Residential school robbed him of the Cree stories from his childhood. But he got them back
Solomon Ratt urges people to reclaim their oral history on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
When Solomon Ratt was a little boy, he spent his winter nights in a log cabin in rural Saskatchewan, curled up cozily with his siblings as they listened to their mother tell stories in Cree.
"There was no separate rooms for parents and children. There was just a cabin itself with the stove burning in the corner, and us against one wall away from the stove, covered up in our blankets," the Cree author and professor said.
"My mother would start telling us stories, and she'd tell stories until we fell asleep. And, the next night, she'd do the same thing."
Those stories, mostly about the Cree folk hero Wisahkecahk, were his mother's way of teaching them about their culture, he said. But in Cree tradition, those tales are only told in the winter. And from the age of six onwards, Ratt spent his winters at the Indian Residential School in Prince Albert, Sask.
"So I did not hear the stories again," he said.
He has since spent his life re-learning and re-telling those stories, and making sure that others have the resources they need to keep them — and the language they were meant to be told in — alive.
He's an avid contributor to the Cree Literacy Network, an online resource aimed at revitalizing the language, and a professor emeritus at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, where he helped build a Cree program.
Solomon spoke to As It Happens host Nil Köksal to mark National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, a federal holiday created to honour survivors of Canada's residential school system, as well as those who never returned.
Between the 1870s and the 1990s, Canada's federal government took more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children away from their families and forced them to attend church-run schools designed to strip them of their languages and cultures.
Abuse and neglect were rampant at the schools and thousands of children died from disease, malnourish, suicide and more.
"It's a good day to say, yes, this happened. What can we do about it? What can we do to move away from that?" Ratt said.
"And one of the things we can do is to start speaking our languages, and also to start telling our stories."
From Cree stories to comic books
Old habits die hard, and even when Ratt was far from his family's log cabin in Stanley Mission, Sask., he continued to spend his evenings immersed in stories. He'd curl up under his blanket in his dormitory after bedtime with a flashlight reading comic books and the Bible.
"We were surrounded by English all the time. Everywhere we turned, it was English, English, English. TV? English. Movies? English. And I wanted to learn," he said. "Reading was a wonderful way of learning the language."
His affinity for English allowed Ratt to excel academically at school, and he was a favourite among his teachers.
In his 2023 book, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, he writes that his instructors showered him with what he then believed was praise, but which he's since realized was anything but — like the time a teacher told him he was "a credit to his race."
"At that time, I thought they were great comments," he said. "As I grew older … I realized that behind that was a certain ingrained racism."
But the teachers, he said, didn't see it that way.
"They meant it in a good way," he said. "And that's the thing about growing up in our society. A lot of us grew up with ingrained attitudes that we don't realize what they reflect."
As he grew up, Ratt says he's had to work to unlearn sexist tropes ingrained in his own psyche, like the old-fashioned idea that women belong in the kitchen.
"I had to outgrow those things and realize it's inside me, that I have to get rid of this, change that attitude. And that's the thing about the settler society looking at, like, First Nations people. They don't realize the attitudes they have are actually racist because they haven't had a chance to look inward."
Just as he didn't realize at first that his teacher's comment was more cruel than kind, it also took him a long time to understand the impact residential school had on his life.
It wasn't until years later, while driving around with his daughter, that it dawned on him. She asked him, point blank, how he was doing with his recovery from residential school trauma.
"I told her I really don't have any trauma from it. I was not sexually abused, I was not physically abused in the schools. And so I really don't have any trauma. So I was in denial," he said.
"And then she told me, 'Well, you were taken from your parents when you were a kid, when you were a child. That's traumatic enough.' And I realized, yes, it is. It was really traumatic for me to be taken away.
"And the healing process started for me."
'You're the one who knows how to write Cree'
That process, he says, came through deepening his knowledge of the Cree language.
Even though he went to residential school, Ratt retained his ability to speak Cree, but he never learned to read and write it.
To do so, he took the same approach he'd adopted all those years ago when he immersed himself in English under his bed covers. He scoured libraries and read anything and everything he could get his hands on about Cree language, Cree stories and Indigenous stories more broadly.
In the '70s, he took Cree classes at the First Nations University of Canada, then known as Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, where he would later teach himself.
By the time he went overseas to teach English in China in the '80s, he wrote well enough to send letters back to his mother in Cree syllabics.
"I felt like a spy spending secret messages across the border," he said with a chuckle.
When he came home to attend his father's funeral, this time it was his own relatives who showered him with praise, telling him: "You're the one who knows how to write Cree."
"They were impressed," he said, "because my mother would be reading the letters I wrote to her to my relatives."
He also wrote short missives, in both English and Cree, including his memories of residential school, which he posted first on Facebook, then on the Cree Literacy Network blog, and eventually in his book.
This summer, he was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country's top honour, for his work "preserving and revitalizing the Cree language through his literacy materials and teachings grounded in traditional cultural values."
On the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, he urges others of Cree descent to follow his lead and embrace their language and their stories, especially parents who want to do for their children what his mother did for him.
After all, he says, there are more free resources online than ever before.
"I hear a lot of young parents saying, 'I wish I was a storyteller so I could tell these stories to my children. But the thing is, traditionally, it was the parent's responsibility to tell the stories to the children," he said.
"Just think about that. You're a parent. Tell the stories. You have sources available online right now. And if you do it in English, great. But if you could do it in Cree, even better."
A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available to provide support for survivors and those affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour service at 1-866-925-4419.
Mental health counselling and crisis support is also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through the Hope for Wellness hotline at 1-855-242-3310 or by online chat.
Interview produced by Leslie Amminson
