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People Magzine article continued...
 The singer's complicated odyssey began in Windsor, Ont., in 1965, where she was born Eilleen Regina Edwards, the second of three children of Clarence Edwards and his wife, Sharon. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and Eilleen moved with her mother and two sisters Carrie-Ann and Jill to Timmins, a gold-mining town 500 miles norht of Toronto. In 1971, Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa forester and mining prospector. Together the couple had two sons, Mark and Darryl, and Jerry adopted Eilleen and her sisters and later got them membership in his First Nation tribe. "My dad's side of the family was the side we grew up with," says Twain. "So it was the Indians that were really our family."
That made Twain's biological father the odd man out. "We maybe saw him three times," says Carrie-Ann. "We don't even know him." With Jerry at the head of the house-hold and frequently between jobs, the family often lived on the brink of poverty. "As a girl, I would go snaring rabbits for food," says Twain. "I'd go hunting [for moose] with my dad in the bush. The basics in our lives were different from a lot of the basics in our white friends' lives." As an example, Twain, who moved with the family from Timmins to nearby Sudbury (pop. 92,000) at age 8, recalls a time when a friend slept over. "She went into the fridge the next morning, got the cereal out and started pouring herself a tall glass of milk plus milk in her cereal. It was such an indulgence in my eyes. So I grabbed the glass and said, 'You can't have that. We have to share.'"
Some people believe Twain is milking, if not embellishing, her rages-to-riches story. "They had a house, a car, a TV," says Lawrence Martin, a family friedn in Sudbury. "I never saw them as being as poor as described in interviews. We were all poor, working, struggling." And in 1996, The Daily Press in Timmins ran a story accusing her of overstating her Ojibwa heritage by not disclosing that Jerry was her adoptive father. A controversy ensued spawned national headlines and temporarily tarnished her image. "I don't know why they have to challenge me," says Twain. "Maybe there were people who knew us during a time when my dad was getting a regular paycheck or both of my parents were working. We went in and out of difficult times; we weren't always starving." As for the alleged North American Indian deception, notes Twain's former lawyer Richard Frank: "It was very upsetting to her when it came out. She looked upon [Jerry] as her father, and she was very proud of her Ojibwa heritage. Her biological father had [left] her mother very early. Eilleen has just drawn a curtain over that part of her life. I think it was terribly painful to have that curtain ripped open. I think she felt that it dishonored her father who raised her and sought to diminish his role as a father."
 One aspect of Twain's childhood is indisputable: her hunger for music. At home she spent much of her time singing along to Anne Murray and Charley Pride hits on the radio. At her parents' urging she began performing around Sudbury at age 8. "They dragged her to bars and festivals and family gatherings," says neighbor Martin. "Her mom drove her all over, scheming where to take her next." Often that was onstage at bars after last call. "I remember my parents coming into the bedroom late at night to fetch her from the top bunk to go sing," says Carrie-Ann. Her parents' ambition and drive particulary her mother's eventually rubbed off on Twain.
Back in Timmins, where she attended high school, Twain joined a Top 40 cover band called the Longshot. Soon, she was singing with the group five nights a week at a local lounge and working part-time at McDonald's. But while she exuded star power onstage, at school she was with-drawn. "I felt invisible a lot," says Twain. "I actually wrote a song called 'Feeling Invisible.' I was athletic and into music and really socializing, and I'm sure a lot of it was because I was introverted." Her upbringing also played a role. "The whole family tends to be a little standoffish," says Carrie-Ann. "There wasn't a lot of hugging and grabbing between our parents."
After graduating from high school, Twain quit the Longshot and in 1987, at 21, moved to Toronto, where she worked as a secretary while singing in clubs. But her days as an independent career woman ended abruptly that November when her parents were killed in a head-on collision with a logging truck on an Ontario highway. (Twain's brother Mark suffered minor injuries in the accident and was hospitalized.) "I felt totally lost," Twain told PEOPLE in 1995. She promptly quit her job in Toronto and hurried back to Timmins to take car of her younger siblings. (Older sister Jill by then had a family of her own.) "I was on automatic pilot, doing what I had to do. It was a stressful time," says Twain. "Eilleen was always sort of a mother figure," adds Carrie-Ann. "We just knew she had to take charge. There was no other way."
Looking after her younger sister and her brothers Mark, then 14, and Darryl, 13 wound up being a test of endurance. "She was really strict with us," Mark, now a computer technician in Vancouver, told PEOPLE in 1995. "She was scared." (Darryl is an electrician in Edmonton, Alta.) And insecure. "I was overwhelmed with a lot of decisions," says Twain. "I had to deal with my parents' mortgage, and I didn't even know what a mortgage was." But, she adds, "what I learned through all of that was how strong I was capable of being. I didn't fall apart. I kept it together, paid the bills, took car of the kids, did the groceries, cooked and cleaned and still kept down a job. I always had a feeling things would work out. I still fell that way about life."
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