IN THE NORTH of the province of Ontario, there is a land so vast that it could swallow up France and still have room left over for Belgium. It is a region of stark, harsh beauty, green and lush in summer, and white and cold in winter, with deep blue skies by day and with countless stars turning dark to light by night. It is the source of several of the greatest rivers in Canada, the Severn, the Winisk, the Attawapiskat, the Albany and the Moose, that rise in the uplands of the Laurentian Shield and flow northwards to the sea through the immense, swampy Hudson Bay Lowlands.
It is also the only part of the province occupied to this day largely by Native people—in the boreal forest by the Anishinabe (Ojibway) and their close cultural cousins the Anishininimouwin (Oji-Cree), and along the Hudson Bay and the James Bay Lowlands by their good friends, the Omushkegowak (Swampy Cree). The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, where this novel is set, is a grouping of forty-nine First Nations whose traditional lands make up more than sixty percent of the area of Ontario running from the height of land to the James and Hudson Bay coast and from the Manitoba to the Quebec borders.
A drama of death and sorrow has been playing out for generations in this region. From the late nineteenth to the latter part of the twentieth century, the people of Ontario’s remote boreal forest, like their Native counterparts across Canada, watched helplessly as the federal government removed their children, often by force, and sent them to Indian residential schools to be turned into brown-skinned white Canadians. All too often the children were abused by predatory caregivers and returned home broken in spirit and devoid of parenting skills. In the infamous “ ’60s Scoop,” the Ontario Children’s Aid Society and its counterparts across Canada entered the reserves and seized children by the thousands and adopted them out to white families across Canada and the United States. In the 1980s, the traditional life of the people was further undermined by exposure to the culture and anti-Native sentiment of the outside world when winter roads were pushed into their communities.
With their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents before them traumatized by their residential school experiences, the youth had no one to turn to in their families for love and support as they confronted these monumental shocks, and they began to kill themselves in staggering numbers. From 1986 to 2010, almost five hundred people, including sixty children under the age of fourteen and one hundred and eighty youth aged fifteen to twenty, took their lives in the territory of the Nishinabe Aski Nation out of a total population of fewer than 30,000 men, women and children. And this despite the frantic efforts of chiefs and councils to stem the epidemic of death that continues to this day, out of sight and mind of the outside world.
In some communities, survivors speak of the ghosts of suicide victims who come calling in nighttime dreams seeking to persuade young people who had joined in suicide pacts to fulfil their part of the bargain and kill themselves. Too often, the appeals are answered and more deaths take place.
For many people, Native and non-Native, dreams, especially about people who have passed away, are not imaginary phenomena but powerful depictions of reality. In the land of the Anishinabe, of the Anishininimouwin and of the Omushkegowak, young people who participate in suicide pacts have spoken to friends and relatives about visits from the spirits of the dead, just before they too killed themselves.
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance the characters may have to people living or dead is entirely coincidental. The Cat Lake First Nation is actually a proud Native community of some five hundred people located on the shore of Cat Lake one hundred and fifty miles upstream from the Albany River and one hundred miles by winter road to the west of Pickle Lake. The airport, band office, school, cemetery, rapids and shoreline depicted in the book are, however, composite creations drawn from more than a dozen fly-in Anishinabe reserves in northern Ontario.
The residential school in this novel is also composite based on many residential schools across Canada, including the St. Anne’s Indian Residential School at the mouth of the Albany River on the James Bay, which was in operation from 1904 until its closing in 1973. On May 29, 2002, arsonists, believed to be former students at the school, destroyed the long-abandoned structure.