Residential Schools and “Reconciliation” in the Media Art of Skeena Reece and Lisa Jackson

Warning: This article discusses the historical trauma and ongoing intergenerational legacy of the Indian Residential School system in Canada. Some information and media art discussed here may stir up or trigger unpleasant feelings or thoughts. One organization that provides emotional support and assistance is the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-721-0066 or at the twenty-four-hour Crisis Line, 1-866-925-4419.

February 2015

I stand before the twenty-five students in my Anthropology of Media class lecturing about the history and contemporary impact of the Canadian Residential School experience as context for this week’s reading on Aboriginal media in Vancouver. It is a lecture that I have given too many times to count over the last ten years, as most of my students have never learned about Canadian residential schools or American Indian boarding schools. I provide this background information in preparation for screening Lisa Jackson’s film Savage. The hand on the clock clicks past 12:30 p.m., and I notice that most of the students sit before me blank-faced, tired, and anticipating the end of the class so they can head to lunch. I am frustrated by their apparent lack of interest as I scroll through archival images and facts about numbers of children removed from their homes and sent to residential schools. I remind them that the last federal Indian residential school in Canada closed in 1996. I speak passionately about the intergenerational impact of the residential school. I explain that I myself did not fully appreciate the extent of the impact of residential schools until doing fieldwork with Aboriginal media makers in Vancouver, where every single person that I interviewed and worked closely with was either themselves a survivor or the child or grandchild of a survivor. I explain that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made an apology on the floor of the Canadian Parliament in 2008, and I begin to read the words of the apology: “Mr. Speaker, I stand before you to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. . . . The government now recognizes that the consequences of Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this legacy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language. . . . The government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country,” and here my voice catches, and I begin to cry.

For the first time in ten years as a professor I weep in front of my class. “I’m sorry,” I say to my students. Deep breath in and deep breath out. I think of all of my filmmaker friends and colleagues whose families and communities were so violently disrupted and harmed by residential schools. I sigh and shake my head, brushing away my tears, determined to finish reading Harper’s quote. I am viscerally struck and nauseated by the hollow ring of his words as I read, “asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.” For failing them so profoundly. If ever there was an understatement, this is it. My students are on the edge of their seats now, unsure how to react to this show of emotion from their professor. Later I am embarrassed that I cried in front of the class, and yet I ask myself, Really, when you think about residential schools and their horrific trauma and intergenerational legacy, what else can you do but weep?

Aboriginal women have long been at the forefront of the vibrant Aboriginal media world in Canada as they create innovative works that speak back against their misrepresentation by outsiders—including anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers—to articulate visual sovereignty through inventive digital storytelling.¹ In her article in this volume, scholar Danika Medak-Saltzman explores how three Diné women filmmakers—Melissa Henry, Sydney Freeland, and Nanobah Becker—have pushed the boundaries of...