Memoir recalls P.A. as a `hard place'
Book delves into growing up in Sask. city, family trauma, racism and reconciliation
Robert Boschman grew up in the back of a 24-hour laundromat in Prince Albert, a “tabernacle of clean” with customers at all hours.
That's literally speaking.
But figuratively, he grew up in the shadow of trauma: His grandmother's death before he was born imprinted his life and those of his family members.
Boschman, who now lives in Calgary, tells his story in the memoir White Coal City: A Memoir of Place & Family, new this month from University of Regina Press.
Boschman's paternal grandmother Margaret was killed in a hit-and-run in Saskatoon in 1940. She was 29 and pregnant. His grandfather John was “traumatized” and “ruined” after that.
In the 1990s, Boschman started collecting the threads that would become this book. He interviewed family members and researched records. In 2009, he started writing.
But, “I couldn't separate that accident that had happened before I was even born … from where I lived as a kid, so I had to bring the two together,” Boschman said.
The book jumps from the 1960s, to the 1930s, to the 1910s, to the 2010s, back and forth as Boschman tells his life story and a history of the Prairies.
He talks about his Mennonite ancestors and the people who were here for millennia before them, the letters his grandparents exchanged, the history of Prince Albert's settlement, his love of cars, finding tadpoles and garter snakes in the slough near his home, his grandparents' farm, playing hockey.
Embedded amid all that is a story about “a place in Saskatchewan, a really hard place.”
Prince Albert was, Boschman writes, a city “growling with the anger of missed chances and dying ends, of things that had shrivelled or would just never be.”
He writes of his father's friend getting beat up so badly his jaw needed wired shut, all for a case of beer. He writes about the smell in the air, “the odours of animal death, excrement, and sulphur (that) entwined and descended on the neighbourhood,” from the slaughterhouse and pulp and paper mill.
Boschman's home in Prince Albert was smack between two pillars of colonization.
“I lived two blocks from the 1885 jail that was built in the aftermath of the Riel Resistance, and two blocks the other side of where I live is a residential school, All Saints, and I'm growing up right there,” said Boschman.
“I mean, how can I tell the story of my dead grandmother and not tell the story of that as well? That I was there as a little white kid and I witnessed that stuff.”
Even as a child, he recognized Prince Albert as “a brutal racist place.”
He writes in one paragraph about the riots by the mostly First Nations and Metis prisoners at the “festering” old jail, and in the next about his teacher who made Boschman write lines on the blackboard, repeating “Adolf Hitler was a great man and did great things for the German people.”
“I'm telling my story, which is a white settler story,” said Boschman, “but I'm doing it in a way that tries to evoke and imply and create awareness about a much deeper, more serious trauma than my family's trauma, which lies upon the land itself. Which has been perpetrated by colonization.
“My hope is that White Coal City will contribute to the truth and reconciliation process that I think all Canadians need to be a part of.”
Most of the customers at the Boschmans' Laundromat were Metis and First Nations people from Prince Albert and area. Boschman's neighbours were Metis. His adopted sister is Cree.
Boschman had “very progressive left-wing parents” — and it was hard for him to realize they participated in the Sixties Scoop.
Crystal was five months old when she came to live with the Boschmans; Robert was 10 years old. His parents had seen an ad for “Adopt Indian and Metis” in the P.A. Herald newspaper, and wanted to help keep a child out of the foster care system.
Today, Robert Boschman is “best of friends” with his sister, who is a teacher in Saskatoon. But he does not profess to speak for her or tell her story.
“I believe it's really important for white settlers like me to tell our stories … to contribute to discourse across the country and across North America actually,” said Boschman, “but to do it in a respectful way that is not telling the story of the peoples who were here for tens of thousands of years before we ever came here, you know?”