Truth and Reconciliation in Life Writing: The Year in Canada

Truth and Reconciliation in Life WritingThe Year in Canada Alana Bell (bio) The most significant life writing event in Canada over the past several years has been the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which collected the life stories, in various forms, of survivors of Canada's residential schools. With a mandate of cultural genocide, the government-funded and church-run residential school system that operated in Canada for over 100 years forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes, placing them in boarding facilities where many suffered ongoing neglect and abuse. Many of the narratives gathered by the TRC are available in highly mediated form in The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. While the TRC itself offers fertile ground for life writing research, recent widely reviewed life writing texts detailing the long-ranging effects of residential schools on students, their families, and their cultures are arguably more important in shaping our national history, because they are more widely read by the Canadian public. Several excellent texts have been published in the last year. Though they take vastly different forms, Joe Friesen's The Ballad of Danny Wolfe, Rosanna Deerchild's Calling Down the Sky, and Wab Kinew's The Reason You Walk, all recount lives affected by residential schools and wrestle with the possibility of healing and reconciliation, suggesting that the process is fraught with challenges, but crucial. While all three of these texts detail the negative effects of residential schools not only on the students who attended them but on their families and communities, none tells a story more broadly catastrophic than journalist Joe Friesen's biography The Ballad of Danny Wolfe. All but abandoned by alcoholic parents who had run-ins with the law of their own, Danny and his brother Richard founded the notorious Winnipeg-based street gang, the Indian Posse (IP) when they were just twelve and thirteen years old respectively. Under Danny and Richard's leadership, IP became both a formidable [End Page 585] criminal force in Winnipeg and eventually across Canada, and also a surrogate family for many Aboriginal youth who suffered from the same pattern of neglect and abuse as the Wolfes. Friesen makes the relationship between Danny's criminality and the family history of residential school attendance and colonial abuse abundantly clear. By the time Danny Wolfe is born, his family has endured over 100 years of colonial oppression. Danny's mother, Susan Creeley, is the daughter of a Cree chief, and a member of a long line of residential school survivors. She suffered abuse both at home and at two different residential schools. In conversation with Friesen, she is forthcoming about her inability to care for her children. Creeley was in her late teens at the time of her second son's birth, drank heavily throughout her pregnancy, and believes Danny suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). By the time Friesen was writing, Susan Creeley is "a responsible woman who has worked at the health centre on her reserve for more than a decade," but she openly describes the effects excessive drinking, petty crime, and abusive partners had on her parenting. Though in 2012, as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), Susan gave testimony about her experience in residential schools, "She doesn't want what she went through to be public … or catalogued in every detail," and there is no real reconciliation in this text. The last residential schools were only closed in the 1990s, and the resulting socioeconomic conditions still exist. Without exonerating Danny of his crimes, Friesen provides a detailed social context, tracing a clear link between colonial abuses of Indigenous people and the formation of gangs like IP. Noting that IP "spread like wildfire" on prairie reserves, where alcohol, drug abuse, and unemployment are widespread (121), Friesen asserts that "the Indian Posse represented a violent rejection of Canadian society at the same time as it emphasized native spirituality, however superficially. … For many native kids raised without much sense of their own identity, the ceremonies, the attitude, the slogans, like 'Red 'til Dead,' were a source of pride" (119). Despite being affected by these conditions, both Danny...