How We Reclaimed Culture After Colonial Religion Tried to Erase It

How Colonial Religion Disrupted Kinship and Fractured Cultural Continuity in Our Family

In many Indigenous families, cultural loss didn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It happened slowly, through systems that entered our communities under the guise of morality, salvation, and “civilization.”

This is part of my family’s story.

I’m sharing because it’s important to name the structural harm caused by colonial religious systems and to show that even after generations of disruption, culture can be reignited.

Our Great-Nanaay Edna on the top-left before she was sent to Residential School
shown with her sister Mona and her Maternal Aunt Lydia and her uncle Simon Wesley

When Religion Entered Our Family

In the early 1950s, my great Nanaay Edna a Residential School survivor and my grandmother Evelyn became Jehovah’s Witnesses. My mother was only one year old at the time.

My mom was later baptized at age twenty when she was pregnant with me, driven by a desire to “be good” and to please her mother. Even then, she sensed something was off about the religion, though it took years to fully articulate why. She wasn’t an active member for long.

Over time, she came to understand what troubled her most:

  • the misogyny,
  • the patriarchy,
  • the self-righteousness,
  • the hypocrisy,
  • and the distorted interpretation of Christianity that separated its members not only from other Christian sects, but from the world around them.
  • The irony of literally standing “in service” (holding magazines) rather than actually serving those in need as Jesus example showed us.

But in 1980, the deepest fracture occurred.

That year, I attended the convention where active Jehovah’s Witnesses were instructed to shun anyone who was not active in the faith, was disfellowshipped, or existed outside the religious boundary. In 1981, the organization formally expanded and enforced this practice globally.

I had just turned five years old. My brother Jesse was about to turn seven.

Erin's Kindergarten Photo

That day, after the convention ended, my aunt and her family, who had been staying in our home, dropped us off in the back alley behind our house. She did not come inside. She did not explain why. That was the last day we had a relationship with her and with our cousins.

Religious Shunning Destroys Kinship Ties

This separation did not end with us children.

My aunt went on to shun her own mother, even though her mother remained an active Jehovah’s Witness. Kinship bonds throughout our family were permanently severed. Religious loyalty became more important than blood, clan responsibility, or intergenerational care.

At my Auntie Blanche MacDonald’s funeral when I was 10, both of my aunts stood in front of us and ignored us. These moments of marked ‘lines in the sand’ so to speak were jarring and left an imprint in my mind. 

Three years after the initial break, we saw our cousins by chance on a ferry. Jesse and I were so excited to see them finally. We ran up to them, not understanding the awkwardness we felt. We asked if they wanted to play. They ran away from us, which we thought was a game of tag, and ran back to their parents.

When we greeted our aunt, she lifted her newspaper and covered her face to avoid us. No hello, not even a smile.

My uncle, an “elder” in the religion, greeted us. Somehow, my aunt could not bring herself to acknowledge us.

When my mother reached us and realized her own sister refused us any kindness, she quietly took us back to the car and broke down in tears.

As children, we didn’t have language for what was happening. We only felt stunned by profound rejection.

This is how colonial religion disrupts kinship, through rejection and enforced abandonment. I am often reminded how our family never knew how to be a family.

Demonizing Culture and Creating Internalized Harm

Alongside the physical separation of family members, the religion taught something even more damaging.

  • It taught that Indigenous culture was evil.
  • That ceremonies were demonic.
  • That “the old ways” attracted bad spirits.
  • It framed Indigenous identity as something to be rejected.

At the same time, it created a skewed hierarchy inside Indigenous communities. Religious devotees inevitably felt superior to other Indigenous people who continued to practice culture. This produced deep internalized racism and colorism, including favoritism toward lighter-skinned children.

Culture wasn’t just discouraged. It was actively stigmatized. Language was punished.

When culture is demonized, it isn’t passed on. When generations are disconnected from cultural practice, knowledge transmission stops. Language fades. Ceremony disappears. Responsibility weakens.

This is how cultural continuity fractures.

Living Inside the Contradiction

Growing up, Jesse and I had a close relationship with our grandparents. Yet there was always fragmentation: on one hand my Grandmother was the kind of Christian who truly embodied Jesus teachings "Love one another, as I have loved you" more than another religious person I've ever known. But simultaneously she would not share space with my mother or speak to her, even by phone.

Jesse our Grandma/Nanaay Evelyn and me

When our grandparents went through a traumatic divorce and our own parents separated permanently in the same year, Jesse and I became even closer to our grandparents. We were children navigating grief, complex loyalties, and emotional weight of a fragmented family.

When I look further back, I see this pattern repeating across generations. (I will share more on the intergenerational story in another post on our lineage history.)

Choosing Reclamation

Despite everything our family lost, we did not stop trying to rebuild.

We reclaimed culture through ceremony.

Through healing work.

Through cultural leadership.

Through building Indigenous-led spaces rooted in culture and responsibility.

We chose reconnection to culture over religion.

We chose responsibility of revitalization instead of claiming titles and positions.

We chose to resurrect culture that was ostensibly lost for five generations.

Why I’m Sharing This

I wrote this for anyone who recognizes pieces of their own family story here. Cultural loss does not have to be the end of the story. Against all odds, culture can be revitalized when people choose responsibility, reconnection, and long-term commitment.

Colonial religion fractured kinship in many families. It disrupted cultural continuity across generations.

But all is not lost. Culture is not gone.

And one thing I know for certain is that culture does not get revitalized when it’s put into the hands of the colonized mindset that destroyed it to begin with.

It lives in the people who have demonstrated the ability to do the work of rebuilding.