Finding Your Way Home

Robert Fritzche is a Sixties Scoop adoptee. He was raised outside of the culture and the language. But Robert shares with host Shaneen Robinson, you can go home again. This incredible storyteller shares his journey from a three year old boy to working and living with the Gitxsan. 

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Transcript

Multiple Speakers [00:00:00] [cheerful electronic music] Sim gigyat, Sigidim Haanak’, K’ubawilxsihlxw. Oki, wishing you good life. Kuei! Kuei! Yo! Wik’sas. Dánet'e, negha dágǫ́ht’e.

Announcer [00:00:14] This is Words and Culture, a series on Indigenous languages funded by SiriusXM through the Community Radio Fund of Canada and distributed by Native Voice One, The Native American Radio Network. [music fades out]

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:00:30] Sim gigyat, Sigidim Haanak’, K’ubawilxsihlxw. My name is Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais and I am a member of the Gitxsan and Cree Nations. Welcome to episode five of six about the Gitxsan Nation for Words and Culture. It’s been quite the journey and honour so far learning and sharing with you these past few weeks.

As you know many of our little relatives were taken from our families, our Nations, and our cultures. More than 20,000 babies and young children were stolen from us – adopted out around the world. It’s a time in our collective history known as the Sixties Scoop.

Many of these children never found their way back home and are still living life with zero connection to community. Some have gone on to the spirit world, others have found their way back.

Robert Fritzche found his way home. This is his story told in his own words. Please note, this episode briefly discusses suicide and Nazis.

Robert Fritzche [00:01:27] I am a member of wil’naat’ahl Anda’Ap. We are from the house of Guutginuuxs, the Fireweed House of the Gitxsan. I'm a sixties scoop survivor, which means that I was part of thousands of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their homes, quite often at a very young age.

I was 18 months when I was removed from my mother's care and immediately put into the foster system. The object of the sixties scoop was for Indigenous children to be adopted out to non-Native families. And the federal government undertook a pretty robust campaign to encourage non-Indigenous families to adopt these Native children.

And so, after I was taken, they made a profile on me and I was advertised in their pamphlets and in their booklets for non-Native families who were looking for more children.

I was in the foster system for 18 months and I was short – adopted shortly before my third birthday. During the foster care period, I switched homes seven times. That results in a new home every six weeks.

And just before I turned three, I was adopted by the Fritzche family. That's why I carry the last name Fritzche. They were a German immigrant family. They came up to Terrace to come and get me and I was legally adopted by them and I was taken to live on a dairy farm just outside the town of Parksville on Vancouver Island.

So from my third birthday until I was probably almost 20 years old, I had no clue what a Gitxsan was. The only information that I was told was that, “Your mother's an Indian and she comes from the Skeena River.” I was told, “Yeah, you're half-Indian.” And that was that.

Lots of sixties scoop families were very, very unkind to the children they adopted. I have spoken to other survivors who lived in horrible conditions. They were treated subhuman. They were basically adopted for labor.

And so, I was very fortunate that a family that adopted me actually cared about me. They wanted the best for me and they saw potential in me.

Because of this, they worked very hard to make me feel included. They constantly reminded me that I was the same as my adopted siblings. I grew up in a family with four children. I was the youngest of four, two boys and two girls. And they constantly told me that I was the same as my siblings, that they loved me just as much as them, and that I belonged in that family.

And these types of reassurances are ones, I think, that other survivors you’ll find – very rare that they enjoyed from their adoptive families.

So I grew up ignoring my Native heritage. In the 1970s and 80s, it was not a time where people wore their Indigenous identity proudly. I was the only person of colour in my entire town. At that time, Parksville probably wasn't even 2,000 people. It was small and everybody knew each other and everybody knew that the Fritzche family had an adopted Indian boy.

Growing up I was – of course I was bullied for being Indigenous, and my way of dealing with it was just to avoid identifying as such. And so I avoided conversations about it, I avoided talking about it and as a result, it was not a part of my life.

I've been told that children, any children, who are taken away from their culture or who are not raised with culture will latch on to the first culture that they can. And that was the case with me. I was raised by a family of German immigrants. My adoptive parents spoke German to one another at home. When we were home alone, they would address us in English – would address each other in German to help us learn the language.

My mother came from a very well-to-do family and her parents were able to finance trips back and forth. So the first time – when I was three years old, I was able to take a trip to Germany with my family.

My adopted mother was quite nervous. She came from a well-to-do family because her father was a very well known obstetrician. He delivered thousands and thousands of healthy babies in his lifetime and over his career.

And the bulk of his career (laughs nervously) was spent during the Third Reich. So as a result, he was a highly decorated nazi. And he was already disappointed that his eldest daughter had moved away to Canada to become a dairy farmer.

And now he has found out that she has adopted a little Native boy and this was my first trip to visit them.

It's a nine-and-a-half hour flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt. And my mother spent that flight teaching a little three-year-old me how to say, “Good morning, Opa. Did you sleep well?” In German.

And we got to Germany and there is an eight hour time difference and because of the jet lag I would wake up early, early in the morning. And every morning at 6am, my grandfather would walk down this big staircase in their huge house and there was little three-year-old me at the bottom of the staircase.

“Good morning, Opa. Did you sleep well?”

And you know how beautiful and cute little Gitxsan children are, especially at that age. And so it didn't take long before I was the favorite grandchild. And so I grew up associating Germany, German language, and culture, all of these things very positively because even the family – the extended family over in the motherland accepted me as one of their own.

And whenever we went anywhere, we – I was treated equally as the rest. And for the longest time, that was my happy place.

I grew up actively avoiding the question, whether I was indigenous. As a 12-year-old, as a 15-year-old, if you had asked me, “Are you indigenous?” I would have looked you straight in the eye and I would've said, “No, I'm not. I'm German.” That was what I built my identity around.

When I was 18, I had the opportunity to spend a year over in Europe where I attended a German language school. It's very similar to when foreign students come to Canada. They take courses to improve their English to the right level and I did the same thing but in German, over in Germany.

All of this just reinforced my wanting to identify more and more as a German Canadian.

When I came home from that year, I went away to university and I decided to go to the University of Ottawa because I wanted to go to a prestigious university and become big and important.

While I was there, it was the first time in my life where I had gone off on my own and I had no support. My family was thousands of kilometers away, I didn't know anybody, and I was signed up to a huge university where I was a number. There was nobody there who cared about me. There definitely wasn't a Native support program at that time. And I ended up failing out of school.

The only credential I walked away from the University of Ottawa with was my French proficiency. And French as a third language, it was one that I picked up quite easily because I had grown up bilingual and paid attention in school and to Sesame Street. So I picked up French as well.

But the idea of not succeeding and failing out of school, it was very embarrassing and it was very difficult for me.

It was also, I think, the first time in my life where I was forced to accept the fact that no matter what I said, no matter how I behaved, no matter what I did, the rest of the world saw a brown person. And when I looked in the mirror, there will always be a brown face that looks back. And there's nothing I can do about that and that's the way it's going to be. I was forced to confront that fact and I'm forced to wrestle with all of the ramifications that come with it.

I did, however while I was at Ottawa, take some time to visit the Indigenous Affairs building and I told them what I knew about myself and I asked them, and then – it was at time that I learned that I was Gitxsan and that I was registered with the Kispiox Band. And the Ministry of Indian Affairs, they sent me a big manila envelope with all the information they could have and that included my status number and it also included a bunch of literature about Indigenous rights and privileges.

I wasn't ready to absorb that. It didn't mean a whole lot to me.

But after I flunked out of school, I couldn't face the idea of going home and facing my family after not being successful. And I ended up in a very bad place mentally, and I tried to take my own life a number of times. That resulted in me spending time in a psychiatric facility.

And while I was there, my German mother went to the local friendship center and she hired a Indigenous counselor who began spending time with me. And he also spent time with my German family to kind of help them understand that I was different and that, you know, my needs were different than the other children. And we needed to explore that in a gentle way.

It was difficult for me, even with him, to identify as Indigenous. And I definitely wasn't going to be convinced to go home and dive into learning about myself.

[gentle ethereal ambiance fades in]

So, while we were alone one time, the counselor said to me – he said, “You know, you might wanna think about going up there and not looking for your parents, not looking for your family, just go up there and live there for a little while and keep your eyes open and watch the people. And you might find that you have more in common with them than you admit right now.”

[ambiance fades out]

So, at the time, I had come back from school. I had gone into the hole. I was working full time on my parents' dairy farm and I was also working a full-time job at a local gas station in order to pay for the mess that I had made by flunking out of school.

I was very frustrated at that time.

And I could feel the rift beginning between myself and my German family. And I couldn't understand, I couldn't interpret it. I didn't have the tools.

So while I was at the gas station, I ended up dating a Tsimshian woman. And I spent a lot of time – she had an older brother who she lived with, and I spent lot of with him. And he and I got into some very lively discussions because growing up, I was raised with the idea that Indigenous people had given up their land, they had basically rolled over and that any modern attempts to reclaim the land were futile. That our ancestors had given up a long time ago and we just need to accept the new reality.

And I was raised with that idea. And so, right, the first thing I needed to do, and no wonder I wanted to let go and not have anything to do with my Indigenous identity.

[ambiance fades back in]

But this man, he was bright. He was successful. He had a very nice home, and he had beautiful coastal artwork. He didn't have any addictions, and he had an answer for everything that I came to him with.

And when I told him I was thinking of coming up to the territory, he spent a lot of time to do his best to get me prepared for what I was going to run into.

[ambiance fades out]

So in the winter of ‘93, I was 19-years-old and I came up to Hazelton in the middle of January.

This fella, who I had met down on the island, had given me a contact number. He said, this is my Auntie, and he said, “If you get in touch with her, let her know that I pointed you in her direction. She'll make sure you do ok.”

So I got to Hazelton and I went into the Sebastian Art Store. I thought, “This is a one-horse town and everybody must know each other.” And I went if – asked – if they happen to know this woman. They didn't know who she was, and so I felt really defeated. I was there with $200 in my pocket, all my worldly possessions on my back, and I didn't know a soul.

So they asked me why I was here, and I told them a condensed version of my story, and they said, “You know, you should call the Gitxsan Hereditary Chief's office down in Hazleton. They probably would be able to help you.”

And they were really kind to me. They brought me in the back and they gave me a bowl of soup and they gave me a phonebook and the phone. And I called up the Hereditary Chief's office in Hazelton.

[ambiance fades back in]

And what I didn't realize at the time that it was my Auntie Ardythe on the other end of the phone. So she asked me a few questions about where and when I was born and she clacked it into the computer and she told me, “Oh, we put you on the A-list a long time ago. We never expected to see you again.”

[ambiance fades out]

I guess those of us who were adopted out, it was quite a successful program. The idea was for us who are scooped to not know who we were, because if we don't know who we are, then we can't assert our rights.

Well, I was still young and I didn't know anything about this, but she told me, “Why don't you come down to the Chief's office here and we'll see what we can do to help you.”

So I hired a cab and by the time I had gotten down to the Hazleton office, Ardythe had called my mom who happened to be living two blocks away from where I walked into that art store.

I was blown away.

The Delgamuukw court case was in full swing. I believe that they were getting ready to go to the Court of Appeals. And so there were computers and there were maps and there was all sorts of buzz and activity going on. And this was the last thing I expected to see going into an Indigenous office.

[nature ambiance, bird calls]

But my Auntie sat me down and she explained who I was and she pulled out a genealogy chart of our wilp. And I believe it goes back to the mid-1700s, and she showed me where I belonged on that tree, and she showed me how she was related to my mom, and told me I belonged to the House of the Guutginuuxs, and that we are part of wil’naat’ahl Anda’Ap. It didn't mean a whole lot to me then, but this was where I first learned about who I was.

I consider that, really, a moment of rebirth, almost. I – during my lowest period, I did things to myself that human beings really shouldn't survive. And it's almost like the Amsiwaa Robert was going to – was needed to die, and Gitxsan Robert needed to be born. And both processes are very painful.

[ambiance fades out]

I had very low self-esteem. I had a big chip on my shoulder and I have to admit that I wasn't very proud to be Gitxsan. I met my mother and she was only 15-years-older than me. She was in her mid-30s. She was a baby herself.

I didn't consider the shock that she must have felt, the fact that her son is back and when nobody else expected it. Everyone was very, very welcoming though. And were – they very much wanted me to learn as much as I could.

My mother immediately – one of the first things she did was bring me around to my great-grandfather Abel, who was the head of our lineage at the time, to introduce me to him, to try and get me to understand my place in the family.

Unfortunately, I was 19-20 years old and all I could think about was drinking and having a good time and I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to what they were trying to teach me. I ended up spending a year here when I was 20. I don't think it was a waste, but I didn't learn a whole a lot culturally.

I had a minimum wage job. I drank every opportunity I got. There was a point, though, about seven or eight months into my stay where I decided not to drink anymore. There came a day where I had a bit of a revelation. I was out drinking with my cousins and I was sloppy drunk at the time, but I fell down and a voice came to me and said, “You know, you don't have to live like this. You have a whole life on Vancouver Island where you're not a drunk and you're not like this.”

And after that, I quit drinking for a few months. I didn't want to drink anymore. I still hung out with my cousins. I still went to the pub with them. I just drank Coke when I was with them, but I ended up leaving Hazelton and returning to the island.

And that's when I went back to school. At the time, like I said, the Delgamuukw case was in full swing.

And so I had met a few people and I had been around that Chief's office and I was brought into the loop as to what was happening and so once I learned the legal framework and the history in these things, I was able to get into some really in-depth discussions because I knew these places and I knew some of these people and I had met some of the Chiefs.

You know, they had come and filled up the gas at the gas station I was working at. And it sucked me in. That was really – I feel like I grew exponentially. It was a cohort of over 80 Indigenous people from all over Canada. And we were looking into things like Delgamuukw and the Nisga'a treaty and, you know, getting into passionate arguments about it.

Malaspina College is where the West Coast Warrior Society was created. We were a bunch of angry young Indigenous men who were frustrated with how slow the legal wheels were turning.

[uplifting ethereal music fades in]

And when we looked at previous events in Native politics, we realized that things really only seemed to change after there was a big perfuffle on the ground.

And, you know, we were great admirers of the Mohawk Warrior Society and we modeled ourselves after them. We weren't always the West Coast Warrior Society, we joined with the Native Youth Movement for a little while. And you know I was caught right up in there. I couldn't wait to block another road. I couldn't wait to go to the next protest. Anything to vent this growing frustration because we were learning things that the general public didn't know yet.

We learned all about the residential school legacy is where I learned about the Sixties Scoop.

Until I went to university, I thought I was unique. I thought that I was a one in a thousand case, you know, “Oh, my parents must've been so poor and so unable to – that they had to give me up.”

That wasn't the case at all. This was where I learned that I was part of a systematic process to erase my identity and to take away any connection that I might establish with my people.

[Music crescendos and ends]

And I was fortunate though, that during my time in college, that we did a lot of focus on culture. Now, I didn't know very much of my own culture. I knew which wil’naat’ahl I belonged to. I knew what house I belonged to, and which clan I belonged to. But there were a few other Gitxsan and Nisga'a, and so I was exposed to the language and culture that way.

When I got out of school, I started working for District 69 in Parksville, Qualicum. The very same school district where I grew up, where I went to school. And now it was the beginnings of the first Native Support Programs. And I was working there in Indigenous education. It was a brand new idea.

There were a couple of Gitxsan children who were kind of on my caseload. And I thought to myself, “Gee, I wonder if I can get Don Ryan himself on the telephone.”

Don Ryan was one of the architects of the Delgamuukw court case. He was responsible for a lot of the awareness and a lot of the movement – the political movement of the Gitxsan people in the 1990s. And I had seen him in several documentaries and other videos that the Gitxsan had produced during the court cases. And I thought to myself, “Let's see if I can get him on the phone.”

Lo and behold, I got him on my phone and we started talking and he asked me about who I was, and I relayed my lineage in my house and he then decided, “Hey, why don't you meet me for lunch.”

So I met him for lunch and this was right – this was around the turn of the century during – the internet bubble was still growing. And through most of the lunchtime, I was pleading with him. I said, “You know, we have to secure the name Gitxsan in cyberspace. If we don't, somebody else will and then we will have to rent it forever and ever.”

So he thought that was a great idea and he told me that the Hereditary Chief's office was setting up in Victoria because they didn't want to be flying back and forth. They were entering into reconciliation negotiations. This was before the treaty process really took over. And he offered me a job as a communications coordinator. And this was fantastic because I was – he took the time to basically mentor me.

He said, “I really like your idea about the website.” He bought me a brand new computer. He said, “There you go, look there. I want you to fill out the website for me.”

And I didn't know how to build a website. I had to go and pick up HTML For Dummies and I had teach myself how to build websites. And this was before YouTube took off, as well. Like, they – you just couldn't YouTube up a video on this sort of thing. But I did it. And I built one of the very first comprehensive Gitxsan – or Indigenous websites at all. In all of Canada.

But now I had daily access to Don Ryan himself and he began teaching me words like, “K'wehl gyeks,” and, “Lip gyeks.” And it was the first time I was learning a new language where we didn't start with the swear words and we didn't start (laughs) with the – how to say screw you and all of these sorts of things.

Or – I was learning wholesome, cultural vocabulary from him.

You know, when you think about the vast differences between the Indigenous worldview and the European worldview, just take a simple concept like wealth. The European worldview involves amassing as much personal wealth as you can for yourself and your family, so that just they get taken care of.

Our ancestors treated wealth as something that was meant to be shared.

And so, that part – very, very difficult to justify both worldviews.

I feel like I am still in that process of finding that balance between what was instilled with me growing up and what I'm learning here.

Because of the political shifts that have happened over the last 10 years, when I encounter somebody who doesn't know who I am. You know, they look at me a little different because they hear that I speak differently and I'm acting a little differently.

[uplifting music fades in]

They might come and ask me who I'm, and I will tell them, “Well, I'm wilps Guutginuuxs.” But you know I'm a sixties scoop survivor. And that's all I need to say. They will immediately understand and they go, “Oh,” they're very welcoming and, “welcome home. We're glad you agreed to come home.”

[music fades out]

Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais [00:26:56] (narrating) I’m related to Robert through our grandparents. We belong to the same Clan and same house group. I find his story so inspiring and hope it has touched you as well.

To our Sixties Scoop relatives, remember you are always welcome home.

I’m Shaneen Robinson-Desjarlais, your host for the Gitxsan episodes of Words and Culture. Remember to follow us on socials for more great content and check out our website at wordsandculture.ca. Hamiyaa, thank you for listening.

Announcer [00:27:24] [cheerful electronic music] Words and Culture is made possible with funding from SiriusXM, through the Community Radio Fund of Canada. It is distributed through Native Voice One, The Native American Radio Network. Words and Culture is produced by Kim Wheeler. Kaylen Belair is our audio engineer and editor.

Multiple Speakers [00:27:44] Hamiyaa. Yammi! K’achu naohdá nǫ́. Halakas'la. Kitakitamaatsinyo’pau, we’ll see you later. [music fades out]