Though a rather small, unassuming book that took me a short amount of time to read, Wenjack by Joseph Boyden conveyed a story that will stay with me forever. Its brevity is swallowed by its poignancy, carrying with it a great weight in contrast to its size. This weight comes from the tragic history of displacement, death, abuse, and what Boyden calls “an attempted cultural genocide” suffered by the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people of Canada. This was suffered at the hands of the Canadian Indian residential school system, which from the 1870s to 1996 had more than 150,000 Indigenous children over seven generations removed from their families with the intention of assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture.Read More »