2Spirit couple Legal fees to adopt and travel

Aaniin kina wiya, hello everyone, our names are Brianna Olson-Pitawanawat and Nanook Gordon. We had been friends for years and fell in love during the pandemic. We first became friends through Indigenous resistance events/organizing and then modeling for Kent Monkman and silkscreening for orange shirt day. We truly admired each other as friends. When the pandemic hit a few months in we decided to go paddle boarding together and there we talked about a lot of meaningful things and how important it was for us to have kids and all the other beautiful things having a family meant to us. As intergenerational survivors of RS & Indian Day school it's very important for us to break the cycles of pain and trauma this institutions inflicted on our families and to raise our children in a healthy and loving environment.

We got engaged in the fall of 2020, got a beautiful dog, Kulu and later on the cutest lil pup, Bungii. Early on we set an intention to have children together. As a 2-Spirit couple, we realized that for our community, it's not as simple as it is for most folks, and that we would have to try hard to make our family plan come to fruition. We put the word out for an adoption and began looking into informal insemination to become pregnant.

Fast forward a couple years and many, many hoops and thanks to our incredible friend Aliqa we found an Inuk Mama who is looking to adopt her unborn baby. We coordinated with the Birth Mama and we all decided to do a customary adoption.

In the North customary adoptions have been practiced since time immorial. If all goes to plan we will fly to the north with our advocate Aliqa and funds will be used for flights, transportation and accommodations and the basic lawyer fees up to that point. There is also a chance that since the Birth Mama is having complications with her health that she will have to be flown down south. This will complicate the situation since the Ontario government does not recognize customary adoptions. There is a chance that the customary adoption will likely not be accepted in Ontario, in which case we will have to go the route of customary care (temporary) and apply for a regular adoption which includes many hours of lawyers fees. We will require legal support to avoid child welfare and to protect Birth Mamas wishes and the baby's wellbeing in our care.

We really appreciate any amount given and if you don't have the means - even sharing our fundraising page will help spread the love. We are beyond excited to start this new journey of parenthood and to share all the love we have with this beautiful little baby.

Miigwech/Nakurmiik!!

Bri, Nanook, Kulu, Bngii