Tags: boarding schools, First Nations, Indigenous, Orphans, Social and family issues Categories: Canada Canada, Historical Fiction Canada, Historical Fiction, Intermediate (ages 9-14)Ī young Ojibway girl, struggling over the fact that her father has died, spends a summer in the bush with her grandmother and finds her own identity and voice. Forced to return to his people, he must try to rediscover the old ways, face the officials who find him a threat, and learn the truth about his father’s death. But despite some bright spots, the adjustments prove overwhelming. When Nipishish is sent to a strange town to live with a white family and attend high school, he hopes for the new life the change promises. Both his parents are dead, his father Shipu, a respected leader, dying mysteriously at a young age. But despite his new freedom, the reserve offers little to a young Métis man. The year is 1959, and fifteen-year-old Nipishish returns to his reserve in northern Quebec after being kicked out of residential school, where the principal tells him he can look forward, like all Native Americans, to a life of drunkenness, prison, and despair. Tags: First Nations, residential school Categories: Canada Canada, Historical Fiction Canada, Historical Fiction, Intermediate (ages 9-14) Drawing from her own experiences at residential school, Ruby Slipperjack creates a brave, yet heartbreaking heroine in Violet, and lets young readers glimpse into an all-too important chapter in our nation’s history. And maybe, just maybe there will be hope at the end of the tunnel. Her notebook is the one place she can record all of her worries, and heartbreaks, and memories.

A fear of forgetting the things she treasures most: her Anishnabe language the names of those she knew before and her traditional customs. She misses her Grandma she has run-ins with Cree girls at her “white” school, everyone just stares and everything she brought has been taken from her, including her name-she is now just a number. Violet Pesheens is struggling to adjust to her new life at residential school.

Acclaimed author Ruby Slipperjack delivers a haunting novel about a 12-year-old girl’s experience at a residential school in 1966.

These are my words ruby slipperjack