Published Experience

In a personal essay published in 2016, “Colonialism Lived,” Emma LaRocque paints the vivid and heartbreaking scene of her first experience with racism. She was eight or nine years old, “sipping pink cream soda and looking at a comic book” in a small-town café, when a red-faced white man asked if she wanted to “go for a ride,” after sneering at her and calling her a slur. “The reality is that I can no longer count all the times I have either experienced or observed racism against Aboriginal peoples,” LaRocque writes.

LaRocque was born in 1949 near Lac La Biche, Alberta; she and her Cree-speaking Métis family lived in a one-room log cabin lit by kerosene. Her love of comics prompted a thirst for literacy, and not long after that unsettling moment in the café, she convinced her parents to let her attend school. There LaRocque would encounter further harm and a slew of stereotypes, spurring the need to confront colonialism in her work. She notes that when she started...