Over the last four years the discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of Residential schools has brought awareness to the experience of multiple generations of Indigenous children in North America. Families devastated and children isolated and abused, these are stories that are hard to face, but face we must.

Indigenous playwrights have written to illuminate the complex experiences of children in these institutions so that we can begin to understand the residential school system and its ongoing impacts in First Nations communities. That is the goal of this course: through reading six plays by Indigenous writers from across Canada, we will discover the enclosed world's Indigenous children entered when they were taken away from their communities and how some survived and some succumbed.

Read the full description and find the list of plays

In this course you will:

• gain a fuller understanding of the range of experiences of Indigenous students at residential schools

• recognize the ongoing impact of residential and industrial school incarceration on Indigenous people

• experience, through reading dramatic representations of residential schools, a deeper empathy for the children and families whose lives were disrupted and sometimes destroyed by what was done to them

• gain a fuller understanding of the systemic injustices of residential and industrial schools and how we are implicated as a societ