Edward Poitras, Don’t Speak, 2015

Installed as a full-scale billboard overlooking a Saskatoon streetscape, Don’t Speak by mixed-media Cree and Métis artist Edward Poitras (b.1953) wrenches a 1909 photograph of uniformed Indigenous schoolgirls at Lac La Ronge (All Saints) Residential School, Saskatchewan, out of the archives and into the public space. The grayscale class portrait of rows of girls in striped dresses with a fenced yard behind them has been digitally overlaid with bright, candy-coloured cartoon speech and thought bubbles. One scarlet bubble near the top commands, “Shhhhh… DON’T SPEAK”; another tiny bubble answers, “OK.” Most hover mute, empty, or filled only with abstract colour. Against the subdued photograph, these graphic intrusions flare like warnings, insisting we reread what might once have passed as an innocuous school picture.

The bubbles do double duty. They name the linguistic repression at the heart of the residential school system—children punished for speaking Cree, Dene, Saulteaux, or other mother tongues—while also signalling the internalization of that silencing. Because the admonition appears as if inside a child’s thought, authority has migrated inward; censorship lives in the self. The many blank bubbles hang like ghosts of unspoken stories, songs, questions, and kinship names, visual placeholders for languages forced underground yet still remembered.

Poitras has written that when he looks at the source image, he wonders what became of these girls—whether they grew to be mothers and grandmothers, whether their own children were taken, who went missing, who lost language, who got it back. That imagined future arcs through the billboard. Colour animates the black-and-white past, collapsing time so that the silenced children address drivers and pedestrians now. The paradox is deliberate: by broadcasting the command not to speak, the work compels speech. People ask, What is this? Whose children? Why silenced?

Presented in spring 2015 by Saskatoon artist-run centres TRIBE and PAVED Arts for TRIBE’s twentieth anniversary, Don’t Speak coincided with the concluding year of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and its naming of cultural genocide. Sited in Saskatoon’s Riversdale district, long an Indigenous neighbourhood undergoing rapid change, the image confronted commuters for months, persisting into a federal election season. Local critics called it the defining artwork of the exhibition cycle. Viewers described feelings of heartbreak, anger, and urgency. In a medium normally reserved for advertising, Poitras broadcast historical accountability.

Don’t Speak is more than memorial. It is public pedagogy and invitation. By crediting the archival source and acknowledging families connected to the photograph, Poitras models respectful collaboration while returning these once-anonymous girls to collective memory. The billboard challenges settler silence, validates Indigenous experience, and gestures toward language resurgence—the possibility that those blank bubbles can yet be filled. In stopping us on the street, Don’t Speak transforms a century-old photograph into a living call to listen, to respond, and to ensure that such enforced quiet is never repeated.