Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press by 
Home of the Buffalo-1930 NFBC (Still from Sisters & Brothers)
"Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” proclaimed one member of the US Army in 1867, demonstrating the colonial government’s awareness of the connection between Indigenous people and animals. Sisters & Brothers (viewable above) draws parallels between the annihilation of the bison and the devastation inflicted by the residential school system. Once 75 million strong, wild bison were slaughtered almost to extinction by European settlers by the 1890s, both for their hides and bones and as part of a larger policy to eliminate the main food source of the First Nations of the Plains and to make way for the colonial appropriation of their lands. Around the same time, the Canadian government established residential schools to remove Indigenous children from their families, destroy their cultures, and assimilate them into mainstream Canadian society. Sisters & Brothers mourns the preventable deaths of thousands of children in residential schools while honoring the resiliency of Canada’s First Peoples. Just as the bison have survived destruction, Indigenous people have endured.
"Almost every Indigenous family in Canada has been affected by the residential school system. When looking back on its 150 years as a country, Canada cannot ignore the devastation caused by residential schools."
-Kent Monkman (Cree)
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