‘Imagining something better’

The Defiant 511 of the Alberni Indian Residential School
by Evelyn Thompson-George and Art Thompson

Victoria: FriesenPress, 2025 
$21.99 /  9781038315359

Reviewed by Linda Rogers

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First, a disclaimer, I might have written this book as the events described in it were confided to me decades ago, but the good news is that Evelyn Thompson-George, the last child of Nuu-Chah-Nulth artist Art Thompson has added her perspective on the multi-generational effect of extreme child abuse and that is one of the gifts of this book. The bad news is that his story is true, not a terrifying variation on a nightmare.

It is never easy to witness trauma and this searingly intimate document from father and daughter, both victims of a racist law, is no soft read. To know the artist and his work, while a great privilege, is an agonising invitation to fresh pain.

It is never easy to witness trauma and this searingly intimate document from father and daughter, both victims of a racist law, is no soft read. To know the artist and his work, while a great privilege, is an agonising invitation to fresh pain.

Art Thompson, who came from a good family, a loving family, was removed from his culture and his first three languages to experience full realisation of the white man’s burden to transform First Children into English speakers and self-identification as “little savages” after he was torn from his family. Even his name was stolen when he was given the number 511.

He was stolen, under threat, from his home village of Whyac on the Nitinat Narrows on the beautiful west coast of Vancouver Island and taken to the child torture chambers, known as the TB Hospital for Indian Children in Nanaimo and then to the Alberni Indian Residential School in Port Alberni, where he was dehumanised and sodomised (anal rape while in a body cast) by staff and clerics and one animal until his final escape with his righteously outraged father at age thirteen.

Until his abduction by the system, Art had enjoyed the love of his elders and eaten the plentiful crabs that thrive on the Cheewhat River, also known as the River of Urine (an unsettling reminder of his humiliating boarding school bed-wetting) near his ancestral home. His starvation, repeated rape and beatings were totally unexpected and his initial silence, and that of thousands of other little children suffered to come unto Jesus by reprobates, were based on fear of reprisal against their beloved Elders, as Canada benefited from the resources offered up by their land and dribbled back in diminished compensation.

Bestialised, sodomised, and beaten, Art survived to tell his story through inspired art practice. That was the miracle of his endurance. “When he was a baby, his Great Grand-father, Tooqbeek, rubbed medicine on his hands: to give him that ability to be good with his hands.”

Good he was, and better. His studies at Camosun College and the Emily Carr School of Art, opened his eyes to European movements influenced at that time by recent discovery of Indigenous world art. Artists as far afield as Henri Matisse and Kwagiulth Chief Tony Hunt, a traditionalist, influenced his impetus to reflect “all my relations” and not just his traditional Salish culture.

His voice, empowered by unbroken self-esteem, travels past his geography, his noble lineage and his suffering and tells the story of our common humanity. It lifts.

That insight and his family pride were the sources of his defiance. He would not be beaten, no matter how violent his punishment from insidious criminals like Arthur Plint, who died in jail thanks to Art’s testimony, which included the attention to intimate details that also informed his art. We can, in his unflinching commentary, even smell the breath of his tormentors, including the German Shepherd dog that defiled him on command. There is no end to the brutal imagination of these now damned men, and even the woman who forced him to pleasure her perversity.

This torture of children followed the government policy of degrading matriarchy by designating Native women as drunks and whores, paving the way to stealing their descendants and redefining them in cultural vacuums, which made even the simplest exchanges between siblings as violations subject to corporal punishment.

My introduction to this practice came when Nuu-Chah-Nulth noblewoman Donna Amos, whom Tony Hunt had brought to dinner, showed me how her hands, also blessed by her Elders, had been scarred by punishment with a beaded strap for talking to her siblings at school in their own language.

Language is essential to the explication of culture. The rules that separated children from their families also attempted to destroy communication, an essential human right. As Art witnesses in this book, silence was golden in this time of perfidy. Telling was discouraged with threats of punishment and shame. No one wanted to own up.

But Art, reinforced in confidence by his knowledge of his worth as scion of a family of consequence in his culture, overcame his shame and his fear of retribution and escaped the way some children do, by imagining something better, a return home, manifesting his blessings in a magnificent body of work and retribution under the law.

I met Art in the 1980s, after he had been through many seasons in hell and dispositions of his rage. We were attending the memorial potlatch for Artist Henry Hunt at Alert Bay, and, in a conversation that started when I bragged about the enormous (27-pound) spring I had recently caught at the mouth of the Cheewhat River near his ancestral village and our discovery of common experiences like surviving the treacherous Nitinat Narrows at tide change, we talked about the clergymen in the room.

I was troubled by the misery of my near neighbours in Chemainus, where my family raised sheep that provided wool for Cowichan sweaters in between the Number 11 and Tussie Road reserves. Their children were my children and vice versa. Our wise people were Elders Maggie Blaney Jack and Leonard Peter. What I observed in family dysfunction was beyond distressing. Children were dying, but nobody spoke of the shameful origins of tragedy. I needed to piece it together.

Art was ready to talk, and I was ready to listen.

As the fires burned and our eyes filled with smoke Art spoke of his misery, almost but not quite in the shocking language of his deposition, which goes even further to reveal the atrocities. I am the daughter and sister of lawyers and I told him he had a case. Even in the country that allowed, indeed legislated, the cruelty he was describing, the rule of law abides.

Now, as Canada comes under threat of an American despot, we are defensible only in our recent resolution to make amends for these crimes committed in silence. Hopefully, using the tools of common law and with books such as this one, we are learning how fragile our commitment to decency actually is and how it is incumbent on all of us to protect its agency.

Defiant 511 is not a book for everyone. For those who have survived childhood abuse, it could be a trigger. For younger readers, it could be a traumatising glimpse into the pit of human degradation. But for those who should know what happened to generations of Native children and their subsequent tragedies and triumphs, it is essential reading.

The production of this text is a noble and courageous act by Art’s daughter, and I, as a partisan reader, understand her impetus to hold our feet to the fire. However, I find myself wishing that other readers, perhaps many who have not seen the range of his artistic excellence, could see how the defiant boy took his blessed and tortured hands and made great beauty so that the world could see the full glory of Art’s heritage and the brilliance of his dedicated talent for visual storytelling. Perhaps the next edition will include a catalogue of his treasures. Ars longs, vita breva. Never more true.

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Linda Rogers, an old friend, in joy and sorrow, of Art Thompson, has just completed a book of memoirs about Chief Tony Hunt, a friend and mentor of Art and facilitator of the revival of Kwakwaka-wakw art after the dark years of the potlatch ban. Both were victims of abuse at the Nanaimo TB Hospital for Indian (sic) Children. [Editor’s note: Linda has reviewed books by Bruce McIvor, Cheryl Troupe & Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.), Adrienne Gruber, Peyman Vahabzadeh, Michael Elcock, and Marion McKinnon Crook for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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