'Signs of Your Identity' in the Classroom

Country:

Canada

Media:

Video

Authors:

Evey Wilson
Pulitzer Center Alum

Libby Allen
Pulitzer Center Alum

MIKE PINAY, Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School (1953-1963).“It was the worst 10 years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of six to 16. How do you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back then. I was a number.” Image by Daniella Zalcman. Canada, 2015.

English

For more than a century, many Western governments operated a network of Indian Residential Schools...

Daniella Zalcman
Grantee

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Mike Pinay, Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School, 1953-1963. Pinay says, “It was the worst ten years of my life. I was away from my family from the age of 6 to 16. How do you learn about relationships, how do you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even known by names back then; I was a number … 73.” Image by Daniella Zalcman. Canada, 2015.

Rosalie Sewap attended the Guy Hill Indian Residential School from 1959 to 1969.

"We had to pray every day and ask for forgiveness. But forgiveness for what? When I was 7 I started being abused by a priest and a nun. They'd come around after dark with a flashlight and would take away one of the little girls almost every night. You never really heal from that. I turned into an alcoholic and it's taken me a long time to escape that. I can't forgive them. Never."

Sewap is one of thousands of former indigenous Canadian residential school students interviewed by Daniella Zalcman for her project "Signs of Your Identity." Zalcman recently visited classrooms around Washington, D.C., where she discussed her interviews and photographs of former residential school students with middle schoolers and high schoolers.