the rabbit hole

 

the rabbit hole

Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day,

 and I keep thinking about a word I recently heard used for people who take DNA tests looking for Indigenous ancestry:

“Spitters.”

It bothered me.

Not because I believe DNA proves Indigenous identity. It doesn't.

But there is a difference between spitting into a tube and suddenly claiming an identity — and spending hundreds of hours trying to uncover a family history that was almost lost.

In 2016, I told my great-niece and great-nephew at Thanksgiving dinner that they were Indigenous.

My family had a huge falling-out.

Nothing was the same afterward.

At one point, Denise Goudie reached out to me. Sadly, she recently passed away. She was trying to prove her own status, and following her story led me down another rabbit hole — the Mary Ann Maranda dit Frise–Brulé trail.

Then came the old records. The babies my ancestors had and lost. The pieces of family history that had somehow survived.

My mother always told us Dad's family was Bohemian and hers was French Canadian Indian.

After she passed away, I searched for a document she had once shown me.

I found my great-grandfather's baptism record:

Mother — Tribal Affiliation: Songhees.

That little line changed everything.

My DNA says about 11% Indigenous. Other family members have less. I know DNA isn't citizenship, and I don't claim that it is.

But I also won't let a DNA percentage erase hundreds of hours of genealogy.

If I hadn't found that documentation, I might have given up after the family fight.

Instead, the family divided.

A clean break.

And I kept looking.

Because if I stop looking, who wins?

Canada?

Colonialism?

The systems that separated families, erased histories and made people ashamed to ask where they came from?

The lateral violence of “NOT INDIAN ENOUGH”?

Not today.

I will keep looking.

For my grandmothers.

For the babies who never got to grow up.

For the stories that survived.

And for the truth — wherever the rabbit hole leads.

Because forgetting is not reconciliation.

Listening is.