How musician Tom Wilson discovered his Indigenous identity

As It Happens29:38In Beautiful Scars, musician Tom Wilson reveals the lifelong search for his true identity

Growing up in Hamilton, Ont., musician Tom Wilson didn't really know himself. The story of where he came from was kept shrouded in secrets. His new memoir charts his lifelong quest to discover his true identity — and how it finally led him, in his mid-50s, to a Mohawk reserve in Quebec.
This story was originally published on Nov. 13, 2017.

Story transcript

Like most children, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings' Tom Wilson asked his parents a lot of questions growing up.

But they refused to answer his most burning questions — like why his mother Bunny and his father George were so much older than his friends' parents, and why they had no photos of him as a newborn. 

Or why his schoolmates would tease him about "looking Indian," when his only connection to Indigenous people was that he sometimes visited his mother's sister, who was married to a Mohawk man on the Kahnawake reserve outside of Montreal.

"There are secrets about you, Tommy, that I'll be taking to my grave," Bunny would tell him when he would ask her about the day he was born.

"I felt like I was in a mystery novel from a young age," Wilson told As it Happens host Carol Off, who he joined in studio to talk about his newly published memoir, Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home.

In the book, Wilson writes about spending much of his childhood in Hamilton, Ont., dreaming of becoming a rock star — a dream he eventually realized as the frontman for Junkhouse in the 1990s.

But as he became known around the world for his music, he grew more haunted by the feeling that he didn't know himself.

Drugs and alcohol took their toll, and it took him hitting rock bottom before he found the truth.

In my 50s I became a Mohawk man.- Tom Wilson

He did not discover the truth until he was 53 years old, when a speaking tour handler who knew his family let slip that he was adopted.

"I knew Bunny and George as my mom and dad," Wilson said. "What they really were, were my great-aunt and uncle."

And the aunt and uncle he used to visit in Kahnawake were actually his grandparents.

"I'm still a Hamilton guy. I'm about coffee and cigarettes, but there was a spiritual connection in that house that I didn't feel in other places," Wilson said.

"I felt more at home in my grandfather's home, my Uncle John's home, than I did in Bunny and George's house."

It took Wilson five decades to fill in all the pieces of his true identity as an Indigenous man — a Mohawk man, with roots still firmly planted on Kahnawake.

"After writing this book, I realized that I was born a Mohawk baby," he said. "In my 50s I became a Mohawk man."

Written and produced by Kevin Ball.