On residential school records

The centre of the battle to recover our children is trying to recover where they are and what happened to them — the truth about what happened to them. We can’t do that without records. The churches kept records. Government agencies and ministries: their records are somewhere, too. We need a place for our people to be able to easily search online for records, like a search engine. I don’t know how far away we are from that, but it’s something we are so in desperate need of.

On her connection to Treaty 9

We often talk about blood memory and about how there is no coincidence. Things are meant to happen. And, through the course of writing this book and just putting all of those little, tiny pieces together, you can see that to be true. Being on the Albany River more than a decade ago [as a journalist for the Toronto Star], I didn’t know that part of my family was always on it — that they were flowing in and out of it. Even writing Seven Fallen Feathers, I was writing about Treaty 9 territory. It’s always been an area I can feel in my bones. And the people in my life, they were all from there. They’ve all been part of the stories I write and my story for the last 13 or so years.

On the enduring consequences of the Indian Act

It’s completely bizarre to have a race-based piece of legislation still on the books in a modern country. It’s remarkable to me — and it’s really problematic, too. It’s the piece of legislation that enshrines our rights, our status. Indigenous Services Canada still has the ability to look at our lineage and say, “You need a card.” We have to come up with something better, but it has to be our people that decide what that “something better” looks like. And that’s not something we can negotiate; it’s something we have to tell Canada we want as Section 35 rights holders, as the people who made the treaties with the Crown and the government to create the country that we’re all now in.

On doing the right thing

I took my mom and my daughter to go meet Ed Janiszewski. He is the one who found the cemetery [where Annie Carpenter was buried], and the information about it. If it wasn’t for his perseverance [Janiszewski successfully lobbied to have the site of the Lakeshore Asylum Cemetery in Toronto restored and maintained], it would still be a dog run and a dumping grounds. And that is, to me, the beauty of this story, as well. The story of Annie, and of non-Indigenous Canadians standing up and saying, “there’s a graveyard here and we have to do something about this.”

On honouring the strength of Indigenous women

I realized I was really writing a book about the strength of Indigenous women. It just came barrelling through at me every time. As I was looking at “country wives,” for example — what happened to our women being taken and married off [to fur traders] at 13 or 14? What did those women do, and how did they survive? They were always thinking about the kids, and it was always about survival. And that really just spoke to me. Only when I finished the book, I really realized that the great theme of the book is the strength of First Nations women and mothers.