In June 2021, Canada fell to its knees when the remains of 215 missing Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves in Kamloops, British Columbia. This was shortly followed by over 700 graves found on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. Then–McClelland & Stewart publisher Jared Bland and I had a lunch scheduled the day following the discovery at Marieval, and the lunch went in a direction that I don’t think either of us anticipated.
For the last decade that I’ve been in the industry, I’ve been one of the only Indigenous people working in publishing in Canada. Even though that number has doubled in the last few years, I can still count the number of us on my two hands. I had watched the response of the country, but mostly the response of our industry, to this devastating news about the graves, and what it revealed felt shattering. It was clear that as an industry, we were failing to advance the work of reconciliation. I was overwhelmed, disheartened, and I felt almost betrayed.
Over what was meant to be a catch-up lunch, Jared and I spoke about some of the key ways that our publishing community could engage in tough conversations about the lack of authentic and positive representation of Indigenous cultures and perspectives in order to challenge ourselves to do better and contribute to an effort to improve things in the industry. The idea of an event took shape over that two-hour lunch, and we decided to hold it on Sept. 29, 2021, ahead of Canada’s newly created National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The government had just announced the creation of this federal holiday to be recognized each year on September 30 as a day of remembrance, action, learning, and reflection on the horrific tragedies experienced by Indigenous people as a result of the country’s former residential school system.
As we started to brainstorm potential structures for the event, we engaged the brilliant minds at Penguin Random House Canada and at CookeMcDermid, where I was a literary agent at the time, to finalize an agenda, and within three months, we had created Decolonizing Publishing, a virtual event to further bring the principles of decolonization to our work in publishing. This first event, which we hope to continue next year, broke boundaries on all sides, bringing booksellers, festival partners, literary agencies, and editors together for an exploration of how the work of reconciliation and decolonization intersects with our industry. The afternoon opened with a stunning exploration of intergenerational trauma. This was followed by three breakout sessions featuring booksellers, editors, and authors looking at Indigenous-led sales and marketing efforts, decolonizing editing practices, and a conversation about effective allyship. The afternoon closed with a keynote on action and how to carry these principles forward into our day-to-day work in publishing and as citizens in the broader world.
The response to the event was incredibly gratifying and inspiring. Spurred by the event, Tundra Book Group publisher Tara Walker reached out to talk about ideas, one of which was a project: a collection of letters centered around Indigeneity in all of its complexities, auntie laughs, and painful inheritances.
For me, this conversation with Tara was revelatory, both personally and professionally. I thought about my own children and the challenges I have had talking to them about our history and how that has impacted our present. My family is incredibly fractured, as many Indigenous families and communities are. I thought about so many Indigenous people outside our industry who have so much to say and haven’t been given a space to say it. And how sometimes, as an industry, we have a tendency to publish for each other.
I then put together a proposal for an anthology inviting Indigenous people with differing cultural worldviews, experiences, and stories to write a letter to an ancestor, or a child not yet born, to share their experience of what it means to be Indigenous today. The list of contributors is wide in scope: activists, environmentalists, actors, writers, Olympians, and NHL players have all come together. I felt strongly that not only would this be a really beautiful book celebrating Indigenous representation, but an incredible opportunity to build community between Indigenous people who have been broken apart by the systems that continue to fail them. Tara acquired the book for Tundra Book Group, and Jared acquired it for McClelland & Stewart.
Stemming from the letters project, I have had conversations that I have learned from on multiple levels, invited new dialogues between people who otherwise would never have been connected, and learned how to speak to my own family in a new way. And it all came from the Decolonizing Publishing event that September.
I share all of this to say, keep going. Have vulnerable conversations. Keep doing the work. Even if you can’t see it immediately, someone, somewhere, is very grateful for it. I sure am.
Stephanie Sinclair is the publisher of McClelland & Stewart and former literary agent at CookeMcDermid Literary Management.
