Stolen Life: The Journey Of Cree Woman - A Tale of Resilience and Redemption

Imagine being forcibly taken away from your family, your culture, and everything you hold dear. Imagine the pain, the loss, and the despair that accompanies such an experience. This is the story of a Cree woman whose life was stolen from her, but whose spirit remained unbroken.

The journey of this resilient Cree woman is a testament to the human spirit's enduring strength and its capacity for healing. Through her struggles, she not only found her voice but also became a beacon of hope for countless others who have experienced similar traumas.

The Beginnings of a Stolen Life

Born into a loving Cree family in the heart of the Canadian wilderness, this woman spent her early years surrounded by the beauty of nature and the warmth of her community. But her idyllic childhood abruptly came to an end when she was forcibly taken away from her family and sent to a residential school.

Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman

by Rudy Wiebe (Kindle Edition)

4.6 out of 5

Language	:	English
File size	:	3753 KB
Text-to-Speech	:	Enabled
Screen Reader	:	Supported
Enhanced typesetting	:	Enabled
Word Wise	:	Enabled
Print length	:	466 pages

FREE

Residential schools, which were part of a government-sanctioned assimilation policy, aimed to strip Indigenous children of their culture and language. These institutions were rife with abuse, neglect, and cultural erasure. For the Cree woman, life at the residential school was a nightmare filled with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

As the years passed, she endured an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering, yet managed to hold on to a flicker of hope. She witnessed the loss of her language, her traditions, and her sense of self. It seemed as if her identity had been stolen along with her life.

A Glorious Journey towards Redemption

But within the depths of her despair, a flame of resilience burned, driving her towards a path of redemption. Through sheer determination, she managed to escape the clutches of the residential school system and embarked on a journey to reclaim her stolen life.

With the support of her community, she reconnected with her Cree heritage and began rebuilding her shattered spirit. She attended healing circles, engaged in cultural practices, and sought solace in the untamed Canadian wilderness that had once been her home. Slowly but surely, she pieced together the fragments of her identity.

As the years went by, the stolen life she had once known transformed into a story of strength, empowerment, and defiance. She became a vocal advocate for Indigenous rights, using her own experiences to shed light on the atrocities suffered by Indigenous communities across the country.

A Beacon of Hope

Now, as an elder in her community, this Cree woman continues to uplift others with her wisdom, compassion, and unwavering resilience. She is a living testament to the power of healing, forgiveness, and the strength of the human spirit.

Through her advocacy work, she has helped pave the way for a brighter future for Indigenous individuals, working to ensure that no one else's life is stolen and that all voices are heard. Her story serves as a reminder that even in the face of immense adversity, the human spirit can rise above, heal, and inspire.

Stolen Life: The Journey Of Cree Woman is a story that needs to be heard. It is a narrative of unimaginable pain and suffering, but also one of resilience, redemption, and hope. By sharing this story, we shed light on the dark history of residential schools, honor the strength of Indigenous communities, and strive for a future where justice and equality reign.

Let this tale of a stolen life serve as a rallying cry to fight against systemic injustices and to amplify the voices of those whose stories have been suppressed for far too long.

Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman

by Rudy Wiebe (Kindle Edition)

4.6 out of 5

Language	:	English
File size	:	3753 KB
Text-to-Speech	:	Enabled
Screen Reader	:	Supported
Enhanced typesetting	:	Enabled
Word Wise	:	Enabled
Print length	:	466 pages

FREE

"Written with primal intensity, touched with redeeming compassion, Rudy Wiebe--has explored our history, our roots and the secrets of our hearts with moral seriousness and great feeling." Governor General's Award for Fiction Citation, 1994

A powerful, major work of non-fiction, beautifully written, from the twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear.

This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence.

Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life that led to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children.

He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life.

How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.