Virtual Displays

A deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada.

Was the residential school era a misguided feature of Canada's generous humanitarian inclinations toward Aboriginal peoples? Were the notorious brutal acts of the operators of these schools the sporadic and isolated deeds of a few malign individuals? The authors of The Circle Game shout a resounding "No!" to these and related questions, arguing that existing accounts in various Canadian and Aboriginal media systematically obscure and misinform about the facts and their interpretation.

Now a retired fisherman and trapper, Merasty was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of 'aggressive assimiliation.' As Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children in the ways of white society. They were taught to be ashamed of their native heritage and, as he experienced, often suffered physical and sexual abuse. Even as he looks back on this painful part of his childhood, Merasty's generous and authentic voice shines through.

In 1964, two brothers are torn from the warm and loving care of their grandparents, and taken to a residential school far from home. James, assigned to manual work on the grounds, sees less and less of his younger brother, Thomas. When James discovers the anguish Thomas is living under, it leads to unspeakable tragedy. The pain and guilt that haunts James continues to affect his troubled son, Edwin. But a new understanding is dawning between them...

Eight-year-old Margaret Pokiak has set her sights on learning to read, even though it means leaving her village in the high Arctic. Faced with unceasing pressure, her father finally agrees to let her make the five-day journey to attend school, but he warns Margaret of the terrors of residential schools.

When residential schools opened in the 1830s, First Nations envisioned their own teachers, ministers, and interpreters. Instead, students were regularly forced to renounce their cultures and languages and some were subjected to degradations and abuses that left severe emotional scars for generations. In this book, 14 aboriginal women who attended residential schools, or were affected by them, reflect on their experiences.

"My name is Sam George. In spite of everything that happened to me, by the grace of the Creator, I have lived to be an Elder." Set in the Vancouver area in the late 1940s and through to the present day, this candid account follows Sam from his idyllic childhood growing up on the Eslhá7an (Mission) reserve to the confines of St. Paul's Indian Residential School and then into a life of addiction and incarceration. But an ember of Sam's spirit always burned within him, and even in the darkest of places he retained his humour and dignity until he found the strength to face his past. The Fire Still Burns is an unflinching look at the horrors of a childhood spent trapped within the Indian Residential School system and the long-term effects on survivors. It illustrates the healing power of one's culture and the resilience that allows an individual to rebuild a life and a future.

A is for Assimilation, although blunt in its approach, is aimed at teens and anyone who isn't familiar with the basic history of the nation's First People.

The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings. It examines the ways in which Indigenous survivors of residential school mobilize narrative in their struggles for personal and communal empowerment in the shadow of attempted cultural genocide.

Two years ago, Margaret left her Arctic home for the outsiders' school. Now she has returned and can barely contain her excitement as she rushes towards her waiting family -- but her mother stands still as a stone. This strange, skinny child, with her hair cropped short, can't be her daughter. "Not my girl!" she says angrily. Margaret's years at school have changed her. Now ten years old, she has forgotten her language and the skills to hunt and fish. She can't even stomach her mother's food. Her only comfort is in the books she learned to read at school.

Since the 1980s, successive Canadian institutions and federal governments as well as Christian churches have attempted to grapple with the malignant legacy of residential schooling. This book explains these institutional responses to Canada's residential school legacy by analyzing archival material and interviews with former students, politicians, bureaucrats, church officials, and the Chief Commissioner of the TRC.

Starting with the foundations of residential schooling in seventeenth-century New France, Miller traces the modern version of the institution that was created in the 1880s, and, finally, describes the phasing-out of the schools in the 1960s. He looks at instruction, work and recreation, care and abuse, and the growing resistance to the system on the part of students and their families. Based on extensive interviews as well as archival research, Miller's history is particularly rich in Native accounts of the school system.

Looks at the experiences of a young Inuit girl returning from a residential religious school, where she is not recognized by her mother and is seen as an outsider.

A school assignment to interview a residential school survivor leaders Daniel to Betsy, his friend's grandmother, who tells him her story. Abandoned as a young child, Betsy was soon adopted into a loving family. A few short years later, at the age of 8, everything changed. Betsy was taken away to a residential school. There she was forced to endure abuse and indignity, but she remembers her fathers words - words that gave her the resilience, strength, and determination to survive.

Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hubert O'Connor, which took place during Sellars's student days, between 1962 and 1967, when O'Connor was the school principal. After the school's closure, those who had been forced to attend came from surrounding reserves and smashed windows, tore doors and cabinets from the wall, and broke anything that could be broken. Overnight their anger turned a site of shameful memory into a pile of rubble. In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution's lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

Idle No More bewildered many Canadians. Launched by four women in Saskatchewan in reaction to a federal omnibus budget bill, the protest became the most powerful demonstration of Aboriginal identity in Canadian history. Thousands of Aboriginal people and their supporters took to the streets, shopping malls, and other venues, drumming, dancing, and singing in a collective voice. Through this book, Aboriginal people have declared that they are a vital and necessary part of Canada's future. The spirit of the drumming, singing and dancing lives on in empowered and confident young Aboriginal people who will shape the future of this country for decades to come.

For more than 100 years, Canada's First Nations, Inuits, and Metis people endured an educational system designed to remove all evidence of their native identities. Children were mistreated and stripped of their identities as they were "educated" in the ways of a nation that wanted no trace of the "Indian". This book provides a history of Canada and outlines the development of attitudes that resulted in the residential education system, as well as a glimpse into the experiences of children who made it through. Readers will also learn about efforts to help a nation continue to heal.

What would Indigenous resurgence look like if the parameters were not set with a focus on the state, settlers, or an achievement of reconciliation? This book explores the central concerns and challenges facing Indigenous nations in their resurgence efforts, while also mapping the gaps and limitations of both reconciliation and resurgence frameworks.

This collection of fifteen true stories of real reconciliation by both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Canadians is in response to questions on how to begin and advance truth and reconciliation.

500 years of colonization have taken an incalculable toll on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: shockingly high rates of substance use problems, depression, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions brought on by genocide and colonial control. This book uses history, human development, ad well as the author's and others' stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization. This book about strategies for healing from intergenerational trauma written in crystal-clear prose. About how we can come back from this with Indigenous ways of knowing lighting the way.

An examination of the barriers facing Indigenous people within the healthcare system from the perspective of an empathetic settler physician. It exposes the healthcare disparities in a country that prides itself on an equitable healthcare system and examines the devastating effects of diabetes, the myth of "the drunken Indian," the inner workings of hospitals, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, epidemics on reserves, and residential school trauma.

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Using previously unreleased government documents, this book provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. It shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Indigenous children.

The legacy of harm caused by the schools is a vivid and crucial link between Canadian colonialism and Indigenous over-incarceration. This book provides an account of the ongoing ties between the enduring trauma caused by the residential schools and Indigenous over-incarceration.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a report designed to facilitate reconciliation between the Canadian state and Indigenous Peoples. Its call to honour treaty relationships reminds us that we are all treaty people -- including immigrants and refugees living in Canada. This book takes up the challenge of imagining what it means for immigrants and refugees to live as treaty people by exploring what reconciliation is and what it means to live in relationship with Indigenous Peoples.

This book argues that if we are to find a meaningful path toward reconciliation, we will need to address the history of sovereignty without assuming its foundations. Exposing the limitations of the current model, Nichols carefully examines the lines of descent and association that underlie the legal conceptualization of the Aboriginal right to govern.

The two major schools of thought in Indigenous-Settler relations on the ground, in the courts, in public policy, and in research are resurgence and reconciliation. Resurgence refers to practices of Indigenous self-determination and cultural renewal whereas reconciliation refers to practices of reconciliation between Indigenous and Settler nations, such as nation-with-nation treaty negotiations.

Canada's residential school system for aboriginal young people is now recognized as a grievous historic wrong committed against First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples. This book documents that subject in a format that will give all young people access to this painful part of Canadian history. It documents how this official racism was confronted and finally acknowledged.

Canada's relationship with its Indigenous people has suffered as a result of both the residential school system and the lack of understanding of the historical and current impact of those schools. Healing and repairing that relationship requires education, awareness and increased understanding of the legacy and the impacts still being felt by Survivors and their families. Guided by acclaimed Indigenous author Monique Gray Smith, readers will learn about the lives of Survivors and listen to allies who are putting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into action.

An account of the author's investigation into violence against Indigenous women in Canada, with a focus on two young women who have been missing since 2008.

This book provides current information, personal insights, authentic resources, interactive strategies and lesson plans that support Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners in the classroom. It is for all teachers that are looking for ways to respectfully infuse residential school history, treaty education, Indigenous contributions, First Nations/Métis/Inuit perspectives and sacred circle teachings into their subjects and courses.