Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Barry Pottle, Yale Dormitory (Residential School), North West River, Labrador, 2015

A photograph of a two-story institutional building in a snowy landscape.

Yale Dormitory (Residential School), North West River, Labrador by Inuit photographer Barry Pottle (b.1961) from Nunatsiavut, Newfoundland and Labrador, confronts the haunting persistence of residential and day school histories in Inuit Nunangat. Pottle, who lived in this dormitory from 1970 to 1975, positions his camera before the boarded-up structure, its skeletal form still marked by silence and cold. Taken decades later, the image is an act of personal return as well as a communal testimony to the enduring legacies of colonial schooling in the North.

The subarctic was not exempt from Canada’s assimilationist project. The principle “to kill the Indian in the child” applied equally to Inuit children, who were removed from their families and placed in institutions like Yale Dorm. In these spaces, language was suppressed, kinship ties severed, and children subjected to neglect and abuse. Pottle’s statement that he photographed the building “knowing that I may not see this place again” underscores both urgency and loss. The building may vanish, but its impacts remain inscribed on bodies, memories, and communities.

Small red identification discs on a ring.

The stark image captures more than architectural ruin. Snow blankets the ground, muting sound and erasing traces of life, while the building’s shuttered windows suggest silenced voices. Yet, in documenting this absence, Pottle asserts presence—his own as a Survivor and, by extension, that of all who lived through these schools. The work insists that Inuit experience belongs within the broader history of residential schooling, which has often centred First Nations narratives while marginalizing Inuit realities.

Critically, Pottle’s photograph disrupts reconciliation’s rhetoric of closure. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada acknowledged Inuit experiences, but systemic redress has lagged, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador, where Survivors had to fight for recognition. By returning to Yale Dorm with his camera, Pottle stages what can be called an act of visual sovereignty: he reframes a colonial institution through Inuit eyes, reclaiming authority over how its history is remembered. The act of looking, mediated through his lens, transforms the dormitory from a site of subjugation into one of testimony.

The aftermath of residential and day schools is not only intergenerational trauma but also intergenerational responsibility. Pottle’s image speaks to this duality: it bears the weight of memory while addressing future audiences who must continue the work of accountability. The photograph becomes an archive, refusing erasure and demanding that Inuit Nunangat’s stories of dispossession be placed within national and global discourses of justice.

Ultimately, Yale Dormitory is both personal and political. It mourns what was taken—language, kinship, cultural security—but it also affirms Inuit resilience. By standing before the decaying structure, Pottle confronts the colonial past on his own terms, transforming a site of imposed silence into an image that speaks. His work reminds us that reconciliation cannot proceed without fully reckoning with the histories of Inuit residential and day schools and without honouring the Survivors whose testimonies keep these truths alive.