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In the summer of 1958, a small, sickly girl sat on the curb of a street in Edmonton, waiting, as she had often waited, for someone to claim her. She was clutching a brown bag containing all she owned, a dirty dress with her name pinned to it: Jane Poitras. She was five years old.
She had been on the move all her short life, from her birthplace in Fort Chipewyan, to the northern logging camps where her mother worked as a cook, and then to Edmonton with the Grey Nuns and assorted foster parents. Her mother came and went mysteriously, and would -- people always assured her -- come again. In fact, Jenny Poitras had died in an Edmonton hospital nine months earlier, the victim of a tuberculosis epidemic. No one had bothered to tell the native girl, nor would she even know her mother's name until she herself was a grown woman.
On this day, a social worker was supposed to come and pick up Jane, but if she came at all, she came too late. Fate had already intervened in the person of Marguerite Runck, a sixty - five - year - old widow who was visiting her daughter in the neighbourhood. Learning that the girl had been found wandering the streets, Mrs. Runck decided on the spur of the moment to take her home. Hand in hand, they walked up the steep hill of the Saskatchewan River valley and down a long, impoverished stretch of 95th street to the small frame house where Jane would live for the next twenty years. Three weeks later, Social Services officials agreed to foster care, without ever checking the girl's treaty Indian status or the fact that she had relatives in Fort Chipewyan.
The eccentric, devoutly Catholic woman known as Grandma -- "She was a saint, really," says Poitras -- set out to remake the girl, body and soul. Jane suffered from malnutrition, infected ears, a hernia and severe eczema. She spoke only a Cree dialect, and rocked herself constantly, so the local nuns decided she was retarded and wouldn't let her into school. Refusing to believe them, Mrs. Runck paid for two years of intensive medical care and speech therapy, about which Poitras...