ONE OF MANY

Sally Tisiga was four years old when she was taken away from her mother and handed over to a foster family. It was thirty years later that she saw her again.

Sally was born in the Lower Post-reservation in the Yukon, Canada to a Native Canadian family. Though she appears like any average modern young woman, Sally has never forgotten her heritage. In 1992 she takes her two adolescents sons to the Yukon on a search for the past she was forced to leave behind.

The trip takes them across the West of the country, from urban areas of large cities to wild solitary places in the Canadian Rockies, through huge windswept plains. She revisits places and meets people who awaken forgotten memories. But many new questions arise also – why was her family torn apart and why did her parents not resist?

Sally’s story is shared by several generations of Native American children who were the victims of a government practice of taking them away from their families and communities.

To kill the Indian nature of the child was the aim of this policy of assimilation that was adopted by the Canadian government, after realizing that adults would not simply conform to white civilisation’s standards. The result is the continuous erosion of the Native Canadian society by a blind bureaucracy that wrenched thousands of children from their culture and left them, lost in a society where they have no place.

Identity, culture, education are all questions that Sally raises throughout her journey as she traces the signs of a forgotten territory, an Indian territory shattered by the values of a dominant society caught in its own traps.