Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves

Forcibly removed from her Indigenous family as a child, Andrea Currie journeys back to her Nation and the truth of who she is

Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the M?tis, meaning "the people who own themselves."

Andrea Currie was born into a M?tis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians--all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the policy of removing children from their Indigenous families was firmly in place. Together with her younger adopted brother, also M?tis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.

Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state's attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. Finding Otipemisiwak is the story of one woman's fight--first to survive, then to thrive as a fully present member of her Nation and of the human family.

Andrea Currie is a writer, healer, and activist born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and currently living in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is a psychotherapist working in Indigenous mental health and has accompanied the We'koqma'q Residential School Survivors on their healing journey for the past twenty years.