“This Year Book...has been entirely produced by staff and students”: Indigenous Youth, Indian Schooling, and Historical Production in the Northwest Territories, 1959-71

Abstract

In 1960, two of the newly constructed schools in the Northwest Territories (NWT) published yearbooks for the first time. By the end of the decade, yearbooks were a common feature of school life in the territory. While school yearbooks have been important for historians working in a variety of subdisciplines, there is little methodological writing on these sources. In this article, which draws on yearbooks from seven Indian residential and day schools in the NWT, we provide historians with a set of questions and considerations for working with yearbooks generally and those produced within Canada’s system of “Indian education” specifically. We conclude with a discussion about using yearbooks to write histories of “Indian schooling” that includes a brief examination of yearbooks as sources for writing about recreation at residential and day schools.