It’s difficult being in the middle of two things—like the proverbial rock and the hard place. My life is lived in that cleft, and I have found a way to be in this place. I’m constantly redefining what it means to live here.
My family are born of two worlds, the pre-contact world and the modern world, which gave way to a third world, a future, which is where I write from. All things that have passed, the good and the ugly, have resulted in me. There is a constant flow of revisiting, enlightening, and revising our understanding of the past as well as what has come down our DNA to sit and grow in our bones. The story I present here is very close to a story in my family, in which a very young Indigenous woman is taken/chosen as “wife” by a modern settler; in my family, it was Alexander Merrifield, one of the “Pioneers of Granville,” and my ancestor granny Siamelaht. The story that follows is
