Colliding Heartwork: The Impacts of the Residential School System on Indigenous Descendants

• In Event: 34.038 - Challenging Post-Truth Rhetoric Through Decolonial Frameworks: Learning From Participatory, Ethnographic, and Narrative Research in Education

Abstract

Examining the aftereffects of the residential school system may be emotional for descendants whose ancestors, grandparents, parents, and siblings who attended these institutions. Indigenous children who attended these institutions were denied from speaking their Indigenous language and stripped of their identity. The residential school system altered Indigenous life-ways; therefore, it may be difficult to detach us from emotion. Emotions are attached to Indigenous bodies and interwoven with events and history of all our history: pre-contact, genocides, residential schools, colonial policies to disrupt or erase Indigenous identity, culture, land, and removal, and ongoing oppression. As an Indigenous researcher, I had the privilege to work with Indigenous university students who shared both their family members and their experiences about how the residential school system had personal, familial, and communal after-effects. The academy must give more credit to Indigenous scholars and participants draw on personal experiences to critical investigate the lingering repercussion of not only the residential school system on our community and family members. These lived experiences and the ample ranges of emotions that “work to space the surfaces of individual and collective bodies” to form the “source of our feelings” (Ahmed, 2015). The presentation shares the results Indigenous university students’ pictures and interviews drawing from Sara Ahmed’s theory of emotions and Dian Million’s scholarship on Felt Theory to explain a process I call “Colliding Heartwork.”
My theoretical framework, Colliding Heartwork, refers to how individuals in particular Indigenous students process the multiple layers of learning about the direct familial impacts of the residential school such as the loss of Indigenous culture, knowledge, language, and identity. Colliding heartwork is an emotional response to the multiples losses Indigenous peoples suffered due to the residential schools and other events imposed on them by the settler state. Colliding heartwork involves empathy and empowerment to revitalize the losses to strengthen an Indigenous individual or community by examining how descendants of residential school survivors’ emotions are bonded to their bodies; thus creating a space for how emotions show us how boarding school histories stay alive, even when they are not consciously remembered. Colliding heartwork also provides a foundation for the researchers to allow themselves to be vulnerability and to create empathy. It is with a good mind and ethical research practices researchers develop into a vessel of shared and accepted knowledge to undergo the process of colliding heartwork.

Author

• Natahnee Winder, Simon Fraser University