Michel Jean is one of the best writers of our time. He has something to say, he knows what he's talking about, and his topics are relevant. The new novel Der Wind spricht noch davon (The Wind Still Speaks of It, published by Wieser 2022) is about the wolves of the Catholic Church. Wolves, in this novel, are called male and female educators, monks and nuns who ambush indigenous children and youth in their resident schools to sexually abuse them. Like a pack of wolves, they prowl around the weakest during the day, and at night they often prey on them together. The crimes could happen because the church leaders were convinced that the so-called savages finally had to be civilized, because the parents of the victims were in bondage to the spiritual shepherds, and because the Canadian state financed the forced enrollment of the children in far away places. The issue has shocked Canadian society in recent years, a cultural genocide has been recognized and payments have been made to the victims, but it has ruined the abused children for life.

Michel Jean describes the Catholic Wolves from the point of view of three children from the Innu people. He reconstructs facts from reports and files and tells the story of the children who so involuntarily fell under the reign of terror of the wolves, in the ludicrous system of the so-called civilization of savages. The narrative of events in the early first half of the 20th century is an emphatic approach to a time in hell, in a clear tone but brutally honest. What particularly resonates - I read the book in one go - is the story of Marie, the survivor, told in parallel.
Marie, who lost her best friend at the residental school, after a period of drinking and homelessness on the streets of Montreal, has moved to a distant village where she has done nothing but drink and talk to no one for decades. That is, until a young lawyer arrives to make sure Marie receives the tens of thousands of dollars in compensation to which she is entitled. Marie reluctantly gets involved with the stranger, but slowly comes to and begins to remember.
The conclusion of her catharsis is frightening: the worst thing is that the leader, who himself has never committed any crime against anyone, has always kept silent about everything. It was impossible that he didn't know anything, because everyone was aware of it. And this is perhaps the most important moment that this novel targets in the ethos of real life: The shepherds of the Catholic churches are not protecting the sheep, but the wolves.

I also read this novel as a testimony to an era in the cultural contact of the Arctic peoples with us whites. It is the literary testimony of a unique climate culture. Unfortunately, it does not have the ethos of a grand way of life in which humble people with humble means brave the harshest environmental conditions, in which a young girl in the dark of night can manage to shoot two attacking polar bears at once and save her family. This story has the ethos of a drama in which she has no chance against the wolves.