Amy’s path
When she was a teenager, Amy Montour rejected her Six Nations home and faced motherhood, poverty and abuse, but later emerged to become a physician and return to the place she never really left
THE GIRL RAN BAREFOOT in the grass and played in the creek behind her home on Six Nations. She learned lessons of the Bible from her father, a Christian pastor, and the ways of her Indigenous culture.
Amy Montour’s parents doted on her and protected her.
At 16, she quit school and was pregnant. She lived in poverty off the reserve, and at the darkest moment, summoned all her strength to form a protective cocoon around her toddler daughter as a man rained blows upon her.
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day,” wrote Joseph Campbell in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” describing the archetype of the hero. “Forces are encountered ... unimaginable torments.”
At 36, Montour walked across the stage in Ham-
ilton Convention Centre. She wore a white robe, signifying the passage of medical school graduates into the realm of physician.
A speaker at the ceremony offered graduates inspirational words: You are the elite, the best of the best.
Montour felt a smile as she listened. She thought: No I’m not. And: You don’t know my path.
HER HAUDENOSAUNEE
parents, Daniel and Judith, met on Six Nations. Neither finished high school but Daniel rose to be general manager of Canada Gypsum Company; Judith worked as a health-care aid in a nursing home.
They had two sons, Dave and Dan, and daughter, Donna, and then a surprise: Amy.
Her parents were born-again Christians and Daniel became pastor at Bethany Baptist Church on the reserve.
In addition to traditional longhouses, Six Nations — a community of about 20,000, the largest reserve by population in Canada — has churches including Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal and Mormon.
Some people told Daniel his faith was incompatible with being Indigenous.
“They tell you you’re not Indian if you don’t believe (in the longhouse),” he says. “But it’s not true and they know it. You can’t turn off being an Indian. I’m proud of my heritage.”
Amy was raised Christian and also learned the sacred seven grandfather teachings: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, truth.
Growing up, she felt out of place when off the reserve. She felt like the other: you were either white or Indigenous.
“You end up walking around with your head down,” she says.
Her father took the kids to restaurants to learn etiquette. She wasn’t allowed to attend dances or parties. He believes you become who you associate with and did not want Amy with the wrong crowd.
She was bullied in elementary school, and when she found a circle of friends in high school, it was the wrong circle. She started to dislike the girl she saw in the mirror.
When the rebellion came, she went all the way. She announced she was leaving home and stayed wherever there was a couch available.
Her father blamed himself: “Very much so. Your children are your responsibility.”
Three weeks before she turned 16, she was pregnant, and then married the father because it seemed like the right thing.
They lived in an apartment in Brantford. Rental housing on Six Nations was scarce; if you didn’t own land or live with family, there were few options.
She awoke to a fist hitting her face. She was in bed with her 18-monthold, Rachel. The abuse, fuelled by her young husband’s drug and alcohol addictions, had to that point been verbal, but now, on this one night, it exploded.
She defended her girl and ran, phoned her father and he picked them up. She pressed charges and her husband was convicted. Her face, bruised and swollen, was unrecognizable for weeks.
“It sounds horrible but that episode was a game changer for me,” she says. “I found some value in myself, discovered I deserved more, and it taught me to stand up for myself.”
She lived with Rachel in a women’s shelter for two months, an ultimately transformative experience.
“They don’t let you wallow, you have to get up and move on. I got back on my feet.”
She later remarried and had a boy and girl, Jason and Ashley. Soon after that marriage broke down, her exhusband was killed at his job in a demolition yard, crushed by a car he had been working under.
Montour was $300,000 in debt and raising three kids. She cleaned and taught piano lessons. At times, life felt hopeless.
Her parents kept saying they believed in her, and she lived in a halffinished house on their property on Six Nations. Elders at her father’s church, people like Peter Hill, were kind and supportive.
Her brother had returned to school and urged her to do the same. She scored high on aptitude tests. She attended Six Nations Polytechnic for her high school equivalency.
THE MOMENT when she truly started seeing herself differently was the first day on campus at McMaster University, enrolled in the nursing program.
All these young people from different backgrounds; it was no longer Indigenous or white. She was one among many. She held her head high.
“It felt like a good thing to be an Indigenous person; it wasn’t something to hide. And when I went through my programs, it was amazing, I was successful.”
It was a busy time, raising the kids, attending classes.
Palliative care interested her. When she was a child, she had tagged along with her mother to work at a nursing home, and watched her parents care for her great-grandmother and grandfather at home in their final days.
At a work placement at Carpenter hospice in Brantford, on her first day, she sat with a palliative patient, but could not even touch him because of the painful condition he was in.
She wondered about the purpose of it all. How could she help him? But by the end of her time with him, she understood.
“I learned more about palliative care than a textbook could teach; I learned how to be with somebody.”
One day her phone rang: it was a nursing professor who suggested she apply for medical school. Montour laughed.
High school dropout, single mom on welfare, domestic violence?
“All I could think about was that I had lived the social determinants of health,” she says. “And those kinds of people don’t become doctors.”
But Montour had been growing stronger, elevated by family and mentors, people like Pat Mandy, who grew up with Amy’s mother and been a nurse, administrator, teacher, and the only Indigenous president of the College of Nurses of Ontario.
“Amy would come see me, and I would listen and encourage her that she had the ability to do what she wanted, but that she needed to follow her head and heart,” Mandy says.
Montour called her mother and relayed the professor’s crazy idea that she become a doctor.
And her mother said: “Why not?”
IN 2011,
her mother and father had tears in their eyes watching her graduate from the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. She was the second oldest in her class of 179.
When she started working, she sent her parents on a cross-Canada vacation by train they had long yearned to take.
“I tease them, I say: ‘Have I done enough to atone now?’”
She started practising in a clinic in Ohsweken, founded by Karen Hill, called Juddah’s Place — the first residency ever at the clinic.
“Amy offered to be the guinea pig,” says Hill. “I didn’t know her personal story at the time, bits and pieces came out later, and I thought: this is a resilient woman. Very smart, focused, strong.”
Montour next worked at a family health clinic on Six Nations but left after experiencing a rocky relationship with the band council that oversees it.
Hill had left the clinic for the same reason and says Indigenous physicians are often looked down upon on the reserve: “We don’t receive our own people very well. It’s internalized racism. There is fear, because (as physicians) we become ‘the man.’ It’s a weird dynamic that’s slowly improving ... But it’s what we signed up for when we said we wanted to be doctors.”
Montour continues to treat elderly and palliative patients on Six Nations but most of her work is off reserve. She is a palliative care hospitalist with Brant Community Health Care; member of the outreach team with Stedman Community Hospice in Brantford; regional Aboriginal clinical lead in the Hamilton-Niagara-Haldimand-Brant region, and regional palliative care multidisciplinary co-lead for the regional network and Cancer Care Ontario.
Her passion for end-of-life care, she says, has roots in her childhood, and Indigenous heritage, where life is viewed not in a linear way but as a cycle.
“Death is a social event that impacts so much more than just your physical being. There is beauty being with a person at the end of their life cycle.”
Among the palliative patients on reserve she has treated, was her kindergarten teacher, Viola MacKenzie, and family friend Peter Hill, who had meant so much to her.
“I was so fortunate to be their doctor at the end of their lives.”
Montour remarried, Jeremy Bomberry, a Six Nations man. They live with Amy’s daughter, Rachel, who is now 26, and Rachel’s 15-month old son, Jack, plus four Siamese cats, two mastiffs and two black labs.
Life: In her teens, Rachel confided she had been sexually abused as a child by an older cousin. She battled drug addiction and was in and out of rehab. At one point, Amy, having come to the rescue one too many times, forced herself to let go so her daughter could find her way.
And she did. Rachel says she has been clean 18 months. Through it all she earned her diploma from Mohawk College in medical office administration.
“My mom has worked so hard to give us a better life,” says Rachel. “A lot of women, especially young native women, have gone through what she did, and a lot of them don’t know they can rise up and do better for their families ... I love that she shows them anybody can do it.”
Montour keeps a packed schedule. One recent morning she was up at 4 a.m. to review emails, at 6 a.m. she spent time with little Jack — the best part of her day — and was on the road to Grimsby for a meeting with the Local Health Integration Network. Then it was off to a palliative care meeting, and Brantford General Hospital for palliative patient rounds, a meeting with Brant Aboriginal Health Links, and back to Six Nations to visit patients before reviewing notes that evening to plan for the next day.
She is a role model and mentor to others, like Bradley Johnson, her nephew, a family physician in Simcoe who graduated from Mac’s medical school in 2015.
“Amy’s story should be an inspiration to anyone from any race, culture, or income level,” he writes in an email, adding: “As Indigenous people, we are proud when another one of our own has the successes Amy has had.”
This fall, she will give talks on palliative care, and Indigenous health. Last year, she was keynote speaker at an Indigenous health conference in Hamilton, where she urged a blending of Western evidence-based care and traditional healing practices.
Whether in speeches or conversation, she is open about her experiences, seems fearless and laughs often.
A political party, at this time in Canadian history, might be wise to court a woman like 43-year-old Amy Montour.
She smiles. It’s not the first time someone has mentioned it. She offers a typically unvarnished response.
“I think you have to have a lot of patience to be in politics. But if the door was open and that was the path I was supposed to take, then I would do it.”
She resists indulgences, but one was buying a Hemi-powered black Dodge Challenger with red interior. It fits.
When she returns to Six Nations from Brantford General, she drives east along Hwy. 54 and over the Grand River — in Mohawk, O:se Kenhionhata:tie, or Willow River — on the bridge at Chiefswood Road, where her family used to cross on a one-car ferry.
She feels it every time: Home. None of the hierarchy and status that has always felt foreign to her in the medical profession. “Here I’m just Amy. There is something about arriving on the reserve and putting your feet on the ground; that’s your connection. Nowhere else has felt like that.”
She offers a guest a tour, pointing out homes of family members who live minutes away from her.
Here is Emerson Corner, named after her father’s brother, who struggled with alcoholism; when his shack burned down, he would sit in a car seat on that corner each day. The community built him a little house that still stands.
Here is the place that belonged to her great-grandmother, Margaret King. She was a feminist before her time, she says, born at the turn of the century, who owned land and businesses and was a self-taught artist.
“She used to walk to the bush behind that house to wash clothes on the rocks in the creek, while her dad tapped trees for maple syrup.”
Montour lives in the house her parents gave her years ago, on a gently sloping hill behind theirs, near the creek she used to play in. She has no desire to build what she calls a “show home” on the reserve.
Every morning before sunrise, she lies in bed and says prayers like she did when she was little. She thanks God for blessings and asks for guidance and protection for her family.
“My dad has always said to think of your relationship with God like your relationship with your father. My dad and I have a close relationship, we talk about everything, so it’s very much like that. I fell away from it at times, but it’s always been my go-to place, my rock.”
She came to believe that all the mistakes she made, all the pain, happened for a reason and was divinely inspired.
Destiny — whether divine or driven by statistical probabilities (“I lived the social determinants of health” )— suggests a certain inevitability.
But if Montour, who was on a deadend road in her teens, proves anything, it’s that the trajectory of a life is never preordained.
“A decisive victory is won,” wrote Joseph Campbell, “and the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure transformed with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Dr. Amy Montour’s phone buzzes with calls. She has colleagues and patients to see.
She shifts the muscle car into gear and rumbles west through Six Nations, past verdant fields dotted with dandelions, under a big blue sky, around a bend in the river.
“Here I’m just Amy. There is something about arriving on the reserve and putting your feet on the ground; that’s your connection. Nowhere else has felt like that.” AMY MONTOUR On being at home on Six Nations
Amy was raised Christian and also learned the sacred seven grandfather teachings: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, truth.
“Death is a social event that impacts so much more than just your physical being. There is beauty being with a person at the end of their life cycle.” AMY MONTOUR On her passion for end-of-life care
Her passion for end-of-life care, she says, has roots in her childhood, and Indigenous heritage, where life is viewed not in a linear way but as a cycle.