Students by Day (Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School)

The atrocities of the residential school system in Canada are amply documented. Less well-known is the history of day schools, which some two hundred thousand Indigenous youth attended.

The Curve Lake Indian Day School operated for over ninety years, from 1899 to 1978. Implementing Indigenous community research practices, Jackson Pind, alongside the Chief and Council of Curve Lake First Nation, conducted a search of the federal archive on operations at the school. Students by Day presents the findings, revealing that the government failed in its fiduciary duty to protect students. Harmful and discriminatory policies forced children to abandon their language and culture and left them subject to many types of abuse. To supplement this documentation, Pind also interviewed survivors of the school, who shared their often difficult testimony. He situates Curve Lake’s development and operations within the wider context of Canadian assimilation policies, noting the lasting impacts on Anishinaabe identity and culture.

Not only recovering the archive, written and oral, but building on files repatriated to the community, Students by Day is a story of Indigenous resilience, activism, and hope in the face of educational injustice.