Author: Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773598227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and their home communities. For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers. Legal action by the schools’ former students led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2008. The product of over six years of research, the Commission’s final report outlines the history and legacy of the schools, and charts a pathway towards reconciliation. Canada’s Residential Schools: The Inuit and Northern Experience demonstrates that residential schooling followed a unique trajectory in the North. As late as 1950 there were only six residential schools and one hostel north of the sixtieth parallel. Prior to the 1950s, the federal government left northern residential schools in the hands of the missionary societies that operated largely in the Mackenzie Valley and the Yukon. It was only in the 1950s that Inuit children began attending residential schools in large numbers. The tremendous distances that Inuit children had to travel to school meant that, in some cases, they were separated from their parents for years. The establishment of day schools and what were termed small hostels in over a dozen communities in the eastern Arctic led many Inuit parents to settle in those communities on a year-round basis so as not to be separated from their children, contributing to a dramatic transformation of the Inuit economy and way of life. Not all the northern institutions are remembered similarly. The staff at Grandin College in Fort Smith and the Churchill Vocational Centre in northern Manitoba were often cited for the positive roles that they played in developing and encouraging a new generation of Aboriginal leadership. The legacy of other schools, particularly Grollier Hall in Inuvik and Turquetil Hall in Igluligaarjuk (Chesterfield Inlet), is far darker. These schools were marked by prolonged regimes of sexual abuse and harsh discipline that scarred more than one generation of children for life. Since Aboriginal people make up a large proportion of the population in Canada’s northern territories, the impact of the schools has been felt intensely through the region. And because the history of these schools is so recent, the intergenerational impacts and the legacy of the schools are strongly felt in the North.
Author: Renée Hulan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773522271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed indigenous peoples.
Author: Renée Hulan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773522282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
In Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Renée Hulan disputes the notion that the north is a source of distinct collective identity for Canadians. Through a synthesis of critical, historical, and theoretical approaches to northern subjects in literary studies, she challenges the epistemology used to support this idea. By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.
Author: Murray Sinclair
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781522815013
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
While the northern experience of residential schools was unique in some ways, the broader themes remain constant. Children were taken from their parents, often with little in the way of consultation or consent. They were educated in an alien language and setting. They lived in institutions that were underfunded and understaffed, and were prey to harsh discipline, disease and abuse. For these reasons this is not the only volume of the historical report to address northern issues. The thematic chapters in other parts of this report include northern examples in their discussion of the residential school experience.
Author: Cynthia R. Comacchio
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771126167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 707
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Book Description
Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s. Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up. This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups. Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.
Author: Heather E. McGregor
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774859490
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Since the mid-twentieth century, sustained contact between Inuit and newcomers has led to profound changes in education in the Eastern Arctic, including the experience of colonization and progress toward the re-establishment of traditional education in schools. Heather McGregor assesses developments in the history of education in four periods � the traditional, the colonial (1945-70), the territorial (1971-81), and the local (1982-99). She concludes that education is most successful when Inuit involvement and local control support a system reflecting Inuit culture and visions.
Author: Jonathan Waterman
Publisher: New York : A.A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The Arctic—with its twenty-four-hour daylight, surprisingly curious animals and inexplicable humming noises—is a world of constant danger and limitless possibility. This unforgiving landscape is home to the Inuit (the name they prefer to “Eskimos”), whose complex and little-studied society is fascinating in its divergence from as well as its assimilation into Western culture. Jonathan Waterman’s 2,200-mile journey across the roof of North America took him through Inuit communities in Alaska to Nunavut, Canada’s new, 770,000-square-mile, self-governed territory. His story, at once illuminating and alarming, offers firsthand observations of their life, language and beliefs; records their reactions to global modernization; documents their centuries of unjust treatment at the hands of Kabloona (bushy-eyebrowed whites); and witnesses unemployment, teen suicide and such persistent plagues as spousal violence and substance abuse. From the perspective of his 1997–1999 voyage—as the Inuit stand on the brink of a more hopeful, independent future—he also looks into a past marked by famous (or infamous) Arctic explorers, government cover-ups and environmental destruction. This beautifully written work of intrepid reporting and even scholarship also reveals the physical risks and psychological perils of crossing the legendary Northwest Passage. Utterly alone for weeks at a time, Waterman struggles against freezing conditions, the tricks played on him by his own mind and dangers more complex than aggressive bears, stormy seas and mosquito blizzards. Following the advice of an Inuit shaman, who said that “those things hidden from others” are discovered only “far from the dwellings of men, through privation and suffering,” Waterman kayaks, skis, dogsleds and sails across the Great Solitudes in a thrilling and ultimately successful quest for this “true wisdom,” arriving at a profound understanding of environment and culture.
Author: Louis-Jacques Dorais
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887558631
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
"Words of the Inuit" is an important compendium of Inuit culture illustrated through Inuit words. It brings the sum of the author’s decades of experience and engagement with Inuit and Inuktitut to bear on what he fashions as an amiable, leisurely stroll through words and meanings. Inuit words are often more complex than English words and frequently contain small units of meaning that add up to convey a larger sensibility. Dorais’ lexical and semantic analyses and reconstructions are not overly technical, yet they reliably evince connections and underlying significations that allow for an in-depth reflection on the richness of Inuit linguistic and cultural heritage and identity. An appendix on the polysynthetic character of Inuit languages includes more detailed grammatical description of interest to more specialist readers. Organized thematically, the book tours the histories and meanings of the words to illuminate numerous aspects of Inuit culture, including environment and the land; animals and subsistence activities; humans and spirits; family, kinship, and naming; the human body; and socializing with other people in the contemporary world. It concludes with a reflection on the usefulness for modern Inuit—especially youth and others looking to strengthen their cultural identity —to know about the underlying meanings embedded in their language and culture. With recent reports alerting us to the declining use of the Inuit language in the North, "Words of the Inuit" is a timely contribution to understanding one of the world’s most resilient Indigenous languages.
Author: Andrea H. Procter
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
"On January 22, 2005, Inuit from communities throughout northern and central Labrador gathered in a school gymnasium to witness the signing of the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement and to celebrate the long-awaited creation of their own regional self-government of Nunatsiavut. This historic Agreement defined the Labrador Inuit settlement area, beneficiary enrollment criteria, and Inuit governance and ownership rights.
Author: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
