Deborah Hayward - Sharing Her Residential School Survival Story One Clip At a Time

Spinoff Success

Deborah Hayward is a mother and grandmother from Kitamaat Village, B.C. who is sharing her story of surviving residential school as a teenager one clip at a time on TikTok.

As her life memories surface, Debra shares them during daily posts to her 20+ thousand followers on the wildly popular social media platform. My goal was to give Debra a platform to tell her story in a longer form.

We talk about the day she left, how the separation affected her family, then and now, and how she's reclaiming and restoring her native culture on her own timetable and in her own way.