Thank you to all the panelist for your work. Here in Canada the Residential Schools have been a very important topic of discussion, so this is very timely in many ways.

For my question, I'd love if you could talk about what are some good methods to help make sure more perspectives (especially Indigenous ones) are more widely taught and shared?

Can digital methods be to used share or strengthen perspectives. Are there particularly effective ways? Methods you'd like to see used more, or perhaps differently?

Thank you for the panel.

Indigenous history has been overlooked and often purposely buried for years. How can you fight that, and rebuild a history when so much of it has been lost? Are there efforts within the tribes and nations to consolidate oral history along with whatever written sources can be found?

Thanks for this panel- it was fascinating to listen to and great context for the headlines that keep appearing in the news.

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This question is more pointed towards u/anthropology_nerd and u/DrDawsononReddit since I'm interested in the intersection of education and colonialism. Can you talk about what Indigenous people expected when sending their children to schools and reactions to learning of the tragedies occurring in those spaces?

For any of the panelist, is there anything you'd like to add on that you didn't get time to discuss in the video?

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone on the panel. I found all the panels incredibly interesting. This must have been some emotionally tough research at times. How did you manage some pretty emotionally powerful topics/pictures/stories? For people in general, how can we discuss these topics respectfully, and giving proper agency to the people it happened to?

Welcome to the “Forbidden to Remember, Terrified to Forget: Trauma, Truth, and Narratives of Indigenous History” conference panel Q&A! Settler societies around the world rest on foundations of violence perpetrated against the original inhabitants of the land. While open conflict has become less common over time, the resulting traumas have been perpetuated by brutal processes of forced assimilation. Even as these societies take unsteady steps towards acknowledging and attempting to reconcile this past, the reality of these histories and their incompatibility with heroic national narratives is a source of inescapable tension. This panel explores these tensions, seeking to carve out space to acknowledge the traumas suffered by Indigenous peoples amidst wider processes of local and national mythmaking.

Moderated by Kyle Pittman (u/Snapshot52), the papers in this panel all deal with various forms of Indigenous trauma, from residential schools to the memorializing of Indigenous death at the hands of settler colonizers. It features:

Berklee Baum (u/berkleebaum) presenting her paper, ”Forgetting the Bear River Massacre: Analyzing physical memorials to explain nationwide historical amnesia”

On January 29th, 1863, General Patrick Connor and his troops attacked the Northwestern Shoshone tribe in their lodges on the banks of the Bear River in present-day Idaho. An estimated 450 men, women, and children were murdered in one day, making the massacre one of the deadliest in United States history. Yet this massacre remains largely unknown in the United States. This paper seeks to answer the question of why and how this massacre has been misrepresented, ignored, and forgotten for over 150 years. It does so by tracking the Bear River Massacre memorialization process through seven physical memorial case studies, which illustrate a past of injustice and willful ignorance. These memorials include one erected by a local community of white settlers, two erected by settler religious organizations, two memorials honoring perpetrators of the massacre, one large mural at a local post office, and, finally, one informational memorial created by the Northwest Shoshone tribe. These sources highlight the importance of three groups on the memorialization of the massacre: the Northwestern Shoshone tribe, who, since the massacre, have been denied both reservation land and the right to control the narrative of their own tragedy; white settlers, who have painted themselves as heroes; and the US government, which has taken the route of quiet amnesia. The findings of this paper highlight the power of physical memorials, and emphasize an important conclusion: those who control memorials have the ability to change collective memory. It is therefore no surprise that memorials have become the focus for campaigns and counter-campaigns around the world.

Elle Ransom (u/anthropology_nerd) presenting her paper, ”Thirteen Headstones: Reclamation of the Unknown Burials at Carlisle Indian Industrial School Cemetery”

During the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, Native American and First Nations children across the United States and Canada were forcibly removed from their families and placed in residential boarding schools. The schools were social experiments and warfare by other means, an effort to extinguish indigeneity by interrupting the transmission of traditional knowledge and languages, thereby killing Indian cultures.

The flagship institution in the United States residential school system was Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle stripped children of their clothing, their names, their hair, their languages, and their cultures. Abuse, disease, and malnutrition were rampant. 10,500 students enrolled in the school from 1879-1918. Only 758 ever graduated. At least 192 perished at school, interred far from their homeland in the unforgiving Pennsylvania soil. Their uniform white headstones provide the only visible monument to this genocidal system. Most markers in the school cemetery display the names, date of death, and tribal affiliation for each individual.

Thirteen headstones are inscribed with a single word: Unknown.

In the past two decades, through the combined efforts of still-grieving indigenous nations and historians/digital archivists, the names of the unknown are being reclaimed. This paper briefly discusses the troubled history and memory of the residential schools through an examination of the Carlisle cemetery, before exploring the subsequent collaboration to identify the thirteen. The vital work of reclamation provides an opportunity for the families of residential school survivors to mourn, to honor the lost ones, and to heal from the intergenerational trauma caused by a nation waging war on indigenous children.

Josh Dawson (u/DrDawsononReddit) presenting his paper on, ”Sight Unseen: On Visibility at the Assiniboia Residential School”

Following the publication of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2015, the testimonies of more than 6,000 survivors of Canada’s Residential School System (IRS) became the gravitational centre around which reconciliation discourse in Canada revolved. While the TRC changed the public nature of this discourse, many advocates had been speaking, writing, and publishing materials criticizing the IRS dating back to the first decades of the 20th century. Among these early critics was Dr. Peter Bryce whose work was suppressed by the Federal Government after he found gross negligence on the part of the churches running institutions and a lack of transparency from the government in recording and reporting the deaths of children in the IRS. The continued relevance of such suppression is especially clear today with the discovery of 215 bodies in an unmarked grave at the former site of the Kamloops Residential School in May of 2021.

Many Canadians practice what Eve Tuck (Unangax) terms “settler moves to innocence” in the knowledge that the government actively worked to suppress knowledge of the schools and that the work of critics such as Bryce fell upon deaf ears. A key feature of contemporary reconciliation discourse emphasizes the lack of knowledge of the IRS because so many institutions were located in remote, rural locations. As its interrogative title suggests, the publication of Did You See Us? in 2021 shifts the discourse from sound to sight and questions this lack of knowledge and visibility in the context of an urban institution, the Assiniboia Residential School, which was located in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. In my paper I propose to examine the implications of the question posed by this title for contemporary efforts at reconciliation and for the public discourse around the IRS such as it circulates in post-TRC Canada today.

I look forward to watching your video when I have the available time without distraction.

In what ways do you participate in advocating to reverse ongoing colonial harms and systemic oppression?

This country needs to recognize Indigenous languages as official languages. Here in Ontario, there is a great need for Language teachers to graduate from university and work in their board. Unfortunately, universities do not run the necessary Additional Qualification courses for “teacher of the Ojibwe language”, because enrolment isn’t a money making venture. Even before that, FN people face many barriers to accessing post-secondary institutions. Even before that, if a high school student wanted to be a French teacher they would take 6 university-level grade 12 courses, one of which can be the French course. For someone wanting to be an Indigenous Language teacher, they would have to take 6-university level courses but additionally Ojibwe language courses in highschool are not available at the U-level, meaning that if they wanted to continue to take Ojibwe and go to university, they would be taking a larger workload than their peers. This is all before even graduating from highschool.