Librarians create educational tool for accessing residential school survivor stories

Warning: This story deals with disturbing subject matter that may upset and trigger some readers. Discretion is advised.

A lot can be learned from the stories of residential school survivors.

Inspired by a desire to have these stories accessible, three librarians set out to create a publicly-available online storybase of residential school survivor stories.

“We recognize that for a long time our institutions have not been very responsive to community needs,” said Indigenous studies librarian at the University of Toronto, Desmond Wong.

“We are really working as a library system to respond to the prompts that have been put forward by Indigenous people.”

The storybase is searchable and links to approximately 250 survivor stories in various formats; visitors can search by survivor name or former school.

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The storybase points to survivors’ original accounts on various platforms like the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Legacy of Hope and YouTube instead of holding their stories directly on the site.

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“We really see this as a way for us to set an example of what ethical consultation and ethical community collaboration can look like,” said Wong. “We don’t hold any of the material, we don’t steward any of the material, we simply point to the material.”

The team working on the project — led by Wong, Mikayla Redden and Grant Hurley — call this reciprocal library work.

“We were really brainstorming around this time las,t year about what kinds of contributions we could make as a group of library staff and librarians and so my colleague Mikayla Redden who is an Anishinaabe librarian, brought up the fact that her sister, who is a teacher was having trouble finding resources around actual survivor stories,” said Wong.

“So we were thinking about what we do well as librarians and really what we thought about was organizing, accessing, indexing.

“And so those two things really came together to create this tool to point people in the direction of these resources and of these stories so that they can find them very easily and very quickly.”

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The work was done through consultation with community members and organizations and features stories paired with reflection questions as well as stories that are better for younger audiences.

“What we really wanted to do was to try to make these things that are already available online come together so that you could get a fuller story, a fuller picture or see a survivor talk about their experience from different angles,” said Wong.

Ahead of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Wong hopes the tool will serve as a starting point for many.

“There is a lot of truth in the saying that we need truth before a reconciliation and I think for a lot of people, myself included, there are still so many things that we need to learn about the residential school system,” he said.

“There is so much that we can learn from survivors.”

The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line (1-800-721-0066) is available 24 hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of their residential school experience.