This episode is emotional, raw, real and it isn't my regular content and deals with heavy subject matter including addiction, death, overdose, suicide, self-harm, sexual abuse, residential schools and my Indigenous lived experience. Listen with care. Seek support at 988 if you are in crisis and/or need support. RIP my brother Ty Iron. May the spirit world deliver what your life could never.
This episode is emotional, raw, real and it isn't my regular content and deals with heavy subject matter including addiction, death, overdose, suicide, self-harm, sexual abuse, residential schools and my Indigenous lived experience. Listen with care. Seek support at 988 if you are in crisis and/or need support.
RIP my brother Ty Iron. May the spirit world deliver what your life could never.
Myrna McCallum: This episode of the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast is definitely not my usual content and it discusses some pretty serious themes of Indian residential schools and suicidal ideation, self harm, addiction, overdose, death, sexual abuse, all the heavy stuff. So if you don't have the capacity to hear any of that today, then, then you're gonna want to skip this episode.
There's this movie from a long time ago, I don't know how many years ago now I saw it, but it's called Once We're Warriors. It's a, Maori cast, Maori, I guess, storyline. And I've been thinking about this movie lately as I've been hiking in the Sequoia National Forest here in California, thinking about my family, thinking about my history, thinking about what it means to live this Indigenous life. I wonder often what my life, the life of my brother, my mother, my grandmother and on and on could have looked like if not for the residential school system. I mean, it's a greater, bigger dream to think about what life could have been like without colonization.
But right now I'm just thinking about the residential school system. And so for those of my listeners who live outside of Canada or even North America, the residential school system was a government policy that was enforced, with the active participation of the churches, and the police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to essentially kidnap Indigenous children and take them to these institutions where they would turn, Indigenous kids, I guess, into like white kids, punish them for speaking their language, punish them for trying to go home, jail.
The parents who were trying to come and rescue their children taught Indigenous children religion, all kinds of things, just all kinds of things, all kinds of stories. All you gotta do is Google and you'll learn all the stories. by the time my brother and I went to residential school in the early 80s, it wasn't the church running the residential school anymore. It was Indigenous folks.
The school I went to, Lebret Indian Residential School, I believe, was under the administration of a First Nation, or it was about to be. And a lot of the childcare workers were former Indian residential school students themselves. And although at the time when we went, the government was no longer mandating or making it law that Indigenous children go to these institutions, my mother willingly dropped my brother and I off at the school.
I can't say what, why she did that, what the motivation was, but she was married to a pedophile and, somebody who liked to beat on my brother sexually abused me. And I don't know if she thought, oh, I need to get my kids out of the way. So I could, you know, I don't know, have this man to myself, or if some part of her thought, you know, here is a way that I can protect my children, who knows? And now she's gone, so I could never ask her.
And honestly, I think if I did, and she was still around, the state she was in, you know, the year prior to her passing away at 59, which is crazy young, she did this, like, revisionist kind of history thing where she told herself a different story. I think she probably would have argued against me to say that we never went to residential school because she had already decided we had never been to foster care. Although she left us alone so many times.
And, Child Protective Services apprehended us so many times. And for a period of time, we were constantly in and out of foster care. So, I don't know, maybe she thought residential school was, awesome. She could continue to receive, you know, child tax credit checks from the government and her kids are out of the way, and then she could have this man all to herself. I don't know. Anyway, m. What would the indigenous life be had there never been residential schools? Who would we be as a people? Who. Who would we be as communities?
This is something that is so heavy on my mind right now. Who would we be as individuals? What would our relationships look like? What would our families look like? What would parenting look like? What would. What would our love look like? These are questions I've been asking as I've been hiking in this, like, strange and beautiful place. And then my mind moves between me and my lived experience and my brother and his lived experience. You know, I only went to residential school for a year before I ran away, and I was like about 12 or so. my brother was four years younger than me and I couldn't take him. I mean, first off, we're segregated, so it's not like I had access to him.
And secondly, what can a 12 year old do with a 8, year old? Like, I don't know. You know, I think I was just trying to survive when I left. And so, Yeah, so I left and he ended up going to two residential schools over the next seven or eight years or so that he was in these institutions. You know, by the time he got out of residential school, he was a very different person. I mean, the damage to he and I had already been done by the time we got there. I, mean, a lot of sexual abuse that happened for the both of us happened before we got there. A lot of physical abuse happened before we got there. The abandonment and the neglect by our mother happened before we got there. However, my brother being so young and so vulnerable, Well, it was like, you know, a lamb in a wolves den. You've got all these kids who are being like, I don't know, propped, up, celebrated for harming younger kids. I don't know the details of what happened to my brother in residential school, although in my office, it's a sealed report of his Indian residential school hearing, where he told his story in detail to an adjudicator when he was seeking compensation for his experience. And this was all part of the Indian Residential School Settlement agreement, which I adjudicated.
I was an adjudicator in for many years, which is how I knew about it. And I urged my brother to submit an application to. To get compensated for his experience. And although he had his hearing in Vancouver, I did not go into the hearing because I could not hear what he was about to say to my colleagues in that room. So I waited outside. All I knew was that my brother had been harmed, but I didn't know how he'd been harmed, and I didn't ask. And. I'll never forget his hearing, though, because there was a point when he came out during a break and his face looked so full of pain. And, he, instead of walking toward me, walked down the hall, And he walked towards the corner of the hallway, and he turned his face towards the corner, and he stood there and his body started to shake and he was crying. And what came back to me was like, school, you know, I don't know if you ever had this experience, but, like, when you were being punished, sometimes you'd be sent to the corner of the room and told to face the wall.
And that's exactly what he was doing. And he was crying and he was shaking, and I just, walked to him and I put my arm on his back. And he said. He said. The adjudicator asked me what. What was the most impactful thing about my residential school experience? And I told her that because of that experience, I could never become a father. Sure, my, my brother has made babies, but he was never able to be a father. And what he meant in those moments was that, his ability to love, to give love, to show love, to accept love was gone. Now imagine for a moment what might happen in your life, particularly in your childhood, that leaves you loveless like that. I mean, I have a pretty good idea that my brother was subjected to repeated rape and repeated beatings. I know this because of the amount of the settlement that he received. After his hearing. I didn't see, him for a really long time. And I realized, you know, that when people go through those hearings and they have to tell those stories and they have to go back to their childhoods and they have to say all the things to strangers. The pain and the re-traumatization and the ripping open of the wound isn't just limited to the time that you sit in that hearing room. It follows you. You stay ripped open and bleeding for I don't know how long. How long it takes to come back to a place where you can close up the wound. Or suppress it enough to just stop the bleed.
The details of his hearing sit in this envelope in my desk in my office. And I know I will never open it, but I keep this record because one day somebody will. Somebody will read it. Somebody who will ask about him and what his life was like. That person or those persons will read the details of his residential school experience. M I m hate residential school for all that it took from so many people. I just hate it. There's something about sexual abuse, sexual violence, especially when it happens to you when you are small, when you are a child. I don't know what it is. I just know what it feels like when something shifts in you, like you're just not you anymore. And I'm sure so many of you who are listening to me, you know what I mean? Because I know that my audience are folks who've been through a similar experience. M. I hate residential school. I hate.
I hate it for all that it has taken. Like, who would we have been as indigenous people had those places never existed? Who would we be? I think we would be the warriors that we were intended to be, that we were designed to be, that we weren't destined to be. You know, when you see an addict, like a drug addict, specifically on the street in your city, you know, Gabor Mate would say that's somebody with childhood trauma. The drugs are simply to cope. It's not. The drugs are not the problem. The trauma is the problem. And he has said drug addiction, it feels like a warm, soft hug when people are injecting themselves or getting high. That's what he says. It feels like a warm, soft hug. I don't know much about that because I've never been addicted to drugs. I've never used drugs as a coping mechanism. For a very short period in my life, I drank alcohol. I mean, I haven't done that. I decided a long time ago that's not who I want to be. I don't want to do that. And I just decided I, won't ever drink again. But for a period of time to deal with the bad decisions I was making that was causing me so much pain, I used alcohol to cope, and it was an easy thing to go for. When I looked around my profession, everybody was drinking.
Like, almost everybody was drinking. There were a few sober judges that were inspirations around me, but mostly everybody was drinking. It was accepted. It was like celebrated almost. It was ridiculous. And, you know, I would drink to the point where I was chasing this feeling. And the feeling I would chase is like a point where I felt like I just no longer existed. So for me, it wasn't a warm, soft hug that I was chasing. I was chasing the feeling of non existence. That's a feeling I know I've been chasing a long time, like for most of my life. And a question I am always kind of dealing with, what would it be like to no longer exist? What would that be like? I mean, one day I'll get my answer. But I started asking myself that question at 6 years old. Because in existence, and I know it's not just for me, it's so many of us. Fuck. It just hurts. Like, it hurts. There's so much pain, so much shame, worthlessness, hopelessness, loneliness, fear. Like it hurts to live sometimes. And I could see, I could see why people would chase some kind of altered state that only drugs or alcohol can give you. I can also see why so many people enlist the assistance and the help of drugs and alcohol to end their lives, their sad, traumatized, tortured lives. Like, I get it. So many people, especially indigenous people, are dying right now of overdose deaths of alcohol, related deaths.
My friend Harold Johnson, who's been passed away now for a while, he wrote this great book called Firewater How Alcohol is Killing My People and Yours. I've had him on this podcast. You know, he talked about death and alcohol and the connection between the two and pain and trauma and hopelessness and woundedness. But if we didn't have to talk about that in the context of the indigenous experience, had there not been a residential school, residential school system, who would we be? Who would we be? I think we would be warriors. Proud, strong, Loving. And instead, so many of us are struggling, are drinking, are homeless, are dying. My sweet, sweet brother died of a drug overdose on February 11th of this year. He died on the downtown east side in Vancouver in a slum building. Right on Hastings Street.
I didn't even know he was there. I had told myself a story after, you know, he got his settlement that like, maybe he left the streets and he pulled his life together and he met a great woman and he built a life for himself and he is doing well. Like, this is the story that I told myself. And I deliberately and intentionally would try to avoid the downtown east side because historically I would go there and scan the streets looking for him. I'd always find him and I would pull him off the streets, I'd feed him, I'd clothe him, I try and get him housing, I would give him money, and then he'd always go back. All those years, I never thought that my brother was a drug addict. I thought, he's on the streets because he's poor. He's on the streets because he can't get a job. He's on the streets because he's drinking.
When I heard that he had died with meth in his system and fentanyl, I was shocked. And I only heard about his passing a few weeks ago. Why? Because the Vancouver Police Department decided to that this indigenous man probably had no one who loved him or cared for him. So they decided to not look for me. Even though they had my name, they had my occupation, and they had the province, the name of the province that I'm from. You put any of that in any kind of Google search? Any search, I'm, who comes up me. And they just decided not to look for me until some coroner, some compassionate corner in April decided to, to do a basic Google search. And as soon as he, he pulled my name, my contact info sent it to the Vancouver police, said, here, I believe I found, I found this man's sister.
They still sat on that until late June. This was April. And only then did somebody call. So as a consequence, you know, my daughter and I went to identify my brother's body last week. My brother was 47 years old. He had just turned 47 about two weeks before his passing. What we saw looked like an 80 year old man because by the time we got to view his body, he'd already been decomposing. His skin was slipping, mold was growing on his body, hair had fallen off of him. We were looking at a stranger and I always thought like, if I could see his hands, I would, I would note for sure that that is my brother. But because of the state of his body, they had his hands covered in white gloves. So the VPD sitting on this information and just deciding not to look for me robbed my family of the opportunity to be able to see my brother in the state that he was in when he passed, to be able to, identify him with 100% confidence. So angry. Because the only thing, the only conclusion I can draw was that, they don't care. And they probably thought, who the hell cares about this homeless native drug addict? And the truth of the matter is, so many of us care about our people who are on the streets. And so many of us have gone to those streets to try to rescue our family, But we can't force them to come home with us.
Those folks are somebody's son, somebody's daughter, maybe somebody's sister, somebody's brother, somebody's somebody's family member, somebody somewhere loves. I wonder who my brother would have been. Had he never been abused, had he never been assaulted. He was such a, loving guy with, like, such a, powerful laugh. He loved to laugh. He always called me sister, never called me by my name. And he was proud of me, clearly right up until his passing, because it was the guy who was using with him who said, hey. Ty talks about his sister. She's a lawyer, this is her name, and she's from Saskatchewan. My brother never called me these last several years. And I always took that to mean that he was doing okay. I don't know about you, but, like, I've only ever heard from family when something's gone wrong and somebody needs something. But when people are cool, you don't hear from them. So I just assumed he was. Well, I wanted to assume that he was well. I wanted to believe that he was married and settled and healing. He loved powwow music. He had a drum that he gave my daughter many years ago. We put that in his casket. She made him a ribbon shirt, and we got him moccasins.
Fortunately, for me, a friend of mine had given me some sweetgrass and sage not that long ago, and I had none. So I was able to put that in his casket. And a feather, an eagle feather, came to me on the beach, and I put that in his casket. Interestingly enough, after my daughter and I viewed him, we went to the same beach, and another eagle feather came to us. And she took it home somewhere. There's a version of him that is whole and healed and beaming with light, with love and with pride. And somewhere, one day, I, too, will be beaming with light and love and pride and wholeness. I will be healed. And maybe that happens in the next life. We'll get to be warriors.
And once we're warriors, everything will become possible again. If you or someone you know is struggling with any of the subject matter that I spoke about about in this podcast today, help is available at, 988. It's a suicide and crisis lifeline, so please give those good folks a call. Today's episode was also recorded while I was visiting the Sequoia national park, which I've come to understand is the ancestral territory of the Western Mono people and their Shoshone and speaking Speaking Shoshone and Shoshone speaking people. as well as the Te Bat to Labal, which is also a Shoshone and speaking people. That's their land. And I just have been feeling incredibly grateful to have visited. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. And although I'm not okay right now, I will be, so don't you worry about me.