Reconciliation: London area shaping US scholar’s Indigenous work

At the former Mount Elgin residential school site near London, Cristina Stanciu saw little shoes and toys that area students had brought to a memorial that stood there to the Indigenous children forced to attend the school.

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“Just seeing that broke me up a little bit. But was what encouraging was to hear that a lot of students in London are coming there, and they’re learning about these stories.”

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The pain and hope Stanciu has found in and around London are guiding her work.

A professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Stanciu arrived at King’s University College in London in November as Canada’s first Fulbright scholar in justice and reconciliation. Her research into, and teaching about the literature of Canadian Indigenous residential schools and US Indigenous boarding schools could only benefit from time at the Western University liberal arts college, Stanciu figured.

But it was sitting down with survivors and their families, and teachers in London and neighboring First Nations, that opened her eyes the most.

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“The knowledge I acquired by sitting down with people and by visiting residential school sites has been, hands down, the most valuable experience of this trip,” Stanciu says.

The Fulbright program, a prestigious American educational and cultural exchange, supports students and scholars in research, teaching and studying around the world.

Originally from Romania, Stanciu’s love of American literature took her first to the works of William Faulkner, whose stories of the US south include Indigenous characters. When Stanciu moved to the US and took courses to learn more about Indigenous people, she quickly realized the stories behind those characters were false.

“So, then, my question became, what about the real people behind those stories? I made a complete switch from what I was studying at the time to Indigenous literature,” she says. Since then, Stanciu has added to and shared her knowledge of Indigenous stories. She is an associate professor of English specializing in Indigenous and ethnic studies in literature at her university in Richmond, Va., and is the director of the school’s Humanities Research Center.

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She’s written or co-written four books, more than a dozen papers and been a Fulbright scholar in Romania.

Her work has led to researching the stories of survivors in the US of the Indigenous boarding system and in Canada of the residential school system.

Taken from their families, and separated from their languages ​​and culture, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were forced to attend Canada’s network of church- and government-operated residential schools during the 1800s and 1900s, as the federal government sought to assimilate Indigenous people.

Nearly 1,000 children attended the Mount Elgin school, on the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation. One of the earliest and longest-running residential schools, Mount Elgin operated from 1851 to 1946 and was used as a day school after 1967.

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Southwestern Ontario was also home to another such school, the Mohawk Institute, in Brantford.

Stanciu said there were differences between the Canadian and American colonial approaches to Indigenous people.

“My students and I were reading Canadian materials, (and) we found something very, very different from the US story. In the US, the mantra was ‘kill the Indian and save the man.’ In Canada, the fate of mantra was ‘kill the Indian in the child.’”

But Canada, she knew, was further ahead than the US in terms of recognizing a painful past.

Canada set up a national commission to chronicle the history and effects of the residential school system, but critics have noted few of the 94 recommendations for change made by the commission have been completed since its final report was released in late 2015.

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”I always look up to Canada for guidance, because you are way ahead of us in terms of addressing these issues. Of course, there are imperfections and of course, there are still problems,” Stanciu says.

She’d already been collecting the written literature of Canadian residential school survivors and family, but it’s important for her to listen to stories directly from the mouths of those affected, in their places, Stanciu says.

“When you work in Indigenous studies, these are not just stories or histories. These are lived histories that continue to inform contemporary lives of Indigenous communities.”

In the London region over the past few months she’s spoken to residential school survivors and their descendants, teachers of Indigenous history and storytellers and visited the Mount Elgin and Brantford’s Mohawk Institute residential school sites.

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Stanciu is returning to the US soon, not only with more information about Canada’s stories but with guidance, as well, about the challenge in telling the stories both in classrooms and future publications.

How do you inform and inspire non-Indigenous people without alienating them by focusing on the shame of the past? she wonders.

She’s getting the answers from local storytellers Ray St. John from the Oneida Nation of the Thames, a teacher in the London District Catholic school board’s Indigenous education system led by Dolores Caranci.

“Ray has a deep understanding and compassion for everyone willing to learn and teach with kindness. He taught me that if there are ways to bring this education forward, to find the tone that doesn’t really alienate readers, but makes them curious to learn more.”

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A book that comes from her work in Canada and the US will be aimed at academics and a wider audience, largely non-Indigenous.

“Instead of starting with that history of genocide, I’m planning to start with the present. I’m planning to start with resilience,” she says.

A published book is still a couple of years away.

“I think my main project going home is to write some (applications for) grants to bring some of the Canadian elders I met to my home institution,” she says. “We train a lot of teachers who then go on to teach these histories. So, they can learn from the elders.”

As the director of her school’s humanities research center, Stanciu also supports a film festival and Indigenous writer-in-residence program. She’s hoping to bring Ontario filmmaker Ogiima Keesis G’Nadjiwan and her mother to the festival, and perhaps introduce an elders-in-residence program.

“I think the more we do these comparisons between the US and Canada, I think the more we learn. I’m a guest in both countries and I’m still learning.”

Stories are at the heart of the learning, Stanciu says.

“That’s what literature does, right? It uses that power of imagination and story to bring back that past, to show that there’s a lot of pain, but there’s (also) a future.”

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