Art, Truth & Reconciliation

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Between 2008 and 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada documented the lasting impact of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools on Indigenous Peoples and created 94 Calls to Action. Although the report profoundly reshaped the nation’s cultural consciousness, until now, no comprehensive surveys have been conducted to see how Indigenous artists have responded to this chapter in Canadian history.

Art, Truth, & Reconciliation fills this void. Written by Gerald McMaster, one of Canada’s leading curators and scholars, the book examines the works of artists from across the country—including Carl Beam, Christi Belcourt, Rebecca Belmore, Robert Houle, Kent Monkman, David Ruben Piqtoukun, Allen Sapp, Adrian Stimson, and many more—revealing how they have confronted histories of dispossession, survival, and renewal. Alongside these contemporary and historic voices, the book presents children’s drawings made within residential schools—fragile records that testify to both trauma and imagination under oppression.

“Truth telling is profoundly visual. Art created by Indigenous peoples is not mere expression—it is cognitive, ceremonial, and political. From the early paintings of children in residential schools to the contemporary works of Survivors and descendants, this art conveys stories of rupture and resistance, land and language, memory and resurgence. It is visual sovereignty in motion—asserting Indigenous ways of knowing, seeing, and relating.”

– Gerald McMaster

Art, Truth & Reconciliation is structured in three sections that explore the works of different generations of artists: children who were in residential schools, artists who recall their time in residential schools, and a contemporary generation of visual creators who are coming to terms with the knowledge of residential schools. Poignant, passionate, and a call to action, the book reveals how Indigenous art continues to shape collective healing and understanding. In the hands of Indigenous artists, visual creativity breaks silences, bears witness to the truth, and documents the past with an eye to a more just future.

Banner Image: (top left) Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:steltun, Indian Residential School, Leaving the Shallow Graves and Going Home, 2022. (top right) Allen Sapp, Recess at Onion Lake School, 1988. (bottom left) Luke Marston, Bentwood Box, 2009. (bottom right) Kent Monkman, The Scream, 2017.

About the Author:

Gerald McMaster

Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist, author, and professor and former director of Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University, Toronto. With over forty years of international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology, and Indigenous aesthetics, he has worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; and the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau). As a curator, McMaster represented Canada at La Biennale di Venezia (1995) and the 16th Mostra di Architettura di Venezia (2018). In 2012, he was Artistic Director of the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia. He is also the author of many books, including Iljuwas Bill Reid: Life & Work (2020), Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity (2023), and Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art (1998). He is a néhiyaw (Plains Cree) and a citizen of the Siksika Nation.

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Black-and-white portrait of Gerald McMaster. He is sitting in a chair in an art gallery.

Online Book Sponsors

We gratefully acknowledge this book’s generous benefactors:

Season Sponsor,
2026–2027 Publications

Lead Sponsor

Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage (Canada History Fund)

Gold Sponsor

The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation

Silver Sponsors

Jason Donville

Bronze Sponsors

Mike and Kim Downs

Ontario Arts Council

Photograph of a person with long black hair and the top of their face painted red. They are wearing long fringe earrings, dozens of red beaded necklaces over a bare chest, and long red gloves, by Ken Monkman

Kent
Monkman

Kent Monkman: Life & WorkBy Shirley Madill

Mixed-media painting layering Indigenous portraits, historical images, text, and paint drips in red and ochre tones

Carl

Beam

Carl Beam: Life & WorkBy Anong Migwans Beam

In the Classroom

Learn About

Finding Your Voice

through the art of

Carl Beam

Grades 9-12Finding Your Voice
through the art of Carl Beam

Through his work in painting, printmaking, ceramics, and performance art, Carl Beam challenged assumptions about First Nations creativity and the style and content of contemporary Indigenous art.

Indigenous Studies, Canadian History, Visual Arts