Coming Home to Myself: Finding My Indigenous Roots
My grandmother, Mabel Angus, fell in love with my grandfather, Bo Lung, somewhere along the CN Railroad. Theirs was a careful courtship — they travelled up and down the line with a chaperone, two people from different worlds choosing each other anyway. Ours is a railroad family — both my Indigenous and my Scottish relations worked the CN line, the same rails that carried my grandparents' courtship up and down the canyon. They loved each other very much.
But when my grandmother came down from the canyon, they made a quiet, painful decision. In those days, being "Indian" was treated as something shameful and dangerous — and so, to protect the family, we would simply be Chinese and Scottish. My great-grandparents were each half Scottish and half Indigenous, and that Indigenous half was folded away, out of sight.
My grandmother knew exactly what she was protecting us from. As a child, Mabel had been taken to a residential school, where she endured atrocities no child should ever know. When you have survived something like that, hiding isn't shame — it's the instinct to keep the people you love safe. She carried that weight so we wouldn't have to.
It's hard to explain how heavy the world was then. Being Chinese in that era carried its own cruelty — this was the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. But being Indigenous was treated as worse still.
There was another wound in our family, too. My great-grandmother, Sarah, lost her Indian Status when she married a non-Indigenous man after my great-grandfather passed away — stripped of her identity on paper by a law that, for generations, punished Indigenous women simply for who they loved.
I grew up with rumours. As children, we'd ask — Are we Indigenous? — and the answer was always no. The door stayed closed.
My parents passed young — at 65 and 69, when I wasn't yet 40. And it wasn't until my mid-50s that the truth was finally confirmed: we are Indigenous — Nlaka'pamux, people of the canyon, our family scattered along the Fraser River from Chilliwack and Hope to Yale and Lytton.
With the help of John Haugen from Lytton, a family-roots expert who helped me connect the dots, I began to find my way home. I travelled up and down the canyon, visiting the bands, asking about my family, gathering the pieces of a story that had been hidden for generations. And something happened on those drives that I'll never forget: the closer we got to the reserves, the more I looked out the car window and felt that every person I saw could have been my family. I recognized my own face in theirs.
When the truth finally settled in me, I cried. I looked in the mirror and recognized myself — really recognized myself — and I knew who I was.
One of the reasons I chose to apply for my Indian Status was to honour Sarah — to reclaim what was taken from her, and to say, generations later, that our family belongs.
So much made sense in that moment. Why I had always been drawn to the land, to the sky, to spirit and Creator. Why healing came so naturally to me. That pull is the very reason I created Cydney Mar Wellness — a leaning into Mother Earth, into the medicine of the natural world, into something my body and spirit had known long before my mind had words for it.
Finding my roots changed me. I move through the world now with more respect, more care, and more awareness of trauma — my own and others'. I've done my best to support reconciliation, because for me it has never been abstract. It;s my Mother. It's Mabel. It's Sarah. It's my family.
This June, for National Indigenous History Month, I'm honouring my ancestors — Mabel and Bo Lung, Sarah, and all the people of the canyon whose faces I finally got to see as my own. I'm honouring the journey home and the courage it took them to survive so that I could one day come back.
If you carry roots you've never fully explored — a story your family folded away to keep you safe — I hope mine gives you permission to go looking. You may find, as I did, that you were never as far from home as you thought.