“I was always hungry and cold at Lejac. … Soup at lunch was a different color depending on the season. Gray soup in wintertime and colorful soup in the fall.” This moving account of a young Dakelh girl in western Canada forced to leave her home to live at a church-run residential school for much of the year is imbued with marvelous details and remarkable balance as it describes both hardship and resilience. Told in the voice of an older woman looking back on her childhood, her memories are of sadness and loss but also moments of humor (discovering nuns go the bathroom!), ingenuity (she and her friends sewed secret pockets inside their petticoats to hide food), and joy. Nothing was more joyful than the arrival of her grandfather’s sleigh to take them home at winter break, and the renewing months of summer among family. “Now … I look back at this time and see what sweet little geniuses we were. … We sewed our survival into every stitch. We were geniuses. We are geniuses. We will always be geniuses.” Heartrending and heartening, this stirring picture book features illustrations with a somber palette that brightens, and sober expressions that lighten, when setting and thoughts shift to home. (Ages 6-9)

The true story of how Indigenous girls at a Canadian residential school sewed secret pockets into their dresses to hide food and survive

Mary was four years old when she was first taken away to the Lejac Indian Residential School. It was far away from her home and family. Always hungry and cold, there was little comfort for young Mary. Speaking Dakelh was forbidden and the nuns and priest were always watching, ready to punish. Mary and the other girls had a genius idea: drawing on the knowledge from their mothers, aunts and grandmothers who were all master sewers, the girls would sew hidden pockets in their clothes to hide food. They secretly gathered materials and sewed at nighttime, then used their pockets to hide apples, carrots and pieces of bread to share with the younger girls.

Based on the author's mother's experience at residential school, The Secret Pocket is a story of survival and resilience in the face of genocide and cruelty. But it's also a celebration of quiet resistance to the injustice of residential schools and how the sewing skills passed down through generations of Indigenous women gave these girls a future, stitch by stitch.