Taking detailed notes was something Marie Wilson did every day while she served as one of three commissioners on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2009 to 2015. 

Most of the time, she was recording what the residential school survivors who spoke at the commission’s sessions had to say as they shared their experiences. Survivors shared stories of abuse, of being separated from their parents and families, of being forced to speak English and lose their Indigenous languages. For Wilson, a long-time journalist and TV host, note-taking was an instinctive and natural way to process the often difficult information she was hearing.

Those notebooks, which eventually grew so numerous that they fill a whole bookshelf, serve as the bedrock of Wilson’s memoir North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, published in June by House of Anansi Press. In the book, Wilson tells the story both of her experiences on the TRC, where she was the only woman and the only non-Indigenous commissioner, alongside the story of her own life, moving from her early years in Ontario where she grew up unaware of the realities – and even existence – of residential schools to her adulthood in the Northwest Territories, where she and her husband, former Northwest Territories premier Stephen Kakfwi, raised a family. 

Wilson always expected that she would write something based on her TRC experience, but wasn’t sure what form that writing would take until 2017, when she spent a month at the Rockefeller Foundation’s residency program in Bellagio, Italy. That concentrated time alone with her notebooks and thoughts allowed her to clarify her objectives for the project. 

“[Serving on the TRC] had been a really monumental experience in my life, quite transformative in some regards, and I realized the more I talked with people that the kind of exposure and life that I had had was not typical in any way, and that a lot of the things that I had both experienced and come to understand about all of this were not things that you could easily understand just by living your life in a so-called normal Canadian way,” Wilson said, speaking to Q&Q in late May from Hay River, Northwest Territories, where she and Kakfwi were preparing to open the Northwords Writers Festival with a double-billed event. (Kakfwi’s Stoneface: A Defiant Dene was published last year by Caitlin Press.) “I wanted to find a way to pay it forward, to really share both the beauty but also the profundity of the experience, and to try to do that in a way that people could actually receive it.”

The resulting memoir is structured along the seven teachings common to many Indigenous nations that served as themes for the TRC’s national events: respect, courage, love, truth, humility, honesty, and wisdom. After introducing herself, the commission’s mandate, and her fellow commissioners Murray Sinclair and Chief Wilton Littlechild, Wilson moves through the seven national events that were held in Manitoba, the North, the Atlantic region, Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta. Using the notes she took at the public TRC sessions, Wilson cross-referenced her notebooks to create composite, anonymous quotes from survivors who spoke at the sessions, and organized them based on the theme they best reflected. 

“The consistency of information was glaring,” she writes in an author’s note. “My notebooks reflect both distinct experiences and recurring themes – the individual and the collective. For this book, I have chosen to do the same.”

In a chapter titled “The Longest Day,” Wilson takes readers through the 16 hours of testimony that she and the gathered survivors and witnesses heard in 2013 at the Alberni Indian Residential School in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. It was the longest day of testimony in the commission’s six years, and new issues and ideas were raised there by virtue of its sheer length. 

Wilson says that in the editing process, her editor questioned whether this chapter was essential. “After I consulted with my health advisors,” (Wilson wanted to ensure she was not doing any harm to others by sharing so much difficult testimony), “I went to the editor and said, ‘It really needs to be in there; otherwise, I’m talking about an issue but I’m not revealing the issue. I’m sugarcoating it,’” Wilson says. “Readers are grown ups; they’ll skip ahead if they don’t want to read it. But what they can’t do is not believe it.”

She includes a very specific content caution at the start of this chapter – a note to survivors that this might be a chapter they need to skip. But she urges all others who do not have first-hand experience of residential schools to read on. “Do not flinch. Do not hide,” she writes in the content caution. “I cannot make it softer for you. This is what I witnessed. This history belongs to all of us.”

Wilson is transparent not only about the often difficult experiences survivors shared with the TRC, but also about difficult experiences from her own life. That, too, is intentional.

“I wanted it to be accessible in the broadest sense of the word accessibility, and part of the way that people access human experiences is in relation to their own human experiences,” she says. “If you talk about why were people not talking about [their experiences at residential school] in their homes, and why was there such a cone of silence, I can’t give a universal answer to that, but I can tell you what my own experience was in my own home and with my own husband.”

Kakfwi is a residential school survivor, and his first efforts to face the reality of what he had experienced “eventually blew up our family,” she writes. “It was a long, painful crawl back to a shared life.” Kakfwi’s experience determined how Wilson set up her own supports for the difficult work as a TRC commissioner: “any details about the experiences of other Survivors could trigger traumatic memories for him, too,” she writes. “It was unfair and unreasonable for me to expect support from him in that way.”

But as Wilson capably demonstrates, the TRC did not just involve sharing difficult subject matter and heartrending stories of childhoods stolen by the Canadian government that developed the residential school system. There are moments of great levity and deep connection, between survivors and relatives at the events, between the commissioners themselves, and between Wilson and her family.

Wilson hopes readers take inspiration from the stories shared within the book to look with a more humble lens on Canada and our place within it. 

“We cannot reconcile with strangers,” she says. “We need to come to know each other better as the friends and neighbours we were supposed to be, and as peace and friendship treaties are supposed to ensure.”

Photo of Marie Wilson by Tessa Macintosh Photo.