Yellowknife resident Marie Wilson, a former CBC North broadcaster and director, played a central role on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
For years, Wilson served as the lone non-Indigenous commissioner as thousands of people gave testimony about their experiences in Canada’s residential schools.
Nearly a decade after their publication, the commission’s final report and calls to action are still shaping much of the nation’s response to the trauma generated by residential schools and colonization.
Wilson has published a book – North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner – that partly documents the inner workings of the commission and partly serves as a memoir.
“It’s a human ability to relate to another human being. To say, ‘Oh my God, what if that had been my child?’ And to realize that is what happened to over 100 years of generations of kids in this country,” Wilson told Cabin Radio.
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“I made the conscious decision that in writing my book, yes, I’m going to take people on the practical outward journey of the commission. Yes, I’m going to share – to the extent that I think it’s of public value – my internal journey of how all of this played with me and affected me.
“But I am also going to bring people to the rooms they did not come to, so that they can hear first-hand what survivors said for themselves. Because if I learned anything throughout the commission it’s that there’s not a single word our chair, or my co-commissioner or myself could ever say that could carry the same impact as what survivors said for themselves so powerfully, sometimes so graphically, very often so poetically, and always so compellingly.”
Wilson said she wanted her book to form a separate record.
“Not as an alternative to the TRC report, our reports. I’m proud of them and I think they speak for themselves,” she said.
“But they’re written as reports, they’re more antiseptic. They’re not through the lens of a beating heart. And I offer this book through my own beating heart, both as a commissioner, and as a mother and grandmother, and as a human being who cares about those around me and those I live and interact with.”
Listen to Marie Wilson and Ollie Williams discuss the book, her role as a commissioner, and Canada’s response in the years since the commission’s final report and calls to action were published.
