Saturday, June 20, 2015
The Eyes of Children — life at a residential school Christmastime at a residential school in British Columbia in 1962.
The search parameters that lead me to this film were “Marshall McLuhan First Nations,” and McLuhan just happened to be on the same page as this unrelated video. I was looking for some ideas about the interaction between wellness at school, technology and First Nations. Instead I found a half hour documentary in the CBC archives that sent shivers up my spine. I have started thinking about how so much mainstream media on FN people exists and what a project it would be to “answer” it all, to shine a new (old?) light on it. Here is a media project that could go on for a long time – confronting media images like Nanook or this film with new FN-generated media. Not directly related to my topic of wellness, but perhaps this an indirect way of healing?
Try watching the opening shots of the documentary which depict the priest greeting the students, then follow it up immediately with this fact sheet on the Kamloops Indian Residential School where the film was shot . . .
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Digital+Archives/ID/2568294042/
http://irsr.ca/kamloops-residential-school/