Professor Celia Haig-Brown shares her collaborators’ stories of their experiences of residential schools and reconciliation. Haig-Brown talks about returning to earlier work on surviving the Indian Residential School in her forthcoming book, 'Tsqelmucwílc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School―Resistance and a Reckoning', and the journey to its publication.

"I think in terms of reconciliation, this book has allowed the opportunity for me to return to the people I interviewed initially, to the children of those people who have passed on, and to offer them the opportunity to claim their words for themselves by using their full names. At the time that I was doing this work - it was not possible to do that," says Haig-Brown.

"There's a number of them who have agreed to have their names attached to their words and a number of them have also done some follow-up writing about the ongoing impact of residential schools," continues Haig-Brown, "How they're moving on and reconciling themselves to their understandings of what residential schools have done to culture, language, family and making positive moves in the direction of a change."

Listen to the full interview on the .

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Celia Haig-Brown’s book Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School was one of the first texts to describe the experiences of residential school survivors from their perspectives, particularly those who had been forced to attend the .

It was published in 1988. Since then, many more books have been published by Indigenous writers, academics and survivors detailing those experiences.  have written hundreds of stories. And the was created, releasing reports and sharing survivors’ experiences. 

But when Haig-Brown set out to write her book more than three decades ago, there was very little to compare it with — and that presented its own challenges, including pushback from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers, because the legacy of residential schools had barely been questioned outside of Indigenous communities up to that point. 

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