Two years ago, after more than a decade in Japan, Shirley (Blackstar) Macdonald and her husband, Chris, decided it was time to go home. Now they run Eagle Feather Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia, with a magnificent cedar house in deep forest north of the city. A long way from working in Tokyo, with a small Taisho Era house in Kamakura.

Eagle Feather Gallery sells the work of 35 First Nation artists, with an artist usually on site carving totems. The project is the fruit of Shirley's determination to retrace her roots as a First Nation baby adopted into a white middle-class family and raised in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. "My birth family gets bigger daily -- 1,500 to date. I'm a Blackstar & Tootoosis, from the Cree Nation of Saskatchewan." Just recently, talking to a woman on the phone, she found they were half sisters on her father's side.

Look at Shirley's photo albums and you see a typical white Canadian childhood -- good student, cheerleader, life and soul of the party. Yet it is also clear that she is the only person in town with dark skin. "I never queried it. My upbringing was that loving, that solid. I only began to ask questions in Japan, realizing I looked more like the people around me." (Japanese and First Nation Amerindians share DNA.)

After college she worked as a dietary aide. "My ambition? No more than to become a secretary in the same hospital, I'm afraid." A course to become a makeup artist in Vancouver was fun, but the industry cutthroat. Much more pleasant to sell sportswear in a club along with Pamela Anderson (before the "Bay Watch" star hit the big time). This is where she met Chris. "I fell in love because of the way he talks with people." Their first date was at a sushi party, and they have been together ever since.

He had just graduated in communications and signed up for a course in China. After complex maneuverings that took them to Bangkok and Singapore (an annual trip for years), back to Canada and finally Tokyo ("a friend in China said there were lots of jobs in Japan"), they moved here finally in 1989. They thought, "six months and we'll be out of here." Six months later they were only just finding their feet.

With Chris working in insurance and finance, Shirley began corresponding with Canadian provincial governments. "I was reading a lot about Native Americans." When the Indian Act was changed in 1986, allowing women married to nonaboriginal men to remain Indian, 5,000 women regained their Indian status. "I learned through the government that a half brother on my birth mother's side was looking for me. I thought, 'I'd better look into this.' " Knowing only that she was a Blackstar and her birth mother's reservation Moosomin, her third letter of trying was read by a cousin working in the Moosomin tribal office, who passed it to his sister. " 'We are in awe,' this woman wrote me. 'Welcome.' And sent me the family tree."

In May '93, Shirley visited her birth mother's reservation for the first time for a tribal feast. She could sense the poverty but felt the warmth of the people. "When four older women announced they were my birth father's sisters, I nearly fell off my chair. I met him for breakfast the following morning. Invited to a Treaty Day feast, I met 150 more relatives from my father's side. The three-day visit was completely overwhelming. It was good to return to Japan. I needed the distance to integrate the experience."

Attending a powwow on her father's reservation in summer that year began a period of research and reflection. Motivated to do something, even from half a world away, she connected with Goro Takahashi, who made native jewelry in Harajuku. And responded to an ad for the "Sacred Run 1995," from Hokkaido to Hiroshima, "on which I met my friend Dennis Banks, cofounder of the American Indian movement."

Wanting to show respect and hang out with friends of aboriginal people, she joined a group of Japanese who gathered every full moon. "I liked their acceptance of native culture. I felt part of an international family." She also discovered she had a famous relative: her uncle John B. Toototis, founding member (1920s) of the present-day Canadian Assembly of First Nations (the national organization of chiefs, with over 600 members) and senator of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians (the provincial organization of chiefs).

When Native American people visited Japan for cultural exchange gatherings, often held at La Foret in Harajuku, Shirley was thunderstruck. Seeing all the booths, she decided to start a business importing native-made First Nation goods. "I began with dream-catchers and medicine wheels, nice peaceful stuff. Jewelry came later. Now it's in the hands of Japanese partners."

The couple decided to return home in 2000 because Shirley wanted to re-connect with her culture on a deeper level. "Also my health was failing. Even a move to Kamakura didn't help. I realize now that my people, the Cree, have never been exposed to high levels of pollution like in Tokyo."

Initially the challenge was, which part of society did Shirley want to join? Chris found re-adjustment to life in Canada challenging too after so long in Japan. The gallery was initially founded (with a native ceremony) to operate as a cooperative. But it was too challenging. Some people would bring in things to sell to feed their families that very night. It was all too emotional. As Chris (who handles the business side) explains: "Now we buy items and commission work, with the artists themselves fixing the retail price. It's a form of high-end fair trade."

Having artists work on site is good for everyone. The tourists love it. And Shirley enjoys seeing the confidence and self-esteem of her people soar. "We are working with youth, teaching them more about business. Also native elders -- turned off by exploitation in the past -- are downtown again." And not so long ago, famed nihonga artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, a professor at Yokohama College of Art, just wandered in off the street.

This was the beginning of a beautiful relationship that will blossom in late March with a major event at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. Sugimoto, the Canadian artist and writer William Allister (a former POW in Japan) and the gallery's resident carver, Doug LaFortunate, together with a plethora of performance artists, will all participate as part of a Canadian lifestyle show.

As Shirley says, "Seeking to repair the pain of separation, whether it be from tribe, family, culture or country, we are working to help bring Canada and Japan closer together."