Brent Henry, English Only!, 2021

Placed in dialogue with the installation i want to forget the english language, ulterior, 2020/23, by Duane Linklater (b.1976), Henry’s English Only! enters a broader conversation about language as both a site of violence and a horizon for renewal. Where Linklater’s work constructs a grammar of Cree resurgence through tipi poles, tarpaulin, and a chandelier, Henry opts for immediacy. Linklater calls us into careful reorientation, slowing down perception through Cree linguistic and cosmological structures. Henry, by contrast, hurls us into the violence itself. His painted slogan does not invite contemplation so much as force recognition of what was shouted at children across generations.

The two works converge in their insistence that language is not merely symbolic but rooted in traditional knowledge, structuring how the world is seen, known, and lived. Linklater’s desire to “forget the English language” gestures toward a Cree realignment, a refusal of colonial perceptual dominance. Henry, meanwhile, makes visible the wounds of that dominance—the scars left when language was forbidden, cut away, crossed out. In Henry’s figures, we see the aftermath; in Linklater’s tilted tipi poles, the possibility of another orientation.

Together, these artists insist that the violence of assimilation cannot be forgotten or bypassed. It must be named, seen, and transformed. Henry’s contribution lies in his unflinching witness to enduring legacies of colonial assimilation through visual testimony. English Only! stages a direct confrontation with the stifling of Indigenous languages in residential and day schools, where children were punished for speaking Anishinaabemowin, Cree, or other ancestral tongues. It is not subtle; it is urgent. Its slogans and defaced inscriptions are less painting than testimony, less abstraction than wound. But precisely in this rawness lies its power: it reclaims what was silenced, forcing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers to contend with the psychic scars of enforced English and to imagine the resurgence of languages once forbidden.