Name: Kim Collins
Institution: Ryerson University
Email: kimberlee.collins@ryerson.ca
Paper title
How do we tell our children?: Keeping the history of Huronia Regional Centre through radical children’s literature
Abstract
Stories are powerful. They have ability to transport us through time, to change minds, to keep history alive. Radical children’s literature uses this power to challenge the status quo. This paper follows the process of collaboratively writing a piece of children’s literature while considering the question of how to tell children about historically traumatic events in disability history. The history of the incarceration and institutionalization of people labelled with intellectual impairments at Huronia Regional Centre is in danger of being sanitized by the government of Ontario. It is vital that survivors tell their stories and future generations to read them.
Keywords
Huronia Regional Centre, children’s literature, historical trauma, storytelling as activism, institutionalization