Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Beau Dick, The Ghost Confined to the Chair, 2012

a worn studio chair once housed in a former residential school

In The Ghost Confined to the Chair, Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick (1955–2017) transforms an ordinary object—a worn studio chair once housed in a former residential school—into a vessel of memory, resistance, and cultural continuity. Atop the red vinyl seat rests a mask of Bukwus, the Wild Man of the Woods and Chief of the Ghosts. In Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, Bukwus is a skeletal, ghostly figure who lures lost souls with spirit food, condemning them to his spectral retinue. His presence here links the residential school chair to the fate of children forced into assimilation; cut off from family, language, and community, many became like the wandering spirits that Bukwus embodies. Around the mask, the cedar rope, goat’s wool, feathers, and woven cedar rose assert ceremonial knowledge and sacred continuity. Behind the chair, a painted backboard carries Northwest Coast formline motifs, while at the base lies a copy of the Indian Act, the primary instrument of cultural erasure. Together, these materials layer the spiritual, ceremonial, and bureaucratic dimensions of colonial control.

A circular carving depicting a stylized hawk.

The chair itself anchors the installation in the history of residential schools, where children were confined, silenced, and disciplined. By repurposing it as a platform for Bukwus, Dick reclaims the object from its colonial function, turning it into a site of Indigenous resurgence. The mask does not simply haunt the chair; it sits upright and active, insisting on being witnessed. In this context, Bukwus is a malevolent spirit and also a potent metaphor for the psychic dislocation caused by assimilation. His skeletal visage mirrors the cultural emptiness imposed on Indigenous children, while his ghostly entourage evokes the generations lost to residential schooling. Yet, by placing Bukwus in a ceremonial frame surrounded by cedar, feathers, and formline, Dick transforms him into both warning and witness, an ancestral presence that refuses erasure.

Dick was an influential Northwest Coast artist, renowned for his technical mastery of Kwakwaka’wakw carving as well as for his ability to animate traditional forms in response to contemporary political and social realities. The Ghost Confined to the Chair does not offer reconciliation as resolution. Instead, it keeps the conversation unsettled, reminding viewers that the spirits confined by history remain active in shaping the present. Through Bukwus, Dick channels both trauma and continuity, creating a ceremonial archive that binds memory to resurgence.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Beau Dick, The Ghost Confined to the Chair, 2012

Collection of A New Generation of Witness

Beau Dick, The Ghost Confined to the Chair, 2012