\u0027I hold this country responsible\u0027: One Indigenous family\u0027s terrible journey through the Sixties Scoop
Stan Bissonette, b. 1953Susan Bissonnette, b. Aug. 22, 1957, d. Oct. 10, 1957Clayton Bissonnette, b. 1959, d. 2021Adrienne Clarke, b. 1968, adoptedArticle content
Sometime in her late 20s or early 30s, Mary Ellen heads to Windsor, moving from place to place, petty crime to petty crime, rooming house to rooming house.Later that year, she gets a month in jail for assault. She’d been sleeping in a 74-year-old pensioner’s spare room. He’s known her for 12 years, he says in court. But she wakes him one spring evening, briefly knocks him out and takes his watch and $135 from his pants pocket.Advertisement 11Two years later, on Feb. 11, 1973, Mary Ellen dies.
The small Indigenous girl in the column is born in 1968 and named Donna Lynn by her mother, Mary Ellen Lamure.Then a St. Thomas family adopts her. Her name is now Adrienne. She looks at herself and her family. She is dark-skinned; they are fair. They have blond and brown hair; hers is jet black.At school, she suffers racist taunts, even from kids who don’t know what race she is.
“I knew when I was 16, police couldn’t be called on me and I couldn’t be dragged back to that place,” Adrienne says. “I suffered so much abuse during that time, because I was being accused of sleeping with professors . . . the bus driver, everybody.”This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.“I was proud of who I was. I felt like I had been lied to my whole life about who I was, what I was capable of, especially with school,” she says. “I was pulling off amazing marks and I remember just thinking, ‘OK, I’m just going to be myself.
“Your birth mother said that it was difficult to give her baby up, but she hoped you would get good care. Though your birth mother was described as being immature and impulsive, she was very fond of her children. She very much wanted to care for you; however was unable to plan for you.”Article contentTwo-month-old David is made a permanent ward of the Children’s Aid Society and moved to another foster home. Then on Oct. 9, 1965, he’s adopted by a family in London.
In school, he is compared to his older siblings, on paths to become accomplished musicians and scientists and executives, paths that don’t seem open to him.The inner struggles explode into the open when his parents retire and move to Apsley, a town about 60 kilometres northeast of Peterborough. Want to party? Yes. Want to drink? Yes. Want to do drugs? Yes. School gets in the way, so he quits and, like Adrienne, heads to runaway city.
They get David a job making watch boxes, and he works his way up from an assembly line, to cutting fabric, to the glue room.I can do anything you want, he tells the foreman.You can’t do anything, but I’ll hire you as a labourer, the foreman says.One day, he sees a street kid he used to hang with. “I am trying to reach you by phone today to leave you a message, but I wanted to make sure you got this news,” starts a letter to David. “We have found your birth sister, Adrienne, the baby of the family.”“Adrienne is very happy about all this, but quite overwhelmed with this sudden news of you and Paul and the death of your birth mother and she feels a need to move a little slowly right at the beginning,” the letter to David says.Hope and worry stir in Adrienne.
That man, born in 1967 to Mary Ellen, wants no part of this story or much to do with the others anymore. Many letters, phone calls and emails later, the three meet for the first time at Adrienne’s Burlington home in 2001. Paul brings his family, David brings his girlfriend. Adrienne cooks spaghetti and makes her brothers dream catchers; Paul brings pizza.“We were kind of standoffish at first,” Adrienne says. “By the end, we were hugging each other.”
The three younger siblings also learn they have a full biological brother, who stayed with their mother and father and grew up with the older Bissonnette children.After letters and phone calls and a few smaller meetings, the whole family reunites in London in 2003. David has left his sober days behind him and parties with the older siblings, their partners and children.“Danny kind of stands back in the shadows,” David says. “Danny didn’t like to party. He was dead set against it.”“He was leery of them,” his ex-wife recalls.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called on government to allow residential survivors and families to reclaim their Indigenous names and waive fees for revision of identity documents. “I can remember going to our auntie’s a lot, visiting, getting to play with the kids, doing things that kids do. We hung out together as kids, until we were all scooped up,” Ann Chadwick says.
Stan is 18 in 1971. He is charged with his mother, Mary Ellen, in the robbery of the 74-year-old pensioner in Windsor, but the charges are dropped because there’s no proof of his involvement.“He didn’t really talk about his mom,” Danny’s ex-wife says years later. “I didn’t find out about his mom until we went to Windsor to find her grave so we could put a headstone on it. That’s when he told me his mom had died on the streets of Windsor in winter.
Danny makes it as far as Grade 9 in school. He becomes a bricklayer, a hard worker, everyone says. But beneath the silence and work ethic, he struggles. On Saturday mornings, Tracy packs a little lunch for Danny and the kids and they ride off to explore the trails near their London home. Then he decides he has to be full-out Indigenous. He’s been seeing a white woman for four years, but decides he can’t anymore. He has to be with an Indigenous woman.
“I thought I would learn a lot from them, but I never made the inroads. I made some friends, but not the inroads,” David says. “Twenty years in age difference came back to bite me. You fall in love like fire, next thing you know, you’re separated.” It’s really no trouble, he tells David. You just come and sit around. You don’t have to do much. But I need you, because I need the votes.He can’t always shake the feelings of the boy standing at the mirror.
“I know it’s from my childhood. I know that I feel some normalcy around alcoholics. I feel some normalcy around abusive people,” Adrienne says.There are “honeymoon” periods when her second husband, the one in Hamilton, tries to be a good father and husband. But they’re few and short-lived.Once he acts out for her horrified children how their mother was going to drown on a fishing trip. He laughs as he describes not quite being able to reach her with an oar. She will sink beneath the water.
The next spring, Adrienne begins a 470-kilometre walk from Brantford to Parliament Hill to demand stiffer sentences for street racing. The day she stops at Queen’s Park in March 2007, the province announces tougher rules are coming. She’s won. She drives him to hospital, where they prescribe Percocets, a painkiller containing the opioid oxycodone, for a shattered heel.“We’d be sitting in the living room, watching TV, laughing and joking, and he’d get up and go to the kitchen and get a pop and come back somebody totally different.”What the hell happened from you going to the kitchen and coming back? Tracy would ask.We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
Danny’s never violent to her, but he’s mean to everyone, Tracy says. “He really did get a mean mouth on him. He said some mean and nasty things. My son to this day will not forgive him.” The two sets of Mary Ellen’s children have bonded in some ways, but not always as strongly as they could. That’s the problem, Adrienne says. How do you live an Indigenous life in a colonial world? How do you reconcile so many names?Sometimes she just wants to live off the land in the woods.
His children – “half Innu and half Algonquin and half Irish” – face comments from white kids because of their Indigenous background and comments from Indigenous kids because of their white background, David says.The white kids? You can guess what they say. Even as aunts and uncles and cousins are still being found, though, the older siblings are being lost.
“He was a working man. I think he sort of sensed that about me, too. I had some money, and I was successful and Danny liked it. He didn’t resent any of it. He was always so supportive.” “I always thought, ‘Boy, this guy is really young and if he can get past whatever he’s got going on health-wise, he’s got a lot of years ahead of him.'”
“Clayton held the key for us to knowing a lot of information, because the older siblings are gone,” Adrienne says. Danny gets out through the passenger-side door. Police try to give him a sobriety test, but he falls down. They arrest him and take him to the station for a drug recognition evaluation, which shows he was under the influence of a prescription painkiller. He’s charged with driving while impaired by a drug.
“But he was always very positive, very joyful. He always wanted to make sure that I was having a good day. He would always start our conversations by asking me how I was doing.”Venables tries the same argument this time in pre-trial meetings in 2020. A back injury brought the drugs into his life and every substance in the police drug analysis was prescribed to him, Venables says. One prescription had been changed and he became impaired while driving, he says.
There is no official account of the hardships Danny endured, no pre-sentence Gladue report that assesses an Indigenous person’s circumstances and can lead to a reduced sentence.
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