Status
Call number
Call number
Collection
Description
When residential schools opened in the 1830s, First Nations envisioned their own teachers, ministers, and interpreters. Instead, students were regularly forced to renounce their cultures and languages and some were subjected to degradations and abuses that left severe emotional scars for generations. In Finding My Talk, fourteen aboriginal women who attended residential schools, or were affected by them, reflect on their experiences. They describe their years in residential schools across Canada and how they overcame tremendous obstacles to become strong and independent members of aboriginal cultures and valuable members of Canadian society. Biographies include: Eleanor Brass, Journalist, Plains Cree, Saskatchewan Rita Joe, Poet/Writer, Mi'kmaq, Nova Scotia Alice French, Writer, Inuit, Northwest Territories Shirley Sterling, School Administrator/Storyteller, Nlakapmux, British Columbia Doris Pratt, Education Administrator/Language Specialist, Dakota, Manitoba Edith Dalla Costa, School Counsellor, Woodland Cree, Alberta Sara Sabourin, Community Worker, Ojibway, Ontario. Dr. Agnes Grant worked with the Native Teacher Training programs at Brandon University, Manitoba, for thirty years. As an administrator and professor, she spent much of her time in remote communities. Dr. Grant is the author of No End of Grief: Indian Residential Schools in Canada and three other books. She lives in Winnipeg.… (more)
Publication
Original language
Language
User reviews
But there is another, darker boarding school narrative - a tale of coercion and cruelty, the massive kidnapping of another people’s children, and the long-term, multi-generational damage done by the abuses inflicted on those children. It is NOT a story of privilege, but of privation, a story of racism, colonialism, and genocide. It is the story of the residential school system, set up to “teach” the indigenous children of this continent, and although Grant’s book focuses on the indigenous women of Canada, it is a story that has significance both in Canada and the United States.
Imagine that outsiders came to your village, and took all the children away. If you were a parent, and you tried to resist, you could be sent to jail. Imagine that these children, many of them far younger than the mandated seven years, were brought to church-run institutions, set up to wean them from the “deleterious” effect of their own cultures and families. If you spoke your own language, you were punished. If you tried to run away, you were recaptured, severely beaten, and sometimes put in isolation. Imagine being forbidden, as a young child, from going to the bathroom, except during very limited times, and then beaten for wetting yourself. Imagine that, terrified and lonely, you were watched closely, to ensure that you formed no close friendships. Imagine being told that you were “trash” every day, or being taught religion by a clergyman who used a diagram in his lessons showing white people ascending to heaven, and Indians descending to hell.
Imagine that you were never fed enough, and that the food you were given was often rancid. Imagine being ill or injured, and having your agony ignored by the adults responsible for “caring” for you. Imagine being a child at such a “school” - small and vulnerable in a world where you had no power, no voice, and no value, a world in which you could be abused with impunity. A world so permissive of sexual violation that one judge, in later years, called it “nothing but a form of institutionalized paedophilia,” run by “sexual terrorists.” And finally, imagine that this had been done to ALL the children of your cultural group, and that those responsible for inflicting such untold misery on you, were held up by society as philanthropists...
You don’t need to imagine it. Your can read about it in Agnes Grant’s Finding My Talk, a collection of “mini-biographies” of fourteen Native Canadian women who survived these residential schools. Some of the women profiled are writers, some educators, but all have struggled to find their way in life, after their traumatic early experiences. Many of the women here emphasize that their own personal experiences weren’t so bad, but whether they were victims of physical and/or sexual abuse themselves, or just witnesses to it, they were one and all abused mentally and spiritually. The terrible scars left by their youthful incarceration can be seen in the troubled relationships many had with their own spouses and children, and the long, rocky road that each had to travel, in order to find some measure of inner peace, and outer success.
This was a very difficult book for me to read, and I found that I often needed to stop, after reading only one profile, in order to reflect upon and absorb what I had been reading. As Marlene Starr noted in her foreword, these are hopeful stories, stories of survivors. But one never quite forgets that so many didn’t survive, that they weren’t meant to survive.
Addendum: The women profiled here include: Eleanor Brass (Cree, Saskatchewan); Ida Wasacase (Cree/Salteaux, Saskatchewan); Rita Joe (Mi'kmaq, Nova Scotia); Alice French (Inuit, Northwest Territories); Sister Dorothy Moore (Mi'kmaq, Nova Scotia); Shirley Sterling (Nlakapmux, British Columbia); Marjorie Gould (Mi'kmaq, Nova Scotia); Doris Pratt (Dakota, Manitoba); Edith Dalla Costa (Mixed Blood, Alberta); Bernice Touchie (Nuu-chah-nulth, British Columbia); Mary Cardinal Collins (Metis, Alberta); Elizabeth Bear (Cree, Manitoba); Sara & Beverly Sabourin (Ojibway, Ontario).