Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada

“We are all standing on the shoulders of the Indigenous women and men who broke down the doors and made room for these necessary works.”

Michelle Good’s most recent book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada continues sustained efforts by Indigenous Peoples in this country to bring about change through the sharing of knowledge and experience. In her essays exploring such topics as residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, land rights, the White Paper and the Red Paper response, and ‘Pretendians’, Good establishes a clear through-line of colonialism and its impacts, both historical and contemporary.

“Racism Carefully Sown,” effectively elucidates the realities for Indigenous women, establishing the historical context of diminishment, categorical racism and misogyny built into the colonial structures that accompanied the fur trade and the treatment that was often applied by Indian Agents trafficking or abusing young girls, with the authority given to them under the Indian Act. When we look at the current situation of Murdered and Missing Indigenous People, Good shows the longstanding effects of the degradation of the image and value of Indigenous women and how mistreatment, misogyny and indifference have not only continued but proliferated into the twenty-first century.

“$13.69,” Good’s essay on the Sixties Scoop relates her own experiences both as a survivor and as a recipient of compensation awarded to survivors. She does the math, breaking down the price of abuse as determined by the government in its settlement. For Good, her settlement amounts to $13.69 per day over the period in which she was in the system, abused, and disconnected from family and culture: a biting, powerful commentary on systems of apology and their subsequent pay-outs. What is the value of someone’s suffering? How does one calculate one person’s suffering over another’s, and in this case, a whole people’s categorical suffering imposed by a bureaucracy? Is the suffering worth less because it is endured by so many? Good’s essay is provocative in its presentation, furthering the discussion as to the role of Government in Indigenous child welfare, and into discussions around compensation for continued mismanagement post-Sixties Scoop.

In her essay, “The Rise and Resistance of Indigenous Literature,” Good recounts the historical efforts made by writers and historians such as Harold Cardinal, Maria Campbell, and George Manuel in writing about their personal experiences and those of a people widely abused by the government and its supporting structures and institutions, and indirectly combatting unjust government policy, like Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper. As Good points out, these voices have been present for decades, struggling to find their way into the mainstream and to be heard by Canadians. In this post-TRC world, Indigenous authors are finally achieving more widespread success. The timely and astute essays comprising Michelle Good’s Truth Telling build on the works of previous authors and activists, bringing a new perspective to Indigenous issues, and widening their historical context. The result is a propitious offering that makes for an accessible and galvanizing read.

MICHELLE GOOD is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After three decades of working with Indigenous communities and organizations, she obtained her law degree. She earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while still practising law. Her novel, Five Little Indians, was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It received the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Five Little Indians was also chosen for Canada Reads 2022. Michelle Good’s poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins Publishers (May 30 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1443467812
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1443467810

Christina Barber

Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.

Christina Barber

1 thought on “Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada”