Trauma From the Past

Carrie Anne Ford lived most of her childhood in the Huronia Regional Centre. Even though she grew up in a place that was very unkind, she is an expert in caring for animals and children. She is also great singer who won a trophy. Carrie Anne can see and name the truth in hard cases, and speaks frankly about weakness and pain at Huronia. Now that her partner has died, Carrie Anne is still proud of her 26-year marriage. For the past four years, Carrie Anne has been a co- researcher working with Recounting Huronia: a collective of researchers, artists, and survivors using arts-based and storytelling methods to return to and preserve lived memories of the HRC. The research team often operated in pairs, in monthly workshops that used scrapbooking, poetry, cabaret performance, and other arts-based methods to articulate traumatic memories. Carrie Anne worked closely with Kate Rossiter during this time, and began to articulate her experience of living at Huronia through writing and art. Carrie Anne wrote this history on her own, then worked with Kate Rossiter who compiled and transcribed this work.