#kamloops

Young Braised&Soledad Munoz live at Pink NoisebyInstant CoffeeforLuminocity, Kamloops Art Gallery, 2014

Amber Bracken, “Kamloops Residential School” (2021) for the New York Times.

Bracken shows a memorial to the 251 graves found near a residential school in British Columbia.

Photo of the Year Award

Atthe residential school memorial downtown, a speaker encouraged everyone present to take photos and share stories of the tributes and of what they had seen that evening. The memorial commemorated the recent discovery of 215 bodies at a Kamloops state institution that separated Indigenous children from their families and culture in an attempt to indoctrinate them into a western, Christian way of living. So I am doing as she asked.

I try to learn about and be mindful of Indigenous cultures in Canada and feel that, even as an immigrant, I still have more rights, freedoms and safety than people who were born here and who can trace ancestry back to before anyone like me ever arrived. I know, as many do, that the last residential school closed as recently as the 90s and that they were hugely harmful, abusive institutions with little to no accountability (thousands of other children remain unaccounted for to this day). I’m also well aware of the lack of access to healthcare, mental health resources and sometimes even clean water that affects many of this country’s Indigenous communities.

I have a complicated relationship with online activism and I feel I’ve known too many people who are performative or disingenuous, using it as a front and a facade in lieu of real action, and this includes much of the current Canadian administration. I also feel that what we care about and what we feel inside of us goes so much further than what we share on the internet.

I don’t know how to make other people care, but if you live anywhere in North America I would encourage you to use the internet to find out about the Indigenous Peoples who do, or once did, live in the spaces you move through, and what they are like. Education is one of the first ways that we can combat cultural erasure, ignorance and prejudice, and it’s also something that enriches all of us. If you’re in Canada and you can help financially, I’d suggest donating to the Residential School Survivors Society, or otherwise consider writing to your representatives to ask how they are working toward reconciliation, supporting and uplifting cultures and peoples who have been abused and oppressed for so long.