Evelyn Thompson-George has been hoping someone would write about her father Art Thompson’s experience surviving abuse at the Alberni Indian Residential School.
“ I’ve been trying for five years to get somebody to write this book about my dad. I was asking university professors. I was asking people that have written already, and my mom kind of sat me down,” she said.
“She was like, ‘sweetie, I need to be really honest with you. Dad’s story’s really hard. It’s really, really hard to write about, and you’re asking people that knew love and cared for him, and it’s a little too hard for them to write about.’ So I sat there and said, ‘okay, well why not me? How about I do it?'”
The result is The Defiant 511 of Alberni Indian Residential School, a book that combines Art Thompson’s own words from a pair of court cases in the 1990s, with Thompson-George’s own story and memories of her father woven in.
“I want to not only help navigate the residential school story experience for my father, I wanna start talking about what inter-generational trauma is. I wanna start talking about how my dad had 10 children and each one of us had a different father. Every single one of us had a different version of who he was,” she said.
“My oldest sister had kind of like, one of the worst versions of my dad, straight out of residential school experience and trying to learn how to be a father in his early twenties. That was not pretty, you know what I mean? He had a lot of unhealed trauma, being a father to some of my siblings and for me, starting the conversation about residential school survivor history is going to slowly start building into inter-generational trauma and how it trickled through all of us, because while I had the best version of my father, I still saw things as a child that, you know, adult Evelyn doesn’t do around my children.”
Thompson-George wants potential readers of the book to know going in that it is graphic in sections and can be difficult to read.
“ All I ask is for you to do some form of self-care while you’re reading the book, because it can really be daunting,” she said.
The National Indian Residential School Crisis Line provides 24-hour crisis support to former Indian Residential School students and their families toll-free at 1-866-925-4419
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