“Legend of Sugar Girl” by Joseph Boyden

“Legend of Sugar Girl” by Joseph Boyden
White men gave Indians a lot of gifts. Guns and outboard motors. Television. Coffee. KFC. Road hockey.
Baggy jeans and baseball caps. Rock-and-roll music and cocaine. But there is one gift that no one ever really talks
about.
Once there was a young girl. She lived far up in the bush, past the Canadian Shield, so far up that deer could
not survive in that harsh place. Her father was a hunter and a trapper. Her mother made her family’s clothing and
cleaned the game that the father brought home, and her stretched and tanned the hides. They traded these pelts at
the Hudson’s Bay Company post for some of the wemestikushu’s, the white man’s, goods – goods that that
Anishnabe, The Indians, found made life easier in that cost place. They traded lynx and beaver, moose, and marten
and snowshoe hare and mink for flour and bright cloth, bullets, simple tools and thread.
The young girl had many brothers and sisters, and all of them helped their parents with cooking and
snowing, hunting and trapping. In the winter they kept their home in the bush by the father’s trap lines, and in the
summer they moved camp to the edge of the lake where fish were plentiful. This young girl wasn’t so different
from other young girls. She had a doll and her brothers and sisters to play with. Sometimes they would argue, but
most of the time they got along. The young girl had a good life, especially in the summer, when it stayed light until
late in the evening and the family would stay up with the light, playing games and telling stories.
But as all things must, this good life would soon come to an end. One day, after a visit to the Hudson’s Bay
Company post, the father came back with an ashen face. He sat with his wife and explained to her what he’d been
told by the white traders at the post. A residential school had been built near the post, and the government had
made it law that all Anishnabe children must leave their families’ camp and live at this school. ‘It won’t be so bad,’
the white traders told the young girl’s father. ‘Your children can come back and live with you for two months every
summer. Thing of it this way,’ the white traders said. ‘They will live in our world and learn our ways.’
‘And what if I do not sent them to your residential school?’ the father asked. ‘Then we are no longer
permitted to trade with you, and the government will send the Mounties and they will take your children anyways,’
the white traders answered.
The young girl’s father told his wife all this, and she cried. She knew they had to do what the government
told them.
‘We will go deep in the bush where they cannot find us,’ the father said. ‘We will live the way the
grandfathers did, and forget about these white men.’
‘Even this country is not big enough that we can run away from them,’ his wife said. ‘They have airplanes
that will spot our fire smoke. You won’t have bullets for your gun. You can no longer shoot a bow well enough to
feed all of us. What kind of life would that be for our children? Running and hiding the rest of our lives like rabbits.”
So the young girl’s parents had no choice but to do what the government told them. When the geese left
that autumn, they took the children to the residential school, where nuns in black habits, with stern round faces,
waited for them.
The first thing the nuns did was cut the children’s hair. The boys had their hair cut short so that it poked up
from their heads. The girls’ hair was cut in straight bangs, the rest of it hanging above the shoulder so that they
could no longer braid it as their mother and grandmothers did.
The next thing the nuns did was dress the children in stuff, itchy clothing. Then they told them that they
were no longer allowed to speak Cree. If they did, their mouths would be washed out with soap and they would be
struck with a switch. Some of the children laughed, the young girl among them, for they thought the nuns were
joking. Who would hit the children, especially with a switch? They were not dogs! The young girl was shocked

when a nun dragged her to a room, put the young girl over her knee, hiked her school dress up and beat her bare
skin until she cried.
That night, and for the next several months, the young girl fell asleep to her own crying and the sound of
other children crying in the large room lined with beds. They missed their parents and the cook-fire and the smell
of tanned leather.
Besides the haircuts and clothing and days filled with clocks and classrooms and spanking and schedules,
the oddest thing the young girl experienced was the food that the nuns made her eat three times a day. In the
morning, she stood in line with the others and was given a bowl of grey mush. Then she was given a little milk to
pour on the mush. But the most interesting thing was that she was expected to place a spoonful of sugar, white as
snow on a lake, onto the mush and milk. The sugar made the bland food taste good. The young girl learned to like
her breakfast because of it. It made the grey morning bright for a while. Soon, the girl got the habit of sneaking a
spoonful of sugar into her school dress pocket. During the day, when she was bored or felt like a treat, she licked
her finger and placed it in the sugar in her pocket, then stuck her finger in her mouth without any of the nuns
noticing. She was very careful doing this, for if the nuns saw, they would surely beat her with a tamarack switch.
The days turned to weeks turned to months. The children became better at speaking English, but many still
spoke their own language, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose. Always, when they were caught, they
had their mouths washed out with soap and were given a switching on the bare skin of their behinds. The young
girl noticed that even the bravest boys, who on a dare would look a nun in the eye and insult her in Cree could still
be heard crying quietly as they fell asleep. The nights were the worst; nuns creeping like ghosts between the beds
and hushing the children with their bony fingers to their lips. The young girls looked forward to mornings.
When the children were very good, they were given a hard candy, sweet and brightly coloured that they
sucked on until the candy became a sliver, then disappeared. These were even better than the white sugar to the
young girl. The flavour was deeper, thicker. It made her think of the warm sun on her skin, and made her feel the
way you feel when you wake up in the morning and realize the day is all yours. The grey days of residential school
passed more quickly with hard candy.
Spring came, and the children talked about soon going back to their summer homes by the lakes and rivers.
This prospect made the children happy and, when they were happy, they behaved well. The nuns in turn handed
out a little more candy. The young girl thought it would be a good idea to bring some of this candy home with her.
She even began doing favours for the other children, making their beds, tickling their backs, even giving away part
of her dinner in exchange for candy.
It wasn’t long before she became possessed by the idea of hoarding candy, if she could get enough of it, she
could have candy all the time and her days here would be much happier. She begged and finagled and traded so
much that soon the other children began to call her by a new name. They began calling her the Sugar Girl. Some of
them meant it to tease her, but the Sugar Girl was proud of her new name. The other children began to admire her
intensity and focus on this sweet substance. Before long, they called her this name as a sign of respect.
Summer was a strange time for the Sugar Girl and her brothers and sisters. They had only spoken their
language in secret and in whispers all year, and for the first long part of the summer, whenever they spoke Cree out
loud, something inside them flinched tense for a beating.
Summer passed quickly, as summers do. Years passed quickly, as years so. Each summer as the children
grew, they came back home remembering a little less of their language, until a time came when the Sugar Girl and
her brothers and sisters could barely talk with their parents anymore.
During these years that the Sugar Girl was gone to residential school, her mother and father tried to live life
as they’d always lived it. Father went out on the traplines or moose hunting, and Mother kept their home. But they
were growing older, and with age comes weakness. To cut and clean a mood is a young man’s work. With no
children to help them, the Sugar Girl’s parents finally admitted that they had to do what other parents were doing.
They moved to the reserve where the residential school was and, with the little bit of money the government gave