Uncovering history through testimony. A traumatic account of aboriginal peoples in Canadian residential schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The residential schools' system in Canada was created over a century ago and it ended up affecting not only those who survived its cruelty but also the following generations of Aboriginal peoples. As a consequence of the Indian Act (1876), Aboriginal children were forced to attend residential schools so as to be better assimilated into Euro-Canadian society. In these schools, many of the Aboriginal students experienced sexual, mental, and physical abuse. Moreover, some of them were subjected to unconsented scientific experiments. The victims of this system remained silent for long. It is time now to explore this largely untold history and unravel the silenced historical atrocities not only for the sake of the survivors but also out of respect to the dead. The operation of the residential schools in Canada led to loss of culture, language, broken family ties, lack of parenting skills, and personal trauma. In this study, I focus on selected anglophone reminiscences, Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), Johnston's Indian School Days (1988), and two francophone novels, Jean's Le Vent en Parle Encore (2013), and Perron's Billydéki (2019), as well as on ten YouTube testimonies by the survivors and the documentary Sleeping Children Awake (1992). I have chosen these works since they all reflect the testimonies by the survivors, the plights they underwent at residential schools in Canada, and the diverse strategies through which the victims managed to survive the trauma they experienced. Sharing their experience is a way to connect with others and it can facilitate the healing process. Sharing the story of the experiences they underwent, helps the survivors to construct meaning from the devastating and traumatic events they endured. Through the survivors’ testimonies, the readers and the audience come to know that Aboriginal students attempted to defend themselves through various techniques, one of which is humor. This dissertation analyzes the selected narratives in light of Judith Herman’s concept of trauma, and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's concepts of witnessing, and testimony. The survivors, who experienced the atrocious incidents at the schools, stand as the first-hand witnesses of the incidents and they give their testimonies. We, as the audience, stand as the second-hand witness who is informed of the silenced moments. Based on the information we receive through various narratives, we can have access to a multilayered vision of one incident, as well as gain a more thorough understanding of the legacy of residential schools in Canada as a whole.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".