In his novel Kukum, Canadian author and journalist Michel Jean lent his voice to his great-grandmother Almanda Siméon, who came to Quebec from Ireland in 1875 at the age of three and married an Innu. In the sequel “Atuk” the author alternated with his grandmother Jeannette as the narrator. Jean presented his third book translated into German in Vienna on Friday. “Maikan” tells of brutal attacks on young indigenous people in re-education camps.
“My mother’s cousin was in a boarding school herself. Nothing that I describe in my book is made up,” the author assures in an interview with APA. For many decades, children of families from Canada’s eleven First Nations have been taken away from their parents by state coercion and taken to distant church boarding schools. There the “savages” were to be alienated from their culture and language of origin and turned into French-speaking “civilized people”. However, what the new book, the original of which was published in 2013, describes is not just an inhumane policy towards the autochthonous population, as is also known from the USA or Australia, but also a reign of terror by some monks and nuns characterized by brutality and sexual abuse were called “Maikan” by the children: “Wolves”.
Over the decades, around 150,000 children are said to have been “transformed” in such institutions. 80,000 of them are still alive – and the number of those who are severely traumatized with alcohol and drug problems is high. While the goal in these schools was to “kill the Indian in the child” (and over 4,000 children actually died there), the 1960-born author, who studied history and sociology and became a television journalist, received repeated hearings from relatives : “You have the Indian in you.”
The positive acceptance of his origins finally changed his life, says Michel Jean. He accepted the task of telling regarding the difficult fate of his people, also driven by the realization: “Who should do it if not me?” There are hardly any literary testimonies from members of the First Nations, it was only through the astonishing success of his books that others were encouraged to tell their own stories, so that there is now a narrow literary scene, but one that includes around a dozen names.
Later, during his reading in the Hartlieb bookshop in Vienna-Alsergrund, Michel Jean was touched that so many people in this country were interested in his books and his people and assured those present: “You don’t need to be ashamed that you know so little regarding us. Most Canadians are like you. We learned the official history of the settlement of Canada in school, but nothing at all regarding the people who used to live here.”
The cultural differences are quite remarkable: “While the Christian world view is taught in school, in which man is at the top of the creation pyramid, the natives consider nature to be a valuable good that is worth protecting, into which man must integrate, because it feeds him. Most Canadians are critical of the way white settlers treated Native American tribes and find it hard to believe that a similar injustice has happened in their country. And while demonstrating once morest the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, they ignore that something similar to the boreal forest being made in their own country. Most people have the image of huge forests in Canada. But today there is only a meager remnant of it. The timber industry has hardly anything left.”
As a journalist and as an author, Michael Jean will not run out of topics and stories any time soon, he is sure of that. The Canadian public still has much to learn. The boarding school Fort George on an island in James Bay, which is the setting for “Maikan”, existed from 1936 to 1952 – but the suffering has a long-lasting effect. The novel tells in two story lines regarding the experiences of the three young Innu Marie, Virginie and Thomas in the clutches of the “wolves” and regarding the efforts of a young, dedicated lawyer decades later to track down the three people who had disappeared from all registers as recipients of compensation payments and to give them to deliver late justice.
In 2007, the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada” was founded, modeled on South Africa. Since then, people have come a little closer to the truth, says Michael Jean, but “it will take a few more generations for reconciliation.”
(SERVICE – Michel Jean: “Maikan – The wind is still talking regarding it”, translated from French by Michael von Killisch-Horn, Wieser Verlag, 196 pages, 21 euros)
