In this excerpt, Colleen Cardinal tells her story of being a child of the Sixties Scoop when she and 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their homes to be placed in foster care or were adopted.

There was a huge disparity between how us girls and our adoptive brother were treated. As a child I could not speak out or even identify that my sisters and I were treated differently than our adoptive brother. It’s a hurtful feeling to know you are not valued as much as your light-skinned brother, I thought he must have been pretty special. Scott never knew the sting on his ass after a harsh spanking, nor did he have to change his pants after pissing himself from fear. Scott never went to bed terrified, crying and lonely. Scott never knew the cold outhouse on a late school night or pissing in the rabbit shed because he was locked out of the house. Scott has always known comfort, convenience and the privilege of being born “white,” to “white” parents. A thin wall separated our rooms but a massive wall of privilege separated our experiences in that household.

I watched my parents support and encourage Scott to excel. He flourished while my sisters and I ran from Ronald’s abusive, wandering hands. My brother had a job, lived at home, had his own car and attended college. Was I jealous? No, I was deeply hurt that we were not valued in the same way and not afforded the same opportunities. Instead my sisters and I lived in fear of a father who molested us. I felt angry and helpless. I could not speak out against the atrocities that I witnessed for fear that I would hurt my mother or put her in danger. But it was a torn loyalty I had, and still have, for my mother because she never showed that she cared for me or loved me as a child or even as an adult.

Excerpted from Ohpikiihaakan-ohpimeh (Raised Somewhere Else) by Colleen Cardinal. Excerpted with permission from Roseway Publishing

We thought he was on PCP or something, one says.

He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.

He’s huge, one exclaims! Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them.

We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased.

And then he was charged with terrorism.

Literally.

Excerpted from When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir © PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS and ASHA BANDELE, 2018. Published by Raincoast Books, raincoast.com

Nothing is more beautiful than a story. And nothing is more human. To weave the snarled strands of a life, either real or imagined, into literature is a form of blessed alchemy. Twists of plot and turns of phrase mirror the messy details of human existence. We are nothing more or less than the stories we tell. But the only story most outsiders ever hear about Palestine is a thin volume of enduring conflict. The character of the Palestinian is either a furious militant throwing stones with a keffiyeh wrapped around his face, or an old woman in hijab wailing in front of her destroyed home. This single Sisyphean narrative of anger and deprivation holds the Palestinians hostage, and little beauty is to be found in such a plot.

Excerpted from Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense. Copyright © 2018 by MARCELLO DI CINTIO. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.

“We don’t know why a person turns out gay,” Alfonzo told me when we were alone in his private office after my most recent group confession. “In your case you’ve obviously misplaced your maternal needs. You would never have sought homosexual love if you’d received the love of your mother as a child. But then the father comes into play as well. Your father was a passive little boy with pockets of unexpressed rage, exploding onto his children. He never provided strong role modeling. I don’t think you even bonded with your father. Clearly, all your sexual liaisons with men have been an extension of that need you found lacking in your father.”

“So, it was my mother . . . or . . . what? I’m confused.”

“You’re confused because you’ve been searching for the love of your parents in every man you’ve been with sexually.”

“So you’re saying that no one is born gay?”

“Rarely is anyone born homosexual. Only a small percentage of people are born with a predisposition to homosexuality. But it’s rare.”

“Do you think I’m one of those people?”

He paused, looked me up and down.

“No. You’re definitely heterosexual. You don’t have any of the characteristics of a homosexual.”

“Characteristics?”

“Effeminacy, passivity, desperation to get a man, a drug addict, an alcoholic: you aren’t any of these things. The fact is, Peter, most gays learn their behavior. Therefore, it can be unlearned, though with great difficulty.”

This had always been my greatest fear: that my attraction for men had been created, and not by God; that my sexuality had been like a descending staircase I’d been pushed down, one step at a time, into the cellar of my homosexuality. Now I was trapped inside that prison, fearful that what had been done to me as a child, I would do unto others. Alfonzo was saying that I could unlearn my homosexuality, unlock my trap door, and ascend into the light of heterosexuality. But he might as well have said that we could prevent me from becoming like the fat man in my elementary school toilet: a dirty old man, preying on innocent children. Alfonzo’s words were like a lifeline, thrown out to me at sea.

“Ultimately, Peter, it’s up to you. What sort of life do you want? Do you want to have a life filled with casual sex in public toilets and bathhouses, always hiding, never being accepted by friends and family, a life of secrecy and shame, compartmentalizing your relationships? Only you can answer those questions.”

“Of course that’s not what I want.”

“Then you have to listen to me when I tell you what to do.” He rocked forward in his chair. “You have to stop arguing with me. During groups, in your individual sessions: You have to do as I tell you. Do you understand me? God created Adam and Eve, Peter. He didn’t create Adam and Steve.”

He laughed. I forced a smile, but his joke reminded me of how the boys used to crowd around me in my elementary school playground, pecking me and calling me “faggot,” or worse, simply my name, like a curse: “Gay-dicks.”

“When you get right down to it, we’re all heterosexual. Your true sexuality has been buried beneath years of self-abuse, but you’re just as heterosexual as I am.” His voice trailed to a whisper. “Only in my unique hands do you have any hope. You know that. You’ve seen what’s out there. You’ve lived the life of a homosexual. This is it, Peter. This is your last chance. You either fix it here, once and for all, or else you go back to the life you were living. It’s up to you. Only you can decide.”

By late spring 1990 my primal sessions had deepened; so too had my feelings of dependency. I believed that Alfonzo understood my suffering as no one else. I began to accept—or, at least at first, to not contradict—his views about the apparent causes of my homosexuality. Both in private and in the presence of other group members, he called me his “experiment.”

“I am going to revolutionize the field of psychiatry by being the first psychiatrist to find a cure for homosexuality,” he told one of my groups, looking at me sitting across from him.

In a matter of weeks, I had changed from arguing with his views on homosexuality to defending him if another patient objected to the way he screamed at me. I blinded myself to his faults (the way he chastised patients whenever they stepped out of line or disobeyed his instructions) and magnified his positive traits (his unexpected warmth and charisma).

Meanwhile, the insomnia and panic attacks that had driven me to seek help in the first place worsened. To counter this, Alfonzo again prescribed a dose of Surmontil.

“It’s your choice, whether or not to take the medication. But if you don’t, you’ll never get anywhere in your therapy. You need restorative sleep. Eventually, you won’t have the energy to do this therapy without some type of medication.”

There didn’t seem to be much of a choice in what Alfonzo told me. Either I took the medication or discontinued therapy.

I had the prescription filled that same night.

The medication’s dose was increased quite rapidly, then replaced with Sinequan, another tricyclic antidepressant, and used in conjunction with Rivotril. Elavil, yet one more tricyclic, soon followed.

Alfonzo explained that we would need to “tweak” my use of various medications and that some experimentation would be inevitable. The medications led to a great deal of sleep; for the first time in years, I didn’t have to worry about going to bed. No longer was I plagued by nightmares. Tossing and turning for hours, or lying in bed obsessing about what being gay would mean for the rest of my life—these all became events of the past. Sleep turned into something I no longer had to do. Sleep was done for me.

The Inheritance of Shame, from Brown Paper Press, is now available in stores across North American and online at all major retailers.