Reclaiming My Family's Story: Cultural Trauma and Indigenous Ways of Knowing

• Main Author: Melissa Beard
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Indian; anishina*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1920/12405

This dissertation project is an Indigenous autoethnographic study of my own family’s story of survival through the Native American boarding school system. The creation of this document is in part an academic exercise, but also an effort to reclaim pieces of my family’s experience that were purposefully silenced and erased from mainstream hegemonic nationalist narratives. The process of extracting the history of both the Holy Childhood School of Jesus and the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School through the collection of texts and oral histories provides insight to how the identity of my family was influenced by my own grandmother’s experience and also serves as a method of ceremony and reclamation. Essentially, this dissertation is my own personal ceremony in reclaiming my family’s histories, stories and culture and a method of healing from generations of cultural genocide and forced assimilation. The central question surrounding my dissertation is: how does a traumatic and culturally suppressing experience such as the Native American boarding school system affect and influence the identity development and understanding of an Anishinaabe individual and their descendants? My goal for this dissertation was to understand not only how the boarding school experience may have affected those who physically attended a Native American boarding school, but how the experience has come to affect the children and grandchildren of those who attended. Additional sub-questions include: How does an Anishinaabe family affected by the boarding school system understand and express their individual and collective identities? Are they proud and/or ashamed of their Native American heritage? Can a process of cultural reclamation begin with the sharing of stories and the collection of oral histories, both pertaining to general Indigenous identification and boarding school experiences? Within these inquiries, I explore the role storytelling and collective memory play in the formation of Indigenous individual and ancestral ...