Early Life
Margo Kane was the only First Nations child adopted into a white working-class home. Her adoptive father had re-married three times. Kane grew up with an abusive and overly strict stepmother, and eventually found herself alienated from her family later on.
Kane found an interest in dance at an early age. She was an honours student in school; however, her teenage years led to severe depression. She has described her early life as having a sense of “cultural schizophrenia”. Kane remembers that she knew she was native before her father had even told her. Of her first encounters with the children bussed to her school from the residential school, Kane recalls that “we just stared at each other like cows in the field. Just looking wide-eyes, wondering who was going to make the first move.”. By the time Kane graduated high school she had, what she describes as an “inferiority complex”.
By the age of twenty, Kane had taken up residence on Skid Row, was living off social assistance, and was dependent on drugs and alcohol. Eventually, Kane was able to disentangle herself from her substance abuses, and move away from Skid Row and enroll in Edmonton’s Grant McEwan College for performing arts; it was here that she excelled in dance, acting, and singing. Her performance at McEwan College led to scholarships with Banff School of Fine Arts and Circle in the Square Theatre Company in New York.
Read more about this topic: Margo Kane
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)