White Coal City: A Memoir of Place and Family

A moving, unflinching exploration of life in Prince Albert, SK, as told through one family’s multigenerational story

Robert Boschman grew up in the living quarters of the King Koin Launderette in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, sandwiched between a residential school and a jail built in the aftermath of the Riel Resistance of 1885. White Coal City is the story of this hard hockey-obsessed white-settler town on Treaty Six territory and Boschman’s troubled family who lived within it.

Trauma was palpable but never spoken of in the family, and this silence hounded the psychology of their men and boys. Years later, Boschman discovered the reason behind it: the devastating fate of his grandmother, killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was six months pregnant. Her husband, who saw it happen, was plagued by the crime. Their story is gently shared through letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and accounts from the coroner’s inquest.

With its penitentiary, sanatorium, pulp mill, and half-built hydro-electric dam, Boschman describes the city of Prince Albert as a “circle of pain”―one felt by white settlers but more so for the generations of First Nations and Métis people in the city and surrounding lands who were forcibly removed, incarcerated, or abducted. The harms of colonialism touched Boschman’s own family; his Cree sister Crystal was adopted by his parents during the Sixties Scoop when she was just a baby. Careful to tell his own story, not hers, Boschman accounts for his family’s own part in Canada’s shameful past.

White Coal City is a poetic, necessary exploration of the painful landscapes of colonial cities in Canada.