Sixties Scoop survivor traces her ancestry with dark photo exhibit in Burnaby

Dawna Mueller says it's been a "very long journey" since she first learned she was Métis and Anishinaabe in 2004, when she was 44 years old, living in Vancouver and pregnant with her second child.

She opened a heavily redacted information package she received from Manitoba's Ministry of Social Services, and among the blacked-out information, she learned that her ethnicity was both Indigenous and French.

"It was an incredible moment for me," said Mueller, a professional photographer and survivor of the Sixties Scoop, who'd coincidentally taken Indigenous studies at UBC in the 1980s ⁠— something she feels "spoke to [her] genetic memory."

Mueller is now showcasing a photography exhibition called "Unforgotten ⁠— My Journey Home" at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby. It's a collection of photographs of her ancestral homelands in Duck Bay, Manitoba, and it documents part of the discovery of her identity as a Sixties Scoop child who was forcibly taken from her Indigenous mother at birth in 1960.

The Sixties Scoop was a decades-long period where thousands of Indigenous children were apprehended and placed into non-Indigenous homes, resulting in a loss of cultural identity.

"My adopted (Ukrainian) parents were told that I was French, and because of my recessive skin colour … it was easy for them to believe that," Mueller said Monday on CBC Radio's The Early Edition.

Mueller said she's since reconnected with her Indigenous birth mother, who is one of 18 siblings and has learned she has hundreds of cousins. 

"We're all on this journey together now," she said, describing a one-month research trip she took with her mother, brother and sisters to her homelands last summer, where they "followed in the footsteps of their ancestors for the last 300 years."

The trip was the basis of her exhibit, a part of her master's thesis in photography, and a "real gift" because it was one of the last her birth mother was able to take due to early onset dementia.

Mueller said she made the "poetic" decision to use historical, analogue technology, so she bought a large-format camera and taught herself to use it by watching YouTube videos. She then took many photos of the Duck Bay landscape and learned to develop them in the darkroom at the West End Community Centre in Vancouver.

Mueller said that because the Sixties Scoop is such a dark period in Canada's history, she wanted to present her photos in a similar way. She said the images are each composed of at least two exposures layered on top of each other, rather abstract, with a "footprint of her homeland as the foundational photo," and all images are exposed as negatives on reverse-processing paper.

"It's not a literal photo. It's not a pretty photo ... it's a negative, and they're dark," she explained, adding that some people who've seen them have said they're "evocative of a spiritual essence" and that layering the photos invoked the depth of the story.

Mueller said the final exhibit is a "visual depiction of this landscape of my ancestors" and is her way of showing a bridging of French and Indigenous cultures that she still doesn't quite feel she fully belongs to. 

 "Unforgotten — My Journey Home" is open at the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby until March 29 and will then be shown at the Monica Reyes Gallery in April.