Oh, to Drink From the River Lethe: Making (Non)Sense of Testimony

• In Event: Roundtable Session 124
  In Roundtable Session: Weaving of Narratives Within Poetic and Visual Expressions

Abstract

As a way of understanding how traumatic testimonies such as the Indian Residential School (IRS) survivor statements can be implemented within the educational system, the author uses an arts-based tripartite weaving of embodiment, narrative and visual expression in relation to revealing her own personal trauma as a way to better understand, at a deeper level, what it entails to testify. By coming forward and bearing witness to an event the author spent a lifetime keeping secret, allowed for advocating for the sacrosanctity of the oral testimonies and the implementation of a place-based pedagogy, where the possibility of a co-emergence or coalescence of memory could ensue and where one could reencounter the feminine within the 'matrixial borderspace.'

Author

• M.D. Caroline Lefebvre, Simon Fraser University