"Nii Ndahlohke is a Lunaape word that translates as “I work” in English. It is an appropriate title for this short but informative book about student life and child exploitation at the Mount Elgin Industrial School. Residential School histories are being written with increasing and welcomed frequency. Works like Nii Ndahlohke help elucidate this national history by showing how schools operated and impacted Indigenous people in specific areas. Focussing on how children at Mount Elgin were forced to provide free labour to maintain the school, McCallum illustrates how this school not only failed to provide Indigenous children with a useful education but also exploited those children to support the same school that was, in turn, harming them." |
"I'm assigning [Nii Ndahlohke] to a joint graduate and undergrad History and Indigenous Studies course.
Obviously Indian Residential Schools is a big field in Indigenous histories but I want the students to see it from different angles - particularly the angle of descendants and community members. [Nii Ndahlohke will get students to] really think about how who's asking the questions determine how the answers are sought and framed."
Dr. Susan M. Hill,
Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor
University of Toronto
Obviously Indian Residential Schools is a big field in Indigenous histories but I want the students to see it from different angles - particularly the angle of descendants and community members. [Nii Ndahlohke will get students to] really think about how who's asking the questions determine how the answers are sought and framed."
Dr. Susan M. Hill,
Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor
University of Toronto
"Nii Ndahlohke will be of particular interest to scholars of work and labour be-cause of McCallum’s decision, guided by community priorities, to focus on the role of student work in the institution’s operation/ maintenance as well as student/com-munity resistance to the school’s coercive labour regime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Overall, this small book makes a large contribution. It shows how Canada’s genocidal residential school system must be understood through the lens of work and labour. In doing so, it models what community-engaged histories, attentive to Indigenous research priorities and Survivor experiences, can add to knowledge about schooling and settler capitalism in Canada." |
"I’m planning to use [Nii Ndahlohke] as the centerpiece for the term project in my first-year Canadian history course next term. The main aim of the project is teaching students how to do a book review / historiographical essay, and I think [the] Nii Ndahlohke project, particularly in the way it combines Indigenous and labour histories, as well as the language and art components, will give students lots of ways to approach it. There is always a large number of concurrent Education students in this course, including some in the Indigenous stream, so I also like how they could review your book from the perspective of teaching. From my reading, there is a strong pedagogical bent to the book."
Steven Maynard
Department of History, Queen's University
Steven Maynard
Department of History, Queen's University
“Nii Ndahlohke is a fantastic little book that clearly and concisely tells us about the experience of boys and girls at Mount Elgin Industrial School and is a unique and important contribution to the growing field of residential school history. I have no doubt many readers will be struck by the stories and photographs of Indigenous children labouring away in a large industrial institution when they could have been living and learning at home with their families and communities.” |
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Recently, I found out (from a tweet by Niigaan Sinclair) that you’d written a book (Nii Ndahlohke) about the use of unpaid and coerced student labour in the Mount Elgin Residential School in St. Thomas. ...
I am writing to express how extremely excited and grateful I am that an academic text has been written which highlights the intense presence of colonial power, especially in that region. -Stefan Suvajak |
“I read most of Nii Ndahlohke on my flight from Princeton. It is a beautiful and thoughtfully-written work. I love that language learning and contemporary art by Indigenous artists are part of the book. It helped me as a reader process the historical weight of the stories and see how Indigenous artists reflect on this history. The book also builds tangible cause/effect connections between residential schools and the loss of language - and drives home the importance of language and cultural revitalization today. It's a great solo read and I can also imagine it being read at the High School or college level, integrated into course curricula (the discussion prompts at end of each section are excellent). These are powerful personal stories. I learned a lot reading them and the book is a wonderful resource for teaching and sharing these stories with a wide audience.” |
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"I got my copy a few weeks ago. Nii Ndahlohke is a fantastic little book that clearly and concisely tells us about the work done by boys and girls at Mt. Elgin Industrial School. Using archival records, photos, family stories, art, and the Lunaape language, this book is a unique contribution to residential school history. It is readable and accessible for all Canadians. We need this kind of book for every residential school in the country."
- Alison Norman, PhD Historian, Researcher and Historical consultant, Trent University |
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