Extended Biography
Although my Michif family comes from the prairies, I was raised on a sheep farm on the lands of the Kwantlen and Stó:lō––a few clicks north of the American border, in a small town called Langley.
Photo: Behind my family farm in Langley, BC
I am of mixed heritage. My mother’s family is of German and Michif descent. Our traditional Michif family names are: Bear, Thorpe, Schindler, and Lenoir. My father’s side is largely unknown: there’s a dense, thick shroud over my paternal relations due to generations of sexual assault, alcoholism, and abuse.
My upbringing was a colonizing experience.
My cousins proudly took on our Michif heritage yet mine was something I had to hide unless I wanted my father’s attention. He often called my mother an “Indian.” To be clear: he never hurt her with his hands––just his words and absences.
Mom wasn’t the gospel either, though. As a child I lacked the language and concepts to fully grasp her internalization of colonialism. As I get older, though, I realize how much she internalized abuse and systemic racism as an inherited survival strategy.
For example, when my school sent a letter home asking if I would be interested in taking classes and activities related to my Michif culture, she laughed and told me that “those classes are only for dumb kids.”
I thought to myself: “I guess that means I’m dumb? I guess that means all Michif are dumb?” My mother was taught and conditioned to debase her Indigenous identity.
One year, my Michif aunty got me into the local lamb and wool-craft 4H club where I was tasked with training a Hampshire lamb. My first job was to get “Aurora” used to her halter so that I could steer her around at the Agro-Fair.
It took months! On one occasion, I lost my temper and took it out on Aurora––as had been done to me many, many times. Violence was how my family resolved its issues. Luckily, I did not hurt Aurora.
Indeed, I was raised to do the same.
I share this memory with you as a sorrowful reminder about how the men in my family repeat the violence that they themselves survived. Ultimately, as a young adult, my relationship with violence pushed me to radically question who I was and how I might escape this vicissitude.
Photo: Church of St. Peter, Dynevor, MB
As a young adult, I left home and permanently severed my relationship with my father. My surname at the time—“Robinson”—echoed his paternal legacy of abuse and alcoholism
Away from home, I learned that the name “Robinson” was actually bestowed on my paternal grandfather by his abusive step-father. My grandfather was born of rape. His step-father held this against him and reminded him of his inferior and un-wanted status with physical and, I suspect, sexual abuse.
I saw that this cycle needed to break. So I decided to re-align with my maternal, Indigenous relations, and bury my settler side as much as I could. My first step on this journey of renewal was to legally change my last name from “Robinson” to one from my mother’s side: “Wapeemukwa.”
Photo: St. Louis
White Bear, or, “Wapeemukwa” was born around 1780 in Cumberland House, Saskatchewan. His father, Philip Turnor, was an English HBC fur-trader and his mother, Elizabeth Bear, was a Cree woman.
In his youth, White Bear/Wapeemukwa worked at Swan River as an interpreter and guide until the HBC and NWC merged in the early 1820s. Following that tumultuous merger, Wapeemukwa moved to the Red River forks and, eventually, Chief Peguis’ settlement.
Even though I intimately know the steps and paths that my ancestor walked, my personal and emotional connection to Wapeemukwa are admittedly distant.
The politics surrounding my choice of name are compounded by my ability to enjoy the privileges of whiteness without experiencing racism on a daily basis like my less fair-skinned kinfolk. However, my decision to change surnames is not unique. In fact, many of my Michif ancestors survived similar hardships, including name changes and histories of hiding in order to survive.
If you want to know more about this, please visit my Instagram page where I have a short series on my ancestors, name changes, and hardships.
My maternal grandfather is Wayne Gerald Flindall, of West Bend, Saskatchewan.
Photo: Where Grandpa Wayne’s from, West Bend, SK
Grandpa Wayne is my namesake. He was Michif, with ancestral ties to the Saskatchewan River District and Turtle Mountains.
Wayne’s Grandma—Emma Thorpe (née Schindler)—was born on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. As a girl, she seasonally trekked north, into Saskatchewan, for months at a time to visit her sister Winnie and extended family. Emma met her husband, Art Thorpe, on one of these trips and the two got hitched. Emma and Art were both Michif.
Art’s relations were Anglo-Metis from the Northwest, Cumberland House, Chief Peguis settlement, and Muskoday Reservation. Art’s mother was Maggie Bear and hailed from the prominent Bear family on Chief John Smith’s reserve outside Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. If you want to read about these Anglo-descended “Autres Métis” please read Paget James Code’s insightful thesis, which discusses my Thorpe relations.
Emma’s Michif relations were French-Métis from St. Françoise Xavier and Red River. Emma’s family descended from a voyageur named Jean-Baptsite Roy who married a Michif woman named Marguerite “Assiniboine” in 1804. Later, they were associated with the Peguis Cree/Metis Band in Red River.
Like me, my Michif Grandpa Wayne sought to escape the violent path that his family history assigned.
Photo: Me in North Dakota, 2019
Despite his deep connections to Turtle Mountain and Prince Albert, Wayne moved west to Vancouver after marrying my Grandma. Because he was white-passing, Wayne strategically hid the fact that he was Michif so that he could get a job. Assisted with treaty monies sent from my great-grandmother, they built their “home” in Surrey, British Columbia, on the land of the Katzie, Tsawwassen, Stó:lō, and Kwantlen––the land where my story begins.
Grandpa Wayne died from the cancer the year I was born. I think that’s why I’m named after him. Names have always been important mnemonics in my family. Names are impossible to bear alone. Entire families are needed to carry them. But there are no “Wapeemukwas” in the universe––only me. When I was younger, I thought that I was too smart to be a white-trash “Robinson.” Now I wonder whether I am “Michif enough” to go by “Wayne Wapeemukwa.”
Names are so heavy to bear alone because they are spiritual “birth-stories” into which we are born and, for a time, live as protagonists. Such stories begin far before life and continue long after death.
Reflecting on my “home” gives me new insights into how the birth-story outlined by my name is, in fact, merely one chapter in a much longer chronicle which began before I was born and whose ink will remain wet after I am dead. To this end, I invite you—Reader—to follow me as I get to know the ancestors who are standing in observance of who I already am.
This is a living document.
To all my relations.