3/25/2023 0 Comments Dark cloud money![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One day we were driving to Cailas to transport items. “I got a job as a helper where I would load the trucks with products with the driver. “I went to London first and began working at a market in Covent Garden. “I hitch hiked from Maidenhead all the way to the south of Croatia. “So, when I overheard their conversation, I ran away from from home at age 15. In 1978 they moved to Maidenhead in Berkshire and one day he overheard his parents saying they were going to send him to boarding school. He said him and his British family weren't close at all and he was “pretty numb” his entire life and would run away from home all the time. “I felt like I didn't belong there,” he recalls. They had two children also but I always knew I stood out. My skin and my accent separated us instantly. “As soon as I was separated from my two sisters and my birth mother, I always knew I was different to my white British family. I was kicked out of schools constantly due to my behavioural problems.” “The amount I was drinking was affecting everything, but especially my education. “Every weekend, he would leave hash and alcohol in my room so I would be under his supervision. “During that time period, there was also kidnapping of foreign students happening in the Philippines, so my British father said that he would prefer for me to drink inside the house where he could see me. “In the late 1970s there were wern't really rehabilitation centres like there were now and we were living in a third world country, so it was something I just lived with. "My birth mother was a coke addict and alcoholic when she didn't realise she was pregnant with me until she was four months into her pregnancy, so I was born a baby alcoholic. He was taken to Singapore by his British adoptive family and from then on they moved to many different countries, including the Philippines and Hong Kong.ĭark Cloud began drinking aged nine and was diagnosed as a chronic alcoholic at age 11. Growing up Black in a white seaside town - an adopted child on the frontline of racism.He said as I get older there’ll be a silver lining around the dark cloud, like my silver hair,” he said. “He gave me such a negative name because he said I come from a dark place and he knew I’d be taken away. He was given the name ‘Dark cloud’ by the medicine man in his city, which in his native language, is ‘Makadayannad’. “We were driven straight to a residential school, where they stripped us of our language and our spirituality. “Then, that’s it, we never returned home."ĭark Cloud says he was effectively kidnapped from his troubled family in Thunder Bay, Ontario and transplanted into a different culture and moved overseas. We’re like ‘Yay, we get to go in this car, how cool is this?’ He said: “The Canadian government and social services came in with their fancy cars and gave us fancy toys, candy, sweets and said: ‘Would you like to come into our fancy cars?’ and of course we’re children, we’re naive, we’re excited. His life story is one of hundreds of thousands that document a decades-long battle against racist institutions. He said he was kidnapped and coerced by authorities when he was two years old. It is believed that around 20,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and adopted by primarily white middle class families, sometimes overseas. This primarily happened between the 1950s and late 1980s. The 53 year old from Easton was a survivor of the so called Sixties Scoop in Canada, where authorities would ‘scoop up’ indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or adoption. 'Stolen' from his family and culture at the age of two - and an alcoholic by the age of 11 - it took decades before Dark Cloud beat his addiction and gained an education in Bristol. ![]()
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