Helen Raptis

The legacy of residential schools has haunted Canadians, yet little is known about the day and public schools where most Indigenous children were sent to be educated. In What We Learned, two generations of Tsimshian students – elders born in the 1930s and 1940s and middle-aged adults born in the 1950s and 1960s – add their recollections of attending day schools in northwestern British Columbia to contemporary discussions of Indigenous schooling in Canada. Their stories also invite readers to consider traditional Indigenous views of education that conceive of learning as a lifelong experience that takes place across multiple contexts.

Reviews
"Helen Raptis has written an important book about Tsimshian educational history. It is also a book about building research relationships with Indigenous communities. It is a work that recognizes, implicitly, that Indigenous history does not run in a straight line but is more liquid and circular. The journey to understand the Indigenous past requires deft canoe navigation through riptides and crosscurrents, past colonization’s half-submerged debris. Landing on the beach, one discovers no conventional separation between past, present, and future. There are only the stories—the stories and the sacred landscape." — Michael Marker, University of British Columbia, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 57 No. 1, February 2017

Educator Information
Helen Raptis is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. The members of the Tsimshian Nation are Mildred Roberts, Wally Miller, Sam Lockerby, Verna Inkster, Clifford Bolton, Harvey Wing, Charlotte Guno, Don Roberts Junior, Steve Roberts, Richard Roberts, Carol Sam, and Jim Roberts

Additional Information
224 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback