"A Métis clan weathers bitter cold, ethnic bias, and sexual molestation in Canada’s Northwest Territories in this memoir.

Hardy, whose father was a White Canadian and mother was a Métis of mixed European and Shúhta Got’ıne First Nation ancestry, looks back to the 1850s in tracing his family’s history in Fort Norman and other subarctic villages. The author chronicles several generations of forebears: the women bearing heroic numbers of children and the men working as fur traders, clerks, and managers for the Hudson Bay Company. He moves on to his boyhood in Fort Norman, where he traveled by dog sled and absorbed the Métis cultural stew: Families still trapped and hunted but embraced Christianity and prized formal education. The book’s centerpiece is Hardy’s adolescent experience at a Roman Catholic boarding school, where he lived in a dormitory whose supervisor repeatedly raped him and other boys. (He includes a blistering indictment of the church for covering up such crimes.)

...there are also intriguing snippets of frontier history and lore: an episode of famine and cannibalism; his grandfather’s killing of a moose with a knife; and tales of the monstrous “Náhgáneh” bushman. The author also paints a revealing picture of social tensions, exploring how the Métis uneasily navigated White bigotry and Indigenous resentment and the antagonisms between Catholics and Anglicans.

Hardy’s prose, usually lucid and workmanlike, is searing in conveying his victimization at school ... and lyrical in evoking nature. ...Beneath the reams of family factoids, readers will get an authentic and sometimes harrowing view of life in the Northwest Territories.

Vivid stories of anguish and survival."
- Kirkus Reviews [READ FULL REVIEW]

"Richard I. Hardy’s candid memoir Mǫ́lazha details his lineage, his Métis childhood in the Northwest Territories, and abuse within a Catholic school. 

The book first revisits the Mackenzie River District––once under the purview of the Hudson Bay Company. With its focus there, it discusses Hardy’s First Nations, Scottish, and French ancestors, whose ties to the company involved jobs in the fur trade. It’s an informative regional and personal history.

...in 1959, Hardy and other Métis children were sent to a school in Inuvik as part of the Canadian government’s plan to consolidate schools in the Northwest Territories. Grollier Hall, a Catholic-run hostel, was marked by cruelties and rapes under the helm of its supervisor. Hardy writes about these difficult events in a lucid, determined manner, expressing hope that such traumas can be recovered from.

Reckoning with Canada’s dark periods of abuse, Mǫ́lazha is a meticulous survivor’s memoir about growing up Métis and facing generational traumas."
- Foreword Clarion Reviews [READ FULL REVIEW]

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