Experiential

Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens is unusual in this theme, and a facilitator should think about it before the session rather than during it. In most themes the room’s own experience is the primary material. Here, unless the room is Native, it is not. Most non-Native participants in North America have no experience of this to surface; what they have is a location on a map, an education that left something out, and a benefit they did not ask for and cannot return by wanting to. That is worth naming rather than working around. Start with the land under the room, then hand the floor to people who do have the experience, and let them keep it.

Anchor questions

Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room, and see the facilitator guide for general guidance. If the room is Native, or partly Native, most of these change shape and some should be dropped; ask first.

• Whose land are you on? Find it on the map before anyone speaks. What did you know an hour ago?
• What were you taught about how this land was acquired, and by whom, and what word did they use?
• Did you learn any of this from a Native person, or only about Native people?
• Have you ever been to a reservation, a powwow, a land acknowledgement? What was it like, and what were you doing there?
• Is there anyone in your family story who got land? Where did it come from before that?
• What do you owe, if anything, and to whom, and how would you know?

Materials that may help

All free unless marked otherwise. Lead with the films: this theme’s testimony is unusually well served on film, because Alanis Obomsawin spent fifty years making it and the National Film Board gives it away.

Alanis Obomsawin

Obomsawin (Abenaki) is the reason this lens is strong. She has made documentaries at the National Film Board of Canada since 1967, largely about what happens when a state meets a nation it has decided is not one, and the NFB streams them free and complete, from the rightsholder, watchable outside Canada.

• Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993, 119 min). Seventy-eight days behind the barricades at Oka in 1990, filming from the Kanien’keha:ka side while the Canadian army stood on the other. The dispute was a golf course expanding onto a burial ground. The single best film in this theme, and the one to build a weekend around. Free: nfb.ca
• Incident at Restigouche (1984, 46 min). Quebec police raid the Mi’gmaq reserve over salmon the Mi’gmaq have a treaty right to catch. Contains the exchange in which Obomsawin puts the minister’s own words to him and waits. Free: nfb.ca
• Trick or Treaty? (2014, 85 min). Cree communities on what Treaty No. 9 says versus what their ancestors were told it said, and Idle No More. The clearest film anywhere on a treaty as a live document. Free: nfb.ca
• Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Metis Child (1986, 29 min). Twenty-eight foster placements, dead at seventeen, told largely in his own diary. The argument is that child welfare is what the boarding school became. Twenty-nine minutes, and a room will need time afterward. Free: nfb.ca

The schools, from both sides of the record

• Zitkala-Sa (1876 to 1938), American Indian Stories (1921). Her own boarding school, written while the schools were still running: the hair, the language, and coming home a stranger to her mother. Public domain. Free: gutenberg.org
• Personal Stories (National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition). US survivors telling their own stories, gathered by a Native-led organization where survivors keep ownership and decide if a story is ever public. Free: boardingschoolhealing.org
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Executive Summary (2015). Thousands of residential school survivors’ statements, and a commission that concluded the system was cultural genocide. Long; take a section. Free: nctr.ca. The permanent archive is at nctr.ca, whose database a browser can reach and a script cannot.
• Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (Dickinson College). Put this beside the two above and the session teaches itself. Student files, ledgers, cemetery records, and the before-and-after photographs, from the school that coined “kill the Indian, save the man.” This is not Native voice. It is the institution’s own paperwork, describing what it did, on purpose, for an audience it expected to approve. The photographs were taken to prove the method worked. Free: carlisleindian.dickinson.edu

Testimony and oral history

• Mary Brave Bird (1954 to 2013), Lakota Woman (1990). The mission school, AIM, and giving birth inside the Wounded Knee siege in 1973. As told to Richard Erdoes, a settler collaborator; the voice is hers and the mediation is real, and both are worth discussing. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes (1998). Bettelyoun (Sicangu Lakota) dictated this in the 1930s to Waggoner (Hunkpapa Lakota) specifically to correct the white histories she had read. Two Lakota women writing Lakota history for themselves; it waited sixty years for a publisher. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Doris Duke Native Oral History Collections (University of Florida). One of the largest bodies of recorded Native oral history there is, from the 1960s on, with transcripts. Academic, so the interviewers are mostly outsiders; the testimony is not. Free: ufdc.ufl.edu
• Archive of Native American Recorded History. The portal that now stewards the Doris Duke recordings, run collaboratively and explicitly on a principle of responsible stewardship rather than open extraction, which is itself worth discussing beside the Carlisle archive. Free: nativeoralhistory.org
• Water Protector interviews. Standing Rock in the water protectors’ own words rather than in coverage of them. Free: waterprotectorscommunity.org

Now

• Reclaiming Power and Place (National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 2019). More than 2,380 family members, survivors, and knowledge keepers testified, and the inquiry concluded that what has happened is genocide. Read the truth-gathering volumes for the families rather than the recommendations for the state. Free: mmiwg-ffada.ca
• Gather (Sanjay Rawal, 2020, 75 min). Food sovereignty being rebuilt: an Apache chef, a Cheyenne River Sioux teenager studying buffalo, the Yurok Ancestral Guard. The director is not Indigenous; the people in it speak for themselves. Free with ads on Tubi, which is a licensed service: tubitv.com

A note on method

Two traps in this lens specifically.

The tragedy trap. This material is genuinely devastating, and a room can leave feeling moved and having learned nothing it can act on. Obomsawin is the antidote, because her films are not about suffering; they are about people who are winning arguments, holding barricades, and putting ministers on the spot. If a session ends in sorrow, run Restigouche next time and watch what a Mi’gmaq fisherman does with a treaty.

The consumption trap. Survivor testimony is not content. The NABS archive exists on the principle that survivors decide whether their story is public; the Carlisle archive exists because the school photographed children to prove a method worked. Both are open to you. They are not the same thing, and a group that cannot say why has missed the theme.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is carried unusually by film, because Alanis Obomsawin made fifty years of it and the National Film Board gives it away. Contributions welcome, especially US-side testimony from families of missing and murdered Indigenous women, which has no equivalent to Canada’s national inquiry and was searched for without success; Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian voices, which are absent here; and contemporary Native writers whose work is paywalled and who therefore did not make this list. Note that two strong NFB films, Reel Injun and We Were Children, are geoblocked to Canada and are deliberately not listed, since most of this school’s readers cannot watch them.