Book Review: The Fire Still Burns: Life in and After Residential School

Several times each month, we are pleased to republish a recent book review from the Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR). CLLR is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD), and its reviews cover both practice-oriented and academic publications related to the law.

The Fire Still Burns: Life In and After Residential School. By Sam George with Jill Yonit Goldberg, Liam Belson, Dylan MacPhee & Tanis Wilson. Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 2023. xi, 133. Includes reader’s guide. ISBN 9780774880855 (softcover) $21.95; ISBN 9780774880879 (ePub) $19.95; ISBN 9780774880862 (PDF) $19.95.

Reviewed by Stephanie Karnosh
Reference Librarian,
Cassels

The Fire Still Burns: Life In and After Residential School is a personal memoir by Squamish Elder Sam George, recounting his early life on a reserve, his time at St. Paul’s Residential School in North Vancouver, B.C., and how that experience tainted the rest of his life. Though not strictly a legal text, this book illuminates and elucidates the residential school experience for those keen on contributing to reconciliation.

An afterword by Jill Yonit Goldberg explains how Sam George’s memoir came into being: George participated in a course at Langara College run by Yonit called Writing Lives, which focuses on interviewing survivors of the residential school program to contribute to the Truth and Reconciliation movement.

George begins by describing his memories of his home and community as a young child. He recalls a family situation in which his older siblings took care of the little ones when his parents were busy, and his grandmother “Ta’ah” lived down the street. The Elders all spoke the Squamish language, which George understood but couldn’t speak. The members of his band gathered as a community for large dinners or days at the beach; the children went to the movies together or swam in the ocean or fished.

George describes a somewhat idyllic childhood, markedly free from interaction with white people—until the day the RCMP came to the door and marched him and his siblings up the hill to the local residential school. There, George would become known to the nuns who ran it as “Number 3,” the number he was assigned upon his arrival.

At residential school, George learned a great many things, including how to become invisible, how to take care of himself though still a child, and how to look out for other kids as well. He also learned that running away didn’t do any good, as he would always be found and hauled back, although that didn’t stop him and many others from trying. The nuns also inculcated the children with the idea that they were “ugly and dirty.” George permanently lost hearing in one ear from a beating he endured while at school. In the meantime, he was also tacitly learning that white people meant pain and hatred; he suffered both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the nuns who were supposed to care for him.

George makes clear that all the children at the school absorbed some amount of the nuns’ loathing into their psyches. For years, George kept the sexual abuse hidden out of shame. After leaving school, he began drinking heavily, which eventually led to fighting and jail time. After several years of cycling through incarceration, parole, and more incarceration, George found work as a longshoreman and over time it grew into a career. But still he anesthetized his emotional pain with drinking and drugs, as did many of his family members and friends who had also lived through the residential school system.

After years of addiction followed by periods in rehab, George finally found relief through Tsow-Tun Le Lum, an Indigenous rehabilitation centre that used traditional methods, such as sweat lodges, as well as talk and writing therapy to treat addiction. George not only managed to overcome his addiction, but he also found a great measure of healing. He explains, “I’ve come back to my culture and helped others—younger people—come into it. Sweats. Sundance. These things saved me. I’ve been doing them for more than twenty years. Now I’m a Sundance Chief.” In addition, he worked as a counselor at Tsow-Tun Le Lum to help others not only overcome addiction, but also to find their way back to the Squamish Indigenous community.

Sam George’s story is not only culturally significant but is crucial in a legal context for any depth of knowledge of the scars left by residential schooling and any notion of how reconciliation must move forward.

The Fire Still Burns would be an excellent addition to any law library serving Indigenous people, or to any academic library with an Aboriginal or Indigenous Law collection. While some may ponder its suitability in a private firm, any lawyer practicing Aboriginal or Indigenous Law would do well to sit down with this book and drink deeply of the story within.