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Artifact 1

Remember Every Name

Context

Remember Every Name is an advocacy group organized by survivors of Huronia Regional Centre. Every Mother’s Day, they hold a memorial at the cemetery.1(footnote) The project is an ongoing response to the many deaths in the institution.2(footnote) It exposes the history of eugenics and the resulting brutal violence and abuse imposed on those incarcerated within institutions for people labelled with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Its members are committed to ensuring that those who died are not forgotten.3(footnote)

The name of the group, Remember Every Name, is itself a call to action that relates to the past, the present, and the future. The name asks people to remember those who died in the past in order to bring about a more socially just future.

The Remember Every Name memorial sculpture — and all those it names and remembers — activates a future other than the one given by the eugenicists discussed in Activity Two. The memorial generates an opportunity for people to learn the truth of the past and think differently about the future. It is a reminder that given the chance to fully and freely express themselves, survivors can change social narratives by the power of the stories of their experiences.

Remember Every Name is also a reminder of the great loss of worldmaking knowledge that results from the violent and brutal impulse of eugenics to eliminate difference. Remember Every Name reminds us we need to listen and learn from the bodies and minds of those most affected by eugenics thinking and forced institutionalization. These are the people, according to disability researcher Carrie Sandahl, “who have the most to lose in becoming visible—those who are completely socially marginalized, stigmatized, and hidden away in institutions (residential, prisons, etc.). What they know, how they know, and why it matters is most threatening to the status quo.”4(footnote) Remember Every Name takes up the challenge of decentering and rejecting eugenic worldviews.

The future as it was expressed in the eugenic mass media artifacts of Activity Two and the futures expressed by Remember Every Name are vastly different in terms of whose knowledge is valued and counted as valid. The future envisioned by eugenics-thinking is imagined and forged through the intentional elimination of difference. Eugenic futures tell us to remember only a select few names and only a select few aspects of those lives deemed, within a eugenic frame of reference, to be the most strong and healthy and worthy. Eugenic futures reduce people’s pasts in the present and define people’s futures in a very narrow way. Remember Every Name, on the other hand, embraces multiple voices and brings them forward into the future. A future that is accessible for Every Name.

  • Memorial sculpture in park surrounded by grass and trees.

Remember Every Name memorial sculpture, Orillia, ON, August 2021. The sculpture has two tall rectangular stones with engravings. There is a tree with crows between the stones. Grass and trees surround the sculpture. Photograph by Evadne Kelly.

Footnotes

  1. Madeline Burghardt et al., “Listen to Our Stories and Learn from Us: How Helping Professionals Can Support Institutional Survivors,” Journal of Progressive Human Services 32, no. 1 (2021): 63–69, (Source). ↩

  2. Remember Every Name, “Carrieanne Tompkins: Memories of the Ontario Hospital School,” Orillia, 2017, (Source). ↩

  3. “Remember Every Name Survivors Group: Huronia Regional Centre History,” accessed December 3, 2021, (Source). ↩

  4. Carrie Sandhal quoted in Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson, “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 149-169, 242, 157, (Source). ↩