his story of reclamation in 1987’s Foster Child. The two documentaries are both made in Canada, though thirty years separate their creation. Yet, they tell such similar stories. How little has changed in thirty years of child welfare policy in this country. And how many more Indigenous babies were taken during those thirty long years, yet another story of loss forced upon them to be reckoned with decades down the line, if at all? The cycle of separation and loss churns on. Stories also help us to understand the true scope of things, the way reverberations from trauma can stretch out further than it’s possible to see.

The titles Foster Child and Birth of a Family both speak to the anonymity of being subsumed into this system. This is the system that took Gil Cardinal from his mother and one that he confronts in a powerful scene, via a soft-spoken white social worker with a perfectly arranged coif. While searching for answers about his biological family and why he was separated from his mother, Cardinal reviews his case file and learns from the social worker that he was deemed unadoptable when he was taken—because he is Métis. While the law would later, graciously, allow for “Indian” children to be legally adopted rather than permanently fostered, at the time of Cardinal’s removal this was not allowed by the Canadian government. Taken and then sentenced to a permanent state of limbo, designated as less than, less deserving. Designated by a moniker that seeks to redact the past but can’t erase it: foster child. This scene reveals the fallacy that claims the system is meant to protect children. The system took Cardinal, like so many others, and re-named him. In doing so, it redirected his story, his life.

Through seeking out their original family in Foster Child and Birth of a Family, the dynamics of dislocation and reclamation are highlighted by the painful truths confronted, and through the bringing together of siblings and other relatives. Healing ourselves heals our ancestors, too, but healing is long and aching work. Always nestled in with the joy of meeting is the sense of loss, the pain of not having shared a life together. In a particularly moving scene from Birth of a Family, the brother, meeting his three sisters for the first time in Banff, stands just off a trail away from the others, crying in the sparse woods. “All that was lost,” he says, meaning the opportunity to know each other the way siblings would, to have shared birthdays and holidays as a family unit. Even moving forward together now, they cannot get those years back.

Cardinal made Foster Child as an adult and, almost unbelievably for contemporary audiences, we learn that he has never seen a picture of his biological mother. Over the course of the film, Cardinal is shown two photographs of his mother by the relatives he has tracked down. These two pictures tell the shadow narrative that haunts both these stories: that of the mothers deemed unfit and left to weather the storm of forced separation from their children. 

In the first picture, Cardinal’s mother is younger, standing with family members, squinting against the sun. He is delighted to see some of his own features in his mother’s face, and nearly overcome with emotion to be able to see her, finally, if only through a picture. The second photograph marks quite a different reaction in Cardinal. Though he has already learned by this point that his mother was an alcoholic, he is taken aback to see the older, more weathered version of his mother looking back at him in black and white. “She looks like a hard Indian,” Cardinal says with dismay. Denied having known her in life, he can see in her face only the stories he’s been told by society over the years and by the social worker and the system she represents: drunk, hard, unfit, Indian. Her story was told for her too, by an uncaring colonial state. A permanent cleave rending mother and child: a mother labelled as “Indian,” as “Other,” by the child who shares her face. Cardinal does not mean to disparage his mother; the photograph acts as a mirror, and suddenly he is forced to see himself, to think of himself, in a way he previously hadn’t growing up in a white family. 

This profound dislocation of identity is also evident in Birth of a Family when the siblings visit the information centre during their trip to Banff and meet with an Elder in residence there. The Elder recognizes the siblings as First Nations, but there is a clear feeling of awkwardness among the siblings, along with the joy of discovering some of their culture. They were all raised in non-Indigenous families and grew up unfamiliar with cultural traditions. Epitomizing the terrible paradox created by the child welfare system of being without knowing, they are Indigenous but have been stripped of the knowledge of what that means. Their brown skin separates them, but something else, too: a nagging piece of crucial information that they do not have. Their blood memory calls out for their relatives and ancestors, that collective whole that they are still part of, but they have no way of making that connection as an individual in their current circumstance. The call often cannot be returned. This is a pain that must cease to be inflicted on Indigenous peoples. It is a deeply flawed system, predicated on punishment and removal, rather than rehabilitation and reunion. Why not create robust, culturally appropriate programs for Indigenous parents? Why not give single mothers adequate social assistance? 

Telling a story, one that affects so many others, is deeply powerful, even if told from within a tangle of colonial systems. It has deep power in it, in part, precisely because of this. To speak at all is an act of resistance, of resetting. To tell a story, to claim your narrative, resonates as deeply as any pain, and that means something—that means a lot. 

Untangling these systems and their effects to reclaim an authentic self is an important and difficult task, one that is both deeply draining and rewarding. A reclamation: joyous and dark, both things at once. How many Indigenous children and youth never get the chance to reclaim themselves? So many are lost to the manifestations of pain that overtake us when our spirits feel helpless. So many are lost to the cruelty and carelessness of a system designed to profoundly and permanently dislocate the Indigenous self. A newborn baby taken from their mother in the hospital, her womb still aching and her heart waiting to meet her little one—waiting, waiting. And a teenage girl walking out of an unsupervised hotel room, never to return. What do we have to gain by telling our stories? The world; ourselves. The simultaneous reclamation of identity and creation of something new, something caring and kind, something dedicated to the wellbeing of the children—something that will teach them who they are and, rather than closing off pathways, open up the endless possibilities of who they can become.

Adriana Chartrand is Michif from St. Laurent, Manitoba as well as Scottish/Irish/French. She is the Institute Manager at imagineNATIVE where she oversees year-round professional development programs for Indigenous screen creatives and the annual Industry Days during the festival. She has two degrees in Film Studies, including an MA from the University of Toronto, and a degree in Women’s and Gender Studies. She speaks English and French and is passionate about cultivating leadership in future Indigenous generations. She was born and raised in Winnipeg, MB.

This article is published in issue 37.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue