I don't belong to these places.

Christina Dargatz
May 11
3 min read

Updated: May 11

I am often asked, “How have your kids adjusted?”

Let's start with me

Around 1994, my dad took a government job managing an arts facility in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), a remote Inuit community of roughly 2,000 people in the Canadian Arctic. The nearest neighbouring community was Rankin Inlet, an hour flight south along Hudson Bay. Inuktitut was spoken more often than English, and life was deeply rooted in culture and tradition.

It was an incredible place to spend time while growing up. I was surrounded by an unusually large number of extraordinarily talented Inuit artists. The world-renowned sculptor, Barnabus Arnasungaaq would sit on his knees outside his house, carving for hours in every kind of weather. I passed him on my way to school.

I loved spending time where my dad worked, watching and learning from local artisans. Although we only lived there for about four years, the experience shaped me in ways that still ripple through my life today.

I wasn’t Inuit, though. And while parts of the community welcomed me warmly, the children around me made sure I understood I was Qallunaaq, a white outsider. I was reminded not to get too comfortable.

Now raising kids in rural Guatemala…

Our children aren’t Mayan, and although they’ve also been embraced in many (beautiful) ways by the local community here in Guatemala, the classroom is where they are reminded that they are not from here either. They don’t fully belong.

Baker Lake, Canada

Growing up somewhere "foreign" to Western culture, I learned very young what discrimination felt like firsthand. Children have no filters. They inherit and repeat the unresolved pain passed down through generations. To many of the children around me during my childhood, I represented the invader. I had my hair cut, was spat on, hit, and threatened. I witnessed suicide, addiction, abuse, and grief regularly. Death rates were high.

When we moved our family to Guatemala, we understood some of the challenges we were setting the table for. But the hardship I experienced in the North is also one of the greatest gifts of my childhood. It gave me a deeper understanding of empathy, suffering, history, and contradiction.

As an adult, it led me to learn more about genocide and residential schools, about complacency, corruption, coups, and civil wars. Our children will one day wrestle with these same difficult truths in meaningful ways.

Some days, they come home and tell me no one wants to play with them because they are gringos. I see the rejection in their faces, and I hold them. I don’t tell them everything will be okay, because sometimes it won’t be.

The brain resists contradictions like belonging and exclusion, and I’m not interested in resolving that tension or insulating them from it.

As a child, when I returned from the North, the South of Canada no longer looked the same to me. Things that once felt normal in Western society became filtered through my experiences in the Arctic. I knew I didn’t fully belong in the South anymore, but I also didn’t belong in the North.

Guatemala. The Canadian Arctic. Saskatchewan. Rossland, BC. Peru... I don’t belong to any of these places. They belong to me.

They are mine to interpret, mine to carry, mine to be shaped by. My sense of belonging no longer comes from the spaces I fit into, but rather the spaces I hold dear.

So, how have our children adjusted?

They are constantly adjusting.

They may never feel fully Guatemalan or fully Canadian, and that’s okay. They may grow up never fully fitting in anywhere, but hopefully, they will learn how to adapt and thrive almost everywhere. The doses of pain they experience while growing up in the safety of a loving home condition them to face problems that are sometimes unsolvable. While those problems may be impossible to permanently resolve, the emotions surrounding them can be temporarily eased when they are given the space to lean into and process what they are experiencing. Learning to engage in this process again and again is a tool we hope to give them as they face the realities of the world.

We all give our children gifts from our own childhoods, hidden layers that only reveal themselves over time. At first, they can seem painful, confusing, or heavy. But as our children grow, heal, and mature, perhaps they begin to understand them differently. We are finding that the greatest gifts we have given our children are the moments when we have struggled together and seen things through with love and space for processing. Our struggles and pains are part of what makes us all human, and when those pains are paired with humility and self-reflection, they become a powerful foundation for raising good humans.