Library Spotlight: Posts

Every Child Matters

"Today is the start of National Indigenous Awareness Month. It is meant to be a celebration of culture, language, art, music and dance. It's not going to be that this year, it can't be. Check on your Indigenous friends, family, community, colleagues, peers. Be gentle, everyone." - Ryan McMahon.

Humber Libraries mourns the loss of Indigenous children at the hands of Canada's Residential School System. The hundreds of unmarked graves found at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. The 215 children found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The more that will likely be uncovered as the searches for unmarked graves at residential schools continue. We recognize this tragedy as part of an ongoing legacy of racism, discrimination and violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada.

At the library, we continue to build resource collections that uncover the truth of the genocide that occurred in Canada's Residential School system. We work to find resources that include residential school survivor's stories so that these legacies, ongoing traumas, and truths are not lost. 

The last residential school closed in 1996. Below are some library ebooks that explore the ongoing impact of the Indian Residential School system. Explore this interactive map to learn where these schools were located. Read the TRC Call to Action to learn more about how you can work to address this legacy.

For more resources on residential schools and more, browse the library's Indigenous Research Guide, created with support from Indigenous Education and Engagement at Humber.

Sugar Falls by David A. Robertson; Scott B. Henderson (Illustrator)

A school assignment to interview a residential school survivor leads Daniel to Betsy, his friend's grandmother, who tells him her story. Abandoned as a young child, Betsy was soon adopted into a loving family. A few short years later, at the age of 8, everything changed. Betsy was taken away to a residential school. There she was forced to endure abuse and indignity, but Betsy recalled the words her father spoke to her at Sugar Falls -- words that gave her the resilience, strength, and determination to survive. Sugar Falls is based on the true story of Betty Ross, Elder from Cross Lake First Nation.

 

The Sleeping Giant Awakens : Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald

Confronting the truths of Canada’s Indian residential school system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In The Sleeping Giant Awakens, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples.

 

 

 

From Bear Rock Mountain by Antoine Mountain

In 1949, Antoine Mountain was born on the land near Radelie Koe (Fort Good Hope) in the Northwest Territories just south of the Arctic Circle. At the tender age of seven, he was stolen away from his home and sent to a residential school--run by the Roman Catholic Church in collusion with the Government of Canada--three hundred kilometres away. Over the next twelve years, the three residential schools Mountain was forced to attend systematically worked to erase his language and culture, the very roots of his identity. While reconnecting to that which had been taken from him, he had a disturbing and painful revelation of the bitter depths of colonialism and its legacy of cultural genocide. Canada has its own holocaust, Mountain argues. As a celebrated artist and social activist today, Mountain shares this moving, personal story of healing and the reclamation of his Dene identity.
 

Canada's Residential Schools - Missing Children and Unmarked Burials by Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Canada's Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials is the first systematic effort to record and analyze deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. As part of its work the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada established a National Residential School Student Death Register. Due to gaps in the available data, the register is far from complete. Although the actual number of deaths is believed to be far higher, 3,200 residential school victims have been identified. The analysis also demonstrates that residential school death rates were significantly higher than those for the general Canadian school-aged population. 

 

I Am a Damn Savage; What Have You Done to My Country? by An Antane Kapesh; Sarah Henzi (Translator)

Quebec author An Antane Kapesh's two books, Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (1976) and Qu'as-tu fait de mon pays? (1979), are among the foregrounding works by Indigenous women in Canada. This English translation of these works, each page presented facing the revised Innu text, makes them available for the first time to a broader readership. In I Am a Damn Savage, Antane Kapesh wrote to preserve and share her culture, experience, and knowledge, all of which, she felt, were disappearing at an alarming rate because many Elders - like herself - were aged or dying. She wanted to publicly denounce the conditions in which she and the Innu were made to live, and to address the changes she was witnessing due to land dispossession and loss of hunting territory, police brutality, and the effects of the residential school system. What Have You Done to My Country? is a fictional account by a young boy of the arrival of les Polichinelles (referring to White settlers) and their subsequent assault on the land and on native language and culture. Through these stories Antane Kapesh asserts that settler society will eventually have to take responsibility and recognize its faults, and accept that the Innu - as well as all the other nations - are not going anywhere, that they are not a problem settlers can make disappear.

 

Power Through Testimony by Brieg Capitaine (Editor); Karine Vanthuyne (Editor)

Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which includes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground. Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors reveal how survivors are unsettling colonial narratives about residential schools and how churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the new "residential school story."

 

Indigenous Writes by Chelsea Vowel

Delgamuukw. Sixties Scoop. Bill C-31. Blood quantum. Appropriation. Two-Spirit. Tsilhqot'in. Status. TRC. RCAP. FNPOA. Pass and permit. Numbered Treaties. Terra nullius. The Great Peace... Are you familiar with the terms listed above? In Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowel, legal scholar, teacher, and intellectual, opens an important dialogue about these (and more) concepts and the wider social beliefs associated with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada. In 31 essays, Chelsea explores the Indigenous experience from the time of contact to the present, through five categories--Terminology of Relationships; Culture and Identity; Myth-Busting; State Violence; and Land, Learning, Law, and Treaties. She answers the questions that many people have on these topics to spark further conversations at home, in the classroom, and in the larger community. Indigenous Writes is one title in The Debwe Series.