Artful places: creativity and colonialism in British Columbia's Indian residential schools

Residential schools for Aboriginal children were a primary site of negotiations between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous subjects. These schools, and the records of peoples who occupied them, provide opportunities to better understand colonialism in British Columbia. Residential schools were places created to transform Aboriginal children, through assimilation, into a modernizing and colonial society. They are simultaneously places that offer access to Indigenous articulations of self and Indigeneity, expressions of resistance, and exertions of agency. Cultural products created by children in residential schools, particularly creative art products, allow us to visualize and understand Indigenous response to and evasions of colonial education. When taken together with Aboriginal peoples’ testimonies about the residential school experience, and with colonial records of the schools’ intents, children’s creative materials and expressions allow some access to the complex places that constituted the cultural geography of colonialism in British Columbia.

Department dc:contributor.department

Geography

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• De Leeuw, Sarah

Advisors dc:contributor.supervisor

• Godlewska, Anne
• Kobayashi, Audrey

• Post colonial geographies
• Residential schools
• First Nations and Aboriginal peoples
• Place

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1974/870

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/870