Uncovering Indian Residential Schools

This is Mike Pinay, who attended the Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School from 1953-1963. "It was the worst ten years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of 6 to 16. How do you learn about relationships, how do you learn about family? I didn't know what love was." © Daniella Zalcman

This is Jaime Rockthunder, who went to the Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School from 1990-1994. She was sexually assaulted during her time there, and her younger brother was raped by a classmate. Jaime said, "He finally told me about it, almost 20 years later, and he blamed me. All he could say is, 'Why didn't you protect me?'" © Daniella Zalcman

This is Valerie Ewenin, who went to Muskowekwan Indian Residential School from 1965-1971. "I was brought up believing in the nature ways, burning sweetgrass, speaking Cree. And then I went to residential school and all that was taken away from me. And then later on I forgot it, too, and that was even worse." © Daniella Zalcman

This is Brian Shannacappo. He attended Gordon Indian Residential School in 1995. “I wish I’d had an education but it was more like a little jail instead.” © Daniella Zalcman

This is Marcel Ellery, who went to Marieval Indian Residential School from 1987-1990. "When I got out, I turned to booze because of the abuse. I drank to suppress what had happened to me, to deal with my anger, to deal with my pain, to forget. Ending up in jail was easy, because I'd already been there." © Daniella Zalcman

This is Rick Pelletier, who attended the Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School from 1965-1966. He was 7 years old. He was being beaten so badly—both by the nuns and by older students who themselves had been subjected to extreme physical violence —that when his parents went to take him back for his second year, he ran away. © Daniella Zalcman

In 1996, the last of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools closed, ending a 120 year old program that took First Nations children from their homes and placed them in church-run boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their language or practice their traditions in an attempt to assimilate them into western culture. Many of the children were sexually and physically abused. Since then, the extent of the damage done by the system has begun to come to light, and in 2008, the Canadian government issued its first formal apology. Signs of Your Identity, an new book of photographs and interviews by Daniella Zalcman, published this month by FotoEvidence (the project won the 2016 FotoEvidence Book Award), collects interviews and pairs of portraits of First Nations men and women who attended the schools.

In brief quotes, the subjects describe harrowing experiences at the schools, and the effects of the abuse they received on their adult lives. The book includes two photographs of each person, an underexposed portrait set against a plain background, and an image that combines that portrait with a fragment of landscape. A man who spent eight years at Gordon Indian Residential School before he ran away to a nearby farm is pictured in a Western hat; in the composite image, a small-town crossroads is superimposed on his portrait. A cloudy sky obscures the face of a woman who spent two years at Muskowekwan Indian Residential School and describes her struggle with alcoholism. The double exposure effect suggests both memories of specific places and more illusive states of mind. As Marlene McNab writes in an essay in the book, “Rather than risk forgetting what happened in residential school and be forever silenced by the suffering, the contributors to Signs of Your Identity are showcased in images that appear almost three dimensional and words that are raw testimonies to the truth of what they experienced.”

Zalcman writes in an afterword that as a non-Indigenous journalist, she was hesitant to take up Indigenous stories. But she sees the book as a needed corrective that could make use of her ability to bring the story “to those who otherwise might not listen.” As she writes, “This book’s genesis is rooted in my own shame that this version of history was excluded from my textbooks. Indigenous narratives remain a footnote in western education. What little is shared has been flattened and whitewashed. There is a deliberate forgetting of the legacies of colonialism and of the effects of intergenerational trauma. I hope that, in some small way, I can help correct that.”

An exhibition of the work, along with other finalists for the FotoEvidence Book Award, Mario Cruz, Narciso Contreras, Hossein Fatemi and Ingetje Tadros, opens October 26 at St. John the Divine in New York City.