Each September 30th marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day. This display highlights Indigenous perspectives on residential schools, with a focus on first-person accounts from survivors and inter-generational survivors. Check out the resources below that complement our physical display at the Nanaimo and Cowichan campus libraries.
How does it work?
Tsqelmucwílc (pronounced cha-CAL-mux-weel) is a Secwepemc phrase that loosely translates to English as “We return to being human again” and was published a year after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS). Tsqelmucwílc is based on the book Resistance and Renewal (1988), the first Canadian publication on residential school history. It includes the original text, first-hand memories from 13 KIRS survivors and their children, and essays from survivors Garry Gottfriedson and Elder Randy Fred.
The Fire Still Burns is a tale of survival and redemption through which Squamish Elder Sam George recounts his residential school experience and how it led to a life of addiction, violence, and imprisonment until he found the courage to face his past and begin healing.
In this poetic, poignant memoir, Dene artist and social activist Antoine Mountain paints an unforgettable picture of his journey from residential school to art school--and his path to healing. In 1949, Antoine Mountain was born on the land near Radelie Koe, Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. At the tender age of seven, he was stolen away from his home and sent to a residential school--run by the Roman Catholic Church in collusion with the Government of Canada--three hundred kilometres away. Over the next twelve years, the three residential schools Mountain was forced to attend systematically worked to erase his language and culture, the very roots of his identity. While reconnecting to that which had been taken from him, he had a disturbing and painful revelation of the bitter depths of colonialism and its legacy of cultural genocide. Canada has its own holocaust, Mountain argues. As a celebrated artist and social activist today, Mountain shares this moving, personal story of healing and the reclamation of his Dene identity.
A residential school survivor finds his way back to his language and culture through his family’s traditional stories.When reflecting on forces that have shaped his life, Solomon Ratt says his education was interrupted by his schooling. Torn from his family at the age of six, Ratt was placed into the residential school system—a harsh, institutional world, operated in a language he could not yet understand, far from the love and comfort of home and family. In kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, Ratt reflects on these memories and the life-long challenges he endured through his telling of âcimisowin—autobiographical stories—and also traditional tales.Written over the course of several decades, Ratt describes his life before, during, and after residential school. In many ways, these stories reflect the experience of thousands of other Indigenous children across Canada, but Ratt’s stories also stand apart in a significant way: he managed to retain his mother language of Cree by returning home to his parents each summer despite the destruction wrought by colonialism.Ratt then shifts from the âcimisowina (personal, autobiographical stories) to âcathôhkîwina, (sacred stories) the more formal and commonly recognized style of traditional Cree literature, to illustrate how, in a world uninterrupted by colonialism and its agenda of genocide, these traditional stories would have formed the winter curriculum of a Cree child’s education.Presented in Cree Th-dialect Standard Roman Orthography, syllabics, and English, Ratt’s reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile. Even when his memories are dark, Ratt’s particularly Cree sense of humour shines, making kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân /The Way I Remember an important and unique memoir that emphasizes and celebrates Solomon Ratt’s perseverance and life after residential school.
As a child, Joseph "Augie" Merasty experienced first hand the government's policy of "aggressive assimilation" dished out at the church-run St. Terese Residential School in Sturgeon Landing. Now in his late 80s, Merasty has published a memoir of his experiences with the assistance of author David Carpenter.
The captivating story of Mary John (who passed away in 2004), a pioneering Carrier Native whose life on the Stoney Creek reserve in central BC is a capsule history of First Nations life from a unique woman's perspective. A mother of twelve, Mary endured much tragedy and heartbreak--the pangs of racism, poverty, and the deaths of six children--but lived her life with extraordinary grace and courage. Years after her death, she continues to be a positive role model for Aboriginals across Canada. In 1997 she received the Order of Canada. This edition of Stoney Creek Woman, one of Arsenal's all-time bestsellers, includes a new preface by author Bridget Moran, and new photographs.
Mnidoo Bemaasing Bemaadiziwin is a twenty-five year research and community based book. It brings forward Indigenous thought, history, and acts of resistance as viewed through the survivors of residential school who through certain aspects of their young lives were able to persevere with resiliency, and share their life experiences, teaching us about them, and their understanding of their own resiliency. Through their voices, we hear how they found strength within'their own life force energy, or mnidoo bemaasing bemaadiziwin'and survived and thrived in spite of aggressive assimilation.
Cecil King’s memoir takes readers from his early years in Buzwah, Ontario, through to his return as a teacher. Disillusioned with the Ontario curriculum, he began his work as a champion for Indigenous Control of Indigenous Education in Canada.
The Assiniboia school operated in Winnipeg between 1958 and 1973, toward the end of the residential school era. It was a rare urban school in the residential system. This volume gathers the memories of students at the school, from the day-to-day life to the bonds of memories that still tie them together.
This true story is the triumphant memoir of Margaret Pokiak, at the time an eight-year-old Inuit girl who voluntarily decided to enter residential school to learn to read and write and managed to survive the hardships she endured there.
Arthur Bear Chief suffered both sexual and psychological abuse during his time at Old Sun Residential school in Gleichen on the Siksika Nation. My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell is a of chronological vignettes that depict the punishment, cruelty, and injustice that Arthur endured at Old Sun and then later relived in the traumatic process of retelling his story in connection with a complicated claims procedure. Late in life, after working for both the provincial and federal government, Arthur returned home to Gleichen. It was there that he began to reconnect with Blackfoot language and culture and to write his story.
In the first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph's Mission at Williams Lake, British Columbia, Xat'sũll chief Bev Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be white and roman catholic.
Residential school survivor Isabelle Knockwood presents the first-person account of 42 survivors at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. This edition includes conversations with 21 survivors about the 2008 apology by the Government of Canada.
Fourteen women discuss how they reclaimed their culture after their experiences in the residential school system.
Residential school survivor Raymond Tony Charlie exposes the sexual, emotional and physical abuse he suffered while attending two schools in British Columbia.
Price Paid teaches readers about myths, misconceptions, and the truth from the author of They Called Me Number One's own perspective. Based on a presentation she once delivered to treaty-makers, politicians, policymakers, and educators this book expands key historical concepts to comprehensively cover: Indigenous contributions to the world, conflict between settlers and Indigenous Nations, and the impact these histories have had on current legal systems imposed on current traditional governance structures and everyday Indigenous experiences.
In 1939, 10-year-old Basil Johnston was taken to the St. Peter Claver Residential School in the community of Spanish on Manitoulin Island. Despite the harsh routines, the culture shock, and the loneliness he experienced, Basil's account is often touched with humour. Johnston went on to graduate from the school and become a teacher himself as well as a researcher who documented First Nation's culture.
From Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel comes a groundbreaking and emotionally devastating autobiographical meditation on the complicated legacies that Canada's residential school system has cast on his grandparents', his parents' and his own generation.
A collection of personal stories recounting experiences in and the impact of Residential school survivors in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Pennsylvania.
Straight from the heart, Rita Joe tells the story of her remarkable life: her tumultuous childhood in foster homes, education in an Indian residential school, turbulent marriage and daily struggles with prejudice, sexism and poverty. Over time, these battles led her to discover her poetic voice which helped her reclaim her Aboriginal heritage. In the fascinating final part of her story, Rita Joe writes movingly about old age, her lifelong spiritual quest and the promise of renewed hope and healing.
These two one-act plays about an Indigenous girl who escapes from residential school explore the same characters and events from alternative perspectives. Nelson Gray voices a non-Indigenous adolescent boy who has contact with the girl in Talker’s Town, while Vancouver playwright Marie Clements’s The Girl Who Swam Forever takes us inside escapee Roberta Bob as she undergoes a magical transformation and communes with the spirit of her grandmother in the form of a sturgeon.
Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.
VIU Library | email:library@viu.ca | Nanaimo: 250.740.6330 | Cowichan: 250.746.3517 |
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