Jess Dunkin

Masì to Hotıì ts'eeda and ICHR for inviting Crystal Fraser and me to talk about the How I Survived project and podcast this Friday, January 23, as part of their lunchtime learning series.

Click on this link below to register for this free event: www.eventbrite.com/e/how-i-surv...

A Perfect Square: Environmental Control and Settler Vision at Brandon Industrial School Brandon Industrial School exemplified settler-colonial control, using landscaped grounds, forced labour, and distant relocation to erase Indigenous land relationships.

"A Perfect Square: Environmental Control and Settler Vision at Brandon Industrial School" by Taryn Goff is the latest article in our Land, Memory, & Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by @jdunkin.bsky.social & Crystal Gail Fraser.

niche-canada.org/2025/12/02/a...

Listen: New podcast rewatches classic CBC TV show North of 60 Thirty years after North of 60 first aired, Melaw Nakehk’o and Brie O’Keefe are rewatching every episode of the CBC show in a new podcast: Lynx River Revisited.

Thirty years after North of 60 first aired, Melaw Nakehk’o and Brie O’Keefe are rewatching every episode of the CBC show in a new podcast: Lynx River Revisited.

Our Stories Are Science: Taylor Galvin on Land, Memory, and Indigenous Futures Taylor Galvin champions Indigenous-led science, water protection, cultural revitalization, and relationship-based environmental stewardship grounded in ancestral knowledge.

"Our Stories Are Science: Taylor Galvin on Land, Memory, and Indigenous Futures" is the latest article in our Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by Crystal Gail Fraser and @jdunkin.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/11/25/o...

#indigenous

Teacher and pupils at Bear Island Indian Day School. Identified individuals include Presque Petrant (back row, far left), Cici Becker (back row, second from right), Margaret Petreant Moore (back row, far right), Emma Doherty (teacher, far left), and Charlie Moore (front row, white shirt). Photo by Duncan Campbell Scott, 1906.

For #NationalChildDay, catch up on our Land, Memory, & Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series, edited by Crystal Gail Fraser & @jdunkin.bsky.social, to learn about the violence inflicted on Indigenous children in the residential school system
niche-canada.org/tag/trc10env...

Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School The Bear Island Indian Day School balanced Anishnabeg seasonality and colonial schooling until Ontario’s environmental policies dismantled land-based life and autonomy.

"Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School" by @tweedwoodcabin.bsky.social is the latest article in our Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by Crystal Gail Fraser & @jdunkin.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/11/18/s...

#envhist #cdnhist

Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School The Bear Island Indian Day School balanced Anishnabeg seasonality and colonial schooling until Ontario’s environmental policies dismantled land-based life and autonomy.

Today's post by Robert Olajos (@tweedwoodcabin.bsky.social) is about a seasonal day school that operated on Teme-Augama Anishnabeg Lands. Bob's post highlights the seasonality of colonial power and also Teme-Augama Anishnabeg agency, resistance, adaptation, and survivance.

Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School The Bear Island Indian Day School balanced Anishnabeg seasonality and colonial schooling until Ontario’s environmental policies dismantled land-based life and autonomy.

It's Tuesday, which means another installment in the Land, Memory, Schooling series that Crystal Fraser and I are editing for @nichecanada.bsky.social.

The Price of Gold Fifty years of gold mining at Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories spurred northern settlement and produced millions of dollars in profits. But mineral processing also had catastrophic environment...

NEW: You can now freely access the *full* introduction of our new book, The Price of Gold, on the refreshed website for @mcgillqueensup.bsky.social:

www.mqup.ca/Books/T/The-...

"These stories are part of the environmental history of Indian residential schools: a history of energy, Land, and exploitation. Remembering them means acknowledging the children who were harmed and refusing to let their labour remain invisible."

Mapping with the Assiniboia Residential School Legacy Group Collaborative mapping projects with Assiniboia Residential School Survivors use digital story maps to reclaim space, document experiences, and advance decolonization and reconciliation.

"Mapping with the Assiniboia Residential School Legacy Group" by Stephanie Pyne, Caléa Turner, @andrewwiebe.bsky.social, & Andrew Woolford is latest article in our Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series.

niche-canada.org/2025/11/11/m...

#envhist #cdnhist

Mapping with the Assiniboia Residential School Legacy Group Collaborative mapping projects with Assiniboia Residential School Survivors use digital story maps to reclaim space, document experiences, and advance decolonization and reconciliation.

In this week's post in the Land, Memory, and Schooling series on @nichecanada.bsky.social, we learn about how the Assiniboia Residential School Legacy Group is using a variety of innovative and collaborative map-based approaches to document, archive, and present Survivor experiences.

“The U.S. military built bases and installations across Unalaska and throughout the Aleutians during WWII, then abandoned structures and equipment when forces left — including insulation with asbestos, drums of brake fluid & antifreeze, & transformers containing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs”

It's good to see attention being drawn to the social, cultural, and environmental legacies of contamination, in this case, related to WWII, but it parallels much of what the Petroleum Histories Project team is hearing from Dene and Métis about oil and gas exploration and development in the Sahtú.

“Too Dangerous a Job”: Forced Child Labour and Wood Collection at the Chooutla Indian Residential School At Chooutla Residential School, Indigenous boys were forced to cut and haul wood for heating, enduring danger, injury, and exploitation under colonial systems.

"'Too Dangerous a Job': Forced Child Labour & Wood Collection at the Chooutla Indian Residential School" by Blake Butler is the latest in the Land, Memory, & Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by @jdunkin.bsky.social & C. Fraser

niche-canada.org/2025/11/04/t...

"Forced wood cutting and hauling at Chooutla was not a benign lesson in self-reliance. It was a system that endangered children, stole their classroom time, and transferred institutional heating costs onto their bodies."

"These stories are part of the environmental history of Indian residential schools: a history of energy, Land, and exploitation. Remembering them means acknowledging the children who were harmed and refusing to let their labour remain invisible."

"Forced wood cutting and hauling at Chooutla was not a benign lesson in self-reliance. It was a system that endangered children, stole their classroom time, and transferred institutional heating costs onto their bodies."

“Too Dangerous a Job”: Forced Child Labour and Wood Collection at the Chooutla Indian Residential School At Chooutla Residential School, Indigenous boys were forced to cut and haul wood for heating, enduring danger, injury, and exploitation under colonial systems.

In today's post in the Land, Memory, and Schooling series for @nichecanada.bsky.social, Blake Butler writes about child labour and wood collection at the Chooutla Indian Residential School in Carcross, Yukon.

Still Here: Land, Memory, and the Failure of “Indian Education” Jack Hoggarth, a survivor of colonial Catholic schooling, reclaims identity through Anishinaabe teachings, ceremony, and Land, proving assimilation failed—resilience endures.

"Still Here: Land, Memory, and the Failure of 'Indian Education'" by Jack Hoggarth is the latest post in our Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series edited by Crystal Gail Fraser and @jdunkin.bsky.social

niche-canada.org/2025/10/28/s...

#envhist #cdnhist

Still Here: Land, Memory, and the Failure of “Indian Education” Jack Hoggarth, a survivor of colonial Catholic schooling, reclaims identity through Anishinaabe teachings, ceremony, and Land, proving assimilation failed—resilience endures.

"This is a story about Indian Education, but it is also about Land-based resistance, about ceremony, about the scent of beaver castor and sage cutting through colonial fog...I am still here. The Land is still here. And together, we remember."

Still Here: Land, Memory, and the Failure of “Indian Education” Jack Hoggarth, a survivor of colonial Catholic schooling, reclaims identity through Anishinaabe teachings, ceremony, and Land, proving assimilation failed—resilience endures.

"The Land has always remembered me, even when institutions tried to make me forget. The Land taught me what the classroom never could: how to listen in silence, how to give thanks, and how to remember. Now, I help others remember too."

Still Here: Land, Memory, and the Failure of “Indian Education” Jack Hoggarth, a survivor of colonial Catholic schooling, reclaims identity through Anishinaabe teachings, ceremony, and Land, proving assimilation failed—resilience endures.

In the next installment in the series about environmental histories of residential and day school, Anishinaabe-Dinjii Zhuh scholar and intergenerational Survivor Jack Hoggarth reflects on the legacies of the residential and day school system and the persistence of Indigenous Peoples and cultures.

So Far from Home: Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Red Deer Industrial School Eight Nisichawayasihk Cree children were taken from their homeland to Red Deer Industrial School; most died, yet their Nation endures.

William Elvis Thomas, Eva Linklater, Laura Golebiowski & Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation's "So Far from Home: Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Red Deer Industrial School"

The latest in our Land, Memory, & Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series

niche-canada.org/2025/10/21/s...

So Far from Home: Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Red Deer Industrial School Eight Nisichawayasihk Cree children were taken from their homeland to Red Deer Industrial School; most died, yet their Nation endures.

In this post, Elvis Thomas, Eva Linklater, and Laura Golebiowski share the story of eight children who were taken from nisicawayasihk in what is now northern Manitoba to the Red Deer Industrial School and how the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation is keeping the memory of these children alive.

So Far from Home: Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and Red Deer Industrial School Eight Nisichawayasihk Cree children were taken from their homeland to Red Deer Industrial School; most died, yet their Nation endures.

There is a new post in the “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education” series on @nichecanada.bsky.social.

The Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools: Law and Schooling as Tools of Dispossession Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools dispossessed Anishinaabe from Land and identity, yet cultural resilience, language, and Land-based resurgencies endure.

"The Williams Treaties & Indian Day Schools: Law & Schooling as Tools of Dispossession" by Jackson Pind is the latest article in our Land, Memory, & Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education series, edited by @jdunkin.bsky.social & Crystal Gail Fraser

niche-canada.org/2025/10/14/t...

The Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools: Law and Schooling as Tools of Dispossession Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools dispossessed Anishinaabe from Land and identity, yet cultural resilience, language, and Land-based resurgencies endure.

"For the people of Curve Lake and other Williams Treaties First Nations, the combined impact of the treaty and the day school system was suffocating. One removed them from the Land legally. The other worked to remove them from the Land ideologically." - Jackson Pind

The Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools: Law and Schooling as Tools of Dispossession Williams Treaties and Indian Day Schools dispossessed Anishinaabe from Land and identity, yet cultural resilience, language, and Land-based resurgencies endure.

The second post in the series that Crystal Fraser and I are editing for @nichecanada.bsky.social is live.

In this post, Anishinaabe historian Jackson Pind illustrates how the Williams Treaties and Indian day schools were tools of dispossession.

Please join me in becoming a monthly donor to the SSC.