Approaches to Issues of Residential Schools through Interreligious and Interspiritual Dialogue: Paradoxes of “All My Relations”

This article reflects upon complex and difficult issues associated with North American Residential Schools, focusing on my parents’ participation as lay teachers. It approaches these through comparative study and constructive interreligious and interspiritual dialogue, in their relation to past and subsequent generations, with attention to coloniality issues and possible movements towards reconciliation. The methodology includes (1) exposition and analysis of specific circumstances of these schools, emphasising the traumatic suffering of students and their families; (2) pertinent biographical materials; (3) the nature of our dependent connections with ancestors in terms of hereditary genetics, social context, and spirituality; (4) expressions and processes of related visual art; and (5) comparative spirituality, philosophy, and theology.