AN ACI ORiginal

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

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.

Copyright Information

IBSN 978-14871-0413-9

Published in Canada

Art Canada Institute

Massey College, University of Toronto

4 Devonshire Place

Toronto, ON M5S 2E1

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.

yellow school house in a green field with children in the yard

An iron bedstead in a room at a residential school

Child's drawing on paper shows a tipi set against rolling foothills, smoke rising gently as figures move across open ground.

orange figures walking at night in across a valley

A school desk and chair sit in a gallery. A bar of soap is on the desk.

Two side-by-side portraits: on the left, a person in traditional Indigenous attire holding a feather fan; on the right, a person in a black dress shown from behind against a neutral background.

An Inuit man is torn between a Raven spirit and a Catholic missionary.

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

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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