Rita Joe - I Lost My Talk

I Lost My Talk

Words by Rita Joe

Art by Pauline Young

Copyright Text 2019, Rita Joe

Copyright Art 2019, Pauline Young

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Nimbus Publishing Limited

3660 Strawberry Hill Street, Halifax, NS, B3K 5A9

(902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca

Printed and bound in Canada

NB1401

Design: Heather Bryan

Editor: Whitney Moran

Text on page About Rita Joe adapted from Amazing Atlantic Canadian Women , written by Stephanie Domet and Penelope Jackson, forthcoming from Nimbus Publishing

The publisher is grateful for the generosity of Breton Books for granting publication rights.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: I lost my talk / words by Rita Joe ; art by Pauline Young.

Names: Joe, Rita, 1932-2007, author. | Young, Pauline, 1965- illustrator.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20190159030 ISBN 9781771088107 (hardcover)

Classification: LCC PS8569.O265 I2 2019 | DDC C811/.54dc23

Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

I lost my talk

The talk you took away.

When I was a little girl

At Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away:

I speak like you

I think like you

I create like you

The scrambled ballad, about my word.

Two ways I talk

Both ways I say,

Your way is more powerful.

So gently I offer my hand and ask,

Let me find my talk

So I can teach you about me.

A Short History of Residential Schools

T he Canadian government imposed its Indian Residential Schools program on Indigenous peoples for over one hundred years. It began in the 1870s and ended in 1996, when the final school, in Saskatchewan, was shut down.

Funded by the federal government and run by churches, who saw the residential school system as a chance to create new religious converts, these institutions were not really schools. They were an attempt by the Government of Canada to destroy Indigenous culture and peoples and eliminate what they called the Indian problem. They were an attempt, the government admitted, to take the Indian out of the child. To accomplish this goal, people known as Indian Agents, who worked for the newly created Department of Indian Affairs, would regularly snatch children from their com- munities. These children, sometimes as young as five, would typically remain at the schools until the age of sixteen.

Once imprisoned inside the schools, children were forbidden from speaking Indigenous languages, and physical and emotional abuse were often the punishment for speaking your mother tongue. Hair was cut short or shorn off completely, uniforms were enforced, and numbers replaced names. If a child did have a name, it was an English name given to them by the nuns who ran the schools. Much like Europes

Nova scotia museum

Children outside of the Shubenacadie School, c. 1930.