August 25, 2025 • 56 mins
If you’ve ever dug deep into your family history, you know that there are sometimes surprises. Author Tanya Talaga discovered that the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter was mostly unknown because she was Indigenous. It’s a struggle that many Indigenous people in Canada have: how do you learn about your family’s past without crucial records? Talaga’s incredible book, The Knowing lays out Annie’s story and Tanya’s journey to find the truth.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All of these schools had graveyards like our schools. Now,
you don't build a school and build a graveyard, but
they did then.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. If you've ever dug deep
into your family history, you know that there are sometimes surprises.
(01:11):
Author Tanya Talaga discovered that the life of her great
great grandmother, Annie Carpenter was mostly unknown because she was Indigenous.
It's a struggle that many Indigenous people in Canada have.
How do you learn about your family's past without crucial records?
To Laga's incredible book, The Knowing lays out Annie's story
(01:31):
and Tanya's journey to find the truth. So where do
we start. Your mom comes to you and says, there's
this piece of history that's missing, which is something I
deal with, you know, all the time. I'm a historical
true crime writer and podcaster, and people ask me all
the time, why does it matter? I mean, this person
(01:52):
has been gone generations and generations, so much has happened,
so much has developed.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
What will this do?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
So maybe you will have a much more eloquent answer
than I will.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Why does this matter? In your family and in general?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh if I had a dollar every time somebody said
that to me or you know, why can't you just
get over it? Right? As an Anashnabe, a First Nations woman,
We've always known that there are people in our family,
my maternal family that was just gone, right, A lot
of First Nations people. We have been affected by Indian
(02:30):
residential schools, Indian boarding schools in the States, policies of
extermination in the United States, it was Andrew Jackson, you know,
and the moving of our people, the killing of our people.
In Canada, we had something similar and we are still
governed in Canada by something called the Indian Act, which
(02:51):
is a race based piece of legislation that essentially assigns
a ten digit number to every single Indian quote unquote
or First Nations person in Canada. And I'm a status Indian,
so I also have attended at number with my name,
and my name's on a roll with my mother and
(03:12):
our relations signifying that we are under the eyes of
the Canadian government they recognize us as quote unquote Indians.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
But that's a whole other.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Conversation, and that's partly part of a story that we
might get into here.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
But you know, truth be told, it was.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
My mom who constantly said to me she wanted to
know where Annie was. She always wanted to know what
happened to her great grandma. She knew she was in
Toronto somewhere, she didn't know where she was or what
happened to her. And she said to me, you know,
you're the journalist, Tanya. You're the one in this family
who professionally looks for people for a living. And I
(03:49):
do you know I've written crime stories, health stories, national politics,
covered G twenty events. You know, I've been to Latvia
and England and France, and you know, I've done all
these different stories, but the biggest story that I've ever
done is really on my own family, and that was
assigned to me by my mother.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
So let's kind of get into for me.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
If I were a listener, I would immediately think, why
do we think that this is something that needed to
be investigated? Not as a disappearance, because you know a
lot of people. Man, I've had a really hard time
tracing some of my great great great band parents. But
you really are connecting it to her status, Annie status,
(04:34):
as of course, you know, a woman of the First
Nation and everything that was happening these Indian residential schools
and boarding schools. Do we start with Annie through this
and then through the lens of Annie's story we see
what is happening over the centuries in Canada to you know,
members of First Nation?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Absolutely, you know, because when Annie was born, you know,
you have to start at the beginning, and you have
to start with what you have, right and what I had,
and all my uncle Hank really had of Annie's that
was a piece of paper that could lead us in
directions was her death certificate. He had a lot of letters,
(05:15):
He had a lot of random names that turned out
to be distant relations. But it was really hard finding
the thread of all that he had, you know, especially
when someone passes away and leaves you all of their notes,
you've got to sort of go through them. And he
only used to write little notes on the margins, and
so there wasn't a lot really there to go on.
(05:37):
But there was this death certificate, and this death certificate
gave us an idea of her age. It was wrong
when it came to her parents and where she was
from their question marks, so we didn't know any of that,
but it had her married name and so that was
a start. It had the institution that she was into
(06:00):
way too and at the bottom of the death certificate
it said that she was buried in a cemetery that
I'd never heard of before, but was associated with the
Ontario hospital where she died, and so that was the beginning.
It's like, okay, so where's the Ontario Hospital? What is
the Ontario Hospital? After much digging, it was a lunatic asylum,
(06:24):
and every single province in Canada had a provincial hospital
just like this one. And in the United States there
was also a hospital for the insane. It was called
Canton and the Canton Hospital for the quote unquote insane
also had many First Nations Native American people they were
(06:48):
sent there. And this piece of paper for me was
the beginning of Okay, well, now we have a first step.
We've got her married name, we've got to maybe her age.
And I had a lot, a lot of help with
trying to find more out about her. And I'll tell
you why. I mean, I've been a journalist, as I said,
for a couple decades, and I find people for a living.
(07:10):
But finding and sifting through government archives and records, a
lot of what the Government of Canada has archive wise
is not digitized, less than ten percent is. Most of
the archives are held in Ottawa. I live in Toronto,
which is about a four and a half hour drive
away from Ottawa, outside of Ottawa, and it was like
(07:33):
looking for a needle in the haystack, like literally looking
for an needle haystack. And I was lucky enough to
have a friend who is a professional archivist and who's
read both my books and said to me, you know,
the next time you ever are looking for someone and
you need some help, let me know. And it was
at that time I said to my friend Ryan, I
said you know what, I need your help. I need
(07:55):
your help in trying to find any. And it was
the people that he were within himself that found the
census report. The government of Canada takes a census every
ten years, and he found the eighteen eighty one census
report that told us that any her last name was
actually Carpenter, that was her maiden name, and she was
(08:18):
ten years old in eighteen eighty one, and that she
was from a place called Fort Albany. And Fort Albany
is way up the James Bay Coast. It's about twenty
five hundred to three thousand kilometers or about two thousand
miles north of Toronto.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I am used to ancestry, you know, US ancestry, where
you can gather a tremendous amount of information because it's digitized, right,
I mean, since all of these things are pretty incredible,
you know, access that you can gain. I found so
many people in their history fairly easily thanks to ancestry.
(08:58):
And you're saying it's not the same. I mean, is
the US government just more proficient at digitizing everything? And
why would the US government be better at something than Canada?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Is you actually have better privacy laws too? It's easier
for you to find information than it is in Canada.
In Canada, it's pretty tough. Like as a journalist, I've come,
you know, I have to do. They're called freedom of
information requests in Ontario and federally they're called access to
Information requests, and they are not easy.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That's a step.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
A step B is that a lot of the records
that were taken down that talked about our families spelled
our names wrong. They were either taken down by someone
who was English or someone who was French. But then
they were dealing with people that are Cree or people
that are on a shnobbe, and they have and all
of these different indigenous dialects and names and customs of
(09:55):
what a name is and what a name isn't. So,
for instance, when we we were trying to find Annie
and her family, Annie's husband who we later found I
have at least seven different spellings for his last name,
and so trying to find Annie and Samson's children as
a result of that, it's like it adds, you know,
(10:19):
with the digging, it's even harder and harder and harder
because you've got to look for so many different names
and in so many different locations as well. So yes,
there's a lot of stuff on ancestry because there's so
many families and so many people putting things and pulling
things together, and they can build their own trees. And
you could also sort of get in there and help
(10:40):
fill in blanks, but it's difficult when you're dealing with
indigenous people.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Well, that was my question.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Is you know, when I'm doing research, I can go
to newspapers dot com and look in the eighteen hundreds
and me notorious for being inaccurated. You know, I have
done that with my own book and with some a
woman who asked me to help her a little bit
with her own family, where I've purposely misspelled the names
and have gotten just this treasure trove of information because
(11:08):
the newspapers weren't accurate. But I am also accustomed to
looking through papers from the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds,
where someone is almost always mentioned as a little slip
of a thing, mister who and missus who went to
go visit. Is that not the case for indigenous people
in Canada? Did they show up in newspapers under any
circumstances at all during this time period?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yes, it did. And thanks for asking that question. But normally,
you know, we have a saying here amongst Indigenous journalists
that oftentimes in news media only covered us if we
were one of the four d's, drunk, drumming, dancing, or dead.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
And that's pretty well true.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It was so hard to find any information out about
our families, and a lot of what was written in
the eighteen hundreds and the nineteen high it's in newspapers
as well, all the way up to the two thousands
in newspapers.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Is pretty racist.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Can be pretty racist too, right, And so we were
for the longest time on both sides of the border
not treated the same way, you know. And you could
see that through having two entirely different school systems for
children in Canada. We also had Indian hospitals, so segregated healthcare.
(12:28):
We have the Indian Act, right, so there was another
ring of our people. Isabelle Wilkerson is brilliant in her
book cast about this, about the different classes in America.
It's the same in Canada, right, And oftentimes it's easier
to find someone, it's easier to go back if you're
(12:51):
a British ancestry like I have some friends that can
go back and you know, my son, my son's dad
was I. They can go back and look and look
and find people, you know, from thirteen hundred and something,
and I'm just like, wow, on my mother's side of
(13:12):
the family, I can only go back to eighteen sixty two.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
What about twenty three and me something like that? Is
that at all helpful for people?
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Huge? Huge?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
That is like and thanks for bringing that up. You know,
my cousin was so incredibly helpful to me. She said, Okay,
here's our profile and here are all the people that
were related to. And it was like a bomb growing
off in my mind because all the research I was doing,
(13:43):
and you know, finding that Annie Carpenter was originally you know,
Cree and from the James Bay coast and she had
all these brothers and sisters and then they all had families,
and that so many of our kids disappeared in Indian
residential schools. I can see all of these people I
was related to. And as a journalist, I've been covering
(14:05):
indigenous issues too in Ontario and in Canada, and there
was a lot of people there that I cover and
know and that I turn out that I'm related to.
So that was pretty mind blowing, and that was from
twenty three and me twenty three and me basically mirrored
the results of the research in my book that I
was finding and it solidified it and said, yeah, actually,
(14:27):
you're absolutely right, this is what happened.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Tell me if this makes sense the way they tell
the story, can we take whatever pieces of information that
are fact that you have records for that you've discovered,
and can we tell her story chronologically? Like you had mentioned,
you sort of started with the death certificate. And did
you say letters that uncle Hank had Was it letters
(14:53):
from Annie or to Annie or what was it?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
No, we have nothing like that.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
These were letters that my uncle Hank wrote to the
government and of Canada asking for any information he had
about his mom, where his mom was born, and also
about Annie. And the information he got from the Government
of Canada back to him and to the Province of
Ontario regarding his mom, Liz, Annie's daughter was that she
(15:18):
didn't exist. They had nobody on record that had this name. Well,
I knew that she existed because I exist. Uncle Hank
knew he had a mom, and so those were the
letters that he left. They were at letters that he
was writing to government institutions looking for his mom and
his grandma, his mom's identity really, because you find this
(15:39):
with a lot of people that have been through Indian
residential school and I'd like to say probably the same
with Indian boarding schools. What they experience in those schools
is so traumatic that they shut down that part of
their life, Like we have survivors that leave those schools
and never want to speak about it again, never want
(16:01):
to go back that way. And also too, no longer
believe that they are themselves indigenous, because they had it
sort of drummed into them that being an Indian was
good for nobody and that you had to assimilate into
the culture that was all around you. And so when
(16:22):
he wanted to talk to his mom about what she
had been through, she would not, for instance, and took
whatever happened to her to her grave. The book The Knowing, too,
it's almost like I'm having a conversation with Annie in
some spots, I'm asking her questions about why she made
the choices she did, or how she felt about when
we discovered that she had children besides my great grandma
(16:45):
that were just gone and disappeared into the school system,
how she felt about that. I mean, as a mom,
it's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Well, let's start from the beginning. I know, is that
the census. Is that how you found out what year
she was born? You said that you found the eighteen
eighty one census, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, this said that she was ten years old. Then,
so we knew she was born in eighteen seventy one.
And then too, you know when you look as you
know you're a historian as well, like you know, you
look at that year and to figure out what was
happening in Canada at that time. Okay, well, first Canada
was just being born. The Indian Act, that racist peace
of legislation I was telling you about, came into law
(17:24):
in eighteen seventy six, so when she was five years old,
and right before that time, Sir John A. MacDonald, who
was the first Prime Minister of Canada, had just purchased
an absolutely massive territory of land called Rupert's Land that
actually encompassed six American Northern states, all the provinces from
(17:48):
basically Quebec over to British Columbia and into the Northwest Territory.
So it was like eight thousand square kilometers, a huge,
vast territory of land. Of course First Nations people were
already living on and had been living on forever, but
was sold quote unquote from the Hudson's Bay Company, which
(18:11):
is a giant fur trading outfit monopoly for two hundred years,
to Sir John A.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
MacDonald.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
And so what I did in the book was I
look back to see what was happening in Annie's life.
And while that sale of represent is so important as well,
was Annie's dad, Jean Baptiste, we discovered was a servant
of the HBC. So there were all of these forces
that were going on in North America at the time
(18:39):
of Annie's birth that would change her life in such
profound ways. Generations and generations of women that would go
from being partners with their husbands and in their communities
and having a voice and having an integral part at
that decision table with communities to being almost a commodity.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Now I had read you know, I think you mentioned
in the book that there were young children, who were
young girls from First Nation who sold off essentially to.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Marry these fur traders.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
That's how you know, entrenched that industry was with the
government and you know everything else.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Do you want to talk a little.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I know that that might not be applicable directly to
any story, but you want to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Oh for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Thanks for bringing that up, because I didn't mean to
do this until I actually sat down and started writing
the book and you know, did that okay, when was
she born? And then took a look at the forces
in her life that I started to realize that all
the history books I was reading as well, and the
first hand accounts, they were so different, like they were
(19:51):
interpreted in such a different way. I mean, one of
the things that I read about constantly were these this
notion of quote unquote country wives and country why or
something we always heard about in Canadian history. I remember
hearing about it as a student. And these were First
Nations girls, so indigenous girls who were twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
and they were married off to European fur trader's career
(20:15):
de Bois, and the romantic idea was they were country wives.
You know, Oh, isn't this wonderful. She's helping this man
who's twenty or thirty years older than her to start
a family and you know, showing him what plans to
eat and which rivers to travel and everything else. And
(20:35):
I was thinking to myself, you know what, twelve thirteen
or fourteen year old girl wants to be married off
to some sort of stinky man that's like twenty or
thirty years older than her. Leave her family, leave her language,
leave everything that she knows to be a wife at
such early age. And that to me was wrong, you know,
(20:57):
And that to me was the beginning I do believe
of trafficking if are women of indigenous women across North America,
and also too the crisis that we see on both
sides of the border again, which is murdered and messing
Indigenous women and girls. Women are just taken and used
(21:17):
and abused and then in some cases thrown away. I
could see the history of that, the beginnings of that
thought process and that othering of women in North America.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Was this an agreement with the indigenous families with the
European fur traders or how did this? They were just
simply taken and there was I guess I need to
understand the subservient part of this, what the relationship was
between First Nation people and you know, Hudson Bay and
in any of these other folks who were coming in.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
So many layered responses to that, and it's a big question.
But I've been to the Hudson Bay Company archives and
they have these contracts. I've seen Annie's dad's contract with
the HBC that lists him as a servant of the HBC,
and it is wildly one sided. You know, basically, you're
(22:10):
selling your life to get paid for furs and for
labor and for basically anything that they asked you to
do for them. And when it came to women, another
troubling story. I mean, I could tell you about one
of the governors. So the Hudson Bay Company was ruled
by a system of governors, and one of the governors,
(22:32):
his name was Sir George Simpson, and he had at
least ten different country wives that he would have children
with and would discard them, and then he would ask
people to get rid of the women. He would try
and marry them off to other workers or other people,
or he would just walk away from them. You know, honestly,
(22:53):
who knows what was happening at the time and what
the contracts were, what the agreements were. I'm sure in
some cases it was an agreement that a family was making,
but was it in every single family circumstance and how
one sided were those agreements, how desperate were those families.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
What were Annie's parents like? But they're both indigenous, is
that right?
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, they're both Cree. We call them in Innu, so
Inanu is Cree. And they were from James Bay and
Hudson Bay. So if you look at a map of
North America, what looks like a giant horseshoe, you know
over northern Canada, Ontario, that is Hudson Bay, named after
(23:38):
Henry Hudson, the same guy that founded the Hudson River.
He was an explorer of little repute in England. Nobody
really knew about him, but he made some major discoveries
quote unquote here in North America, and one of them
was Hudson Bay. And Hudson Bay is actually a giant seat.
It's a giant saltwater seat, and all along the coastline
(24:02):
is where Annie's people were from, and they have lived
there for generations and generations. So that was something I
discovered about Annie, which was interesting to me because that
is a different cultural group than what my maternal family
was already a part of.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And that's on a schnabe.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So there are different indigenous cultures all through Canada and America.
For instance, on a schnabe are all around the Great Lakes.
If you were to put a you draws circle right
around the Great Lakes north, south, east, and west, and
you will find on a shnabe people. And so my
mom's grandfather was on a schnabe and so we always
(24:44):
you know, just talked about being on a schnabe and
no one really talked about being crete. And there she was. Well,
so that was interesting to find that out. But just
finding the fact that we had all of these relations
that we just didn't know about was pretty wild. And
as you know from you know, twenty three and me
(25:05):
and from doing your own ancestry, that's something.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And then you start looking at your own family history
and it's like a patchwork quilt.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
You're trying to put together all the pieces.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
So now I think we're up to her being ten,
and you know, we know this from the census.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
What do we know about her life?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
What's the next piece of information, what's the next clue
you have about Annie?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Well, the next knowing her last name was a huge clue.
Carpenter and I actually turned to Facebook, believe it or not,
because a lot of Indigenous people use Facebook, Like we're
the only ones still on Facebook. I know everyone else
probably thinks it's like pass everything else, but every single
Indian is on Facebook, and we talk to each other
(25:47):
all the time. We use Facebook Messenger, we post way
too much about our lives sometimes, and you know, we
know each of this business through Facebook.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's a thing.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
So that's where I turned. I you know, went to
Facebook like, hey, does anybody know any carpenters from the
James Bay Coast. And one of the first people to
reply was Paula Rickard and she is from a community
along the James Bay Coast called muse Cree First Nation.
And she said to me, I know the Carpenters. She goes,
(26:15):
They're in my family tree. She's a community historian and
she has thirteen thousand names in her family tree.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So basically, if you are in a new if you're
a Cree and you're from the coast, she's got your
name and you know a part of your family. So
she was such a valuable resource. And she helped me
find Annie's marriage certificate to her first husband. And I
didn't know his name, I knew it was possible that
(26:43):
she was married, had a husband that wasn't who was
listed on that death certificate, And I was right, she
was and she was married at eighteen, and she found
Paula has the record of that marriage, and that was
a credible to me. So I could see who my
great great grandfather was. His name was Samson Themest Goose
(27:06):
and he was a hunter for the Hudson Bay Company.
Of course, so was this a contract? Is that what
that was?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
No? But he was he was crete, Okay, so he was.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I don't know how they met or you know, did
they meet at residential school at Indian residential school, did
they meet at a day school? Did they meet on
the coast somewhere? I have no idea, but Paula found
this record and in those church records she also found
that they had five other children.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And you all had only note about Liz, right about
Hank's mom.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
That's right, Well, so this would be a child Liz
came from Samson.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Okay, This is all part of the mystery, right because
Liz always had the last name Gotier, and Anne Gotier
was on the death certificate.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Gotier was her married name.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
But I always suspected that that wasn't her real last name,
that she had a different dad, And I was right.
Her dad was indeed Samson, this Cree hunter, and they
had Liz was child six with them.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
There were five others.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
And we knew nothing about them, what happened to them,
where they went to. I am still finding out information
about those five. One died of hooping cough when he
was just a young boy. But the rest I had
to try and hunt down and find which Indian residential
(28:38):
schools they were taken away to. One was taken across
the border of the provincial border into Manitoba to attend
a residential school there. It was remarkable. And then finding
their children, it's been a process.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Now it's a good time to introduce us to Indian
residential schools. And you also talk about Indian boarding schools.
You'd say taken so explain what all of this means.
And it sounds like Annie ended.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Up in one of these.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So Indian residential schools existed in Canada between the mid
eighteen hundreds to nineteen ninety six and when they were
first set up and when the Indian Act came into law.
Under the Indian Act, it was law to send your
children to these schools. These schools were funded by the
(29:33):
federal government and they were administered by the Christian churches.
These schools got more money the more students they had,
and so oftentimes children would be taken away and put
into the schools so the schools could have more money.
And also, as I said, it was against the law
(29:53):
not to have your child at the school for decades,
and so parents would be jail or face high fines
if they didn't give their children to the police officer
that came to the door and said, your kids have
to come with us, and they're going to Indian residential
school And at these schools you lived there. Many of
(30:16):
the schools didn't let the kids go home on the
summer or in the holiday period because they felt that
interaction with their family was detrimental to the work they
were doing, and that work was Christianizing the children and
assimilating them to become good British citizens, to become good Canadians.
(30:36):
In America, the Indian residential schools were called boarding schools
and industrial schools, and they were run by the War
Department because it was integral to clear people off the
land to make way for the settlers. So the War
Department ran the schools and they were doing the same thing.
(30:56):
Assimilation was the key religious entity were often involved as
teachers quote unquote. But the education in both of these institutions,
and they were institutions, were not as good as what
non Indigenous children received, and in many cases, children were abused,
(31:20):
they were neglected, they were you know, physically assaulted, sexually assaulted,
taken advantage of, and children died because they weren't given
proper health care or through incidents or accidents or violence.
And so all of these schools had graveyards. Like our
schools now, you don't build a school and build a graveyard,
(31:43):
but they did then and many of those graveyards are unmarked,
and that is why you hear so many people Indigenous
people on both sides of the border looking for the
relations that died at the schools and where they're buried.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
You had talked about these records were of course held
by the church, right, not the Canadian government, and so
you've talked about the process that you had to go through.
The foyas I think is you know what you were
saying to get those kinds of records, Is there any
recourse to get these types of records from the church.
Is there now a more of an openness of the
(32:19):
churches in Canada that used to run these schools to
release these records.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It's gotten better. It has gone better. The fairest thing
I can say. I am so in my journalist's life.
This is all kind of exploding. The time I was
looking for Annie, at the same time, something happened at
the former grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which
is in Kamloops, British Columbia. There was this discovery of
(32:46):
a potential two hundred and fifteen graves of children, and
that made headlines all over the world. And that was
happening at the same time that I was looking for Annie,
And that discovery led to an investigation in all of
the one hundred and seventy Indian residential schools in Canada
(33:08):
looking at where the children buried, who went to these schools,
and so there was an opening up of records. People
started searching for records and we started to ask the
Catholic Church, the Catholic Church ran the most residential schools,
to help us find those records. That was a tough
go because there are many denominations in the Catholic Church.
Some are a little bit more forthcoming than others, and ultimately,
(33:33):
the Vatican has many records, and I was part as
a journalist. I went with the Assembly of First Nations
and the Mateen National Council and Nuit as well to
go to Rome, to go to the Vatican to ask
the Pope for an apology for the Catholic Church's involvement
(33:53):
with Indian residential school. And part of that was to say,
we'd like our records. We'd like for you to open
up your vaults and to give us your records. That
is still a work in progress.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
I'm curious about what your emotional process is once you
find out that she's married and she's had these six children,
do you fill in the blanks? Because I assume you
don't know how the marriage went, how happy she was.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I mean, how would you know that just from government records?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Right?
Speaker 3 (34:22):
So did you and your mom fill in the blanks
and just sort of think, I hope this was a
good marriage, I hope this wasn't abusive. Do you have
to do that or are you on such a mission
that you're just trying to gather records you're not coming
up with your own narrative as you move along in this.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, No, I did come up with my own narrative.
Thanks for asking to frame me it that way, you know.
And I was talking to Annie in the book. You
can know in the book you can see a methodical
look at me at the records I would find, and
sometimes I would ask any questions, you know, and I
would make comments on you know. I hope that her
(34:58):
marriage to Samson was one of love and light, because
her life just went dark. You know, she had all
of these kids, she was married at eighteen, you know.
Was she as an eighteen year old girl who was
marrying like this, you know, handsome Greek hunter? You know,
was she thinking of this is wonderful, you know, here
(35:19):
we go, we're starting our life out. And I like
to think that that's what she was thinking, and that
this was years of happiness that she had, but they
would be short lived because her children would be taken
away and Samson dies. He dies and leaves her a
widow with the two remaining children she has, which is
(35:44):
my great grandma Liz and who I later found out
was Christina, her sister. She was with her brother. She
went with her brother after Samson died, and she started
using Samson's first name as her last name, which was
a custom when your husband dies. And it's not just
(36:05):
with our people too, I've heard that before as well.
It was some European families too, right, So suddenly she's
left a widower, her kids are gone, she's got two
wee ones with her, and she's with her brother.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
And as a woman of.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Any race in North America at the turn of the
twentieth century, marriage was your only way of survival.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
How old was she when Samson died? And do we
know why he died? Was natural causes, no idea, no idea.
Could not find anything.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
You couldn't find his death certificate or anything.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Huh nothing, nothing, So and there were many of us looking.
We couldn't find what happened to him. And so there
she was and she was left with trying to survive
in this world. And we found her second marriage license.
She was married when she was thirty eight years old
(37:06):
for a second time, to a man named Joe Gautier,
hence the name Annie Gotier. Hence my great grandma Liz
having the name Gautier appear on all her documents. And
that's why the Canadian government said that she didn't exist
because there was no birth record of a Liz Goutier
because that wasn't her dad. So, you know, imagine being
(37:30):
married again in the late it was nineteen nine, I
believe it was that she got married and Annie would
have been thirty eight, thirty nine, which is old now
it's not, but it was then, and then she had
a daughter with Joe Goutier.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
What does that signify to you within the culture or
in the time period. If a man is marrying a
woman who's thirty eight, who I would assume during that
time period was considered outside the range of a woman
who would be pregnant, what would be the motivation do
you think is that supporter? Do you have more optimism
(38:10):
about the second marriage because maybe it was for love?
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, I think about that sometimes, but then I think
maybe not because he got rid of her oh quote
unquote right, So she was Annie. Like when we found
out more about this Ontario hospital, Annie was sent away
from her home and sent twenty five hundred kilometers so
(38:37):
about nineteen hundred miles south to this Ontario hospital. And
she was married to Joe got at the time and
I kind of look at it like, well, why didn't
he do anything to stop that? Did he go visit her?
And when she died, why didn't he bring her body
back home? Why did he leave her in an unmarked grave?
(38:58):
Which is what we found that Annie was in an
unmarked grave outside of this hospital. So that led me
to believe the marriage wasn't everything that it was cracked
up to be.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
And when I say.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
That, I mean, you know, my mother remembers Joe hearing
stories about Joe got and knowing Joe Goti is just
like she goes, Oh, he was so vibrant, you know,
she remembers this red beard. He was also not indigenous.
He was French Canadian. And I wonder too, you know,
did he take Annie for a wife because he needed
a woman to do things for him.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I mean, I'm sure you know the answer to this,
but you know, husbands in the early nineteen hundreds, just
for no good reason, could have their wives institutionalized. I mean,
I can't even tell you how many stories I've written
about that. I'm glad you said that he was you
said French Canadian write Gotier, Yeah, because I was wondering
if a indigenous man would also have that ability or
(39:57):
would that have to be kind of an act of
the government, Right, He wouldn't have that, right, right, there'd
have to be something that would happen.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Okay, well there you go, so he could have done
it himself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
And you know in the nineteen thirties too, right, like
what you just said, you could be institutionalized for having
anxiety over not doing your homework. Yeah, I mean like
teenagers were institutionalised for that, for having period cramps and
being emotional, for having an affair, for refusing to speak English,
(40:27):
for instance, and just speaking on a schnabe or speaking
in a new like you know, speaking creed or speaking ujiboy.
I mean, there are a whole host of reasons, and
mental illness doesn't have to be one of them. So
it's that part is all pretty much a mystery as
to what happened to Annie, why she was put in
(40:48):
to this institution. You know, it was my mom that
said to me, he got rid of her.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Now, Paula, you said the woman you found on Facebook,
she's a gotier.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Is that what she said? That's how you? No, No,
she is.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Her last name's Rickard, but she has she is cree
and she has this giant family tree of all the
Cree families essentially from the James van Hudson Bay coast.
So she knew about Annie's family and she helped us
put the pieces together that way. About her Cree side, well,
she was all free. But Joe Gautier, we poked around
(41:25):
on him ourselves and pretty unremarkable. You know. He was
born in Quebec, came over to Ontario and some where
he crossed paths with Annie and they married.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Now this would be not her father but stepdad, stepdad,
that's who. But you always thought it was her father, right.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Always did.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
And then I had to, you know, go in my
group chat with all my cousins and tell my mom,
oh yeah, you know that guy you always thought was
your great grandfather, he's actually not related to you, and
then tell all my family that as well. That was
something I had, this giant group chat with my cousins,
and I would every time I would find something, I
would tell them more because I wanted to be as
(42:09):
transparent as it possibly could with them. So and it
all didn't come out, you know, when the book was
finished as this giant Oh my gosh, right, you've got
to process this information.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
So just to be clear, because this is actually pretty
shocking to me. You know, if we're thinking, and Uncle
Hank's thinking that his father is Joe, Joe is French Canadian,
his biological father is Free, right.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
That would have been so Hank, that would have been
his grandpa, got it, Okay, he was thinking that was
his grandpa. So that's because Annie was married to Joe Gotier, right,
And it was Annie's daughter, Liz, So her last child
was Samson.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
That was Hank's mom.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And she married a guy named Alfons Pishki who is
on a schnabe. He always knew, Hank knew that was
his dad, Okay, god grandfather that was this white guy
that actually wasn't his grandfather.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Did Uncle Hank die before any of this came out?
He did, right, sadly, yes, you know, sadly, yes, you know.
And it was his research that like really gave me
the big push to find all this information. And he
spent years looking for news and information about his mom
and you know, where she was born and where Annie
(43:26):
was from and what happened to her, And well I
wish I could tell him, you know, but I like
to think that wherever he is his spirit can hear this?
Would that have changed anything for him? I don't know
if it's within the community. But to go from a
grandfather who's French Canadian to a biological grandfather who is,
you know, Indigenous, I don't know if there is that
(43:48):
sort of like a belief of you know, people who
have had in their history a mix of cultures versus
somebody who has maybe just had a mix of Indigenous
you know called Yeah, well it's.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah, it's kind of the opposite, right, So he's like
all Indigenous and then there's this French Canadian grandfather. But
everyone sort of thought about that, and so, you know, yeah,
it was I'm sure at the time too, a lot
of Indigenous people were hiding, right, like, you know, hiding
in the bush, trying not to be noticed by government
(44:23):
officials because why because they took your kids away. Yeah, yeah,
you know, and if you had a quote unquote white relative,
sometimes that was like a bit of a shield.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
What were the circumstances for Annie as far as you
would know, not her specifically, but what were asylums like
in the time period when she was in This was
Lake Shore Asylum, right.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, yeah, what we could find we could, We could
not find very much from the nineteen thirties, so I
went a little bit further afield. And I also had
some help from doctor Jeffrey Rome, who studies this about
what asylums were like in you know, the history of
these places too.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
They were awful. You know.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I don't know if you've seen American horror story Asylum,
but my brain kept going back to that and thinking
about what she was living in. It must have been horrific,
you know, being strapped to gurney's and tables and having
no freedom, no rights at all. I mean, she was
(45:28):
basically disposed of. I mean, did anyone go see her?
Did she have any freedom? Once she was in that place?
She never left. She was there for seven years, eight months,
and twenty eight days, That's what it says in her
death certificate. And then she ended up dying of gangreen
of the intestines and pulmonary disease as well. Right, that's
(45:52):
what they said, Right, that's what it said. Do you
believe that what is gangreen of the intestine sounds like
a horrible, awful way to die, a painful way to go.
And they listed chronic mania as well, and that for
what I understand is kind of a catch all phrase
for any kind of illness that could possibly be. In
(46:16):
the nineteen thirties, but electroshock therapy was starting to be
used in the asylum she was in, and I wondered
about that too. Did that happen to Annie? And you
also had to work in these like giant laundry rooms
where they'd be like no ventilation if you were a woman,
or in big kitchens, and the abuse there would have
(46:37):
been wicked, yeah, you know, and no recourse.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
What age was she when she died? According to the
death certificent.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
They said seventy one, and I think it was sixty seven.
So she was put in the asylum when she was
about sixty years old. And I'm in my mid fifties.
I think about that a lot too. It's like, oh,
she was just a little bit older than me.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
But she was married to Joe for twenty two years
before she went in.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Is that right? When doing the mouth right? Yeah? Good math.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, So everybody, all of the kids had gone, but
we don't know did they go to the Indian you know,
residential schools and then disappeared there or did they spread
out across Canada?
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Did they come to a may We don't know, except for.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Liz Well, Christina, the girl I was telling you about
that when Annie was a young widower and she just
had these two wee ones with her. We found Christina.
Paula really was the one that found and traced her life.
She had been sent to something called Elkhorn Indian Residential School,
which is on the Prairies on the Manitoba Saskatchewan border.
(47:41):
And we were able to piece her story together through
government records. We had something called Indian Agents here in Canada.
It kept track of all of us Indians, and they
wrote letters about Christina, about Christina having a baby and
they named her Christina too, and that baby got sent
(48:04):
to an Indian residential school in Ontario, and so we
were able to piece together her life. We were also
able to piece together John's life. John was Annie and
Samson's son and he died when he was twelve years old,
literally in the middle of Ontario, northern Ontario, in a
(48:25):
tiny little place called Bisco. And he was a quote
unquote labor at age twelve. So we were able to
find that death certificate. But had he been at an
Indian residential school? Was he a runaway. Why was he
out there in the middle of nowhere by himself as
a laborer? What was he doing? Was he there on
his own?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Accord? Like it?
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Just like the more things you find out sometimes through
the records, the more questions you.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Have what ultimately happens with Annie's remains. You said that
they were located right at the asylum with its last
the final name it had.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Okay, so then.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Are you able to move her or what's the last
step for you with this?
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Well, it's it was pretty crazy. So I had lived
in Toronto my whole life, and turns out Annie was
here all along. The cemetery is in the West End Toronto,
and she is in a giant unmarked grave where we
found there are fifteen hundred and eleven people there. There
(49:28):
are only grave markers on ten percent of those graves,
so about one hundred and fifty four of them have
grave markers. The rest it's just this giant field and
that is where the patients were buried. And finding Annie,
we know the plot number and so we can sort
of figure out where she is in this giant area.
(49:50):
But we also discovered there were thirty two other First
Nations people in that unmarked grave area as well. So
finding Annie he led to finding thirty two other First
Nations people and we're in the process of, you know,
trying to locate their families and tell them, Look, you've
got a relation here. It's a hard call now, right, Like,
(50:11):
what do you do now that she's we know where
she is. Do we leave her there? Do we send
her home? And where would home be? Would it be
back up to Fort Albany? Would it be outside of
Thunder Bay to where she was living, you know before
she was sent away, taken away? Where did we put her?
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (50:30):
And also too to disturb her after all this time,
and yet you know I can see her here.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
It's a hard call.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
I know that there has been a movement here in
the United States that I know has been going on
forever for in Native Americans, for Indigenous people here to
be able to reclaim remains.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
What do you do with someone who you know, ideally you.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
Would bury in a very particular kind of way, but
you know now that she's been buried, do you disturb
what's the best thing for Annie?
Speaker 2 (50:59):
At this point, we have held one ceremony for Annie
so far, and you.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Know, when we first went out there.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
When my mom, my daughter and I first went out
there to see Annie, we held our own little ceremony
for her. You know. We brought our sacred medicines and
we we smudged the ground in the area for Anny,
you know, and let's let her know that we were there.
We also held a ceremony with many of the leaders
(51:31):
from Northern Ontario, from my nation, and that was pretty
huge for us. We all went out there and actually
the Kookpie of Kamloops to kum Loops, so where the
Kamloops Indian Residential School is, she was also with us.
And we drummed and we sang and we said prayers
(51:52):
for Annie, and that was something. And now, yeah, my
cousins and I like one cousin in particular, he's he's
an elder, so he in our community is you know,
someone we look up to and ask for spiritual guidance.
And we're talking about okay, well what do we do now?
Do we take a vote? Do we talk about this?
(52:13):
And so that's the question.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Now, is there a way to get markers once we've
hopefully identified some of these people, can you create this
sort of own graveyard that's actually something that acknowledges who's
buried there where people can come visit. I mean, actually
something formal that people can see who is there, I hope.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
So, you know, I really do. The Canadian government did
something called the Last Post with soldiers who were lying
in on Mark Graves from the First World War to
commemorate the ending of the First World War. And I
think about that sometimes, and I think about we should
have something similar, just a little plaque with people's names,
(52:52):
right that died in these institutions unwillingly we're taken away.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
You know.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
We've got all of these kids too there and on
Mark Graves all over Turtle Island. Whether we've got to
find some way of commemorating them. If not a plaque
for everyone, what about some kind of a statue or something,
you know. Yeah, I think about that a lot. And
I think with Annie as well. Somebody in one of
(53:20):
our communities said to me, maybe we leave Annie there
and we put up a monument and so people could
come and know that this is where she is and
this is her story. Yeah, and people will see it
because it's where she's buried, where this giant graveyard on
Mark Graveyard is. It's right off one of the busiest
(53:43):
highways in Toronto, and Toronto is a city of over
three million people, and so it's literally sounds of a
giant ikea.
Speaker 3 (53:51):
Well, you know, I'll try to bring this back to
the purpose of you doing this. You know, I talked
to my own kids. I have fifteen year old twin girls,
and I talk to them about kind of a legacy
and why I do what I do. And for me,
my legacy is not true crime or anything that I'm
doing now. It's really to try to be the best
parent I can be so that they will be the
(54:13):
best parents they can be and their kids will be
because then you're sending out all of these people for
generations who will have a positive impact on the world.
That is my goal instead of generation wealth, It's like
generational positivity and having an impact. And I just think,
you know, with Annie, I don't know what she thought
about herself, and I know you've thought about that, like,
does she think that this is this is it? This
(54:34):
is what my life has come to. I don't have
my children anymore. I'm in an asylum. I don't know
if you know she had good marriages or not. Never
a million years, I'm sure would she have thought that,
you know, who knows what happened to the other kids,
but this one child, Liz, would just eventually end up
with you, who is trying to make an impact for
you know, a nation of people. So that's a legacy,
(54:55):
you know.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
Like which thank you, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2 (54:59):
I think at that sometimes, you know, and you know
what runs through our blood, right, all the women that
came before us, and we are you know, as mothers,
as women. I mean, we're here because of the strengths
of our mothers and our grandmothers and our great grandmothers
and all the whoors, the love, the hardship, the pain,
the beauty that they live through. But we survived and
(55:23):
we do that to tell their stories. I believe that
to be true.
Speaker 3 (55:38):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(55:58):
This has been an exact write production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
(56:20):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
more and if you know of a historical crime that
could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also
take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All of these schools had graveyards like our schools. Now,
you don't build a school and build a graveyard, but
they did then.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. If you've ever dug deep
into your family history, you know that there are sometimes surprises.
(01:11):
Author Tanya Talaga discovered that the life of her great
great grandmother, Annie Carpenter was mostly unknown because she was Indigenous.
It's a struggle that many Indigenous people in Canada have.
How do you learn about your family's past without crucial records?
To Laga's incredible book, The Knowing lays out Annie's story
(01:31):
and Tanya's journey to find the truth. So where do
we start. Your mom comes to you and says, there's
this piece of history that's missing, which is something I
deal with, you know, all the time. I'm a historical
true crime writer and podcaster, and people ask me all
the time, why does it matter? I mean, this person
(01:52):
has been gone generations and generations, so much has happened,
so much has developed.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
What will this do?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
So maybe you will have a much more eloquent answer
than I will.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Why does this matter? In your family and in general?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh if I had a dollar every time somebody said
that to me or you know, why can't you just
get over it? Right? As an Anashnabe, a First Nations woman,
We've always known that there are people in our family,
my maternal family that was just gone, right, A lot
of First Nations people. We have been affected by Indian
(02:30):
residential schools, Indian boarding schools in the States, policies of
extermination in the United States, it was Andrew Jackson, you know,
and the moving of our people, the killing of our people.
In Canada, we had something similar and we are still
governed in Canada by something called the Indian Act, which
(02:51):
is a race based piece of legislation that essentially assigns
a ten digit number to every single Indian quote unquote
or First Nations person in Canada. And I'm a status Indian,
so I also have attended at number with my name,
and my name's on a roll with my mother and
(03:12):
our relations signifying that we are under the eyes of
the Canadian government they recognize us as quote unquote Indians.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
But that's a whole other.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Conversation, and that's partly part of a story that we
might get into here.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
But you know, truth be told, it was.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
My mom who constantly said to me she wanted to
know where Annie was. She always wanted to know what
happened to her great grandma. She knew she was in
Toronto somewhere, she didn't know where she was or what
happened to her. And she said to me, you know,
you're the journalist, Tanya. You're the one in this family
who professionally looks for people for a living. And I
(03:49):
do you know I've written crime stories, health stories, national politics,
covered G twenty events. You know, I've been to Latvia
and England and France, and you know, I've done all
these different stories, but the biggest story that I've ever
done is really on my own family, and that was
assigned to me by my mother.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
So let's kind of get into for me.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
If I were a listener, I would immediately think, why
do we think that this is something that needed to
be investigated? Not as a disappearance, because you know a
lot of people. Man, I've had a really hard time
tracing some of my great great great band parents. But
you really are connecting it to her status, Annie status,
(04:34):
as of course, you know, a woman of the First
Nation and everything that was happening these Indian residential schools
and boarding schools. Do we start with Annie through this
and then through the lens of Annie's story we see
what is happening over the centuries in Canada to you know,
members of First Nation?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Absolutely, you know, because when Annie was born, you know,
you have to start at the beginning, and you have
to start with what you have, right and what I had,
and all my uncle Hank really had of Annie's that
was a piece of paper that could lead us in
directions was her death certificate. He had a lot of letters,
(05:15):
He had a lot of random names that turned out
to be distant relations. But it was really hard finding
the thread of all that he had, you know, especially
when someone passes away and leaves you all of their notes,
you've got to sort of go through them. And he
only used to write little notes on the margins, and
so there wasn't a lot really there to go on.
(05:37):
But there was this death certificate, and this death certificate
gave us an idea of her age. It was wrong
when it came to her parents and where she was
from their question marks, so we didn't know any of that,
but it had her married name and so that was
a start. It had the institution that she was into
(06:00):
way too and at the bottom of the death certificate
it said that she was buried in a cemetery that
I'd never heard of before, but was associated with the
Ontario hospital where she died, and so that was the beginning.
It's like, okay, so where's the Ontario Hospital? What is
the Ontario Hospital? After much digging, it was a lunatic asylum,
(06:24):
and every single province in Canada had a provincial hospital
just like this one. And in the United States there
was also a hospital for the insane. It was called
Canton and the Canton Hospital for the quote unquote insane
also had many First Nations Native American people they were
(06:48):
sent there. And this piece of paper for me was
the beginning of Okay, well, now we have a first step.
We've got her married name, we've got to maybe her age.
And I had a lot, a lot of help with
trying to find more out about her. And I'll tell
you why. I mean, I've been a journalist, as I said,
for a couple decades, and I find people for a living.
(07:10):
But finding and sifting through government archives and records, a
lot of what the Government of Canada has archive wise
is not digitized, less than ten percent is. Most of
the archives are held in Ottawa. I live in Toronto,
which is about a four and a half hour drive
away from Ottawa, outside of Ottawa, and it was like
(07:33):
looking for a needle in the haystack, like literally looking
for an needle haystack. And I was lucky enough to
have a friend who is a professional archivist and who's
read both my books and said to me, you know,
the next time you ever are looking for someone and
you need some help, let me know. And it was
at that time I said to my friend Ryan, I
said you know what, I need your help. I need
(07:55):
your help in trying to find any. And it was
the people that he were within himself that found the
census report. The government of Canada takes a census every
ten years, and he found the eighteen eighty one census
report that told us that any her last name was
actually Carpenter, that was her maiden name, and she was
(08:18):
ten years old in eighteen eighty one, and that she
was from a place called Fort Albany. And Fort Albany
is way up the James Bay Coast. It's about twenty
five hundred to three thousand kilometers or about two thousand
miles north of Toronto.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I am used to ancestry, you know, US ancestry, where
you can gather a tremendous amount of information because it's digitized, right,
I mean, since all of these things are pretty incredible,
you know, access that you can gain. I found so
many people in their history fairly easily thanks to ancestry.
(08:58):
And you're saying it's not the same. I mean, is
the US government just more proficient at digitizing everything? And
why would the US government be better at something than Canada?
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Is you actually have better privacy laws too? It's easier
for you to find information than it is in Canada.
In Canada, it's pretty tough. Like as a journalist, I've come,
you know, I have to do. They're called freedom of
information requests in Ontario and federally they're called access to
Information requests, and they are not easy.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
That's a step.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
A step B is that a lot of the records
that were taken down that talked about our families spelled
our names wrong. They were either taken down by someone
who was English or someone who was French. But then
they were dealing with people that are Cree or people
that are on a shnobbe, and they have and all
of these different indigenous dialects and names and customs of
(09:55):
what a name is and what a name isn't. So,
for instance, when we we were trying to find Annie
and her family, Annie's husband who we later found I
have at least seven different spellings for his last name,
and so trying to find Annie and Samson's children as
a result of that, it's like it adds, you know,
(10:19):
with the digging, it's even harder and harder and harder
because you've got to look for so many different names
and in so many different locations as well. So yes,
there's a lot of stuff on ancestry because there's so
many families and so many people putting things and pulling
things together, and they can build their own trees. And
you could also sort of get in there and help
(10:40):
fill in blanks, but it's difficult when you're dealing with
indigenous people.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Well, that was my question.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
Is you know, when I'm doing research, I can go
to newspapers dot com and look in the eighteen hundreds
and me notorious for being inaccurated. You know, I have
done that with my own book and with some a
woman who asked me to help her a little bit
with her own family, where I've purposely misspelled the names
and have gotten just this treasure trove of information because
(11:08):
the newspapers weren't accurate. But I am also accustomed to
looking through papers from the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds,
where someone is almost always mentioned as a little slip
of a thing, mister who and missus who went to
go visit. Is that not the case for indigenous people
in Canada? Did they show up in newspapers under any
circumstances at all during this time period?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yes, it did. And thanks for asking that question. But normally,
you know, we have a saying here amongst Indigenous journalists
that oftentimes in news media only covered us if we
were one of the four d's, drunk, drumming, dancing, or dead.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
And that's pretty well true.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It was so hard to find any information out about
our families, and a lot of what was written in
the eighteen hundreds and the nineteen high it's in newspapers
as well, all the way up to the two thousands
in newspapers.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Is pretty racist.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Can be pretty racist too, right, And so we were
for the longest time on both sides of the border
not treated the same way, you know. And you could
see that through having two entirely different school systems for
children in Canada. We also had Indian hospitals, so segregated healthcare.
(12:28):
We have the Indian Act, right, so there was another
ring of our people. Isabelle Wilkerson is brilliant in her
book cast about this, about the different classes in America.
It's the same in Canada, right, And oftentimes it's easier
to find someone, it's easier to go back if you're
(12:51):
a British ancestry like I have some friends that can
go back and you know, my son, my son's dad
was I. They can go back and look and look
and find people, you know, from thirteen hundred and something,
and I'm just like, wow, on my mother's side of
(13:12):
the family, I can only go back to eighteen sixty two.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
What about twenty three and me something like that? Is
that at all helpful for people?
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Huge? Huge?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
That is like and thanks for bringing that up. You know,
my cousin was so incredibly helpful to me. She said, Okay,
here's our profile and here are all the people that
were related to. And it was like a bomb growing
off in my mind because all the research I was doing,
(13:43):
and you know, finding that Annie Carpenter was originally you know,
Cree and from the James Bay coast and she had
all these brothers and sisters and then they all had families,
and that so many of our kids disappeared in Indian
residential schools. I can see all of these people I
was related to. And as a journalist, I've been covering
(14:05):
indigenous issues too in Ontario and in Canada, and there
was a lot of people there that I cover and
know and that I turn out that I'm related to.
So that was pretty mind blowing, and that was from
twenty three and me twenty three and me basically mirrored
the results of the research in my book that I
was finding and it solidified it and said, yeah, actually,
(14:27):
you're absolutely right, this is what happened.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Tell me if this makes sense the way they tell
the story, can we take whatever pieces of information that
are fact that you have records for that you've discovered,
and can we tell her story chronologically? Like you had mentioned,
you sort of started with the death certificate. And did
you say letters that uncle Hank had Was it letters
(14:53):
from Annie or to Annie or what was it?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
No, we have nothing like that.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
These were letters that my uncle Hank wrote to the
government and of Canada asking for any information he had
about his mom, where his mom was born, and also
about Annie. And the information he got from the Government
of Canada back to him and to the Province of
Ontario regarding his mom, Liz, Annie's daughter was that she
(15:18):
didn't exist. They had nobody on record that had this name. Well,
I knew that she existed because I exist. Uncle Hank
knew he had a mom, and so those were the
letters that he left. They were at letters that he
was writing to government institutions looking for his mom and
his grandma, his mom's identity really, because you find this
(15:39):
with a lot of people that have been through Indian
residential school and I'd like to say probably the same
with Indian boarding schools. What they experience in those schools
is so traumatic that they shut down that part of
their life, Like we have survivors that leave those schools
and never want to speak about it again, never want
(16:01):
to go back that way. And also too, no longer
believe that they are themselves indigenous, because they had it
sort of drummed into them that being an Indian was
good for nobody and that you had to assimilate into
the culture that was all around you. And so when
(16:22):
he wanted to talk to his mom about what she
had been through, she would not, for instance, and took
whatever happened to her to her grave. The book The Knowing, too,
it's almost like I'm having a conversation with Annie in
some spots, I'm asking her questions about why she made
the choices she did, or how she felt about when
we discovered that she had children besides my great grandma
(16:45):
that were just gone and disappeared into the school system,
how she felt about that. I mean, as a mom,
it's terrifying.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Well, let's start from the beginning. I know, is that
the census. Is that how you found out what year
she was born? You said that you found the eighteen
eighty one census, Is that right?
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Yeah, this said that she was ten years old. Then,
so we knew she was born in eighteen seventy one.
And then too, you know when you look as you
know you're a historian as well, like you know, you
look at that year and to figure out what was
happening in Canada at that time. Okay, well, first Canada
was just being born. The Indian Act, that racist peace
of legislation I was telling you about, came into law
(17:24):
in eighteen seventy six, so when she was five years old,
and right before that time, Sir John A. MacDonald, who
was the first Prime Minister of Canada, had just purchased
an absolutely massive territory of land called Rupert's Land that
actually encompassed six American Northern states, all the provinces from
(17:48):
basically Quebec over to British Columbia and into the Northwest Territory.
So it was like eight thousand square kilometers, a huge,
vast territory of land. Of course First Nations people were
already living on and had been living on forever, but
was sold quote unquote from the Hudson's Bay Company, which
(18:11):
is a giant fur trading outfit monopoly for two hundred years,
to Sir John A.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
MacDonald.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
And so what I did in the book was I
look back to see what was happening in Annie's life.
And while that sale of represent is so important as well,
was Annie's dad, Jean Baptiste, we discovered was a servant
of the HBC. So there were all of these forces
that were going on in North America at the time
(18:39):
of Annie's birth that would change her life in such
profound ways. Generations and generations of women that would go
from being partners with their husbands and in their communities
and having a voice and having an integral part at
that decision table with communities to being almost a commodity.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Now I had read you know, I think you mentioned
in the book that there were young children, who were
young girls from First Nation who sold off essentially to.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Marry these fur traders.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
That's how you know, entrenched that industry was with the
government and you know everything else.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Do you want to talk a little.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
I know that that might not be applicable directly to
any story, but you want to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Oh for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Thanks for bringing that up, because I didn't mean to
do this until I actually sat down and started writing
the book and you know, did that okay, when was
she born? And then took a look at the forces
in her life that I started to realize that all
the history books I was reading as well, and the
first hand accounts, they were so different, like they were
(19:51):
interpreted in such a different way. I mean, one of
the things that I read about constantly were these this
notion of quote unquote country wives and country why or
something we always heard about in Canadian history. I remember
hearing about it as a student. And these were First
Nations girls, so indigenous girls who were twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
and they were married off to European fur trader's career
(20:15):
de Bois, and the romantic idea was they were country wives.
You know, Oh, isn't this wonderful. She's helping this man
who's twenty or thirty years older than her to start
a family and you know, showing him what plans to
eat and which rivers to travel and everything else. And
(20:35):
I was thinking to myself, you know what, twelve thirteen
or fourteen year old girl wants to be married off
to some sort of stinky man that's like twenty or
thirty years older than her. Leave her family, leave her language,
leave everything that she knows to be a wife at
such early age. And that to me was wrong, you know,
(20:57):
And that to me was the beginning I do believe
of trafficking if are women of indigenous women across North America,
and also too the crisis that we see on both
sides of the border again, which is murdered and messing
Indigenous women and girls. Women are just taken and used
(21:17):
and abused and then in some cases thrown away. I
could see the history of that, the beginnings of that
thought process and that othering of women in North America.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
Was this an agreement with the indigenous families with the
European fur traders or how did this? They were just
simply taken and there was I guess I need to
understand the subservient part of this, what the relationship was
between First Nation people and you know, Hudson Bay and
in any of these other folks who were coming in.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
So many layered responses to that, and it's a big question.
But I've been to the Hudson Bay Company archives and
they have these contracts. I've seen Annie's dad's contract with
the HBC that lists him as a servant of the HBC,
and it is wildly one sided. You know, basically, you're
(22:10):
selling your life to get paid for furs and for
labor and for basically anything that they asked you to
do for them. And when it came to women, another
troubling story. I mean, I could tell you about one
of the governors. So the Hudson Bay Company was ruled
by a system of governors, and one of the governors,
(22:32):
his name was Sir George Simpson, and he had at
least ten different country wives that he would have children
with and would discard them, and then he would ask
people to get rid of the women. He would try
and marry them off to other workers or other people,
or he would just walk away from them. You know, honestly,
(22:53):
who knows what was happening at the time and what
the contracts were, what the agreements were. I'm sure in
some cases it was an agreement that a family was making,
but was it in every single family circumstance and how
one sided were those agreements, how desperate were those families.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
What were Annie's parents like? But they're both indigenous, is
that right?
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, they're both Cree. We call them in Innu, so
Inanu is Cree. And they were from James Bay and
Hudson Bay. So if you look at a map of
North America, what looks like a giant horseshoe, you know
over northern Canada, Ontario, that is Hudson Bay, named after
(23:38):
Henry Hudson, the same guy that founded the Hudson River.
He was an explorer of little repute in England. Nobody
really knew about him, but he made some major discoveries
quote unquote here in North America, and one of them
was Hudson Bay. And Hudson Bay is actually a giant seat.
It's a giant saltwater seat, and all along the coastline
(24:02):
is where Annie's people were from, and they have lived
there for generations and generations. So that was something I
discovered about Annie, which was interesting to me because that
is a different cultural group than what my maternal family
was already a part of.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And that's on a schnabe.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
So there are different indigenous cultures all through Canada and America.
For instance, on a schnabe are all around the Great Lakes.
If you were to put a you draws circle right
around the Great Lakes north, south, east, and west, and
you will find on a shnabe people. And so my
mom's grandfather was on a schnabe and so we always
(24:44):
you know, just talked about being on a schnabe and
no one really talked about being crete. And there she was. Well,
so that was interesting to find that out. But just
finding the fact that we had all of these relations
that we just didn't know about was pretty wild. And
as you know from you know, twenty three and me
(25:05):
and from doing your own ancestry, that's something.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And then you start looking at your own family history
and it's like a patchwork quilt.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
You're trying to put together all the pieces.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
So now I think we're up to her being ten,
and you know, we know this from the census.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
What do we know about her life?
Speaker 3 (25:22):
What's the next piece of information, what's the next clue
you have about Annie?
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Well, the next knowing her last name was a huge clue.
Carpenter and I actually turned to Facebook, believe it or not,
because a lot of Indigenous people use Facebook, Like we're
the only ones still on Facebook. I know everyone else
probably thinks it's like pass everything else, but every single
Indian is on Facebook, and we talk to each other
(25:47):
all the time. We use Facebook Messenger, we post way
too much about our lives sometimes, and you know, we
know each of this business through Facebook.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
It's a thing.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
So that's where I turned. I you know, went to
Facebook like, hey, does anybody know any carpenters from the
James Bay Coast. And one of the first people to
reply was Paula Rickard and she is from a community
along the James Bay Coast called muse Cree First Nation.
And she said to me, I know the Carpenters. She goes,
(26:15):
They're in my family tree. She's a community historian and
she has thirteen thousand names in her family tree.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So basically, if you are in a new if you're
a Cree and you're from the coast, she's got your
name and you know a part of your family. So
she was such a valuable resource. And she helped me
find Annie's marriage certificate to her first husband. And I
didn't know his name, I knew it was possible that
(26:43):
she was married, had a husband that wasn't who was
listed on that death certificate, And I was right, she
was and she was married at eighteen, and she found
Paula has the record of that marriage, and that was
a credible to me. So I could see who my
great great grandfather was. His name was Samson Themest Goose
(27:06):
and he was a hunter for the Hudson Bay Company.
Of course, so was this a contract? Is that what
that was?
Speaker 1 (27:14):
No? But he was he was crete, Okay, so he was.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I don't know how they met or you know, did
they meet at residential school at Indian residential school, did
they meet at a day school? Did they meet on
the coast somewhere? I have no idea, but Paula found
this record and in those church records she also found
that they had five other children.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And you all had only note about Liz, right about
Hank's mom.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
That's right, Well, so this would be a child Liz
came from Samson.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Okay, This is all part of the mystery, right because
Liz always had the last name Gotier, and Anne Gotier
was on the death certificate.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Gotier was her married name.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
But I always suspected that that wasn't her real last name,
that she had a different dad, And I was right.
Her dad was indeed Samson, this Cree hunter, and they
had Liz was child six with them.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
There were five others.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
And we knew nothing about them, what happened to them,
where they went to. I am still finding out information
about those five. One died of hooping cough when he
was just a young boy. But the rest I had
to try and hunt down and find which Indian residential
(28:38):
schools they were taken away to. One was taken across
the border of the provincial border into Manitoba to attend
a residential school there. It was remarkable. And then finding
their children, it's been a process.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Now it's a good time to introduce us to Indian
residential schools. And you also talk about Indian boarding schools.
You'd say taken so explain what all of this means.
And it sounds like Annie ended.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Up in one of these.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So Indian residential schools existed in Canada between the mid
eighteen hundreds to nineteen ninety six and when they were
first set up and when the Indian Act came into law.
Under the Indian Act, it was law to send your
children to these schools. These schools were funded by the
(29:33):
federal government and they were administered by the Christian churches.
These schools got more money the more students they had,
and so oftentimes children would be taken away and put
into the schools so the schools could have more money.
And also, as I said, it was against the law
(29:53):
not to have your child at the school for decades,
and so parents would be jail or face high fines
if they didn't give their children to the police officer
that came to the door and said, your kids have
to come with us, and they're going to Indian residential
school And at these schools you lived there. Many of
(30:16):
the schools didn't let the kids go home on the
summer or in the holiday period because they felt that
interaction with their family was detrimental to the work they
were doing, and that work was Christianizing the children and
assimilating them to become good British citizens, to become good Canadians.
(30:36):
In America, the Indian residential schools were called boarding schools
and industrial schools, and they were run by the War
Department because it was integral to clear people off the
land to make way for the settlers. So the War
Department ran the schools and they were doing the same thing.
(30:56):
Assimilation was the key religious entity were often involved as
teachers quote unquote. But the education in both of these institutions,
and they were institutions, were not as good as what
non Indigenous children received, and in many cases, children were abused,
(31:20):
they were neglected, they were you know, physically assaulted, sexually assaulted,
taken advantage of, and children died because they weren't given
proper health care or through incidents or accidents or violence.
And so all of these schools had graveyards. Like our
schools now, you don't build a school and build a graveyard,
(31:43):
but they did then and many of those graveyards are unmarked,
and that is why you hear so many people Indigenous
people on both sides of the border looking for the
relations that died at the schools and where they're buried.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
You had talked about these records were of course held
by the church, right, not the Canadian government, and so
you've talked about the process that you had to go through.
The foyas I think is you know what you were
saying to get those kinds of records, Is there any
recourse to get these types of records from the church.
Is there now a more of an openness of the
(32:19):
churches in Canada that used to run these schools to
release these records.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
It's gotten better. It has gone better. The fairest thing
I can say. I am so in my journalist's life.
This is all kind of exploding. The time I was
looking for Annie, at the same time, something happened at
the former grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which
is in Kamloops, British Columbia. There was this discovery of
(32:46):
a potential two hundred and fifteen graves of children, and
that made headlines all over the world. And that was
happening at the same time that I was looking for Annie,
And that discovery led to an investigation in all of
the one hundred and seventy Indian residential schools in Canada
(33:08):
looking at where the children buried, who went to these schools,
and so there was an opening up of records. People
started searching for records and we started to ask the
Catholic Church, the Catholic Church ran the most residential schools,
to help us find those records. That was a tough
go because there are many denominations in the Catholic Church.
Some are a little bit more forthcoming than others, and ultimately,
(33:33):
the Vatican has many records, and I was part as
a journalist. I went with the Assembly of First Nations
and the Mateen National Council and Nuit as well to
go to Rome, to go to the Vatican to ask
the Pope for an apology for the Catholic Church's involvement
(33:53):
with Indian residential school. And part of that was to say,
we'd like our records. We'd like for you to open
up your vaults and to give us your records. That
is still a work in progress.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
I'm curious about what your emotional process is once you
find out that she's married and she's had these six children,
do you fill in the blanks? Because I assume you
don't know how the marriage went, how happy she was.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
I mean, how would you know that just from government records?
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Right?
Speaker 3 (34:22):
So did you and your mom fill in the blanks
and just sort of think, I hope this was a
good marriage, I hope this wasn't abusive. Do you have
to do that or are you on such a mission
that you're just trying to gather records you're not coming
up with your own narrative as you move along in this.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, No, I did come up with my own narrative.
Thanks for asking to frame me it that way, you know.
And I was talking to Annie in the book. You
can know in the book you can see a methodical
look at me at the records I would find, and
sometimes I would ask any questions, you know, and I
would make comments on you know. I hope that her
(34:58):
marriage to Samson was one of love and light, because
her life just went dark. You know, she had all
of these kids, she was married at eighteen, you know.
Was she as an eighteen year old girl who was
marrying like this, you know, handsome Greek hunter? You know,
was she thinking of this is wonderful, you know, here
(35:19):
we go, we're starting our life out. And I like
to think that that's what she was thinking, and that
this was years of happiness that she had, but they
would be short lived because her children would be taken
away and Samson dies. He dies and leaves her a
widow with the two remaining children she has, which is
(35:44):
my great grandma Liz and who I later found out
was Christina, her sister. She was with her brother. She
went with her brother after Samson died, and she started
using Samson's first name as her last name, which was
a custom when your husband dies. And it's not just
(36:05):
with our people too, I've heard that before as well.
It was some European families too, right, So suddenly she's
left a widower, her kids are gone, she's got two
wee ones with her, and she's with her brother.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
And as a woman of.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Any race in North America at the turn of the
twentieth century, marriage was your only way of survival.
Speaker 3 (36:33):
How old was she when Samson died? And do we
know why he died? Was natural causes, no idea, no idea.
Could not find anything.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
You couldn't find his death certificate or anything.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Huh nothing, nothing, So and there were many of us looking.
We couldn't find what happened to him. And so there
she was and she was left with trying to survive
in this world. And we found her second marriage license.
She was married when she was thirty eight years old
(37:06):
for a second time, to a man named Joe Gautier,
hence the name Annie Gotier. Hence my great grandma Liz
having the name Gautier appear on all her documents. And
that's why the Canadian government said that she didn't exist
because there was no birth record of a Liz Goutier
because that wasn't her dad. So, you know, imagine being
(37:30):
married again in the late it was nineteen nine, I
believe it was that she got married and Annie would
have been thirty eight, thirty nine, which is old now
it's not, but it was then, and then she had
a daughter with Joe Goutier.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
What does that signify to you within the culture or
in the time period. If a man is marrying a
woman who's thirty eight, who I would assume during that
time period was considered outside the range of a woman
who would be pregnant, what would be the motivation do
you think is that supporter? Do you have more optimism
(38:10):
about the second marriage because maybe it was for love?
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, I think about that sometimes, but then I think
maybe not because he got rid of her oh quote
unquote right, So she was Annie. Like when we found
out more about this Ontario hospital, Annie was sent away
from her home and sent twenty five hundred kilometers so
(38:37):
about nineteen hundred miles south to this Ontario hospital. And
she was married to Joe got at the time and
I kind of look at it like, well, why didn't
he do anything to stop that? Did he go visit her?
And when she died, why didn't he bring her body
back home? Why did he leave her in an unmarked grave?
(38:58):
Which is what we found that Annie was in an
unmarked grave outside of this hospital. So that led me
to believe the marriage wasn't everything that it was cracked
up to be.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
And when I say.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
That, I mean, you know, my mother remembers Joe hearing
stories about Joe got and knowing Joe Goti is just
like she goes, Oh, he was so vibrant, you know,
she remembers this red beard. He was also not indigenous.
He was French Canadian. And I wonder too, you know,
did he take Annie for a wife because he needed
a woman to do things for him.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I mean, I'm sure you know the answer to this,
but you know, husbands in the early nineteen hundreds, just
for no good reason, could have their wives institutionalized. I mean,
I can't even tell you how many stories I've written
about that. I'm glad you said that he was you
said French Canadian write Gotier, Yeah, because I was wondering
if a indigenous man would also have that ability or
(39:57):
would that have to be kind of an act of
the government, Right, He wouldn't have that, right, right, there'd
have to be something that would happen.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Okay, well there you go, so he could have done
it himself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
And you know in the nineteen thirties too, right, like
what you just said, you could be institutionalized for having
anxiety over not doing your homework. Yeah, I mean like
teenagers were institutionalised for that, for having period cramps and
being emotional, for having an affair, for refusing to speak English,
(40:27):
for instance, and just speaking on a schnabe or speaking
in a new like you know, speaking creed or speaking ujiboy.
I mean, there are a whole host of reasons, and
mental illness doesn't have to be one of them. So
it's that part is all pretty much a mystery as
to what happened to Annie, why she was put in
(40:48):
to this institution. You know, it was my mom that
said to me, he got rid of her.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Now, Paula, you said the woman you found on Facebook,
she's a gotier.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Is that what she said? That's how you? No, No,
she is.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Her last name's Rickard, but she has she is cree
and she has this giant family tree of all the
Cree families essentially from the James van Hudson Bay coast.
So she knew about Annie's family and she helped us
put the pieces together that way. About her Cree side, well,
she was all free. But Joe Gautier, we poked around
(41:25):
on him ourselves and pretty unremarkable. You know. He was
born in Quebec, came over to Ontario and some where
he crossed paths with Annie and they married.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Now this would be not her father but stepdad, stepdad,
that's who. But you always thought it was her father, right.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Always did.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
And then I had to, you know, go in my
group chat with all my cousins and tell my mom,
oh yeah, you know that guy you always thought was
your great grandfather, he's actually not related to you, and
then tell all my family that as well. That was
something I had, this giant group chat with my cousins,
and I would every time I would find something, I
would tell them more because I wanted to be as
(42:09):
transparent as it possibly could with them. So and it
all didn't come out, you know, when the book was
finished as this giant Oh my gosh, right, you've got
to process this information.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
So just to be clear, because this is actually pretty
shocking to me. You know, if we're thinking, and Uncle
Hank's thinking that his father is Joe, Joe is French Canadian,
his biological father is Free, right.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
That would have been so Hank, that would have been
his grandpa, got it, Okay, he was thinking that was
his grandpa. So that's because Annie was married to Joe Gotier, right,
And it was Annie's daughter, Liz, So her last child
was Samson.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
That was Hank's mom.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And she married a guy named Alfons Pishki who is
on a schnabe. He always knew, Hank knew that was
his dad, Okay, god grandfather that was this white guy
that actually wasn't his grandfather.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Did Uncle Hank die before any of this came out?
He did, right, sadly, yes, you know, sadly, yes, you know.
And it was his research that like really gave me
the big push to find all this information. And he
spent years looking for news and information about his mom
and you know, where she was born and where Annie
(43:26):
was from and what happened to her, And well I
wish I could tell him, you know, but I like
to think that wherever he is his spirit can hear this?
Would that have changed anything for him? I don't know
if it's within the community. But to go from a
grandfather who's French Canadian to a biological grandfather who is,
you know, Indigenous, I don't know if there is that
(43:48):
sort of like a belief of you know, people who
have had in their history a mix of cultures versus
somebody who has maybe just had a mix of Indigenous
you know called Yeah, well it's.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah, it's kind of the opposite, right, So he's like
all Indigenous and then there's this French Canadian grandfather. But
everyone sort of thought about that, and so, you know, yeah,
it was I'm sure at the time too, a lot
of Indigenous people were hiding, right, like, you know, hiding
in the bush, trying not to be noticed by government
(44:23):
officials because why because they took your kids away. Yeah, yeah,
you know, and if you had a quote unquote white relative,
sometimes that was like a bit of a shield.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
What were the circumstances for Annie as far as you
would know, not her specifically, but what were asylums like
in the time period when she was in This was
Lake Shore Asylum, right.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, yeah, what we could find we could, We could
not find very much from the nineteen thirties, so I
went a little bit further afield. And I also had
some help from doctor Jeffrey Rome, who studies this about
what asylums were like in you know, the history of
these places too.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
They were awful. You know.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
I don't know if you've seen American horror story Asylum,
but my brain kept going back to that and thinking
about what she was living in. It must have been horrific,
you know, being strapped to gurney's and tables and having
no freedom, no rights at all. I mean, she was
(45:28):
basically disposed of. I mean, did anyone go see her?
Did she have any freedom? Once she was in that place?
She never left. She was there for seven years, eight months,
and twenty eight days, That's what it says in her
death certificate. And then she ended up dying of gangreen
of the intestines and pulmonary disease as well. Right, that's
(45:52):
what they said, Right, that's what it said. Do you
believe that what is gangreen of the intestine sounds like
a horrible, awful way to die, a painful way to go.
And they listed chronic mania as well, and that for
what I understand is kind of a catch all phrase
for any kind of illness that could possibly be. In
(46:16):
the nineteen thirties, but electroshock therapy was starting to be
used in the asylum she was in, and I wondered
about that too. Did that happen to Annie? And you
also had to work in these like giant laundry rooms
where they'd be like no ventilation if you were a woman,
or in big kitchens, and the abuse there would have
(46:37):
been wicked, yeah, you know, and no recourse.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
What age was she when she died? According to the
death certificent.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
They said seventy one, and I think it was sixty seven.
So she was put in the asylum when she was
about sixty years old. And I'm in my mid fifties.
I think about that a lot too. It's like, oh,
she was just a little bit older than me.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
But she was married to Joe for twenty two years
before she went in.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Is that right? When doing the mouth right? Yeah? Good math.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, So everybody, all of the kids had gone, but
we don't know did they go to the Indian you know,
residential schools and then disappeared there or did they spread
out across Canada?
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Did they come to a may We don't know, except for.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Liz Well, Christina, the girl I was telling you about
that when Annie was a young widower and she just
had these two wee ones with her. We found Christina.
Paula really was the one that found and traced her life.
She had been sent to something called Elkhorn Indian Residential School,
which is on the Prairies on the Manitoba Saskatchewan border.
(47:41):
And we were able to piece her story together through
government records. We had something called Indian Agents here in Canada.
It kept track of all of us Indians, and they
wrote letters about Christina, about Christina having a baby and
they named her Christina too, and that baby got sent
(48:04):
to an Indian residential school in Ontario, and so we
were able to piece together her life. We were also
able to piece together John's life. John was Annie and
Samson's son and he died when he was twelve years old,
literally in the middle of Ontario, northern Ontario, in a
(48:25):
tiny little place called Bisco. And he was a quote
unquote labor at age twelve. So we were able to
find that death certificate. But had he been at an
Indian residential school? Was he a runaway. Why was he
out there in the middle of nowhere by himself as
a laborer? What was he doing? Was he there on
his own?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
Accord? Like it?
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Just like the more things you find out sometimes through
the records, the more questions you.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
Have what ultimately happens with Annie's remains. You said that
they were located right at the asylum with its last
the final name it had.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Okay, so then.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Are you able to move her or what's the last
step for you with this?
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Well, it's it was pretty crazy. So I had lived
in Toronto my whole life, and turns out Annie was
here all along. The cemetery is in the West End Toronto,
and she is in a giant unmarked grave where we
found there are fifteen hundred and eleven people there. There
(49:28):
are only grave markers on ten percent of those graves,
so about one hundred and fifty four of them have
grave markers. The rest it's just this giant field and
that is where the patients were buried. And finding Annie,
we know the plot number and so we can sort
of figure out where she is in this giant area.
(49:50):
But we also discovered there were thirty two other First
Nations people in that unmarked grave area as well. So
finding Annie he led to finding thirty two other First
Nations people and we're in the process of, you know,
trying to locate their families and tell them, Look, you've
got a relation here. It's a hard call now, right, Like,
(50:11):
what do you do now that she's we know where
she is. Do we leave her there? Do we send
her home? And where would home be? Would it be
back up to Fort Albany? Would it be outside of
Thunder Bay to where she was living, you know before
she was sent away, taken away? Where did we put her?
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (50:30):
And also too to disturb her after all this time,
and yet you know I can see her here.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
It's a hard call.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
I know that there has been a movement here in
the United States that I know has been going on
forever for in Native Americans, for Indigenous people here to
be able to reclaim remains.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
What do you do with someone who you know, ideally you.
Speaker 3 (50:52):
Would bury in a very particular kind of way, but
you know now that she's been buried, do you disturb
what's the best thing for Annie?
Speaker 2 (50:59):
At this point, we have held one ceremony for Annie
so far, and you.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
Know, when we first went out there.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
When my mom, my daughter and I first went out
there to see Annie, we held our own little ceremony
for her. You know. We brought our sacred medicines and
we we smudged the ground in the area for Anny,
you know, and let's let her know that we were there.
We also held a ceremony with many of the leaders
(51:31):
from Northern Ontario, from my nation, and that was pretty
huge for us. We all went out there and actually
the Kookpie of Kamloops to kum Loops, so where the
Kamloops Indian Residential School is, she was also with us.
And we drummed and we sang and we said prayers
(51:52):
for Annie, and that was something. And now, yeah, my
cousins and I like one cousin in particular, he's he's
an elder, so he in our community is you know,
someone we look up to and ask for spiritual guidance.
And we're talking about okay, well what do we do now?
Do we take a vote? Do we talk about this?
(52:13):
And so that's the question.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Now, is there a way to get markers once we've
hopefully identified some of these people, can you create this
sort of own graveyard that's actually something that acknowledges who's
buried there where people can come visit. I mean, actually
something formal that people can see who is there, I hope.
Speaker 2 (52:31):
So, you know, I really do. The Canadian government did
something called the Last Post with soldiers who were lying
in on Mark Graves from the First World War to
commemorate the ending of the First World War. And I
think about that sometimes, and I think about we should
have something similar, just a little plaque with people's names,
(52:52):
right that died in these institutions unwillingly we're taken away.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
You know.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
We've got all of these kids too there and on
Mark Graves all over Turtle Island. Whether we've got to
find some way of commemorating them. If not a plaque
for everyone, what about some kind of a statue or something,
you know. Yeah, I think about that a lot. And
I think with Annie as well. Somebody in one of
(53:20):
our communities said to me, maybe we leave Annie there
and we put up a monument and so people could
come and know that this is where she is and
this is her story. Yeah, and people will see it
because it's where she's buried, where this giant graveyard on
Mark Graveyard is. It's right off one of the busiest
(53:43):
highways in Toronto, and Toronto is a city of over
three million people, and so it's literally sounds of a
giant ikea.
Speaker 3 (53:51):
Well, you know, I'll try to bring this back to
the purpose of you doing this. You know, I talked
to my own kids. I have fifteen year old twin girls,
and I talk to them about kind of a legacy
and why I do what I do. And for me,
my legacy is not true crime or anything that I'm
doing now. It's really to try to be the best
parent I can be so that they will be the
(54:13):
best parents they can be and their kids will be
because then you're sending out all of these people for
generations who will have a positive impact on the world.
That is my goal instead of generation wealth, It's like
generational positivity and having an impact. And I just think,
you know, with Annie, I don't know what she thought
about herself, and I know you've thought about that, like,
does she think that this is this is it? This
(54:34):
is what my life has come to. I don't have
my children anymore. I'm in an asylum. I don't know
if you know she had good marriages or not. Never
a million years, I'm sure would she have thought that,
you know, who knows what happened to the other kids,
but this one child, Liz, would just eventually end up
with you, who is trying to make an impact for
you know, a nation of people. So that's a legacy,
(54:55):
you know.
Speaker 1 (54:56):
Like which thank you, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2 (54:59):
I think at that sometimes, you know, and you know
what runs through our blood, right, all the women that
came before us, and we are you know, as mothers,
as women. I mean, we're here because of the strengths
of our mothers and our grandmothers and our great grandmothers
and all the whoors, the love, the hardship, the pain,
the beauty that they live through. But we survived and
(55:23):
we do that to tell their stories. I believe that
to be true.
Speaker 3 (55:38):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(55:58):
This has been an exact write production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
(56:20):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
more and if you know of a historical crime that
could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also
take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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