Criminalized Women and Girls’ Ancestral Research: Supporting Descendants of Those Incarcerated or Born at the Institution and Adopted.
Joined June 2022
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Over 20,000 women & girls were incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory in Toronto, ON from 1880-1969. What happened to the children of imprisoned mother’s or their babies born while incarcerated?
Follow as we explore #HiddenHistories & #adoption
Annual Report 1948. No. 18, p. 36
Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females retweeted
Invisible Institutions Podcast Season 2 Episode 1
Saskatchewan Training School: “You cannot just walk away”
In memoriam of all those buried on the grounds of the Saskatchewan Training Centre
invisibleinstitutions.com/in…
Prison Born calls attention to the colonial and gendered assumptions that continue to underpin the legal system--assumptions that so frequently lead to the violation of the rights and denial of personhood for children and their mothers.
youtube.com/watch?v=sULYjzh5…
Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females retweeted
Children were imprisoned with their mothers around the world, not just at Toronto’s Mercer Reformatory. Miriam Makeba was 18 days old when imprisoned with her mother. She became “Mama Africa” & a voice against apartheid. Many others’ stories remain unknown
youtube.com/watch?v=Fqdcz0eY…
Stompin’ Tom’s life was rooted in his mother’s poverty, imprisonment & child welfare. He didn’t speak about it for years because, he says, people “don’t want to hear that.” Hers is one of hundreds of thousands of mothers’ stories that remain untold.
youtube.com/watch?v=PxguUwmR…
Ireland’s Magdalen laundries & its “architecture of containment” formed a vast network of interlinked institutions. Canada had a similar architecture—a network of institutions & systems of confinement. The Andrew Mercer Reformatory was but one part of it.
youtube.com/watch?v=r14yd-Vj…
Archiving Female Confinement: Counter-Archives, Testimony, and the Memory of the Good-Shepherd’s Institutions in France (1945–1980)
youtube.com/watch?v=yLTfdat3…
Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females retweeted
Newly online from our Spring issue: @DBPanneton's "Incorrigible Women," on how a 1948 riot helped end a special hell for Canadian women at the Andrew Mercer Reformatory in Toronto: ow.ly/jlBa30jyiS8 #cdnhistory #longread
Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females retweeted
New #SSHRC-funded research at Queen’s Law is examining Ontario’s inmate appeal program and helping preserve Indian Residential School Survivors’ records for future generations. Read more: bit.ly/3S1KhVa
@coleenlisa @kahnasatake @colleenflood2 #AccessToJustice
Vanishing Into Custody
Indigenous women are overflowing the prison system. Nobody’s watching, and I lived it.
indigenousinsider.substack.c…
Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow, (University of Regina Press, 2024)
Fantastic presentation and discussion.
youtube.com/watch?v=sULYjzh5…
For centuries, pregnant women were incarcerated, and their babies were forcibly removed for adoption—while few questioned it.
This Article uses systems theory to outline the problem of automatic rights denial of children born to incarcerated persons. 👇
journals.library.columbia.ed…
With rigorous scrutiny and deep care, Robin Hansen's Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow offers crucial insight into the intersections of ongoing colonial harms facing Indigenous mothers in Canada.
youtube.com/watch?v=yV1Sald4…
Before it was Toronto's trendiest neighborhood, Liberty Village was home to the Toronto Central Prison and the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women; institutions built to hold the people the city didn't want to see.
youtube.com/watch?v=4CmiR6-y…
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Ontario Training Schools - To all survivors in Ontario, Canada, and beyond: you are not forgotten.
youtube.com/watch?v=xmQM80pX…
2/2
Ontario Training Schools Class Action Settlement here: trainingschoolsclassaction.c…
Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females retweeted
Here's the full episode of @Niigaanwewidam and I on CBC's Front Burner talking about what's fuelling residential school denialism and what we can do about it: youtube.com/watch?v=BdJImlyS…
Ontario Training Schools (OTS)!! Many OTS girls were later incarcerated at Mercer.
youtube.com/watch?v=h_-yFEmJ…
Using a chronological timeline, Birth exposes Canada’s history of eugenics-based policies and how they’ve contributed to the forced or coerced sterilization of Indigenous women.
youtube.com/watch?v=wovSsCDl…