Voices from a buried past: Recovering dis/ability histories through the Woodlands Memorial Garden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2007, the Woodlands Memorial Garden (WMG) was installed in New Westminster, British Columbia, on the site of a long-forgotten cemetery, active between 1920 and 1958, for people diagnosed as mentally “unfit” who were institutionalized at the Public Hospital for the Insane and/or at Essondale Hospital for the Mind (later known as Woodlands and Riverview). Unique in Canada, the WMG recognizes 3200 individuals whose burial places were erased by the provincial government’s removal of gravestones from the Woodlands cemetery in 1976 to transform the site into a “park.” The 2007 installation of a public memorial created not just a material, geographic space for collective recognition and remembrance, but a symbolic, discursive space that prompted individuals to enquire about relatives buried at the site and to explore suppressed family histories related to the history of dis/ability and ableism in BC. Interpreting the WMG as a hybrid counter-memorial, I conducted a collaborative ethnographic study with relatives of people buried at the Woodlands cemetery, engaging in and tracking their research of “lost” family members, inviting responses to the WMG, and co-creating stories, while examining the entanglements between personal, familial, and public remembrance and forgetting. Emerging participant stories addressed the affective, ethical, and sociopolitical dimensions of researching a stigmatized and suppressed family past, while presenting a range of creative strategies for reinstating and including institutionalized relatives in family narratives and the public record. Through storytelling, participants extended the meaning of family advocacy by “rewriting kinship” (Rapp & Ginsberg 2001) across generations of the living and the dead: intervening in family silences, addressing historical erasure, and challenging persistent ableist exclusions in contemporary society. This study offers insights into collaborative ethnographic practice and demonstrates how anthropology can contribute valuable knowledge to disability studies. It contributes to an under-explored area of disability studies – the advocacy and caring role of families in the lives of people with dis/abilities, and their social and political potential. It highlights intersections between colonialism and ableism in dis/ability history and expands historical memory work and commemorative studies by drawing attention to ableism and dis/ability as social justice issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".