The small town of Duck Lake is an isolated one, over 150 miles north of the nearest large city of Regina, Saskatchewan. It was here in Duck Lake that a great nineteenth-century Indigenous uprising called the Northwest Rebellion began. The old Victoria school is now the Wapiti Public Library. On the building is a mural of the Cree man Almighty Voice. In 1896, he was killed in a gun battle with authorities for the alleged crime of slaughtering a settler's cow. Duck Lake is also the site of one of Canada's last residential schools for Indigenous children; it remained in operation until 1996. These schools were the site of one of the darkest chapters of the European settlement of Canada. Indigenous children were taken away from their parents and forced to abandon their native language and culture. This tragedy played out in the US as well, with terrible consequences. These programs also bring up uncomfortable questions for our project, which has always championed education and literacy. In Duck Lake and other residential schools, the institutions may have had good intentions, but education and literacy for Indigenous children sometimes became a form of cultural genocide rather than a source of hope and a way to a better future.