Up Ghost River
Authors: Edmund Metatawabin
Advance praise for
Up Ghost River
“
Up Ghost River
is a very difficult story to read, but a necessary one in the reckoning of Canada's abusive and exploitative relationship with its First Nations people. Edmund Metatawabin's measured and honest account shows evidence of remarkable healing, and his story has much in common with the history of colonized indigenous people around the world. Metatawabin's journey is a metaphor for the journey we must all take if we are to heal our relationship to the land at this crucial hour in the environmental fate of the planet. With Alexandra Shimo, Metatawabin writes about his life in a way that is both agonizing and redemptive, personal and political, gut-wrenching and level-headed; it will break your heart.”
Christine Pountney
, author of
Sweet Jesus
“A harrowing and redemptive story of a man's personal battles with one of Canada's worst practices. Edmund Metatawabin's tale of residential schools and government bureaucracy will leave you angry at the evils of colonization. Yet it will also show you a man'sâand a people'sâincredible ability to survive and seek justice. There are plenty of ghosts in this book, apportions of shame and responsibility, but Metatawabin's journey and destination on that river will definitely leave you full of hope and richer for it.”
Drew Hayden Taylor,
author of
Motorcycles & Sweetgrass
“Moving documentation, recollected tragedy and personal triumph, this book is a necessary first-hand account of being First Nations in contemporary Canada. From the atrocities of residential schools, to the present-day policy challenges,
Up Ghost River
will open your eyes to the all-too-recent history of Canada's First Peoples, through the experiences of a resilient individual and his family.”
The Right Honourable Paul Martin
, former Prime Minister of Canada
“Edmund Metatawabin's voice is clear, brave and full of the grace of his Cree homeland.
Up Ghost River
is a powerful and unsettling read, full of heartbreaking truth-telling, resistance and Metatawabin's uncompromising love of land, his people, his language and his culture. These stories are full of the real lived violence of colonialism and of the beautiful tiny moments that our elders and storytellers wrap around our children to teach them, protect them and nurture them. Metatawabin is a gift to all who are lucky enough to read him, and the key to reading Metatawabin is a willingness to simply allow these stories to transform you.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
, author of
Dancing on Our Turtle's Back
and
Islands of Decolonial Love
, and recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award
“A shocking, sadly revealing Canadian story. Cree elder Edmund Metatawabin has the courage to tell how âwhite learning' stripped him of his name and systematically brutalized himâincluding strapping him into a school-built electric chair and electrocuting himâtraumatizing him throughout his childhood, youth and adulthood, until he could finally let it all âpass through' him and find himself as a human being. âWe are still here,' he asserts, and âour forefathers ⦠are still here, all around us, guiding those who listen.' Every Canadian needs to hear this story.”
Rudy Wiebe
, author of
The Temptations of Big Bear
and
Come Back
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2014 Edmund Metatawabin
Foreword copyright © 2014 Joseph Boyden
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.randomhouse.ca
Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
this page
constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Metatawabin, Edmund, 1947â, author
Up Ghost River : a chief's journey through the turbulent waters of Native history /
Edmund Metatawabin with Alexandra Shimo; foreword by Joseph Boyden.
ISBN 978-0-307-39987-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-39990-8
1. Metatawabin, Edmund, 1947â. 2. Native peoplesâCanadaâResidential schools. 3. Native peoplesâCanadaâSocial conditions. 4. Cree IndiansâBiography. 5. Indian activistsâCanadaâBiography.
I. Shimo, Alexandra II. Title.
E99.C88M483 2014Â Â Â Â Â 971.004â²973230092Â Â Â Â Â C2013-908612-9
Cover design by Jennifer Lum
Cover image: Metatawabin Productions and Research
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L'an dernier, le Conseila investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l'art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
v3.1
This book is dedicated to Joan, my partner of forty-four years, who refused to let my hand go, and to my children Albalina, Shannin, Jassen and Cedar, and also to all the residential school survivors
.
I have long been a First Nations advocate, but writing a memoir was different entirely. I had previously published a guidebook,
Harvesting: Cree Hunting and Gathering Techniques
, and a novel,
Hanaway
, about a young man trying to discover his Cree culture, but documenting my own story felt painful and fraught. I wanted my story out there as it chronicles an important part of Canadian and First Nations history. Yet I was hampered by gaps in my memory, perhaps because of my unusual childhood or the trauma of what I would later do to my body.
Starting in July 2011, I began to work with author and journalist Alexandra Shimo to try to close those gaps. She interviewed people from my past, and dug up old court transcripts, St. Anne's Residential School records, police interviews and reports through Freedom of Information requests, photos, and newspaper articles to fill in those places where my memory was spotty, checking them against my own recollections. In some places, we changed names and details to protect people's identities. Any dialogue is created as it might have happened, to the best of my memory.
TEN SUNRISES BY JOSEPH BOYDEN
I first met Edmund Metatawabin during the beginning of a cold James Bay winter in 1995. I'd made the rather shocking move from New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico to Moosonee on the gulf of the Arctic and was still trying to find my way in this at once familiar and yet so foreign part of the world. I'd taken a position at Northern College and was basically the itinerant professor who travelled up and down the west coast of the bay from my home base in Moosonee, flying into different Cree reserves such as Moose Factory, Fort Albany, Kashechewan and Attawapiskat in order to try and hone the English and communications skills of students wishing to begin careers in fields as divergent as nursing, mechanics, and drug and alcohol counselling.