I Am Not a Number

I Am Not a Number (2016) was written to share Dupuis' grandmother's experience at residential school. In the afterword, Dupuis notes that her "granny rarely spoke about her year away," and, in fact, "stories about the residential school system were seldom told in [their] community" (n.p.). Fortunately, Irene Couchie Dupuis did share details about her residential school experience with her grandchildren, which Dupuis bravely chose to share in a picturebook. After enduring a year at a residential school, Irene and her brothers returned home and told their family about the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their so-called caretakers. When the Indian agent returned for them at the close of summer, her father had the children hide, the Indian agent left without them, and they never had to return to school, which was a much happier ending than I was expecting.

Webstad, the author of The Orange Shirt Story also avoided going back to residential school after only a year; she closes her story saying, "Not every child was as lucky..." (final opening). This is certainly true, and becomes readily apparent when comparing this story to other texts. For example, Shi-shi-etko returns to residential school in Shin-chi's Canoe; Ashley's uncle discloses he was at residential school for six years in The Train (eleventh opening); Margaret-Olemaun reveals that she "had grown tall and very thin from two years of hard chores and poor meals at the outsiders' school" (Not My Girl, second opening); in A Stranger at Home, we learn that Margaret-Olemaun's family was later coerced into sending her back to residential school with her younger sisters, so she ended up spending more time at the residential school system than what is covered in her books.

I think it's important that children reading this text understand that "not every child was as lucky" as Phyllis Webstad or Irene Couchie, and that it was "the laws that force[d parents] to send [their children] away to residential school" (Campbell, 2008, fifth opening), and that hiding wasn't always possible. Parents were threatened with prison sentences, as Irene's own parents were on the first opening of I Am Not a Number (see also: As Long as the Rivers Flow), or were disincentivized financially for keeping their children at home. In Fatty Legs (2020) Margaret-Olemaun, says her father didn't decide to send her back to school until "the government made school attendance a condition for receiving child benefits" (p. 83– 84), which her family desperately needed. However, he also worried that "without learning their language and how to read and write it, we won't survive" (A Stranger at Home, 2011, p. 95). Some families made the hard decision to send their children to school, in spite of their knowledge about conditions at school, because they felt it was "necessary in order to prepare them for a rapidly changing world" (A Stranger at Home, 2011, pp. 107–108).

However, most often this was not a choice that families made. It was not simply a question of deciding not to go, or hiding from government agents when they came to pick children up. "Most children," Jordan-Fenton & Pokiak-Fenton (2011), "were forcibly taken, some, even kidnapped by government agents and church authorities" (p. 108), a cruelty demonstrated in season 3, episode 9 of the Netflix series Anne with an E. This potential misreading of I Am Not a Number highlights the importance of using multiple texts when reading about important topics like this.

On the other hand, I Am Not a Number addresses the hardships of residential school in more detail than other picturebooks, describing specific meals and punishment in very forthright manner, rather than simply alluding to how tings were. For example, at the sixth opening, Irene recalls that "if you don't eat your meal at breakfast, they will serve it to you for lunch. And if you throw it up, you will have to eat the vomit." Such vivd details can act as a dose of reality when served alongside stories that speak more generally about mistreatment (see: When We Were Alone and Stolen Words).

Works Cited:

Campbell, N. I. (2008). Shin-chi’s Canoe. Groundwood Books.

Jordan-Fenton, C., & Pokiak-Fenton, M. (2011). A Stranger At Home: A True Story. Annick Press.