Before I was born, my biological father left my mother.  I have never met, nor do I know who my really dad is.

When I was a newborn, my mom was so poor, she took two clothes hangers, clipped empty chip bags, chocolate bar wrappers and empty pop cans to them and hung it from the roof with twine as my first crib mobile.

When I was in kindergarten, I knew the phone number to three different bars in town because I called them so often when I came home from school looking for my mother, wondering when someone was coming home to watch me.

When I was in grade school, I got teased by the white kids for being brown and picked on by the brown kids for living off-reserve.

When I was in high school, my home life was so turbulent, I dropped out, secured my own apartment and a job working full-time cleaning ashtrays and taking out the trash at Kewadin Casino for $5.65 US an hour instead.

When I was 21, I had a freak bicycle accident that broke, smashed, and cracked nearly every bone in my face. The impact alone should have killed me but it did not.  I loss so much blood that I had to have a blood transfusion, which I had a bad reaction to and almost died. The swelling was so bad they had to cut a hole in my throat just so I could breathe.

When I was 31, I was pretty much homeless, sleeping at a friend’s house, with no money in the bank, my credit card maxed out and my car was falling apart.