This chapter examines how Canadian educational institutions played a key role in the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, entwined with legacies of British colonial policies and practices, by constructing and perpetuating destructive knowledges. The transfer of oppressive knowledge became evident through a close reading of archival documents that uncovered three decades of eugenics at a Canadian home economics and teacher training school, Macdonald Institute, in Guelph, Ontario, from 1914 to 1948. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “Calls to Action on Education,” Justice Murry Sinclair notes that “[i]t is precisely because education was the primary tool of oppression of Aboriginal people, and miseducation of all Canadians, that we have concluded that education holds the key to reconciliation.” We draw on the archival documents and their display in a cocreated exhibition, Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, that cast new light on these archival documents through prioritizing modes of knowledge transfer that celebrate difference, lived experience, anti-racism, decolonization and access. After analyzing how value-laden data about the body performs as it is projected and narrated in very different educational settings, we argue meaning is encoded in the performative transfer of knowledge. Notions of performance help us understand how eugenics slides, accompanied by their narration, transfers knowledge between bodies unevenly implicated in formations of power in ways that perpetuate and disrupt a Canadian status quo. As performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz has argued, national norms are activated through the affective performance of gendered and racialized normativity. In addition to considering the role of performance in activating meaning, we show how performance also participates in the transfer, continuity and disruption of knowledge in how it is remembered and reproduced by bodies, in their movements and the images and/or words and silences they produce.

Kelly, E., Boye, S., & Rice, C. (2021). Projecting eugenics and performing knowledges. In N. Brooks, & S. Blanchette (Eds.), Narrative Art and the Politics of Health (pp. 37–62). Anthem Press.