Marie Wilson’s  newly-published “North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner” is a tour de force. 

Richly woven, it is part memoir, part documentary. It’s also the kind of book you’ll want to read more than once – not only because it reveals an important part of Canadian history, but because the overall story is so compellingly told.

The book starts with a story about Wilson’s mother-in-law watching Canadian TV at home in the Northwest Territories. 

“Out of the blue”, Wilson writes, her mother-in-law Georgina exclaims: “I don’t live northwest of anywhere! I live right here!” 

You’ll have to read the book for the full meaning of Georgina’s statement, but it signals that this is not going to be your typical Canadian history book.

North of Nowhere tracks the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s journey across the country over a period of nearly 7 years, starting in 2009. Commissioners listened as Indigenous people shared deeply painful accounts of the hours, days and years after they were removed from their families and taken away to Canada’s residential schools. These schools operated from the 1870s to as recently as 1996.

North of Nowhere is also the personal story of the author and her own family.

Wilson was the only woman, non-lawyer and non-Indigenous member of the commission, which meant she had a lot to learn. That also gives non-Indigenous readers an extra on-ramp to what lies ahead as we follow Wilson on her own learning journey as a commissioner.

Wilson had grown up in a Scottish-Canadian family in a small town in southwestern Ontario. She was bright and ambitious but had no clue of the amazing life that lay ahead: that she would teach in Africa, work as a radio and television journalist in various Canadian cities, marry a Dene activist and raise their family with him in Yellowknife, where she would become head of CBC North and he would become premier of the Northwest Territories. 

It was a life full of public service, family, and Indigenous traditions – and a secret. It took years before Wilson found out that both her husband and mother-in-law were survivors of Canada’s residential school system. 

“Not affectionate. Not warm. Not close,” is how Wilson describes her mother-in-law in the book’s opening chapter. She didn’t know that Georgina had been removed from her own family, sent to residential school far away, and had lost most of her family  – most while she was away, the rest soon after she returned. Decades later, as the TRC panel would hear repeatedly, difficulty in showing familial love is typical behaviour for people who had never been raised in a family. It is also perhaps the mildest example.  

Marie Wilson, left, is welcomed to The Readers’ Nook bookstore in Cobourg, Ontario, where she did a reading & interview. 

Marie and her husband Stephen had shared 15 years of life together before he started to tell her about his experiences – stories he had hidden from almost everyone. Stephen had also been taken away to residential school, far away from his family, at only nine years old.

“He was my husband,” Wilson writes. “And he was lying beside me as this story seeped out of him more than forty years later. Drip, drip, drip…” 

“This scene of Stephen as a small child melted away so much of my anger from past letdowns – the sequels of rage and silence, the physical and emotional disappearing acts of our life together.”

Years later, as the Commission prepared to launch, one of the first steps it would take was to adopt a slogan for the TRC’s work ahead: 

“For the child taken, for the parent left behind.”

In some ways, Wilson and fellow commissioners Murray Sinclair and Wilson Littlechild were prepared for what lay ahead. Wilson was the spouse and daughter-in-law of survivors, TRC Chair Murray Sinclair was the child of survivors, and Wilson Littlechild was a survivor himself.

And in some ways they weren’t prepared. 

The testimony they heard from survivors or their children as the TRC travelled across the country was painful and often gut-wrenching.

Schools, often run by Christian churches,  that allowed the physical and sexual abuse and emotional deprivation of young children in their charge.   

Survivors who tried to blot out their painful memories with alcohol and drugs. 

Children neglected or hurt by parents who grew up in institutions, not families. 

And how the trauma of survivors sometimes repeated themselves in their descendants through self-destructive behaviours and the inability to love or be good parents.

Wilson, in an interview for this article, says:

“The most challenging part to write was also the most challenging part to experience as a Commissioner.  It was every aspect of the residential school story that relates to what happened to children in this country. With every account of harms to them, I felt the pangs any loving mother or parent or grandparent would feel in imagining, ‘what if that had happened to my own beloved child?’” 

Some shocking moments in the TRC and the book came from elsewhere. After 18 months of widely televised hearings, the Catholic Church’s most senior official in Halifax stunned the gathering by saying: “This gathering is educating me. I came here just a short while ago. I am hearing about this for the first time.” 

The crowd erupted into angry boos and the three commissioners were themselves caught flat-footed, their leadership tested. How they recovered and moved forward is one of many suspenseful moments in North of Nowhere. 

North of Nowhere is in fact, full of teachable moments. We, the readers, feel shock and deep sorrow as survivors relive their experiences, but also feel enlightened, encouraged and hopeful for reconciliation as we follow the TRC journey through this book.

Marie Wilson is now on a cross country book tour. She says she hopes readers will see the strength and inspiration in the stories that residential school survivors have shared with Canada and the world.

“I hope that all will be inspired and determined, with deeper understanding and more compassionate eyes, to engage in the continuing work of redress, relationship-building, and rebalancing of resources and opportunities, in the spirit of ongoing reconciliation, both within this country and wherever else in the world these lessons may be relevant.”

North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, is available through all bookstores and online booksellers.