Fated

"When  you come from a loving family and something like this comes, it destroys you. He [adoptive father] was my giant."

"How can something like that happen?"

"That really made me really torn. It tears something out of your body. It rips your heart out. This is your family."

“How do you have the wrong baby and give it to the parent? What happened at that time? It’s something I will never be able to explain. Obviously, it was a big, careless mistake.”

“I have met already some of my sisters and brothers. I need to get my identity back. I need to prove who I am.”

“I call him my brother [Beauvais]. Even though we are not brothers, we are brothers in a way.”

Edward Ambrose, 67, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Edward Ambrose holds up two picture frames. The picture in his left hand is a wedding photo of his 'bonded parents,' as he calls them. The pictures in his right hand are of his biological parents, who he never got to meet. (Gary Solilak/CBC)

 

"[It was a difficult childhood -- living with his siblings in a historically Metis community on the shores of Lake Manitoba -- but] seemed normal to us."

"All of a sudden I realized I'm not Native. That really upset me."

“The hardest time in my life, I think, is when I had to phone my two sisters … and tell them that I was not really their brother,"

“I felt as if something was taken away from me. I guess I fought for the right to be native. Whenever anyone teased me about it, I would fight them when I was a kid, and I was kind of proud to say I was native. And you don’t understand it until it’s taken away from you suddenly."

Richard Beauvais, 67, Sechelt, British Columbia

It's an old story, one that takes people by surprise, angers and upsets them, leaving them feeling that their world has turned inside out and they hardly know how to respond. Some do with dismay and bitterness, disbelief and self-pitying anguish. Some take it in stride, others are traumatized and forever changed. Their verities altered, they are no longer, they feel, who they thought they were. This happened to two men whose both sets of parents lived in Manitoba.

Their mothers gave birth to them at a municipally owned and operated hospital equipped with eight beds and cribs and four bassinets. The Arborg Medical Nursing Unit was located within the area now administered by the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority itself under the control and direction of the Manitoba Department of Health. But in 1956 when the men were born, the provincial health department was not responsible for the hospital.

And it was there that the babies were given into the care of the wrong families. Each set of parents took  home with them babies not their biological own, but a stranger's who just happened to give birth at the same time in the same nursing centre. And it is only now that each of those men discovered that switch that threatens the stability of their lives. One, Edward Ambrose, lives in Winnipeg, the other, Richard Beauvais in Sechelt, British Columbia, their sense of identity suspended.

Born June 28, 1955, neither man suspected they had been switched at birth. They had no reason at all to investigate the time and place they were born and whether their parents actually were their parents. Beauvais was recently given an at-home ancestry kit as a gift. When it was returned he was identified as having Ukrainian and Jewish genetic origins. This man who had been raised Metis, who had always believed himself Indigenous. As a youth he knew racism, and he was also sent to a residential day school.

He puzzled over the genetic results, discussed the situation with some of his relatives, then set it aside as an anomaly, inexplicable and of no real significance. And then Ambrose's sister made use of an at-home ancestry kit. Curiosity drives people to want to know about their distant past. To discover unexpected links. And she did. Her results revealed a brother living in British Columbia and she reached out. It just happened to be Beauvais.

Soon Ambrose's sister and Beauvais discovered that both men had been born the same day in the same small hospital. Ambrose was nonplussed and disbelieving. He and his sister decided on further testing, hoping to ease his mind. The conclusion was that further tests indicated they were not, after all, biological siblings. Had the two men not been switched, their life paths would have been completely different.

Beauvais explained that his father died while comparatively young leaving his mother to struggle to raise three children, himself and two siblings, in Saint Laurent, Manitoba. He recalls the difficulties of an impoverished childhood, scrubbing about in the local dump to find anything edible. He recalls being picked on by others and bullied because he was an Indigenous child. In time he and his siblings were taken into care.

Then came various foster homes until a family adopted him and that family represented his safe haven; their support was invaluable and continues to the present. He moved to British Columbia and became a commercial fisherman. He married and children followed. Pride in his Metis roots was shattered when he learned he was not Metis, leaving in his mind a profound sense of loss. He was loathe to tell his sisters that what they had believed all their lives just was not reality; they were not biologically related. 

 

Ambrose's story is fairly similar. His memories revolve around growing up in a farming community south of Arborg. His mother died in 1953 when he was 9 years of age, followed by his father's death when he was 12. He was placed with various relatives, and finally with a foster family that adopted him. As an adult, he married, became a father and lived his life. Now, he says, he's trying to explore the good that can come from the truth about his parentage.

Richard Beauvais, seen here with his wife, Sonja, says it was a shock to learn he was not Métis. (Submitted by Richard Beauvais)