Canada Reads 2020: Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

Akil Augustine is a basketball commentator on the NBA championships who grew up in Scarborough,  a formerly independent city that was merged into Toronto in 1998.

He chose, as the book that he wanted to convince all of Canada to read, Radicalized: short stories published by the Canadian-British author, internet freedom advocate, and technological blogger Cory Doctorow in 2019.

Radicalized is 'of the moment.' It addresses pandemics even though it was published before the coronavirus spread in Europe and North America, and it addresses the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality even though it was published before George Floyd's murder made these subjects leap to everyone's mind again in June. It also addresses the intimate role that large technological companies like Facebook monopolize in daily life.

But as Doctorow is not just Canadian — he lives in the United States, and his stories are set in the United States — Augustine's fellow jurors argued that Radicalized did not have a Canadian focus.

There are parallels of the US to Canada and other countries. As Augustine said, Black Lives Matter and police brutality are not just American questions, and he used his presence on Canada Reads to draw attention to anti-racist activism in Canada. There are also clear differences, of course.

But Akil Augustine's arguments that the coronavirus pandemic and the role of social media companies are international issues and as such should be taken to heart as Canadian issues as well, were rejected by the roundtable on Canada Reads.

A few fellow jurors also felt that the competition has a social function and not just a literary role: they preferred to publicize books from authors whose national background, romantic/sexual orientation, and gender are less traditionally advantaged in the publishing industry.

To quote his publisher, Doctorow's Radicalized embraces these four tales:

Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment [MacMillan]
Cory Doctorow [Wikipedia] 

Cory Doctorow at ORGCon 2012
Attributed to D. Morris, March 2012
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-2.0)

Excerpt from "Unauthorized Bread":

“The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.”

Canada Reads 2020: Small Game Hunting

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. Although a few writers and others have criticized its colosseum-like approach to literature, it is intended to spotlight Canadian memoirs, novels, or short story collections that every fellow citizen 'should read.' In one of my bursts of patriotism, I am willing to take up the cause.

The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

A fresh-faced young YouTube star, who was speaking via video screen due to coronavirus distancing measures, Alayna Fender was arguing that her fellow jurors should vote for Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club as the book of the year.

Canada Reads also introduced the author, Megan Gail Coles.

St. John's, Newfoundland (ca. 2005)
Attributed to user Aconcagua
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Megan Gail Coles was born on the island of Newfoundland.

Together with the mainland region of Labrador, Newfoundland is the easternmost tip of Canada, with its own half-hour time zone. Newfoundland has a seagoing flavour still, with its ports where fishermen have been coming and going for centuries, not as often now that the Atlantic cod has been wildly overfished. To western-Canadians like me, other stereotypes are the Irish and Scottish cultural influences, and the folk music ... and offshore Irving oil platforms. It entered Canada later than any other province, in 1949.

The travelling spirit seems to have infected the author, too, because she went across to the other side of Canada to do her Master of Fine Arts in Vancouver.

*

So Coles drew from experience when she set her tale in St. John's, the capital city of Newfoundland, in an expensive restaurant. The action unfolds, with an Aristotelian sense of unity, on one cold February day — Alayna Fender's fellow jurors agreed that it was an atmospheric book; 'you feel cold' just reading the book.

It's hard to judge just from the first chapter. But in my view a quirky, cleverer-than-thou tone sets in right away. We start the story with Olive, a young woman who is looking at the restaurant from the street.

A scattered taxi slogs by carrying fiendish-looking passengers who attempt to discreetly smoke from barely cracked windows. Discretion is a skill they have fallen out with but they don’t know that yet. They still fancy themselves stealth, piling four parka-plied humans into a single toilet stall, scarves dangling beneath the door, telling tails on them all.

Fender explains on Canada Reads that the character's name is 'Olive' because she represents 'all of' us. At the same time, Olive specifically (if I remember the discussion correctly) is an 'outsider' in more sense than one. The book's publisher mentions that she is "far from her northern home," and she is no 'townie.'

Most of the book seems to take place inside the restaurant, however, with the chef, the diners, and the waiters.

*

Small Game Hunting was voted 'out' on the second day of Canada Reads. Many jurors enjoyed it but found it too enigmatically written to appeal to many Canadian readers.

Akil Augustine also felt that the characterization of the male figures was not convincing. To paraphrase, he said that 'the bad men I've known generally don't know that they're evil; they think that they're good.' He also mentioned that the book had 'lots of axes to grind,' starting with misogyny and classism.

But this social commentary pleased the three female jurors, who felt that it thereby touched on the interests of a broad part of Canadian society.
***

Canada Reads
Wikipedia

Canada Reads 2020: Day 1
YouTube: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
July 20, 2020

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club
Megan Gail Coles
House of Anansi, 2019

Around the World in 32 Countries: Polish Literature for Beginners

1989: Poland forms its Third Republic and ends its decades 'behind the Iron Curtain'

Capital City: Warsaw

Surface area: 312,696 km2 (larger than Italy, smaller than Norway)

Currency: Polish złoty

Driving side: right

Historical figures:

Casimir III, who ascended the throne in his early twenties and was king from 1333 to 1370, is apparently Polish history's answer to French history's Henry IV. He weakened the predominant power of the aristocracy in the nation's law, creating a balance with the bourgeoisie, and "was known for siding with the weak when the law did not protect them from nobles and clergymen." Besides he encouraged Jewish people to settle in Poland, and forbade Christians to kidnap Jewish children for religious conversion. When the Black Death broke out in 1347, the King closed the borders and Poland was mostly safe. Also, for example, he established the University of Kraków. His rule ended when he died during a hunting excursion.

Sources:

Poland [Wikipedia]

Casimir III the Great [Wikipedia]

List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia] 

***

For Polish literature, I will content myself, I think, with not reading a whole book; instead I will mention a few works.

THE EARLY PARTS of Ève Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie, give (I think) a fine snapshot of Poland in the late 1800s.

The daughter writes of the familiar places where Marie Curie grew up, not just in Warsaw where Marie's family lived but also in the countryside where she might go for holidays as a child. Here she quotes one of Marie Curie's letters:

We go out in a band to walk in the woods, we roll hoops, we play battledore and shuttlecock (at which I am very bad!), cross-tag, the game of Goose, and many equally childish things. There have been so many wild strawberries here the once could buy a really sufficient amount for a few groszy [...] Every Sunday the horses are harnessed for a trip in to Mass [...]

Ève Curie describes public, educational and vocational life beneath Russian domination (every Russian whom she names is apparently a villain), the Polish hierarchy that divided the aristocracy and a professor's family. Also, it is clear how few resources there were for women who wanted to study there — which made emigration to France attractive.

"Specjalny obszar ochrony siedlisk Dolina Środkowego Świdra." c. 2015
by M. Nowaczyk?
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0-PL Licence)

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER's The Magician of Lublin has wonderful passages on Polish scenery, animals and trees and snow; the food; and Jewish faith. He wrote after the Holocaust and in his books rebuilt a lost world; it is estimated that some 3 million Polish Jews died under Nazi rule. I did not finish the book. (After Singer began writing about the third extramarital affair of the main character, and it really began to be questionable if the mistresses were free agents or if they were being manipulated by the main character or by their circumstances, I decided that enough was enough.) The delineations between the religious and ethnic communities — e.g. the difficulty of intermarriage — were also kind of depressing; but I imagine that it was the same in most or all countries. But aside from that, from a literary perspective and for its social insights, it was exactly the book I want.

Überall war Gottes Hand sichtbar. Jede Obstblüte, jeder Kieselstein, jedes Sandkörnchen verkündete Sein Dasein. Die taunassen Blätter der Apfelbäume funkelten im Morgenlicht wie kleine Kerzen. Jaschas Haus lag am Stadtrand, sodass er auf die großen Weizenfelder hinausblicken konnte.

(Roughly translated: God's hand was visible everywhere. Every fruit tree blossom, every gravel stone, every grain of sand announced His presence. The dew-dampened leaves of the apple trees glittered in the morning light like little candles. Yasha's house lay at the edge of the city, so that he could look out onto the great wheat fields. German translation from the English/Yiddish by Susanna Rademacher, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.)

"Henryk Sienkiewicz i jego wizje" (1905)
by Czesław Tański (1862–1942)
via Wikimedia Commons

MANY YEARS ago, I read Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, written in an earlier generation of Polish writers and representing Poland's Catholic side. Taking place in ancient Rome, it is (as far as I remember) a saccharine but readable story of young Christians making their way against their decadent Roman overlords; St. Paul appears in vignettes. Looking at it again now, every feminist fibre of me is horrified by the beginning of the book. But if one decides to ignore the objectification of women (also of Black women who appear incidentally as the scene is set), it seems entertaining.

The best of all times for visiting is after noon, but not earlier than when the sun sinks towards the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and begins to throw oblique shadows on the Forum. It is usually still very warm in the autumn, and people are fond of sleeping after eating. At this time it is pleasant to listen to the murmuring of the fountain in the great hall, and when one has taken the thousand obligatory steps, to muse in the purplish light sifted through the purple of the half-drawn awning.

(Quoted from Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Translation by S.A. Binon and S. Malevsky, Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897. p. 15. via Hathi Trust)

*

Artur Rubinstein's My Young Years: It's well over 15 years that I read it. In my recollection the famous 20th-century pianist mixes extraordinary talent — of which he is extremely aware — with likewise extraordinary cattiness, also with despair and gloom. Whether it offers insight into Polish history and society I don't recollect, but doubt.

*

A colleague recommended (but with a warning) Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird, which is apparently a dark book about a childhood during the Holocaust. I kind of doubt I will read it because it sounds too grisly. He also recommended Joseph Conrad 'if Conrad counts' — I decided that his books do have more of a British perspective — and Stanislav Lem's science fiction classic Solaris.

*

RYSZARD Kapuściński's speeches, The Other, are in the family bookshelf. It is no longer entirely up-to-date, I'd say. The translator — his speeches were held in Polish — uses the phrase 'Third World.' Also, I'd argue we rarely still need to read European anthropologists to learn about the world — we have books, videos, and social media written by people who live elsewhere. It's still fascinating to think of what Kapuściński saw during his journalistic career. While his focus is beyond the borders, he also illustrates, perhaps, the change in Poland's 20th century fortunes. First he was a representative of an Eastern Communist state as a foreign correspondent; but his speeches have allusions to Christian belief and the theology of Pope John Paul II now. His literary, anthropological, religious, etc. references are often Polish, despite his international career; perhaps this is also because the audiences for these specific speeches were Polish. But aside from that, rather than Russian, he cites British influences.

*

LASTLY, as an outsider's look at Polish history for those who love early 19th-century English kitsch, I'd recommend Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw. In a more contemporary vein, a book subscription service I use has books by Olga Tokarczuk; so I've started reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead.

***

Madame Curie, by Ève Curie [Goodreads]

The Magician of Lublin (novel), by Isaac Bashevis Singer [Wikipedia]

Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz [Goodreads]

Quo Vadis (film) dubbed into Russian [YouTube]

My Young Years, by Artur Rubinstein [Goodreads]

Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad [Wikipedia]

Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

The Other, by Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter (Later 1831? edition) [Hathi Trust]

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk [Goodreads]

***

Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1483-1490)
by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Although an Italian painting, it was brought to Poland in 1798 by Prince Adam George Czartoryski.
It now belongs to the Polish government. (Source: Lady with an Ermine, Wikipedia)
via Wikimedia Commons

Around the World in 32 Countries: Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni
Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2013

Because it has been clear lately that my reading hasn't been representative of the world's populations, I've begun a new project. For the 32 most populous countries of the world, according to a count for the year 2000, I want to read 1 book per 20 million inhabitants.

First, the countries whose population was estimated at 38 million to 58 million in 2000:
Tanzania, Poland, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy.

It has been easy to find Tanzanian books on an online book subscription website, and I've nudged colleagues to recommend Polish books.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_5.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

First, a brief introduction to Tanzania:
***

Number of languages: 126
Official Main languages: Swahili and English; "Approximately 10 per cent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 per cent speak it as a second language"

Modern-day state formation year: 1964
Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago merge to form the United Republic of Tanzania
Colonial 'overlords': Germany, Britain

Tanzania is also home of the African continent's highest mountain:

"Eastern ice field in Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_icefield_Mt._Kilimanjaro.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

Capital city: Dodoma
Surface area: 947,303 km2 (larger than Nigeria and smaller than Egypt)

Currency: Tanzanian shilingi (shilling)
Driving side: left

Main exports to these countries: India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, China
Main imports from these countries: India, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates
Crops that are food: maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, millet
Cash crops, food or not food: sugar, cotton, cashew nuts, tobacco, coffee, sisal, tea
Main meat products: beef, lamb, chicken, pork

***

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History is an academic book, published in Dar-es-Salaam, by a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Aside from teaching at an American university, he also taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Although the words 'academic book' may strike fear into one's heart if one associates it with the hundreds of pages of dry or waffling prose that one is forced to read as a student, Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni's style is pithy and fluent. His choice of anecdotes is also striking and often funny.

He does not write about Tanzanian prehistory — famous after archaeological excavations at Oldupai Gorge — or much of the years of Muslim influence and Arab rule until he treats Zanzibar in the late 1800s through the 1960s at the end of the book.

He writes of the British society in the early 20th century. Unlike neighbouring Kenya, the former German colony of Tanganyika fell to the share of the British government mainly after World War I. His, and later Her, Majesty's Government paid salaries to local chiefs, and had a small administration besides. The remaining European contingent was, for example, big game hunters or gold miners who had come to reap the natural resources of the country; doctors; etc. There were few British people who came systematically as settlers.

I was surprised that the 'fool's paradise' of modern-day Tanzania for British government workers and visitors in the early 1900s, and the 'Happy Valley' expatriate society of Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiong'o lampooned in Wrestling with the Devil, sound so similar.

To borrow from Dr. Mbogoni's turns of phrase and to attempt to put his portraits in a nutshell: a British newcomer to Tanzania could listen to the radio, or become a naturalist. If these hobbies weren't to the Briton's taste, the newcomer could drink liquor — whisky, gin, beer, ... the list goes on — and run into debt, to try to cope with homesickness and tedium.

This colonial (mis)rule rather proves the essential ridiculousness of colonialist ideology even from a European standpoint.

Kipling wrote in his famous poem (1899),

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

[...]

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

The question is why this 'heavy harness' and 'thankless years' were ever thought necessary by anyone — except for financial motives.

At any rate, I am perhaps 1/6th of the way through the book; the next part is about elephant-hunting.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

***

Additional information taken from:
List of countries by population in 2000 [Wikipedia]
Languages of Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni [African Books Collective]
Kipling quoted from: The White Man's Burden [Wikipedia]

What I'll Be Reading in July 2020

It is unlikely that this July I'll be reading many new publications. With the Black Lives Matter movement resurging in June after the killing of George Floyd, it became clear to me again that I have many books that have been published even decades ago that I need to catch up on. Therefore my pile of books 'To Be Read' turned from a manageable stack of perhaps 5, to a mountain of well over 15.

I have paper copies of Wole Soyinka's Aké and Teju Cole's Open City, both of which my mother purchased in past years, to read. In terms of e-books, I was already reading Wrestling with the Devil by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and have now moved on to Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. In between, I managed a few articles from the Anti-Racist Reading Guide put together by Victoria Alexander, and when those are done there are a lot of books that she has recommended. And aside from paper and pixel texts, I've been watching more videos from African-American YouTubers in the 'BookTube' community.

Of course part of this reading and watching is 'hopping on the bandwagon.' But I'd be foolish to ignore good book recommendations and good YouTube recommendations just because they are also part of the zeitgeist.

***

On another note, after picking it up in a bookshop yesterday, I have finally read We Should All Be Feminists. It is a bestselling book based on a speech that novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave at a TED conference in the UK, a conference centred specifically on countries in the African continent.

It is not a long book. It is also not a revolutionary book if it's compared to the feminist canon just on the basis of its ideas. But it mixes anecdote with declarations of opinion and purpose, it has refreshingly little jargon (academic or ideological), and it is engagingly presented. And I think it is a brisk, encouraging starting point for the early 21st-century reader.

As an adult, Adichie identifies herself as a feminist. But she has been amused, or surprised, by the reactions to feminism in general of people to whom she has spoken.

As a feminist, people worry she might be ill-tempered, un-African, man-hating, etc. So she jokes that she has eventually needed to call herself a "Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."

Cover, We Should All Be Feminists
Design by Joan Wong (website)
Penguin Random House, 2015

In Nigeria and in the United States, Adichie has been confounded by gender stereotypes that persist without a logical foundation. When she pays a tip to a self-assigned 'pilot' who guides car drivers to parking spots, for example, he thanks the man she is with; he presumes that the man is the breadwinner.

Gender roles also strictly define everything from marriage to the types of careers we undertake. But she wants "A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves." This begins with how we raise children.

What would happen, she wonders, if teenage girls and boys can go out on a date, and the teenage boy is not expected to pay — whoever has more money can pay? (I don't really know how dating etiquette is in practice in Nigeria or in North America, to be honest; so I wasn't sure if she was speaking more of gender roles in Nigeria, where some of her anecdotes take place.)

"[I]f we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means."

If men are not raised to feel that financial muscle is part and parcel of their masculinity, it reduces the pressure on them. It even reduces pressure on women — women no longer feel that they need to earn less, if they do not want to 'intimidate' men.

A passage from Adichie's speech that people like to quote on Goodreads is:

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.

Canada, First Nations, and Residential Schools

On June 21st, which is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, I read a Twitter message by Shelagh Rogers that related to First Nations authors. (Shelagh Rogers is a former radio host for a Canadian national broadcaster, and now Chancellor of the university at which my father used to work.) So it made me curious about First Nations literature, which is — surprisingly, since I lived in Canada for 15 years — 'terra incognita' to me.

Speaking of which, Canada's literary magazine The Walrus is also running a series of short-form fiction, of non-fiction essays and of artwork by First Nations authors and artists: Terra Cognita.

***

Cover, Sugar Falls
Artwork by Scott B. Henderson
Highwater Press, 2012

Aside from David A. Robertson's graphic novel Stone, described in this blog post, I also read Sugar Falls yesterday. (A few of Robertson's books are on the book subscription website Scribd, so I will be reading still more.)

Sugar Falls is a look at a real-life story of a Cree child's life in a 20th-century residential school in central Canada, after she was taken from her parents to be educated according to government guidelines. It is not for the faint of heart and it describes the abuse she went through.

I'd say that the book stands for itself. A large part of its power is that it tries to hew closely to the life story at its core, which was shared with the author by an elder, Betty Ross. This restraint is almost an ideological statement, when it is so easy to adapt someone's testimony to suit one's own artistic interests and opinions. To be frank, I prefer Sugar Falls a bit to Stone, although it's even harder reading. So I want to imitate the author's example, by not over-paraphrasing the story, and not running the risk of misinterpreting reality.

Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story [Highwater Press]

*

To digress, reading online sources about the Residential School that's mentioned in the book was enlightening. It underlined that an undeserved self-complacency — although that's easy for me to say, since I'm of a younger generation that doesn't directly carry this moral burden — still exists in the communities that founded and ran these schools. A website run by the United Church of Canada (which operated the residential school after 1925) writes rather harmlessly of Norway House:

The church rebuilt in 1952, with room for 120 students in two dorms housed in separate buildings in order to minimize the risk of fire. The half-day system was abandoned.

By 1964, there were 138 children in residence at Norway House IRS and 242 day students who lived in their own homes in the community. Margaret Ann Reid recalled her experiences as a young teacher of the grade 2/3 class: "Progress was slow for many of the children—this was partly due to the language barrier —schoolwork was in English—the students were accustomed to talking and thinking in Cree. There were no restrictions on speaking Cree outside the classroom." Reid also noted that attendance continued to be very fluid in the school, as children frequently stayed home to care for siblings or to accompany their families on trapping and fishing excursions.

In other words, the Church's summary denies that children were held apart from their parents, or that children were punished for speaking Cree (at least 'outside the classroom'). Also, it does not recognize the sexual abuse that is alleged to have occurred,* nor does it mention the drowning death of a girl — described in Sugar Falls — who tried to escape the school. [Edited to add: That said, the graphic novel speaks of a Roman Catholic school, whereas Norway House was Methodist/United Church. Perhaps this was the only detail that was changed from real life, or perhaps other details have also been changed to reflect First Nations children's experiences in other schools as well.]

In the meantime, a report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated residential schools, describes the view of another teacher, Dorothy McKay, who taught there in the 1960s:

I think about the first week, you’d hear the children crying themselves to sleep, but the other side of that is I can remember we would go to the plane with them when it was time at the end of June for them to go home [they were] crying [...]

Implicitly contradicting Ms. Reid's representation, Ms. McKay concludes that the children's tears do not reflect mere love for the school. Rather, they reflect the traumatic experience of many months' separations from their families:

[T]hey no longer knew about their homes, they’d been away for ten months [...]

Sugar Falls [Goodreads]
Norway House Indian Residential School [United Church of Canada Archives]
Canada's Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939 to 2000: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol. I [Google Books]

* e.g. To cite another case: In her memoir Back to the Red Road, a woman recounts that she taught at Norway House in the 1950s when she was 19 years old, and found out years later that one of her pupils had been abused during his time there. A summary of the book can be found in:
"The New Victims" by Jula Hughes. In Power Through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation. Brieg Capitaine and Karine Vanthuyne, ed. (Vancouver: UBC Press) p. 191 [Google Books]
***

Stone: Linking the Present and the Past for Modern-Day Cree

After realizing that I haven't read many First Nations authors despite living in Canada for ~15 years, I did a little research to find a few names, and started today with a short graphic novel by David A. Robertson.

Living in the province of Manitoba, he is a member of the Norway House Cree Nation. He has written many other books that also thematize the Cree community. For example, one was about Helen Betty Osborne, who was murdered when she was only 19 years old in 1971, and whose murder was only resolved after 16 years after investigations that were reported to have been undercut by racism and sexism.

It, and his series 7 Generations, were censored in school systems in the province of Alberta. In the case of 7 Generations, it was alleged that the series contained "sensitive subject matter and visual inferencing of abuse regarding residential schools."

David Alexander Robertson [Goodreads]
David A. Robertson [Twitter]
"Edmonton public schools to review its ‘books to weed out’ list due to concerns" [Global News Canada] by Colette Derworiz, The Canadian Press (September 25, 2018) [Read July 11, 2020]
"Alberta government 'censored' Indigenous book, undermining reconciliation in schools, author says" [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio] by Amara McLaughlin (November 23, 2018) [Read July 11, 2020]

*Note: 20th century Canadian residential schools for First Nations are in fact notorious, not just for 'inferences' of abuse, now. "About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and forced to attend government schools. The last school closed outside Regina in 1996," wrote Bill Graveland, of the Canadian Press, in 2018. These schools had a history of "physical, sexual and emotional abuse," and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission "estimated at least 6,000 children died at the schools."
Source: "Online course that asks about positive effect of residential schools 'a slap in the face'" [Global News Canada]

***

[Disclaimer in advance: Maybe this review isn't a very profound insight, because I read the book for the first time today and likely many facets haven't sunk in yet. Also, it's part of a series.]

In Stone (Highwater Press, 2010), the first book of the 7 Generations series, David Alexander Robertson's protagonist is Edwin, a present-day man who attempts to kill himself and sends a despairing message to his mother. The young man's mother rushes to his hospital bed and asks him to look to his ancestors to guide him out of his crisis.

Faith in ancestors is a little sentimentalized. Maybe a few ancestors were awful people who'd give awful advice. But I think that for First Nations, searching for and understanding one's forebears is a necessity of life if, because of colonialist policies, the line of tradition and of family history has been interrupted.

"Cree Camp on the prairie, south of Vermilion (Lat N. 53 Long W. 111 nearly) Sept. 1871."
by Charles Horetzky (1838 - 1900)
Library and Archives Canada
via Wikimedia Commons

In flashback scenes, Edwin sees the life of a warrior ancestor Stone whose brother has been killed by the Blackfoot nation. Struggling to come to terms with the death, the 19th-century warrior finds that he is finally permitted to avenge his brother, and he is able to find a new life with a young woman who loves him.

"Wanuskewin Heritage Park" c. 2008 by K. Duhamel
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC BY 2.0)