This post is part of a series entitled “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education.” You can find the introduction here.
This post and series 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 1-866-925-4419. Additional resources are available here.
Introduction
In our Summer 2025 call for this NiCHE series, we invited scholars, community members, and practitioners to think with us about environmental histories of Indian residential and day schools. This series was inspired by interviews we conducted with residential and day school Survivors through the How I Survived project.
Histories of residential and day schooling are inseparable from Land, water, infrastructure, and the material conditions of colonialism. Residential and day schools were not only institutions of policy and pedagogy, they were also environmental projects. They reshaped relationships to Land, disrupted systems of knowledge, and attempted to sever Indigenous Peoples from the places that sustained them.
At the same time, Land is not a passive backdrop to these histories. It holds memory, bears witness, and continues to sustain Indigenous life, knowledge, and resurgence.
From this premise, “The Land Remembers Us: Intergenerational Camps for Healing and Strength” emerges. This new project is a northern-led initiative that builds directly from the work of How I Survived and moves it in a crucial direction: from documentation and storytelling toward Land-based action.
We are honoured to share that this project has been named an Arctic Inspiration Prize (AIP) laureate for 2026 and awarded $500,000. This recognition affirms both the urgency of this work and the strength of northern, Survivor-led approaches to healing and knowledge mobilization.
From Storytelling to Land-Based Practice
How I Survived began as a project grounded in community and listening. Through collaborative research, podcasts, and community events, we have worked alongside Survivors and intergenerational Survivors to document histories of recreation at residential and day schools in the North. These stories complicate dominant narratives; they reveal harm and violence, but also strategies of survival, creativity, and relationality.
But as many Survivors have told us, storytelling alone is not enough. The Land Remembers Us responds to this call. Over two years (2026-28), this initiative will bring together Survivors, Elders, youth, families, artists, and wellness workers through a series of regional on-the-Land camps across the Northwest Territories, followed by a territory-wide gathering.
These camps will be structured, multi-day, intergenerational spaces grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems and northern realities. Participants will engage in storytelling, Land-based skills training, art-making, and cultural practice, supported by embedded wellness care. Youth will learn directly from Survivors and Elders—on the Land, in relationship, and through doing. This is environmental history in practice.
Land as Archive, Teacher, and Relation
The NiCHE series on environmental histories of residential schooling asks us to reconsider what counts as an archive. If we take that question seriously, the Land must be understood as a living archive—one that holds memory, knowledge, and responsibility. The Land Remembers Us is grounded in this understanding.
Residential and day schools sought to disrupt Indigenous relationships to Land: removing children, restructuring seasonal cycles, and replacing Land-based knowledge with institutional discipline. The impacts of this disruption are ongoing and can be felt in family relationships, cultural continuity, and community wellbeing.
This project addresses those impacts by returning to Land as a site of remembrance, learning, and healing. This is not a return to a romanticized past, but a forward-looking practice rooted in Indigenous modernities and futurisms. Camps will be co-designed with regional First Nation partners, shaped by local knowledge, and responsive to contemporary needs. They will also generate new materials—stories, recordings, artworks—that will circulate through schools, communities, and public platforms. In this way, Land-based practice becomes both method and outcome.
Intergenerational Knowledge and Northern Expertise
A central intervention of this project is its insistence on intergenerational engagement. Residential schooling was, in part, a project of breaking relationships: between children and parents, Elders and youth, people and place. Any meaningful response must therefore be relational and intergenerational.
At the camps, Survivors and Elders will lead. Youth will not simply “learn about” history; they will participate in its transmission and interpretation. They will gain skills in storytelling, media production, and cultural practice, while also building relationships that extend beyond the duration of the camps. The expected outcomes reflect this emphasis: strengthened intergenerational relationships, improved wellbeing, increased youth confidence and skills, and the creation of new community-rooted resources.
Crucially, this is northern expertise in action. The project is led by the Northwest Territories Recreation and Parks Association (NWTRPA) and the University of Alberta in collaboration with the How I Survived Advisory Committee—composed of Survivors and intergenerational Survivors—and three regional First Nation governments (Dehcho First Nations, Gwich’in Tribal Council, Tłı̨chǫ Government). This governance model matters. It ensures that the work is accountable, co-developed, ongoing, and relational.
Environmental History and the Work of Reconciliation
In the introductory post for this series, we argued that environmental history plays an important role in the work of truth and reconciliation. But that work requires more than documenting past harms. It requires engagement with present-day practices that address those harms and imagine different futures.
The Land Remembers Us is one such practice. It takes seriously the insight that healing happens on the Land—not as metaphor, but as material and relational practice. It recognizes that environmental histories of residential schooling are not only about what was done to Land and people, but also about how those relationships can be restored and reimagined. And it insists that this work must be led by those most directly affected.
The Arctic Inspiration Prize affirms this approach. It recognizes the project’s potential to generate “lasting, community-driven change across the North” and to move beyond short-term programming toward sustained impact.
Looking Ahead
This NiCHE series creates space for critical reflection, scholarly analysis, and community-engaged writing on the environmental dimensions of residential and day schooling. The Land Remembers Us sits alongside this work as a complementary intervention, one that translates knowledge into action.
This series remains ongoing, and we continue to welcome contributions from scholars, community members, educators, and practitioners engaging with environmental histories of Indian residential and day schools. We are particularly interested in work that pushes us to think with Land—as archive, relation, and site of responsibility—and that reflects the diversity of approaches emerging across communities and disciplines.
As The Land Remembers Us moves forward, we see this series as one space among many where these conversations can continue to unfold: critically, collaboratively, and with care. If the Land remembers, then our responsibility is not only to listen, but also to respond.
Feature Image: Members of the How I Survived project team host a community listening event for the How I Survived Podcast at the Ingamo Hall Friendship Centre in Inuuvik (Inuvik) in October 2025. Photo credit: Vince Ret, NWTRPA
Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin
Latest posts by Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin (see all)
- The Land Remembers Us: Survivors, Intergenerational Camps, and Northern Futures - May 22, 2026
- Environmental History and the Work of Truth and Reconciliation - September 30, 2025
- Call for Submissions – Environmental Histories of Indian Residential and Day Schools - July 22, 2025
- How I Survived: Land and Northern Histories of Residential and Day Schooling - January 9, 2025