Browsing by Subject "asuttajakolonialismi"

This thesis discusses social remembering of difficult past in the context of Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Perceiving remembering as social practice of making the past meaningful for the present, the thesis focuses on the role of local memory practices in bringing a silenced history into focus of public attention and historical reconstruction. Residential schools were originally established by the Canadian government and churches for assimilating indigenous children into Euro-Canadian settler society through separation from their cultural background. Although operated for more than a hundred years between the late 19th and 20th centuries, the schools remained a silenced topic in the history of the country until the 1990s. Exploring local practices of commemoration and education around the old Shingwauk Residential School in Northern Ontario, the thesis discusses how negotiation over the meaning of a troubling past takes place in the intersections of public, political discussion and local level social interactions. Remembering as social and political practice is here understood not exclusively as a basis of shared identity grounded on common understanding of the past. Rather, the thesis focuses on challenging, negotiation and transformation as essential aspects of social memory. The thesis takes part in discussion on the relationship between past and present in debates over colonial history: whether residential schools are regarded as a single policy situated in the past, or whether they are recognized as part of the broader colonial history that still shapes the contemporary Canadian society. The analysis in this thesis is based on three-month field research conducted in the summer of 2016 Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, on the site of the late Shingwauk School that nowadays hosts Algoma University. The research focused on the following memory practices that have developed around the school since the 1970s: a history-documenting and archiving project, a former students’ association, and an archives centre, dedicated to preservation of and education about the history of the school. The research was based on qualitative methods of thematic interviews and participant as well as direct observation, and supported with archival sources. Local negotiations over the memory of residential schools are discussed in relation to three different elements of the research context. The first part of the analysis focuses on the mutual emergence of public discussion on the history of residential schools and the local memory practices. The thesis argues that those local practices have contributed to uncovering the silence around the schools in public discussion and historical documentation. The second part looks at the relationship between memory and place: how the site of the Shingwauk School is today integrated in negotiation over the historical significance of residential schools. The old school is perceived as a site of transmitting the memory of past injustice, inseparable of the contemporary debates over addressing the legacy of that past on local as well as national level. Finally, contemporary educational practices of the archives centre and the former Shingwauk students are discussed as social spaces of negotiating the place of residential schools as part of the broader history of colonization for the public memory of Canadians of different backgrounds. The thesis argues that local practices of commemoration and education work as a counterforce against silencing and forgetting by creating social space between public discussion on residential schools and everyday experiences of people who might otherwise find that history distant to themselves. Local actions for preserving the memory of the Shingwauk School are intertwined with broader concerns over awareness about and engagement with the history of residential schools especially among the non-indigenous public. The thesis maintains that local initiatives of remembrance that emphasize continuity between the past and the present can challenge the rhetoric that attempts to obscure the enduring legacy of colonialism in Canadian society by situating residential schools into a past that has already reached its closure.