Content Warning: This episode contains themes that some listeners may find disturbing or upsetting. Chrystal Toop has been through a lot. Chrystal is the founder of Blackbird Medicines, an indigenous spiritual and cultural wellness practice in Canada. Born in the small town of Marathon, Ontario, and raised in challenging family circumstances, Chrystal’s story uncovers the generational effects of residential schools. Her great-grandfather's experiences set off a chain of events that shaped her family's life. Despite incredible obstacles like caring for siblings while young, battling financial hardships, transient living, and even overcoming homelessness, Chrystal never gave up. She began a family and found her calling as a talented indigenous storyteller. This episode of "And So, She Left" offers deeply moving insights into Chrystal's life, rooted in the wider context of Indigenous experiences in Canada and the intergenerational trauma that is far too common in the Indigenous community.
Content Warning: This episode contains themes that some listeners may find disturbing or upsetting.
Chrystal Toop has been through a lot.
Chrystal is the founder of Blackbird Medicines, an indigenous spiritual and cultural wellness practice in Canada.
Born in the small town of Marathon, Ontario, and raised in challenging family circumstances, Chrystal’s story uncovers the generational effects of residential schools. Her great-grandfather's experiences set off a chain of events that shaped her family's life.
Despite incredible obstacles like caring for siblings while young, battling financial hardships, transient living, and even overcoming homelessness, Chrystal never gave up. She began a family and found her calling as a talented indigenous storyteller.
This episode of "And So, She Left" offers deeply moving insights into Chrystal's life, rooted in the wider context of Indigenous experiences in Canada and the intergenerational trauma that is far too common in the Indigenous community.
Learn more about Chrystal and Blackbird Medicines.
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In this episode, we cover:
Quote of the Week:
"Within one generation, my family left the land. My family lost their language. And when you don't have such large essential pieces of how you relate to each other as a family...the impacts of that on the next generation are monumental."— Chrystal Toop
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon," "Cylinder Two," "I'm About to Do the Second Hardest Thing I've Ever Done," "Editing Beyond the Door III Again," "You Fiddle, I'll Burn Rome," "We Were Never Meant to Live Here," "Short Song 011723," "The Dark Glow of the Mountains," "Short Song 020723," "I Can't Imagine Where I'd Be Without It," "There's Probably No Time."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:00.120] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Hi, I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos. Starting my own venture wasn't easy. After a decade working in the corporate world, I realized that so many things were out of my control, like layoffs and changes in direction. I didn't like the instability. I didn't want that to define my whole career and professional story. And so I left. I started my own company and achieved more than I ever imagined. Now I'm on a mission to share stories from extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who never give up on their vision.
[00:00:39.700] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
This week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chrystal Toop. She's the founder of Blackbird Medicines, a Canadian indigenous spiritual and cultural wellness practice. She's also one of the most resilient people I've ever met. This episode isn't for the faint of heart. Chrystal was born in Marathon, Ontario, and raised amid complex family dynamics and troubled neighborhoods. Her story reveals the intergenerational impacts of residential schools. Her great-grandfather's experiences in a residential school set in motion a series of events that would affect her family for generations. In the face of incredible challenges, Chrystal has always found the courage to keep moving forward. She looked after her siblings at a young age.
[00:01:26.000] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
She navigated the turbulent waters of financial adversity and transient living. And through all this, her journey was filled with conflicts, choices, and discoveries. Listening to Chrystal talk about her journey was an experience that I won't soon forget. She emerged from impossible circumstances, overcoming homelessness at a young age to start a family and eventually finding her sense of purpose as a talented indigenous storyteller.
[00:01:57.600] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Hi, Chrystal. Thanks so much for joining me today.
[00:02:01.040] - Chrystal Toop
Thank you for having me.
[00:02:02.720] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
I think you're one of the most interesting, fascinating people we've had on the show so far. You have done a lot in your life, and it's so interesting and varied. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about who you are and what is your current job? What do you do?
[00:02:21.310] - Chrystal Toop
Well, I'll just introduce myself a little formally that we expect our indigenous community members to do. Nidijinikaz, makwa indodem. My name is Chrystal Toop and my traditional name is Story Healing Thunderbird. I'm from the Morning Growth Beak clan. And a little bit about me, I'm a member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. I have Polish and French ancestry as well. I am someone who is a registered social service worker. I call myself an indigenous life spectrum doula. What I do in the world is a lot of different things. I consider myself a community educator. I'm a public speaker, so there's that storytelling. I also love to write. I have a lot of things I do, but they all stream through one of those areas or another.
[00:03:27.530] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
It's wonderful. It's such a varied background and also something that all works together as well. I would love to hear about your childhood a little bit. Tell me how that was for you.
[00:03:40.030] - Chrystal Toop
I was born in Marathon, Ontario. I never lived there, but the hospital for where we did live was under renovation, so my parents had to make quite the trek to get to the nearest hospital for my birth in a snowstorm in January. Northern Ontario in January is legendary. My parents grew up in Northern Ontario. My father grew up in Smoothrock Falls. My mother was in Caramat, Ontario. These are really remote places. My father was this French Catholic guy from a big old French Catholic family, and my mother was from a smaller family. Her father was an Algonquin man. That's where I get my community affiliation for the Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. The way they met was that my grandfather actually met my father and his older brother in a work camp, which is still pretty common in those remote communities. He invited my uncle and my father home for dinner after work one night and him and my mother headed off immediately, got very smitten very quickly and before too long they were married and not much longer I came along. I have to say we really moved around a lot in my upbringing. We moved from Northern Ontario to Ottawa and that was really my father in those early years when myself and my sister came along, he had been working these jobs where he would come home on the weekend, so my mother would be alone with us for long stretches of time.
[00:05:12.900] - Chrystal Toop
Obviously, that wasn't ideal for anybody, anywhere. We moved to Ottawa right before I started junior kindergarten. It was a very interesting time. I know now that we lived in a very troubled neighborhood, I'll say. There was a lot of gangs. There was a lot of biker, infiltration. I remember there was a really tragic situation where someone a few blocks over, there was like this domestic violence, murder, suicide thing. My parents, both being from small towns, looked at each other and it's like, Okay, time to get out of the city. He hiked back up to Northern Ontario. But that was temporary because my parents struggled to find work. There was a decision that my dad would move to a job opportunity he had in Montreal. He made that trek. During the time of that, my parents decided to divorce. My sister and I chose to go live with my father. We moved to Montreal.
[00:06:18.430] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Do you remember thinking as a child that this was a lot of movement or this just became a normal part of your life?
[00:06:26.120] - Chrystal Toop
It was very normal, I think. I was someone in school who struggled a lot with bullying. Basically, I was a chunky kid. I'm a pretty thick, broad person in general. When I was a kid, just like so many other young people, there was a big fixation on bodies and all these other things. I just experienced so much bullying. When it was time to move, I was so ready for a new group of people. I was like, Yes, get me out of here.
[00:06:57.140] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Life in Montreal for you, how do you compare that to Ontario?
[00:07:02.010] - Chrystal Toop
It was interesting. I found we live right near this cool forest that had trails. There was a big focus I found on outdoor lifestyle, I guess. I noticed there was a lot more focus on environmentalism and just vitality and healthy living. It was also a difficult time just living in a single-parent household. Of course, two girls with their dad, there was challenges there, particularly around menstruation and things like that. But it was an exciting time because we had been in such a remote place where there was one paved road before that. Going to such an extreme opposite, it was very exciting. It was just super exciting. I had so much more independence. Being the oldest of four at the time, it was just two of us, I was able to go on bike rides and we'd go swimming at the community pool and check out the library and all these, and I ended up taking a babysitter's course there. That was the very start of me earning my own money.
[00:08:11.040] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Do you remember when you first understood that you were a child of a multicultural family?
[00:08:17.290] - Chrystal Toop
I think I had… My mother had started to look at reclaiming culture and our house being in Ottawa was a really important stop point for folks who were traveling to different political demonstrations. My mother has a younger sister and a younger brother, and her younger sister at the time was a university student. I just remember going to bed just like any other kid and waking up to a house full of native people sleeping on the floor. Of course, as a kid, I didn't know the difference between native or not native, but I was in this situation where I was playing on the playground and I knew what my mother had said, like you're native. And I didn't really have a concept of what that meant, except that it was something that I could argue with people about that, Well, yeah, I am Native, actually. Then I'm going to ask my mom, I'll prove it. That was it. My mother, they weren't raised with their culture. Her father certainly had had lots of grounded reasons and fears around not passing on the language, not maintaining those traditions. So my mother very lightly started to reclaim those things where she started to learn about the sacred medicines.
[00:09:34.280] - Chrystal Toop
We had sacred medicines on our entryways with the four directions in our home. But that is really where it felt like it stopped for me. But outside of those visits from my aunt with all of her university friends, and it wasn't until much, much later that I realized actually that whole group of people were on their way to the Oka protests. There was like we were this background story on these really important political actions that were happening and the movements that young indigenous people were taking to have.
[00:10:10.860] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Their voices heard. Did you ever have to prove to people that you were indigenous, native?
[00:10:16.770] - Chrystal Toop
Always. I still have to every day. I present as a white woman, and that's absolutely something that I had to learn about as a privilege and what that really means to have white privilege and how to wield it. But within my own family, there was almost some, I mean, they were supposed to be jokes, but it was very clear that I was the white one and my sister was the brown one. So even within our own little family unit, we were othered from each other. There was conversations that I look back on with a whole new lens as an adult, like many of us do, that made me realize that there was that other in there. As I got older, I ended up getting my status card when I was about 12 years old because I really needed braces. That's what that status card helped with. We were certainly a low income family, but my mother was someone who had lost her status because she had married my father, a white man, she lost her rights, whereas her father had married a French, Polish woman, and she became a status member as a white woman.
[00:11:29.430] - Chrystal Toop
There was politics that were always impacting my life that I had zero awareness of as a kid. I would find out later we had had this really traumatic experience living in Ottawa where a neighbor or someone had made a crank call to the police and they said that my father had actually killed my mother and myself and my sister. He was basically just this horrible, horrible story. We were actually woken up in the middle of the night by a whole task force, making sure that we were alive. They had just run in and taken over the whole house.
[00:12:07.370] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Oh, my goodness.
[00:12:08.440] - Chrystal Toop
I found out later that was actually an act of racism from someone in the neighborhood who wanted to cause trouble for my mother, who was an indigenous woman.
[00:12:17.500] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Oh, wow.
[00:12:18.210] - Chrystal Toop
To not have just have these experiences and growing up being afraid of police and not quite knowing why, it's always something that it took a lot of unpacking for sure. Like I said, it's a big part of my storytelling arsenal.
[00:12:36.290] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
That's heavy, and not every child goes through that. The ones who do, you have to spend your life surviving that, I guess.
[00:12:44.210] - Chrystal Toop
It was that nobody talked about it. I thought it was a bad dream I had had probably until I was in my teens. Then I had overheard my mother on the phone telling the story, and I was like, Wait, that actually happened?
[00:12:57.290] - Chrystal Toop
She just talked about it was like it was some epic prank. I'm thinking, This is a trauma puzzle piece.
[00:13:07.600] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Definitely. As a young woman, you went to school and you got your degree, were you ever trying to run away from that and say, I just want to live a life that doesn't involve all this? Or how did you make the decision to go into social work?
[00:13:23.090] - Chrystal Toop
Well, that was all much later, actually. I didn't really find much success with post-secondary studies until I was in my 30s and a parent of two myself. Before all of this pathfinding, I was floundering for years. I continued to bounce back and forth between my parents' homes. I had a very high conflict relationship with my mother. I continue to have a high conflict relationship that's actually now been no contact for about. Five years.
[00:13:56.800] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Why is that?
[00:13:58.800] - Chrystal Toop
It's like they say, you have to be a cycle breaker and you have to address what you can within your own generation for the betterment of the next. That's certainly what I've tried to do with my family. But if the generation before you isn't well enough to do that work, it gets passed on. For my family, there's just a lot of unaddressed mental illness that stems from generational impacts of residential school. If you think about my great-grandfather, who was apprehended at age four to attend one of these schools, he had lived his life in the bush, on the land completely undisturbed. Then he fought in World War II. After getting out of residential school, he signed up and he was a gunner. He's a decorated war veteran. He gets back from the war and he died before he was 57 and he had nine kids right away. The kids all spoke Anishinaabowin, but by the time my grandfather was 12, he couldn't remember that language. Within one generation, my family left the land. My family lost their language. When you don't have such large essential pieces of how you relate to each other as a family, then the impacts of that on the next generation are monumental.
[00:15:24.140] - Chrystal Toop
My mother was that next generation. There's a lot of reasons that we don't have a relationship now. As the oldest of four children, I was a parental figure for my siblings, and it's really shaped who I am. But going back and forth and not seeing eye to eye with my parents who are supposed to be parenting me, I didn't feel that growing up. I didn't feel parented. I felt really alone. I felt neglected. I felt isolated, and I felt like I had to figure things out on my own, and that's what I did. I'm really lucky that I have a passion for reading. I have a passion for learning. Those two passions carried me through so much in my life, but it's also made me a bit of an adventurer. By the time I was 16, I was really fed up with my parents. Like so many teenagers are, now that I have teenagers I know. But I was supporting myself through my babysitting. I was buying my own clothing. My parents were both very low income. My father worked very hard, but he didn't make as much as we needed. From about 12 years old, I started supplying my own clothing, supplying my own needs.
[00:16:50.030] - Chrystal Toop
If I wanted a yearbook or to eat lunch at school, these were things I paid for myself. After about four years of doing that, you start to look around and go like, What the heck are you people for? You just stress me out. I would get into a lot of conflict situations with my parents, which would result in me getting kicked out. I'd go to the one house, the other house. That became tricky because sometimes, well, most of the time, my mother lived across the province of Ontario from me. When my parents separated, my dad moved us to Montreal and my mother stayed in Northern Ontario. It was difficult, but at the same time, I had already started to form my own foundation without my parents' guidance. By the time I was 16 in grade 11, I was living in Thunder Bay. That time trying to get along with my mom and she had had another two children, a half siblings who are 12 and 15 years younger than me. I felt a lot of responsibility for my younger siblings. I often upon hindsight and reflection, I often made choices based on what I found were my obligations to care for my younger siblings.
[00:18:10.210] - Chrystal Toop
So my mom decided she was going to move up to Thunder Bay. She had moved to our town for the first time. We were very excited to have her living in the same town with us again, especially with our little siblings. And she didn't even last more than a year. And she said, Well, I'm going to move back up to Thunder Bay. And instead of losing out on my younger siblings again, I opted to go with her because my relationship with my father had deteriorated. I found myself going to high school in Thunder Bay. We lived in a very bad part of town. My grandparents lived close by. Just like always, just like everywhere I always was, I started working and I didn't even complete my first semester of grade 11, but my mother kicked me out in Thunder Bay. I was embarrassed to contact my grandparents for help. I was embarrassed to reach out to the supports I have, and I had to figure it out on my own like I thought that I was supposed to do. I was couch surfing in Thunder Bay in December. I managed to connect with a wonderful nonprofit organization, Operation Come Home.
[00:19:22.330] - Chrystal Toop
Because I was of limited means, they were able to pay for my bus ticket to come back to Ottawa, and at least I had a place to stay with my dad. But that, again, was temporary. That time between surviving in Thunder Bay and coming back to the Ottawa area, I started what I call my street life chapter and started trying to survive on my own as a 16-year-old in downtown Ottawa, and I found a family on the streets. I found friendship and safety. That's something that a lot of people don't understand about homelessness. When you are living in that lifestyle, in that environment, you very quickly build trust with your peers and they look out for each other. There was something about street life that the morals of it, the black and white of good and bad that really spoke to me and how I wanted to live my life. I got stuck in street life for a while. I hated not having a place to sleep, not knowing where I was going to put my head down every night just stressed me. It still stresses me. If we're traveling or something and we haven't booked a hotel, I get so agitated.
[00:20:38.180] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Yes. Can I ask you, how did you determine who you could trust? Because you were young. You were developing a very strong sense of independence without a roadmap. Who do you trust in those moments?
[00:20:53.730] - Chrystal Toop
I was lucky/unlucky. I went into that lifestyle with my best friend from high school. We had met in grade nine. I was going to school in Chesterville, Ontario. She was also struggling with her home life. When I said, Okay, I'm coming back to Ottawa, she was ready. I had a friend that I could trust, but we operated in very different social circles in street life. She was actively sleeping outside and she was also actively abusing substances. I wasn't. I was couch surfing and working at the bay. I was selling wigs. I always struggled like I always tried to maintain my employment because she would panhandle, but I couldn't. There was so many people you meet. The thing about traumatized people is that they will disclose their trauma like you and I might discuss a weather report. It's very nonchalant. It's a very big part of our identity, the trauma we've gone through. You see the heart of people. Really, being 16 years old and meeting other people in that same age range, so many of them were group home runaways. So very many of them were children who had parents with addictions or who were neglecting them and nobody was looking for them.
[00:22:32.200] - Chrystal Toop
There was a lot of us who were surviving out there. When you feel safe with somebody, it's very instinctual. For myself, my mother had undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. Quite a lot of my survivorship was gaging people's feelings. Am I safe to be around you right now? Where are you at? What are you feeling? I didn't know how I should feel until I could assess others. That skill served me very well in street life. Who is a threat versus who isn't? I had some good instinctual skills that I brought to that existence. Yeah, it sounds like it. There was a few times I was just in these situations like, How did I get here? I didn't even consider these problems. I write about one activity where I was in a stolen car and we were on the highway and we were supposed to be driving to Cornwall for some reason. I remember thinking on the highway on the Queensway, it's like, Nobody knows where I am. Nobody knows where we're going. If I don't come back here, they don't have to stop at Cornwall. We could end up anywhere. It just hit me over the head like I was in danger.
[00:23:47.700] - Chrystal Toop
There was a lot of-
[00:23:49.000] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Wait, hold on. How did you get into that car? Tell me what happened.
[00:23:53.450] - Chrystal Toop
Well, it was a boy. It was a boy. I had a boy. He actually became my children's father. He offered 50% of that DNA for me.
[00:24:01.940] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
He stole a car, then he stole your heart.
[00:24:05.030] - Chrystal Toop
That's it. It's a tale is old as time.
[00:24:07.970] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Yes. But I find it interesting, the whole concept of bonding over trauma and that people who are not homeless, maybe they don't bond over that. That's not something that people readily talk about when they first meet. Then in your case, you're telling me that people were talking about it so nonchalantly that it becomes that street currency almost.
[00:24:28.690] - Chrystal Toop
Absolutely.
[00:24:29.530] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Correct me if I'm wrong.
[00:24:31.030] - Chrystal Toop
Absolutely. Street currency is a great way to term it because there's what we call seasonally homeless people, youth who have good lives at home, good parents, but they're sick of those rules and they're sick of coming in at a interview and they're sick of getting grounded because they didn't get good grades. They leave home and they live on the streets and they just torture their poor, lovely parents. There was absolutely kids like that who came downtown and they were really a target and a joke to the kids who were there because they had no one else to be. You really could tell very quickly who was and wasn't safe. You could tell very quickly who wasn't healthy, but would protect you. If somebody, let's say, what the heck did everybody... Back then, everybody was robbing payphones. That was the big ticket. Steal a car, pry a payphone out of the booth, and then spend the next week paying for everything in quarters. It would take one person would have a windfall—and if we were all staying, it's one person's apartment and there was 12 of us, that one person who successfully got this money, they would share with everybody.
[00:25:39.860] - Chrystal Toop
Everybody would eat that night. Everybody would have cigarettes that night. Everybody would have toilet paper in the house. There was real care offered in those times.
[00:25:50.790] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
I find that fascinating because that person could have easily just kept everything to themselves, but instead, they're still community-minded.
[00:25:58.680] - Chrystal Toop
Exactly.
[00:25:59.400] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Even in the toughest of times.
[00:26:01.160] - Chrystal Toop
Absolutely.
[00:26:02.240] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Wow. Well, how long did you do this? How many years?
[00:26:06.480] - Chrystal Toop
Oh, until I got pregnant.
[00:26:08.480] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
How old were you.
[00:26:10.120] - Chrystal Toop
When that happened? I was 18. My son was born at the end of 2000. By that time, I had already gotten an apartment. I had been off the couch surfing and into my own place, but then I had become the communal drop-in. I was the safe place that people brought toilet paper to. I tried to. My boyfriend at the time had gotten out of prison. He had been arrested for all of his behaviors. It was probably spring. He'd been out for maybe a month and a half and I found myself pregnant. Pretty quickly I knew that I wanted things to change. I knew that I wanted to... It was different very quickly from looking after my siblings and making decisions based on their best interest, making decisions based on my son's best interest became a vital importance. I started doing prenatal classes. I started setting boundaries within my home for all these people. But it took time and I also, again, these were the people that I had come to rely on for safety. If I hadn't eaten in a day or two, this was the group of people who would make sure I got something in my stomach.
[00:27:29.820] - Chrystal Toop
It was hard to move away from that community. I didn't completely extract myself from that community until my daughter was born, which was six years later in 2006. A lot of the kids who had made friends on the streets, many of us started to exit street life by getting a home. The numbers of street kids were unprecedented. There was a lot of talk around the Safe Streets Act. Homelessness was being criminalized in a way that it hadn't been before. I found my advocacy boots in those spaces and I started facilitating youth liaison type of work with police, service providers, and being asked to by Operation Come Home, who had traveled me, they were asking me to do speaking engagements. That's great. I was showing up in front of CECIS and Canada Post Workers and talking about how the Safe Streets Act had impacted myself and my community. It was a long road to fully break free of street life. But getting a home was step one. I was one of the first street kids who had a baby that I was trying to access the youth drop-in because I needed to do laundry. They had to have meetings and create policies because I was the only one trying to enter the drop-in with a baby and they had to consider safety and things like that.
[00:28:55.720] - Chrystal Toop
A bit of a trailblazer, if you will.
[00:28:57.380] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Well, that's it. I was going to say that's very pioneering of a journey and for you to be able to do that. Tell me more about how then your children started to grow up a little bit and you found yourself to be in your late 20s, I guess, at this point, if I'm doing the math.
[00:29:13.960] - Chrystal Toop
Yeah.
[00:29:14.720] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
What happened after that?
[00:29:18.220] - Chrystal Toop
I managed to finally, once and for all, end this on and off relationship with their bio-dad and set some things down that I needed to set down once and for all. But I still found myself in unhealthy relationships, romantic relationships. That pretty much occupied the rest of my 20s was these unhealthy relationships. I was in two long term relationships, and I thought I was doing better because, hey, I'm not homeless and, hey, I make sure my kids have what they need and nobody's ever going hungry. I listen to them and I look after them and things like that. I've already broken away from what was normalized for me and created, like you said, those new pathways. But I had no idea the work that I needed to invest in myself and in my own healing and my own wellness to realize the cycle breaking that would make up a huge part of my 30s and early 40s. At that point, I started working in Minwaashin Lodge, the Indigenous Women's Support Center. My daughters age was two years old, so I was 28, and I had a shiny mall college diploma, Computer Business Application Specialist, which meant I was really, really good at Microsoft Office.
[00:30:43.280] - Chrystal Toop
I became an executive assistant and a human resources assistant. For the first time, I'm working nine to five. I got a car. I'm not working for minimum wage anymore. I'm working for double minimum wage. It's very exciting, but all of a sudden I'm faced with a flood of what does it mean to be an indigenous woman? Oh, gosh, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was working in this organization and they said, Well, indigenous applicants are priority based on the section, blah, blah, blah. I thought, Okay, good, this looks good. I applied and got the role. I did really well. It was an undefined role. I was struggling because at that time, my family didn't know about our residential school history and our family. It was a secret. My family, we didn't talk about the ways that we had been disconnected from our indigeneity. For myself, it's always been just like a fun fact about me. It wasn't something I felt that I embodies or even that it was something that I was allowed to claim. I'm working in this place with literally 40 First Nation Inuit Metis staff women. I'm participating in ceremony for the first time in my life.
[00:32:06.280] - Chrystal Toop
I did a sweat lodge and I learned about all these different parts of culture. I'm, of course, helping the executive director and I'm her go to person and... I remember clearly we had this one ally. She was a Métis lawyer who had written some really great papers in collaboration with the organization. She was presenting on one of these papers, and it was very statistic heavy. She's spitting out these statistics. One in four indigenous women will be sexually assaulted. One in five, one in six, like all these different numbers will experience domestic violence. I'm soaking all this up, but all of a sudden I had to get out of the room because I'm having a full-blown panic attack, and I had no awareness as to what was happening or why. I went into counseling and therapy and things like that, and I started to unpack it and have conversations with others in my workplace. I didn't find out about the residential school history of my family until about six years ago. I was still very far from that knowledge. But all I knew was that these statistics had triggered me in a way that reading all these reports and things hadn't.
[00:33:20.200] - Chrystal Toop
It's because those statistics applied to me. Every statistic she shared, I had had relevant life experiences associated with it.
[00:33:29.540] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Oh, wow.
[00:33:30.220] - Chrystal Toop
It was strange because I identified with being a first nation's woman as far as my lived experiences. I couldn't pair that with like, I'm not allowed to be native. I'm not native enough. That's where I had to start on learning and being surrounded by other indigenous women who looked in all different ways, shades and shapes, learning about shadeism and how this is a tool in continue that in fighting so that we're not stronger together because we're too busy fighting over who does and doesn't belong. Those were really important times for me to get my head around being an indigenous woman and also feeling comfortable to say that, yeah, I'm an Algonquin woman.
[00:34:16.300] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Do you remember any experiences talking to these women in your work environment and what they were teaching you?
[00:34:22.380] - Chrystal Toop
Well, I mostly experienced questioning. I understand now that is part and parcel of being a member of the Indigenous community because I am white presenting. I have to position myself and say the names of my relatives and say the name of my community. But I was experiencing challenges because certain people thought I wasn't. I was making it up. I experienced workplace bullying as a result until so and so realized, Hey, she actually knew my auntie. Then she started being nice to me, has been nice to me ever since. Those experiences by itself taught me a lot about like there's a lot of protocol in First Nations communities, and that's something that I've always struggled with. When I was doing my doula training, the facilitator invited her auntie, who was like the superstar, neuroscientist type of Haudenosaunee, wunderkind, awesome matriarch. She said, Our ancestors were intelligent and you descend from intelligence and you are intelligent beings. That was the first time at age 35 that I'd ever heard that because growing up, the message is native people are drunks, they're a mess, they're embarrassing, they're gross. Even as a street kid, I remembered telling a friend of mine, there was this one couple and they were very, very street entrenched and they were visibly Inuit.
[00:35:55.720] - Chrystal Toop
They were targeted on the streets. I remember telling a friend, it makes me sad sometimes because Ottawa is such a big tourist city, people from all over the world come here and it's bad enough people think indigenous folks are extinct. Then they see an Inuit person on the street and they're inebriated and this tourist is going to go home and think this person represents all indigenous people in Canada. I've learned so much about the Inuit community since those days, and I'm really grateful for learning about how wonderful Inuit people really are, but that was something that stood out for me. When I was learning about reconnecting, it was really just talking with others who are doing the exact same work. One lady talked to me, she was the head of the counseling department, and we had this conversation about how her mother had sold her status during the war because her children were starving. The Indian agent came around and offered her money, sell your status and leave the community, but you're going to get enough money to survive the winter with your children. That's the choice that a lot of families had to make.
[00:37:09.170] - Chrystal Toop
You want to go to school and be a lawyer? Well, guess what? You're not native anymore. You don't have anymore indigenous rights. So good luck with your lot, agree. There are so many stories like this and I had never heard any of them. Learning about residential school, learning about the 60s scoop, learning about colonization and what that looked like was such a huge journey. We all took history. In my school, anyway, in Upper Canada, they had a paragraph that said how the Europeans came and saved the indigenous people. That was the paragraph, and then we moved on with history teachings. But my children's bio-dad, he was a 60s scoop survivor, so he had been adopted out of Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, as an infant. When we met in that drop-in for homeless use, we were two native kids who knew nothing about being native. He continued a trajectory in and out of correctional institutions, but my trajectory meant, how do I keep my kids out of those institutions?
[00:38:12.620] - Chrystal Toop
How do I-.
[00:38:13.170] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Right, to break the cycle.
[00:38:14.440] - Chrystal Toop
Exactly. I remember getting pregnant with my daughter and finding out it was a girl. I felt devastated. I don't feel like I'm a strong indigenous woman. How will I teach her to be a strong indigenous woman? It's only now, many years later, where she's almost 20 years old that I can say, Actually, I'm crazy strong for an indigenous woman, and I feel like you're a really good role model. If I do say so myself.
[00:38:43.150] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Well, I want to talk about the term doula and how that played into your life, how you got into it, and what it means and the different phases of it and how that brings you back to your ancestry.
[00:38:58.740] - Chrystal Toop
In 2015, I responded to some Facebook ad that said, free full spectrum doula training in partnership with Donna International, which is the crème de la crème of doula trainings, in partnership with the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. They were offering this training and it was about reclaiming birth work and birth teachings. I always identified as a mother and having birth to people was very powerful for me, especially being 18 and 26 years old. I had grown up around being fascinated about birth. I was just fascinated with my aunt's pregnancies, and I would have predictions about what the gender of these babies would be, and I was always right, which just cemented my curiosity even more. I remember when we were living in very remote, Caramat, Ontario, there was a girl who was… I was in grade five and she was in grade seven. This was so small, the school from JK to grade eight, including janitorial teaching staff, admin staff was 30 people. She was complaining about having tender breasts and being sore and uncomfortable. She was a bigger girl and we lived at least a two hour drive from a doctor and that doctor came once a month.
[00:40:25.670] - Chrystal Toop
So medical assistance was rare and we relied a lot on home remedies and wife's tails and things like that for dealing with ear aches and infections. So she disappeared one day and then the word came out that she had been pregnant, she didn't know it, and she had delivered prematurely a little girl. I remember just being like, How did she not know she was having a baby? There was this huge lack in sexual health education, reproductive education, we didn't know how our bodies worked. That just really stuck with me. Fast forward to this doula training and I'm in this weird place. I'm about two years into my undergrad degree. I'm in this training without knowing my sister, the one that's two years younger, she also signed up for the exact same training. We just unbeknownst to each other, wound up in the exact same training, learning about pregnancy and birth. This something that we had fulfilled for each other. It was a companion, like the person who was cheering the other on and that support person in labor and delivery and definitely in pregnancy. This is where I hear for the very first time, this amazing, haudenosaunee auntie talking about your ancestors are intelligent.
[00:41:50.640] - Chrystal Toop
Your ancestors would have had ways to teach each other about our bodies. We would have had ways to understand the cycles of our menstruation. I felt like, Oh, of course, this is so logical. But it was just having someone say it without any derogatory connotations. It was really powerful. Throughout my reclamation journey, I guess, when I was maybe about 10, we had had a pow wow in this remote town of Caramat, which is a territory. We organized the pow wow. I had my first regalia. I had my coming out, I had danced. There was these protocols that I had gone through, but I didn't really feel very connected to them, and so I didn't continue them after that particular experience. In my 30s, I'm trying to… I always wanted my kids to feel like they belonged. I didn't want them to go through the experience of saying, Am I indigenous enough? I didn't want them to question who their community was and who they belong to. I wanted them to know that. Since pregnancy, I had been... I went to prenatal classes with indigenous organizations, the Friendship Center, things like that. Both my children had walking out ceremonies, and that's where the baby, the feet, the idea is that the baby is so loved in that first year that their feet never touched the ground until they're...Yeah, isn't that beautiful?
[00:43:18.210] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
That's great.
[00:43:18.870] - Chrystal Toop
Until their first year when they're able to walk and then we have a ceremony and they walk on the earth for the first time. It had these things for my children, but I just was so hungry for so much more. But again, I'm not finding my passion at pow wow's or singing or drumming. Through that training, I had this big aha moment where I realized I do have a traditional role. That is an auntie. I'm an auntie. I'm a big sister. I'm a mother. Those by themselves are traditional roles. You don't have to dress it up anymore than that. They're traditional roles. These teachers for this doula training framed it as you don't have to have given birth to be a doula. You don't have to be some reproductive justice guru. You can just be a really caring auntie.
[00:44:17.620] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Thank you so much to Chrystal Toop. You can learn more about the Blackbird Medicines through the link in the episode description. If you found Chrystal's story inspiring, we would love it if you could please rate, review and subscribe to And So, She Left wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us to better serve current listeners and reach new ones. To make it even easier, we're launching a quick feedback form. It's just five questions long and it would help us immensely if you could please take a few minutes to fill it out. Your responses directly impact the creation of the show, and we want to make the show that you want to hear. And So, She Left is made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee. We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode. Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the episode notes. I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos, and thanks for listening.