Did You See Us? by Andrew Woolford

Author:Andrew Woolford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780887559204
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2021-03-02T17:26:42+00:00

Part III

Assiniboia and the Archive

Figure 40. Aerial photo of St. James Bridge with Assiniboia Indian Residential School to the east.

Survivor memories are the heart of our project. But we also decided to look at the archival records for the school. The purpose of this exploration is not to substantiate or confirm Survivor remembrances. Their expertise as knowers of their lives and their school requires no such corroboration or authentication.

What has been drawn from the archive is not objective or neutral. Andrew Woolford, a university-trained settler scholar, who has studied the violence of settler-colonial institutions, reviewed the data and made choices to link together the information he found significant. Such assessments of significance are not innocent. Choices were made based on assumptions about what the audience, and most importantly Assiniboia’s Survivors, would want to hear. But these choices were also influenced by training in sociology that directs attention to certain practices in the social reproduction of institutions. Then, beyond these conscious choices, there exist those motivating factors beneath the surface that inform decisions about what information to treat as important and what to leave outside of the frame. Factors of race, gender, class, life experiences, the attraction of the familiar or the fresh—all these potentially come into play. In short, do not give this next section any more authority because of its form. It represents another engagement with memory, nothing more.

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