Crystal Gail Fraser

Crystal Gail Fraser, By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. University of Manitoba Press, 2024.

Crystal Gail Fraser’s By Strength, We Are Still Here combines rigorous empirical detail, innovative methodological techniques, and community-driven research to detail the experience of and resistance to residential schools in the Northwest Territories. Fraser’s book combines difficult archival research with attention to the living legacies of residential schools in Inuvik, foregrounding the experiences and voices of those who were shaped (as individuals and communities) by the schools from 1959 to 1982 and beyond. Fraser’s methodological innovations are striking in multiple ways, combining the personal with the political. This is community-based and community-driven (“research with the people” p. 13) work that combines research in settler colonial archives with oral histories and other testimonies from the people and the land. This deep engagement with the concept of historical agency in the North produces a strength-based approach informed by Dinjii Zhuh philosophy. Moreover, Fraser’s shows how to integrate and reclaim photographs, including from personal collections, to assert Indigenous sovereignty and agency over these images, many of which were collected by agents of the state or ended up in colonial archives. By Strength, We Are Still Here is beautifully written, well organised, and a powerful testimony to the ongoing legacies of residential schools in Inuvik and of Canada’s colonial project.