Revisiting The Childhood Trauma: A Reading Of Shirley Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza

Native Literature of Canada as a quintessential political, social and cultural representation, successfully addresses the problem of Native persecution and resistance. Shirley Sterling as a contemporary Native woman writer chose to write a juvenile fiction to present her experiences at residential school. Her popular novel My Name is Seepeetza is the autobiographical account of her experiences at Kamloops Indian Residential School. Sterling began writing the novel as an assignment for a course on the suggestion her course instructor. Her strategic decision to write juvenile fiction is motivated by socio pedagogical objectives. She has tried to subvert the disparaging concocted stories created by colonialism about the Natives. As the journal of twelve year old Seepeetza, the novel makes an intense psychological exploration of the characters. Highlighting the socio cultural disparities of Native and Non Natives, Seepeetza juxtaposes the internal and external lives at residential school with the life at home on an Indian Reserve situated in British Columbia. As the narrator of the novel Sterling revisits her childhood trauma with authenticity. Through her narration, Sterling helps the readers to liberate themselves from emotional attachment and diminishes the power to inflict pain through textualisation.