ALISON GRANGER-BROWN lives on Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, and works with indigenous women in the prison system. She shares one woman’s story of courage and personal transformation. It is a reminder that even the most marginalized can find their way toward peace and purpose in life.
This is about my journey alongside an Ojibwa woman who was my client and who became my friend. We met in the women’s correctional system in British Columbia, Canada. At first I was afraid of her. That fear diminished as I became increasingly involved in her healing passage, and she grew from inmate to mother to researcher to colleague and finally to hospice patient. I traveled through many systems with her and saw first-hand the deeply ingrained racism in every institution and government organization with which she had to navigate and negotiate.
She was the victim of childhood poverty, daily sexual abuse, and intergenerational trauma as the daughter of a residential school survivor. She experienced institutional racism from early childhood when she was removed from her family at the age of six and taken into government “care” through her childhood, to her involvement with the justice system’s over-incarceration of Indigenous people, especially women. From an early age she used drugs, alcohol, and violence to survive and manage the emotional pain of a life fraught with injustice. The group home she was sent to as a little girl was so diabolical that she set fire to the school room. How hurt is a child to act in such a way?
Gradually, over time, her strong self-will and determination transitioned from harmful manipulation to healthy independence to helpful influencer in supporting other women like herself. She drew on her strengths and reshaped how she applied them, for example her sense of humor. She could see the absurdity in some rules and shifted from aggression to humor. Her survival skills turned from anti-social and criminal, to creative and legal, in order to meet the needs of herself and her young son.
I watched and wondered at her resilience and commitment to change, with the absolute devotion to breaking the cycle of her family’s trauma from colonial oppression to the growth and development of her son and his future. She succeeded in change; the system did not and has not. This is the lesson – we cannot change the situation, the system, or the story, but we can change how we respond and react. That pause between input to output is where we have our personal power.
Her resilience stemmed from the true ability to live in hope. Not false or unfounded wishful thinking, not a mulling over the potential probability of optimism, but a real belief in the possibility that we can effect change in our own capacity to manage and succeed. Here lies the lesson of hope.
This is the lesson
– we cannot
change the situation, the system, or the story,
but we
can change how we respond and react.
We may dream of systems changing, of the “other” seeing it our way …well good luck. Hope rests on finding and nurturing our self-will and building our capacity for creative thinking to find new pathways, new strategies, and new solutions. Every one of us has this capability if we look inside. We are the system, we are the only change possible, “We got this.”
My friend died of cancer because she went undiagnosed, even with repeated requests for an examination by her doctor. That is another story. She never lost her sense of humor, her acute observations of the absurd, and her fierce determination. She survived several years longer than predicted out of pure love for her son, to make sure he would have a memory of her. He was six when she died. He is now sixteen, six foot five, and a gentle, funny, healthy, hopeful young man. He has already overcome painful challenges in his life, and I believe he will draw on the resilience he learned from his mother for the rest of his life to continue to grow and heal the historical wounds his family and his people have endured. He is the best next generation image of his mother, as she hoped he would be.
Hope rests on finding and
nurturing our self-will
and building our capacity for creative thinking
to find new pathways, new
strategies, and new solutions.
Every one of us has this capability if we look inside.
We are the system, we are the
only change possible, “We got this.”
Alison Granger-Brown
