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Of the thesis entitled:��“Don’t��Let Fear Take Over”: The Space and Memory of Indian Residential Schools

Abstract:

The Indian Residential School (IRS) system in Canada��directly affected 150,000 Indigenous children who were taken to state-sponsored��and church-run institutions to separate them from their families and cultures.��During the century and a half leading up to around 1970, over��130 IRS were��scattered throughout the country. The role of architecture in this genocidal��system is a crucial, but overlooked aspect of its realization. In the first��decades of the twentieth century, the Canadian government became increasingly��involved in building and rebuilding��the IRS, as a dedicated arm of the��Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa became a centrally controlled apparatus��of architectural production. Passing from utopian space to evolving memory, the��architectural remnants of the IRS system tell many stories, among those that��need��to be heard and acknowledged by contemporary Canadian society as part of��its troubled relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Through archival research, documentation, narrative,��and critical analysis, explorations of four former IRS sites configure this��thesis, each providing a lens on the space and memory of this difficult and��often traumatic past. Located in Ontario and Manitoba, they were designed,��fully or in part, by the little-known R.G. (Roland Guerney) Orr, Chief��Architect of Indian Affairs from 1921 to 1935. Mapping architecture to��ideology, I examine the development of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford,��Ontario in the legal and political contexts of Indigenous-Canadian relations.��At the abandoned Birtle IRS in southwestern Manitoba, the institutional intricacies��of this broad view come into focus through a critique of the architectural��program and its intentions. Nearby, at the site of the demolished Brandon IRS,��the heap of leftover��debris calls forth questions of collective memory,��explored through conventional representations and their transformations in the��art of survivors and post-residential school Indigenous artists. I consider the��archive and its role in bringing forth the future at the former Shingwauk��Hall��in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, now the site of Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig, an��Anishinaabe post-secondary institution, and Algoma University. Finally, I��return to the Woodland Cultural Centre, located next to the Mohawk Institute��building and whose staff are currently��reimagining the former IRS based on��feedback from the community. Rather than resting on conclusions, this thesis��probes these difficult histories as an opening up towards the future, propelled��by the past but open to spaces of divergence.
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