3.0
informative reflective medium-paced

 The author of this book recounts her personal experience living with a parent who attended residential school. Her mother was a child of a residential school, where she endured considerably violence and abuse. Children enrolled in residential schools had their familial ties disrupted. They were unable, in most cases, to form strong bonds with their parents and other family members, especially if those family members also had attended residential schools. The Indigenous customs and histories were lost or not passed on in ways they normally would have been. Tribal support was not there in ways that would have been had Indigenous populations been left undisturbed. The author discusses her difficult relationship with her mother, and the consequences of enrollment in residential schools.

I found this book to be emotional and tragic. It is especially tragic to think about the hundreds of thousands of children who endured this situation. There were residential schools in operation for far longer than many people think. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. The last residential school in the United States closed in 1978. So many generations of Indigenous people were traumatized in heinous ways in these places, and the systematic cultural genocide can never be repaired.