A still from the Indian Affairs film ?We Learn English? includes a modernist school building as a backdrop. Courtesy NFB
Writing about modernism in colonial contexts, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright proposes that ?the physical environment became a strategy for enforcing common values while maintaining difference within a conjoint modern world.? In Canada, little else exemplifies this statement so strongly as the century-long experiment known as residential schools.
Recent confirmations of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Residential School in unceded Secwépemc territory and several other former residential school sites ignited a national conversation about this history and its ongoing consequences. For Indigenous communities, it has been a time to grieve, as it should be for us all. For settlers, it has also been a wake-up call to take a more critical look at Canadian history, particularly the recent past and present of settler-Indigenous relations. As a settler-colonial nation, Canada?s access to territory has always been predicated on the removal of its prior occupants. This took place through sequestering Indigenous peoples on reserves or congregating them in permanent settlements, as well as separating children from their families and communities through residential schools?a system the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called ?cultural genocide? in 2015. The primary purpose of these institutions was to re-educate children for assimilation in...