From genocide to resurgence: Launching the second edition of Project of Heart
Visit bctf.ca/ProjectOfHeart to find the second edition.
By Nancy Knickerbocker (she/her), retired BCTF staff
For more than a quarter century, starting with its 1999 Task Force on First Nations Education, the BCTF has been working to end the systemic discrimination facing Indigenous teachers, students, and their families, and striving to build a public education system in which all students see themselves, their histories, and cultures reflected with honesty and dignity.
In 2015, to mark the release of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the BCTF launched the first classroom resource focused on the history of residential schools in our province. With more than 45,000 copies in print and thousands more downloads online, Project of Heart: Illuminating the Hidden History of Indian Residential Schools in BC has proven to be a useful entry point for secondary students to the difficult truths of our colonial history and contemporary reality. Now the BCTF is launching a second edition to include the many important developments in the past decade, including:
The 94 Calls to Action and how BC students have documented the progress, or lack thereof, on many of these crucial steps toward reconciliation.
The important findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and how the REDress movement has spread across Canada to honour the memories of those no longer with us.
The search for the children who never came home and the efforts in Kamloops and other BC communities to investigate the grounds of residential schools, corroborate oral histories and survivors’ testimonies, and identify students who died there.
The need to make meaningful reparations for these missing and disappeared children as outlined in Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience, the landmark 2024 report by the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves.
In a province that is 95% unceded traditional territory, the ongoing struggle to regain sovereignty and protect Indigenous land, rights, and title through the courts, political action, and advocacy.
Reckoning with the acknowledgment that Canada committed genocide through the residential school system, and how to assert the historical truth in the face of rising denialism and misrepresentation of the facts to undermine reconciliation.
The role and responsibility of non-Indigenous Canadians to take a stand for truth and against denialism, illustrated through profiles of four courageous allies.
Indigenous resurgence and its transformative change, focusing on some outstanding British Columbians making profound contributions in the arts, politics, law, education, medicine, and more.
The second edition also provides updates to earlier stories. For example, the first edition tells the moving story of Gladys Chapman, a Nlaka’pamux girl who died of tuberculosis at age 12 in Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS). After further investigation, family members learned more about Gladys’s sister Maggie, who also didn’t come home from KIRS. School enrolment records show her in attendance from August 1926, but after January 1927 her name simply disappears. The family is left haunted by the question: What happened to Maggie?
The first edition also carried a story about Kwantlen Elder Josette Dandurand.Josette was a residential school survivor who shared her story many times with students in Langley. A positive update is that in 2024, the school district announced its newest elementary school would be named after Josette to honour her immense contributions over many years.
Brenda Celesta, district Indigenous resource teacher in Kamloops and a member of the BCTF Executive Committee, believes the theme of resurgence is vitally important to highlight; far from being defeated by the past injustices and contemporary racism, Indigenous people are taking positions of leadership in every aspect of society.
But she is very concerned about rising denialism, especially after the revelations of suspected unmarked graves at the local residential school. She pointed to Dallas Brodie, the MLA for Vancouver Quilchena well-known for her denialist views, who travelled to Kamloops to stage a publicity stunt on the campus of Thompson Rivers University.
To share the deeply authentic and creative learning students have done, Celesta brought the BCTF’s Commemoration Canoe to Kamloops. Embellished with thousands of wooden tiles drawn on by students as they learned first-hand about residential schools from survivors, the canoe is a powerful symbol of education for reconciliation.
“The whole school came out to watch it being brought in, and then four classes did a deep dive into the canoe, looking at the tiles students had drawn, how it was made, and its purposes,” Celesta said, adding that it has inspired many students’ interests in the history of relations between Indigenous Peoples and settler Canadians, the Indian Act, and the governance of Canada.
Penny Carnrite, a resource teacher in Langley, has devoted her career to this work ever since she did her practicum on a reserve in Alberta. “I saw the injustice but also the beauty of the culture, and that’s what I wanted to teach.” When the BC First Nations 12 course came out 30 years ago, right away she asked to teach it. Her department head was skeptical, asking, “Who would want to take it?” But right from the first year it was successful, and the next year she enrolled four classes.
Every year Carnrite takes her students to the annual march held in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to honour Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Over time their numbers have grown to two busloads of students accompanied by parents and administrators who have become allies. “It’s not difficult to be outraged when you learn even a bit about residential schools, and we see the kids teaching their parents about this,” she said.
It has also become a tradition at her school for students to do land acknowledgments at their graduation ceremonies. This year two students, one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous, shared about their learning journeys. “They really knocked it out of the park!” Carnrite said. “Those two kids are great examples of the goals of reconciliation.”
