Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir, by Tomson Highway

I’m not sure what to say about this book. It’s brilliantly written, a wonderful story of Indigenous childhood and joy in rural Manitoba in the 1960s that plays with languages in a wonderful way and was a delight to listen to as an audiobook. And yet, it took me ages to get through the audiobook — while it was enjoyable listening, I never found it compelling.

Also as a settler-descended Canadian, it was odd to listen to a book by an acclaimed Indigenous author in which he writes about his years in residential school in a mostly positive way. It’s not that Highway is unaware of or unaffected by the harms done in the residential school system, but he chooses to focus on the way in which it opened doors to him for further education and his future career, and most of the stories he tells about his school days are funny or heartwarming ones about his fellow students.

This is an unexpected perspective, but obviously any Indigenous person has the right to tell their own story in whatever way works for them, and as the title implies, Tomson Highway, while acknowledging the hardships and discrimination forced upon Indigenous people in Canada, chooses to frame this particular book around Indigenous joy — “permanent astonishment” at the beauty of the land, the joy and resilience of the Cree, Dene, and Metis people he grew up among, and the liveliness and power of the Cree language.