Warning: This story contains references to child sexual abuse which some readers may find disturbing.

Alberta, Canada – The mid-morning autumn light spills through the kitchen window as Martha Cardinal threads her hands through the wisps of sage smoke. The 76-year-old’s movements are deliberate and graceful. She reaches up to beckon the smoke over her head and moves the sage in sweeping arcs around her small frame. Then she closes her eyes as if in silent prayer. This is her daily smudging ritual and each breath she takes is a quiet act of reclamation.

When she has finished, she opens her eyes, settles into her wooden kitchen chair, and declares, “I feel good.”

The Cree elder shares her home on the Saddle Lake reserve in central Alberta with her daughter, son-in-law and four of her grandchildren. It is a busy, bustling home filled with the paraphernalia of three generations – full kitchen cupboards, shelves bursting with cookery books, schoolwork and trinkets – set back behind a grove of orange- and yellow-tinged pine and maple trees.

Home and family are important to Martha. “I’m blessed to have them here with me,” she says.

Martha is a survivor of Canada’s Indigenous residential school system and the Sixties Scoop. From the 1870s to the 1990s, Canada operated a system of church and state-run residential schools that forcibly separated hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their families, communities and cultures with the intention of erasing Indigenous languages, spiritual practices and identities. Abuse was rife at these schools and thousands of children did not survive them.

The Sixties Scoop was an extension of the residential school system and ran from the late 1950s through the 80s. During this period, thousands of Indigenous children across Canada were forcibly removed from their families by child welfare services and placed into non-Indigenous foster homes or adoptive families, often far from their home communities. Part of a broader government policy aimed at assimilating Indigenous peoples into mainstream Canadian society, authorities typically justified these removals by citing poverty, poor living conditions, or perceived neglect.

Martha was 10 years old when she was taken.

‘I felt abandoned’

But tragedy first struck a year and a half earlier.

Martha grew up on the Frog Lake Cree Nation, a reserve some 103km (64 miles) east of Saddle Lake. She remembers an idyllic childhood spent foraging for berries and fishing in the lake. The family didn’t have much, but they had each other, and their mother was the glue that kept them together.

The day her life changed “was warm and sunny”, she recalls. She was playing out in the bush with her brothers and sisters when they heard a commotion. Soon after, they saw their mother being carried out of the house and placed in a neighbour’s horse-drawn carriage.

“(Mom) told me before she left, ‘My girl, take care of your brothers and sisters.’ She made me promise,” Martha says, softly.

Later that evening, their father returned home alone. Their mother had died of a brain aneurysm. She was 27 years old and left behind nine children between the ages of one and 11. Martha was the second oldest.

Martha’s gaze drifts out of the kitchen window towards a line of trees and a recently ploughed wheat field beyond, as she says: “I felt … abandoned by my mother for her to just leave us like that.”

Gulping back decades of grief, she reflects on the final words her mother spoke to her. “I think she knew she was going to die,” she says.

It was a few days later, at her mother’s funeral, that Martha understood the finality of death.

“She was lying there,” she says before pausing. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “She had a blanket on her. I asked, ‘Is mom sleeping? Is she going to wake up?’ My dad said, ‘No, your mom is gone.’”

The siblings kissed their mother goodbye and then followed a wagon “over a big mountain of a hill” to take her to her burial place.

“I didn’t want to remember what happened after that,” she says, her fingers resting gently on the edge of the kitchen table.

‘We were with strangers’

Overwhelmed by grief, their father, who was barely 28 years old, struggled to care for his nine children. So, Martha became a stand-in mother for her younger siblings – bathing and feeding them – while her older brother, Stanley, looked out for them all.

“My dad had a hard time,” Martha reflects.

“He must have been in shock because he didn’t even talk about our mom … That was his way probably of trying to cope with it,” she says.

“Then he took to drinking.”

The family fell into a crisis. Child services intervened after neighbours noticed the children were missing school and often hungry.

Then one day, about a year-and-a-half after their mother died, two social workers showed up at their home and loaded the children into a station wagon.

That moment is seared into Martha’s memory.

She recalls her dad telling her, “You’re going to go somewhere with some people, you’re going to go stay with them for a while.”

“So, I figured, well, we’re going to go visit or something. We waved goodbye to him. He looked sad. And we were really quiet in the back of that station wagon because we were with strangers.”

‘We were just pay cheques to them’

The children were sent to different foster families. Martha and two of her younger sisters eventually ended up with a Native family on the Saddle Lake reserve.

Her voice breaks as she describes their experience there. “It was just drink, drink, drink and fight, fight, fight,” she says of the family.

“We were neglected. Sometimes we didn’t have food, we’d just get the leftovers they were eating. They didn’t have no love for us.”

After a moment, she adds: “We were just kids. But we were just pay cheques to them.”

All the while, their father was fighting to regain custody of them. Martha and her siblings would attend court but the judge, she says, wouldn’t relent.

“Our dad loved us. He cared for us. He was fighting for us. He would’ve done anything to take care of us, but he wasn’t allowed to keep us,” she says.

Their father begged the judge to at least keep the children with Native families so that they wouldn’t lose their culture. The judge agreed.

‘You would just stand there, frozen’

Soon after, Martha and her two younger sisters were sent about 180km (112 miles) south, to the Poundmaker Indian Residential School near Edmonton.

Almost immediately, the Catholic Church-run school cut her long, black hair, severing a deep connection to the culture that her mother had instilled in her, explaining the significance of her hair as she tenderly braided it. She was forbidden from speaking Cree and from communicating with her sisters.

She recalls a time her father visited them at the school. He gave each of the children five cents to buy candy at the confectionery store, she says, but he looked different from how she remembered him. “I thought, ‘You look rugged.’ But I didn’t say that to him.” She later learned that he had been living on the streets of Edmonton and struggling with alcoholism.

After a year at the school, the sisters were moved back up north to attend the Blue Quills Indian Residential School near St Paul and the Saddle Lake reserve.

The verbal and physical abuse was even worse there, Martha recalls. And it was constant.

The nights were the worst. Martha would hear her four-year-old sister’s muffled cries from across the dormitory they shared with about 200 other girls. But the school’s rules forbade her from comforting her sister.

Early on, Martha noticed that the nuns would come to the dorm in the middle of the night and remove some of the girls.

“I used to wonder where are they taking them. I thought, ‘I want to go too’,” she says.

She hadn’t been there too long before she found out.

Her words catch in her throat as she says: “They were taking them to where they got molested.”

After a pause, Martha continues: “These are the people that are supposed to take care of us, but look what they did. We’d go to his (the priest’s) office and he would touch you. And you would just stand there, frozen.”

“I felt dirty,” she says.

Martha’s tears follow the lines on her face as she explains that it was only as an adult that she discovered her sister had also been abused.

“I didn’t know this was going on and she didn’t know what was happening to me,” she says. “When we were older, we talked about it and we just cried.”

“Back then,” she continues, “I wondered where was our mom. She’s supposed to have been there to protect us.”

‘We were hungry’

Martha has other dark memories from the school.

“There used to be a little closet (under the stairs),” she says. “(The nuns) used to put me there with a blanket.”

It was punishment for stealing food from the kitchen. “I used to steal food to eat,” she says. “A lot of the kids did that.”

She recalls the homemade buns that were reserved for the priests and nuns. “They looked so good when I saw them, so I used to steal them. We were hungry,” she says, describing how the staff “ate like queens and kings” while the children went without.

“It was dark and scary (in the closet),” she says.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to die here.’”

Martha would be kept there all night and would go without supper and breakfast.

“I learned I had to do what they say, ‘cause I didn’t want to have to go back in there any more,” she says.

Today, Martha still has to reassure herself that she’ll be OK in the dark.

‘The healing process’

While they were still at the school, Martha and her two sisters were fostered – and later adopted – by another family. At first, they stayed with them in their home on the Saddle Lake reserve during the school holidays. Then, one day, their foster mother took them out of the school. They had been there for three years.

“I think the Blessed Virgin was the one that looked after me (at the school),” she says, as her crooked fingers – the result of being repeatedly hit by the nuns with a wooden ruler – trace the outline of a tattoo of the Virgin Mary and a rosary on her shoulder.

“She was there for me when I was going through all this stuff. And I learned to say my prayers there, I learned how to say the rosary, and stuff like that,” she says. “To this day, I still pray, you know.”

Life was better with the new family. “Our foster mother would look after us,” she says, describing a strict, hardworking woman who taught the children how to get water and wash the dishes.

“I guess she was trying to prepare me for married life one day,” she adds.

“After I got married, she used to come and visit me and she would bring me presents and I thought, ‘Well, you know, she really cared about me.’”

“I think I was her favourite amongst all the foster kids because there was plenty of us that came and went away, and she always looked out for me and treated me real good.”

But trauma and abuse followed Martha to her new home. Soon after she moved there, a relative of her new foster family started to sexually abuse her. The abuse lasted for several years.

Her shoulders hunch slightly as she takes a sharp breath.

“I never did tell (my adopted mother),” she says. “I didn’t want her to treat me differently.”

Martha remained close to her adoptive parents until their deaths in the late 1980s.

“I always say that it was the best adopted home because they fed us, they clothed us and they made us go to school. And we’d do things with them. On Sundays, we would go watch baseball, or when there was a sun dance or something, we’d all go together like a family.”

They also helped Martha to reconnect with her culture. She relearned the Cree language and started to attend a local powwow, just observing from the sidelines at first. The beat of the drums stirred something deep within her, she says, restoring a connection she thought had been lost. The sound made her feel like she wanted to sleep, she says, describing it as “part of the healing process”.

Slowly, she regained a sense of pride in her Native roots and reclaimed the identity that had been stolen from her as a child.

Her adoptive maternal grandmother also taught her about traditional ceremonies and where to pick medicinal plants on the territory.

“I loved it, little by little I was learning,” she explains.

‘He was lost’

Martha was focused on healing and reconnecting with her culture when she met her future husband. The two had one notable thing in common: they were both residential school survivors.

A member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, John Cardinal had also attended Blue Quills and bore the scars of the neglect and abuse he’d endured there.

“It seemed like we could talk about the same things because he was a residential school product (like me),” she says. “He saw basically what I saw there. Him too … he was lost.”

Martha says the first nine years of their marriage were good. They had four children together. John was one of the first First Nations RCMP officers in Alberta and, over the years, he garnered multiple accolades for his work. Martha attended college and became a teacher’s aide, eventually earning a teaching degree in the Cree language.

But after nine years, things started to change. From the outside, it still looked like they had an exemplary family life, but behind closed doors, the physical and verbal abuse had begun.

A footlong scar on her forearm tells of the years of abuse Martha endured from her late husband, who broke her arm one day in a rage.

Her eyes grow distant as she talks about it.

“Not once did he tell me he loved me. And it was probably what he learned (at residential school),” she says. “I tried to leave, and he told me ‘if you ever leave, I’m gonna kill you.’ And he would’ve.”

They were married for 43 years. On his deathbed in 2010, John apologised to Martha.

“He says to me, ‘I want to ask for your forgiveness for what I did to you. I know that wasn’t right of me.’ And I said, ‘OK, I guess.’ I didn’t know how to react because I was so scared of him.”

When her husband died, Martha says she didn’t even cry. “I thought, ‘goodness, he won’t beat me up any more’,” she says.

‘I’m a survivor’

Tragedy struck again eight months later. Martha’s eyes mist over as she points to a photo of a handsome dark-haired man posing with his young daughter.

“My boy,” she says softly. “It was 2011 when we lost him. Liver failure. He was on dialysis. It was the alcohol addiction that took him.”

Martha’s son, Warren Cardinal, was 42 years old when he died.

Martha slipped into depression and lay in bed for months.

“I cried for him a lot,” she says.

It was her daughter who convinced her to get out of bed and out into the community again.

“My youngest daughter (Marissa) said, ‘Mom, you need to do something. You gotta live. Let’s go, get dressed. So, we went for supper.”

Soon, Martha decided it was time to face the traumas of her past and the loss of her husband and son head-on.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to heal me. I’m still hurting from all this and I need to do something about it. I wanted to be happy again. To be a good role model to my grandkids.”

She started counselling, attended cultural ceremonies and joined a residential school survivor healing circle.

For the first time, she shared her story with her children.

“They said, ‘Mom, that was so sad, what happened to you. And you lived with it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I survived.’ I survived, I’m a survivor,” she places her hand on her heart and sits upright in her chair.

She reaches for another photo, one of her with her three remaining children. “They are all doing so well now,” she says with a smile.

But being a mother didn’t always come easily to Martha. She struggled to show affection to her children when they were younger.

“I’m close to my kids, I let them talk to me and we share stuff. But I had a hard time giving them hugs. They used to ask me, ‘Mom, how come you never hug us? Don’t you love us?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I love you guys.’ I had trouble parenting my kids. I didn’t know how to do it. I was never shown,” she says.

Reflecting on her own childhood, she says: “I don’t ever remember anybody hugging me. That’s something that I missed growing up. I never had that nurturing. I felt so alone.”

‘It’s like home’

Martha was able to heal some of that trauma by reconnecting with her father before he died in 2005.

“He sobered up in the later years,” she says. “He was getting sickly, but I would ask him things, (about our culture). And he would bring me to round dances, he would bring me to a healing sweat lodge.”

At each ceremony, she would observe her father – the way he carried himself, how he interacted with the elders, the precise way he performed their cultural rituals. When he spoke of their Cree traditions, she would lean in close, soaking up every word.

“This was what I was missing,” she says.

“I really felt that he was trying to look out for me now that I was older and understood about pain and hurt and all that stuff. I think that’s why he was bringing me to these ceremonies. I lost my culture and my identity. And he was trying to bring it back.”

Martha was just getting to know him, she says, when, aged 72, he died in his sleep at home.

Now, Martha passes on the culture and traditions to her 14 grandchildren.

But to be able to fully do that, she has had to forgive those who abused her.

“I had to pray for (the people who hurt me) because I want to have a good life. I want to be at peace. I had to learn how to forgive.”

In 2008, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised to the residential school survivors. In the same year, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established. Over six years, it travelled across Canada, gathering testimonies from survivors. The Catholic Church delivered a historic apology in 2022.

Martha is now retired. She fills her time hosting healing workshops in Saddle Lake and other Indigenous communities and volunteering at a church in Edmonton, where she feeds the homeless and provides outreach to people in need.

Martha runs her fingers over a large bundle of dried sage leaves.

“. is a lifelong journey,” she says.

“It took a long time (to get where I am),” she reflects. “I’m going to keep learning, keep going back to my culture. I just love it when somebody is talking to me in Cree. It’s like home.”

This summer Martha participated in a sun dance ceremony, a sacred ritual practised by several Indigenous Nations. The sun dance is a time of spiritual renewal and personal sacrifice. Participants seek visions, offer prayers and make sacrifices to the Creator. Martha fasted for four days and danced in the sacred circle praying for healing for her community.

It was pouring with rain as she danced, but she says the skies opened to a stunning vision of her father.

“When I was dancing, I saw my dad. He was looking down. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m doing this for my dad.’ And the message for me was, ‘Your dad is happy, you’re doing it for him, you’re doing it for everybody’.”

“I don’t want to be stuck over there (in the past),” she says. “I was already there long enough.”

If you, a child or a young adult you know require support, help is available. Please visit Child Helplines International to find sources of help. In Canada, Kids Help Phone is available on 1-800-668-6868. In the United Kingdom, call Childline on 0800 1111 and in the United States, text or call the Childhelp hotline number 800-422-4453.