The scholarship on truth and reconciliation in Canada has grown considerably since the TRC’s final report in 2015, yet sustained engagement with visual art as a form of knowledge-making has remained peripheral to that conversation. Where Indigenous art has entered these discussions, it has often been read through frameworks inherited from Western art history—those that position artworks as objects of interpretation, evidence, or cultural data rather than as living practices grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This book begins from a different place. It asks what becomes visible when Indigenous ways of seeing, making, and truth-telling are understood in their own right. That question opens a different relationship to the artworks assembled here: one that is relational rather than extractive, and accountable rather than merely interpretive.
When the Archive Names You
I write this book from the perspective of my lived experience as a nêhiyaw ayisiyiniw (Plains Cree person) shaped by the legacies of day and residential schools, as a curator who has worked within colonial institutions, and as a scholar committed to what I call Indigenous visual knowledge—a concept grounded in the Plains Cree kanawâpâtahmowin, and referring to a way of seeing in which knowledge is carried through land, story, memory, and kinship, and activated through visual and material practices that connect generations. It is a living archive, one that continues to take form in the images, ancestral belongings, and actions through which Indigenous people affirm who they are. My training in Western art history has given me another way of looking, and in this book, I work between these perspectives through Two-Eyed Seeing: holding Indigenous and Western frameworks together while refusing to let one subsume the other.1 In Cree, this is miyô kanawâpâhtowin—seeing together in a good way.
Personal memory is one of the most vital sources of this living archive. This understanding emerged for me in the archives of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where images and records revealed long-standing connections to my Siksika and Red Pheasant Cree Nation families. I was guided through the museum’s collections by eminent Alberta historian Hugh Dempsey,2 who led me to residential school records. There, we discovered how two boys from Siksika were stripped of their names and assigned new ones, O’Keefe and McMaster. This early encounter with forced erasure was not simply historical but deeply personal, as I had carried the assigned name McMaster for my entire life. A letter in the file described how the two young boys attempted to escape from Crowfoot (St. Joseph’s) Residential School their capture by the RCMP, and their forced return.
The violence of renaming resonated with a broader pattern I began to see in the documents. Before the boys ever arrived at the school, the colonial state had already begun to redraw the world around them. It imposed borders across the Plains, fragmenting nations and corralling communities onto reserves whose boundaries bore little relationship to Indigenous geographies. Renaming children was simply another layer of this reordering, another mechanism designed to sever people from place, from kin, and from story. These records made visible the intimate costs of that system and echoed the complex layers of my own family’s history.
The materials I studied in the Glenbow’s archives were not passive historical objects; they bore witness to lives shaped by residential schools and cultural suppression. Encountering them required me to acknowledge my own place within these histories. Through the archive, I had access to stories I recognized and silences I had inherited, and these made clear that my work would have to account for Indigenous and institutional ways of seeing simultaneously. This recognition marked a shift in how I approached Indigenous art and its histories. The narratives I sought to write could not be separated from my responsibilities as a nêhiyaw ayisiyiniw, nor from the museum and university contexts in which I had long worked. In this way, the archive became not only a repository of records but an active site of encounter, one that reshaped how I understand art, history, and responsibility.
A Personal Prelude
My approach as a scholar and curator is inseparable from the histories, relations, and responsibilities I carry with me, which shape how I understand truth, testimony, and the role of art in reconciliation. nikâwiy, my mother, Lena Wuttunee, was from Red Pheasant Cree Nation, in Treaty 6 Territory, south of North Battleford in west central Saskatchewan.3 In the 1940s, she traveled to Gleichen, Alberta, and met a man named Howard McMaster from Siksika. Although he passed away before I was old enough to know him, I inherited his name through that relationship, which connected me symbolically to both Red Pheasant and Siksika communities. I grew up on Red Pheasant and, like many of my generation, attended the local Indian Day School for Grades 1 and 2.4 Unlike Residential students, we returned home each evening, but the school still bore the mark of assimilation. nêhiyawêwêwin (Cree language) was suppressed, Christianity enforced, and discipline maintained through rigid and punitive means.
From Grade 3 onward I was sent to an “integrated”5 public school in a nearby town of Battleford.6 The shift was both liberating and disorienting. By the time of Grade 6, I was the only Indigenous student in my classroom; all of my cousins had been placed in another Grade 6 class. One day, our teacher recorded each student reading aloud. When I heard my voice played back, I recognized the rhythm of the rez in my speech. A wave of shame washed over me near instantly. I learned to self-edit, to speak differently, what some might today refer to as code-switching. In short, to adapt through acts of self-erasure I would later spend years unlearning.
Those early years left their mark. In that integrated school environment, I encountered racism from both students and teachers, and the separation from my cousins made the experience even more isolating. Anything connected to Plains Cree language or culture was treated as backward or inferior. That climate made the recording exercise all the more painful, confirming what the school system had quietly taught us to believe. It took many years before I could reclaim my voice and begin to undo the shame woven into those early lessons.
On another occasion at the Glenbow Museum, I came across images that deepened these reckonings. An 1897 football team photograph from Battleford Industrial School7 included many names I recognized. Some were relatives, among them my great-uncles Peter and James. My grandmother (nohkôm), Isabella Schmidt, attended that school for ten years (1904-1914); my grandfather (nimôsom), George Wuttunee, did not. Based on family history, he likely attended the Red Pheasant Indian Day School. I encountered this photographic evidence through two ways of seeing: one rooted in relationships with land, language, and kin; the other framed by institutional control and the moral certainty of the church. This dual perspective reflects what I understand as a form of Two-Eyed Seeing: holding Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together while remaining accountable to both.
This prelude is not only personal; it sets the stakes for the work that follows. If my own family’s story is entangled with the history of residential and day schools, then the artists in these pages expand that story into a collective one. Their work demonstrates that Indigenous art is not merely aesthetic. It carries law, story, kinship, ceremony, and forms of knowledge that exceed the written record. The works stand as acts of sovereignty and truth-telling, refusing disappearance. In this way, the personal and the conceptual are not separate, but form the ground from which this book approaches Indigenous art as a living practice of visual knowledge. I write this book because art has carried truths our families were never meant to keep, and because those truths still shape who we are and who we will become.
These encounters—the archive, the integrated school, the football team photograph at Battleford Industrial School—did not produce the framework I bring to this book; they clarified it. What each of them demanded was a particular kind of seeing: not detachment, but accountability—a willingness to remain with what the records held, to acknowledge both what was taken and what endured. That kind of looking requires terms adequate to what it encounters. The three Plains Cree concepts developed in the section that follows—kanawâpâtahmowin, tâpasinahikêwin, and miýikosiwin—are not imposed upon the works in these pages as an analytical system. They are a recognition that Indigenous visual practice has always been shaped by these commitments: to relation, to truthful making, to the life-giving force of creation. The personal and the conceptual are not separate registers. They are the same ground.
Seeing, Making, Truth-Telling
Guided by Indigenous paradigms that understand seeing, making, and truth-telling as inseparable, this book draws on Plains Cree concepts—kanawâpâtahmowin (seeing with responsibility), miýikosiwin (the life-giving force of vision and creativity) and tâpasinahikêwin (drawing truthfully)—as modes of understanding Indigenous art about truth and reconciliation. These principles account for kinships and continuance while resisting detached modes of analysis. They do not function as metaphors or interpretive lenses, but as a coherent epistemological framework—one that situates art as a form of knowledge grounded in relation, responsibility, and lived practice. Examining children’s drawings, survivors’ art, and contemporary art practices, the book traces an intergenerational continuum of visual knowledge and truth-telling, demonstrating that Indigenous art is not ancillary to reconciliation but central to it. In this sense, Indigenous art operates through what Jolene Rickard has described as visual sovereignty: the assertion of Indigenous self-representation, authority, and presence through visual and material practices,8 grounded in relation and responsibility. In relation to the histories of residential and day schools, art cannot be approached solely through aesthetic critique but must be engaged as cultural responsibility—testimony, relational knowledge, and an ongoing practice of accountability and renewal.
At the heart of this framework is kanawâpâtahmowin, the “condition of seeing.” In nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) thought, seeing is not passive or merely visual; it is how awareness, relationship, and responsibility come into being. Oral teachings tell of the First Human rising, opening his eyes, and encountering the beauty of the world—an act through which consciousness was formed before speech or naming. The first words spoken were an expression of gratitude for life, and in that moment, vision, humility, and relationship were linked. Cree storytellers remind us that this act of seeing is renewed each morning when we wake, making vision a daily, ceremonial practice. To see, in this sense, is to enter into relationship with people, land, memory, and the unseen, and to accept responsibility for what is witnessed. Kanawâpâtahmowin asks us to look with care rather than detachment, through kinship rather than ownership, and to respond rather than to extract. It establishes seeing as an ethical condition—one in which perception itself carries obligation. Seeing in this way is an ethical act—and it forms the ground from which truthful, accountable art can emerge.