“We Were So Far Away”: Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools Heather Igloliorte

GSPNUIFCPPL$VSBUJOH%JGGJDVMU,OPXMFEHF7JPMFOU1BTUTJO 1 1VCMJD1MBDFT &EJUFECZ-FISFS .JMUPO1BUUFSTPO “We were so far away”: Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools Heather Igloliorte In the spring of 2008, two Inuit residential school Survivors1 from each of the four Inuit geographic territories of Canada—the Inuvialuit settlement region, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut—traveled to Ottawa, Ontario to share their stories for the creation of a national exhibition about the Inuit experience of the residential school system. During the sensitive filmed interviews, the Survivors recounted the impact that residential schools had had on their lives before, during, and after their time as students. Individually, their stories described a range of distinct circumstances, as they attended schools in different times, in different parts of the country, and experienced varying degrees of abuse, trauma, and long-term negative impact. Yet read together, themes emerged that resonated across the stories of all eight of the Survivors, providing invaluable source material around which to build the exhibition. As curator of “We were so far away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools, it was my great honor to conduct these interviews with the eight participants and bear witness to their personal testimonies. It was my responsibility to take care of these stories and the people who shared them with me. Doing so depended on the development of a unique curatorial approach to representing this sensitive knowledge to a particular hierarchy of audiences: residential school Survivors, Inuit communities across the Arctic and Subarctic where the exhibition would tour, and the broader Canadian public. While these eight testimonies became the foundation of the exhibition, we also included historical images from archives across Canada, along with the Survivors’ personal photographs and objects that they felt were important to their memory of residential schools. We hoped that these personal stories, combined with their intimate childhood images, would help make this difficult history more tangible to the general public, and more relatable 23 24 The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools to other Survivors in the North. A year later, at the first opening of the exhibition at Library and Archives Canada, one of those eight Survivors, Carolyn Weetaltuk of Kuujjuarapik, Nunavik, recognized her mother in one of the unlabeled archival photographs of “anonymous” school children, thereby reclaiming a piece of this history for herself. It was a remarkable moment—and it reinforced our conviction that the primary audience for this exhibition was first and foremost Inuit Survivors and their families and communities. For Inuit, none of the archival images were “anonymous,” and every archival photograph held the potential to be personal. The nationally-touring exhibition “We were so far away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools is thus the culmination of a collaborative effort between myself, the Legacy of Hope Foundation (LHF), and the eight courageous Inuit Survivors who shared their stories. The exhibition is intended to supplement, assist, and encourage the many healing initiatives that are already being undertaken in communities across the Canadian North. This chapter explores some of the challenges that arose and the strategies we developed in creating an exhibition with a motive to heal, and a mandate to tour the Arctic. 1.1 The residential school system in Canada, from the 1830s to the 1970s The exhibition was conceived at a significant moment in the history of Canada’s settler/indigenous relations. While the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was formed in 1998 to encourage and support community- based, Aboriginal-directed healing initiatives to address the legacy of residential schools, the history of the residential school system had only very recently come to the attention of Canada’s national media, reaching its greatest exposure in June of 2008 when the Canadian government made its first public apology to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples.2 Yet still today there is a lack of public comprehension around the federally funded, church-run boarding schools that operated in Canada for more than a century, and this lack of public knowledge and understanding is exacerbated by the exclusion of this history from our educational system, and the unwillingness or inability (until very recently) of Survivors to speak about their experiences in the schools. Simply put, the purpose of residential schools was to assimilate the Aboriginal population into the dominant colonial culture by removing children from the care of their parents and communities and placing them into institutions far from their homes, where they could be taught Heather Igloliorte 25 the Western way of life and corresponding “values.” Based upon the fundamental belief that the colonial culture was superior to that of Aboriginal peoples, the Canadian government and churches adopted the paternalistic goal of “saving” the Aboriginal population from their so-called savage, heathen ways through assimilation and conversion. As John Milloy describes in A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986, it was believed that this trans- formation could best be accomplished by removing Aboriginal children to off-reserve boarding institutions that would “civilize” the Native population and prepare them to participate in the Euro-Canadian economy as industrial laborers or domestic workers, while isolating the children from the interfering influence of Aboriginal parents or communities (Milloy, 1999: 26). In contrast to these idealistic goals, however, and tragically so, the disastrous legacy of the residential school system is most often a story about loss and neglect, abuse and mistreatment. Conditions in the off-reserve boarding schools were usually deplorable as chronic under- funding and gross mismanagement of resources and staff compounded the problems of substandard living conditions, over-crowding, and disease. Aboriginal languages and practices were considered unfit for civilized society, and children were prohibited from speaking their language or practicing their culture, frequently resulting in harsh punishments for minor “offences.” This widespread forced adaptation to English threatened to wipe out the dozens of Aboriginal languages spoken by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. Many children suffered physi- cal, mental, and sexual abuses, and the legacy of that trauma has been passed on through generations from parent to child.3 As Prime Minister Harper noted in his now famous apology on behalf of Canada to former students of residential schools: For more than a century, Indian Residential Schools separated over 150,000 Aboriginal children from their families and communities. In the 1870s, the federal government, partly in order to meet its obliga- tion to educate Aboriginal children, began to play a role in the development and administration of these schools. Two primary objectives of the Residential Schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption [sic] Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, “to kill the Indian in the child.” Today, we recognize 26 The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country. (Younging et al., 2009: 357) The LHF, a charitable organization formed in 2000 by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, was created to educate, raise awareness, and foster understanding about this history of residential schools in Canada. For this exhibition, we hoped to raise that level of awareness to include an appreciation for the Inuit-specific residential school experiences and the legacies that still resonate in Inuit communities today. 1.2 The Inuit-specific experience of residential schools One of our main motivations for highlighting the Inuit experience of residential schools as unique within the broader history of the Canadian residential school system is that for Inuit, the residential school system was but one facet of massive and rapid cultural changes taking place in the first half of the twentieth century. In the few short decades preceding the introduction of the residential school system across the Canadian Arctic and Subarctic, Northern cultural practices had been significantly eroded by the incursion of European culture. While Aboriginal communities in southern Canada had undergone several centuries of inten- sifying Western European colonization and missionary involvement since the arrival of Columbus in 1492, Inuit communities, isolated by the harsh Arctic climate and the difficulty of traveling in the North, were relatively unaffected by outside contact until the early twentieth century. Within the span of only a few short decades, however, the pre- contact way of life underwent dramatic changes. One of the first of these tremendous changes was the settlement of Inuit in communities around trading posts for the purpose of becom- ing fur trappers, which often led to the over-hunting of wildlife in the immediate area and an increasing dependence upon preserved food and packaged goods imported from the South. This was soon coupled with a decreasing animal population and an

Load more