By Kaylie Seed
Content warning: residential schools
Rita Joe’s I Lost My Talk is a simple yet powerful children’s book about the children who were forcibly taken from their families and sent to residential schools in Canada between 1870–1996. These children lost who they were—their culture, their words, their families, their way of life—and were forced to assimilate to the ways of the Catholic Church. I Lost My Talk is a fantastic book for parents to introduce their children to what the residential schools did in the most basic of descriptions.
Joe uses little words throughout I Lost My Talk, yet they are extremely powerful, as she is able to describe what was taken from her without using much detail. Joe also brings up how she just wanted to use her words to share everything about herself, something that was forbidden for Indigenous children to do while in residential schools. Books like I Lost My Talk are a great place to start for parents who are trying to teach their young children about the horrors that happened at the residential schools.
I encourage and urge fellow settlers like myself to continue to educate not only yourself but the children in your life about residential schools and the devastating impact it has had on countless generations within various Indigenous communities.
*I am not an #OwnVoices reviewer and I encourage you to seek out #OwnVoices reviewers for this title.
*Thank you to Nimbus Publishing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.