Jackson Pind

Jackson Pind, Students By Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Canadian historians have rightly turned their attention to the abhorrent conditions in residential schools. Much of the scholarship on those institutions focuses on Indigenous children who were separated for long periods and at great distances from their families. Jackson Pind’s Students By Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School is a valuable and path-breaking examination of a day school attended by Indigenous children in southern Ontario. It is the first book to study day schools in that province and reveals that conditions in this particular institution could be as terrible as in a residential school. It importantly shows Indigenous parents, elders, and students demonstrating considerable agency as they worked tirelessly to shape the Curve Lake School including what children learned and who taught them. This book in a strong and welcome addition to the history of Indigenous people in Canada, and also to the history of education.