So I sat down and I was like, I’m just going to write this as a fantasy.” I’m a cis white dude, so I can’t ever really go through something like what those children had to go through. “I didn’t want to co-opt, you know, a history that wasn’t mine. Literally profiting off of missing and undocumented children, and people who are STILL living with the trauma of residential schools, who are still living like second class citizens in THEIR country due to the impact of those schools(which ran well until the mid 90's) along with so many other atrocities committed against them over the past hundreds of years.

so you know part of an actual genocide), and then acted like it was all figured out after a settlement. He bedazzled and turned into fantasy the trauma of children who were forcibly separated from their families in a cultural genocide(that involved torture, SA, and murder. It’s estimated that over 20,000 indigenous children were taken, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the families of those affected reached a financial settlement with the Canadian government totaling over eight hundred million dollars.'Įven this description of residential schools is sugarcoating it. The goal was for primarily white, middle-class families across Canada, the US, and even Europe-to adopt these children.

In Canada, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, indigenous children were taken from their homes and families and placed into government-sanctioned facilities, such as residential schools. 'It remained fuzzy until I stumbled across the Sixties Scoop, something I’d never heard of before, something I’d never been taught in school (I’m American, by the way). Then months after reading it I discovered that his book was inspired by Canada's Sixties Scoop. I'll be honest, I read it, and I loved it, writing was great and everything.

The house on the cerulean sea