Canada's official residential school policy, functioning between 1879 and 1986, acted as a weapon in a calculated attack on indigenous cultures, seeking--through such now infamous procedures as familial separation, forced speaking of non-Native languages, and propagandist derogation of precontact modes of existence and Native spiritual systems--to compel its inmates into assimilation. The results of this onslaught are now widely documented. Native children were divorced from their traditional Native cultures yet at the same time were refused entry into prosperous white Canada through inferior educational practices and racism, institutionalized to occupy a liminal space characterized by disillusion, identity crisis, and despair. In her autobiography, as elsewhere in her oeuvre, Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe focuses her narrative energy on what she terms "the good" at the expense of fully formulated discussions of considerable trauma endured. Outlining how she will deal with her residential school years in "Song of Rita Joe". Joe's willingness, in the poem, to view residential school experiences outside the preconceived categories of mistreatment and abuse and in relation to positive effects in Native communities appropriately sets the stage for the prose passage that follows. Although again she admits briefly "that bad things happened," Joe focuses her prose narrative on positive events and relations that sustained her throughout these potentially alienating years. In this article, the author explores how she managed to shift discursive attention toward positive aspect of residential school history and at the same time examines the political potential of Joe's autobiography through the analysis of the text's aesthetics and its literary methodology. (Contains 48 notes.)