In this quietly powerful and deeply human book, Ruth DyckFehderau and twenty-one James Bay Cree storytellers put a face on Canada’s Indian Residential School cultural genocide.
Through intimate personal stories of trauma, loss, recovery, and joy, they tell of experiences in the residential schools themselves, in the homes from which the children were taken, and on the territory after survivors returned and worked to recover from their experiences and to live with dignity. The prose is clear and accessible, the stories remarkably individual, the detail vivid but not sensational.
Together they reveal the astonishing courage and strength of children along with the complexity and myriad methods of their oppressors. A tough, often funny, and ultimately uplifting book that’s not quite like anything else out there.