TY - JOUR AU - Eric Farr PY - 2022/06/10 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - “Were It Not for the Spirit of the Boys… There Would Have Been No Story”: Memory and Childhood in Residential School Narratives JF - Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation JA - HSE-RHE VL - 34 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.32316/hse-rhe.v34i1.4953 UR - https://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rhe/article/view/4953 AB - This article examines how the policies and practices of the residential school system refracted the conceptual dynamics of childhood in twentieth-century Canada and shaped the lives of Indigenous children in that system. In particular, I discuss how the racializing logic of the residential system totalized or disrupted broader conceptual shifts in the relationship of childhood to the public domain and to adulthood. In this context, I draw on three residential school narratives to argue that memory played an essential role in the lives of the Indigenous students as a crucial site of creative agency, and in the residential school system’s strategy of assimilation. These narratives make a certain twentieth-century Indigenous child knowable to history, one that relies on a set of relationships, held together by memory, among the child, the adult, and the familial and communal narratives in which they are situated. ER -