On the eve of the fourth National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we once again honour treasured Elder and tireless community-builder Theodore Niizhotay Fontaine with Niizhotay Stories, an annual event which calls on us all to forge a healing path in the spirit of “two hearts.”For this year’s installment, we welcome Andrea Currie back to Winnipeg to celebrate the launch of her new book, Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves (Arsenal Pulp Press), featuring a conversation hosted by katherena vermette. Co-presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of THIN AIR 2024.
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.
Andrea Currie was born into a Métis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians – all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the Sixties Scoop was in full swing. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Métis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. In Finding Otipemisiwak, Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.
Andrea Currie is a writer, healer, and activist born in Winnipeg and currently living in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is a psychotherapist working in Indigenous mental health and has accompanied the We’koqma’q Residential School Survivors on their healing journey for the past twenty years.
Host katherena vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company), won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novels The Break (House of Anansi), The Strangers and The Circle (Hamish Hamilton) were all national bestsellers and won multiple literary awards. Her most recent novel, real ones (Hamish Hamilton), was recently longlisted for the Giller Prize. Her work for children and young adults includes the picture book The Girl and the Wolf (Theytus) and the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo (Highwater). She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba. katherena lives with her kids—fur and human—in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.