WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
In a Peterborough, Ont., courtroom last year, three Cree sisters unfolded the difficult stories of their childhoods. They recalled the beatings their aunt by marriage routinely meted out.
They alleged Katherine Cannon, the woman acting as their foster parent, had beat them with her fists, a belt and razor strap, and abused them with death threats and racist insults in the 1960s and ’70s.
The woman who called them “dirty Indians,” they testified, later became a self-styled “chief” of the Algonquins of Ontario organization. They alleged her Algonquin identity was “bogus” and was adopted
