"Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi'kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia is the personal memoir of Isabelle Knockwood. As a child of five, she was sent to a Catholic residential school in 1936. Her memories of this education system have haunted her throughout her life and as a mature adult she enrolled in a university program where the basis of this book began. In addition to her first-person account, the author interviewed 27 former Mi'kmaw students and conducted archival research. The book begins with a chapter on her life before attending residential school. She explains the Mi'kmaw use of the talking stick in traditional Mi'kmaw culture as well as childrearing and education. These early years during the 1930s are fondly remembered. When she arrives at residential school the feeling of intense fear is overwhelming. The chapters describe the origins of this residential school, the everyday life at the school, work and play, rewards and punishments, and student forms of resistance. The interviews with other students recount the beatings, shaven heads, solitary confinement and a host of mental, sexual, and physical abuses. The author recalls an early attempt by the parents to assassinate the school principal. This idea was dismissed when the helpless parents believed their action would only lead to future abuses of their children. The final chapters describe the last days of the school as well as ghosts and hauntings associated with the school. Knockwood wrote this book as her personal form of healing and her contribution to the literature on residential schools is significant. In this newly updated fourth edition, Knockwood speaks to twenty-one survivors of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School about their reaction to the apology by the Canadian government in 2008. She has also included a section called, Discussion between Isabelle and Gillian. This section explores how the author worked with Gillian Thomas to write Out of the Depths. Their revealing discussion describes family violence, post-secondary education, and racism issues. Anyone interested in the Mi'kmaw, First Nation education, and residential schools should read this moving account of one woman's triumph over her experiences." -- Provided by publisher

Hulan, Renée. "A Just Allotment of Memory: Witnessing First Nations Testimony in Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the Depths." Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012, pp. 53-74, 254. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/102104….

Miller, Virginia, Thomas, Gilliam and Knockwood, Isabelle. "Out of the depths: the experiences of Mi'kmaw children at the Indian residential school at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia // Review." Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1995, pp. 165 - 166. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/215640….

"The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree).

Magic Weapons examines the ways in which Indigenous survivors of residential school mobilize narrative in their struggles for personal and communal empowerment in the shadow of attempted cultural genocide. By treating Indigenous life-writings as carefully crafted aesthetic creations and interrogating their relationship to more overtly politicized historical discourses, Sam McKegney argues that Indigenous life-writings are culturally generative in ways that go beyond disclosure and recompense, re-envisioning what it means to live and write as Indigenous individuals in post-residential school Canada." -- Provided by publisher

Eigenbrod, Renate. "Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community After Residential School." The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2008, pp. 212-214. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/218101….

"In From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing, Deena Rymhs identifies continuities between the residential school and the prison, offering ways of reading 'the carceral'—that is, the different ways that incarceration is constituted and articulated in contemporary Aboriginal literature. Addressing the work of writers like Tomson Highway and Basil Johnston along with that of lesser-known authors writing in prison serials and underground publications, this book emphasizes the literary and political strategies these authors use to resist the containment of their institutions.

The first part of the book considers a diverse sample of writing from prison serials, prisoners’ anthologies, and individual autobiographies, including Stolen Life by Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson, to show how these works serve as second hearings for their authors—an opportunity to respond to the law’s authority over their personal and public identities while making a plea to a wider audience. The second part looks at residential school narratives and shows how the authors construct identities for themselves in ways that defy the institution’s control. The interactions between these two bodies of writing—residential school accounts and prison narratives—invite recognition of the ways that guilt is colonially constructed and how these authors use their writing to distance themselves from that guilt.

Offering new ways of reading Native writing, From the Iron House is a pioneering study of prison literature in Canada and situates its readings within international criticism of prison writing. Contributing to genre studies and theoretical understandings of life writing, and covering a variety of social topics, this work will be relevant to readers interested in indigenous studies, Canadian cultural studies, postcolonial studies, auto/biography studies, law, and public policy." -- Provided by Publisher

Andrews, Jennifer. "From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing." Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2010, p. 189+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A286514957/BRIP?u=utoronto_main&sid=….

Bomberry, Victoria. "From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing." American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 32, no. 4, 2008, pp. 162-165. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A195881303/BRIP?u=utoronto_main&sid=….

Dobson, Kit. "Indigenous Defamiliarizations." Canadian Literature, no. 200, 2009, p. 189. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234570489/BRIP?u=utoronto_main&sid=….

"From the iron house; imprisonment in First Nations writing." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2008. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A183483701/BRIP?u=utoronto_main&sid=….

McKegney, Sam. "From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing." University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 1, 2010, pp. 496-498. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A340743517/BRIP?u=utoronto_main&sid=….

"Two Trails Narrow: A Novel by Stephen McGregor follows the lives of two Algonquin young men, Ryman McGregor and Abraham Scott, who united as wannabe escapees from the harsh hands of the Jesuit priests at St. Xavier's Residential School outside Spaniards Bay on Lake Ontario. With the help of a kind man and Ryman's sister, they are successful in their escape from the priests and their RCMP trackers. Arriving home on the reserve had its good fortunes but also marked their partition. Their reunion takes place years later, when they are selected to serve as valuable Corporals of one of the best Canadian commando units in WWII. They participated in the liberation of Holland, and also meet two Canadian nurses who served in this conflict. Set against the residential school experience for First Nation children and the looming shadow of the Second World War, Two Trails Narrow recounts the pain of a young generation of First Nations young men who were pulled into the vortex of forced battle at home and overseas. Through the eyes of two soldiers, Ryman McGregor and Abraham Scott, Two Trails Narrow is a remembrance to the courage and depth of the human spirit in an era of hostilities." -- Provided by goodminds.com

"Porcupines and China Dolls is a brilliant novel written by Teetl'it Gwich'in writer Robert Arthur Alexie. He writes about a community in the Northwest Territories where many of the people live lives of desperate searching for relief from the pain and nightmares of abuses endured while attending residential school. The two male characters at the centre of this novel each suffered abuse at the hands of a priest at the school and when the former priest is seen on television the men's lives are thrown into despair and finally action. The book's title refers to the way the boys and girls looked after their hair was cut and their small bodies were covered in delousing powder. The boys appeared as porcupines with their sheared heads and the girls appeared as tiny china dolls after they were scrubbed and powdered. Throughout the book the author weaves a love story and adds wry humour to ease the pain and suffering." -- Provided by publisher

"The original edition of Truth and Indignation offered the first close and critical assessment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as it was unfolding. Niezen used testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission as well as interviews with survivors, priests, and nuns to raise important questions about the TRC process. He asked what the TRC meant for reconciliation, transitional justice, and conceptions of traumatic memory.

In this updated edition, Niezen discusses the Final Report and Calls to Action bringing the book up to date and making it a valuable text for teaching about transitional justice, colonialism and redress, public anthropology, and human rights. Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to understanding truth and reconciliation processes in general, and the Canadian experience in particular." -- Provided by publisher

Gaertner, David. "Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools." BC Studies, no. 190, 2016, pp. 144-146. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/183686….

Phelps, Teresa G. "Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Indian Residential Schools by Ronald Niezen (review)." Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, 2014, pp. 665-666. https://muse-jhu-edu.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/article/551263/pdf.

Stanton, Kim. "Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools." Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2014, pp. 257-259. https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/169926….

"Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and home communities.

For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Education and technical training too often gave away to the drudgery of doing the chores and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers.

Legal action by the schools’ former students led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2008. The product of over six years of research, the Commission’s final report outlines the history and legacy of the schools, and charts a pathway towards reconciliation." - Provided by the TRC