By Colin Alexander ——Bio and Archives--July 20, 2024
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North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner,
by Marie Wilson (Anansi Press, 2024, 362 pp. Hardcover $34.99)
A Review by
Colin Alexander
This recently published book of reminiscences, by former Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) commissioner Marie Wilson, warrants a review only because she regurgitates widely accepted falsehoods that need to be debunked. Promotion for North of Nowhere erroneously suggests that it represents real history from Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) inquiry.
But as historian Basil Liddell Hart explains “The object [of history] might be…expressed thus: to find out what happened while trying to find out why it happened. In other words, to seek the causal relations between events.”
Wilson’s book follows three multi-million-dollar, government-funded commissions that delivered no vestige of a workable plan for turning things around for the burgeoning Indigenous underclass. Instead, taxpayers support never-ending make-work projects for self-serving Indigenous elites, the equivalent of the “In Party” in George Orwell’s 1984. As for the corresponding proletariat, I know an Ojibwa grandmother who got a $10,000 compensation cheque for her one-year stay in an IRS. Within a week it went for past and current purchases of crack cocaine. I also know an Inuk who got $95,000 compensation in April 2023. After splurging in Ottawa on drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes, by August he was again scrounging for cigarettes.
Wilson’s stated aim is “to dig up as many witnesses as possible, and cross-reference for consistency….” She admits there was no questioning of those telling their stories nor attempted corroboration of what they said. She throws out “the promise I made to the Survivors of…residential........