The Fire Still Burns

Life In and After Residential School

By Sam George
With Jill Yonit Goldberg, Liam Belson, Dylan MacPhee, and Tanis Wilson
Categories: Indigenous Studies, History, Canadian History
Publisher: UBC Press
Paperback : 9780774880855, 152 pages, May 2023
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774880862, 152 pages, May 2023
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774880879, 152 pages, May 2023

Table of contents

Preface / Sam George

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Text

1 Your Name Is T'seatsultux

2 In Them Days

3 Our Lives Signed Away

4 The Strap

5 A Girl Named Pearl, a Boy Named Charlie

6 Runaway

7 I Tried to Be Invisible

8 Finding Ways to Feel Good

9 On Our Own

10 Oakalla

11 Haney Correctional

12 Longshoreman

13 Misery Loves Company

14 Drowning

15 Tsow-Tun Le Lum

16 I’m Still Here

Afterword: On Co-Writing Sam George’s Memoir / Jill Yonit Goldberg

Reader’s Guide

About the Authors

The Fire Still Burns is a tale of survival and redemption through which Squamish Elder Sam George recounts his residential school experience and how it led to a life of addiction, violence, and imprisonment until he found the courage to face his past and begin healing.

Description

“My name is Sam George. In spite of everything that happened to me, by the grace of the Creator, I have lived to be an Elder.” Set in the Vancouver area in the late 1940s and through to the present day, this unflinching account follows Sam from his idyllic childhood on the Eslhá7an (Mission) reserve to the confines of St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, and then into a life of addiction and incarceration. But an ember of Sam’s spirit always burned within him, and so this is also a story of survival, recovery, and redemption, of facing past trauma to rebuild a life and a future.