Learning To Be White At Saskatchewan's Residential Schools

It's easy to forget about the legacy of Saskatchewan's residential schools, especially if you live, as I do, on the east side of the city.  Last weekend, however, I found a primer-type picture book at a garage sale, stamped inside with the name "St. Phillip's Residential School".  The book's insensitivity to culture needn't be pointed out, and was indeed the point.  These schools sought to eliminate the "indians", or at least make them White. 

A few pages from the reader...

St. Phillips Residential School was opened in 1899 and closed in 1965.  It was located in Kamsack, Saskatchewan.  

For more on the residential schools, I highly recommend the following websites:

• Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools 
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
• Saskatoon Public Library's Indian Residential Schools: Histories, Biographies, and our Future

Miracles Do Happen

I finished Augusten Burroughs' This is How in a matter of hours.  I know I will read it again and again.  It's a book worth owning, just to know it's there on your shelf, just in case.  

Augusten Burroughs, on miracles (from, of course, This is How):

“Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. Because we are all, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space. There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see. In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation. In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas. And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun–itself a star on fire–when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass. All of these are miracles.”

I am in love with an old wooden trunk

Why is it that I always plan out a garage sale route, even when I know the best ones are the ones you just come across?  I'm utterly delighted with this old wooden trunk I found in Saskatoon this past weekend.

It could have been the best garage sale ever.  The proprietor, a woman in her eighties, told me that she and he husband weren't necessarily downsizing but "you can't keep everything".  She had been a teacher; he a scientist.  I was at the sale for over 2 hours, as she showed me the best reading games and the books her children loved as kids. 

Then, when I had packed two boxes plus the trunk to take home (on my bike) she insisted on delivering my purchases to me later that evening.  I told her I could take the bus, or make several trips since that's what I'm used to doing anyway.  But she would have none of my nonsense and delivered my trunk and boxes at 8 pm that evening. 

Ain't it grand?