Between 2009 and 2015, Marie Wilson travelled the country as one of three commissioners collecting the oral histories of Residential School Survivors for Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 

The result of this collaborative work was the extensive official report of 2015 with its 94 “calls to action,” intended to promote and sustain reconciliation into the future.

Almost a decade later, Dr. Wilson has written North of Nowhere, a book about her experiences during those six years of research. She gave a talk before a full audience at the Picton Branch Library last week, along with County Museums’ Curator Jessica Chase.

“Churches have lots of archives.
Government departments have lots of archives.
Children didn’t keep very good records of their lives.
So there was a huge missing piece of the story from the perspective of the children who lived it.”

Dr. Marie Wilson explains the motive of the TRC

Her book describes the job of documenting this missing piece of history. It is an account of honest listening, and the challenges of sustaining this listening. She writes of her personal connection to the mission. Not Indigenous herself, Dr. Wilson grew up with the misrepresentations taught in schools for decades, and the blind eye turned toward well over a century of public policy that displaced 150,000 children — with the attendant loss of entire cultures and languages. 

Then, “years later, I married someone who had been one of those children. Without knowing it, I now had an entire extended family of multi-generational residential school survivors, all raised by others far away from home.”

Part travelogue, part behind-the-scenes documentary, and part reflective memoir, the book offers an emotional connection to the work of the commission, a form of “deep remembering,” as Dr. Wilson calls it. 

“When I was listening to other people’s accounts, I found something jogged in my own experience, my own memory, and that helped me to see their story that much more clearly. And I thought that was a really interesting thing.”

“On the inner level, the invisible level. That was what was happening to me as I was going along. My own memories were showing up. It was so vivid.

“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

Reflecting on the legacy of the TRC she noted, “we were definitely not a perfect commission.”

“I wish we had been more specific about land in what we said. The very fact that people are trying to do land acknowledgments is for us, I think, to understand. But what are we actually doing? Are we acknowledging history? If there’s no present-day reflection on what that means, then there’s clearly work to be done there.”

Dr. Marie Wilson

The work of the Commission continues. 

“We did not foresee that interest would not die out. Here we are nine years on and still getting called, each of us, to speak here and go there. We did not foresee the load of demand and request.

“The happy outcome of this is, I think, we have ‘life after the commission.’ That doesn’t mean that I think for a second that everything is all better and good enough. I don’t think that at all, which is why I keep trying all the ways that I can to keep it alive.”

Dr. Wilson’s book is a key part of that effort. “I hope you will all read this book, that you will experience it as a compelling story that is well told and respectfully told — both of you, the reader, and of the people who are the primary purpose of the book. I wish it to be an ongoing reference book just to remind you of the story of what happened here. It’s our story and we should be reminded of that and be re-energized to keep trying and to keep getting better in the ways I’m certain we can.”

After her talk, Dr. Wilson signed books for a long line of listeners. 

North of Nowhere is available at Picton’s Books & Company.