Author Tags: Disaster Essentials 2010 Literary Landmarks Poetry Travel


Articles: 5 Articles for this author

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After his marriage collapsed and he'd chucked his tenured teaching job in Montreal, Vancouver-born poet and editor Gary Geddes bought a 31-foot sloop called The Groasis and learned to sail it-slowly-to produce Sailing Home: A Journey Through Time, Place and Memory (Harper $32).

My literary predecessors were legion-such as James Cook, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver-so I planned to maintain a respectful distance from their journals.

There were three female exceptions.

Kathrene Pinkerton, whose Three's a Crew (1940) was published the year I was born, recounts her adventures upcoast with her husband Robert and daughter Bobs. I was particularly fond of this book because it casts Kathrene and family as duffers with even less knowledge of the sea than I possessed, although Robert had some mechanical competence and Kathrene was capable of fine writing and acute observation.

M. Wylie Blanchet, a widow with several children, cruised the Inside Passage over several summers, condensing her experiences into a minor classic called The Curve of Time (1968).

The third member of the trio was Beth Hill, whose Upcoast Summers, published in 1985, pieces together the 1933-1941 journals of Francis Barrow, who travelled the coast with his wife Amy and two black spaniels and managed to record encounters with 227 coastal residents.

If these upbeat, affectionate accounts had a downside, it was in their implicit reminders that sailing is more enjoyably done with company and that the working population of the remote coast that I was setting out to find-farmers, loggers, fishermen-had almost disappeared.

As inspiring as these books were to me as I gunkholed my way up the Inside Passage, where hazards are innumerable and support can be minimal, I wanted to do something different. For me, a trip up the coast would be not so much a discovery as a recovery narrative, a way of getting in touch with people and places and events from my own past.

I felt that I knew and, in some ways, owned the coast already.

My grandfather had drowned off Point Atkinson, his body never recovered. My mother swam alongside the boat for miles in Howe Sound as a young woman before dying of cancer at age thirty-four. My father had been part of the rescue team at the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver. He and I had fished together commercially in Rivers Inlet. I had spent several summers on the waterfront, loading trucks and boxcars at the B.C. Sugar Refinery in Vancouver, working at my uncle's boat rentals in Whytecliffe and, later, driving water-taxi between Westview and Texada Island.

The lure of the coast is such that people will try to travel it in anything that floats, including bathtubs, canoes, leaky rowboats, ancient hulks with dangerously high superstructures, kayaks, houseboats made of plastic, rotting clinker-built trollers, concrete sailboats, perhaps even bamboo rafts if, as seems likely, Asian and Polynesian navigators actually made it to the West Coast.

My own expectations were modest: I wanted a sailboat that was roomy, seaworthy and cheap, but with devastatingly beautiful lines and an exotic track record. One of my friends recommended I phone an acquaintance in Victoria who did legal work for the artistic community and might know where to begin. This proved an interesting lead.

If I were prepared to give up the idea of sailing, the voice said, and willing to do some basic carpentry work, I might be able to use one of the two gillnetters currently serving as props in the Scott Hicks movie of David Guterson's stunning novel, Snow Falling on Cedars. The price was right and my earliest experiences in boats on the coast had taken place on my father's gillnetter in Rivers Inlet, so this was a tempting offer. However, I was determined to sail as much as I could and I wanted a boat with a real rather than a fictional history. I also knew better than to try composing my modest memoir in the shadow of such excellence. Eventually, boat and owner came together as if the hand of fate had intervened, though you'll have to wait for that part of the story.

Sailing Home is not for professional seamen or the archetypal beautiful person on a yacht; rather, it's for the rest of mankind, those of us who, with warts and failures and impossible dreams, have tried to go back, with or without a boat, tried to find that intimate space, or state of mind, called home.

When I set sail at the tail end of the second millennium, I was joining the ranks not only of intrepid mariners, but also of complete novices such as Charles Darwin, who emptied the contents of his stomach over the gunwales during three-and-a-half years at sea on the Beagle, and a religious crusader named Jeff Bauchmann rescued off Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island on July 3, 1999 with no charts or maritime experience, only the two hundred bibles he was planning to deliver to Russia. When the Canadian Coast Guard picked him up, he was heading in the wrong direction. Although my missionary zeal was of a different kind, and my library of offerings to the Russians would have had considerably more variety, I certainly knew the feeling of being way off course.

First I had to learn to read a chart ("No, Gary, asterisks are not decorative. They're symbolic; they represent rocks.";), figure out how to handle a headstrong boat, and learn to navigate in a sea teeming with personal and tribal ghosts.

I was, from the outset, a sort of floating anachronism, crawling across the surface of the sea on my belly, because so much coastal travel is now done by air. My speed, five nautical miles per hour, seemed good to me; I needed to slow down, decompress, take stock, to look long and hard at the places of my desire and, perhaps, see them again for the first time.

It was a scary and glorious misadventure. In due course, tide-lines would became song-lines; life-jackets merge with book-jackets; boat and book share something we refer to, quaintly, as a launch.

[Gary Geddes / BCBW 2001]

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Vancouver, BC - The West Coast Book Prize Society is proud to recognize Gary Geddes as the recipient of the fifth annual Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence. British Columbia's Lieutenant Governor, the Honourable Steven Point, will present the award at the Lieutenant Governor's BC Book Prizes Gala to be held at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in Vancouver on April 26, 2008. The event will be hosted by broadcaster Fanny Kiefer. This prize was established in 2003 by former Lieutenant Governor, the Honourable Iona Campagnolo, to recognize British Columbia writers who have contributed to the development of literary excellence in the province. The recipient receives a cash award of $5,000 and a commemorative certificate.

The jury for Geddes' award consisted of Carla Funk, poet laureate for the city of Victoria; Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of BC; and Mel Bolen, owner of Bolen Books, Victoria. Carla Funk, wrote, "From 15 Canadian Poets to Skookum Wawa to 20th Century Poetry and Poetics, Gary Geddes has raised the literary profile of both our province and nation, and has long been considered one of Canada's most important men of letters. He has given decades of his life to teaching Canadian literature and the craft of writing as well as working as a university professor, writer-in-residence, critic, anthologist, translator, editor, and most importantly, writer. Gary Geddes' writings have crossed countries and continents in performance and translation. He has received numerous awards, including the E.J. Pratt Medal, a Canadian Authors Association prize, two Archibald Lampman awards, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize for service to literature and the people of Chile. His work as a poet has been generous in its outward-looking gaze. His poems bring song and light into darkened corners of the human experience, document silent and hidden lives, and enter politics through the individual and the personal. His newest book of poems, Falsework, explores the 1958 collapse of Vancouver's Second Narrows Bridge. His meditative memoir Sailing Home: A Journey Through Time, Place and Memory (2001) chronicles his return to the West Coast with a deep sense of awe and gratitude for the beauty, wildness, and history of this place. In whatever genre he pursues, Gary Geddes writes with eloquence and intense awareness of mystery within the commonplace, and the single human voice singing inside the crowd. He tells the truth, in all its rawness and splendour. For the integrity of his creative work, for his active and generous promotion of other writers, and for the words he has given to help map the literary geography of British Columbia, we proudly celebrate Gary Geddes.";

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GARY GEDDES was born in Vancouver in 1940. He was raised for four years in Saskatchewan but grew up primarily in Vancouver's Commercial Drive area. He became a lay preacher for the Baptist church and a singer in one of Vancouver's first rock combos. He received his PhD in English from the University of Toronto and has edited important college anthologies such as Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics (1969) and Skookum Wawa (1975), a breakthrough volume for BC literature. Described as Canada's best political poet by critic George Woodcock, some of his major poetry titles are Letter of the Master of Horse (1973), War Measures and Other Poems(1976), The Acid Test (1981), The Terracotta Army (1984) and Changes of State (1986). Geddes has led a literary delegation to China, founded a subscription-based publishing company and he teaches at Concordia University. Gary Geddes lives in Dunvegan, Ontario.

T: War Measures & Other Poems is an odd book to come from a westcoaster. Where do the politics and the interest in French Canada come from?
GEDDES: You can't grow up in BC without becoming political. Either you get on the bandwagon and try to milk the land, or become a socialist-there seems to be no easy middle ground out here. I guess my fundamentalist background left me with an overactive conscience too, like all those other Baptists who ended up in the CCF. As for Chartier, the mad bomber, he was a westerner too. He knew about marginality. He was French-Canadian and an Albertan. I found in his death a symbol for something tragic and deadly in our culture. He had no means of redressing the injustices he felt. He thought politicians were crooks. Many of them are. What good was his vote? He decided to take a stick of dynamite into the House of Commons. Was he going to throw it from the gallery? We don't know. The newspapers laughed at him, as a not-so- beautiful loser, as another Canadian failure, as a fool. One paper denied that his act was Canadian. We don't act separately here, it said; we are violent in groups only. Therefore, Chartier's act is meaningless, essentially American.

T: Your Chartier is not an assassin.
GEDDES: No, he seems cut out for something else. Whether he changed his mind when he got there, seeing all the school children in the gallery, watching the minister of consumer affairs picking his nose and reading the Globe or remembering another alternative, that of the Buddhist monks in Vietnam, who gave up their own lives in protest to the American presence-whatever it was, Chartier ended up taking his own life. Who's to say he didn't intend that all along, and who's to say it was not the most powerful gesture possible? Some of our contemporary terrorists should remember that.

T: That was a long answer. It's also a long poem. How do you keep a poem that long from collapsing in the middle, or turning to sludge?
GEDDES: Maybe you don't. I tried something different. I used the form of diary jottings, to keep the sections short and lyrical, highly charged and with the kind of intensity of image of a stopped frame in a film. Kroetsch called those sections narrative remnants, a phrase that makes sense to me. The reader is kept alert by both the intensity of the image, hopefully, and the energy and attention required to stitch together those non-linear, but still interconnected, narrative remnants.
For the long poem, you need many different strategies, but it's the most exciting form in my view, and the one that separates the sheep from the goats. I leave it up to you to decide which is which.

T: How did you come to spend time on Vancouver's Commercial Drive and what part did that landscape play in your life?
GEDDES: When the family returned from Saskatchewan, we lived briefly with my father in Rivers Inlet, where he was gillnetting. That landscape continues to haunt me in quite a different way, for its excess, its exotic qualities, the vibrant colours, the scale of trees and mountain and ocean. Commercial Drive was bleak in comparison, a poor decompression tank for immigrants and white trash waiting for a break to get them into the suburbs. I don't know how much of that I noticed as a kid. I was too busy making a living and trying to survive on the street.

T: Was it all that negative? GEDDES: That experience was not pleasant, but it wasn't totally negative either. It's the stuff legends and stories are made of. I sometimes wear my poor years as a sort of proletarian badge fried bologna and baking powder biscuits, hustling coal sacks and hubcaps, living in a drab flat over a store at the corner of Fourth and Commercial- but it was also rather magical, since that's where I began to learn about sex, where I started to earn money from working for a hunchback jeweler, where I bought my first second-hand bike that gave me the freedom of the city.

T: So the poverty is a fiction?
GEDDES: No, but it's convenient legend to use sometimes in polite, pretentious company. We were poor. The family received food baskets at Christmas and clothes from friends at the church. My father had drinking problems and health problems, so there was not always sufficient money available. My mother worked in Toot's Cafe at the corner of Broadway and Commercial for fifty cents an hour and tips, at a time when she should have been at home looking after my younger brother, who was sick.
Still, the Drive had the best view in the city, if you looked north. I'll always miss the mountains I could see almost any day of the week. And the trams and streetcars.

T: The place seems to be central in a number of ways in your life, if only in name.
GEDDES: Yes, it's my St. Urbain Street. My father drove cab like Duddy's father. I learned to hustle on the Drive, working at various jobs, coming quickly to the opinion that only work would get me out of there. Ironically, many of my writer friends are now moving to the Drive; it's the only place I could possibly afford to live if I returned to Vancouver. I know what you're getting at though. The many different hats I wear as a teacher, editor, writer, publisher and general propagandist for culture in Canada may have some roots in the Drive. Not in the commercial sense, but certainly in terms of drive. A. Y. Jackson once said that the only way an artist can survive in Canada is to become an institution. That's my impression too. Especially for poets. Who wants to pay for a poem, or a book of poems? So I teach, I do a few odd jobs that are useful and that bring in money to support my family and my almost secret vice of poetry.

T: But you've had some success, and some support too.
GEDDES: Yes, I'd say I've been very lucky. The kid on the Drive would never have believed all this. Still, I was a romantic and had great hopes for myself. I wanted to be a preacher and save the world, from what I'm not sure. Now I think I'd like to save it from people like me.

T: Poetry as a substitute religion?
GEDDES: Yes, fakirs and fakers. Jimmy Bakker and Mahatma Gandhi. I think of writing as a way of getting in touch with my deepest feelings. I don't lay these feelings out on the page like dripping laundry. I wring them out and cut them up into very different forms, to make something new with words that will take others deeply into themselves, not into my life and its problems.

T: You take refuge from yourself in masks.
GEDDES: Which one am I wearing now?

T: The concerned, earnest poet-as Baptist mask.
GEDDES: Obvious I should throw that one away, it's too transparent. The mask helps me to find a voice. I seem to be able to get into the heads of my characters by using the first person more easily than I could talking about them in the third person.

T: Is that part of the legacy of the coast?
GEDDES: More the legacy of being human, being insecure. Our culture in Canada, perhaps even more so in BC, has always been anti-intellectual, afraid of the mind and afraid of the imagination, resources cherished in many other countries. I had to work hard to overcome the sense that I should be seen and not heard, that my accent was odd and my thought processes were unattractive. We all live with that as Canadians.
Beyond that, however, I have my own need to remain private. A writer gives himself away with every word he writes, I realize that. But I find it difficult, and not entirely valuable, to write about my own daily life. That life sifts into everything, of course, and colours the most seemingly objective material, even something as exotic and non-native as Letter to the Master of Horse and The Terracotta Army.

T: What is it that is personal in those works?
GEDDES: Frye once said that every poet has one or two structures of feeling that are absolutely central to him and his work, and that these structures are often consciously or unconsciously announced in the titlepoems of the author's books. I'd say that I am preoccupied with injured figures, figures caught in the machinery of society or politics or religion. There's something common between the narrator of Horse, Chartier, the potter in Xian and Sandra Lee Scheuer, who was killed at Kent State University. Perhaps a good shrink could tell you why I write about these individuals. I might even venture a guess or two myself, but not today.

T: Yeats said "everything that is personal soon rots."
GEDDES: Yes, but he was also writing out of his own deepest needs and desires as he said that. It doesn't really matter what material you begin with. What matters is what you do with that material. Or, what it does with you?

T: What do you mean?
GEDDES: I'm not sure, but it sounds right. Material that is personal becomes objectified in the process of creation; material that is objective becomes strangely personalized, receives its stamp of style, of character. So, too, the author changes in the process.

T: No man steps twice. .. GEDDES: That's it, yes. The processes are quite mysterious. The Russian Jewish poet Mandelstam talked about writing his own death or his wife described the process as it worked in his poems. The poet creates and falls into his own myth.

T: Art as self-fulfilling prophecy, then.
GEDDES: Recently there was a film on television about the life and death of Claude Jutra, a Quebec filmmaker of great importance, and a gifted actor and director. He committed suicide not long after he discovered he had Alzheimer's disease. He drowned himself. In one of his early films there is a scene in which the central character walks off the end of a pier and drowns, the concluding moment of the film. There are signs in the other works as well.
Pat Lowther's poems are full of signs that we might say prefigured her own death by violence. I don't want to fall into this way of thinking about writing, or about art. The author's death is the least important detail. The work is what matters, regardless of the path taken or the price paid.

T: You were talking about material being personal.
GEDDES: Personality is a masquerade. What lies underneath is bedrock, unchanging, eternal, if anything is eternal. That is what art aims to discover. Al Purdy's domestic poems are romances. David McFadden's delightful first-person comedies are fabulous fictions created by a psyche that is quite startling, quite severe.

T: And behind Geddes's poems about injured figures?
GEDDES: Perhaps a degree of violence that desperately needs capping. Is it an accident that this interview is taking place on Main Street in an East Indian restaurant that used to be called, not in jest, the Razor Blade Cafe?

T: Excuse me while I move to the next table.
GEDDES: Do you know the Indian concept of "deep-name"?

T: No.
GEDDES: It's the name by which God would really know you. Not as Alan Twigg, but a real name, such as He-Who-Would-Shoot-From-The-Hip- Before-Falling-Off His- Horse. That sort of thing. In analysis once I described the experience of having my father come from Saskatchewan, after my mother's death, to take me to live with him and his second wife. I was sitting on the piano bench. I'd had only twelve piano lessons. I'd learned to playa few pieces. When my father arrived at the house, he was sitting behind me on the couch and I was playing the piano. As I recounted this story for the psychologist, I burst into tears. Deep sobs. Ii suddenly became clear to me that I had been playing for my life. I had to get that piece right or my father would not love me, would
not take me with him. Of course, that was not accurate at all, but that was how I had perceived it at the time and, perhaps, how I have perceived it unconsciously all these years. There I was on my island piano stool. And that is my deep-name: He- Who-Sings-For-His-Own-Life.

T: And of course poetry can be said to be a form of singing too. Just like making music on the piano.
GEDDES: I sang all the time as a kid. Certain songs on the radio used to make me weep. I never knew why, just assumed I was a sentimental slob. Recently, I learned that my mother had sung all those songs to me as a child, even while I was in the womb. The feelings of loss clung to the notes and lyrics. I used to sing in my potato patch in Saskatchewan, and in the outhouse. Poems must have been a continuation of that urge to sing.

T: For self approval, or the approval of others?
GEDDES: Both, obviously. At a certain point, however, the singing serves other functions than self validation. You start to sing of the tribe, to keep the record, to bear witness. Most poems come to me as a gift. The coincidence of elements that allows me to write a poem has little to do with me. I have to keep alert and keep my language self in good shape, like a volunteer fireman. I have to be there at the right time, ready to work. I believe language is a collective and communal treasure. My job is to try to write another poem, not take credit for what is done.

[STRONG VOICES by Alan Twigg (Harbour 1988)] "Interview"

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Three events in British Columbia drew world attention during the 1950s. Englishman Roger Bannister and Australian John Landy eclipsed the four-minute-mile barrier at Empire Stadium during the Miracle Mile (on August 7, 1954); north of Campbell River, engineers generated the largest non-nuclear peacetime explosion in human history at Ripple Rock (on April 5, 1958); and eighteen steel workers and one rescue diver were killed when the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed during its construction (on June 17, 1958).

In 1958, having just graduated from King Edward High School, Gary Geddes was working on the waterfront at BC Sugar Refinery, loading boxcars with 100-pound sacks of sugar, so the news of the bridge collapse did not take long to reach him.

"What I did not know at the time,"; he says, "was that my father had been called out as a former navy diver to stand by in the search for bodies in the wreckage. I've carried for a long time the image of him dangling from his umbilical cord of oxygen in that cauldron of swirling water and twisted metal.";

Geddes has imagined the voices of those most directly affected by the accident for an unusual collection of poetry, prose and archival photos called Falsework (Goose Lane $19.95). The title is an engineering term that refers to the temporary supports that are required for a cantilevered bridge under construction.

"In this case,"; he says, "a mistake was made and the horizontal I-beams were inadequate to support the weight. It was a simple mathematical error that should have been picked up by both the contractor, Dominion Bridge, and the consulting engineers, Swan Wooster and Associates.";

The Second Narrows Bridge was renamed the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge in 1994 to commemorate the tragedy. To this day many British Columbians are haunted by the event. This summer, when Geddes read from Falsework at the Denman Island Writers Festival, a woman in the audience recalled working as a telephone operator in 1958-and every conversation she overhead on that fateful day mentioned the bridge failure.
978-0-86492-498-8

[BCBW 2007] "history"

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Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care
by Gary Geddes
Victoria: Heritage House, 2017
Reviewed by Mary-Ellen Kelm

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Sandy Morris grew worried when his brother Ivan did not return from surgery. When Sandy went to Ivan's cot on a ward in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, he found two orderlies stripping it. He asked them what they were doing and where was his brother. They responded by twisting his arm behind his back to punish the impertinence of speaking to them at all. When they were through abusing him, they walked away, one orderly saying over his shoulder that Ivan would be of no use to Sandy now; he was in the morgue. Tearfully Sandy ran to the basement where he found Ivan on a gurney. Terrified and heartbroken, he pulled back the sheet to reveal Ivan's face. Leaning forward to kiss his brother one last time, he felt the subtle feathering of breath against his cheek. Ivan was alive. Clamouring noisily up the stairs as only a little boy can, Sandy confronted the orderly asking him to bring his brother back up the ward - he was not dead. The orderly responded: "If you want your brother so badly, bring him up yourself.";

While shocking, such stories no longer surprise us as Canadians. We have heard many like them of the Indian Residential Schools. Gary Geddes, in Medicine Unbundled, makes the case that the Indian Hospitals, like the one at Nanaimo, were part of an integrated system of institutions, including the residential schools, designed for the suppression of Indigenous peoples and having long-lasting health impacts on them. Canadians know little of the Indian Hospitals; their history is only now being documented. There were once twenty-two of them, mostly in the West, although there were three in Ontario. They were opened in an era when health officials worried that intransigently high rates of tuberculosis among Indigenous people (status and non-status Indians, Métis, and Inuit) would undermine the control over the disease that public health measures were gaining among Canadians. The Indian Act made treatment compulsory for status Indians with communicable diseases and so they had little choice but to go to hospital often far from home and sometimes on a moment's notice. Their hospital stays could be long, lonely and traumatic. Geddes writes that the treatment offered in Indian Hospitals was outdated. There surgeons continued to perform procedures, including the removal of bone, gland and lung tissue, long after such surgery was considered effective treatment. Antimicrobial drugs made their way to the hospitals first through clinical trials but their introduction as treatment was inextricably delayed. Not surprisingly, Geddes notes, few Indigenous people he met trust our medical system.

This book is not so much about medicine, though, as it is about relationships, about conversations and about listening. It begins with a conversation between Geddes and Joanie Morris, a Tsartlip survivor of Kuper Island Residential School and the niece of Sandy and Ivan Morris. Her mother spent seventeen years in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital. As she learns to trust Geddes, she opens the door to others who might wish to share their stories and they in turn introduce him to more people until he has travelled half way across this country. Some bring photos but mostly they talk and they challenge Geddes, and us, to listen. When he wonders whether he, as a white man, should be doing this work, Joannie responds, "Hey, Gary, no one has listened to us for the last two hundred years, so why don't you get off your butt and be the first?";

Listening, as it turns out, can be a problem for Canadians. As Joanie puts it, "the problem I have with white people is that they don't listen."; Publishers told Geddes that "no one in Canada cares about Indians."; For decades, Canadians dismissed the testimony of residential school survivors or simply refused to hear it. Some still wish to see the "good"; in the schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its public events across the country offered all Canadians a chance to hear survivors' testimony and many thousands did just that. Through the massive TRC report, we can hope that the weight of such testimony has removed disbelief.

On the Indian Hospitals, Geddes finds, we have a long way to go. Our ears remained blocked, partly because the stories are so horrific, but we have learned through the TRC that such stories are nonetheless true. Geddes, and the people he met, worry that Canadians will not listen because we are still inclined to weigh documentary evidence as more trustworthy than oral history. For those who want the documents to speak, getting access to them is not easy. Geddes, it seems, was refused access to the archival files he requested. Some of the most compelling examples of medical abuse remain uncorroborated - children, now adults, recall repeated vaccines, or other shots, but without school medical or hospital records we cannot know what the vaccines were, or why or how they were administered. Sometimes the records seem simply to no longer exist, such as those of the mysterious deaths at the Brandon Sanitarium in the 1950s. Access denied, files destroyed, Geddes writes that the archives have been cleansed of the evidence of our atrocities. We cannot hear the stories we cannot find.

Mainly, Geddes argues, we have trouble listening because we lack a narrative into which to fit what we are hearing. The national history we embrace -- of the multicultural peacemaker -- simply does not equip us to reckon these other stories, the ones Geddes tells here of residential schools, medical abuse, and the segregated hospital system. As Canadians we remain fractured from our own past until we find a new narrative: one that embraces all of our history, the contradictory impulses, the heartbreaking realities alongside the growth we perceive in ourselves. Without the truth, we cannot heal. That is, we - Canadians -- cannot heal. As Richard Wagamese wrote: "It's been a story of generations of abducted children, intergenerational pain and wounds passed down because the whole story has not been told...First Nations people know that. It's time that Canada came to understand the nature of that truth as well."; As we approach the 150th anniversary of Confederation we can start to craft a new honest history of our nation, one that embraces the darkness of that past.

As in his previous books on violence and reconciliation in sub-Saharan Africa, Geddes is fascinated by healing. Repeatedly, he asks the people he speaks with why they are not angry, why they do not hate. They respond that in healing they have let go of their anger. They are turning inward to their own cultures, their languages, their foods, and their medicines. This is what Indigenous writers like Taiaike Alfred and Lee Ann Betasamosake Simpson call resurgence. It is healing for Indigenous people by Indigenous people.

There is not much of Geddes the poet in this book. Yet there are compelling images here. An eagle and a heron battle in the sky above Geddes' Thetis Island home; the heron escapes the raptor because it has strong wings that carry it aloft to safety. Thetis Island sits adjacent to Penelakut Island, where Kuper Island Indian Residential School once stood -- the site of many of the saddest and most terrifying stories in the book. Thetis is Penelakut's twin, Geddes tells us; they are connected. Just as Canadians are connected to these histories, to this past, and to Indigenous people now and in the future.