Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing

Five hundred years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: substance use disorders and shockingly high rates of depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. With passionate logic and chillingly clear prose, author and educator Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others’ stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization.

Suzanne Methot was born in Vancouver in 1968 and raised in Sagitawa (Peace River, Alberta), Suzanne is Asiniwachi Nehiyaw (Rocky Mountain Cree) of mixed Indigenous and European heritage. She lived for 29 years in Wendat–Haudenosaunee–Anishinabeg territory in Toronto, and now makes her home on the unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw Nation, near Nanaimo, BC.

Resource format: Non-Fiction

Age recommendation: Grade 12 - University

Keywords: Residential school, reserve, knowledge, remembering, learning, family, relationships, letters, memories, memoior, way of life, language, school, traditional knowledge, Anishinaabe, trauma, food, hunger, resiliance 

Year of publication: 2019

Publisher information: ECW Press