April 5, 1996
TIMMINS, Ont. (CP) -- Country sensation Shania Twain is dodging barbs from embittered family members who accuse her of ignoring her biological father and exaggerating her native roots to help her career. But the singer -- who has rocketed to the top of the country charts with her album The Woman in Me -- says she's had no contact with her blood father since her mother separated from him when she was two years old.
In a series of stories, the Timmins Press reports that Twain's biological grandmother and other unnamed relatives are upset that Nashville's hottest act is no longer in touch with them. The stories also suggest she may have oversold her native heritage -- her mother is of Irish descent and her blood father is French-Irish. However, her adoptive father, Jerry Twain, is Ojibwa.
Twain, in a statement sent to the newspaper, takes issue with the accusations in the story. "I don't know how much Indian blood I actually have in me, but as the adopted daughter of my father Jerry, I became legally registered as 50 per cent North American Indian.
"Being raised by a full-blooded Indian and being part of his family and their culture from a young age is all I've ever known. That heritage is my heart and my soul, and I'm very proud of it."
Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards to Sharon and Clarence Edwards. When the future singer was two, her mother left Edwards and took up with Jerry Twain. Sharon legally married Twain when Shania was six years old. Jerry and Sharon were killed in a car accident in 1987.
Twain has told interviewers how she trapped rabbits as a child and spent time on the Mattagami Reserve. She performed recently at the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards in Vancouver. But Twain's biological grandmother (Edwards's mother) says the red-hot singer isn't native and laments that she doesn't talk with her blood father's side of the family.
"All she talks about is this Indian man, but what about her real father? What about us?" Regina Nutbrown, 85, said in an interview in nearby Chapleau, 200 kilometers west of Timmins.
"I wrote a year ago but once she started going good she never wrote. I wish she would. I don't know what's happened to her."
Edwards declined an interview with the Timmins Press.
Relatives and friends in Chapleau, a small lumber community, describe him as a quiet, unassuming man who speaks little of his famous offspring. In her statement to the Timmins Press, Twain said she "never deliberately avoided contact with the Edwards family, but my father Jerry's parents loved us as though we were their own grandchildren and we were equally accepted by his other relatives....
"I never felt the need to seek the love or support of another family, because I had it from the Twains."