Retrieved from: http://www.mysterescanadiens.ca/blooden.html
Historical Fiction
‘Making and Remaking the Past’
Dr. Wendy Donawa
Reading Canada
Dr. Leah C. Fowler
SECTION IV
Where Does ‘History’ End?
This section explores fiction set amid the
two world wars and the intervening
Depression, and the meanings they suggest
to the growing sense of national
consciousness. It examines literature
depicting the experience of ethnic groups
originally marginalized, then increasingly
understood to be valuable components of
Canada’s cultural mosaic.
Retrieved from: http://britishmilitariaforums.yuku.com/topic/10030
IV.A.
Entering the century, entering the country
Retrieved from: http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2011/05/24/digital-tv-boom-timeahead-for-eastern-europe/
IV.A.1.
Eastern Europe: Oppression and migration
European immigration to
Canada in the early years of
the century was fueled not
only by industrial economics
but also by violent change in
Eastern Europe, particularly in
Russia.
Your Mouth is Lovely (Nancy Richler, 2002)
 At 23, Miriam, the Jewish
protagonist, is serving a life
sentence in Siberia, writing her
memoir from the infant daughter
who will never know her, whom
she has headed over to her sister
to take to Canada and raise her as
her own. This text highlights the
lives of people driven to
desperation and conveys a woman
caught up in circumstances
beyond her control.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL5957137W/Your_Mouth_Is_Lovely
Russländer (Sandra Birdsell, 2001)
 This text begins in 1910, in a wealthy
Mennonite farming community in
Russia, whose devout inhabitants
seem scarcely aware of the poverty,
oppression, and resentment of their
Russian workers. The narrator, Katya,
now an old woman in Winnipeg, but
eight years old as the story begins,
recalls an idyllic childhood world that
will later implode with the 1917
massacre of her family.
Retrieved from: http://www.sandrabirdsell.com/bookshelf/the-russlander/
Retrieved from: http://www.canadashistory.ca/Magazine/OnlineExclusive/Articles/History-Spotlight--British-Home-Children.aspx
IV.A.2.
Home children
Not all the vulnerable children who arrived
in Canada were fleeing revolution and
violence. Between 1869 and the Great
Depression, in a largely forgotten social
experiment, British ‘Home Children’ –
orphaned and abandoned children – were
removed from streets, workhouses, and
impoverished parents, and dispatched to
servitude in different parts of the
Commonwealth.
Orphan at My Door (Jean Little, 2001)
 Set in 1897 in Guelph, Ontario,
the young diarist, Victoria,
records her family’s acquisition
of a sad, silent ‘home girl’. She
eventually befriends the little
servant, and vows to help her
rescue the younger brother from
the abusive placement in which
he has been placed.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL470697W/Orphan_at_my_door
Retrieved from: http://www.canadianbadlands.org/cbl/tours
/
IV.A.3.
Internal migration: Boomtowns and Cities
Canada’s expanding and changing
population was not only the result
of migration from abroad; there
was also constant internal
migration as workers moved to
farms, cities, and single-industry
boomtowns.
Keely: The Girl from Turtle Mountain
(Deborah Ellis, 2004)
 Keely arrives in this frontier
town in 1901 with her widowed
father, one of hundreds of
workers pouring in for
employment in the coal mine.
Keeley befriends a variety of
colourful characters including E.
Cora Hind, the first woman to
succeed as a journalist in
Western Canada.
Retrieved from:
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/books/our_canadian_girl_keeley_01_girl_turtle_mount
ain_deborah_ellis
Terror at Turtle Mountain (Penny Draper, 2006)
 This riveting, action-filled
survival story for the younger
reader recreates the terror-filed
night in 1903 when 100 million
tons of limestone crashed down
Turtle Mountain, burying the
town of Frank. The 13-year-old
protagonist is instrumental in
the town’s rescue efforts, and
the book includes useful
resources, websites, and archival
photographs.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL8549719M/Terror_at_Turtle_Mountain
Deafening (Frances Itani, 2003)
 Five-year-old Grania, the youngest
daughter of small-town Ontario
hoteliers, has lost her hearing to
scarlet fever. Her parents are too
burdened by guilt and too mired in
false hopes to work with her obvious
intelligence. But she is blessed with
a fiercely determined grandmother
whose innovative instruction is
described in a way that opens the
world of the Deaf to the reader.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312881.Deafening
The Bone-Collector’s Son (Paul Yee, 2003)
 In Vancouver’s Chinatown, 14-
year-old Bing Wing resentfully
assists his father in the lowly
job of collecting bones from
old Chinese graves to be sent
back to China. A double ghost
story, with one ghost haunting
the bone collector and another
haunting the house where Bing
works.
Retrieved from: http://www.ryerson.ca/library/events/asian_heritage/yee.html
Retrieved from:
http://schools.4j.lane.edu/churchill/library/classes/WWIQuest/WWIWebquest.html
IV.B.
World War I: War literature and the YA reader
Renee Englot poses some thoughtful questions to interrogate war
narratives:
 Is the reader positioned to see war as complex?
 Does it open up different understandings and the growth of awareness?
 How is the enemy represented by the author, and treated by the fictional
characters?
 Is there an implied acknowledgement of common humanity?
 Are the consequences of war examined, and do they contribute to civic
literacy?
“Gonna study war much more: War in historical fiction for children.”
Canadian Children’s Literature 33 (1): 17 pp.180-197
More contemporary novelists have
widened their scope to consider the
destructive force of the war on the
individual psyche, the dissolving
distinctions of gender and class, the
definition of ‘manly’ behaviour, and
its implications.
And in the Morning (John Wilson, 2003)
 Told in diary entries, newspaper
clippings, and letters, this text
conveys war’s psychological
impact on soldiers. At 15, Jim
cannot wait to fight in the war.
But when his father is killed in
action, and his mother succumbs
to depression, under-aged Jim
enlists.
Retrieved from: http://www.bookcentre.ca/library/catalogue/and_morning
Megiddo’s Shadow (Arthur Slade, 2006)
 Based on Slade’s grandfather’s
experiences, sixteen-year-old
Edward lies about his age,
enlisting to avenge his brother’s
death, and leaving his depressed
widower father in
Saskatchewan. After training,
impatient for action, he is sent
to the Palestine front against the
Turkish, where heat, dust,
malaria, and brutality alter the
wide-eyed innocent.
Retrieved from: http://www.arts.on.ca/Page1806.aspx
The Wars ( Timothy Findley, 1977)
 This text reconstructs the
puzzling career of sensitive 19year-old Robert Ross, a Canadian
who enlists in the Great War and
is sent overseas to the trenches.
Here, he is traumatized by the
bloody carnage of violent and
meaningless death, and of cruelty
to animals as well as to humans.
Retrieved from: http://englishimmersionfrancaise.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/mayreading/
Retrieved from: http://www.lismore.nsw.gov.au/cp_themes/default/page.asp?p=DOC-DFT-07-22-23
IV.C.
Between the wars
 The aftermath of WWI was so profound that many see the
second World War as the child of the first. The 30 million
casualties, the social disruption and psychological trauma, the
dispossession and relocation of ethnic populations, the reinvention of national boundaries, and the disappearance of an
ordered way of life left a social and political void.
 The values once unexamined and accepted uncritically –
ideas about class and gender, about the rights of ordinary
people, about assumptions of British ‘superiority’, and of
patriotism itself, were no longer taken as self-evident.
Retrieved from: http://libcom.org/history/1930-present-labour-unrest-successivegeographical-restructuring-world-automobile-indust
IV.C.1.
Labour unrest
Red Goodwin (John Wilson, 2006)
 Will, a 16-year-old English boy
whose father was killed in the
war, is sent out to live with his
uncle, a mine manager in
Cumberland on Vancouver
Island. In the town’s highly
stratified society, young Will
soon finds himself torn between
obedience to his uncle, loyalty to
his father’s memory, and
attraction to Goodwin’s vision of
a more just society.
Retrieved from: http://ronsdalepress.com/books/red-goodwin
/
Retrieved from: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/features/new-chums-skilled-us-upfor-new-era/story-e6freoro-1225804539876
IV.C.2.
Post-war immigration
The displacement and dislocation of European
populations meant a continued flow of immigrants
into what would eventually be known as the
Canadian mosaic.
It is not surprising that Canadian literature set in
this era includes themes of exile, dislocation, and
alienation, or that it demonstrates patterns of loss
and change across multi-generational narratives.
Disappearing Moon Café (Sky Lee, 1990)
 This text follows four
generations of Wongs across a
century in which the Chinese
were restricted mainly to
menial and service occupations.
Retrieved from: http://www.asiancanadianwiki.org/wiki/Sky_Lee
The Concubine’s Children (Denise Chong, 1995)
 Her maternal grandmother,
sold as a concubine to Chan
Sam, is sent out to Gold
Mountain to bear him sons,
while her earnings are sent
back to China to support the
‘at-home’ wife.
Retrieved from: http://www.wlu.ca/page.php?grp_id=2529&p=11318
Retrieved from: http://www.frumforum.com/stiglitz-rewrites-the-great-depression
IV.C.3.
The Great Depression
Regardless of race or ethnic history, North
Americans felt the impact of the 1929 American
Stock Market Crash.
A decade of unprecedented drought, hailstorms,
locusts, and poor farming practices depleted the
soil, ruined most farmers, and exacerbated
Canada’s plunge into the Depression.
Who Has Seen the Wind? (W.O. Mitchell, 1947)
 The young boy’s journey from
innocence to experience and his
realization of death and loss take place
during the Depression in small-town
Saskatchewan. As the relatively secure
son of the town’s pharmacist, Brian is
free of the worst deprivations of that
decade, but he observes the effects of
poverty in his friend Ben, the town’s
‘wild child’, and in the suicide of the
town’s lonely Chinese restauranteur
when malnourished children are taken
from him.
Retrieved from: http://hungrylikethewoolf.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/who-has-seen-the-wind-byw-o-mitchell/
The Landing (John Ibbitson, 2008)
 This text takes the reader to
Depression-era Muskoka, where
fifteen-year-old Ben and his
widowed mother live with Ben’s
bitter, critical uncle. Musically
talented, Ben knows his life will
be limited without the
professional teaching that is
utterly beyond his reach – or so
he believes.
Retrieved from: http://www.renaudbray.com/books_product.aspx?id=984391&def=Landing(The)%2CIBBITSON%2C+JOHN%
2C9781554532346&page=184
Hobo Jungle (Dorothy Joan Harris, 2003)
 Ellen’s dad has lost his job, and
the family crowds into her
grandfather’s Vancouver home,
where they stretch every penny
to make do, and Ellen chafes at
the endless mending and
crowding and poverty.
 OUR CANADIAN GIRL SERIES
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/Ellen-Hobo-Jungle-CanadianGirl/dp/0141002700/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329861136&sr=8-1-fkmr0
Not a Nickel to Spare: The Great Depression
Diary of Sally Cohen (Perry Nodelman, 2007)
 Coping with the Depression is
challenging enough, but when
Sally ventures outside of Toronto’s
Jewish district, she must cope
with anti-Semitism as well.
 DEAR CANADA SERIES
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/Not-Nickel-Spare-GreatDepression/dp/0439961300
Retrieved from: http://www.rememberingthechildren.ca/history/history-acc.htm
IV.C.4.
Residential Schools
Between the wars, the prospects for Aboriginal youth were bleak.
The Indian Residential System (IRS) had firmly established an educational
policy whose aim was the forced assimilation of Aboriginal students into the
lower fringes of mainstream white society
Legislation acts were intended by their makers to be benevolent and
protective: they laid out stages by which Indians could, in effect, become
‘honorary whites’ in the process losing their Indian rights and identity.
Legislators had not anticipated the emotional and cultural devastation
experienced by children so forcibly removed from their known world of
family, community, and language.
As Long as the Rivers Flow (Larry Loyie, 2005)
 Set in 1944, this text is an
elegiac account of his last
summer before he must leave
for residential school.
Retrieved from: http://firstnationswriter.blogspot.com
/
Nicola Campbell’s texts convey in simple, poetic language the attachment
to a life attuned to nature, family, and tradition and their immanent
uprooting to be taken away to residential school.
Shi-shi-etko, 2005
Retrieved from: http://www.okanagan.bc.ca/Page12327.aspx
Shin-chi’s Canoe, 2007
Retrieved from:
http://www.jacketflap.com/megablog/index.asp?tagid=10393&tag=The+Tiger's+Bookshelf
Maata’s Journal (Paul Sullivan, 2003)
 Set in 1924 and stranded on an
Eastern Arctic mapping
expedition and awaiting rescue,
17-year-old Maata reflects back
on her life and recounts the
difficulties of adapting to change
and the challenge of trying to
live in two worlds.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL482523W/Maata's_journal
Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
IV.D.
The World War II decade
Writers of the World War II decade
moved away from the Romantic
patriotism seen at the onset of WWI;
they expressed the costs of war,
physical and psychological, and
examined war’s dehumanizing impact.
Retrieved from: http://ehsjournal.org/http:/ehsjournal.org/scott-nadler/environmentalmanagement-geographic-mismatch-coping-with-dislocation-in-the-global-economy/2010/
IV.D.1.
Conflicts and dislocations
The English Patient (Michael Ondatje, 1992)
 This dense and complex narrative
interweaves two plots: In one, the
‘English patient’ is seen to
actually be a Hungarian explorer
in 1930s North Africa, having an
intense affair with a colleague’s
wife. The other plot is set in the
ruins of 1944 central Italy, in an
isolated Tuscan villa, once a
military hospital.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/English-Patient-Michael-Ondaatje/dp/039428013X
The Lost Garden (Helen Humphreys, 2004)
 This text is set in the English
countryside during the WWII
Blitz. Gwen, a horticulturist, has
fled the bombed-out devastation
of London for a ruined estate,
where she takes charge of a group
of Land Army girls cultivating
foodcrops for the war effort.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/Lost-Garden-Helen-Humphreys/dp/0006393594
Retrieved from: http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/confusing-social-mediawith-media/
IV.D.2.
The Torn Social Fabric
In early September 1939, nearly 3, 000, 000
people were transported from endangered
cities to the safety of the countryside. Most
were children, labeled like luggage, and
separated from their parents. The trauma of
fear, separation, and isolation experienced by
so many are still clear in survivors’ accounts
60 years later.
Retrieved from: http://www.qlhs.org.uk/oracle/2008-warchildhood/index.htm
IV.D.2.a.
Evacuees and disrupted communities
The Guests of War Trilogy (Kit Pearson) depicts in detail
the fallout, over five years, from the ruptured lives of two
evacuated children.
 The Sky is Falling (1989)
 Looking at the Moon (1991)
 The Lights Go on Again (1993)
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL2802858W/Guests_of_War_Trilogy
Boy O’Boy (Brian Doyle, 2005)
 Set in Ottawa’s Lowertown at
the war’s end, this is a powerful,
painful novel for young adults.
Young Billy O’Boy and his friend
Martin reflect on grim news
from the war, on their families’
equally grim dilemmas, and on
their hero, Captain Marvel.
Retrieved from: http://www.tower.com/boy-oboy-brian-doyle-paperback/wapi/100366473
The Cure for Death by Lightning
(Gail Anderson-Dargatz, 1996)
 Isolated and vulnerable on her
family’s remote farm, 15-yearold Beth, the narrator, is haunted
by dark fears of known and
unknown malice: a mysterious,
unseen predator, as well as more
sinister abuse at the hands of her
father, who is unhinged by a First
World War head injury.
Retrieved from:
//www.goodreads.com/book/show/824173.The_Cure_For_Death_By_Lightning
Jade Peony (Wayson Choy, 1997)
 Three children tell of their
family during the WWII years,
each from his or her point of
view; however, they are clearly
rooted in the longing for bonds
between generations that
connect them to events shaping
Chinese immigrant life earlier in
the century.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL2402995W/The_jade_peony
Retrieved from: http://esjay07.wordpress.com/photo-gallery/japanese-internment-2/
IV.D.2.b.
The Japanese-Canadian internment and dispersal
Obasan (Joy Kogawa, 1981)
 This text chronicles the erosion
of civil rights experienced by
Canadians of Japanese descent
during WWII. Marginalized
voices critique the ‘normal’
official voice of authority:
Historical thinking and literary
insight expose the official
version of Japanese-Canadian
history as a lie.
Retrieved from: http://www.whonnock.ca/whonnock/Events-Pictures.htm
Retrieved from: http://www.newtbdrugs.org/blog/2010/07/the-sanatorium-files-part-3the-sanatorium-movement/
IV.D.2.c.
Public health, tuberculosis, and the sanatoria
The World War II era was marked
by public health measures that
transformed the future for those
suffering from tuberculosis, which
was, until mid-century, Canada’s
biggest killer.
Queen of Hearts (Martha Brooks, 2010)
 Set in the early war years, fun-
loving 15-year-old Marie-Claire
enjoys her close-knit farm family
and flirtations at the local army
base. In a flash, that life is gone as
she and her younger brother and
sister are diagnosed with
tuberculosis and thrust into the
isolation of the sanatorium life,
quarantined even from one
another.
Retrieved from: http://mabelsfablesraves.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html
Consumption (Kevin Patterson, 2006)
 Although Victoria’s story
begins in 1962, her
treatment is complex, and
when she does return to
her Inuit community six
years later, she is alienated
and almost unable to speak
Inuktitut.
Retrieved from: http://www.mcdermidagency.com/authInfo.cfm?auth=87&userID=6
Retrieved from: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/jews
IV.D.2.d.
Jewish-Canadian Holocaust narratives
The contributions of Jewish-Canadian writers
include richly-imagined accounts of Jewish
immigration and settlement, the complex
negotiations of ethnicity and gender within their
own community, the tensions of new citizenship
and Old Country, and the ever-present antiSemitism and ‘otherness’ to both the Catholic
norm of Quebec, and the powerful Anglo-Celtic
norm of Protestant Canada.
Margit, Book One: Home Free
(Kathy Kacer, 2003)
 11-year-old Margit has escaped
German-occupied
Czechoslovakia, and is part of
the small group of Jewish
refugees allowed into Canada,
despite the government’s policy
of exclusion.
Retrieved from: http://lookingglassreview.com/html/the_our_canadian_girl_series.html
Clara’s War (Kathy Kacer, 2001)
 This text centres on 13-year-old
Clara’s imprisonment in the
Terezin concentration camp, and
her effort to find meaning in the
children’s opera she participates
in, in an environment without
hope.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/Claras-War-Kathy-Kacer/dp/1896764428
The Thought of High Windows
(Lynne Kositsky, 2004)
 Sixteen-year-old Esther is on the
run from Germany to France,
with a group of 60 teenaged
refugees. Esther’s loneliness and
misery come equally from her
very real danger, and from her
exclusion, even amid danger, by
the attractive and popular young
refugees.
Retrieved from:
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL8570429M/The_Thought_of_High_Windows
Turned Away (Carol Matas, 2005)
 This text dramatizes the
Canadian government’s
shameful refusal to accept a
number of children who
were cleared to leave their
countries.
Retrieved from: http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol12/no3/turnedaway.html
In My Enemy’s House (Carol Matas, 1999)
 This text follows Marisa, a
blond, blue-eyed Polish Jew
who escapes the ghetto, finds
papers to disguise herself as a
Polish Christian, and travels to
Weimar, where she finds work
as a servant with a wealthy
farming family who treat her
well.Yet she must live a lie in
order to survive.
Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369295.In_My_Enemy_s_House
Greater than Angels (Carol Matas, 1998)
 This text fictionalizes a true
story of a village in France that
committed itself to sheltering
deported Jewish children. Le
Chambon is a small farming
community in southern France,
who, with their pacifist pastor,
helped hide as many Jews as
arrived there.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/Greater-Than-AngelsCarol-Matas/dp/068983084X
The Whirlwind (Carol Matas, 2007)
 Set in 1941 Seattle, 14-year-
old Ben and his family have
fled from the horrors of Nazi
Germany. Ben begins to hope
for safety, enjoying the
friendship of John, a
Japanese-American boy.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL9319080M/The_Whirlwind
I was the Child of Holocaust Survivors
(Bernice Eisenstein, 2006)
 Eisenstein’s parents met in
Auschwitz, married shortly after
the Liberation, and immigrated
to Canada. The trauma of their
experiences and the ever-present
horror of memory permeated
their lives.
Retrieved from:
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL8876332M/I_Was_a_Child_of_Holocaust_Survivors
Retrieved from: http://fbh.ycdsb.ca/departments/fbh_library/students/chapter_4.html
IV.E.
Reading post-war Canada
History does not happen in neat sections and,
much as we love charts and timelines, history
cannot be filed in pigeonholes. Events seem to
happen with shocking suddenness – human
catastrophes are generally the result of
multiple pressures, fissures, and historical
tentacles of cause and effect.
Retrieved from: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/coldwar1.htm
IV.E.1.
Post-war, Cold War
The end of WWII did not mean the end of
ideological struggle. While populations
struggled to mend their lives after the end of
overt hostilities, the Cold War framed the
unarmed confrontations between the United
States and the Soviet Union and their allies.
Each superpower was motivated by fear of
world domination by the other and by its
implications for nuclear war.
Pure Springs (Brian Doyle, 2007)
 Martin, from Boy O’Boy, 2003, is
now 15, an orphan, and the
Korean war has begun. Fatherless
and with male role models all
heroically off at war, Martin who
is still haunted by the
choirmaster’s sexual abuse, is
working for a crooked delivery
man who initiates Martin into the
world of crime.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL8212310M/Pure_Spring
The Way the Crow Flies
(Ann-Marie MacDonald, 2003)
 Nowhere is this dichotomy
Retrieved from: http://classic.eyeonbooks.com/ibp.php?ISBN=0060578955
between Cold War
demoralization and middleclass complacence more
searingly depicted than this
text. The connection of private
and personal choices to the
international zeitgeist, a tale of
innocence betrayed, is told
through the consciousness of
sunny, imaginative, eight-yearold Madeleine McCarthy.
Gemini Summer (Iain Lawrence, 2007)
 Young Danny River and his
teenaged brother Beau are
devoted, despite brotherly
squabbles. Danny wants nothing
more than a dog; Beau,
enraptured by the space race,
watches breathlessly as the
Gemini space missions are
covered on television, and heroworships the astronaut Gus
Grissom.
Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/192757631
Rex Zero and the End of the World
(Tim Wynne-Jones, 2006)
 Eleven-year-old Rex’s family has
just moved from Vancouver;
Rex and his sister check for
Communists, caught up with
the paranoia and excitement of
possible air raids, bomb
shelters, gas masks, and the
prospects of nuclear war.
Retrieved from:
http://openlibrary.org/works/OL47001W/Rex_Zero_and_the_end_of_the_world
Retrieved from: http://grist.org/politics/2009-12-07-the-physics-of-copenhagenwhy-politics-as-usual-may-mean-the-end/
IV.E.2.
Mid-century and the human rights pendulum
Perhaps both historical understanding
and literary ‘dose of imagination’ teach
concern for how human rights can evolve
out of personal devastation and difficulty,
and teach, as well, a profound desire to
nurture and protect vulnerable and
disadvantaged populations.
Juvie: Inside Canada’s Youth Jails (Gordon
Cruse, 2007)
 This text points how the Juvenile
Delinquents Act, the Young
Offenders Act, and the Youth
Criminal Justice Act are flawed
and beneficial, but none offer
solutions that will satisfy equally
the general public, lawenforcement officers, the courts,
or the offenders themselves (in
Lidster, 2007, p. D11).
Retrieved from: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/juvie-gordon-cruse/1015783178
Tin Angel (Shannon Cowan, 2007)
 Ronnie faces, first, her father’s
death, then the loss of the
family’s idyllic mountain lodge,
then the move to town, and her
mother’s depression and
drinking problem. Details of
Ronnie’s story, at first blurred
and meaningless, gradually build
up to damning evidence that
leads to her arrest.
Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL6234796W/Tin_Angel
Retrieved from: http://educ.queensu.ca/news/aboriginalvoices.html
IV.E.3.
Aboriginal voices: ‘An unacknowledged shadow’
The mid-century saw little
improvement in the lives of
Aboriginal youth, who were still
subject to removal from their
families, and whose education
was still enforced assimilation.
Kiss of the Fur Queen (Tomson Highway, 1998)
 Tomson and his brother Rene
were taken from their family and
placed in the Le Pas residential
school where they were both
sexually abused by the priests. But
both boys were gifted and had
their creative talents nurtured.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Indian-Literature-CriticalStudies/dp/0806139331/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329866003&sr=1-2
Green Grass, Running Water
(Thomas King, 1993)
 King uses wit and ridicule, an
intertextual grab-bag of popular
culture and Judeo-Christian
myth, to skewer myths and
stereotypes, to expose the
absurdity of cultural and
patriarchal oppression that has
kept them outside the dominant
culture.
Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.ca/Green-Grass-Running-WaterThomas/dp/0006485138