During the Indian Residential School period (1867-1960) in the Mackenzie River area of the Northwest Territories, Indigenous students at several schools administered by the Order of the Grey Nuns produced crafts and art items that were then exported to the Order’s motherhouse in Montréal. This collection of 275 pieces, ranging from garments and footwear to paintings and drawings, was repatriated at the request of the Fort Providence Métis Council to the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre (PWNHC), in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in 2001.
While locationally repatriated, the Grey Nuns collection has to date remained in storage at the PWNHC until 2015 when, in cooperation of PWNHC staff, I was able to carry out a preliminary examination of the collection. The objective of this examination was to: (1) temporally and spatially trace the movement of the pieces across Canada, situating the PWNHC collection within the residential school history in Canada; (2) to explore if the making of these pieces by the children who attended residential schools in the Mackenzie River Valley perpetuated Indigenous artistic traditions; (3) to determine whether the materiality of the collection exposes the complex interrelations between children’s crafting knowledge and the colonial structure; (4) to explore the potential and challenges of reconnecting this collection now at the PWNHC with its source communities today.
This thesis reports on the analysis of a small subset of the collection’s contents. This sample, consisting of two pairs of moccasins, one pair of mittens and a single souvenir object, was analyzed for information pertinent to my main objectives, and especially what they indicate about hybridity and materiality regarding the different cultural influences, Métis, Dene and Euro-Canadian, that met in the Indian Residential school setting.
The objects, made at the behest of the Grey Nuns in order to meet the demands of the Canadian tourism industry, and provide badly needed income to support their Northwest Territories schools, exhibit a combination of two, and even three, of these influences, notably in the items’ styles, decorative motifs and the materials employed in their creation. Of particular note, these sample objects portray distinct Métis and Dene artistic knowledge and traits. Their making speaks to the continuance of important Indigenous women’s traditions, knowledge that did not disappear despite the often hostile institutional environment around their creators. The collections offers another window on student-colonizer relations within some Indian Residential schools in the Lower Mackenzie region in the early twentieth century. / Graduate / 0326 / abra.wenzel@gmail.com
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/7508 |
| Date | 31 August 2016 |
| Creators | Wenzel, Abra |
| Contributors | Walsh, Andrea N. (Andrea Naomi) |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/ |
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