“Bending the Light” toward Survivance: Anishinaabec-Led Youth Theater on Residential Schools

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES an Anishinaabec-led youth theater project on the intergenerational legacy of residential schools to rethink ideas about Indigenous survivance.¹ My aim is to develop a hermeneutics for listening to complex narratives within the play and in interviews with the audience and cast. While there is now a substantial literature on the racist ideological framework of these schools and their traumatic effects, less has been written about former students who considered themselves successfully assimilated graduates. A key story in the production discussed here concerns the legacy of one such student, Marguerite Stella Syrette, who attended St. Joseph’s Residential School for girls in Spanish, Ontario, in the 1930s. Her grandson, Teddy Syrette, was the lead writer and actor in this theater project, where he developed a compelling set of auto-ethnographic reflections on his relationship with his grandmother. These stories illustrate the legacy of those who considered themselves successful converts and model citizens as a result of residential schooling, capturing what may be for many readers an unexpected outcome of the residential school project. At the same time, these narratives also demonstrate how students wove complex narratives of appropriation and transculturation in contexts not of their own choosing.

My work draws on Indigenous analysis of survivance (e.g., that of Vizenor) and Figes’s study of those who endured the terror of Stalinist Russia, as well as insights from interviews from the cast and audience to explore the ambivalence at the heart of navigating domination. I argue that this performance enacted a risky and important form of Indigenous self-representation, where actors and audience members related anecdotes and shared ephemera which hinted at stories that can never be fully known. Through dramatic monologues, humor, and auto-ethnographic storytelling, Teddy Syrette’s performance highlighted both how racial and hetero-gendered norms taught in the schools echoed down the generations within Indigenous families, as well as the grit and determination that enabled Anishinaabec survivance—without papering over the contradictions.

The context for this theater performance is the present-day legacy of boarding schools for Indigenous children. In Canada, as in other settler colonial contexts, residential schools were officially designed to alienate Indigenous children from their family and kinship relations, convert them to Christianity, and assimilate them into the lowest rungs of a settler society. Schooling practices aimed to extinguish Indigenous languages, culture, and spiritualities through representing them as backward and primitive, and many staff employed regulatory practices that ranged from public humiliation to physical and sexual abuse in order to punish students and expunge their Indigenous heritage.²

I will start with a brief review of the history of residential schools and then explore the contradictions of “assimilation” through analysis of Teddy Syrette’s compelling narratives from the play. The next section draws on interviews with the cast and selected audience members to elaborate on how they made sense of that legacy in order to “bend the light” toward Indigenous survivance. Throughout I highlight the contradictory ways in which Anishinaabec people (re)imagined the assimilative drive of residential schools and theorize the significance of Indigenous theater for navigating the inheritance of education as a racialized program of social control.

Background and Context

Boarding schools for Indigenous children first began to proliferate in Canada in the mid-1800s; while most closed in the 1960s or 1970s, the last institution did not shut its doors until 1996. The schools were jointly run by the churches and the government. They were systematically underfunded and in most cases provided a substandard education geared toward menial work.³ Yet these schools also provided a key plank in the mission of the Indian Department, which aimed, according to Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy minister in 1920, to get “rid of the Indian problem” through the “gradual civilization” of Indigenous people through education.⁴ The purpose of this Canadian policy, as one American Bureau of Indian Affairs official said in 1945, was “the extinction of the Indians as Indians.”⁵ This was pursued through many avenues, including land seizures, the reserve system, the outlawing of Indigenous spiritual and cultural...