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Few people can justify a memoir at the age of thirty-three. Gregory Scofield is the exception, a young man who has inhabited several lives in the time most of us can manage only one. Born into a Metis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent but never told of his heritage, Gregory knew he was different. His father disappeared after he was born, and at five he was separated from his mother and sent to live with strangers and extended family. There began a childhood marked by constant loss, poverty, violence and self-hatred. Only his love for his sensitive but battered mother and his Aunty Georgina, a neighbor who befriended him, kept him alive. It wasn't until he set out to search for his roots and began to chronicle his life in evocative, award-winning poetry, that he found himself released from the burdens of the past and able to draw upon the wisdom of those who went before him. Thunder Through My Veins is Gregory's traumatic, tender and hopeful story of his fight to rediscover and accept himself in the face of a heritage with diametrically opposed backgrounds.… (more)
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This book was initially published in 1999 but was re-issued in 2020 with a foreword by Scofield about his intervening years. Scofield was raised in Maple Ridge BC but his origins are Red River Metis. His mother never acknowledged her indigenous background so Gregory did not learn about his Metis origins for many years. His father was never in the picture and at times there was just Gregory and his mother. However his mother got married to an abusive man who beat both her and Gregory. To escape he sometimes went to a neighbour lady who was aboriginal. He called her Aunty as she kind to him, taught him to speak Cree and to do beadwork. As a teenager he realized he was gay; for some time he tried to divorce his sexuality from his ethnicity but eventually brought the two together as his true personality. Scofield's mother was an alcoholic and pill addict and Scofield struggled with substance abuse himself. Always searching for his origins he eventually ended up at the Back to Batoche days in Saskatchewan where he learned about the Metis culture and history. About this same time he started writing radio dramas and returned to BC. His mother died soon after and in 1998 his Aunty was murdered. Scofield writes movingly about visiting their gravesites and old building in Maple Ridge where he finally came to terms with his traumatic upbringing.
The Wikipedia article about Scofield itemizes some of his accomplishments which include winning the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 and the Latner Writer's Trust Poetry Prize in 2016. Not bad for a high school dropout.