Sheila

‘You could say I’m a product of society. I was born normal and, if I am a bit violent now, well, it was the white family, the beatings, the child sex abuse and everything else.’

Sheila is a First Nations woman in her 50s, who lives with mental health conditions associated with the abuse she experienced as a child.

A ‘white family’ adopted her and her twin brother because their ‘real mother didn’t want [them]’, she told the Royal Commission.

Sheila said her ‘white father’ sexually abused her and ‘bashed [her] with a hammer’. She left the household when she was in her mid-teens.

‘And I haven’t looked back since. But they still cause me grief in other ways. Because I left that family feeling like dirt, like I was “nothing and nobody”, because that’s what my white mother always used to tell me.’

Sheila felt her adoptive mother probably ‘turned on’ her because of the sexual abuse.

She said ‘Aboriginal children should be raised and cared for by Indigenous people … elders of the community’, not by ‘white people’.

The trauma had a domino effect. Over the years, Sheila has ended up before the courts, in jail, in mental health facilities and violent relationships. ‘Because there’s a vicious cycle,’ she said.

In her 30s, there were ‘a few warrants out’ for her arrest. That’s when child protection services started ‘knocking at the door’.

Once they accused Sheila of abusing her three-month-old daughter. A hospital doctor ‘checked her all over for bruises’, but found nothing wrong.

However a child safety officer later came to Sheila’s home, ‘grabbed the baby off [her] hip’ and took her away on a ‘new allegation’. ‘They didn’t reveal what allegation,’ Sheila said.

Once Sheila spent 10 days in prison for not paying fines. On her release, two social workers came to her house to ‘take her three babies’ away.

They asked Sheila to sign a document. ‘I didn’t know my rights. I told them, “No, I’m not signing nothing.”’ Sheila wanted to ‘take it back to court’, but the social workers said she ‘had no hope in hell … It had been dealt with’.

‘And they just blankly refused me the privilege of being able to fight for my kids … I lost custody of them.’

Sheila tried ‘to retrieve’ her children many times over the years, without success.

So, she ‘went out and hurt people’ and kept ‘racking up charges’.

‘When [they] took my kids, they took my heart and my soul, my spirit.’

‘20 something years later’, Sheila discovered she had been ‘legally their mother’ all that time.

She wants to sue child services for forcing her to give up her children without allowing her to seek legal advice. ‘They broke the law there,’ she said.

Sheila recently spent two years in a mental health ward.

‘I let myself go. I used to have beautiful long black curly hair … I lost a lot of my own self-respect.’

Now, she has a dream to open a café serving up traditional tribal foods.

‘And I want to buy a big a property where I can farm the bush foods that we need for these meals.’

Sheila would like young First Nations people before the courts to come there, ‘instead of being convicted’, and ‘learn about their culture, their heritage’.