Michelle Good

Based on the real stories of victims of Canada's Indian residential schools, this is heartbreaking historical fiction centered on five lives completely altered and permanently damaged by the physical and psychological abuses they suffered at the hands of the government and the church.

Far from feel-good, this is a feel-bad book. It is heavy. I was flooded with perpetual feelings of dread from start to finish, as it becomes apparent from the first pages that the characters are going to suffer misery and trauma they will never be able to escape. And, unsurprisingly, the perpetrators never saw justice. I would recommend this novel to anyone who can handle it, though, as it's important, and acknowledging atrocities of the past is one way to help ensure that such horrors would be prevented from happening again.… (altro)

I think this book should be required reading for every person of settler ancestry in Canada. It explains how the policies of the colonialists did such substantial harm to the Indigenous peoples. And it explains how those policies continued to be promulgated into quite recent times. It will probably make you feel very uncomfortable. It certainly made me feel that way. But I encourage you to keep reading because Good has a message for how we can achieve reconciliation with our Indigenous neighbours.

Michelle Good probably now regrets giving Buffy Sainte-Marie as an example of people affected by the Sixties' Scoop. CBC has certainly cast doubt on whether she is even of Indigenous ancestry. In another chapter Good talks about "Pretendians" (non-Indigenous people who pretend to be Indigenous) and she is pretty scathing for those people who pretend to be Indigenous for material gain. She likens them to invasive plants that do harm to their surroundings. She has another category of non-Indigenous people "who have long history of association with Indigenous Peoples and communities in a good way and are welcomed and adopted into the community." These people are like naturalized plants which spread into non-native environments but don't harm the existing native plants. Buffy Sainte-Marie is probably a naturalized plant.… (altro)

There are some books that really must be read, especially in the frame of the Pope’s visit and somewhat inadequate apology (what about the $$, sir, and that Doctrine of Discovery?).
It can be easy, as part of the settler culture, to let the stories of abuse wash over you, fill you with sadness, brief and ineffectual, and let them slip away.
This book makes you live the stories through the characters, feel their strength despite everything, their need to pull together, the horrible risks so many suffer(ed) under. It’s an uneasy experience, especially if you have your own stories of abuse, but the humanity never slips into gratuitous description, and as the reader you are left to your imagination about much of went on. This, in and of itself, makes the book a high-residue one- I’ll be thinking about it, and these characters, for a long long time.
It’s impossible not to grieve for the decades/centuries of inhumane treatment we have put each other under. I can only pray that we somehow learn our lesson and choose kindness at some point.
Have to admit I’m not overly optimistic about that, though.
Read this book.… (altro)