Residential Education for Disadvantaged Girls: An Alternate Field?

In this article, we engage with the experiences of students in a government-run residential secondary school that enrols girls primarily from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Through an exploration of the history of the programme, secondary evaluations conducted over the years and a month-long engagement with one such residential school, we probe how the categories of disadvantage—caste and gender— continue to operate, even as the state tries to obliterate them in this space. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theorization of ‘practices’, we describe daily informal interactions in the space, highlighting their role in reinforcing and sometimes challenging extant social differences. Drawing attention to the diversity that lies even within the formal category of ‘disadvantaged’, we describe the potential and the limitations of targeted residential schooling. Our work points to the need for greater sensitivity in the planning and implementation of state-run programmes targeted at the most marginalized and a re-imagination of efforts to offer an ‘alternate field’.

The Linguistic Intimacy of Five Continents

This chapter elaborates work by Edward Said on comparative linguistics in embedding a history of linguistic study in histories of colonialism and capitalism. We look at three late nineteenth and early twentieth century challenges to comparative linguistics: evolutionary linguistics, which elaborated and sharpened ideas of racialized difference on the grounds of biology; the study of pidgins and creoles which challenges notions of “hybridity” and thus certain ideas of racial distinction; and Boasian approaches focusing on culture, which only critiques certain aspects of racialization. We also consider the ways colonial ideologies of race played out in the pragmatics of imperial rule, in the arena of language and industrial and residential schooling. These schools, which targeted Indigenous and Black bodies, were implemented at the same time that Boas was elaborating the field of anthropology; that they were not subject to critique shows the limits of the Boasian focus on culture as a means of resisting racism.

Beyond Church and State: Rethinking Who Knew What When About Residential Schooling in Canada

This study moves beyond evidence left behind by church and state officials to ask who knew what when about residential schooling in Canada. While our historical knowledge about residential schooling and the people involved in and affected by it has grown in recent years, scholars have characteristically focused on official church and state agents. Other non- Aboriginal individuals who lived in or spent some time in Aboriginal communities, and who are not typically implicated in residential schooling, have consequently been overlooked as a source of knowledge about the truth of residential schooling. By broadening our examination of the various people who knew about residential schooling, by considering what they knew, and by coming to terms with the truth that many of them did little or nothing to stop the abuse they witnessed, this study suggests that we can more fully understand ourselves and our history, and we can be more properly prepared to move forward in a process of reconciliation and healing.

Child Welfare, Indigenous Children and Children’s Rights in Canada

In Canada, Indigenous children have been removed from their families and communities for residential schooling and for adoption and fostering by the state. These historic and ongoing policies have contributed to a general lack of awareness and respect for the rights of Indigenous children as children, as well as Indigenous rights bearers. This paper examines the ways in which historic Indigenous transracial adoption projects acted as a means of public education for ignorance, and argues there is an urgent need for increased public and academic attention to Indigenous children’s rights as both universal children’s rights and Indigenous rights.

Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a hyper-stylized film, extremely conscious of the way narrative conventions are organized into genres. In telling a story about a Mi'kmaw girl's leadership of a revenge plot, the film juxtaposes the genres—and the very different models of time-space—of the Gothic novel and the Red Power-era exploitation film. I read this jolting combination as a critical intervention into what I call Residential School Gothic, a dominant discourse on the historical wrong of Indian residential schooling which has emerged in Canada over the past two decades. The film's immanent critique of this public narrative template for telling stories about residential school exposes some of the crucial ways in which Residential School Gothic serves to reconfirm a settler common sense about liberal progress.

Off to School: Filmic False Equivalence and Indian Residential School Scholarship

This article uses two short, mid-twentieth century documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada as an entry point into charting popular and scholarly representations of Indian residential schools. The article begins with a close reading of one 1958 film followed by an overview of how scholarship has changed over the last fifty years, particularly alongside and sometimes because of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The article advocates centring survivor testimony and provides major turns in considering as well as teaching about residential schooling and settler colonialism in Canada as well as ways of how to teach about and learn from it. The article concludes with a close reading of a second film, produced in 1971 by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, which offers a decidedly different perspective from the film discussed at the beginning of the article.RésuméCet article utilise deux courts documentaires produits par l’Office national du film à l’époque du centenaire de la Confédération comme point de départ permettant d’étudier les représentations populaires et universitaires des pensionnats indiens. L’article s’amorce sur une lecture attentive d’un film de 1958, puis propose un aperçu des changements survenus dans la littérature académique au cours des cinquante dernières années, en particulier grâce à la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada. Il met l’accent sur le témoignage des survivants et propose des changements importants, à la fois dans la façon de comprendre le système des pensionnats et le colonialisme canadien, de même que sur les façons de l’enseigner et les leçons à en tirer. L’article se termine par l’analyse d’un second film produit en 1971par la cinéaste Abénaquis Alanis Obomsawin, qui offre une perspective très différente de celui tourné en 1958.

Decolonizing Family Photographs: Ecological Imaginaries and Nonrepresentational Ethnographies

This article lays out my process of developing an ecological and nonrepresentational approach for conducting an ethnography of family photos as objects of investigation, practices, and sites for the making and remaking of decolonizing stories and histories. It is rooted in a three-part project on family photographs: first, an ongoing project with a three-generation Indigenous family who has a history with Canada’s residential school system; second, revisiting my own family photo albums that include photos of missionary nuns in my family who had worked in Indigenous schools and communities in the 1950s–60s; and third, the development of a politico-ethico-onto-epistemological approach for viewing and analyzing family photos and narratives from and about photographs. The article focuses on the latter two parts of this project. Informed by my reading of Lorraine Code’s “ecological thinking” approach to knowledge making, I bring Code into conversation with Phillip Vannini’s “nonrepresentational ethnographies” combined with new materialist writing on performativity and vitality; selected Indigenous scholars’ writing on ontological multiplicity, knowledge making as relationship, and the making of life worlds; Margaret Somers’s approach to nonrepresentational narratives and ontological narrativity; and Annette Kuhn’s work on analyzing family photographs and cultural memory. I demonstrate this approach through the analysis of one of my family photos. I also reflect on the ethical challenges of attempting to analyze a different kind of family photo, such as photos of residential schooling that are increasingly on display in media, online, and in public venues. I argue for the need to address representational issues of social injustice in nonrepresentational approaches and a recognition that there are sites and times—especially in cases of human rights abuses, violence, or trauma—when nonrepresentational ethnographies and narratives call for strategic negotiation with representation.