How I Survived – a podcast about how the land, culture and ways of life helped people survive being institutionalized in residential schools – starts airing on Cabin Radio on Tuesday evening.
Co-hosted by Paul Andrew, a Shutoatine former broadcaster and chief, and Crystal Gail Fraser, a Gwichyà Gwich’in historian and Indigenous studies scholar, the seven-episode show will air at 8pm each Tuesday from March 3.
The show bills itself as a podcast “about recreation at residential and day schools in Canada’s North that celebrates the strength, resilience, spirit, and creativity of former students and Survivors.”
“This started with a question that maybe many northerners have asked themselves: looking around your family or your community and wondering, ‘What happened to our people?'” Fraser told Cabin Radio.
“I decided to make that a scholarly pursuit. Growing up in the North, having those connections and access to Elders and knowledge keepers, definitely has helped with that pursuit.
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“This grew out of a desire to not only advance truth and reconciliation, but to do it in a way that is northern, to do it in a way that could help to build capacity in communities, but really to focus on what survivors are telling us.”
The podcast is part of a larger project initiated by Fraser and the NWT Recreation and Parks Association that records, preserves and shares the stories of survivors of residential schools and day schools in the North.
Jess Dunkin, an NWT Recreation and Parks Association employee and co-producer of the show, said an advisory committee decided a podcast was an intimate and accessible way to have people “hear directly from survivors in their own words.”
‘How we move forward’
The podcast launched in October 2024.
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Fraser said How I Survived uses a “pretty broad understanding” of recreation as the show’s basic premise.
“We know that those experiences are diverse,” she said.
“This could mean everything from learning how to play the guitar to being on the yearbook club at a residential school to being in girl guides or boy scouts to the elite cross-country ski team that emerged out of Inuvik.
“That was really important to us, is that every step of the way we look at survivors and their experiences and how they envision these stories to be told.”
Explaining the focus on recreation, Dunkin said survivors had described it as an important part of their experience.
“This project is about listening to survivors and taking direction from them in terms of how we move forward,” she said.
“Recreation is also a really interesting lens through which to understand residential school, because it meant so many different things to different people.
“Recreation was also a tool for administrators, for teachers of assimilation. So it was a way to reshape these young children and youth, Indigenous children and youth, into sort-of white citizens. And so it allows us to see the complexity, the diversity of what was happening, what the intentions were for residential school, how they failed, in terms of the persistence of Indigenous peoples and their languages and cultures, and then some of the tools that young people used to make it through that experience.”
Episode one, at 8pm on Tuesday, March 3, is an introduction.
Guests on future episodes include Rassi Nashalik, Dave Poitras, Beatrice Bernhardt, Ernie Bernhardt, Agnes Kuptana and Sharon Firth.
