Deconstructing the Narrative: 'Legend of Sugar Girl' by Joseph Boyden

The assignment analyzes Joseph Boyden's 'Legend of Sugar Girl,' a story depicting the experiences of an Indigenous girl forced into a residential school. The narrative highlights the cultural and personal impacts of these institutions, focusing on the loss of language, identity, and the introduction of sugar as a coping mechanism. The analysis explores themes of cultural assimilation, trauma, resilience, and the lasting effects of historical injustices. The story illustrates the government's role in the forced assimilation of Indigenous children, the harsh conditions within the schools, and the children's struggles to maintain their cultural connections. The protagonist's journey reflects the broader impact of residential schools on Indigenous communities, including the loss of language, family ties, and the introduction of unhealthy habits to cope with the trauma experienced within the schools. The story is a poignant reflection on the intergenerational effects of historical trauma and the ongoing challenges faced by Indigenous peoples.

“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

them, they bought expensive food and necessities from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Sugar Girl’s father had no
choice but to laugh when he thought about how well the government and the company worked together, how they
were like two hands on the same body. One hand would give something, and the other would just as quickly snatch
it away,
The years passed, and the Sugar Girl grew up and eventually came to call the residential school home, just
as the nuns and government had planned. As she grew taller, the Sugar Girl grew plumper. The nuns’ food was very
different from her family’s food. The sauces, the desserts, the sweet teas and soda pops she discovered – all of them
were thick with sugar. In some strange way, this food that she ate and grew to love replaced what had been taken
from her, and when the Sugar Girl felt sadness, the sadness that comes from deep in her stomach, she smothered it
with her sugary foods.
The day finally arrived when it was time for the Sugar Girl to leave the residential school. Although she
would never have imagined it when she first came there, she was scared to leave. Even though the nuns were
generous with their whipping, they also gave her the things she needed – her clothing, her food, but what they
neglected to give her was the ability to find these things on her own.
The government gave her little money, just as they gave her parents little. It was strange to realize that,
now she was free to see her parents, she rarely did. She spoke a different language, liked different things. This fact
made her feel as though she’d lost something very important, and when the sadness swelled up from inside her,
she blunted it with sugar in its many forms.
For all the pleasant feelings that these sweet things brought her, the Sugar Girl began to notice the bad
effects. Her teeth were turning brown and hurt her horribly. Her skin had suffered too, as the poor diet ate away at
that as well. She noticed that when she didn’t eat sugar she felt run down and got horrible headaches. She kept
eating away.
On her 20th birthday, the Sugar Girl’s friend gave her her first taste of alcohol. That night she once again felt
the way she had as a small girl when she’d been given her first taste of sugar. It made things seem brighter,
warmer. It made her happy and made her laugh. It made her forget. She didn’t know that alcohol was sugar in its
fermented, purer form. ‘Think of it as candy for adults,’ one friend said to her that night, and she laughed and
laughed until tears flowed.
And so it was that alcohol became her new candy. But the effects of this new candy was stronger. She felt its
effect soon after she drank it, felt it the next morning. Worse than that, she did things while drinking that she
normally wouldn’t do. For the first hour or so she and her friends were talk more and laugh more than normal, and
that was nice. But when they continued to drink, the laughing turned to sadness or anger. She never knew for sure
which way it would go.
She wanted the warm feeling of happiness that first came upon her to last, but the alcohol wouldn’t allow it.
When the Sugar Girl drank too much and the sadness or anger came, she tried to figure out where it came from. She
was angry with the nuns. They’d threatened her and hit her until she’d become what they wanted. But she didn’t
know who or what this new person was that she’d turn into.
There were mornings when the Sugar Girl would wake up sick, never wanted alcohol again. Sometimes
there would be a man she knew, or even one she didn’t know, lying beside her. On these mornings, the Sugar Girl
wanted the life of her childhood back. The fire at night. The sound of her mother singing an old Cree song. Her
father’s stories, the games with her brothers and sisters. But her parents were too old now to back and live in the
bush, to teach her brothers and sisters how to hunt and trap and make Indian clothing and prepare game for
eating. That life was gone.
As those awful mornings turned into afternoons on the reserve where she lived, and her body began to feel
better, the Sugar Girl questioned whether she even wanted that old life back. She’d gotten use to and learned to like
what the nuns and government had given her. The soft bed, the radio and its music, the food that was available at
the Hudson’s Bay store. Life was easy. If she was careful with the money the government gave her each month in

exchange for her family’s old hunting grounds and life, she could just get by. But there was still the nagging worry,
like a mosquito buzz, late at night that her life was missing something.
When the day came that the Sugar Girl found out she was pregnant, she thought maybe this was the thing
that was missing. The white doctor informed her that not only was she to have a baby but she had a disease,
something wrong with her body and how it dealt with all the sugar she’d consume since childhood. ‘You should
take better care of yourself,’ he said. ‘Many of your people have this problem. Your bodies can’t deal with the awful
diet you subject it to, If you’re not careful, if you don’t change your ways, it will kill you.’
And so it came to be that the Sugar Girl gave birth to her sugar baby. She gave him a Bible name, in the hope
that this would help him in his life with white people, and raised her boy as best she could. She thought back to her
own childhood and what he mother would do when the Sugar Girl was sick or acting up or needed help. But that
seemed so long ago. There weren’t too many memories of that time left. Sometimes it was easier to do what the
nuns had done to her, and spank her boy when he was naughty, and quiet him with candy, and feed him the same
things she ate.
For a short time when she was pregnant and when she was breastfeeding her baby, the Sugar Girl felt as
healthy and happy as she had as a child. But it wasn’t long after that time that she fell into her old ways again. She
saw it in the grocery store, at the restaurant, in her home. It had made itself a permanent part of her. It was
impossible to separate herself from the thing she had become.
So she raised her child as best she knew how and lived as best as she knew how. But the Sugar Girl got
sicker and sicker. The same sugar that had befriended her and comforted her as a child and helped her live as the
nuns demanded, was her enemy, had been her enemy from the beginning, eating away at her from the inside out.
And by the time it was the son’s turn to help look after his mother, he too was taken away to the residential school.
The Sugar Girl had lived long enough to feel the same pain her mother and father felt. The son suffered the fate of a
residential school child, and in painful ways, at the hands of certain sick men, that his mother had fortunately never
faced.
But legends are not meant to be sad stories only. They are told to express a people’s magic, to make victors
out of weaklings. The Sugar Girl died, but a part of her was carried on in her son – that good part that the nuns
couldn’t take out of her, that had been in her all along though she didn’t know it.
The Sugar Girl’s son was strong. After all, his blood was Cree, He left the residential school and watched it
crumble at the hands of the ones who had built it, watched it rot and collapse because of their physical and mental
and sexual abuse, The Sugar Girl’s son went on to learn everything he could about the dangers of the sugar disease.
White men gave Indians a lot of gifts. Hockey and electricity, prefab houses, snowmobiles, running shoes,
pick-up trucks, pavement and reserves.
In turn, Indians gave white men some gifts back. Lacrosse and long hair. Corn and the peace pipe. Names
for professional baseball teams. Powwows, Tonto, Custer’s Last Stand. Lots of land. Thanksgiving.
It’s the gifts that are never mentioned, though, that we all feel the most.