Customer Reviews

Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi'Kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia

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Isabelle Knockwood has a shocking story to tell. She will take you by the hand into her past and the atrocities commited within the walls of "Shubie" Indian Residential School in a way so simple and literal that will grip your understanding until the very end. Definitely the first book to read if you have plans to understand the Mi'kmaw people of eastern Canada and their modern culture. It will take you right to the depths of collective consciousness and the indifference of an entire colony that allowed this cultural massacre to endure for over 30 years. Read it with an open mind and you will have gained access to a wealth of hidden and opressed Mi'kmaw culture, one of the roots for many Mi'kmaw social problems and identity conflicts pending. As a foreigner to the Mi'kmaw culture I must say that this book has been of invaluable help to my research. Thankyou Isabelle.

C. Milton

In unflinching detail, Mi'kmaw author Isabelle Knockwood describes her years of fear spent in the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, which she entered at the tender age of five. Life in this bleak institution comes vividly before our eyes in scene after heartrending scene, from the harsh discipline of the classroom, where her language and culture were so relentlessly stripped from her soul, to the drudgery of the kitchen and laundry, where small children worked unsupervised with dangerous machinery. Presiding over all and often meting out brutal punishment were the nuns and priest assigned to act as the children's guardians.

Amid the pervasive gloom are fleeting moments of sheer delight - glimpses of little girls skating on the pond in winter, or excitedly weaving skipping ropes in spring. The happiest moments of all, however, are the author's visits from her parents every Sunday throughout the years of her stay. Without them, she could not have survived.

This is a courageous book. Woven among the personal memories and reflections are the stories of other survivors of the school - stories never told before. The stark testimonies have shattered a taboo. Like the blighted walls of the old school itself, the wall of silence protecting its secrets has at last come tumbling down.

So much healing needs to take place within and without my Mi'kMaw Nation. Miss Knockwood's work helps to begin that healing because to heal from any hurt means that you first need to acknowledge it. So many of our families have turned to alcohol or other drugs to numb the pain or are living with debilitating post traumatic stress disorders, unable to form attachments because of the damage to kinship values within the walls of the residential schools. Congratulations to Canada who, as a country, is at least apologising for the devastation to babies, adults and communities who were shamed into thinking that to be an Indian meant being a savage without a soul. I din't think I'll live to see the US taking the same action, but chii miigwech (big thanks), Miss Knockwood!

In the 1990s, ordinary 'white' Canadians were shocked by a flood of revelations of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse affecting thousands of First Nations women and men who as children had attended the church-run and government-funded Indian Residential Schools. As it turns out, these abuses were only symptoms of a deeper violence: the purpose of the IRS system was to eradicate Indigenous culture in Canada, to "kill the Indian, save the child" by teaching children to abhor their birth culture and accept a stigmatized and inferior position within Canadian settler society. Knockwood was one of these children, and Out of the Depths is an ensemble of personal narratives from her own experience and those of other students whom she interviewed. The stories are sometimes homely and humorous, more often chilling or atrocious. The rough and unpolished quality of her writing is more than offset by the sincerity and emotional rawness of the stories she has to tell. I assigned this book to a class of first-year sociology students, and many of them thanked me for giving them the chance to read it and to discover a dimension of Canadian society that they had not realized even existed.

Revelations about pedophile priests have been fairly frequent in the news for the last several years, ...and probably will continue to be for quite some time.

This book gives us an entirely new twist on this repulsive scandal.

The author gives us a thoroughly candid picture into the vile, soul-crushing hell of Indian Boarding Schools. There are plenty of film-documentaries on the fate of Native Americans, and what became of them in the late 19th to mid 20th centuries. Most of them give merely passing reference to the harsh environment within the Indian schools, while focusing on the larger picture of the cultural disintegration of the tribes. These "schools" were a series of institutions in the United States and Canada, whose general aim was to "civilize" the children of the various surviving Indigenous People, ...by erasing their Native American heritage.

We generally know that conditions were bad for the children in these schools, ...but this narrative is particularly shocking, as it comes from the personal experience and observations of the author. It is particularly striking in that the events and conditions described within, took place within living-memory. The author and children like her are middle-aged or elderly adults now. The events of this book took place in the 1950s. The setting is a Catholic boarding-school in eastern Canada.

The priests and nuns of this facility presided over an institution where the children were frequently physically, sexually, and verbally abused. Its all described here in horrible detail.
-In the very least, the children were subjected to constant derision and humiliation by "care-takers" who hated their Native American wards.
-The children received a level of education that could be described as mediocre at best, but was in fact quite abyssmal.
-They were subjected to long hours of strenuous labor that was in fact illegal under the Child Labor Laws of Canada.
-All in all, the conditions in the school are reminiscent of descriptions of a Soviet gulag or a P.O.W. prison.

The after-math is much worse. Considering the inevitable damage that such a traumatic childhood brings, the Catholic church owes these people a debt that can never be repayed.