What is the message of "I Lost my Talk"? What true events is the poem based on?

"I Lost my Talk" by Rita Joe:

Rita Joe was a prolific Canadian Aboriginal poet from the Mi'kmaq nation. Joe was an orphan and sent to a residential (boarding) school in Nova Scotia. In the Canadian residential schools, Aboriginal children were taught to speak English and follow Catholic teachings. They lost their native languages and cultures, and did not know their families or people. They were eventually sent back to live on the First Nations reservations, but so many children were raised in the residential schools that many of the Canadian Aboriginal languages, stories, beliefs, and customs have been forgotten and lost.

In the poem "I Lost my Talk," Joe speaks directly to the reader, accusing the reader of taking her language away from her by placing her in a residential school called Shubenacadie. Shubenacadie is a small community in central Nova Scotia. Joe uses strong words like "snatched" and "scrambled" to create a tone of anger and confusion. The repetition of "I ... like you" three times in the second stanza creates a strong image of how the residential schools forced young Aboriginals to behave and think like the white people who colonized their land. However, in the final stanza, Joe offers the reader her hand in a gesture of friendship and forgiveness, and asks, "Let me find my talk / So I can teach you about me." This shows that the narrator wants to undo the damage done by the residential school system and forgive the white people who now run the First Nation peoples' homeland of Canada.

The message of the poem is that although white Europeans colonized Canada through violence and more or less destroyed the Aboriginal peoples' languages and cultures through the residential school system, the Natives want to forgive the white people and live together harmoniously as they re-learn and in turn teach about their original languages and cultures.

The problem of residential schools taking away people's language and culture is still very serious in Canada today. The last residential school was closed in 1996. Over several generations, about 30% of Aboriginal children were placed in residential schools. The effect of residential schools on the First Nations of Canada is still very widely felt as people all over Canada struggle to regain their languages and cultural knowledge. In addition, taking children away from their families and raising them in boarding schools has stripped the basic knowledge of family life, communication skills, and parenting skills from entire generations of Aboriginal people, leading to constant problems in First Nations communities with domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide. Poems like "I Lost my Talk" help all Canadians understand the problems Aboriginal people are facing and recognize the roots of the problems.

I have listed a few other homework help topics that might give you more information about the topic of this poem and residential schools in Canada.