In this post, we discuss Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-800-695-4419. Additional resources are available here.
We have been working together on a project about recreation at residential and day schools in the Canadian North since 2018. Initiated in response to a need for further education about residential and day schooling generally and the place of recreation within this system specifically, the How I Survived podcast was also envisioned as a way to further truth and reconciliation in this country, and engage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action.
Guided by an advisory committee of Survivors and intergenerational Survivors, the purpose of this project is to gather, preserve, and share the stories of residential and day school Survivors, with a focus on recreation. To date, we have interviewed six Survivors—four women and two men—from across the North, who were collectively institutionalized at fourteen different residential and day schools.
In October 2024, we launched the How I Survived podcast to share these interviews. In this post, we draw on these interviews to consider the relationship between histories of “Indian education” in the North and environmental history.1
As Jocelyn Thorpe made clear on this site in 2016, residential school history is environmental history:
“Canadian government representatives took Indigenous children away from their families, communities and territories to residential schools in order to secure the land base for non-Indigenous families and communities. The transfer of land from Indigenous peoples to European powers and then to the Canadian government and settlers had, and continues to have, profound consequences for both people and land. It doesn’t get much more environmental historical than that.”
And yet, only one other NiCHE blog post since then has further explored this connection. In 2021, the editorial team gathered five sources that “engage critically with residential school history and highlight[ed] the environmental context of each.” They also issued a call to “Canadian environmental historians to write more in-depth posts about residential schools in Canada.” We welcome the opportunity to respond to this call with this post and hope others do the same.
Building and strengthening relationships and interviewing people were obvious methodological choices for How I Survived. In the first draft of the interview guide for the project, all of the questions but one centred on the residential or day school experience. Drawing on his experience as a Shúhtaot’ı̨nę Elder, residential school Survivor, and more than thirty years as a journalist, advisory committee member Paul Andrew suggested adding the following questions to the guide:
- If willing, can you tell us how your home life was before residential school?
- What survival skills did you learn at home before residential school? Who taught you? How were they taught?
- What role did those skills play in life in residential school?
- How did those skills show up in daily life at residential school?
- How did survival skills from the Land help you in residential school?
- Did you ever think of Elders, parents while you were at residential school?
The majority of the new questions were placed at the beginning of the guide. The remainder were sprinkled throughout the questions that focused on the Survivors’ experiences at residential and day school.
Elsewhere, we discuss how the reorientation of the interview did not prevent anyone from talking about difficult and traumatic experiences.2 They did, however, support Survivors to craft narratives that centred strength and survival.
As importantly, these questions brought the Land into the interviews.3 Almost without exception, Survivors talked about the places they were born and raised. They described the Land that nurtured them and their relationships with Land. These were relationships that were at once ancestral and contemporary; modelled by parents, Elders, and others in their families and communities; grounded in story; and practiced through a variety of daily and seasonal activities.
Agnes Kuptana was born in an iglu near Uluksaqtuuq (Ulukhaktok) and raised on the Land, following the animals. In episode six, she shares the following:
“Our teachers were our parents, mom and dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandmother, grandfather. And your cousins, your older cousins that look after you in a camp. If the families are out, out on the ice hunting seal, or they’re up on the Land hunting tuktu (caribou). And maybe checking trap lines, few traps that they may have. It was beautiful. It was healthy, loving. Lots of teachings. Every day is different and there was no fear. And it’s all in the language and lots of playing time and learning to do things. Chores, sewing. Sometimes you help your cousins go check trap line, maybe a few traps, and you come back and you help Elders if they want. You hitch up maybe one, two, three dogs and, and go chop some ice from the lake or get water…And, there was lots of growth. There may not be that many animals close by, but there was always something. To every, every different season of the four seasons we have. Those were my teachers. And it was a loving, everyday, close-knit families that always have listening hands and helping hands for need.”
Agnes’s memories and experiences growing up on the Land have much in common with many of the other interviewees.
Residential and day schools were designed to remove and distance Indigenous children and their families from the Land, both practically and spiritually. Longing and loss were key themes of the interviews we conducted. “I don’t have any community to call home,” Ernie Bernhardt tells Paul Andrew in episode five. Ernie was institutionalized from infancy (ten months old) to adulthood (eighteen years old), primarily at Immaculate Conception Indian Residential School in Akłarvik (Aklavik). Having a home is intimately connected to our identities and wellbeing, as well as to our understandings of time, place, and space in our lives. Ernie felt like he did not have this.
Rassi Nashalik was born and raised at an outpost camp near Pangniqtuuq (Pangnirtung). A Survivor of the Pangnirtung Hostel and Churchill Vocational Centre, Rassi has this to say in episode two about being taken away from the people and places she loved: “You know, I was very close to my family. My family was very close to each other. Family, family, family, and it was hard. It was really, really hard…And also, we didn’t really play outside anymore. Only recess time. And I used to think about our village. I wonder what my friends are doing.” Like many other children institutionalized at residential school, Rassi thought about and longed for the physical and social space of her village.
In spite of the distance from familiar people and places and the structured and colonial world of residential and day schools, institutionalized children found ways to sustain relationships with Land, even in landscapes that were radically different from the ones they called home. For some children, recreation provided a means for (re)connecting with the Land.
Podcast co-host Paul Andrew was institutionalized at Grollier Hall in Inuuvik (Inuvik) for seven years. During his conversation with Dave Poitras (episode three), Paul said, “I used to ski a lot. I really liked it because it got me out on the Land. It was foreign land–I was in Inuvik–it was foreign land, but it still got me out on the Land. And I think that’s one of the reasons I really skied a lot. And it did save my life quite a bit.”
Skiing was also a way to connect with the Land for advisory committee member and four-time Olympian Sharon Firth, who is featured in episode seven of the How I Survived podcast:
“When we lived on our trapline, we did lots of walking and so the trails for skiing at that time, they were narrow. So that brought back memories from home and listening to the skis making noise on the snow. Because when we walked, like you’d break through ice or break through fresh snow or hard snow. And my mom would tell us stories as we were walking. You know we would see different animal tracks so she would explain those to us and the type of different animals. So when we skied there was lots of rabbits around. And that was our food, that was our grocery store. And so, there was that connection to the Land because there was Land, water, food, the basic necessity for life.”
Sharon and Paul’s experiences speak to the power of the Land in maintaining children’s relationships with their families and ways of life, across both space and time, and giving them strength as they navigated residential and day school.
Renewing relationships with Land was a critical part of healing for Survivors of residential school. In episode three, Dave Poitras talks about how, after leaving Holy Angels Indian Residential School in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, at the age of 11, he spent the next three years living the seasonal life of a trapper. When they weren’t trapping muskrats and mink, Dave and his brother were cutting wood and hauling water.
For many Survivors, revitalizing disrupted connections to Land is a life-long pursuit. In episode two, Rassi talks about how she has reconnected with the Land and her Inuit practices as an Elder, through lighting the qulliq and working on hides.
“Well I told you a lot what we learned, I learned in Churchill, Manitoba, but traditionally, it seems like I didn’t learn how to do the scraping seal right from scratch and stretch it and prepare it. And never too late. I start doing that now. I am Elder, like my son hunts here in Yellowknife. I do moose hide. I tried anyway. I am learning. I stretch them, I skin them, I flesh them. And I even did the muskox in August. Because I learned that from my mom, even though she didn’t work with moosehide, she didn’t work with muskox hide, I seen her doing caribou, like all these traditional stuff…And I learned how to do the qulliq lighting just by watching my mom…I thought [qulliq lighting] was gonna be very, very hard, but I do it now. I pick the Arctic willows, pussy willows in the fall time so I could have enough for the whole winter…It’s good to try. Try your best and keep on practicing it. Never give up. That’s my advice.”
As Rassi explains, revitalizing relationships with Land also renews relationships with family and ancestors, and with ancestral knowledge.
There is no doubt that the system of “Indian education” that existed in the Canadian North from the 1850s to the 1990s was genocidal. It actively sought to assimilate and eliminate Indigenous cultures, families, systems of governance, and connections to the Land. Without denying these truths, the How I Survived project and podcast celebrates the strength, resilience, spirit, and creativity of former students and Survivors.
You can listen to the How I Survived podcast on:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Podcast website
We are interested and willing to produce a second season of the podcast if there are northern Survivors who would like to share their stories. If you are interested in being interviewed, please reach out (Jess Dunkin, jdunkin@nwtrpa.org, or Crystal Gail Fraser, cgfraser@ualberta.ca).
Notes
1. “Indian education” is a term the federal government used to refer to the genocidal system of institutions, practices, and curricula targeting Indigenous children and their families. Sean Carleton writes about “inventing Indian education” in Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022), 110–40.
2. Crystal Gail Fraser and Jessica Dunkin, “How I Survived: Recreation at Indian Day and Residential Schools in the Canadian North,” Wicazo Sa Review (under review).
3. Land is more than a backdrop to Indigenous lifeways. It is foundational to identity, language, spirituality, culture, and sustenance.
Feature Image: The cover art for the How I Survived podcast was designed by pipikwan pêhtâkwan based on a wall hanging made for the project by Agnes Kuptana.
Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin