By Celeste Trimble and Kristen Suagee-Beauduy
Four mornings before a young girl named Shi-Shi Etko is to leave her family and go away to residential school, she is reminded of all the things she must not forget. Songs, dances, family, laughter, joy, and especially the land. Shi-Shi Etko tries to memorize all the stones and plants and waters and the feeling of being near them. She is given a small pouch in which to contain these memories, like a sprig of a fir tree or a dried berry. She prays that she remembers each and every part of her life at home until she returns in the spring.
CELESTE: This book is extraordinary on so many levels. Campbell’s writing is such elegant poetry, saturated with love and care. Through this poetry, I can easily feel the warmth and tenderness of this family and community – both for each other and for the land. The concept behind the story, telling of the last four days before a child must leave their home community, is so rich because we have this beautiful book, a positive book about all the aspects of this child’s life that hold them up, support them, nurture them. At the same time, this is about leaving for residential schools, leaving the incredible beauty and richness described in this story. One thing that is different about this book is that the information writing about residential schools is located in the very front of the book as a sort of preface. In this way, there is context for the adult reader that might facilitate discussion with the child reader. It is in this preface that the pain and trauma of residential schools is described, such a stark contrast with the comfort of the story.
In the preface, Campbell asks, “Can you imagine a community without children? Can you imagine children without parents?” This way of framing the story is really so powerful.
KRISTEN: It is powerful. I was listening to a story on NPR about a woman who went to an Indian residential school in the United States in the 1960s and she was sharing how there was a cemetery for the children who passed but she suspected there were bodies in unmarked graves too because of the rumors she grew up with. I know we mentioned that before, briefly, but I think this NPR piece hit me differently because in the time since we started writing these WOWlit blog posts the number of kids they’ve found in unmarked graves has risen by the thousands. These kids weren’t just dealing with leaving everything good behind them, but they were in a place that let them die and thought so little of them and the people they came from that they just put them in the ground and covered their bodies with earth, without ceremony. There was not only an absence of community but of care. In the decades since I studied boarding schools I had forgotten how much the lack of care was intentional—this article reminded me: Canada’s Residential Schools Were a Horror – Scientific American.
I appreciate that Shi-shi-etko was on our reading list because its subtlety added a type of diversity. If you read it without the preface it’s not even about boarding schools because it centers on the beauty of Shi-shi-etko’s First Nations life. I think if you’re an educator putting together a unit on boarding schools, this is a necessary book because we don’t have to worry about issues of compassion fatigue or trauma porn. Yes, two phrases I learned during the pandemic.
I mention this because I think that we can all get to a place where we hit our emotional limit and we’re not going to connect with someone’s struggle anymore because we have to take care of our own health–it’s not always a conscious decision and I think kids have a lower threshold than adults do. The second term, well, I learned it in the context of a Native person critiquing the trend by non-Natives that dwell on the pain and suffering of Indigenous people when they tell our stories instead of letting us highlight resilience and the actions we’re taking to move beyond historical trauma. I think that might be the thing I appreciate most about this experience was getting to spend time with First Nations #ownvoices representations—just like there are so many different experiences with boarding schools there are so many different ways to tell these stories.
CELESTE: Thank you for these very important thoughts about this book. I absolutely agree with what you are saying here. It is the beauty that is highlighted in this book, a reprieve that doesn’t ignore the trauma of history, but it really allows the child’s perspective to be a fissure in the great pain of reality. In these days before Shi-shi-etko knows what residential schools are like, she is still bathed in the love of her community, in the love of the land. And through her eyes, the reader gets to feel this love, too, before the scar of trauma. This feeling is absolutely essential for all readers, especially Indigenous readers, to see in print, to hear, and to feel deep down. And this text does it beautifully.
The flipside of this is the necessity of teaching this history both accurately and with appropriate emotional resonance. But really, most of the Indigenous authored books that are about or adjacent to residential schooling are doing this. Some in incredibly beautiful and important ways. Far fewer are doing what Shi-shi-etko has managed, to allow the trauma to be acknowledged without being highlighted, for it to be significantly less important to the story in the book and the story in real life as the power of love of community and land is.
The sequel to Shi-shi-etko is Shin-chi’s Canoe, a look at Shi-shi-etko’s younger brother’s first year at residential schools. I think it is really interesting to look at these books together, as the sequel definitely touches on the traumas of residential schooling more specifically. But I absolutely hear you about having both an individual and collective fatigue. And while we cannot hope to avoid this essential history when we recommend or teach or gift or read books, we must also hope to balance it with nourishment and positivity that existed before this trauma, moved through this trauma, and now moves Indigenous people and Indigenous stories into the future.
Toward the end of the story, Shi-shi-etko offers this prayer as she places her bundle of memories beneath the tree.
“Dear Grandfather Tree,
Please keep my memories and my family safe.
I will be home in the spring.”
This whole book is a prayer for keeping Indigenous peoples safe against the memories and hugely damaging legacies of the residential school systems in both the U.S. and Canada. But it leaves the reader with the positive message, “I will be home in the spring”. We also know, through the next book, that Shi-shi-etko does indeed come home in the spring. This book leaves open the possibility that healing can and is happening.
KRISTEN: Aw, I love your analysis. There was a moment in the text that stayed with me more than others and it was about a feeling you get in a very specific context. After a day spent on the water paddling a canoe with her grandfather, Shi-shi etko “fell into water-exhausted sleep”. I connected with that because some of my favorite childhood memories take place paddling in a canoe in the north woods of Minnesota. If you haven’t been up that way I’m not sure you can imagine just how big the lakes are and how deep and cold they get when they’re fed by glacial waters. When the lakes are still like they were in the book, it feels like it doesn’t take any energy to paddle and the movements become meditative—and I bet even more so if you are singing paddle songs with your grandfather like Shi-shi etko. In those deep woods, sound travels on top of calm, big lake water in the most beautiful way—like you’re in a moving amphitheater but it’s the animals and weather performing theater. It’s special and stimulating and peaceful in a way that you can’t replicate when there are other people around. Anyway, when it’s time to go to bed your body just yearns to be still because you realize that you’ve been moving all day without processing it and you can’t help but crash into a deep sleep.
I hate that one of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie, turned out to be a sexual predator but he said something one time that I think is key to good writing—the trap door. He was using it in the context of content that means one thing for a non-Native audience but opens up a whole other level for Native audiences. I feel like good writing is fresh because it’s specific to the author’s perspective and it’s that specificity that is a trap door for readers who’ve had the same experience. I can’t think of another children’s book besides Shi-Shi Etko that has a trap door for me, and that was a joy to read. And I’m just talking about a feeling I got from a place—imagine how amazing a cultural trap door could feel to someone from an underrepresented group when they finally see themselves and their community in a text.
Shi-Shi Etko by Nicola I. Campbell, illustrated by Kim LaFave, Groundwood Books, 2005
Title: Shi-Shi-Etko
Author: Nicola I. Campbell
Illustrator: Kim LaFave
ISBN: 9780888996596
Publisher: Groundwood Books
PubDate: August 9, 2005
Throughout August 2021, Celeste Trimble and Kristen Suagee-Beauduy discuss four recently published picturebooks about indigenous residential schooling in Canada. Check back each Wednesday to follow the conversation!
- Themes: Celeste Trimble, Kim LaFave, Kristen Suagee-Beauduy, Nicola I. Campbell, Shi-Shi Etko
- Descriptors: Books & Resources, My Take/Your Take