Creating Community Name Records at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC)

Wednesday October 05, 2022

From 3:30pm to 4:00pm

The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre works to support meaningful access to Residential School records for survivors and their families in British Columbia and beyond. Our presentation will describe a project at the Centre to update the names of Indigenous communities on our residential school records for British Columbia. Our content management system hosts a record for each of these schools and it includes the names of the communities from which students of a given school came. Survivors, family members, and communities use community names to ascertain the school(s) children from a particular community attended. The list of community names was initially derived from historical church and government documents, however, and many were out-of-date and/or colonially imposed. We will describe the approach we took in order to prioritize community voices, ensure more transparent information practices and challenge colonial narratives.

Our first stage of the project was to create a set of community name records that serves as a thesaurus. We included the contemporary community name, a list of historical alternatives, a brief description of the name changes and a content note.

The second stage of the project centres on community engagement. We wanted to ensure communities' autonomy over the information and description included on the community record. This process of engagement will be unique for each community and we have therefore created a schema to document the decisions and preferences for each community in regards to what engagement looks like and the information communities provide.