This is the best summary I could come up with:

He would proudly take out a blurry photocopy of the land scrip application signed by my “half-breed” ancestor Augustus Harrison in 1876 and carefully trace my finger along the line of surnames of our family tree to me.

The second of five children, he spent his childhood wandering thick swamp lands and running barefoot through trembling aspen and white birch forests hunting for prairie chickens and grouse to help feed his family.

Every day after school, even at minus thirty-five degrees, he checked trap lines for foxes, coyotes, muskrats and mink to skin and sell to the Hudson’s Bay Company for a few extra dollars.

Over a decade, however, the knots of shame that filled my belly were teased apart through gentle micro-validations that came from family and friends as well as shifts in Canadian society and discourse.

When my BCMF card arrived, it felt like I had been given permission to fully embrace the Red River Métis culture, language, and history as part of my own, and yet I had unknowingly waded into a quagmire of Indigenous politics that threatened to sink my newfound confidence.

Like a young willow tree along the banks of the Red River, I held on knowing that I am on a journey of discovery and self-acceptance — one that I am excited to be on for myself, my children and the Métis Nation.

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One day, in the near or distant future, we will look back at blood-based and ancestry-based self-identification as being rather quaint. In the same way that sexual self-identification has changed over time.