FEW RESIDENTIAL. SCHOOL SURVIVAL. NARRATIVES have found their way to publication as literature. Segments of hundreds of (largely anonymous) survivor accounts exist within historical studies and government publications, but these are mainly invoked as testimonial evidence and discussed in distinctly non-literary terms. (Such presentation is unsurprising, of course, given the veracity of such accounts depends on their perceived transparency, on the orator's reluctance to ornament, to mould, to play.) In a few instances, however, indigenous survivors have had occasion to record their residential school experiences within book-length memoirs which profit from the technologies of literary analysis. Such life-writings emerge, for the most part, from an extremely small sector of the indigenous population within the geographical space of Canada. A cursory glance at the careers of authors of some of the most famous residential school survival narratives--Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Rita Joe (1)--reveals their distinguished status among the elite of Native letters: all have multiple publications; all are educators, lecturers, and activists as well as writers; all are considered pillars of their tribal communities and of the Native arts community in general; all have received honorary doctorates from Canadian academic institutions and two of the three are members of the Order of Canada (Johnston is a member of the Order of Ontario). Highway, Johnston, and Joe are among the extraordinary success stories to emerge from the assimilationist machinery of the residential school system. As a result, their life-writings both dramatize and serve as evidence for the capacity of the individual to overcome institutionalized trauma. They also relate how tribal languages, customs, and spirituality can participate in the healing of wounded identities which can ultimately be reasserted as viable, healthy, and ongoing through the magic of art. In short, these texts inspire hope with messages of possibility. (2)
