"We Are Here Now": The Generative Refusal of Fictional Residential School Diaries

A fictional residential school diary is a diary-structured novel purportedly written in secret by a residential school student who has escaped all school censorship. The Canadian residential school system, which existed from the 1880s to 1996, separated Indigenous children from their families, communities, and homelands and forbade them to speak their languages and engage in other cultural practices. It also inflicted physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual violence on students. By attacking students' relationships with their families, communities, the land, and the other-than-human, the schools attacked what Glenn Coulthard terms the "grounded normativity" of Indigeneity (13). However, as scholars point out, new ways of resistance are often born and practiced in the most coercive institutions (Harlow 10), and though residential schools were coercive, totalizing institutions, or perhaps because of this, they nevertheless faced resistance by the Indigenous children they incarcerated.

This article analyzes how the fictional residential school diary These Are My Words (2017) by Anishinaabe author Ruby Slipperjack employs the diary as a medium for restor(y)ing relationships—with self, kin, and the land—and thereby for enacting resistance. In order to demonstrate how residential school discourse had changed over time, the article furthermore briefly examines the extent to which resistance is addressed in Nlakapamux author Shirley Sterling's much earlier fictional residential school diary My Name is Seepeetza (1992). As will be demonstrated, Leanne Simpson's concept of "generative refusal" (As We Have 35) is a helpful framework for interpreting resistance in fictional residential school diaries because it crucially conceptualizes resistance as care for the kinship relationships constituting Indigeneity. Analyzing fictional residential school diaries through the lens of generative refusal offers new ways for understanding how residential school literature and, more broadly, residential school testimony resist and rewrite colonial narratives.

While residential school survivors have never been silent about their institutional experiences, over the last four decades, they have been telling their stories more frequently and in greater numbers to an also increasing public audience. They have publicly shared their stories in different forms—including as autobiographies, novels, plays, graphic novels, poetry, and film. This cross-format range of works constitutes the genre that Renate Eigenbrod calls residential school literature ("For the Child" 278). Survivors have also shared their stories in interviews with the Assembly of First Nations, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and the Legacy of Hope Foundation. Nearly 7,000 survivors testified and shared their stories with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established by the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in conjunction with a five-year mandate (and one-year extension) to gather statements and historical documents toward the construction of a residential school history. Diaries written by students at the times of their residential school incarceration have never been shared with the public and are not among the millions of collected documents at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. As the two fictional diaries analyzed here emphasize, writing a secret diary was both dangerous and often near impossible given schools' ubiquitous surveillance and censorship. This does not mean no residential school diaries exist, only that they have not been shared publicly. The only available diaries are fictionalized versions writers have based on their own residential school experiences and released as novels.

I first read Sterling's and Slipperjack's fictional diaries when working as a research assistant at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. As a PhD student specialized in residential school testimony, I was well familiar with residential school narratives, but given the unavailability of nonfictional residential school diaries, I was especially intrigued by the genre of fictional residential school diaries. Growing up in Germany where The Diary of Anne Frank was a common school text, I early on learned the responsibility of learning one's national history and of honoring that history by preventing its reoccurrence. As a non-Indigenous researcher in the field of Indigenous literatures in Canada, I aspire to engage with Indigenous stories in a way that acknowledges the harms of colonialism and that helps decolonize the present. Through this article's...