Click this link to listen to Season 3 Episode 15 featuring the author Dr. Brittany Penner of the memoir, Children Like Us: A Métis Woman’s Memoir of Family, Identity, and Walking Herself Home (Regalo Press, 2025).
In this episode of Native Circles, Drs. Farina King and Davina Two Bears meet Dr. Brittany Penner to discuss her memoir, Children Like Us: A Métis Woman’s Memoir of Family, Identity, and Walking Herself Home (Regalo Press, 2025), recently named one of Indigo’s Best Books of 2025. Penner, a family physician of Anishinaabe, Cree, and European settler descent, was adopted as an infant into a white Mennonite family during what is known as the Sixties Scoop in Canada, an era of state-sanctioned Indigenous child removal that remains central to Indigenous Studies conversations about kinship disruption, settler colonialism, and cultural continuity across North America.
Together, they explore what it means to “walk home” in an Indigenous sense, not simply a return to place, but a return to story, lineage, language, community, and relational accountability. The conversation engages questions of adoption, survivance, and belonging while also considering the ethical and intellectual work of reclaiming Indigenous identity. This episode invites listeners into a powerful dialogue about home, healing, and Indigenous futurity.
Resources:
Learn more about Brittany Penner’s new book Children Like Us: A Métis Woman’s Memoir of Family, Identity, and Walking Herself Home (2025)
“The Sixties Scoop” educational resources shared by the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia
“Exploring Identity: Who are the Métis and what are their rights?” (2019 CBC article)
More highlights about Dr. Brittany Penner and her new memoir:
Brittany Penner is a family physician with Anishinaabe, Cree, and European settler lineage. She was adopted at birth by a white Mennonite family (without her Indigenous birth mother’s consent) as part of the Sixties Scoop and grew up straddling two worlds—one she knew and one that remained just out of reach. The Sixties Scoop is a time in history that most Americans are not familiar with, but it is just as much a piece of our history as it is Canadian history.
With this memoir, she takes readers along as she reckons with the complexities of family, love, grief, trauma, and cultural displacement.
“Children Like Us is a luminous memoir about identity, loss and belonging… Both intimate and unflinching, Children Like Us is a powerful exploration of what it means to know where you come from—and what it costs when that knowledge is withheld.” —Adrienne Brodeur, nationally bestselling author of Wild Game
By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. “When will I be taken away?” You won’t be, she is told. You’re adopted. You’re the lucky one.
On the day of her birth in 1989, near the end of the Sixties Scoop, Brittany was relinquished into the care of the government and adopted by a white Mennonite family in a small prairie town. Her name and where she came from are hidden from her; all she is told is that she is Métis.
Her childhood is shaped by church, family, service and silence. Her family is continuously shifting as siblings arrive and depart. She knows that to stay, she has to force herself into the mold created for her. Whenever she looks in the mirror, she searches her features, wondering if they’ve been passed down to her by her biological mother. As Brittany moves into adulthood, she will uncover answers—but they will be more tangled than she could have imagined.
Children Like Us asks difficult questions about family, identity, belonging, and cultural continuity.
About the author
Brittany Penner is an author, practicing family physician and a lecturer with the University of Manitoba Max Rady College of Medicine, and has been a keynote speaker at the University of Manitoba. She is currently completing a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Harvard University. Her personal essays have appeared in Salon, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Huffington Post Canada, This Magazine and Canadian Family Physician, and typically revolve around the complex nature of identity and family dynamics. She lives in Manitoba.
More Praise for Children Like Us
“Brittany Penner is fierce and fearless, and her story is a gripping and powerful one. Hers is a voice we need to hear—a moral compass in our increasingly disoriented times.” —Susan Choi, award-winning author of Trust Exercise
“Britanny Penner’s writing is as tender as it is raw, her voice as searing as it is poetic. Children Like Us is not the kind of story you simply read—it commands that you feel. This memoir is a resplendent meditation on belonging, love, loss and the persistent journey toward healing.” —Perdita Felicien, nationally bestselling author of My Mother’s Daughter
“An absolutely mesmerizing debut. It was a privilege to bear witness to Brittany Penner’s story about intergenerational trauma, identity and belonging. The kinds of complicated grief we so often experience in life are born out of the complexity of human relationships and our fierce ability to both hurt and heal one another. Penner explores this truth deftly, with wisdom, compassion and grace. I hope everyone reads this book.” —Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
“Children Like Us offers unforgettably intimate insight into the life of a person fractured from history, family and culture, and who for a long time held the impossible weight of her questions alone and within one small body. In arresting prose, Brittany Penner writes about love, loss and hope despite the most heartbreaking of circumstances. Here is a story about adoption, race and pain that is not about finding a perfect solution, but that provokes still-necessary questions about colonialism and kinship like nothing I’ve seen before.” —Jenny Heijun Wills, award-winning author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. and Everything and Nothing At All
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