Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

7IDANsuu James Hart, Reconciliation Pole: Honouring a Time Before, During and After Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, 2015–17

A carved pole stands, surrounded by grass and trees.

Read from ground to sky, the almost seventeen-metre Reconciliation Pole: Honouring a Time Before, During and After Canada’s Indian Residential Schools by Haida carver 7IDANsuu James Hart (b.1952) unfolds a historical arc. At the base, crest beings and sustenance creatures—Salmon, Bear Mother, Raven—evoke the vitality of Indigenous worlds before colonization. Above them rises a meticulously carved residential schoolhouse modelled on the one Hart’s grandfather attended. Encircling this building are ranks of uniformed children holding hands but carved without feet; their truncated bodies signal the deliberate severing of children from land, language, and family. Driving the lesson home, more than 68,000 copper nails puncture the pole’s surface. Hammered in by Survivors, descendants, local schoolchildren, and allies, the nails stand as witness marks to the children who died in Canada’s Indian residential schools. Together, they glint like tears, scars, stars—an embodied ledger of loss.

A carved pole is being raised on a university campus.

Yet, the narrative does not end in grief. As the eye ascends, the cultural beings Whale, Bear, Eagle, and Thunderbird return, restoring a spiritual ecology that the schools sought to extinguish. A canoe and a European-style vessel travel side by side, proposing that Indigenous Nations and Canada must navigate the future together rather than under conditions of domination. Crowning the pole, an Eagle gathers itself to lift, carrying law, vision, and responsibility outward into the world. Copper sheathing and insets—materials signifying wealth, authority, and accountability in many Northwest Coast traditions—flash at key junctures, reminding viewers that reconciliation entails tangible commitments, not symbolic gestures alone.

Hart’s pole operates simultaneously as memorial, history lesson, and act of visual sovereignty rooted in Indigenous visual knowledge. It lodges the truths of the residential school era in cedar, metal, and public space, where hundreds of people encounter them daily. Because the nails were placed by many hands, the artwork materializes shared obligation. Grief and remembrance are not borne solely by Survivors; settlers, institutions, and future generations, too, are literally fastened to the story. The vertical structure encourages physical witnessing—circling the base, tracing the nails, looking up until the pole disappears into the sky—so that history is felt in the neck, the breath, the time it takes to see.

Reconciliation Pole refuses closure. Hart carved it from an eight-hundred-year-old red cedar and raised it on the traditional territory of the Musqueam People at the University of British Columbia, transforming a campus commons into a site of public memory. It stands in continuity with ceremony, Survivors’ testimony, and ongoing language and culture revitalization across Indigenous territories. By carving the past into the present, Hart asks every viewer, Having seen, what work will you do? The pole honours those taken, those who survived, and those carrying memory forward, insisting that any path to reconciliation must begin with, and continually return to, truth.