Dionne Paul, Her First Day of School, 2013

The effect is disquieting. The children appear doubled, their bodies partially overwritten by colonial memory. In Her First Day of School, the little girl’s cheerful stance is shadowed by the stiff posture of a residential school child, her hands clasped in a gesture of enforced piety. In His First Day of School, a boy’s confident presence is cut across by the rigid suit of an earlier era, echoing the systemic disciplining of Indigenous boys who were punished for speaking their languages or practising cultural traditions. The juxtaposition forces viewers to see how the past remains inscribed on the present, living on in memory, family history, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Paul’s decision to use her own children is particularly significant. It embodies both vulnerability and reclamation: these works expose the personal stakes of history, and they also reframe Indigenous children not as passive victims but as visible, loved, and protected. The smiling faces of her children resist the erasure intended by residential schools, standing as living proof of Indigenous survival.

The textual frame of the project further emphasizes this tension. By titling the works around the milestone of the first day of school, Paul aligns her children’s experience with those of the generations before them; yet, she highlights how radically different these experiences are. Where residential schools provided poor food, inadequate health care, and curricula designed to “kill the Indian in the child,” today’s schools, though still marked by systemic inequities, offer opportunities for learning that can be navigated with family support. The contrast underscores both progress and the persistence of structural legacies.

Born to a Nuxalk mother and raised in Sechelt within a shíshálh family, Paul brings together personal experience, ancestral memory, and contemporary forms to assert Indigenous sovereignty and presence. Her work spans painting, weaving, stained glass, and performance, but it consistently returns to themes of reclamation and survival in the face of colonial erasure. With Her First Day of School and His First Day of School, she confronts the intergenerational traumas of the residential school system while grounding her practice in Indigenous land-based knowledge and cultural continuity. Using photography, a medium historically used to document and objectify Indigenous Peoples, she reclaims its authority, repurposing it to honour Indigenous voice and memory. In doing so, she aligns herself with what Robert Houle (b.1947) has called the role of the “artist-warrior,” an artist who uses contemporary forms to insist on truth telling, sovereignty, and survival.

Ultimately, Her First Day of School and His First Day of School operate as both memorial and affirmation. They remind viewers that residential schooling is a lived presence rather than distant history, its effects reverberating into the present. Yet, they also celebrate resilience, positioning Indigenous children as central to cultural resurgence. Paul’s works invite us into an act of witnessing—one that insists on remembering the past while imagining a future where Indigenous children can step into schools free of fear, confident in both their heritage and their learning.