"No One Should Have to Be Resilient Just to Exist"

Reflections on Métis identity, systems, and justice

By: Areebah Arshad, LLB student, Voices for Indigenous Equity in Law, University of

Leicester.

Interviewee: Tasha Gabriel, Métis community member (name used with permission)

Format note: This is an interview-based piece developed from written responses

provided by Tasha Gabriel to a set of questions. The narrative structure was written by

Areebah Arshad, drawing directly on Tasha’s reflections and key themes from her

answers. Minor edits were made for clarity and flow while preserving meaning.

Content note: This piece discusses child welfare, schooling, healthcare, and systemic

harm.

Privacy note: Shared with permission. Some details have been generalized to protect

privacy and safety.

Some stories aren’t inspiration. They are records.

They show how authority works in everyday life: who gets believed, who gets labelled,

who gets punished, and who gets protected. They show what happens when systems

built to “help” respond to difference and distress with control instead of support.

This piece shares the reflections of a Métis community member, Tasha Gabriel. Her

words speak to identity, kinship, and the long shadow of institutional decisions. Some

details have been generalized to protect privacy and safety.

Identity as lived law.

For Tasha, being Métis is not symbolic or distant. It is lived and carried through family

lines, values, worldview, and a responsibility to speak truth when systems cause harm.

She describes her connection to a Métis settlement as inseparable from an

understanding of how land, policy, and identity were disrupted, and how that disruption

continues to affect people today. In her words, it is about reclaiming voice, dignity, and

self-definition.

That framing matters in a legal context. When the law defines identity, family, and

belonging through narrow categories, it can erase the realities Indigenous people live

every day. Justice begins with respecting self-definition and acknowledging that policy

decisions do not stay in the past; they shape the present.

Childhood under authority

When she reflects on her childhood, a theme repeats: silence. She describes being

expected to be quiet, obedient, and not question authority. She was diagnosed with

autism at a very young age, yet her needs were not supported in ways that protected

her. Instead, she learned that difference could be treated as something to manage.

In legal terms, we often speak about the “best interests of the child.” In practice, her

experience shows how easily a child’s needs can become secondary to adult

expectations and institutional convenience, especially when a child is Indigenous,

neurodivergent, and living in environments where fear and punishment are normalized.

Systems that did not see a whole person.

Tasha names how school, child welfare, and healthcare repeatedly failed to recognize

her as a whole person.

• School was rigid and punitive rather than supportive, despite early signs that she

learned and processed the world differently.

• Child welfare moved around her life without truly listening to her voice or needs.

• Healthcare often focused on surface-level behaviour rather than root causes,

including trauma and neurodivergence.

This is not only a personal story. It points to a broader pattern: when institutions

prioritize compliance over care, children learn that safety depends on becoming

invisible. When systems interpret silence as “fine,” rather than asking what silence might

be protecting a child from, harm can become easier to ignore.

Why intersectionality matters here.

An intersectional lens helps explain why institutional responses can be especially

harmful when multiple factors overlap. In this story, being Métis, being autistic (and

often silent), and being a child within adult-controlled systems were not separate

experiences; they interacted. That overlap increased the likelihood of being

misunderstood, disbelieved, or punished rather than supported. A justice-based

response has to address that interaction, because treating each issue in isolation is how

institutions continue to miss the whole person.

Kinship care and what protection can look like.

The stability she remembers most clearly did not come from a program. It came from

kinship. When she lived with her chapan (great-grandmother), she experienced

presence and routine, being allowed to exist without constant correction.

Her chapan taught her to bead, not simply as a craft, but as a practice of care: slowing

down and placing patience into something made by hand. That teaching matters here

because it shows what support can look like in real life. Support is not a slogan. Support

is consistency, attention, and a relationship where a child is not treated as a problem to

be fixed.

She is also clear that kinship care is not automatically perfect. Harm and risk can exist

in any setting. What stayed with her was the knowledge that someone was paying

attention to her, believing in her, and intervening as they could. In systems that claim to

safeguard children, that should be the standard, not the exception.

Naming the harm: from personal blame to systemtic accountability

Tasha’s realization that something unjust was happening was not one single moment. It

was a gradual understanding of patterns: adults using authority without accountability,

institutions prioritizing rules over wellbeing, and Indigenous families being judged rather

than supported.

Finding language—colonialism, systemic neglect, ableism—was painful, but also

clarifying. It shifted the story from “What is wrong with me?” to “What happened to me,

and why was it allowed to happen?”

This is where a legal lens can either help or harm. Law can minimize lived experience

by treating it as an anecdote or an individual misfortune. Or law can take it seriously as

evidence of structural failure; evidence that should trigger reform, accountability, and

prevention.

Reclaimed potential

For a long time, she describes seeing herself as something that needed to be controlled

or corrected. Her body did not feel safe. The future felt conditional. Survival meant

staying quiet and learning how to disappear.

What helped her keep going was not a single intervention, but a combination of tools:

writing, observation, curiosity, and an internal sense of justice. Even when she could not

speak, she was thinking, learning, and questioning. Later in life, reclaiming an accurate

understanding of her autism gave her language for experiences that had been

misunderstood or used against her. Connection to culture, even when fragmented, also

provided grounding.

Her path into healing work and education was not linear. It followed years of instability

and survival, including periods of homelessness and disconnection. Survival came first.

Healing came later.

When she returned to education, she did not just “get by.” She excelled, earning

academic recognition and graduating as valedictorian. She is careful not to frame this

as exceptionalism. For her, it represents reclaimed potential: proof that ability and

intelligence were always there, and that what changed was access, stability, and the

removal of barriers.

Today, as a healer and counsellor, she describes bringing both training and lived

experience into her work. That matters. Credentials are important, but lived

understanding also shapes how a person listens, how they recognize harm, and how

they respond without judgment.

What justice requires.

If people take one thing from her story, it should be this: resilience is not the absence of

harm; it is what people build when they are forced to survive it. And more importantly,

no one should have to be resilient just to exist.

A justice response requires prevention and accountability, not praise for survival. That

means:

• Believing children and taking disclosures seriously

• Replacing punishment with accommodation in schools, especially for

  neurodivergent students

• Investing in prevention so families are supported before crisis, not only

  managed afterward

• Embedding culturally safe, trauma-informed care in healthcare and social

  services

• Supporting Indigenous-led decision-making and services, because

  self-determination is a safety issue, not a slogan

• Measuring systems by outcomes, not intentions, especially when harm is

  repeated.

Acknowlegements,

I am grateful to Tasha Gabriel for trusting me with her reflections and for allowing her

words and experiences to be shared in this form. Her willingness to speak about

identity, kinship, and institutional harm makes it possible to discuss justice not as an

abstract concept, but as a lived reality.

Acknowledgment: Shared with permission. Some details have been generalized to

protect privacy and safety.

Disclaimer: This piece is for public legal education and awareness. It does not provide

legal advice.