Children’s drawings from residential and day schools are among the earliest visual declarations of truth in the colonial encounter. These slender works, made in pencil, crayon, and paint during the mid-twentieth century, speak across time with a clarity unclouded by academic critique or adult mediation. They carry presence, relation, and resistance in their simplest forms: gestures on paper that insist on being remembered. To see them through the Plains Cree concept of tâpasinahikê, a mark done in a truthful way, is to recognize that these are not innocent images, nor quaint school exercises, but visual acts of survivance. These drawings are not merely responses shaped within colonial systems of control; from the moment of their making, they enacted an Indigenous epistemology grounded in relation, memory, and responsibility.
Gallery
Mark Atleo, Sockeye Salmon,1960s
Mark Atleo, Sockeye Salmon,1960s
Mark Atleo (Kiikitakashuaa, Ahousaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) created his Sockeye Salmon painting when he was seven years old while attending the Alberni Indian Residential School in the early 1960s. It depicts a deep-blue salmon marked with bright yellow and green patterns, its body caught within the black lines of a fishing net, surrounded by swirling purple waters. Rendered in tempera paint, the image reflects what he had learned in his early life: before being taken to school, his grandfather had taught him to tie knots and fish. Created in an institution designed to sever Indigenous children from their language, culture, and family, this simple yet vibrant depiction of a salmon in a net is both a personal memory and a profound act of cultural survival.
The art class in which Atleo made this painting was led by volunteer teacher Robert Aller, who encouraged children to paint what was important to them rather than replicate European models. While residential school classrooms typically silenced Indigenous voices, Aller’s approach allowed moments of truth-telling through children’s art. Survivors later recalled how many children painted images of home, family, and culture—subjects denied to them in daily life. In Atleo’s case, the sockeye salmon carries layered significance in Nuu-chah-nulth traditions.
Salmon are not only a source of food but are understood as living relatives who return each year, sustaining both physical life and cultural continuity through reciprocal relationships among people, waters, and the more-than-human world.
The salmon symbolizes abundance, sustenance, and renewal. By painting the salmon, Atleo was not simply depicting an animal but expressing a worldview in which human life is inseparable from the cycles of the natural world. In doing so, he asserted visual sovereignty: a child’s capacity to affirm identity and cultural ties even under oppressive conditions. Years later, he explained that the salmon and net symbolized the “circle of life” his grandfather had shared with him, linking ancestral teachings from the past to his own experience as a child and to the knowledge carried forward into future generations. In capturing these lessons, the painting preserved ancestral knowledge that the school sought to erase. The significance of this painting deepened decades later when it was returned to Atleo as part of a University of Victoria project led by Dr. Andrea Walsh which reunited survivors with artworks that Aller had preserved. At a Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Vancouver in 2013, Atleo was ceremonially presented with his long-forgotten painting. He was overwhelmed: he had repressed memories of his early years and no recollection of ever making the piece. Seeing it again was like “turning the telescope the right way,” unlocking grief and suppressed memory while also reconnecting him to his grandfather’s teachings and to the joy of fishing.
The return of the painting became a catalyst for healing. Atleo has described how the image opened him up emotionally, enabling him to speak about his experiences and reconnect with former classmates and family. Sockeye Salmon exemplifies how children’s art created under the shadow of residential schools carries cultural knowledge across time. What begins as a child’s memory of fishing becomes a vessel of resilience and testimony, grounded in relationships among people, land, and water, returning decades later as a source of truth, healing, and renewal. Today, he uses the painting as a teaching tool, sharing its story with younger generations and the broader public. In doing so, he transforms a personal act of childhood expression into communal testimony.
Although created within the institutional environment of the residential school, the imagery resonates strongly with visual principles found in Northwest Coast Indigenous art. The alignment of animal and human figures recalls the stacked and relational structures common in totem poles and crest imagery, where humans, animals, and supernatural beings are often represented as interconnected presences rather than separate categories of life. The vertical relationship between the eagle and the human figure may therefore suggest a cosmological or kinship connection rather than a simple narrative scene. In many Northwest Coast traditions, eagles are powerful beings associated with vision, authority, and communication between realms.
Little is currently known about the young artist who produced this work. Like many children who attended residential schools, his personal story remains only partially documented. The painting therefore carries particular significance as a surviving trace of his presence. In the absence of extensive written records, the work itself becomes a form of testimony, offering insight into the imaginative and cultural worlds that students continued to carry with them. The circumstances under which the painting was created are also important. During the late 1950s, visiting artist and teacher Robert Aller held weekly art sessions at AIRS, temporarily transforming classroom spaces into studios where students were provided with paper and poster paints. Many of the resulting works depict animals, community symbols, and scenes connected to the children’s cultural backgrounds.
Seen through the lens of Plains Cree concepts of drawing such as tâpasinahikêwin, the act of making such images can be understood as a gesture of truthfulness and witnessing. In this sense, the painting is not simply an exercise in school art instruction, but an act of visual expression grounded in memory, imagination, and cultural knowledge. The eagle hovering above the human figure suggests a relationship of attention and presence, evoking a worldview in which humans and animals exist within networks of reciprocal awareness.
This painting forms part of a broader group of works produced by children at Alberni during the late 1950s, many of which depict animals, birds, and powerful cultural symbols. Today, the painting stands as one small but resonant expression within that larger body of work. Preserved through the efforts of Robert Aller and later researchers, these children’s paintings demonstrate how acts of drawing became forms of testimony. Through image-making, young artists asserted the persistence of Indigenous visual knowledge, transforming moments of creative expression into enduring gestures of presence, memory, and visual sovereignty.
This student painting, produced at the Alberni Indian Residential School (AIRS) between approximately 1958 and 1960, presents a compelling image of relational presence between human and animal forms. A bald eagle occupies the upper register of the composition, its wings extended across the width of the page, while below it, a human figure appears animated and expressive. The composition is direct yet evocative: the eagle’s gaze faces forward, its wings arching outward, while the human figure beneath raises its arms in a gesture that suggests animation, performance, or transformation.
Although created within the institutional environment of the residential school, the imagery resonates strongly with visual principles found in Northwest Coast Indigenous art. The alignment of animal and human figures recalls the stacked and relational structures common in totem poles and crest imagery, where humans, animals, and supernatural beings are often represented as interconnected presences rather than separate categories of life. The vertical relationship between the eagle and the human figure may therefore suggest a cosmological or kinship connection rather than a simple narrative scene. In many Northwest Coast traditions, eagles are powerful beings associated with vision, authority, and communication between realms.
Little is currently known about the young artist who produced this work. Like many children who attended residential schools, his personal story remains only partially documented. The painting therefore carries particular significance as a surviving trace of his presence. In the absence of extensive written records, the work itself becomes a form of testimony, offering insight into the imaginative and cultural worlds that students continued to carry with them. The circumstances under which the painting was created are also important. During the late 1950s, visiting artist and teacher Robert Aller held weekly art sessions at AIRS, temporarily transforming classroom spaces into studios where students were provided with paper and poster paints. Many of the resulting works depict animals, community symbols, and scenes connected to the children’s cultural backgrounds.
Seen through the lens of Plains Cree concepts of drawing such as tâpasinahikêwin, the act of making such images can be understood as a gesture of truthfulness and witnessing. In this sense, the painting is not simply an exercise in school art instruction, but an act of visual expression grounded in memory, imagination, and cultural knowledge. The eagle hovering above the human figure suggests a relationship of attention and presence, evoking a worldview in which humans and animals exist within networks of reciprocal awareness.
This painting forms part of a broader group of works produced by children at Alberni during the late 1950s, many of which depict animals, birds, and powerful cultural symbols. Today, the painting stands as one small but resonant expression within that larger body of work. Preserved through the efforts of Robert Aller and later researchers, these children’s paintings demonstrate how acts of drawing became forms of testimony. Through image-making, young artists asserted the persistence of Indigenous visual knowledge, transforming moments of creative expression into enduring gestures of presence, memory, and visual sovereignty.
Rhoda K. Awa (Rhoda Katsak)
Untitled (Community Scene with Airplane), ca. late 1960s
This panoramic drawing presents a northern settlement spread across a snowy horizon beneath a sky tinted red with either sunrise or sunset. Executed in coloured pencil on paper, the work was likely produced ca. the late 1960s by Rhoda K. Awa (later Rhoda Katsak), who attended the Federal Hostel at Igloolik while going to the local federal day school. The hostel was part of the Northern Affairs Branch Small Hostels Program and operated in Igloolik from 1961 to 1969. When recently asked about the drawing decades later, Katsak immediately recognized the place: “Yes. I remember everything on this picture except where the airport is located. The two inukshuks are familiar. Definitely Igloolik where I was at residential school.”1
The composition unfolds across a wide field of snow animated by small clusters of activity. Figures move through the foreground—some running, some hunting, others travelling with dog teams. Scattered across the landscape are houses, igluit (snow dwellings), sleds, and dogs. Two inuksuit stand in the distance as familiar markers within the terrain. The drawing conveys a vivid sense of daily life in the community, where traditional practices of travel, hunting, and dwelling remain central to the landscape.
At the centre of the image, an airplane approaches the settlement from above. Its elevated position gives it visual prominence and anchors the composition. In the drawing, several figures appear to raise rifles toward the plane while others run across the snow. Rather than signalling simple hostility, this moment may represent the charged drama of arrival. The spatial arrangement of buildings across the middle ground further reflects the social geography of the settlement. Structures associated with Qallunaat authority, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company store and what appears to be a church or school, stand apart from Inuit dwellings and igluit.
Katsak, who grew up in Igloolik and later moved to Pond Inlet (Mittimatalik) in 1972, belongs to a transitional generation of Inuit whose childhood coincided with the shift from life on the land to settlement life and federal schooling. Raised initially in Inuit hunting camps before attending school in Igloolik, she later became a senior public servant in Nunavut and co-author of Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women, a landmark account of intergenerational Inuit experience.
Untitled (Community Scene with Airplane) functions as a form of visual testimony. Through careful observation of everyday details—dog teams, houses, hunters, and the arrival of an airplane—the young artist mapped a world in the midst of profound transformation.
What appears at first glance as a simple community scene thus becomes a powerful document of memory and lived experience, recording through the eyes of a child the encounter between Inuit life on the land and the expanding presence of Qallunaat institutions that reshaped northern communities during the twentieth century.
The drawings produced by Stoney Nakoda children at the Morley Residential School in the mid- 1930s reveal a striking orientation toward life beyond institutional walls. Rather than depicting dormitories, classrooms, or church interiors, these images turn outward to land, kinship, horses, and daily practice. They present camp scenes, rodeo riders, and carefully rendered moccasins. In doing so, they preserve a visual record of community continuity during a period of enforced separation.
Morley Residential School, located west of Calgary in Stoney Nakoda territory, operated under Methodist and later United Church administration from the late nineteenth century. Survivors have spoken of lasting trauma, and recent debates about rebuilding the associated church underscore how deeply the school remains embedded in living memory.
Against this historical backdrop, the children’s drawings take on layered meaning. One scene shows a tipi set against rolling foothills, smoke rising gently as figures move across open ground. The landscape is specific to the Bow Valley and the eastern slopes. Another drawing captures a rodeo rider astride a spotted horse, arm raised mid ride. Rodeo culture among the Stoney Nakoda was not peripheral. By the early twentieth century, horsemanship had become central to identity, shaped by ranching economies and intercommunity gatherings. Rodeo offered a space of skill, pride, and public visibility. That a child chose to draw such a scene suggests familiarity and admiration.
A further drawing of moccasins decorated with floral beadwork underscores the persistence of Plains aesthetic traditions. These designs were not learned in institutional classrooms but within family networks. Even under conditions of regulation, children retained detailed knowledge of material culture. The images do not record absence, they record presence.
The survival of these drawings is due in part to Jean Telfer, who taught at Morley from 1931 to 1934 and later at Alberni Residential School. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Telfer retained correspondence, photographs, and student work from her time in the schools. Her fonds, which include materials relating to Morley and the Nakoda Nation, now form an important archival record. Yet while Telfer preserved these works, the drawings themselves remain the intellectual and cultural property of the children who created them. They are Indigenous visual testimony rather than institutional artifacts.
They demonstrate that children did not simply internalize institutional discipline. They remembered land. They remembered horses. They remembered beadwork, camp life, and community gatherings. The act of drawing becomes a quiet form of continuity. These images affirm that Stoney Nakoda identity endured, not as abstraction but as lived knowledge carried in memory and line.
Jeffrey Cook (Yaalthuu-a, Huu-ay-aht First Nation, British Columbia) created Raven while he was a student at the Alberni Indian Residential School, presents a striking image of cultural memory. The bird fills most of the pictorial field, rendered in deep black against a pale background. Its rounded form and large eye command attention, giving the figure an almost iconic presence. The painting’s economy of form reflects the immediacy of a child’s vision while also echoing visual traditions familiar along the Northwest Coast.
Cook attended the Alberni school for thirteen years and attended after-hours art sessions led by instructor Rober Aller, who encouraged his students to paint from memory and experience. Cook’s Raven likely emerged from memories of the coastal environment of his Huu-ay-aht homeland, where ravens are a constant presence in both landscape and story. Within Northwest Coast traditions, Raven is more than a bird: it is a figure associated with transformation, knowledge, and the shaping of the world itself. By painting this being, the young Cook placed an important cultural symbol onto paper.
The painting’s visual language reinforces this sense of presence. The dark form stands boldly against the background, the bird’s eye appearing alert and watchful. The composition is simple but deliberate, focusing attention on the creature itself. The result is a powerful image that suggests both observation and memory.
Decades later, Cook encountered the painting again when the works created in Aller’s classes were returned to their makers. Cook described the emotional impact of recognizing the work from his youth: “When we left [IRS], we just left with what we had. We never took any of our personal belongings home because they generally threw them away… that is something from my past that I saw and recognized.”
Today, Cook serves as a hereditary chief within the Huu-ay-aht Nation. The raven image from his childhood painting has taken on renewed significance in his life. He later incorporated the raven motif into his family curtain, a ceremonial textile that records lineage and history and will be passed on to future generations. In this way, a childhood artwork created within the confines of residential school has become part of an ongoing cultural narrative. Raven therefore stands as a testament to resilience and continuity. What began as a young student’s painting has become an enduring symbol of identity, memory, and cultural inheritance. Through the image of Raven, Cook affirmed a connection to story and land that continues across generations.