PART 6
December 12, 2008 Ottawa Sun
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media
Born in the Couchiching First Nation reserve near the Northern Ontario outpost of Fort Frances, Catherine Beaver was put up for adoption within moments of her first breath to save her from a life with hopelessly alcoholic and abusive parents, all which adversely put into play the often harsh law of unintended consequences.
Being saddled with fetal alcohol syndrome was not the best of beginnings, but that nonetheless is how the early chapters of Catherine Beaver’s life began — with fast-forward taking her on a hellish journey ... from being a booze-addled runaway living on the streets of Toronto, to teenage pregnancies, hardcore drug addictions, an arson conviction, years of low-end prostitution on a rough Toronto track and, just for a cruel kicker, the diagnosis of being HIV-positive.
This is not news.
While Ontario and Quebec do not collect ethno-specific HIV statistics, a Public Health Agency of Canada report last November revealed that our nation’s aboriginal people — First Nations, Metis and Inuit — accounted for more than 25% of all positive HIV tests in 2006, even though they represent only 4% of this country’s total population.
The story got scant national media attention.
Catherine Beaver, now 28, and despite years strolling the Sherbourne-Gerrard track in downtown Toronto, and doling out $40 oral jobs and $100 back-seat tricks, obtained her HIV status through intravenous drug use when she was shooting up heroin and morphine between binges of crack cocaine — a tragic pointer to the fact that intravenous drug use is the cause of 64% of the HIV cases among aboriginal people.
It is virtually the reverse of overall national averages, where 74% of HIV cases are attributed to sexual contact, and only 24% to the sharing of infected needles.
After being snatched from the Couchiching Ojibway reserve by the Thunder Bay children’s aid, Catherine Beaver landed in Georgetown, just north of Toronto, in the adoptive home of a Native man and his Japanese wife.
“I was raised more under the Japanese culture than my own,” she remembers. “My (adoptive) father never discussed his Native heritage. He went to work (at Petro-Canada) in a suit and tie, and came home the same way.
“I was the only ‘coloured’ person in my school. I was fat, and I was dark-skinned, I stood out, and I was picked on.
“I grew to hate it every second of my life there, and in that house,” she says. “I was ‘different,’ and I knew it.
“My adoptive parents gave me every opportunity in the world. I was in the school band. I was on the swim team.
“But I was also a 250 lb. Native kid in a world filled with white people, and I did not fit in that world.”
At age 16, she took her $10 lunch-and-travel money and, instead of heading to Georgetown District High School and her Grade 10 classes, she caught the GO bus to the outskirts of Toronto, and then the TTC to the corner of Yonge and Bloor where she fell in with a “bunch of street kids.”
That winter, she spent Christmas in a box in an alley off Grenville St., not far from the city morgue.
“Yes, my parents had reported me missing, but I was 16 and there was nothing the police could do except ask me to call home,” she says. “I did ... days later.”
No welcome mat was extended.
When Catherine Beaver was sleeping in a box near the morgue, she was also pregnant, and over five months pregnant, in fact, before the realization finally sunk in and she made her way to Covenant House, a Toronto shelter for homeless youth.
“Condom? Who thinks of condoms?” she says.
That child, eventually taken in by the same parents Catherine Beaver left behind in Georgetown, is now 11.
Two years later, that little girl would have a sister, its father known but so totally out of the picture today that his view of the world is from behind prison bars.
“I never was good with my choice in men,” she says.
Catherine Beaver’s youngest child, now 9, has also been adopted out, her seizure by the Toronto children’s aid no doubt aided and abetted by the arson charges Beaver faced when, five years ago, the news media wrote of friends rushing into a North York apartment to rescue a little girl from a blaze allegedly set by her own mother.
The mother, one of those friends told reporters, was “really, really drunk,” and potentially suicidal.
That mother was Catherine Beaver.
She was arrested under the Mental Health Act, and eventually served six months in jail after pleading guilty, even though she says she never started the fire.
“I just wanted it all to be over, so I pleaded out,” she says “The mental health act likely helped. Otherwise I would have been jailed much longer.
“In a way, I caught a break.”
If that was a break, then Catherine Beaver failed to take advantage of it. Out of jail, she landed in one hostel after another, and fell into a crowd and a lifestyle that had her turning to the sex trade to support her addictions.
She has lost count of those sordid encounters, but “there were lots,” she says. “Sometimes I had to earn $2,000 just to pay for what I consumed over a two-day period.
“I was a crack-addicted, heroin-shooting ’ho ... what can I say? That was me then, not me now.
“Now I am clean, or at least pretty clean.”
In 2004, Catherine Beaver entered the Native Horizons Treatment Centre in Hagersville, and successfully fought the demons that, according to her, began with alcohol.
“Alcohol. That’s what made me lose my whole life in the first place,” she says. “It began with the drinking.”
While she still struggles today to fight the occasional setback, Catherine Beaver has no problem laying out her life for all to see, and has volunteered as a guest speaker for the Toronto chapter of Two-Spirited People of the First Nations, a gay, lesbian and transpositive organization that conducts HIV/AIDS outreach for the aboriginal community.
“I am uncertain of my sexuality after all I have been through,” she says. “Most likely I’m bi-(sexual).
“But HIV is what I have to live with, regardless.”
As for the track she once strolled, Catherine Beaver says she has given it up ... almost.
Which explains why she still carries condoms in her knapsack.
She confesses, in fact, that she went out again the other day, and pulled off a couple of tricks along her old stroll.
“Why? Good question,” she says. “Because I was bored, probably — nothing more.”
TOMORROW: Native elder and artist