Two years ago, after more than a decade in Japan, Shirley (Blackstar) Macdonald and her husband, Chris, decided it was time to go home. Now they run Eagle Feather Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia, with a magnificent cedar house in deep forest north of the city. A long way from working in Tokyo, with a small Taisho Era house in Kamakura.
Eagle Feather Gallery sells the work of 35 First Nation artists, with an artist usually on site carving totems. The project is the fruit of Shirley's determination to retrace her roots as a First Nation baby adopted into a white middle-class family and raised in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. "My birth family gets bigger daily -- 1,500 to date. I'm a Blackstar & Tootoosis, from the Cree Nation of Saskatchewan." Just recently, talking to a woman on the phone, she found they were half sisters on her father's side.
Look at Shirley's photo albums and you see a typical white Canadian childhood -- good student, cheerleader, life and soul of the party. Yet it is also clear that she is the only person in town with dark skin. "I never queried it. My upbringing was that loving, that solid. I only began to ask questions in Japan, realizing I looked more like the people around me." (Japanese and First Nation Amerindians share DNA.)