My names. My cultures.

Me and my Mennonite grandparents.

Welcome to my first blog post!

Some of you who know me, may notice that my website is under a different name. I haven’t made a legal switch at this point, and I’m not entirely sure I will. As it stands, my legal surname is Penner, which I’d changed from my previous surname when I’d married my partner. There are certain assumptions made about a person based on one’s name. And, there are certain assumptions made about a person when one decides to change one’s name. I suppose we can never quite escape such things and ultimately need to do what feels “right” when we check in with that tiny spot in our stomach, which usually flags for us when something definitely feels off.

As some people in my life know, I was adopted during the Sixties Scoop in Canada. Although it’s labeled as the “Sixties” Scoop, the policies which enabled and promoted the displacement of Indigenous children began in the late 1950’s and persisted until, legally-speaking, 1991. It makes sense that many people are confused by the name, surprised to hear that many of my family members and I were part of this nuanced and difficult part of history in both Canada and the United States (although it is not labelled as such amongst our southern neighbours).

Although some Canadian legislation changed thereafter, what many scholars describe as following next was merely a transition into what came to be known as the Millennial Scoop. Still, to this day, Indigenous children are widely overrepresented within the child welfare system across both countries. Across Canada, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children account for just over 52 percent of the children in care, despite making up less than 8 percent of the population below 14 years old. In Manitoba, the numbers are worse, where Indigenous children account for 90 percent of the children in care.

How does one make sense of these numbers? How does one even know where to begin to make sense of a system with such a complicated and layered history? These are questions I’ve struggled to know how to answer my entire life - a life so deeply impacted by this system that I couldn’t even begin to imagine what my life could have looked like without it.

I grew up with foster siblings. Twenty different siblings, actually. Some of whom stayed for only a few weeks, others for years. None for forever. There were those of us in my large, extended Mennonite family who were adopted, who were told we were “here to stay,” as my mom would answer me whenever I, feeling increasingly threatened and fearful, asked my frequent questions. Mom, when are they coming to take me away, too? But even the adopted ones weren’t always “here to stay” forever, at least not in the same way as other children did, the ones who somehow managed to stay with their first families from the moment they were born and never had to leave. This became glaringly clear for me when a few of my cousins, one to whom I’d always secretly dreamed I was biologically related, were taken away by child and family services when we were children.

Forever never really meant forever. Not for children like us, anyway.

All of this - the instability of family, the loving and losing of brothers and sisters and aunts and cousins, the loss of our culture and our first families - has led to so many of us struggling to understand where we belong. And what we are left with are questions. So many questions.

My life has been heavily influenced by my conservative Mennonite upbringing. I know the culture in a way that can only be known by the prayers I would say at night and before faspa and in the way a certain turn of phrase would mean something totally different to an outsider than it did when shared between my two grandparents.

And yet.

I have also been raised with the undeniable influence of my mother’s Ukrainian culture. Her mother, my baba (whom I would always just refer to as “Baba”), has probably solely influenced my life just as much as both of my parents combined. Her first language was Ukrainian. My mother’s first language, and only spoken language until she was seven years old, was Ukrainian. I knew how to say “I love you,” in their language (“ya tebe duzhe lyublyu” - or in the Ukrainian alphabet, “я тебе дуже люблю”) before I knew how to say it in English. The Ukrainian language still sounds like a sing-song love ballad to me. It is also a culture which came to live inside me and around me from the moment I was adopted. It is a culture with which I have a deep and persisting bond.

And yet.

I have never been able to shake the feeling of being an outsider. I’m not sure I entirely want to shake that feeling, either. After all, I also have a culture that is my very own. It does not belong to my adoptive parents, nor does it belong to my grandparents or their parents before them. It is mine. And in regards to my adoptive parents, it is exclusively mine and, perhaps, that knowledge has offered me some solace throughout the years. Apart from the obvious physical ways in which I clearly differ from my parents, I have always felt different from them in more ways than the colour of our eyes or the undertones of our skin. I have always questioned everything, often to the exasperation of both my parents. I have pondered upon the deeper meaning of life for as long as I can remember (the earliest existential crisis I recall encountering was at the age of seven during a lesson at my local Sunday School at church). Perhaps, the knowledge that there was always something within me, an entire culture and history and lineage I could one day explore if I was lucky enough, offered me some relief while feeling so utterly apart from my family, from those I was supposed to feel so connected to.

And yet.

I have not quite been able to shake the feeling of being an outsider even to the culture which runs through my arteries and exists within my marrow and the coarse, intersecting strands of my dark brown hair. That feeling of un-belonging, that uncertainty as to where and to whom exactly I should or want to belong, has haunted me for most of my life.

How do I claim a culture from which I was removed at such a young age?

Is it even mine to reclaim, especially when I have spent most of my life never knowing the identity of my biological mother, the one person that is my connection to that culture?

Furthermore, how do I find a love and acceptance for the Mennonite culture? A culture which has felt like such a divisive presence between me and my own culture, although largely in part due to forces outside of my or my parents’ control. I have experienced an entire spectrum of emotions with regards to my Mennonite culture and identity. While not an ounce of it runs through any part of my body, it still feels like a weighted, essential, and undeniable part of my being, nonetheless.

Does one, should one, culture count more than the other?

Do I consider myself Mennonite because my last name for most of my life has been a Mennonite one, which has always been inherited from one man or another in my life? It was also with me all those years through medical school, when, after a particularly long and hard call shift, I was too tired to remember if the traffic light I just drove through was red or green on my way home. But there I was, the next day, waking up at 6 in the morning to go out and do the exact same thing. It is with me in times of crisis, when all I want to do is cry and break down but am instantly reminded of the actual work that needs to be done in that moment and that the tears, the emotions can be saved for later (if at all - but that’s another story). The culture, the language, the smell of Grandma’s roll kuchen or schnetki preparing in the kitchen has woven itself into my identity and I know I will never be able to remove it. I know I will never want to remove it.

Or do I consider myself Ukrainian, for that is the one language other than English with which I am most familiar? It is the smell of perogies and cabbage rolls on Christmases spent on January 7th and the creaky sound from those old cassette tapes of my Gida’s polka music wafting through Baba’s kitchen on Saturday nights, as the two of us danced, hand in hand, waiting for our supper to finish frying on the stove. It is the warmth of Baba’s hand as she rubbed my back and told me stories in Ukrainian, as I drifted off to sleep next to her, night after night.

Or am I Métis? In the way that my cheeks arrange themselves in the exact same manner as my biological mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s? It is the colour of my skin after I spend a few minutes in the summer sun and the way my scalp never feels more comfortable than it does when my hair is woven into a tight braid. It lives in my feet whenever I hear the beat of any drum and the tears that always gather in the corner of eyes that are otherwise intolerably dry, whenever I am in the presence of traditional Indigenous music and dancing, whether it is the jig or the Haka or the Meke (Métis, Māori , and Fijian dances, respectively).

The most I can come up with is that I am all of these things. I am all of them, plus more that I will likely continue to discover throughout the rest of my days. I had also always suspected that I am part-cat, in the way I have always found immense pleasure since a young girl in my belief that I can decipher the hidden meaning to my cat’s various meows and slow eye blinks. So, I guess there is also that.

So, for now, I have decided that I will reclaim, in part, what I feel is mine to reclaim.

I am choosing to write and live with the names of both of my mothers. Senkiw and McMahon. The name which my adoptive mother struggled to release when she first married during a time and within a culture where she was told she had no other choice. And the name which my biological mother imherited upon her birth and intentionally decided to keep despite marrying. It is the name I was given at birth. It is also a name which was hidden from me until I was a young adult and eventually received my records which informed me of what my name had been before it was erased.

It is rare in life to be given a chance to reclaim something, anything.

And I suppose that using my name to reclaim a part of myself, a part of both of my mothers, feels as though I am reclaiming something both externally and internally. Both macro and micro, tangible and symbolic. It feels significant and important, and at the same time, utterly unexciting.

Perhaps, that is the pleasure I find in this, that it can be all of these things. That someone can look at my name on a website or an ordinary piece of paper and think nothing of it.

And that I might look at that same website and know that it represents an entire collection of histories which were never meant to intersect but which I am continually trying to accept and embrace as a part of what makes me who I am.