Currents
Residential schools naming project seeks to identify former students depicted in photographs.
Residential school project puts names to faces. Key moments in technology. Lake and Mountains by Lawren Harris. Banding together to overcome bigotry.
For too long, they were faces without names, frozen in black and white — hundreds of photos of boys and girls sent to residential schools to be stripped of their culture, language, and identities.
Photographs at residential schools were taken by staff, church organizations, or government officials, and these images rarely ended up in the hands of the students. The photographs ended up in private, church, or government archives, often without context and with very few students identified in the photos.
Now, thanks to a partnership between an Ontario resi- dential school archive and First Nations across Canada, many of those students have been identified and the photos returned to their rightful owners.
Starting in 2005, the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) began the Remember the Children: Photograph Identification Project. This project has involved work to identify people in residential school photographs and to put the images back into the hands of the indigenous communities represented in the pictures.
The pilot project for Remember the Children focused on the thousands of images held by the Shingwauk archive re-