Sugar Falls

The Power of a Telling a Story

In the foreward to Sugar Falls, Senator Murray Sinclair notes that "in [his] family, silence has been the currency of injustice," which has led to a lot of familiar turmoil. The intergenerational confusion and frustration was finally cleared up when, in 2012, as part of his role as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sinclair interviewed his uncle and learned of the abuse his own father had endured while at residential school. Sinclair says that while "this is not an easy story to hear...it is one that, once heard will change you forever," and hopes that "once we collectively understand how things happened we can join together, building a framework for the future that has become possible" (Robertson, 2021, foreward).

While "long-standing issues of misrepresentation and exploitation have caused many Indigenous communities to commit to protecting information related to certain practices and sacred ways of being" (Gultekin & May, 2019, pp. 7–8) and deserve the right to put curtains over "some windows...to prevent the disclosing of sensitive stories and information to wider audiences" (Reese, 2018, as referenced in Gultekin & May, 2019, p. 8), sometimes pulling back the curtain and sharing the story is what leads to healing. In Sugar Falls, Robertson tells the story of Elder Betty Ross, who hadn't "talked about [her] experience in 45 years" (Robertson, 2021, afterward) and that after speaking about her story and confronting the fact that affection had been so absent from her childhood, she was finally "able to hug and show my love for all my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren" (Robertson, 2021, afterward).

This kind of healing, whether personal, inter-generational or collective, "is the power of telling our stories" (Robertson, 2021, foreward).

The Power of Colour

When Betty is preparing to tell her story, the spread is very bright and comfortable (p. 5), but when we turn the page and enter her childhood (p. 6), we are abruptly hit with an almost overwhelming darkness. The shadowy, angular figure of her mother is a jarring contrast compared to the warmth and comfort offered by the smudging on the previous page.

Fortunately, after being abandoned by her mother, Betty manages to find a new family (p. 9) and her childhood regains some happiness. Her adoptive family teaches her about traditional ways and treats her well. The images are fully saturated with colour, which is important to note because when the time comes for her to be taken to school (p. 14), the colour desaturates and every frame is a dusty, muted sepia.

Betty describes many difficult situations at school—the nun who violently scrubbed her in order to get "the 'dirt' off" and then "cut [her] beautiful long hair" (p. 19), being punished for not knowing enough English to do her schoolwork properly (p. 23), sexual abuse by a priest (p. 27), being kicked in the head for speaking in Cree (p. 29), watching her friend run away in the cover of night and then witnessing her drown in the river (p. 32). Eventually Betty has enough and decides she's "going home" (p. 34). She, too, wades into the river and is suddenly flooded by everything she forgot (p. 35).

Interestingly, when Betty remembers—home and the things her adoptive father taught her at Sugar Falls (p. 13, p. 36)—her full colour returns (p. 35). Her surroundings at school and the nuns she interacts with remain desaturated, but Betty glows with power and strength. Betty remarked that "no matter what they did to me, I held on to my language, my spirit. I didn't forget myself" (p. 38).

In the closing frames of the book, Betty, back in her role as kōkom, notes that "telling these stories is how we will create change" (Robertson, 2021, p. 40). Tingle (2010) says that it's important to "celebrate the revealing of previously hidden truths" so that we can be sure not to prevent them from happening again (author's note). Of course, Tingle also acknowledges that these stories are not new; while many residential school survivors have chosen to remain silent about their experiences—putting curtains over the windows, so to speak—many others have shared their stories only to have outsiders "cover their ears and refuse to listen" (Tingle, 2010, author's note).

When the story of the 215 graves in Kamloops made the news and people began to wake up and pay attention to the history of residential schools, many members of the Indigenous community were quick to observe that Indigenous peoples have "always known" (CBC News, 2021; Wong, 2021); it just "seems we've never been truly heard" (CBC News, 2021).

As stories about residential schools continue to be bravely shared, I hope that we can all bravely listen, so that together we can "remember everything" (Robertson, 2021, p. 35), "celebrate...previously hidden truths" (Tingle, 2021, author's note), and experience the fully-saturated version of our history.

Works Cited:

CBC News. (2021, June 1). St. John’s memorial uses 215 felt squares to remember victims of former B.C. residential school. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/stjohns-residential-school-memorial-1.6048983

Gultekin, M., & May, L. (2019). Children’s Literature as Fun-House Mirrors, Blind Spots, and Curtains. The Reading Teacher, 73(5), 627–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1867

Tingle, T. (2010). Saltypie: A Choctaw journey from darkness into light. Cinco Puntos Press.

Wong, D., & Li, X. (2021, July 14). Kuper Island residential school survivor not surprised by discovery of remains. Toronto CityNews. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2021/07/13/kuper-island-residential-school-survivor/