Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Christi Belcourt, Giniigaaniimenaaning (Looking Ahead), 2012

Two stained glass windows in a dark gallery.

In her stained-glass window Giniigaaniimenaaning (Looking Ahead), Métis artist Christi Belcourt (b.1966) presents an historic and symbolic narrative. The lower left panel evokes an Indigenous pre-colonial world: lodge, ceremonies, language, medicine knowledge. These images are not romantic nostalgia but an assertion of what was forcibly disrupted. The central panels plunge viewers into the residential school era: children removed, silenced, suffering. The shattered-glass motif here is especially potent. It fractures the material as well as silence, family, and the psychic lives of Survivors. It corresponds to what historians and Survivors attest: that the system was violent and also designed to erase language, culture, identity.

Detail of a stained glass window featuring the date "2008."

Yet, the upper sections and the right panel trace a movement toward resurgence: the 2008 apology to former residential school students from the Government of Canada, reconciliation, dance, ceremony, motherhood, the return of song and language, and the embrace of future generations. Belcourt closes the narrative with transformation and responsibility rather than despair. The embedded words “I love you” in multiple Indigenous languages counter the enforced silence of the schools and restore voices long silenced. The ritual symbols—jingle dress, drum, medicine, sun and moon—place Indigenous ways of knowing at the centre instead of at the margins. The form Belcourt has chosen, stained glass, traditionally a medium of the sacred and of confession, combines spiritual resonance and institutional presence, a fitting register for such a memorial work.

Giniigaaniimenaaning functions as reclamation as well as commemoration. It performs what many Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada documents speak of: truth, apology, cultural revitalization. But it also critiques reconciliation’s often hollow gestures. Installed on Parliament Hill in 2012, the window stands above the members’ entrance as more than decoration: it is a witness in the heart of colonial governance, ensuring that the narrative of residential schools cannot be forgotten or sidelined. There, it makes implicit demands: that apology must be matched by policy, education, language restoration, and cultural reparation. It reminds us that reconciliation is more than symbolic—it must be material.

Equally important is Belcourt’s attention to intergenerational concerns: remembering life before residential schools, suffering, awakening, and the generations yet to come. This cyclical structure demands that our engagements with the residential school legacy be ongoing rather than isolated experiences. Healing, in this work, is relational and sequential, linking ancestors, Survivors, children, and the unborn.

Giniigaaniimenaaning serves as both a mirror and a map. It reflects the broken history of residential schools and the traumas endured while also showing a possible path forward grounded in Indigenous knowledge, ceremony, language, and collective responsibility. This work demonstrates how public art can shift discourse, locating personal experiences in the political sphere, and demand structural accountability rather than symbolic gestures. As such, it is a powerful act of public commemoration that interweaves memory, loss, apology, and the possibility of healing within a framework of Indigenous visual sovereignty—the right to represent, and to be seen, on Indigenous terms.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Christi Belcourt, Giniigaaniimenaaning (Looking Ahead), 2012

Collection of A New Generation of Witness

Christi Belcourt, Giniigaaniimenaaning (Looking Ahead), 2012