Call for Submissions – Environmental Histories of Indian Residential and Day Schools

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Call for Submissions: Environmental Histories of Indian Residential and Day Schools

Edited by Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin

Submission Deadline: Ongoing

Series Initiation: September 30, 2025

In a recorded interview in September 2023, Paul Andrew (Shúhtaot’ı̨nę from Tulı́t’a) asked fellow northerner Agnes Kuptana (Inuvialuk from Ulukhaktok) how knowledge from the Land helped her survive residential school. Her response speaks to the strength and kinship drawn from the Land, even in the face of colonial institutions:

If we didn’t have that, we would have been maybe lost, maybe trying to walk home. It gives you strength and hope that one day, one day, they’re not going to have us here all the time. One day, we’ll be going back home. And we look forward to going out on the land, eating our country food, preparing it, and hunting it, and sharing it. And the laughter, and the love that you see every day. Everyone was like teachers that are knit together, like a family. Even if they are strangers from different villages, they were like one family. And that’s what gave us strength to keep going.*

In 2016, Jocelyn Thorpe demonstrated to readers of the NiCHE blog how 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.

Only two other posts on the NiCHE site since then have been about residential schools. In 2021, NiCHE’s editorial team gathered five sources that “engage critically with residential school history and highlight[ed] the environmental context of each.”

Earlier this year, we published a post about the relationship between histories of “Indian education” in the North and environmental history that drew on six interviews we conducted as part of the How I Survived project. (These interviews are now publicly available through the How I Survived Podcast.) 

The limited attention paid to histories of Indian residential and day schooling on the NiCHE site is not an anomaly but is consistent with the field of environmental history more broadly. Although Land and environment are central to residential and day school histories, they remain underexamined in environmental history.

We invite submissions of different types to this series. Written contributions of roughly 800 to 1,200 words are welcome and can be reflections, personal accounts, essays, Q&As, narratives, and histories. Visual projects, such as maps, photo essays, and short videos, are of interest, as are graphic histories and sound pieces. Proposals from Survivors, intergenerational Survivors, and community members are encouraged, as well as first-time and experienced writers and creators.

Topics or themes that might be addressed include (but are by no means limited to) the following:

  • Compulsory schooling and dispossession
  • Ecological alienation
  • Health and disease
  • Hunting and trapping
  • School gardens or agricultural programmes
  • School curriculum
  • Labour
  • Outdoor recreation
  • Sport
  • Genocide
  • Land as strength
  • Land as healing

Please include a positionality/community connection statement with your submission (150-200 words). We think it’s important for readers to understand your relation to the research topic and the residential school in question. The statement could include: how you came to this topic; how your identity, social location, and cultural background have shaped your research questions and findings; and how you have engaged community through the research process.

Send your submission care of Crystal Gail Fraser (cgfraser@ualberta.ca) and Jess Dunkin (jdunkin@nwtrpa.org) and tell us a little about yourself and why this topic interests you by August 25, 2025. If you have any questions or want to pre-submit a proposal before the deadline for feedback, please get in touch with Jess (jdunkin@nwtrpa.org). We look forward to hearing from you!

NiCHE offers $50 CAD honoraria to contributors without adequate or consistent access to institutional support. Learn more about our honoraria policy here.

*Agnes Kuptana (Uluksaqtuuq/Ulukhaktok), residential school Survivor, artist, and advocate, passed away in July 2025. Her story lives on in episode six of the How I Survived podcast. Quyanainni, Agnes.

Feature Image: Work and Play. Indian Residential School, [Fort] Resolution, N.W.T Credit: Canada. Dept. of Interior / Library and Archives Canada / PA-048021.
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Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin

CRYSTAL GAIL FRASER (she/her) is Gwichyà Gwich’in, originally from Inuuvik and Dachan Choo Gę̀hnjik. Crystal is a historian and Indigenous studies scholar at the University of Alberta and author of By Strength, We Are Still Here (2024). JESS DUNKIN (she/her) is a settler historian and writer, who has lived in Sǫǫ́mbak’è in Treaty 8 since 2015. Jess is the project manager for How I Survived and author of Canoe and Canvas (2019).

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