Hope is better than fear
August 24, 2011
Phillip Elanik performing in front of the commission in Inuvik
The last few weeks have brought sad news: the First Air crash near Resolute Bay, and the passing of both Phillip Elanik and Jack Layton. I had the honour of seeing Phillip Elanik dance in Inuvik and his passion and skill were inspiring. I offer my sincere condolences to the Phillip Elanik’s family, Jack Layton’s family and constituents, and the families of the victims of the First Air Crash.
Before passing away in the early hours on Monday morning, Jack Layton penned his last letter for Canadians. He discussed his hope for the future of the NDP and for the future of Canada. He ended the letter with these words:
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
The IRS TRC issued a short statement on Honourable Jack Layton’s passing, noting his work in bringing about the official apology to Aboriginal peoples for the Indian Residential School system. The commission wrote:
The Commissioners extend their condolences to the family and friends of the Honourable Jack Layton, Leader of the Opposition who passed away this morning. Mr. Layton was instrumental in bringing about the Statement of Apology issued by the Government of Canada to residential school survivors in June 2008. His contribution was recognized in the apology issued by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who stated:
“For the past year and a half, he has spoken to me with regularity and great conviction on the need for this apology. His advice, given across party lines and in confidence, has been persuasive and has been greatly appreciated.”
Such leadership on reconciliation will be missed.
More statements on the events of the last few weeks can be found on the TRC’s website.
Inuvik in Images
July 1, 2011
Petah Inukpuk holds up an image of his grandfather as he gives his testimony to the commission.
Like the IRS TRC’s national gathering in Winnipeg last summer, the Inuvik event is a complicated negotiation between personal, familial and national reconciliation. And like the Winnipeg event, I have a feeling it will be some time before I process and begin to understand these negotiations.
The days are long and filled with emotion. The morning and afternoon sessions (generally focusing on the gathering of testimony and expressions of reconciliation) often contain stories of extreme hardship and abuse, as well as those of resilience and survival. The evenings are then filled with music and cultural expressions; people dance and sing, ask questions, continue to share their stories and create connections.
Tomorrow (Canada Day) is the last day of the event. I’m sure I will continue to think about what I’ve seen here for a long time to come. I hope to post more about the event, but in the meantime, here are a few images from the last few days.
At the welcome ceremony.
The Commission and dignitaries face the crowd during the traditional blessings.
Dancing to "Forty Days" after a long first day.
The "igloo church" not far from the event site.
It begins with drums
June 29, 2011
Watching the stage at the welcome event.
On the night before the IRS TRC’s second national gathering, the small northern town of Inuvik was already welcoming hundreds of people into their community. On the trip up, the majority of the plane was filled with people attending the event. Some discussed the possibility of giving their testimony, others talked about reuniting with other former students, many that they hadn’t seen in decades. Some were calling the IRS TRC event “the reunion.”
In the early evening, the commissioners, representatives of the state and the churches involved in running the Indian Residential School system addressed the crowd in Jim Koe Park. After the opening remarks, and a recognition of the long days of work ahead, the evening’s attention turned to food and entertainment.
Dancers and drummers after the welcome ceremony (June 27)
A New Sky: Yellowknife
June 28, 2011
The first stop on my northern trip: Yellowknife, a beautiful city where I was fortunate to have amazing hosts. I’m posting just a few photos before moving on to Inuvik for the TRC’s national event.
The sky in Yellowknife at 12:30am. This was the darkest I saw it get.
The Yellowknife airport, complete with polar bear and seal on the luggage carousel.
Bullocks Bistro - amazing fresh fish.
A poster in the coatroom at the Northern Heritage Centre.
Blue sky, blue water, blue houseboat.
Next stop: Inuvik.
Culture and History at Blue Quills
June 23, 2011
After my trip to Vancouver, I traveled to my next stop: St. Paul, Alberta. After flying into Edmonton, I drove 3 hours to St. Paul. The landscape was beautiful. Not quite the flat lands of the prairies I had been expecting, but low hills, fields of crops, and bales of hay. The grass was yellowed in spots, creating patterns that spoke to the wild weather sometimes experienced in these parts.
A back view of the school
I traveled to St. Paul in order to attend the annual Blue Quills Cultural Camp. I had read about the Blue Quills First Nations College and their story of taking back their school (in the 1970s) and wanted to learn more about it. At the time, the Minister of Indian Affairs was Jean Chretien, who predicted that the school under Aboriginal control would only last six months. Forty years later, the school is still going strong. They offer programs in Business Application & Data Management/ Office Readiness, Cree Language, Early Childhood Education, and Information Technology among others.
The school is governed by seven local First Nations communities: Beaver Lake, Cold Lake, Frog Lake, Whitefish Lake, Heart Lake, Kehewin, and Saddle Lake, representing approximately 17,500 people.
Coinciding with the national day of reconciliation on May 25th, the Cultural Camp was a week long event held at the school. The schedule was filled with arts and crafts (rattle making, decorative drums, hide scraping etc.), sharing circles, wagon rides, sweat lodges, and traditional ceremonies (horse dance ceremony and chicken dance ceremony). These events helped to create a real sense of place and a strong sense of community.
Eric Large looking up at his former school
During my visit, former student Eric Large took me on a tour of the school. He pointed out the old dormitories where he slept, the supply closet for the nurse, old classrooms. We walked through what was once the girls dormitory. “I don’t know much about this part of the building,” he said. “We were never allowed here. They always kept us apart. We didn’t take classes together, eat together or play together. Even brothers and sisters were separated.”
As we walked through the third floor of the four storey building, he pointed to one door, now locked. “This is where the traveling dentist worked from. I gave a tour of this building before and the smell of the dental fluoride came flooding back to me. I asked the others on the tour if they could smell it. It was so strong. I guess that’s my body remembering.”
The school means different things to different people. For some it is filled with difficult memories, others recall the struggle to reclaim the space, and for current students it is a place of learning and empowerment. Thank you to Eric Large, Bernadine Houle-Steinhauer, Harvey Young Chief, Charles Wood and many of the other participants for sharing your knowledge and creating such a positive space.
Coqualeetza
June 14, 2011
After I visited St. Mary’s, I drove the short distance towards Coqualeetza. Soon after arriving, it became very clear that my short trip out west would only be long enough to scratch the surface of Coqualeetza’s history. Thankfully, Patricia Raymond-Adair and Karen Bonneau at the Coqualeetza Cultural Education Centre answered my questions and kindly photocopied a mass of documents (including old pamphlets and media coverage) that I’ve brought home with me to go through.
When I began this research, I was under the impression that many of the former Indian Residential Schools no longer existed. I had heard stories of schools that had been demolished, neglected and decayed, and had heard several times about schools lost to (both intentional and unintentional) fires. As I continued the research, however, I found that several of the schools have been taken back by communities. And I wanted to hear more about the strength and determination involved in doing so.
As I’ve mentioned previously, the former Portage la Prairie school is now being used as tribal and administrative offices. Some former students work in the same building where they went to school. The Coqualeetza school in Chilliwack also has an interesting history.
The Coqualeetza site has been used over the last centry as a Methodist Indian Residential School, a tuberculosis hospital and army barracks. In the 1970s, the Sto:lo First Nations occupied the former school to reclaim it as their own. A report in the Chilliwack Progress (May 5, 1976) describes the occupation:
Acting under orders, with the sound of tribal drums ringing in their ears, members of the Canadian Armed Forced heaved against the front door to the former nurses residence at Coqualeetza. By 7:45pm Monday 23 people were carried or led away from the scene that erupted only a short time before when members of the Stalo Indian band decided to stand ground and disobey military and RCMP orders to vacate the Coqualeetza facility.
The Coqualeetza Cultural Education website notes that the occupation was an attempt to “publicize the lack of action on achieving reserve status and ownership of the Coqualeetza Property.” The occupation certainly brought more attention to the Sto:lo First Nation’s claims to the land. The buildings, now being used as the headquarters for Sto:lo Nation and other cultural, health and educational initiatives, still show traces of the past. But they also reveal a promising future.
My next post will be about Blue Quills in St. Paul, Alberta. And shortly afterwards I’ll be heading up north to Yellowknife and then Inuvik. I hope to be posting images and reflections as the trip unfolds.
Thanks to Patricia and Karen for their help at Coqualeetza!
Traces on the West Coast: St. Mary’s IRS
June 1, 2011
The cement foundations of what was once a classroom at St. Mary's Indian Residential School
“It was an evil place. It was a beautiful place.”[i]
I recently took a trip out west to Vancouver, BC. The trip was both personal (to celebrate the wedding of a friend) and research-related (to visit the grounds of former Indian Residential Schools, first in BC and then in Alberta).
The first school I visited was the former St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in Mission, a school that was demolished in 1965. (The students attending there at the time were moved to a new government-run St. Mary’s not far away.) The remnants of the first school, the oldest permanent Indian Residential School in British Columbia, can now be found in the Fraser River Heritage Park.
It was a beautiful late spring day when I visited the park. I had printed out the map of the former school from the Park’s website before my trip and had it with me as I walked. Without the map, it’s unlikely I would have noticed the low concrete foundations embedded in the landscape of the park. The map included buildings that were still standing, that were gone but still marked in some way, and those whose traces had since vanished.
Another cement foundation marking a structure that was once part of St. Mary's.
There were a few other people in the park that day, most were walking their dogs, a few were sitting on benches over-looking the water. I was the only one taking notice of the cement structures, walking from one to another and puzzling over the map.
I found it strange that the cement foundations weren’t marked in some way, so I went to the visitor center to see if I could find more information. There I met Don Brown, a manager at the Heritage Park, who informed me that indeed the foundations were marked. He mentioned that some time ago, they had painted numbers on the structures to coincide with those on the map. But time and weather had worn those away. Then they marked them with small metal plaques. Unfortunately, Don explained, some of those had been stolen, likely to be melted down for the metal. We walked back out to the structures together to see if we could find them and, after checking out a couple, found one marking the old gym.
There was something both beautiful and haunting about that space. It was both serene and unsettling. While at the visitor center, I purchased Amongst God’s Own: The Enduring Legacy of St. Mary’s Mission, a book that captures the contradictions of St. Mary’s. As author Terry Glavin explains, the history of St. Mary’s and the Indian Residential School system is complicated. He writes:
“This book is about a terrible story. It is a story that involves great suffering, betrayal, love, sacrifice, loss, and redemption. This book is also about a wonderful story, a story that involves faith, memory, comfort, forgiveness, sorrow and loyalty. It is also an unfinished story” (11).
The testimonies from the former students in the book discuss both the difficulties and opportunities they experienced at St. Mary’s. Without downplaying the horrible intentions and legacies of the system, the author and the former students involved in the book complicate the narrative of the IRS system as one where only heartache and destruction were the result.
In my next couple of posts I’ll write about the other schools I visited on the trip: Coqualeetza in Chilliwack, BC and Blue Quills in St. Paul, Alberta.
[i] Glavin, Terry and former students of St. Mary’s. Amongst God’s Own: The Enduring Legacy of St. Mary’s Mission. Mission, BC: Longhouse Publishing, 2002.
Two Calls for Papers
May 3, 2011
This symposium looks amazing. I wish I could attend!
More info: http://www.sit.edu/symposium
Scholars working in the fields of memory studies, peace and conflict studies, human rights, and post-conflict are invited to attend an interdisciplinary symposium on Conflict, Memory, and Reconciliation. This symposium will provide a forum for academic exchange, dialogue, debate, and public engagement on topics that are critical to the future of the world.
Come to Kigali, Rwanda to present your work, share your research, and generate knowledge in the fields of memory, reconciliation, and conflict transformation. The Symposium is hosted by SIT, January 10 – 13, 2012.
Call for Proposals: Scholars and practitioners in the fields of memory, reconciliation, and conflict transformation are invited to submit proposals for sessions on themes included but not limited to the following:
- Collective, public, social and shared memory
- The ethics of remembering and forgetting
- Commemoration and remembrance
- Genocide memory
- Cultural memory and heritage
- Oral history and the culture of the witness
- Memory and the politics of identity
- Politics of memory and denial
- Civil society and dealing with shared violent pasts
- Ethics and pedagogy of teaching memory
We welcome additional topics from a variety of case studies of conflict and post-conflict societies, dealing with shared violent pasts. Please be creative and collaborative. Panels can be on a specific theme or case study discussed. The objective is to explore together the meeting points of memory studies and of post conflict, peacebuilding, and reconciliation studies and generate knowledge about the pedagogy and ethics in teaching post-conflict in a study abroad setting.
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts should be sent by June 1, 2011 to Robin Bitters, Director of Institutional Projects via symposium@sit.edu Please include your name, college or university affiliation, address, email, and phone. As noted above, abstracts should not exceed 350 words and include the main argument, the material used, and disciplinary discussions involved.
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And another great conference is being organized by the University of London Institute of Paris:
Building Reconciliation and Social Cohesion through Indigenous Festival Performances, Interdisciplinary Symposium, University of London Institute of Paris, November 17-18, 2011
North of North
April 13, 2011
On a recent visit to New York, I was talking with an American friend about my upcoming trip to Inuvik (to attend the IRS TRC’s second national gathering at the end of June). This is how our conversation went:
Friend: How are things going in Toronto?
Me: Good. I’m planning my trip up to Inuvik.
Friend: Inuvik? Is that like 5 hours north of Toronto?
Me: No way – it’s way further. It’s like…way north. North of north.
But at that point, I realized that I didn’t really have a good grasp on exactly how far north it was. So we google-mapped it. The first image that comes up doesn’t give you a good sense of anything except that there isn’t too much around Inuvik.
If you zoom out a bit, you start to get a sense of how far north it is.
If you zoom out a bit more, you see that it is certainly farther than 5 hours north of Toronto!
The conversation made me realize just how much of Canada, especially up north and outside the urban centers, I have yet to see.
On my way up to Inuvik, I’ll be stopping in Yellowknife too. Looking forward to exploring this part of Canada!
NOTE: The IRS TRC has announced that it will be holding a statement gathering event at the Multiplex in Yellowknife on April 14, 2011. And will then be traveling to some of the other communities in the Northwest Territories until May 12, 2011. More information can be found here.
Event Recap: Memory, Art, and Modern
April 4, 2011
The last couple of weeks have been crammed full with interesting events. Recently, I posted about the Memory Studies conference in New York. The event, which started off with a fascinating opening night screening called A Film Unfinished, brought memory scholars from around together to discuss their research. It was the first time I was able to present some of my research on the IRS TRC’s national gathering in Winnipeg, Manitoba last summer, and I think (and hope) it went well.
Still from "Canned Meat". Image from Harbourfront Centre website.
Back in Toronto, I attended two other wonderful events. On Wednesday, March 30th, the Harbourfront Centre hosted Aboriginal Women in the Arts: Using Art to Reclaim Traditional Roles with Terril Calder, Lee Maracle and Cheryl L’hirondelle. Calder’s film, Canned Meat, was a jarring and beautiful film that spoke to themes of isolation, memory, and community. Maracle’s poetry, as always, was moving. Her responses during the Q and A were insightful and inspiring. And L’hirondelle’s songs were heartfelt and beautiful. (One of the songs was written in collaboration with Aboriginal women in prison in Saskatchewan.) My favourite song was “Wishful Heart,” written while walking through Vancouver’s downtown east side.
Image of the exhibit's book cover from the AGO website.
And last but not least was the Art Galley of Ontario’s symposium called Inuit Modern. The symposium, on April 2nd, brought together Inuit artists and curators to discuss the new exhibit at the AGO: Inuit Modern. As one of the moderators noted, it was the first time so many Inuit artists were gathered together in “the south.” (I learned that Toronto counts as part of “the south” when the point of comparison is so far north.) The participants discussed the tensions between concepts like traditional and modern, north and south, and art and authority.
