ABSTRACT
The Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada (1883–1996) led to the removal of over 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities to attend educational institutions, whose aim was to assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society. The examination of the IRS architectural drawings, and their keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs archives, can serve to question the adequacy of their location and the spatial arrangement that brings the archive together as the legacy of the settler state and its accretion of memory.
An analysis of the architectural drawings of the IRS as testimonial accounts and the colonial reality of the archives could provide a deeper understanding of the spatial unfolding of settler-colonialism and its planning by architects and bureaucrats under the Department of Indian Affairs. This chapter explores alternative readings of the archives of the IRS to question their muteness. It examines how Indigenous artists and survivors reclaim agency and elicit memories to create spaces of healing. Such works assert an evocative force upon the viewers while resisting the colonial gaze and the consumption of traumatic narratives by settler audiences and articulating Indigenous resistance amidst the hegemonic national discourses.
