ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the Embodying Empathy project, a Canadian multidisciplinary public–private research and creative partnership. Embodying Empathy seeks to shed light on the experience of Canada’s Indian Residential School (IRS) system. Many more suffered from malnutrition and emotional and physical neglect. The purpose of the IRS was to ‘kill the Indian to save the child’, to use a well-known phrase often misattributed to the notorious Canadian Indian Affairs minister and Confederation Poet Duncan Campbell Scott. Many children suffered sexual abuse and all were deliberately alienated from their traditional languages and folkways. The promise of immersive virtual environments includes the idea that they may exceed standard fictional worlds in terms of the range and availability of emotions they are able to provide. The persistence or contiguity of behavioural change between virtual and actual worlds has been extensively documented.
