Donate to orange shirt society: orangeshirtday.org/ Donate to Indian residential school survivor society: www.irsss.ca/ News report on the 215 children from British Columbia: www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mass-grave-residential-schools.html News report on Saint Ann’s survivors: www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5809846 LEARN Indigenous history &contemporary issues for free: www.ualberta.ca/admissions-programs/online-courses/indigenous-canada/index.html Watch Anishinaabe author Melissa Blair discuss this: 1) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6977106398328950021?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890 2) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/7013456154789530886?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890 3) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6985301545122270469?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890 4) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6980380687186676997?q=melissa%20blair%20tj%20klune&t=1700262711558 Bring Chanel home: www.bringchanelhome.com/ Books to read: www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/behind-the-smile-a-survivor-of-the-metis-sixties-scoop-9798650933168?shipto=US&curcode=USD&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzL2L-PLLggMVCZ5aBR2WnwtQEAQYAiABEgK4lfD_BwE m.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781928120339?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImIPGjPPLggMVlZxaBR1FxwsNEAQYAiABEgLOnfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&invid=17711259781&NMPi&Google www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh-raised-somewhere-else-a-60s-scoop-adoptee-s-story-of-coming-home-9781773630205?shipto=US&curcode=USD&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3qP0qPPLggMVh5qGCh2VOQ1EEAQYAyABEgJg0vD_BwE
Thanks for bringing attention to the schools. I'm from BC so it's really close to home. Some of my cousins are part of the native community here and it's been really difficult to feel the need to empathize with them and not really knowing how or what's appropriate - wanting to be with them and simultaneously feeling like there's a gulf between us (that probably doesn't exist in actuality, but it's pure anxiety). It just really makes me sad that I don't really know what to do besides just focusing internally to try to understand it as best I can and hope that I'm doing a good job at self reflection. It's just deeply depressing and confusing to think about. Sorry for the ADHD ramble lol, I just appreciate you bringing it up.
I am working as an archaeologist in British Columbia and have been involved in the archaeology around the Residential School unmarked graves. A large part of my job in the past was educating people about what those graves really mean. The article you linked is actually an example I used of the media reporting incorrect information on the topic. Firstly, they were not mass graves, they were unmarked graves. A mass grave is a single grave where multiple bodies have been buried. However, an unmarked grave is exactly what it sounds like, unmarked single burial sites. These graves are not news to the First Nations of British Columbia and the other provinces in Canada. I did a small project inspired by a series of photos I found on how in the 1990's First Nations people would go to the Residential School cemeteries and have traditional cultural ceremonies to honour the children who were buried in the unmarked graves there. Many of these graves were, at one point, legal and even marked (with a tombstone). The children who were buried there often died of the things that all children died from at that time, including Tuberculosis, influenza, and other illnesses. However, they died from these illnesses at a higher rate than white Canadian children, due both to the living conditions of the schools and the lack of medical care provided to them. There also are likely many who died from abuse- there is an example from one residential school in Northern British Columbia where a group of young children (under 10) ran away in the winter time and died from exposure trying to return to their home; the coroner remarked that their bodies showed extreme abuse. Other examples of abuse leading to death have been shared by survivors as well. That fact that there are children that likely died from abuse is not in question. However, one of the biggest issues of these graves is that they are unmarked, and that the children who were buried there were not returned to their families for burial. After residential schools were shut down, the upkeep of these cemeteries was ended, if there ever was any, and the sites were allowed to be used for industrial work, in some cases causing the ground to be too contaminated to safely excavate the remains of the children without a massive cleaning effort (there are multiple examples of this). First Nations people knew about these graves and were talking about them long before the news was, decades before, but until an archaeologist actually scanned the area in Kamloops with ground penetrating radar (GPR) and proved that the children were buried there, no one was listening. Another thing that is important to realize is that no excavation (digging) has been done on these graves (at the time of writing this), and GPR is not 100% accurate, especially when the remains are small. Any number of things can look the same as a buried body under GPR, so context is needed to make any claim of a burial. For the residential schools, the survivors (people who attended the Residential school) tell the scientists were the cemeteries were located, and based on that, and where each positive result was, archaeologists were able to say that there is a certain likelihood of human remains buried. That is not to say that there aren't unmarked graves, but it is important to realize how complicated the process of identifying them is, and where we are currently with regards to actual excavation. Some First Nations want to have excavations completed so the relatives of the children can bury them with the rest of their family, or to discover what the cause of death is for each of them since evidence of abuse suggests a chance there could be murder victims among them, but others would like to leave the remains of the children where they are, and instead mark the graves properly with tombstones. Another thing I want to mention is that each Residential School would have had a cemetery like this, just like any boarding school at the time would have as well, although Residential Schools were very different from boarding schools since the entire purpose of them was to systematically erase Indigenous cultures. I just want people to understand that the historical evidence indicates that it wasn't some sneaky thing where the children were killed and buried unofficially- it is that their graves were not properly marked, they were not taken care of, and the families of these children were not allowed any say in the burial, were not told where they were buried. It was that these children were in some cases physically abused, and no accountability was held by the people responsible. In other cases, children were not abused, but they were still forced to assimilate as a means of cultural genocide. The cause of death for many of these children is whatever the Canadian Government sanctioned authority documented it as. That doesn't mean there wasn't murder, but it also doesn't mean there was, unless someone who was at Residential School with the deceased child remembers a case specifically. What is known for sure is still horrible though. Some of the parents of these children would have had their child taken away and then be told later that they had died and been buried at the school, or heard nothing and have no idea whether their child was alive or not. I'm sure anyone can imagine how traumatic that would be. approximately A few parting notes: -the last Residential School closed in 1996. -Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese is a good fictional example of some people's experience at Residential School. I had to read it when I was in school. A few sources: Site for the children who died after running away: www.nadleh.com/lejac-residential-school Site for an example of how one Residential School unmarked grave site was commemorated: globalnews.ca/news/4387921/regina-indian-industrial-school-cemetery-plaque-highlights-dark-chapter-in-canadian-history/ Evidence of TB deaths: www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IRSR11-12-DE-1906-1910.pdf Other sources I thought were fairly nuanced about the issue: c2cjournal.ca/2021/08/digging-for-the-truth-about-canadas-residential-school-graves-part-one/ larongenow.com/2021/07/19/radar-search-for-graves-at-site-of-former-residential-school-in-delmas-a-long-process/ www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-kamloops-indian-residential-school-215-exhumations-1.6460796 undark.org/2022/03/28/how-radar-is-helping-track-down-lost-indigenous-grave-sites/
I'm a member of the Penelakut tribe. My uncle was one of the RCMPs that investigated the oblate brother who was caught raping boys at the Kuper Island residential school. Since the residential school there is on a small island, I always wondered how many children drowned.
I feel like TJ Klune grew up with this idea (like most of us) that marginalized people, but especially queer people, are hated because those in power fear them. That probably has to do with the choices he made in the first book and the reason why he sees the world the way he apparently does. He probably still truly believes that "phobia" in the word homophobia actually comes from fear of anything different and, in this case, straight. That is also why he probably believes in kindness as the answer. My guy is so privileged in other areas of his life that he's still trapped in this false narrative that they made us, queer people, believe: that our fight is only about who we love, and the right to get married in the system and whatnot, when it's actually much more than that. The whole reason why "love is love" was so well accepted by corporate media, was because of its power to alienate us from the reality of the harm that is systemically done to queer people, especially those who are not white, abled-bodied and live in the global north.
I feel like the reason why people like TJ Klune ignore modern indigenous issues is because they were taught that all the issues happened in the past. As an American who also went through that same education, it sucks to see how easily it gets ignored, like Native American suffering isn't as relevant as other types of suffering. Most reservations aren't allowed to support themselves financially because of federal laws that keep them from doing that, leading to extreme poverty for those living there. Not to mention the lack of documentation for missing indigenous women! And these governments...don't care. The battle to keep reminding people that this is NOT a past issue, but a present one, continues.
A recent portrait book called Project 562 by Matika Wilbur documents every federally recognized Native American Tribal Nation in the U.S. (The title came from the number of nations that existed when she started the book in 2012, but she explained this total is an ever-changing number.) I love it because it's beautiful, but it also documents such a diverse group of indigenous people living today. It's not a history book. And even though Matika Wilbur is indigenous herself, almost all of the information and history she shares comes from the interview subjects themselves because YOU WILL ALWAYS BE IN A BETTER POSITION TO ELEVATE MARGINALIZED PEOPLE'S VOICES IF YOU LISTEN TO THEM TELL YOU WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THEMSELVES FIRST, TJ, THIS IS NOT HARD.
I am indigenous (Caddo, Oneida, and Ojibwe). What residential schools did to my family was awful. People in my family weren’t able to speak their languages anymore. Then with the laws that outlawed us from practicing our own culture, which was only overturned when my mom was 3. None of what he is writing is ancient history. It’s so recent for so many of us. No one on either side of my almost immediate family are able to speak our languages, some of us were only given a watered down version of our cultures. Others none at all. What residential schools did is abhorrent. What it caused for so many indigenous people is unspeakable. it’s disgusting.
Many Indigenous activists also feel that the 60s Scoop is still ongoing in Canada; Indigenous youth activists have taken to referring to it as the 'Millennium Sccop' to parallel their experiences and the failure in care they received with what happened in the 1960s-1980s.
Thank you for this video Rachel, I just donated $50 to the Indian residential school survivor society. This used to be one of my favourite books, I'm grateful you have brought this to my attention.
I'm pretty sure this happened in Australia, Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland, at least. A lot of countries had Baby Scoop Eras. There are different ways they were implemented, but unfortunately it's not very surprising that so many nations have systematized the scale of controlling pregnant people's bodies. I believe that in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, it took the form of kidnapping Indigenous children and effectively trying to erase any connection to the cultures they were taken from. Sadly, there historically have been multiple approaches to evil people controlling the fertility of those with less power. In addition to taking Indigenous children, the U.S. Baby Scoop Era involved pressuring pregnant teenagers to live in an institution until delivery (often called being "sent away") and highly pressured to sign away their parental rights. There are so many horrifying stories from people who survived this about the kinds of things people would say at these institutions to pressure them to cut any contact with the baby--so many people weren't even allowed to hold their baby before they were taken away, and even though these were mostly religious institutions, the workers had no problem lying to these teens about their rights and berating them to try to get them to cut off contact with the baby. (I've read two really excellent books about this time in U.S. history: The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler and The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce.) On top of all this, there was the same kind of systematic approach to sterilizing Black people, disabled people, and other marginalized populations against their will. I won't get into detail because this comment is already too long. (But read Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens and/or google U.S. maternal and infant mortality statistics by race if you want to be outraged and sad.) I wrote all that to point out that while some of these details and some of the dates might vary by country, it's so upsetting to know that so many families all over the world have lived through this kind of systematic trauma. The U.S. Baby Scoop Era had its peak from after WWII to 1972, when the country's Supreme Court legalized abortion (RIP). Most people whose children were taken in the U.S. had to just go back to their old lives and act as if nothing happened after delivery. They weren't going to get any sympathy or even acknowledgement from the people around them, so they just lived with it. Some of them are still alive. It's so heartbreaking to think about all that unacknowledged trauma in my own country, then realize, oh, robbing people of autonomy in family planning seems to just kind of be the law of the land everywhere.
Rachel this is such a important video and thank you for making it…..I am mixed native myself and attended ceremony for kamloops and several other mass child grave sites and have every year as my chronic illness allows……this video was a tough watch for something so close to home, and may I share a bit of my story for added context of how all this information directly relates to things still continuing today, including residential schools? -one of my aunties attended a residential school in my area called oak grove Lutheran academy. She was not hit or abused by the staff and teachers there, however she heard many a rumor of young girls in her class being groomed and sa’d by different predatory teachers. White men. She was stripped of her family and her culture, although they repackaged it and spoon fed it to her under the name “American Indian heritage course”. One of her most prominent memories from grade 4 is listening to her teacher, a white woman, speak on Lakota ceremonies. Not even a specific one , but read from the book that it was a event where dancing took place and ceremonial cutting. She finished the passage with a confused look, as if this were the first time she had ever picked up this book to read to the class, and ended it with “huh, that doesn’t sound like a very fun ceremony.” My auntie graduated in 2010. Oak grove might have caught up with laws of corporal punishment , but they are essentially a repackaged residential school with a shiny new PR-approved propaganda exterior but still hold the corpses of our culture and our children beneath it. -I was adopted in 1998, a little over a year after my birth. I was told the decision was completely up to my bio mom bc my native father did not want me and had no living relatives to care for me or help my stay and learn the culture. I learned at around middle school age I had aunties and uncles fighting endless court battles I never knew abt when I was a toddler to regain custody, or to at least allow visitation and enroll my into certain programs available for preserving our culture. -I was legally adopted bc of bullshit blood quantum rules . My 2 cousins , who were placed with the ant and uncle of my own foster family, both had enrolled immediate family of turtle mountain and standing rock. Bc of this enrollment , paperwork for legal adoption could not go through , so they worked in a loophole where they just fostered both of them their whole life and maintained the story that “your family back on the rez doesn’t want you”.
Thank you so much for sharing. I hope you have been able to reconnect with your family and culture despite all the legal bs your adoptive family and the government has put you through
Your comment made me remember how recent all this is. I graduated 2011 and the only reason I learned about residential schools and the disproportionate amount of indigenous people in the downtown east side, was because I chose a social Justice course as an elective. As a child I had benefitted from doing girl guide camps on indigenous land and learning songs and singing with members of the Musqueam nation. It shook me to my core to realize these people who had treated me with nothing but kindness and shred their culture with me could have had it so ruthlessly suppressed. But even after learning all that I still did not fathom just how recent the legacy of residential schools was. “British Columbia” was built on the blood of indigenous people, and settlers like me need to see this ugly truth. I know nothing can ever take back what was done, but I hope for the best for you and your family.
"I learned at around middle school age I had aunties and uncles fighting endless court battles I never knew abt when I was a toddler" "maintained the story that “your family back on the rez doesn’t want you”." Thank you for sharing your story. You're so young yet the generational trauma is still so fresh. There are new wounds being created alongside old wounds continually being opened and millions of Canadians think everyone should just move on.
i live not too far from kamloops, where the 215 bodies were found. when i heard about it, it didn't feel real for a while. and then i read that MORE bodies of indigenous children had been found, also in MASS GRAVES. it's horrifying, it's devastating, it's heartbreaking.
I did a report on Residential schools in high school and it was truly horrific. It made my heart hurt because it was thoroughly awful what happened to them and the last one was closed in the 90s! The people directly affected by this - not just generational trauma - are still alive. Many First Nations and Indigenous people in Canada are inherently distrustful of the Canadian education system as a natural result of the deep trauma. It's not just what happened to them at the school which includes all kinds of abuse, but the fact that once they were eventually back in their communities, they had been completely divorced from their culture and the sense of alienation and isolation that results. Because they were not accepted into the culture they were forcibly assimilated into, but trauma would block them from connecting to their own culture.
As a mixed First Nation's Canadian, who grew up in foster care, this whole entire thing is so disgusting and hurtful. And I see why so many people called this out. Even before you said what it was inspured by, the WAY the orphanage and "the orphans" were written is so gross. Making them monsters and scary so so so brought me back to parents friends not wanting their kids to be friends with me because I was obviously a bad influence because I was in care. This guy never should have wrote this book. Or if he really really wanted to, not made the orphans inspired by stolen Indigenous children monsters. Edit to add: The GENOCIDE of First Nations people is so well documented in official government documents, personal letters between government and church leaders, that there is no way that this guy did not understand that the 60s scoop was a part of government sanctioned genocide.
For the little that it's worth: it has been and is sometimes still very possible to inoculate yourself from seeing these stories and the history. Especially if you are white, cis gendered, and in a vaguely comfortable economic situation. You can listen to the voices directed to you by sources you have been trained to want and trust, and it's only by coincidence that someone in this demographic (there probably are others, but I can't encompass entirety in my feeble comprehension) even learns about these horrible events and how people have been oppressed and treated as less than human. As someone who only learned about the Tulsa massacres (not sure if singular or plural) in my 50s (yes, I'm older than dirt), I feel disappointed with myself. I hope I can do better, but given this, I am not sure.
Oh I'm SO glad you're talking about this book. When I first read it, it immediately became my new favourite book, it brought me so much comfort and joy, That all went away when I found out about the author's inspiration for the story. I was so disappointed (and shocked).
I'm glad I saw this before reading the book. My grandfather was stolen during the 60s scoop. I can't even begin to describe the long reaching effects on our family. I don't want to read a book based on it, let alone one that perpetuates negative stereotypes that the orphans* are dangerous...
Really well informed and researched video, Rachel. As a Canadian who didn't learn a thing (other than racist stereotypes and general attitudes towards) about the Indigenous Peoples of Canada until I was well out of high school (I was a very dedicated student; it was simply not in our curriculum whatsoever, especially being in the education system of the most conservative province in the country) but have since been horrified learning of Canada's shameful past and secrets coming to light with the sharing of knowledge the internet has allowed for and the discoveries of Indigenous children's mass graves, I think it's a great service you've done here to shine a spotlight and show real world implications and consequences that are still ongoing, especially of the young girl who is being fought over by a murderer's white relatives and a victim's tribal community. I have not read the book but I know of it. It was even recommended to me by a close friend who is a part of a shared bookclub. At our next meetup I will bring this up.
Ex-lawyer here…in court cases where wrongs (torts) have been found to have occurred, the general assumption of the law is that the one thing which will fix the problem is money. Specifically, damages of the monetary kind. And based on my experience over the last few decades, it really is serious monetary penalties WHEN ENFORCED that bring about the most change. I wish it was kindness. The reality is that money talks.
it is uh absolutely fuckin wild to me that he describes his book as a "quirky fantasy" and then literally a sentence later is talking about it being inspired by one of the darkest periods in all of canadian history as if those two sentences belong beside each other. i've visited both so-called residential day schools and the "boarding schools" and the major difference between the two was obviously child separation from their family, often times permanently. but they all had the same purpose of indoctrinating colonial values/mindsight into indigenous children from a young age to try and "save them". and although there is the sixties scoop, it stands to mention that the majority of children in crown custody to this day are still indigenous; the act has never truly stopped, it just evolved. 58.3% of children in foster care in canada are indigenous, yet they make up only 7.7% of the child population. to USE this horribly traumatic issue in your story without fully considering the weight of context behind it, to know that trauma has never been experienced by you as a white guy, and in fact it was largely people who looked a whole lot like you doing these evil acts... that shit is so unbelievably cowardly to make money off butchering their very real stories and offer them no activism or representation in return, it's awful.
I'm a huge hockey fan, and when the news about Kamloops broke, it was one of the most brutal few weeks as reports and stories kept coming out. The hundreds if not thousands of flowers left in tribute were such an outpouring of love for these children who deserved so much better. Survivors spoke out and their stories were devastating. This had the hockey fandom on twitter in such a tight hold as people continued to research residential schools. The continued conversation of MMIW was also brought back, the way Canada has treated indigenous populations from the beginning was brought up again. All this to say, TJ Klune screwed up in a way that is so present, that is still so felt, and it's so frustrating to watch people who liked the book write off his behavior just because they liked the book. Thank you for talking about Chanel too.
Fellow hockey fan here. Just to say that, since I'm not from Canada, I had no idea any of that happened and it was through hockey media during that time that I learned about it. Watching Carey Price cry in front of the media was fucking devastating. It's insane to me that they allowed journalists to ask him about his grandmother, but in the end it was just another symptom of how how hockey has a clear whiteness problem.
It's also weird when he says, "We're so divided these days," Like we weren't 'divided' before? Even worse most times? He seems to think people being pissed at being enslaved, murdered, segregated, arrested, converted, etc. is just a misunderstanding and that those being crushed under rich bigots should only rebel with kindness and passive polite protest. Like if you're a straight white guy maybe things seemed 'peaceful' back then because you didn't have to listen to women, POC, gay, and trans people's voices. I literally don't know what he means when he says that. But like, he's gay, so he should know that right?
I am immediately suspicious of anyone who says those words. Like fuck them, people have been brutalized for their differences since the beginning of humanity. Being fortunate enough to not experience that oppression fries these people's brains and they cannot comprehend what others have gone through.
I didn't know the inspiration for this book, but as an Indigenous person (my ancestors come from the cerulean sea, the Salish sea), I remember it giving me a weird feeling. I just went back to see my Goodreads rating, and I had given it 2 stars. When my daughters were small, I developed PPA, and part of it was fear that my children would be stolen from me by social services. I had no reason to fear that technically, aside from being Indigenous, remembering birth alerts, the sixties scoop, the millennial scoop (the scoopings haven't stopped, people! 53.8% of children in foster care are Indigenous, despite only making up 7.7% of children in canada.) What does he get for saying the story was inspired by Indigenous pain? It certainly must not have gotten the reaction he was hoping for.
thank you for this video, Rachel. I never comment, but I have to. my grandmother was part of the 60s scoop and it caused so much damage to this day. I find it insulting some authors give themselves the right to steal our voices and proceed to gaslight us. #everychildmatters
It's horrible that the abuse of First Nations continues, and this kind of book is NOT what we need. If he wanted to help, he'd actually do more effort than just chanting "people need to be nice"
His book has brought overall focus to the situation. So why is that bad? You guys weren’t even talking about this before. Prob most of you weren’t even aware. Now, you’re all flying your high and mighty flags. What exactly are you doing other than being critical of a writer? Are you going out there to take actual action against these injustices - NO, all you’re doing is commenting how outraged you are about the author writing about this, but that’s all. You bunch of posers!
@@girlloveshemp642 You realise many of the people talking about this are in fact Native Americans, and were already performing activism and being ignored, right?
@@girlloveshemp642 In my area, every high school student is required to take an Indigenous perpectives class that includes this in the curiculum. Many colleges also require a similar course. Indigenous people have been talking about it for decades. Acting as if this is new information is taking away from their voices. Also, the fact that the author thinks Indigenous people were treated this way because of "fear" instead of hatred and predjudice almost suggests that there was some kind of justification for the horrors that many people experienced for decades
I'm so glad to see someone I trust with book opinions covering this. I've been furious about it ever since I learned about the background. I felt like I was going nuts because everyone kept praising it and saying how good and important it is. I was like "..... really, y'all? Do you not understand the issues with fictionalizing a traumatic situation and then spinning it into a heartwarming story while not addressing the actual problem? The bar is so low that it's in hell."
It's not a problem if I ask should I read the book? I brought it more then a year ago, and I haven't got to actually reading it. And i heard about it pretty mixed things (It's eather a "it was a great book" or a "it was good, but could have been better in a lot of ways", and now the writer doing this). Sorry if I sound stupid.
@@Alexandraadftxr7052If you have it and decide to read it, realize what he did. Do a close reading and a reluctant one (which is a type of close reading). Use it as a reflection tool. Or at least that’s what I would do.
@Alexandraadftxr7052 read whatever you like, I think it's just important to have an awareness of the context of the book and acknowledge it. Personally I didn't enjoy it even without knowing the background, but most people seem to like it.
I refused to read this book by him because I knew him from the Green Creek, a series that made me SO uncomfortable. Spoiler alert: it's a werewolf romance, the protagonist is 16 when a 10 year old imprints on him and chooses him as his mate; then when the child turns 17 and the protagonist is 23, they start getting romantic 🤢 huge NO for me. Predatory vibes all over. And the writing level and style is of a 12 year old writing fanfiction (no offense to 12 year old ff writers, I was one of them so i know what I'm talking about 😂). His popularity has always perplexed me. Anytime I think of him I think about the criminal age gap romance and bad writing and my brain just shuts down. This video made my feelings about him even stronger. Indigenous people aren't animals, they don't need you to speak FOR them. They DO have a voice. You just need to listen to it and amplify it. Indigenous people don't exist to cater to your white savior complex. You only call them voiceless because it's convenient for you. (Apologies for my English)
Yeah he seems to have a thing for age gaps. I don't think I'll pick up anything else by him. Definitely not now I first read Cerulean Sea and admittedly loved it. So then I picked up Bear, Otter, and the Kid... Yeah I thought the age gap between the main couple was so weird. They're like ten years apart which would be fine if they hadn't basically grown up together, and that Otter admits he started crushing on Bear when he was only 16 and he was in his late 20s.
Wasn't just me who thought that age gap was weird as fuck 😝 And i'm not even the most pure and moralistic about age gaps (Late teens and early twenties have similar levels of maturity, in my vision). If they had met already grown up, wouldn't be a problem, but 10 to 16? when they have an older brother/young brother relationship? WHEN THEY SLEEP IN THE SAME BED? And the fact that family knows the kid chose him to be his mate and just accept it as normal... this book is a wet dream to the ones who have older brother issues.
I’m just grateful someone else finally pointed out that he wrote a book that a child came onto an adult repeatedly. I got halfway through and I had to stop. It was so beautiful in the writing but I couldn’t get past the gap because it was so GRATUITOUS. Like you don’t need them to be young like that.
I’m a huge werewolf fan but the age gap is so unnecessary I only read wolfsong since it sounded like a nice werewolf romance Yeah I’m not continuing the series
I didn't realize Chanelle's case was still ongoing. I feel like I last heard about it over a year ago. No child deserves to get treated that way. I hope she's home safe with her community soon.
@@danabeetle Oh thank goodness! I was scrolling through the comments in hopes that someone would have an update. That story is both infuriating and heartbreaking. At least she has a chance to heal now.
The Chanel case is crazy to me. I've worked in family law court before, explicitly in a case involving a father who murdered his wife and dude lost his parental rights with a quickness the second the next hearing came around. I can't imagine how the courts wouldn't immediately have declared it within the best interest of the child to not have her life determined by a literal murderer
It really is madness! It's infuriating! The case that inspired "Dear Zachary" was a similar situation, where the judge ruled that the living, homicidal parent was no longer a danger to anyone because the source of her ire (her ex-boyfriend) was gone (because she fucking killed him). So this lady kills her ex, has her victim's baby while in jail, and gets custody of the child once she gets out of jail (which was also a fucking light sentence, barely a year IIRC). The victim's parents fought so hard for sole custody of their grandbaby and were denied time and again in favor of the person who killed their child. And that idiot judge was proven to be WRONG in the worst fucking way imaginable!
Offering this here as a First Nations person - a general rule of thumb is to capitalize the I in “Indigenous”. This is because “indigenous” is used when describing plants and animals. And although I and many other Indigenous folks see no issue with being grouped in with our non-human kin, Western society already does so much to dehumanize us. Running with the theme of “reading is political”, so is writing and editing. It’s a subtle difference but it matters
I feel like so much of how he writes the story adds to the layer of ick I felt when I found out the inspiration of the book. - the quirky Tim Burton-esque vibe of things when the topic is fairly serious -how the hateful people in the book are comically portrayed as downright insultingly stupid... Hate is not something you get rid of with intellect. To basically go "well all these people are uneducated idiots and so they are hateful of children and people different from them" feels like a disservice to the messaging. It feels so holier-than-thou and like Klune is saying he and his characters are SO much more inherently smarter and morally superior. -the whole premise of "well these magical beings are inherently dangerous in some ways, but it's irrational to be afraid of them" always puts me off. -the conclusion at the end of just "oh just believe in the system!! it needs to change but it can't change overnight!! it just takes time for it to be changed with kindness from the INSIDE!!" is just incredibly naive and reeks of someone that hasn't actually looked at history with any critical thought. You'd think for a queer author he'd have more insight, but it just feels like tepid white centrism from a place of extreme privilege. I cannot wrap my head around why he thought he was apparently the voice for these issues when he can't even understand the core of the issue to begin with... and to think there's a sequel where he is doubling down on it too. Just complete clownery.
I have to be honest, I liked the book, but I never loved it and I couldn't quite understand the level of adoration it got online. The child characters always felt very thin and underdeveloped, like they weren't full characters but just props to help Linus understand 'oh monsters are people too, just like me'. Now knowing where he drew inspiration from that adds a extra layer of discomfort to that read, along with the now even worse implication of making his allegory for first nations people literally monsters. Don't love that TJ.
I think what's so frustrating and disappointing is that TJ Klune could have done the work to try and make things better after fucking up royally (he showed that he could with The Extraordinaries controversy), but for The House in the Cerulean Sea? Nothing. I remember constantly checking his Twitter and website, trying to get a glimpse of something, but nope. It seems like this sequel is either going to attempt to address this (I say "attempt" because I honestly don't have much faith in his ability to do the decent thing anymore) or, like you said, double down on his white savior bullshit. Either way, he's long past overdue to say anything and, tbh, probably should've avoided writing anymore in that world. (He would've been better off donating proceeds from the book to Native and indigenous tribes--both in the US and Canada; I mean, he could have, but I highly doubt it)
I have had to reckon with "piece of media I enjoy (or its creator) has problematic elements" before but never to this degree. I *loved* that book, I've described it multiple times as like a perfect manifestation of queer joy. Its due to my own white privilege/ignorance that I didn't pick up on the very direct parallels between the setting of this story and real-life history. This video was really a wake up call about that. Its difficult to reconcile this with how much joy the story has made me feel. There is a part of me that still loves it. But right now i cant stop thinking about what happened to those magic kids' real parents. Its really disappointing that Klune hasn't done anything to address this because its clear he is able to self reflect and take accountability but isnt.
Counterpoint: Don't let bullshit on TH-cam influence how you feel about anything. No one appointed this person the appropriator police. People are allowed to write what they want to write about, and because he wrote it, you are now aware of something you weren't aware of before. That is a good thing, not bad.
I felt very similar. Honestly, before I heard about this, I had assumed all the kids in the book were actual orphans who found new loving parents in the queer main couple at the end. I assumed it was a story about loving “unlovable” kids, but knowing the inspiration completely changes the context of the entire story. What really happened to the kids’ parents? Why wasn’t the happy ending the children reuniting with their original families? This kind of oversight is WHY people should stay in their lane. This is WHY appropriation is a problem. Without the perspective or at the very least sensitivity readers, these kinds of horrific oversights are almost inevitable. It’s why those with privilege really need to STOP.
I’m absolutely shocked I have not heard anything about Channel’s case when I LIVE in Fairbanks Alaska. I recently read a case about Sue Sue Norton and Jennifer Kirk, two native Alaskan women who were both killed on the ex mayor’s land. No charges have been made despite that the mayor’s sons have histories of abusing/beating women. How are these cases not blowing up here?It’s disgusting
I’m American but my great grandpa attended Carlisle Indian Residential School and my grandpa attended one in NC. to say that it hurt them to talk about what happened is an understatement. My great grandpa never told my grandpa what happened there just that he tried to run away home several times and was punished, and my grandpa would never talk about what happened to him at the school to anyone but my grandma. Individuals writing about such sensitive issues that they haven’t researched and have no right to talk about has and continues to cause great damage.
If anyone wants to learn more about ICWA I also recommend the podcast This Land, hosted by Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee writer. It outlines the history of ICWA and interviews other Indigenous people who’ve been impacted by it. Chanel’s story reminds me of a Lakota grandmother interviewed in the podcast who thankfully got to keep custody of her granddaughter even when a white couple wanted to adopt her.
Highly, HIGHLY suggests watching the 2023 tv show called Little Bird about a family torn apart by the Sixties Scoop. Created by a First Nations indigenous cast and crew and ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!! Screw TJ Klune, go watch this! Also this show introduced me to Buffy Sainte-Marie and I've been binging her music ever since
as a canadian who was taught about residential schools my whole life, I never expected a fantasy author to use them as inspo🤦🏼♀️ utterly despicable. Indigenous children were stolen, murdered and beaten for existing as natives, kids were SAed and had their mouths washed out for speaking their language and their hair cut. There are still so many families who don’t know which tribe they come from. This man disgusts me.
Wow, all those words he says and it’s like he just lumps the horror of residential schools and the stolen generations in with modern Twitter vitriol and thinks he’s being a light in the darkness? It’s hard to comprehend the lack of self awareness.
Thanks so much for making this video--I had this book on my tbr list for a while, and I'm glad I watched this before I read it. I think it's really telling that Klune has been justifying his book by saying how inspired he was by real events, how he just couldn't let the idea go because of how much it really moved him, but not enough to seem to actually care about helping real people and supporting indigenous voices. Really disappointing!
Oh wow. I. Really liked House on the Cerulean Sea. As a Métis person who’s had family in one of these schools….my thoughts on it have certainly changed knowing all This
I'm so glad to see you making this video! You always do such important topics. And so many people don't know about the sixties scoop which is just one disgusting thing that the Canadian government has done to indigenous communities. Amazing topic.
I haven't read this book but the kindness thing really irritates me. In 2020 my small town had some racism flashpoints, some relative to BLM and militia-adjacent stuff but more pointedly to our local Tribe. (People were actually mad that the Tribe was acquiring "too much land". Seriously!) In several instances issues were brought to the city council and they refused to make any official statements or even discuss it. Some of the city council members were definitely racist themselves, not just in ignoring the topic in front of everyone that summer. Obviously this created rifts in the community and what did the city decide to do? Put up a bunch of "Be Kind" signs and banners around town. It wasn't about reconciliation, it was telling us to shut up and stop calling out racism in our elected officials. Most of the banners are STILL up and it still pisses me off. Luckily in 2021 we voted out half the problem council members and this month we voted out the other half by a landslide, so there is that.
It makes me sick to my stomach to see that the author has a lot of support up on Reddit and other sites. I've seen people arguing that the world doesn't get upset with authors like George R.R. Martin who was inspired to write his entire series on a few historical events, including: The life and death struggle between Plantagenet England and Capetian/Valois France during the Hundred Years' War, The Wars of the Roses where it saw the life and death struggle between Plantagenets and the Tudors, etc. However, the world seems to quickly turn on authors like TJ Klune for doing basically the same thing, except with different time periods and different people. Needless to say it was an absolutely vile argument. They compared two wars fought during the Medieval Ages by European bodies to an ongoing Genocide in North America.
Concentration camp romances are comparable though imo, and I don't see a huge uproar against them. Hell a romance where a Jewish woman fell in love with a nazi piece of shit and her happy ending was becoming christian for him won an award.
Ugh. The idea of the inspiration being the 60s scoop, but the guy in charge being a kind, good person, REALLY rubs me the wrong way. There’s nothing quirky about it. I watched the most season of Reservation Dogs, which had an episode about a young girl being forced into a residential school, and the way it’s portrayed was so stomach churning. By the end she murders a nun and escapes cause kindness doesn’t freaking work when you’re in that situation!!! I can’t imagine even just reading a Wikipedia article about this and thinking “what if I wrote about this but the school was a ~found family~.” Even if that was the smallest seed of the idea, if you’re trying not to speak over indigenous voices maybe just don’t bring up that bit up all the time? I’ve written a story where the dynamic between brother characters was technically influenced by the wrestlers Bret and Owen Hart, but I’m not out here trying to sell it to other wrestling fans because it’s not a story about wrestling. Okay not a great analogy but. Hopefully I’m conveying what I mean lol
The guy in charge is a kind and good person to the kids because he was a victim of the same system. He was burned alive by the guy in charge of him. Just adding context.
Thank you for sharing about this...I found this book by chance in a bookstore without knowing anything about the author or it's origins. I'm glad you were able to shed light on the context here I was unaware of. A huge thank you also for also putting resources in the description!
I love TJ Klune's books, way back when he was a barely known indie author, but jfc he has his white cis male moments. His books that are about being queer and ND are probably my favourites, probably because that's his voice to use.
@Givebackthescarf oh, I come across this all the time being queer and not white. Also being queer and disabled. I have never been a member of any organised group where I'm fully accepted by everyone. There's always some bigoted bullshit I have to deal with.
Thank you for talking about it, even though it’s stirring up a lot of feelings. It’s something people need to hear because books aren’t written or read in a vacuum, and we can’t ignore the harm and pain of real people over love of fictional ones.
I’m going to be real, my first reaction upon finding this out years ago, was: “Why would you willingly admit to this?”. Because I think a lot of white authors do use the historical (and current) suffering of BIPOC as inspiration, they just don’t say it and therefore manage to mostly avoid backlash. The fact that he believes that just openly saying it would be received well, shows his entitlement and savior complex and makes him look even worse 😅 On top of that, the allegory he makes is so incredibly gross. First Nation children were not ‘monsters’ with ‘inhuman abilities’ that white people were ‘afraid of’. IIRC, the children in the book do have the capacity to kill people very easily. First Nation children did not have that capacity. How he possibly got to a final draft and did not see how far he had strayed from what he was trying to reflect, is WILD. This is very foggy since it was years ago since I last heard about it, but we had this author in my country (European) who wrote a book inspired by a real life tribe somewhere that she visited, and when she got criticism for stealing their culture, she was deadass like “these people are very primitive and can’t write and they actually loved that I wrote about them!!” and. I don’t even know what to say about this. Genuinely. To this day. What. If they have the capacity to convey to you that they love your book, they in fact CAN speak for themselves. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS. Regardless of all this, “kindness” has a lot of work to do. The rate at which indigenous people are murdered, is extremely disproportionate. The murders are poorly investigated (or not at all), and their deaths are not valued by the system. I’m European and even I know that. This is hardly a problem of the past, and Klune has a platform that could elevate the voices of friends and family that are desperately searching for their missing loved ones. Can he use some of his “kindness” to do that, after proudly making money off of their suffering, or am I asking too much? 😬 I rambled a bit. I hope I conveyed everything clearly. I’m a bit far removed from the US/Canada so my knowledge is more limited, but I hope I’m getting a bit of a grasp on what went on. Thank you for this informative video, I definitely learned a lot of details I didn’t know before! 😊
See that what I'm wondering, why did he say anything to begin with? He could have just wrote a story and no one would have connected the two until he directly spelled it out and confirmed it. Why did he have to make it directly connected to real events, like I'm mind blown at all the choices he made. This could have just been a completely isolated story with it's own harmful views but now they are directed at something. I just can't imagine adding so much fuel to my own fire, it's self sabotage at it's finest.
I also had this thought! Why say it at all? And then why continue to say it in other interviews??? And I believe he even put it in the back of his book, because I think that’s where I first heard about his “inspiration” (I don’t have my copy anymore-I really enjoyed the book initially, but the appropriation tainted it for me, and I haven’t reread the book or read any of his other works).
I'm actually one of the people who didn't like the book and therefore I find the author exploiting such a serious matter for a story that wasn't even good in my eyes is all the more baffling. THitCS as a creation is so weird to me - it has such a traumatic inspiration, but it's a cutesy story, it's about grown man, but written in saccharine middle-grade language: all it takes to end the discrimination is some middle-aged dude telling people to be kind! Same energy as Bridgerton telling me all it takes to end racism is a party. I'm a bitter adult reader, I lived long enough to see that a happy ever after for a few characters in a fucked up universe rarely is a true happy ending. You usually need to work harder than that to earn it. Thank you for spreading awareness about Native issues, I'll be donating.
I also didn't like the book when I first read it and I was feeling like an utter hater, what is wrong with me, why don't I adore this like everyone else? But it's nice that the tides change and people start re-evaluating the stories they consume. And that book felt so inauthentic to me in what it was trying to portray!
@@ruplayinggame3080 It was such a weird one! I really disliked how the book was talking down to me about how cute everything was, not trusting me to come to my own conclusions or even remember the information from few pages back - you'd think it's definitely a middle-grade story (as it is actually marketed in some countries), but if that was supposed to be the case, why are we following a middle-aged dude? And why is him getting forced to get married a good ending? D:
Everything else aside, what’s wrong with with a middle-aged protagonist in a middle grade story? I think age diversity is a necessary part of books, especially books for kids who are still young and learning to see from other perspectives. Yes maybe most young readers prefer to read about someone their own age or a little older, but there are still books for kids and teens that follow older characters. And it’s important to have that kind of diversity in the protagonists of books for any age of reader. It helps people relate to each other in real life and helps the future feel less unknown. I don’t even think that’s an exaggeration- I really think kids books with older characters, even those little picture books about the old man and the cat (can’t remember the name right now), help kids envision themselves getting older or at the very least get used to the idea that you could survive long enough to get old, and also that the old people you meet IRL aren’t just NPC’s.
Also their are a lot of native people that never stopped speaking out and writing important books about these topics but they tend to be ignored by white readers. If he wants people to know about these things he should promote native authors.
I just… don’t understand how ignorant you have to be to learn about something as horrific as the sixties scoop and residential schools and think “yeah, this is a good start for my cozy fantasy novel!”
I knew Canada had done something similar to us (Australia), but I’m deeply horrified at how recent it was. We started removing children from their families in the 1910’s, so Canada had access to decades of information on just how devastating and destructive a policy it was yet still implemented it at a time we were realising how wrong it was. Probably the most well known book on our Stolen Generation is Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington Garimara (born Nugi Garimara), based on her own mother’s story. Co-opting real trauma from marginalised groups in a ‘white saviour’ way is awful. Some stories just aren’t ours to tell, though that’s something that can be hard for some to recognise.
There's an amazing artist painter, Kent Monkman, who has painted some truly heart-wrenching works around the 1960s scoop. His works are as beautiful as they are agonizing, and as a queer Cree artist, a voice that should be listened to over this moron.
Idk, I feel like this instance is more coming from well meaning ignorance rather than anything malicious, it's kinda weird watching this video after the stalker author and the murder author
I think this concept COULD* cooooooould be done respectfully provided enough time and research and empathy and understanding of the situation, but it could go wrong SO easily which it was here. I assume he didn't even have any sensitivity readers go over it. I think allegory can be helpful in exploring an issue as important as this, but you REALLY have to get it right. An exceptional writer could pull it off, but the average one could not. The verisimilitude of the allegory MUST be tied 1:1 with the actual events, causes, and solutions. You can't even have the perception of minimalizing the act. Thanks for the book recommendation for writing, I'm going to check that one out. My ADHD has got me a healthy terror of doing something wrong and not expressing myself in a respectful way, and wanting to do it right.
To me, the “those that can’t speak for themselves” thing felt very infantilizing. Like, they’re not only members of a minority group he’s not a part of, but he’s talking about them as kids who apparently don’t have voices or opinions of their own. As if kids (particularly teens) haven’t spearheaded a whole lot of social change across the board in the last several years. The fact that he was talking about indigenous kids (many of whom aren’t even kids anymore, given how long it’s gone on) makes it even worse.
Kids can talk, but they have no legal voice, they can't vote, they can't do that until they are an adult. Any teens who manage to spearhead a movement still rely on adults or have to turn into adults to change the law. I feel like people are reading into that line very negatively, but he is just trying to say ''support abused kids''. I think it is dangerous to say it is infantilizing, sorry but we (adults) all hold political power through voting, creating and signing petitions, donating money to the right causes and campaigns. Abused kids shouldn't *have* to rely on themselves in order not to infantilize them, we should all support them.
I heard about the issues with the author and their inspiration before managing to read the book and it was a pretty easy choice for me to just knock it right off the tbr. There’s options out there. I can look elsewhere.
It's times like these I am glad I'm slow to pick up new books. I wont be reading TJ Klune. There are too many decent authors to prop up one who treats real people like voiceless things. I appreciate you sharing these stories. I have the privilege to avoid a lot of media, so I'm often behind on news. I can at least do a small part and not give money and time to bad actors.
I’m American and though I’m white, I do come from distant Native American ancestry (my grandfather is white passing is the best way I can explain myself) and I also have other family members, not blood related who are even more Native American as well. I don’t even think I have the right to touch this topic, but this man is messed up. I get him, he saw a issue and wanted to give his take on it in fiction. But why the hell is he not doing research on it? That’s literally part of being an author, putting all your effort and might into a story through research, especially something specific like that. Many people’s history was washed away and they were forced to become someone who they weren’t (even Pocahontas did, and she literally died at 20/21). We can’t change the past, but it’s messed up that we can’t even get the past correctly portrayed, because some guy in his 30’s saw an article and wanted to piggyback off others experiences, without looking to them for guidance and understanding what the hell actually happened. Outrageous!
Incidentally, the woman who voiced Disney's version of Pocahontas (among doing other stuff; she's not just that) has lived through some shit for the past few decades. It's hard to remember exact details, but Irene Bedard's family detailed in an open letter that her ex-husband had abused her horrifically, but he'd weaponized the court system against her and their son, which made it impossible for her to detach from him completely. I think any link to the letter is gone (it came out in 2010). Irene Bedard played a fantasy version of a real woman that didn't engage with U.S./indigenous history in any way, but she lives with the very common issues of domestic violence and a government that's weaponized against indigenous people. To be clear, I'm not saying Irene Bedard has anything to do with any problems with the Disney movie or that she shouldn't have taken the role, but it's really striking that the woman playing Pocahontas lives with consequences of the behavior of the good guys in the movie she starred in. What Klune is doing feels so similar: He created this fantasy version of a real era in a book that doesn't engage with the practical effects of that history, but the people he culture vultured have to live with the harm done by people like the book's heroes. I've been thinking a lot lately about how complicated contemporary indigenous issues are (obviously). I'm still floored at the recent revelation that a singer I'd admired since I was in high school has been lying about being indigenous for 60 years, including saying she was taken as a baby as part of the Sixties Scoop in Saskatchewan. That jogged memories from 2018 of being extremely disappointed when women spoke out about inappropriate behavior from Sherman Alexie, an indigenous author whose works had meant a lot to me. THAT jogged my memory about how Sherman Alexie's movie Smoke Signals featured Irene Bedard. Then I saw this comment mention the actual Pocahontas and my mind went full Charlie Day in front of a bulletin board.
Wow. Thank you for mentioning this. I really like Irene Bedard, specifically because of my obsession with Smoke Signals as a kid, and had no idea she went through all of that. It's horrific to hear. Also, I was just talking about the Sherman Alexie stuff with my husband earlier today. I was reminding him about some of the books I've completely removed from my shelf. Aside from Rowling the other example was all my Sherman Alexie books, because of what he did. It's even worse because he wrote about the violence against indigenous people and then perpetuated in on that group which he belongs to. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meant so much to me in high school through my mid-20s. Watching people cling to these works and make excuses for the authors has been so eye-opening and disappointing.
@@Aster_Risk I agree that it's disappointing to see people cling to harmful public figures, but I also sympathize that it's kind of a big psychological blow when you learn something bad about a person you identified with. I'd been a fan of Alexie's since Smoke Signals in the '90s. His memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me moved me deeply and did a lot to comfort me through the loss of an immediate family member. It felt personal to me when the news about his behavior broke in 2018. But I tried to take that as an opportunity to learn about other indigenous people. I've been pitching a lot of people in the comments on the portrait book Project 562 by Matika Wilbur (I promise I am not Matika Wilbur). She spent 10 years documenting every federally recognized Native American Tribal Nation, and the book is full of interviews in which a diverse group of people speak about themselves in their own words. I don't want to speak definitively about Irene Bedard experiencing domestic abuse because I only learned about some of the specifics in Tumblr posts. No shade to Tumblr, but when it's been more than a decade and that's the ONLY source of information, I try to be mindful that I can be misremembering (or remembering info that wasn't factual to begin with). But I do believe that her ex abused her and that ICWA didn't make it any easier for her to free herself and her son from him. I looked her up on Wikipedia, and it looks like she has been acting pretty steadily in the 2020s. I hate that she had to live through something awful, but I hope she and her son are safe and at peace. The fact that they came back from that is just as much a part of their story as going through it.
omg i saw house in the cerulean sea and got soooo sad, i read the book and really really liked it but i’m so glad the issues in it are being brought to light bc it’s important.
I have such a strange relationship with that book in that I loved the intro but as soon as Linus left for the island and stopped being miserable I lost all interest in him and the book. I loved the dark humor and atmosphere of the beginning, as soon as we left that behind it became boring and a bit nauseating in how sickly sweet it was. Really not for me. The added context really does make the found family fluff even more nauseating. Honestly so much "cozy" fiction ends up making me uncomfortable, this guy and his book being a good example of why.
I do not post my previous comment to trauma dump in your comments, but to add some context and lived experience and a native voice to the conversation that is happening here in this video. This is not over, and being kind and amicable to the people who have destroyed families, cultures, and so much more in ways that a colonial society will not ever grasp the importance of will simply not solve this problem. Especially if we allow ppl like this author in question to speak over us with a horse shit ass predominant message of white saviored flavor of kindness. Thank you for the work you have put into this video Rachel !!!! Love all of your stuff :-)
No, thank you for sharing your story. These things are still happening and people need to know. Im white, but I know folks who were affected, who don't know their grandparents because their parents were never reunited after residential schools. My partner has relatives who were born on reservations. These stories need to be heard. Your story is important. It's relevant to this topic. People think it's in the past but it absolutely is not in the past.
I appreciated reading your story above. This kind of government-sanctioned cruelty against indigenous people has taken many forms and has happened for centuries. That means there's great diversity among people who have been hurt by it and the circumstances of how they've been hurt. Indigenous history is American history. There is no way to understand the impact of this harm or to address the issues still happening today without listening to many folks' stories. We can only do that if people share them, so thank you.
I remember when my book club read this book, our general reaction was like "meh it was sweet i guess?" No one was blown away by the writing or the story, but it also wasnt as cozy as some of us hoped it would be. It was too weak across the board. Klune just made the whole thing too "nice." It wasn't enough of a statement; he didn’t have the guts to go there. He could have leaned harder into the allegory, but he apparently just wanted a queer love story - which eclipses the story of the kids.
You know, when one of r/fantasy's bingo prompts was "protagonist has a regular real-life job" and this book was the number one suggested book for that prompt, I saw a couple of people saying the book and the author were "problematic" but no one would elaborate. Thank you for explaining WHY. All anyone would say was that the book was about a "social worker who forms a found-family with some orphans" wooooow. I couldn't help but notice that he said his story was "topical" only when families were being separated at the boarder, as if indigenous people who were stolen from their families/sent to residential schools aren't *still very much alive and impacted by what happened to them*, wtf. Also come on, it's 2023 I thought we all knew that making a fantasy racism metaphor where the people of color are represented by actual dangerous non-humans is bad?!
As a writer, I believe inspiration can come from anywhere. Thank you for making this video. There is no problem with being inspired from history, but it sounds like this is an example of what not to write with that inspiration... EDIT: I'm very white passing, of Mohawk descent...if it matters.
Thanks for this video, Rachel. I shook my head so hard when I saw the announcement about the sequel - talk about someone who cant learn from their mistakes!
i was kinda shocked when I saw the thumbnail because I read the book a few months ago and I really loved it. I am still glad you are sharing the things he had said and done. Wanted to read his other books but after that I don`t see why anyone should.
There is a wonderful podcast if you have the time to listen called Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, which goes into great detail about the Sixties Scoop. It's about a young Cree child named Cleo who went missing in the 70's after she had been taken from her family and placed in the care of a white family by welfare workers. Her family are all adults now and are searching for their sister, and it's honestly just a heartbreaking story that really digs into the atrocities committed against the indigenous community in Canada, and how they still suffer today.
I think I was okay with House in the Cerulean Sea until Klune talked about his inspiration. I do think some of Klune's other works are enjoyable, but it's like Klune completely ran face first into a glass door thinking it was open for him with Cerulean.
during the chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), backed and financied by the US (and UK), thousand of kids were stolen from their families by the church and the government and literally sold to europe and the US to be adopted by white people who couldn't have kids. many of those are now as adults trying to find their real families, not necessarily because they had a bad life, most of them didn't, but to give eachother closure. mothers have been looking for their kids for 50 years and many of them are already old, some even died waiting. it's estimated that it was between 8k and 20k illegal adoptions and barely a few hundreds have managed to reunite.
As someone who participated in collaborative writing a lot in the past (usually in a fantasy or sci fi setting), I have seen writers use the in-world prejudices in order to 'work through' (probably the wrong way to put this) the discrimination that they have personally experienced. But as I said, these were people working through their *own* marginalization. No cismale writers that I saw appropriated, say, misogyny - I think they knew better.
I'd argue that Wheel of Time does a decent job at this (At least if I'm understanding your comment properly, if not please disregard :) ) as the actual critique it gives is of patriarchies and the men in the series tend to be infantilized by the passive sexism around them by the generally female-centric leadership of the world. It's not perfect to be sure, if only because of when it started being published, but it's held up pretty well. It actually works a lot better than the author even intended in a few ways because of a certain scene with Matt and Tylin and him trying to justify the event as his own choice when he was pressured by someone who had institutional power over him. The book, unfortunately plays it off as a joke/comeuppance because he's a man, but it plays off pretty disturbing today.
Thank you for making this video. Funnily enough, I waited a while to pick up this book (mainly because too many ppl hyping it up to the moon). Was just about to borrow it from my library when the news about the residential schools broke FWIW, I've always seen TJ Klune as v. SUS. Ever since his 2011 M/M book Bear, Otter, and the Kid turned out to have almost the exact plot of a 2007 independent gay movie called Shelter. Like 95%. Edit: for clarification.
My family survived the Boarding Schools (American residential schools). Relatives debriefed on my grandmother,who debriefed on me. As an author, I can't imagine how to write anything inspired by the Boarding Schools,not because it hurts too much but because it would come off as hyperbolic.
I know when this book became so popular…and when I found out some problematic stuff about this author…I was like yeah nobody is gonna care because it’s so popular. It was the same thing with Colleen Hoover for a while. If the author is really popular people tend to not care or even listen.
I adored this book when it came out but yeah, glad I’m seeing this now. I’m disappointed. This is probably a reach but did TJ really need to exploit a marginalized community when he’s queer? Like, gay conversion therapy has a long and horrifying history and as a queer person he would have had a lot of personal experience to draw on if he wanted to take it in a magical fantasy realm. Also makes me wonder if he had, would kindness have been the ultimate solution?
It is so telling and insidious that he uses the specific phrase, "doing the work", in the synopsis of the sequel. My ear caught that immediately and I can't help but think it's intentional.
I just donated $50 to the residential school survivors charity. Thank you for shedding light on this awful subject, something TJ Klune has failed miserably to do. Seriously, TJ, what the actual fuck?!
This is such a great video -- taking this as an opportunity to raise awareness about the real and ongoing harm to indigenous and Native American communities is very cool to see.
for additional information about the systemic and social oppression of native people/s in the US, check out the podcast "this land", it sheds light on how exactly we continue to take away (steal) land, culture and children from what should legally be sovereign nations and from native families.
My father was born on reservation to a teenage mother in the 1970s. His mother's family wanted to raise the child so their daughter could finish high school. But a white social worker at the hospital pressured her to give her baby up for adoption right after she gave birth. He was adopted by a white older couple almost 3 hours away from his reservation. But if he stayed he would've ended up in a Residential School. My uncle on my Step Dad's side lived on the same reserve and he and his older sisters were taken to a Residential School, he always showed me his mangled knee and told me a priest would beat it with a cane every time he was caught speaking his native language or even French. It's insulting to say "they were taken out of fear." Because it wasn't fear it was hate and it was genocide.
As an autistic person, any time someone calls themselves a voice for the voiceless I die inside. This book has been pretty high on my tbr. I'm glad this video showed up before I read it. I'm always out of the loop with book discourse.
Thank you so much for this video. I mostly liked the fuzzy feels of the book and now learning about the author's "inspiration" am hugely disappointed -- also in myself. I live in Canada and should have spotted the shallow similarities. So glad I came across your channel, on to binge the rest of your videos.
I'm not native but I am bipoc and telling my white friends about this revealed so much about them, I was so genuinely disgusted and upset that people could value enjoying a book over calling out a white man capitalisating on native american racism
Hi, I recently found your chanel and have been bing watching your videos. I just wanted to tell you i really like your energy (i hope that doesn't sound weird 😅) you have a very comfoting and safe vibe ✨️
Wooooow the self congratulation in those quotes is verging on narcissistic!! It’s like he heard the term “white savior” and thought it was meant as a compliment…
Donate to orange shirt society: orangeshirtday.org/
Donate to Indian residential school survivor society: www.irsss.ca/
News report on the 215 children from British Columbia: www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mass-grave-residential-schools.html
News report on Saint Ann’s survivors: www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5809846
LEARN Indigenous history &contemporary issues for free: www.ualberta.ca/admissions-programs/online-courses/indigenous-canada/index.html
Watch Anishinaabe author Melissa Blair discuss this:
1) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6977106398328950021?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890
2) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/7013456154789530886?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890
3) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6985301545122270469?q=melissa%20blair%20house%20on%20a%20cerulean%20sea&t=1700262833890
4) www.tiktok.com/@melissas.bookshelf/video/6980380687186676997?q=melissa%20blair%20tj%20klune&t=1700262711558
Bring Chanel home: www.bringchanelhome.com/
Books to read:
www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/behind-the-smile-a-survivor-of-the-metis-sixties-scoop-9798650933168?shipto=US&curcode=USD&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzL2L-PLLggMVCZ5aBR2WnwtQEAQYAiABEgK4lfD_BwE
m.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9781928120339?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImIPGjPPLggMVlZxaBR1FxwsNEAQYAiABEgLOnfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&invid=17711259781&NMPi&Google
www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh-raised-somewhere-else-a-60s-scoop-adoptee-s-story-of-coming-home-9781773630205?shipto=US&curcode=USD&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3qP0qPPLggMVh5qGCh2VOQ1EEAQYAyABEgJg0vD_BwE
Bossii has a playlist on "Bring Chanel Home": www.tiktok.com/@inupiaqpotato?lang=en
Thanks for bringing attention to the schools. I'm from BC so it's really close to home. Some of my cousins are part of the native community here and it's been really difficult to feel the need to empathize with them and not really knowing how or what's appropriate - wanting to be with them and simultaneously feeling like there's a gulf between us (that probably doesn't exist in actuality, but it's pure anxiety). It just really makes me sad that I don't really know what to do besides just focusing internally to try to understand it as best I can and hope that I'm doing a good job at self reflection. It's just deeply depressing and confusing to think about. Sorry for the ADHD ramble lol, I just appreciate you bringing it up.
I am working as an archaeologist in British Columbia and have been involved in the archaeology around the Residential School unmarked graves. A large part of my job in the past was educating people about what those graves really mean. The article you linked is actually an example I used of the media reporting incorrect information on the topic. Firstly, they were not mass graves, they were unmarked graves. A mass grave is a single grave where multiple bodies have been buried. However, an unmarked grave is exactly what it sounds like, unmarked single burial sites. These graves are not news to the First Nations of British Columbia and the other provinces in Canada. I did a small project inspired by a series of photos I found on how in the 1990's First Nations people would go to the Residential School cemeteries and have traditional cultural ceremonies to honour the children who were buried in the unmarked graves there. Many of these graves were, at one point, legal and even marked (with a tombstone). The children who were buried there often died of the things that all children died from at that time, including Tuberculosis, influenza, and other illnesses. However, they died from these illnesses at a higher rate than white Canadian children, due both to the living conditions of the schools and the lack of medical care provided to them. There also are likely many who died from abuse- there is an example from one residential school in Northern British Columbia where a group of young children (under 10) ran away in the winter time and died from exposure trying to return to their home; the coroner remarked that their bodies showed extreme abuse. Other examples of abuse leading to death have been shared by survivors as well. That fact that there are children that likely died from abuse is not in question. However, one of the biggest issues of these graves is that they are unmarked, and that the children who were buried there were not returned to their families for burial. After residential schools were shut down, the upkeep of these cemeteries was ended, if there ever was any, and the sites were allowed to be used for industrial work, in some cases causing the ground to be too contaminated to safely excavate the remains of the children without a massive cleaning effort (there are multiple examples of this). First Nations people knew about these graves and were talking about them long before the news was, decades before, but until an archaeologist actually scanned the area in Kamloops with ground penetrating radar (GPR) and proved that the children were buried there, no one was listening.
Another thing that is important to realize is that no excavation (digging) has been done on these graves (at the time of writing this), and GPR is not 100% accurate, especially when the remains are small. Any number of things can look the same as a buried body under GPR, so context is needed to make any claim of a burial. For the residential schools, the survivors (people who attended the Residential school) tell the scientists were the cemeteries were located, and based on that, and where each positive result was, archaeologists were able to say that there is a certain likelihood of human remains buried. That is not to say that there aren't unmarked graves, but it is important to realize how complicated the process of identifying them is, and where we are currently with regards to actual excavation. Some First Nations want to have excavations completed so the relatives of the children can bury them with the rest of their family, or to discover what the cause of death is for each of them since evidence of abuse suggests a chance there could be murder victims among them, but others would like to leave the remains of the children where they are, and instead mark the graves properly with tombstones.
Another thing I want to mention is that each Residential School would have had a cemetery like this, just like any boarding school at the time would have as well, although Residential Schools were very different from boarding schools since the entire purpose of them was to systematically erase Indigenous cultures. I just want people to understand that the historical evidence indicates that it wasn't some sneaky thing where the children were killed and buried unofficially- it is that their graves were not properly marked, they were not taken care of, and the families of these children were not allowed any say in the burial, were not told where they were buried. It was that these children were in some cases physically abused, and no accountability was held by the people responsible. In other cases, children were not abused, but they were still forced to assimilate as a means of cultural genocide. The cause of death for many of these children is whatever the Canadian Government sanctioned authority documented it as. That doesn't mean there wasn't murder, but it also doesn't mean there was, unless someone who was at Residential School with the deceased child remembers a case specifically. What is known for sure is still horrible though. Some of the parents of these children would have had their child taken away and then be told later that they had died and been buried at the school, or heard nothing and have no idea whether their child was alive or not. I'm sure anyone can imagine how traumatic that would be.
approximately
A few parting notes:
-the last Residential School closed in 1996.
-Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese is a good fictional example of some people's experience at Residential School. I had to read it when I was in school.
A few sources:
Site for the children who died after running away: www.nadleh.com/lejac-residential-school
Site for an example of how one Residential School unmarked grave site was commemorated: globalnews.ca/news/4387921/regina-indian-industrial-school-cemetery-plaque-highlights-dark-chapter-in-canadian-history/
Evidence of TB deaths:
www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IRSR11-12-DE-1906-1910.pdf
Other sources I thought were fairly nuanced about the issue:
c2cjournal.ca/2021/08/digging-for-the-truth-about-canadas-residential-school-graves-part-one/
larongenow.com/2021/07/19/radar-search-for-graves-at-site-of-former-residential-school-in-delmas-a-long-process/
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-kamloops-indian-residential-school-215-exhumations-1.6460796
undark.org/2022/03/28/how-radar-is-helping-track-down-lost-indigenous-grave-sites/
I'm a member of the Penelakut tribe. My uncle was one of the RCMPs that investigated the oblate brother who was caught raping boys at the Kuper Island residential school. Since the residential school there is on a small island, I always wondered how many children drowned.
@@forest_green Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for your sharing your expertise on this historical event.
Informative, lists sources, thoughtful and realistic. A+++
thank you for taking the time to write and compile this!
I feel like TJ Klune grew up with this idea (like most of us) that marginalized people, but especially queer people, are hated because those in power fear them. That probably has to do with the choices he made in the first book and the reason why he sees the world the way he apparently does. He probably still truly believes that "phobia" in the word homophobia actually comes from fear of anything different and, in this case, straight. That is also why he probably believes in kindness as the answer. My guy is so privileged in other areas of his life that he's still trapped in this false narrative that they made us, queer people, believe: that our fight is only about who we love, and the right to get married in the system and whatnot, when it's actually much more than that. The whole reason why "love is love" was so well accepted by corporate media, was because of its power to alienate us from the reality of the harm that is systemically done to queer people, especially those who are not white, abled-bodied and live in the global north.
I feel like the reason why people like TJ Klune ignore modern indigenous issues is because they were taught that all the issues happened in the past. As an American who also went through that same education, it sucks to see how easily it gets ignored, like Native American suffering isn't as relevant as other types of suffering. Most reservations aren't allowed to support themselves financially because of federal laws that keep them from doing that, leading to extreme poverty for those living there. Not to mention the lack of documentation for missing indigenous women! And these governments...don't care. The battle to keep reminding people that this is NOT a past issue, but a present one, continues.
A recent portrait book called Project 562 by Matika Wilbur documents every federally recognized Native American Tribal Nation in the U.S. (The title came from the number of nations that existed when she started the book in 2012, but she explained this total is an ever-changing number.) I love it because it's beautiful, but it also documents such a diverse group of indigenous people living today. It's not a history book.
And even though Matika Wilbur is indigenous herself, almost all of the information and history she shares comes from the interview subjects themselves because YOU WILL ALWAYS BE IN A BETTER POSITION TO ELEVATE MARGINALIZED PEOPLE'S VOICES IF YOU LISTEN TO THEM TELL YOU WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THEMSELVES FIRST, TJ, THIS IS NOT HARD.
Just wanted to leave an update for anyone watching this video after it was posted, baby Chanel has finally been reunited with her grandmother!
Yes I am so relieved!!!
FUCK YES!
I am indigenous (Caddo, Oneida, and Ojibwe). What residential schools did to my family was awful. People in my family weren’t able to speak their languages anymore. Then with the laws that outlawed us from practicing our own culture, which was only overturned when my mom was 3.
None of what he is writing is ancient history. It’s so recent for so many of us.
No one on either side of my almost immediate family are able to speak our languages, some of us were only given a watered down version of our cultures. Others none at all.
What residential schools did is abhorrent. What it caused for so many indigenous people is unspeakable. it’s disgusting.
Many Indigenous activists also feel that the 60s Scoop is still ongoing in Canada; Indigenous youth activists have taken to referring to it as the 'Millennium Sccop' to parallel their experiences and the failure in care they received with what happened in the 1960s-1980s.
Thank you for this video Rachel, I just donated $50 to the Indian residential school survivor society. This used to be one of my favourite books, I'm grateful you have brought this to my attention.
I’m so grateful to you for being here and thank you for donating
Oh, they did it here in Australia. It happened to my grandmother.
we come from the same colonial state 😕
I'm pretty sure this happened in Australia, Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland, at least. A lot of countries had Baby Scoop Eras. There are different ways they were implemented, but unfortunately it's not very surprising that so many nations have systematized the scale of controlling pregnant people's bodies. I believe that in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, it took the form of kidnapping Indigenous children and effectively trying to erase any connection to the cultures they were taken from.
Sadly, there historically have been multiple approaches to evil people controlling the fertility of those with less power. In addition to taking Indigenous children, the U.S. Baby Scoop Era involved pressuring pregnant teenagers to live in an institution until delivery (often called being "sent away") and highly pressured to sign away their parental rights. There are so many horrifying stories from people who survived this about the kinds of things people would say at these institutions to pressure them to cut any contact with the baby--so many people weren't even allowed to hold their baby before they were taken away, and even though these were mostly religious institutions, the workers had no problem lying to these teens about their rights and berating them to try to get them to cut off contact with the baby. (I've read two really excellent books about this time in U.S. history: The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler and The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce.) On top of all this, there was the same kind of systematic approach to sterilizing Black people, disabled people, and other marginalized populations against their will. I won't get into detail because this comment is already too long. (But read Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens
and/or google U.S. maternal and infant mortality statistics by race if you want to be outraged and sad.)
I wrote all that to point out that while some of these details and some of the dates might vary by country, it's so upsetting to know that so many families all over the world have lived through this kind of systematic trauma. The U.S. Baby Scoop Era had its peak from after WWII to 1972, when the country's Supreme Court legalized abortion (RIP). Most people whose children were taken in the U.S. had to just go back to their old lives and act as if nothing happened after delivery. They weren't going to get any sympathy or even acknowledgement from the people around them, so they just lived with it. Some of them are still alive. It's so heartbreaking to think about all that unacknowledged trauma in my own country, then realize, oh, robbing people of autonomy in family planning seems to just kind of be the law of the land everywhere.
Rachel this is such a important video and thank you for making it…..I am mixed native myself and attended ceremony for kamloops and several other mass child grave sites and have every year as my chronic illness allows……this video was a tough watch for something so close to home, and may I share a bit of my story for added context of how all this information directly relates to things still continuing today, including residential schools?
-one of my aunties attended a residential school in my area called oak grove Lutheran academy. She was not hit or abused by the staff and teachers there, however she heard many a rumor of young girls in her class being groomed and sa’d by different predatory teachers. White men. She was stripped of her family and her culture, although they repackaged it and spoon fed it to her under the name “American Indian heritage course”. One of her most prominent memories from grade 4 is listening to her teacher, a white woman, speak on Lakota ceremonies. Not even a specific one , but read from the book that it was a event where dancing took place and ceremonial cutting. She finished the passage with a confused look, as if this were the first time she had ever picked up this book to read to the class, and ended it with “huh, that doesn’t sound like a very fun ceremony.” My auntie graduated in 2010. Oak grove might have caught up with laws of corporal punishment , but they are essentially a repackaged residential school with a shiny new PR-approved propaganda exterior but still hold the corpses of our culture and our children beneath it.
-I was adopted in 1998, a little over a year after my birth. I was told the decision was completely up to my bio mom bc my native father did not want me and had no living relatives to care for me or help my stay and learn the culture. I learned at around middle school age I had aunties and uncles fighting endless court battles I never knew abt when I was a toddler to regain custody, or to at least allow visitation and enroll my into certain programs available for preserving our culture.
-I was legally adopted bc of bullshit blood quantum rules . My 2 cousins , who were placed with the ant and uncle of my own foster family, both had enrolled immediate family of turtle mountain and standing rock. Bc of this enrollment , paperwork for legal adoption could not go through , so they worked in a loophole where they just fostered both of them their whole life and maintained the story that “your family back on the rez doesn’t want you”.
Thank you so much for sharing. I hope you have been able to reconnect with your family and culture despite all the legal bs your adoptive family and the government has put you through
Your comment made me remember how recent all this is. I graduated 2011 and the only reason I learned about residential schools and the disproportionate amount of indigenous people in the downtown east side, was because I chose a social Justice course as an elective. As a child I had benefitted from doing girl guide camps on indigenous land and learning songs and singing with members of the Musqueam nation. It shook me to my core to realize these people who had treated me with nothing but kindness and shred their culture with me could have had it so ruthlessly suppressed. But even after learning all that I still did not fathom just how recent the legacy of residential schools was.
“British Columbia” was built on the blood of indigenous people, and settlers like me need to see this ugly truth. I know nothing can ever take back what was done, but I hope for the best for you and your family.
Thank you for sharing this. I can’t imagine how painful this all was for you and your family.
"I learned at around middle school age I had aunties and uncles fighting endless court battles I never knew abt when I was a toddler"
"maintained the story that “your family back on the rez doesn’t want you”."
Thank you for sharing your story. You're so young yet the generational trauma is still so fresh. There are new wounds being created alongside old wounds continually being opened and millions of Canadians think everyone should just move on.
i live not too far from kamloops, where the 215 bodies were found. when i heard about it, it didn't feel real for a while. and then i read that MORE bodies of indigenous children had been found, also in MASS GRAVES. it's horrifying, it's devastating, it's heartbreaking.
I did a report on Residential schools in high school and it was truly horrific. It made my heart hurt because it was thoroughly awful what happened to them and the last one was closed in the 90s! The people directly affected by this - not just generational trauma - are still alive. Many First Nations and Indigenous people in Canada are inherently distrustful of the Canadian education system as a natural result of the deep trauma. It's not just what happened to them at the school which includes all kinds of abuse, but the fact that once they were eventually back in their communities, they had been completely divorced from their culture and the sense of alienation and isolation that results. Because they were not accepted into the culture they were forcibly assimilated into, but trauma would block them from connecting to their own culture.
As a mixed First Nation's Canadian, who grew up in foster care, this whole entire thing is so disgusting and hurtful. And I see why so many people called this out. Even before you said what it was inspured by, the WAY the orphanage and "the orphans" were written is so gross. Making them monsters and scary so so so brought me back to parents friends not wanting their kids to be friends with me because I was obviously a bad influence because I was in care. This guy never should have wrote this book. Or if he really really wanted to, not made the orphans inspired by stolen Indigenous children monsters.
Edit to add: The GENOCIDE of First Nations people is so well documented in official government documents, personal letters between government and church leaders, that there is no way that this guy did not understand that the 60s scoop was a part of government sanctioned genocide.
For the little that it's worth: it has been and is sometimes still very possible to inoculate yourself from seeing these stories and the history. Especially if you are white, cis gendered, and in a vaguely comfortable economic situation. You can listen to the voices directed to you by sources you have been trained to want and trust, and it's only by coincidence that someone in this demographic (there probably are others, but I can't encompass entirety in my feeble comprehension) even learns about these horrible events and how people have been oppressed and treated as less than human.
As someone who only learned about the Tulsa massacres (not sure if singular or plural) in my 50s (yes, I'm older than dirt), I feel disappointed with myself. I hope I can do better, but given this, I am not sure.
Oh I'm SO glad you're talking about this book. When I first read it, it immediately became my new favourite book, it brought me so much comfort and joy, That all went away when I found out about the author's inspiration for the story. I was so disappointed (and shocked).
I think we all went through this exact thing!
Exactly this. Exactly.
I'm glad I saw this before reading the book.
My grandfather was stolen during the 60s scoop. I can't even begin to describe the long reaching effects on our family.
I don't want to read a book based on it, let alone one that perpetuates negative stereotypes that the orphans* are dangerous...
Really well informed and researched video, Rachel. As a Canadian who didn't learn a thing (other than racist stereotypes and general attitudes towards) about the Indigenous Peoples of Canada until I was well out of high school (I was a very dedicated student; it was simply not in our curriculum whatsoever, especially being in the education system of the most conservative province in the country) but have since been horrified learning of Canada's shameful past and secrets coming to light with the sharing of knowledge the internet has allowed for and the discoveries of Indigenous children's mass graves, I think it's a great service you've done here to shine a spotlight and show real world implications and consequences that are still ongoing, especially of the young girl who is being fought over by a murderer's white relatives and a victim's tribal community.
I have not read the book but I know of it. It was even recommended to me by a close friend who is a part of a shared bookclub. At our next meetup I will bring this up.
Ex-lawyer here…in court cases where wrongs (torts) have been found to have occurred, the general assumption of the law is that the one thing which will fix the problem is money. Specifically, damages of the monetary kind. And based on my experience over the last few decades, it really is serious monetary penalties WHEN ENFORCED that bring about the most change. I wish it was kindness. The reality is that money talks.
it is uh absolutely fuckin wild to me that he describes his book as a "quirky fantasy" and then literally a sentence later is talking about it being inspired by one of the darkest periods in all of canadian history as if those two sentences belong beside each other. i've visited both so-called residential day schools and the "boarding schools" and the major difference between the two was obviously child separation from their family, often times permanently. but they all had the same purpose of indoctrinating colonial values/mindsight into indigenous children from a young age to try and "save them". and although there is the sixties scoop, it stands to mention that the majority of children in crown custody to this day are still indigenous; the act has never truly stopped, it just evolved. 58.3% of children in foster care in canada are indigenous, yet they make up only 7.7% of the child population. to USE this horribly traumatic issue in your story without fully considering the weight of context behind it, to know that trauma has never been experienced by you as a white guy, and in fact it was largely people who looked a whole lot like you doing these evil acts... that shit is so unbelievably cowardly to make money off butchering their very real stories and offer them no activism or representation in return, it's awful.
I'm a huge hockey fan, and when the news about Kamloops broke, it was one of the most brutal few weeks as reports and stories kept coming out. The hundreds if not thousands of flowers left in tribute were such an outpouring of love for these children who deserved so much better. Survivors spoke out and their stories were devastating. This had the hockey fandom on twitter in such a tight hold as people continued to research residential schools. The continued conversation of MMIW was also brought back, the way Canada has treated indigenous populations from the beginning was brought up again. All this to say, TJ Klune screwed up in a way that is so present, that is still so felt, and it's so frustrating to watch people who liked the book write off his behavior just because they liked the book.
Thank you for talking about Chanel too.
Fellow hockey fan here. Just to say that, since I'm not from Canada, I had no idea any of that happened and it was through hockey media during that time that I learned about it. Watching Carey Price cry in front of the media was fucking devastating. It's insane to me that they allowed journalists to ask him about his grandmother, but in the end it was just another symptom of how how hockey has a clear whiteness problem.
It's also weird when he says, "We're so divided these days," Like we weren't 'divided' before? Even worse most times? He seems to think people being pissed at being enslaved, murdered, segregated, arrested, converted, etc. is just a misunderstanding and that those being crushed under rich bigots should only rebel with kindness and passive polite protest. Like if you're a straight white guy maybe things seemed 'peaceful' back then because you didn't have to listen to women, POC, gay, and trans people's voices. I literally don't know what he means when he says that. But like, he's gay, so he should know that right?
I am immediately suspicious of anyone who says those words. Like fuck them, people have been brutalized for their differences since the beginning of humanity. Being fortunate enough to not experience that oppression fries these people's brains and they cannot comprehend what others have gone through.
I didn't know the inspiration for this book, but as an Indigenous person (my ancestors come from the cerulean sea, the Salish sea), I remember it giving me a weird feeling. I just went back to see my Goodreads rating, and I had given it 2 stars.
When my daughters were small, I developed PPA, and part of it was fear that my children would be stolen from me by social services. I had no reason to fear that technically, aside from being Indigenous, remembering birth alerts, the sixties scoop, the millennial scoop (the scoopings haven't stopped, people! 53.8% of children in foster care are Indigenous, despite only making up 7.7% of children in canada.)
What does he get for saying the story was inspired by Indigenous pain? It certainly must not have gotten the reaction he was hoping for.
thank you for this video, Rachel. I never comment, but I have to. my grandmother was part of the 60s scoop and it caused so much damage to this day. I find it insulting some authors give themselves the right to steal our voices and proceed to gaslight us. #everychildmatters
It's horrible that the abuse of First Nations continues, and this kind of book is NOT what we need. If he wanted to help, he'd actually do more effort than just chanting "people need to be nice"
His book has brought overall focus to the situation. So why is that bad? You guys weren’t even talking about this before. Prob most of you weren’t even aware. Now, you’re all flying your high and mighty flags. What exactly are you doing other than being critical of a writer? Are you going out there to take actual action against these injustices - NO, all you’re doing is commenting how outraged you are about the author writing about this, but that’s all. You bunch of posers!
@@girlloveshemp642 You realise many of the people talking about this are in fact Native Americans, and were already performing activism and being ignored, right?
@@girlloveshemp642 In my area, every high school student is required to take an Indigenous perpectives class that includes this in the curiculum. Many colleges also require a similar course. Indigenous people have been talking about it for decades. Acting as if this is new information is taking away from their voices. Also, the fact that the author thinks Indigenous people were treated this way because of "fear" instead of hatred and predjudice almost suggests that there was some kind of justification for the horrors that many people experienced for decades
I'm so glad to see someone I trust with book opinions covering this. I've been furious about it ever since I learned about the background. I felt like I was going nuts because everyone kept praising it and saying how good and important it is. I was like "..... really, y'all? Do you not understand the issues with fictionalizing a traumatic situation and then spinning it into a heartwarming story while not addressing the actual problem? The bar is so low that it's in hell."
It's not a problem if I ask should I read the book? I brought it more then a year ago, and I haven't got to actually reading it. And i heard about it pretty mixed things (It's eather a "it was a great book" or a "it was good, but could have been better in a lot of ways", and now the writer doing this). Sorry if I sound stupid.
@@Alexandraadftxr7052If you have it and decide to read it, realize what he did. Do a close reading and a reluctant one (which is a type of close reading). Use it as a reflection tool. Or at least that’s what I would do.
@@halfpintrr thanks. Sorry if I sound stupid.
@@Alexandraadftxr7052 Nah, it’s not stupid.
@Alexandraadftxr7052 read whatever you like, I think it's just important to have an awareness of the context of the book and acknowledge it. Personally I didn't enjoy it even without knowing the background, but most people seem to like it.
I refused to read this book by him because I knew him from the Green Creek, a series that made me SO uncomfortable. Spoiler alert: it's a werewolf romance, the protagonist is 16 when a 10 year old imprints on him and chooses him as his mate; then when the child turns 17 and the protagonist is 23, they start getting romantic 🤢 huge NO for me. Predatory vibes all over. And the writing level and style is of a 12 year old writing fanfiction (no offense to 12 year old ff writers, I was one of them so i know what I'm talking about 😂).
His popularity has always perplexed me. Anytime I think of him I think about the criminal age gap romance and bad writing and my brain just shuts down. This video made my feelings about him even stronger.
Indigenous people aren't animals, they don't need you to speak FOR them. They DO have a voice. You just need to listen to it and amplify it. Indigenous people don't exist to cater to your white savior complex. You only call them voiceless because it's convenient for you.
(Apologies for my English)
Yeah he seems to have a thing for age gaps. I don't think I'll pick up anything else by him. Definitely not now
I first read Cerulean Sea and admittedly loved it. So then I picked up Bear, Otter, and the Kid... Yeah I thought the age gap between the main couple was so weird. They're like ten years apart which would be fine if they hadn't basically grown up together, and that Otter admits he started crushing on Bear when he was only 16 and he was in his late 20s.
Wasn't just me who thought that age gap was weird as fuck 😝 And i'm not even the most pure and moralistic about age gaps (Late teens and early twenties have similar levels of maturity, in my vision). If they had met already grown up, wouldn't be a problem, but 10 to 16? when they have an older brother/young brother relationship? WHEN THEY SLEEP IN THE SAME BED? And the fact that family knows the kid chose him to be his mate and just accept it as normal... this book is a wet dream to the ones who have older brother issues.
I’m just grateful someone else finally pointed out that he wrote a book that a child came onto an adult repeatedly. I got halfway through and I had to stop. It was so beautiful in the writing but I couldn’t get past the gap because it was so GRATUITOUS. Like you don’t need them to be young like that.
I’m a huge werewolf fan but the age gap is so unnecessary
I only read wolfsong since it sounded like a nice werewolf romance
Yeah I’m not continuing the series
I didn't realize Chanelle's case was still ongoing. I feel like I last heard about it over a year ago. No child deserves to get treated that way. I hope she's home safe with her community soon.
sorry for commenting on this 4 months later but if you don’t know she is home now!!!!!!
@@danabeetle Oh thank goodness! I was scrolling through the comments in hopes that someone would have an update. That story is both infuriating and heartbreaking. At least she has a chance to heal now.
That case with Chanel is terrifying. That's the kind of thing that ends in murder/severe neglect of the child.
The Chanel case is crazy to me. I've worked in family law court before, explicitly in a case involving a father who murdered his wife and dude lost his parental rights with a quickness the second the next hearing came around. I can't imagine how the courts wouldn't immediately have declared it within the best interest of the child to not have her life determined by a literal murderer
It really is madness! It's infuriating! The case that inspired "Dear Zachary" was a similar situation, where the judge ruled that the living, homicidal parent was no longer a danger to anyone because the source of her ire (her ex-boyfriend) was gone (because she fucking killed him). So this lady kills her ex, has her victim's baby while in jail, and gets custody of the child once she gets out of jail (which was also a fucking light sentence, barely a year IIRC). The victim's parents fought so hard for sole custody of their grandbaby and were denied time and again in favor of the person who killed their child. And that idiot judge was proven to be WRONG in the worst fucking way imaginable!
Offering this here as a First Nations person - a general rule of thumb is to capitalize the I in “Indigenous”. This is because “indigenous” is used when describing plants and animals. And although I and many other Indigenous folks see no issue with being grouped in with our non-human kin, Western society already does so much to dehumanize us. Running with the theme of “reading is political”, so is writing and editing. It’s a subtle difference but it matters
I feel like so much of how he writes the story adds to the layer of ick I felt when I found out the inspiration of the book.
- the quirky Tim Burton-esque vibe of things when the topic is fairly serious
-how the hateful people in the book are comically portrayed as downright insultingly stupid... Hate is not something you get rid of with intellect. To basically go "well all these people are uneducated idiots and so they are hateful of children and people different from them" feels like a disservice to the messaging. It feels so holier-than-thou and like Klune is saying he and his characters are SO much more inherently smarter and morally superior.
-the whole premise of "well these magical beings are inherently dangerous in some ways, but it's irrational to be afraid of them" always puts me off.
-the conclusion at the end of just "oh just believe in the system!! it needs to change but it can't change overnight!! it just takes time for it to be changed with kindness from the INSIDE!!" is just incredibly naive and reeks of someone that hasn't actually looked at history with any critical thought. You'd think for a queer author he'd have more insight, but it just feels like tepid white centrism from a place of extreme privilege.
I cannot wrap my head around why he thought he was apparently the voice for these issues when he can't even understand the core of the issue to begin with... and to think there's a sequel where he is doubling down on it too. Just complete clownery.
I have to be honest, I liked the book, but I never loved it and I couldn't quite understand the level of adoration it got online. The child characters always felt very thin and underdeveloped, like they weren't full characters but just props to help Linus understand 'oh monsters are people too, just like me'. Now knowing where he drew inspiration from that adds a extra layer of discomfort to that read, along with the now even worse implication of making his allegory for first nations people literally monsters. Don't love that TJ.
I think what's so frustrating and disappointing is that TJ Klune could have done the work to try and make things better after fucking up royally (he showed that he could with The Extraordinaries controversy), but for The House in the Cerulean Sea? Nothing. I remember constantly checking his Twitter and website, trying to get a glimpse of something, but nope. It seems like this sequel is either going to attempt to address this (I say "attempt" because I honestly don't have much faith in his ability to do the decent thing anymore) or, like you said, double down on his white savior bullshit. Either way, he's long past overdue to say anything and, tbh, probably should've avoided writing anymore in that world. (He would've been better off donating proceeds from the book to Native and indigenous tribes--both in the US and Canada; I mean, he could have, but I highly doubt it)
I have had to reckon with "piece of media I enjoy (or its creator) has problematic elements" before but never to this degree. I *loved* that book, I've described it multiple times as like a perfect manifestation of queer joy. Its due to my own white privilege/ignorance that I didn't pick up on the very direct parallels between the setting of this story and real-life history. This video was really a wake up call about that. Its difficult to reconcile this with how much joy the story has made me feel. There is a part of me that still loves it. But right now i cant stop thinking about what happened to those magic kids' real parents. Its really disappointing that Klune hasn't done anything to address this because its clear he is able to self reflect and take accountability but isnt.
Counterpoint: Don't let bullshit on TH-cam influence how you feel about anything. No one appointed this person the appropriator police. People are allowed to write what they want to write about, and because he wrote it, you are now aware of something you weren't aware of before. That is a good thing, not bad.
I felt very similar. Honestly, before I heard about this, I had assumed all the kids in the book were actual orphans who found new loving parents in the queer main couple at the end. I assumed it was a story about loving “unlovable” kids, but knowing the inspiration completely changes the context of the entire story. What really happened to the kids’ parents? Why wasn’t the happy ending the children reuniting with their original families?
This kind of oversight is WHY people should stay in their lane. This is WHY appropriation is a problem. Without the perspective or at the very least sensitivity readers, these kinds of horrific oversights are almost inevitable. It’s why those with privilege really need to STOP.
I’m absolutely shocked I have not heard anything about Channel’s case when I LIVE in Fairbanks Alaska. I recently read a case about Sue Sue Norton and Jennifer Kirk, two native Alaskan women who were both killed on the ex mayor’s land. No charges have been made despite that the mayor’s sons have histories of abusing/beating women. How are these cases not blowing up here?It’s disgusting
I’m American but my great grandpa attended Carlisle Indian Residential School and my grandpa attended one in NC. to say that it hurt them to talk about what happened is an understatement. My great grandpa never told my grandpa what happened there just that he tried to run away home several times and was punished, and my grandpa would never talk about what happened to him at the school to anyone but my grandma. Individuals writing about such sensitive issues that they haven’t researched and have no right to talk about has and continues to cause great damage.
If anyone wants to learn more about ICWA I also recommend the podcast This Land, hosted by Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee writer. It outlines the history of ICWA and interviews other Indigenous people who’ve been impacted by it. Chanel’s story reminds me of a Lakota grandmother interviewed in the podcast who thankfully got to keep custody of her granddaughter even when a white couple wanted to adopt her.
I will add this to the description!
It is a great law podcast too, we listened to it in my law class when ICWA was before the Supreme Court
Highly, HIGHLY suggests watching the 2023 tv show called Little Bird about a family torn apart by the Sixties Scoop. Created by a First Nations indigenous cast and crew and ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!! Screw TJ Klune, go watch this!
Also this show introduced me to Buffy Sainte-Marie and I've been binging her music ever since
as a canadian who was taught about residential schools my whole life, I never expected a fantasy author to use them as inspo🤦🏼♀️ utterly despicable. Indigenous children were stolen, murdered and beaten for existing as natives, kids were SAed and had their mouths washed out for speaking their language and their hair cut. There are still so many families who don’t know which tribe they come from. This man disgusts me.
The problem with the 'kindness' message is also: the only people who actually can improve things with kindness are the racists.
Wow, all those words he says and it’s like he just lumps the horror of residential schools and the stolen generations in with modern Twitter vitriol and thinks he’s being a light in the darkness? It’s hard to comprehend the lack of self awareness.
Thanks so much for making this video--I had this book on my tbr list for a while, and I'm glad I watched this before I read it. I think it's really telling that Klune has been justifying his book by saying how inspired he was by real events, how he just couldn't let the idea go because of how much it really moved him, but not enough to seem to actually care about helping real people and supporting indigenous voices. Really disappointing!
Oh wow. I. Really liked House on the Cerulean Sea. As a Métis person who’s had family in one of these schools….my thoughts on it have certainly changed knowing all This
I'm so glad to see you making this video! You always do such important topics. And so many people don't know about the sixties scoop which is just one disgusting thing that the Canadian government has done to indigenous communities. Amazing topic.
I haven't read this book but the kindness thing really irritates me. In 2020 my small town had some racism flashpoints, some relative to BLM and militia-adjacent stuff but more pointedly to our local Tribe. (People were actually mad that the Tribe was acquiring "too much land". Seriously!) In several instances issues were brought to the city council and they refused to make any official statements or even discuss it. Some of the city council members were definitely racist themselves, not just in ignoring the topic in front of everyone that summer.
Obviously this created rifts in the community and what did the city decide to do? Put up a bunch of "Be Kind" signs and banners around town. It wasn't about reconciliation, it was telling us to shut up and stop calling out racism in our elected officials. Most of the banners are STILL up and it still pisses me off.
Luckily in 2021 we voted out half the problem council members and this month we voted out the other half by a landslide, so there is that.
A couple months ago, this book caught my eye at Barnes and Noble, but I ended up buying something else instead. I made a good call there.
The amount of people who will die on the hill in defense of TJ Klune is astounding.
THIS
💯
There should -never- be someone in any of our lives who we will defend despite their actions, including ourselves.
It makes me sick to my stomach to see that the author has a lot of support up on Reddit and other sites. I've seen people arguing that the world doesn't get upset with authors like George R.R. Martin who was inspired to write his entire series on a few historical events, including: The life and death struggle between Plantagenet England and Capetian/Valois France during the Hundred Years' War, The Wars of the Roses where it saw the life and death struggle between Plantagenets and the Tudors, etc. However, the world seems to quickly turn on authors like TJ Klune for doing basically the same thing, except with different time periods and different people.
Needless to say it was an absolutely vile argument. They compared two wars fought during the Medieval Ages by European bodies to an ongoing Genocide in North America.
Concentration camp romances are comparable though imo, and I don't see a huge uproar against them.
Hell a romance where a Jewish woman fell in love with a nazi piece of shit and her happy ending was becoming christian for him won an award.
Ugh. The idea of the inspiration being the 60s scoop, but the guy in charge being a kind, good person, REALLY rubs me the wrong way. There’s nothing quirky about it. I watched the most season of Reservation Dogs, which had an episode about a young girl being forced into a residential school, and the way it’s portrayed was so stomach churning. By the end she murders a nun and escapes cause kindness doesn’t freaking work when you’re in that situation!!! I can’t imagine even just reading a Wikipedia article about this and thinking “what if I wrote about this but the school was a ~found family~.”
Even if that was the smallest seed of the idea, if you’re trying not to speak over indigenous voices maybe just don’t bring up that bit up all the time? I’ve written a story where the dynamic between brother characters was technically influenced by the wrestlers Bret and Owen Hart, but I’m not out here trying to sell it to other wrestling fans because it’s not a story about wrestling. Okay not a great analogy but. Hopefully I’m conveying what I mean lol
The guy in charge is a kind and good person to the kids because he was a victim of the same system. He was burned alive by the guy in charge of him. Just adding context.
Thank you for sharing about this...I found this book by chance in a bookstore without knowing anything about the author or it's origins. I'm glad you were able to shed light on the context here I was unaware of. A huge thank you also for also putting resources in the description!
Right there with you as someone who loved the book and hasn't been promoting it since this all came out. Thanks for the video.
Hey Didi! i appreciate you watching
I love TJ Klune's books, way back when he was a barely known indie author, but jfc he has his white cis male moments. His books that are about being queer and ND are probably my favourites, probably because that's his voice to use.
@Givebackthescarf oh, I come across this all the time being queer and not white. Also being queer and disabled. I have never been a member of any organised group where I'm fully accepted by everyone. There's always some bigoted bullshit I have to deal with.
I heard Canada, and I just kept on saying no until you confirmed my most uncharitable assumption...
Thank you for talking about it, even though it’s stirring up a lot of feelings. It’s something people need to hear because books aren’t written or read in a vacuum, and we can’t ignore the harm and pain of real people over love of fictional ones.
I’m going to be real, my first reaction upon finding this out years ago, was: “Why would you willingly admit to this?”. Because I think a lot of white authors do use the historical (and current) suffering of BIPOC as inspiration, they just don’t say it and therefore manage to mostly avoid backlash. The fact that he believes that just openly saying it would be received well, shows his entitlement and savior complex and makes him look even worse 😅
On top of that, the allegory he makes is so incredibly gross. First Nation children were not ‘monsters’ with ‘inhuman abilities’ that white people were ‘afraid of’. IIRC, the children in the book do have the capacity to kill people very easily. First Nation children did not have that capacity. How he possibly got to a final draft and did not see how far he had strayed from what he was trying to reflect, is WILD.
This is very foggy since it was years ago since I last heard about it, but we had this author in my country (European) who wrote a book inspired by a real life tribe somewhere that she visited, and when she got criticism for stealing their culture, she was deadass like “these people are very primitive and can’t write and they actually loved that I wrote about them!!” and. I don’t even know what to say about this. Genuinely. To this day. What. If they have the capacity to convey to you that they love your book, they in fact CAN speak for themselves. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.
Regardless of all this, “kindness” has a lot of work to do. The rate at which indigenous people are murdered, is extremely disproportionate. The murders are poorly investigated (or not at all), and their deaths are not valued by the system. I’m European and even I know that. This is hardly a problem of the past, and Klune has a platform that could elevate the voices of friends and family that are desperately searching for their missing loved ones. Can he use some of his “kindness” to do that, after proudly making money off of their suffering, or am I asking too much? 😬
I rambled a bit. I hope I conveyed everything clearly. I’m a bit far removed from the US/Canada so my knowledge is more limited, but I hope I’m getting a bit of a grasp on what went on. Thank you for this informative video, I definitely learned a lot of details I didn’t know before! 😊
See that what I'm wondering, why did he say anything to begin with? He could have just wrote a story and no one would have connected the two until he directly spelled it out and confirmed it. Why did he have to make it directly connected to real events, like I'm mind blown at all the choices he made. This could have just been a completely isolated story with it's own harmful views but now they are directed at something. I just can't imagine adding so much fuel to my own fire, it's self sabotage at it's finest.
I also had this thought! Why say it at all? And then why continue to say it in other interviews??? And I believe he even put it in the back of his book, because I think that’s where I first heard about his “inspiration” (I don’t have my copy anymore-I really enjoyed the book initially, but the appropriation tainted it for me, and I haven’t reread the book or read any of his other works).
Well, that was disgusting. He took what is essentially a genocide and stripped it of its entire historical context for entertainment? Reprehensible.
Thank you for speaking about this with the care and research it deserves.
Thank you for using this video to amplify Indigenous voices. 💜
I'm actually one of the people who didn't like the book and therefore I find the author exploiting such a serious matter for a story that wasn't even good in my eyes is all the more baffling.
THitCS as a creation is so weird to me - it has such a traumatic inspiration, but it's a cutesy story, it's about grown man, but written in saccharine middle-grade language: all it takes to end the discrimination is some middle-aged dude telling people to be kind! Same energy as Bridgerton telling me all it takes to end racism is a party.
I'm a bitter adult reader, I lived long enough to see that a happy ever after for a few characters in a fucked up universe rarely is a true happy ending. You usually need to work harder than that to earn it.
Thank you for spreading awareness about Native issues, I'll be donating.
I also didn't like the book when I first read it and I was feeling like an utter hater, what is wrong with me, why don't I adore this like everyone else? But it's nice that the tides change and people start re-evaluating the stories they consume. And that book felt so inauthentic to me in what it was trying to portray!
@@ruplayinggame3080 It was such a weird one! I really disliked how the book was talking down to me about how cute everything was, not trusting me to come to my own conclusions or even remember the information from few pages back - you'd think it's definitely a middle-grade story (as it is actually marketed in some countries), but if that was supposed to be the case, why are we following a middle-aged dude? And why is him getting forced to get married a good ending? D:
Everything else aside, what’s wrong with with a middle-aged protagonist in a middle grade story? I think age diversity is a necessary part of books, especially books for kids who are still young and learning to see from other perspectives. Yes maybe most young readers prefer to read about someone their own age or a little older, but there are still books for kids and teens that follow older characters. And it’s important to have that kind of diversity in the protagonists of books for any age of reader. It helps people relate to each other in real life and helps the future feel less unknown. I don’t even think that’s an exaggeration- I really think kids books with older characters, even those little picture books about the old man and the cat (can’t remember the name right now), help kids envision themselves getting older or at the very least get used to the idea that you could survive long enough to get old, and also that the old people you meet IRL aren’t just NPC’s.
I really disliked it from the beginning also. It felt so cloying and artificial.
Thank you so much for talking about Chanel, I had no idea it was happening!!
Also their are a lot of native people that never stopped speaking out and writing important books about these topics but they tend to be ignored by white readers. If he wants people to know about these things he should promote native authors.
That woukd require doing more research than just reading a wikipedia page, and T dawg's got #deadlines i guess
I just… don’t understand how ignorant you have to be to learn about something as horrific as the sixties scoop and residential schools and think “yeah, this is a good start for my cozy fantasy novel!”
I had no idea this was the author's inspiration. It casts the whole book in a very different light.
I love how you keep authors in check, even if you liked their books. Thank you for this.
I knew Canada had done something similar to us (Australia), but I’m deeply horrified at how recent it was. We started removing children from their families in the 1910’s, so Canada had access to decades of information on just how devastating and destructive a policy it was yet still implemented it at a time we were realising how wrong it was. Probably the most well known book on our Stolen Generation is Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington Garimara (born Nugi Garimara), based on her own mother’s story.
Co-opting real trauma from marginalised groups in a ‘white saviour’ way is awful. Some stories just aren’t ours to tell, though that’s something that can be hard for some to recognise.
The US was doing residential schools in the late 18th, early 19th century so Canada had even longer to figure out how bad it was than that.
@@platedlizardand a significantly closer example, but one they seemed to want to emulate (bc the us was SO Proud of it god I hate it here)
There's an amazing artist painter, Kent Monkman, who has painted some truly heart-wrenching works around the 1960s scoop. His works are as beautiful as they are agonizing, and as a queer Cree artist, a voice that should be listened to over this moron.
Idk, I feel like this instance is more coming from well meaning ignorance rather than anything malicious, it's kinda weird watching this video after the stalker author and the murder author
I think this concept COULD* cooooooould be done respectfully provided enough time and research and empathy and understanding of the situation, but it could go wrong SO easily which it was here. I assume he didn't even have any sensitivity readers go over it. I think allegory can be helpful in exploring an issue as important as this, but you REALLY have to get it right. An exceptional writer could pull it off, but the average one could not. The verisimilitude of the allegory MUST be tied 1:1 with the actual events, causes, and solutions. You can't even have the perception of minimalizing the act.
Thanks for the book recommendation for writing, I'm going to check that one out. My ADHD has got me a healthy terror of doing something wrong and not expressing myself in a respectful way, and wanting to do it right.
To me, the “those that can’t speak for themselves” thing felt very infantilizing. Like, they’re not only members of a minority group he’s not a part of, but he’s talking about them as kids who apparently don’t have voices or opinions of their own. As if kids (particularly teens) haven’t spearheaded a whole lot of social change across the board in the last several years. The fact that he was talking about indigenous kids (many of whom aren’t even kids anymore, given how long it’s gone on) makes it even worse.
Well, to be fair, the DEAD kids don't have voices of their own anymore, but he's certainly not speaking for them.
Kids can talk, but they have no legal voice, they can't vote, they can't do that until they are an adult. Any teens who manage to spearhead a movement still rely on adults or have to turn into adults to change the law. I feel like people are reading into that line very negatively, but he is just trying to say ''support abused kids''. I think it is dangerous to say it is infantilizing, sorry but we (adults) all hold political power through voting, creating and signing petitions, donating money to the right causes and campaigns. Abused kids shouldn't *have* to rely on themselves in order not to infantilize them, we should all support them.
I heard about the issues with the author and their inspiration before managing to read the book and it was a pretty easy choice for me to just knock it right off the tbr. There’s options out there. I can look elsewhere.
Literally just did the same thing. My executive dysfunction towards reading saves the day for once.
It's times like these I am glad I'm slow to pick up new books. I wont be reading TJ Klune. There are too many decent authors to prop up one who treats real people like voiceless things.
I appreciate you sharing these stories. I have the privilege to avoid a lot of media, so I'm often behind on news. I can at least do a small part and not give money and time to bad actors.
I’m American and though I’m white, I do come from distant Native American ancestry (my grandfather is white passing is the best way I can explain myself) and I also have other family members, not blood related who are even more Native American as well. I don’t even think I have the right to touch this topic, but this man is messed up. I get him, he saw a issue and wanted to give his take on it in fiction. But why the hell is he not doing research on it? That’s literally part of being an author, putting all your effort and might into a story through research, especially something specific like that. Many people’s history was washed away and they were forced to become someone who they weren’t (even Pocahontas did, and she literally died at 20/21). We can’t change the past, but it’s messed up that we can’t even get the past correctly portrayed, because some guy in his 30’s saw an article and wanted to piggyback off others experiences, without looking to them for guidance and understanding what the hell actually happened. Outrageous!
Incidentally, the woman who voiced Disney's version of Pocahontas (among doing other stuff; she's not just that) has lived through some shit for the past few decades. It's hard to remember exact details, but Irene Bedard's family detailed in an open letter that her ex-husband had abused her horrifically, but he'd weaponized the court system against her and their son, which made it impossible for her to detach from him completely. I think any link to the letter is gone (it came out in 2010). Irene Bedard played a fantasy version of a real woman that didn't engage with U.S./indigenous history in any way, but she lives with the very common issues of domestic violence and a government that's weaponized against indigenous people. To be clear, I'm not saying Irene Bedard has anything to do with any problems with the Disney movie or that she shouldn't have taken the role, but it's really striking that the woman playing Pocahontas lives with consequences of the behavior of the good guys in the movie she starred in. What Klune is doing feels so similar: He created this fantasy version of a real era in a book that doesn't engage with the practical effects of that history, but the people he culture vultured have to live with the harm done by people like the book's heroes.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how complicated contemporary indigenous issues are (obviously). I'm still floored at the recent revelation that a singer I'd admired since I was in high school has been lying about being indigenous for 60 years, including saying she was taken as a baby as part of the Sixties Scoop in Saskatchewan. That jogged memories from 2018 of being extremely disappointed when women spoke out about inappropriate behavior from Sherman Alexie, an indigenous author whose works had meant a lot to me. THAT jogged my memory about how Sherman Alexie's movie Smoke Signals featured Irene Bedard. Then I saw this comment mention the actual Pocahontas and my mind went full Charlie Day in front of a bulletin board.
Wow. Thank you for mentioning this. I really like Irene Bedard, specifically because of my obsession with Smoke Signals as a kid, and had no idea she went through all of that. It's horrific to hear. Also, I was just talking about the Sherman Alexie stuff with my husband earlier today. I was reminding him about some of the books I've completely removed from my shelf. Aside from Rowling the other example was all my Sherman Alexie books, because of what he did. It's even worse because he wrote about the violence against indigenous people and then perpetuated in on that group which he belongs to. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meant so much to me in high school through my mid-20s. Watching people cling to these works and make excuses for the authors has been so eye-opening and disappointing.
@@Aster_Risk I agree that it's disappointing to see people cling to harmful public figures, but I also sympathize that it's kind of a big psychological blow when you learn something bad about a person you identified with. I'd been a fan of Alexie's since Smoke Signals in the '90s. His memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me moved me deeply and did a lot to comfort me through the loss of an immediate family member. It felt personal to me when the news about his behavior broke in 2018. But I tried to take that as an opportunity to learn about other indigenous people. I've been pitching a lot of people in the comments on the portrait book Project 562 by Matika Wilbur (I promise I am not Matika Wilbur). She spent 10 years documenting every federally recognized Native American Tribal Nation, and the book is full of interviews in which a diverse group of people speak about themselves in their own words.
I don't want to speak definitively about Irene Bedard experiencing domestic abuse because I only learned about some of the specifics in Tumblr posts. No shade to Tumblr, but when it's been more than a decade and that's the ONLY source of information, I try to be mindful that I can be misremembering (or remembering info that wasn't factual to begin with). But I do believe that her ex abused her and that ICWA didn't make it any easier for her to free herself and her son from him. I looked her up on Wikipedia, and it looks like she has been acting pretty steadily in the 2020s. I hate that she had to live through something awful, but I hope she and her son are safe and at peace. The fact that they came back from that is just as much a part of their story as going through it.
omg i saw house in the cerulean sea and got soooo sad, i read the book and really really liked it but i’m so glad the issues in it are being brought to light bc it’s important.
I have such a strange relationship with that book in that I loved the intro but as soon as Linus left for the island and stopped being miserable I lost all interest in him and the book. I loved the dark humor and atmosphere of the beginning, as soon as we left that behind it became boring and a bit nauseating in how sickly sweet it was. Really not for me.
The added context really does make the found family fluff even more nauseating. Honestly so much "cozy" fiction ends up making me uncomfortable, this guy and his book being a good example of why.
I do not post my previous comment to trauma dump in your comments, but to add some context and lived experience and a native voice to the conversation that is happening here in this video. This is not over, and being kind and amicable to the people who have destroyed families, cultures, and so much more in ways that a colonial society will not ever grasp the importance of will simply not solve this problem. Especially if we allow ppl like this author in question to speak over us with a horse shit ass predominant message of white saviored flavor of kindness.
Thank you for the work you have put into this video Rachel !!!! Love all of your stuff :-)
You did not trauma dump whatsoever. Your voice matters and you sharing your story was deeply appreciate. I’m glad you’re here.
No, thank you for sharing your story.
These things are still happening and people need to know. Im white, but I know folks who were affected, who don't know their grandparents because their parents were never reunited after residential schools. My partner has relatives who were born on reservations. These stories need to be heard.
Your story is important. It's relevant to this topic. People think it's in the past but it absolutely is not in the past.
I appreciated reading your story above. This kind of government-sanctioned cruelty against indigenous people has taken many forms and has happened for centuries. That means there's great diversity among people who have been hurt by it and the circumstances of how they've been hurt. Indigenous history is American history. There is no way to understand the impact of this harm or to address the issues still happening today without listening to many folks' stories. We can only do that if people share them, so thank you.
I remember when my book club read this book, our general reaction was like "meh it was sweet i guess?" No one was blown away by the writing or the story, but it also wasnt as cozy as some of us hoped it would be. It was too weak across the board. Klune just made the whole thing too "nice." It wasn't enough of a statement; he didn’t have the guts to go there. He could have leaned harder into the allegory, but he apparently just wanted a queer love story - which eclipses the story of the kids.
You know, when one of r/fantasy's bingo prompts was "protagonist has a regular real-life job" and this book was the number one suggested book for that prompt, I saw a couple of people saying the book and the author were "problematic" but no one would elaborate. Thank you for explaining WHY. All anyone would say was that the book was about a "social worker who forms a found-family with some orphans" wooooow.
I couldn't help but notice that he said his story was "topical" only when families were being separated at the boarder, as if indigenous people who were stolen from their families/sent to residential schools aren't *still very much alive and impacted by what happened to them*, wtf. Also come on, it's 2023 I thought we all knew that making a fantasy racism metaphor where the people of color are represented by actual dangerous non-humans is bad?!
As a writer, I believe inspiration can come from anywhere. Thank you for making this video. There is no problem with being inspired from history, but it sounds like this is an example of what not to write with that inspiration...
EDIT: I'm very white passing, of Mohawk descent...if it matters.
I spoke on this and created a video also 2 years ago. Thanks so much for doing a video on this Rach 😊
Oh shit let me tag your video! Thank you Kim!
@ReadswithRachel Awww thanks Rachel ☺️
Thanks for this video, Rachel. I shook my head so hard when I saw the announcement about the sequel - talk about someone who cant learn from their mistakes!
i was kinda shocked when I saw the thumbnail because I read the book a few months ago and I really loved it. I am still glad you are sharing the things he had said and done. Wanted to read his other books but after that I don`t see why anyone should.
There is a wonderful podcast if you have the time to listen called Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, which goes into great detail about the Sixties Scoop. It's about a young Cree child named Cleo who went missing in the 70's after she had been taken from her family and placed in the care of a white family by welfare workers. Her family are all adults now and are searching for their sister, and it's honestly just a heartbreaking story that really digs into the atrocities committed against the indigenous community in Canada, and how they still suffer today.
I think I was okay with House in the Cerulean Sea until Klune talked about his inspiration. I do think some of Klune's other works are enjoyable, but it's like Klune completely ran face first into a glass door thinking it was open for him with Cerulean.
during the chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), backed and financied by the US (and UK), thousand of kids were stolen from their families by the church and the government and literally sold to europe and the US to be adopted by white people who couldn't have kids. many of those are now as adults trying to find their real families, not necessarily because they had a bad life, most of them didn't, but to give eachother closure. mothers have been looking for their kids for 50 years and many of them are already old, some even died waiting. it's estimated that it was between 8k and 20k illegal adoptions and barely a few hundreds have managed to reunite.
As someone who participated in collaborative writing a lot in the past (usually in a fantasy or sci fi setting), I have seen writers use the in-world prejudices in order to 'work through' (probably the wrong way to put this) the discrimination that they have personally experienced. But as I said, these were people working through their *own* marginalization. No cismale writers that I saw appropriated, say, misogyny - I think they knew better.
I'd argue that Wheel of Time does a decent job at this (At least if I'm understanding your comment properly, if not please disregard :) ) as the actual critique it gives is of patriarchies and the men in the series tend to be infantilized by the passive sexism around them by the generally female-centric leadership of the world. It's not perfect to be sure, if only because of when it started being published, but it's held up pretty well. It actually works a lot better than the author even intended in a few ways because of a certain scene with Matt and Tylin and him trying to justify the event as his own choice when he was pressured by someone who had institutional power over him. The book, unfortunately plays it off as a joke/comeuppance because he's a man, but it plays off pretty disturbing today.
Thank you for making this video. Funnily enough, I waited a while to pick up this book (mainly because too many ppl hyping it up to the moon). Was just about to borrow it from my library when the news about the residential schools broke
FWIW, I've always seen TJ Klune as v. SUS. Ever since his 2011 M/M book Bear, Otter, and the Kid turned out to have almost the exact plot of a 2007 independent gay movie called Shelter. Like 95%.
Edit: for clarification.
My family survived the Boarding Schools (American residential schools). Relatives debriefed on my grandmother,who debriefed on me.
As an author, I can't imagine how to write anything inspired by the Boarding Schools,not because it hurts too much but because it would come off as hyperbolic.
I know when this book became so popular…and when I found out some problematic stuff about this author…I was like yeah nobody is gonna care because it’s so popular. It was the same thing with Colleen Hoover for a while. If the author is really popular people tend to not care or even listen.
I adored this book when it came out but yeah, glad I’m seeing this now. I’m disappointed.
This is probably a reach but did TJ really need to exploit a marginalized community when he’s queer? Like, gay conversion therapy has a long and horrifying history and as a queer person he would have had a lot of personal experience to draw on if he wanted to take it in a magical fantasy realm. Also makes me wonder if he had, would kindness have been the ultimate solution?
You actually make a great point
It is so telling and insidious that he uses the specific phrase, "doing the work", in the synopsis of the sequel. My ear caught that immediately and I can't help but think it's intentional.
I just donated $50 to the residential school survivors charity. Thank you for shedding light on this awful subject, something TJ Klune has failed miserably to do. Seriously, TJ, what the actual fuck?!
Thank you so much for supporting survivors Garrison
I wonder how Klunes is thinking about the Palestinians. Where does "kindness" solve that problem?
I've been waiting anxiously for this
This is such a great video -- taking this as an opportunity to raise awareness about the real and ongoing harm to indigenous and Native American communities is very cool to see.
for additional information about the systemic and social oppression of native people/s in the US, check out the podcast "this land", it sheds light on how exactly we continue to take away (steal) land, culture and children from what should legally be sovereign nations and from native families.
I am so happy to see you covering TJ Klune!!!
My father was born on reservation to a teenage mother in the 1970s. His mother's family wanted to raise the child so their daughter could finish high school. But a white social worker at the hospital pressured her to give her baby up for adoption right after she gave birth. He was adopted by a white older couple almost 3 hours away from his reservation. But if he stayed he would've ended up in a Residential School. My uncle on my Step Dad's side lived on the same reserve and he and his older sisters were taken to a Residential School, he always showed me his mangled knee and told me a priest would beat it with a cane every time he was caught speaking his native language or even French. It's insulting to say "they were taken out of fear." Because it wasn't fear it was hate and it was genocide.
As an autistic person, any time someone calls themselves a voice for the voiceless I die inside.
This book has been pretty high on my tbr. I'm glad this video showed up before I read it. I'm always out of the loop with book discourse.
Thank you so much for this video. I mostly liked the fuzzy feels of the book and now learning about the author's "inspiration" am hugely disappointed -- also in myself. I live in Canada and should have spotted the shallow similarities. So glad I came across your channel, on to binge the rest of your videos.
I'm not native but I am bipoc and telling my white friends about this revealed so much about them, I was so genuinely disgusted and upset that people could value enjoying a book over calling out a white man capitalisating on native american racism
Hi, I recently found your chanel and have been bing watching your videos. I just wanted to tell you i really like your energy (i hope that doesn't sound weird 😅) you have a very comfoting and safe vibe ✨️
Wooooow the self congratulation in those quotes is verging on narcissistic!! It’s like he heard the term “white savior” and thought it was meant as a compliment…