Crystal Fraser

Crystal Fraser. T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh (By Strength, We Are Still Here): Indigenous Northerners Confronting Hierarchies of Power at Day and Residential Schools in Nanhkak Thak (the Inuvik Region, Northwest Territories), 1959 – 1982. PhD Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2019.

Gwichyà Gwich’in scholar Chrystal Fraser’s PhD dissertation draws on the Dinjii Zhuh philosophical concepts of t’aih, vit’aih, and guut’àii (individual and collective fortitude) to illuminate how Indigenous Northern families and communities negotiated, with intense and profuse strength, the carceral educational systems of the colonial Canadian state. All future historians of Canada will have to grapple with how this methodologically germinal microhistory utilizes oral, documentary, visual, material, and other sources alongside Indigenous and Western theory to tell the immersive story of the Grollier and Stringer Hall Residential Schools.