Carrying the Unseen traces the transgenerational trauma carried by Indigenous youth in Canada. Centered on the lives and deaths of seven students from Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, the project asks: What histories do young people inherit when they are forced to leave home in order to learn? What does it mean to carry trauma that is not yours alone, but passed down through displacement, silence, and survival that ultimately leads to suicide?
Through six keywords—loss, violence, wound, oppression, solitude, and grief—the project traces how trauma takes form not only in the body, but in land, policy, and infrastructure. From residential schools and nutritional experiments to dams, mines, and forced relocations, it outlines a geography of violence that has not ended, but continues to reproduce itself across generations. These are not isolated tragedies, but the symptoms of systems that were never dismantled.
Carrying the Unseen proposes a platform for living memory: a space where communities can document, reclaim, and confront what has been denied or erased. It is a refusal to let these absences remain unseen, and a gesture toward responsibility, visibility, and the collective work of repair.
