ABSTRACT
The de-territorialisation of Native North American Indians, their confinement in bounded reservations, and the forced re-education of children in the residential school system between 1889 and the 1960s point to settler colonialism’s investment in Indigenous immobility. Within this context, photographs of Indigenous subjects attending residential schools emerged as a distinct genre that redefined mobility and progress in terms of assimilation. These pictures only superficially capture the violence enacted by residential schools, a process that often began with a child’s abrupt removal from home, followed by incarceration, sickness, and death. Comparing archives from western Canada and the United States, this chapter shows how and why photographs of residential schools expose the state’s intention to disassociate Indigenous children from their attachments to territory, kin, and culture. In Canada, these experiences have been animated through oral testimonies and photographic representation of psychological and physical disenfranchisement, which together serve as evidence in the advocacy for contemporary political redress.
