Crystal Gail Fraser Transcript

My name is Crystal Gail Fraser. I am originally from Inuvik and [regional language] in the Northwest Territories. I am a historian and an Indigenous Studies scholar and an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. So my book By Strength We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories was published in 2024. It is a book about the histories of the north, specifically related to Residential Schooling in Inuvik, and specifically during the second half of the 20th century. It is also my Nation's history, my family's history.

Everything was in pretty close collaboration with mentors and Elders and Survivors in the north. And it really tries to understand histories of colonialism in a way that allows our own people to speak, that allows a way for us to have not only conversations in community but also healing. So from the beginning it was really important for me that I include family members, Knowledge Keepers, Elders, and of course the most important people in this kind of history, those who experienced Residential Schools themselves.

So from the early moments of project conceptualization I had Elders who I worked with and then throughout the process as a historian-in-training it became pretty clear that historians go to archives. However, I was very committed to community, to the revival of our storytelling practices, and to working with folks who can share so much more about these histories than I could ever find at the archive. So, interviews were an important part and then also community follow-up, reporting back, making sure the kind of history that we want the world to know is correct and helpful. A part of the draw to this research was really asking questions about just what happened to our people.

Growing up in the far north, you know, you see a lot of things and you're unsure of how we even got here. So, even as a kid, I was asking, why is my school named after a white explorer, Alexander Mackenzie? And so starting with pretty basic questions, I was able to, you know, do a PhD that answered some questions from my childhood. Additionally, I wanted to know why is it that some of our people are still suffering. Where did that come from? Could that have been helped? And most importantly, how — as somebody who's an intergenerational survivor who is also a parent — how is it that we can look at our family and start to rebuild our Nations and engage in cultural revitalization in a way that is joyful and healthy but also in a way that is informed by our histories. 

You know, the impact of the book, I think, has already been helped. On the one hand, it gives us a history of Residential Schooling in the north, and we know that Northern Canada has been ignored by historians, that we don't know a lot about it in the context of Canadian history. So I think that is helpful. But more importantly, if this book can be read by Indigenous peoples, if it can be taught in classrooms for its Residential School content, if somebody can open the book and see themselves in the book. Not only see themselves, but maybe find the interviews of their relatives or their grandparents, that would be an enormous success as far as I'm concerned.

The role of history is all around us all of the time and in relation to strength and resilience and building our communities up and really focusing on health and well-being for our people, I think history is such a foundational approach in the sense that, you know, it's sort of cliche now to say that: in order to figure out where we're going, we need to know where we came from. But in many ways, that is fundamentally true. And we know that Residential Schools worked to erase our identities. They worked to fracture our families. They worked to remove us from our own lands. And so as we learn more about the policies that were implemented on our people, we can learn how to overcome them and really how to build strong Nations and families and communities.