A Book to Read for the Day of Truth and Reconciliation, September 30

I repeat: the circumstances in which you read a book may have a big effect on what you think of it.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, reading A Month in the Country during a beautiful August probably made me like the book even more than I would have had I read it in another month.  But it's not just weather that affects the attitude we bring to a book's reading.  What's happening in the world can have a very strong influence.

 

A case in point is Kukum by Michel Jean.  Originally written in French, it is now available in a very good English translation by Susan Ouirou, but I read it first in French in the spring of 2021.  I was taken with the opening scenes:  the young woman who would become Jean's kukum, his grandmother, is an orphan who has been taken in by a couple trying to carve a farm from the forests of Quebec's North Shore.  She is grateful to them, but when a young Innu man comes down the river she (and he) fall desperately in love with one another even though they don't have a common language.  There follows an account of their life together, in the bush, following the caribou, hunting and gathering, telling stories and building dreams.  The life is very hard, but the way Jean tells it, almost idyllic. 

 

Then the outside world intrudes in the form of clear-cut forests, mineral exploration and changes to water flows.  The little family is forced to leave their semi-nomadic life and settle in a rudimentary village.  Then the RCMP comes to take the children away to school...

 

The day I read that was the day that news of the discovery of the remains of some 200 children on the grounds of a residential school in British Columbia  came out.  The coincidence was like a blow to the gut, the pain of Kukum and her family resonating with that of the families whose children were sent to the Kamloops residential school and who never came home. 

 

But Kukum survived as did some of her children, and luckily, Jean, who was the weekend anchor TVA news for several years, is here to tell the tale. 

 

The investigation into suspected grave sites continues. The Day of Truth and Reconciliation is worth remembering.