Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Kent Monkman, The Scream, 2017

Scarlet-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and black-robed clergy swarming across a sunlit yard outside a modest house.

In his monumental acrylic painting The Scream, Cree artist Kent Monkman (b.1965) depicts scarlet-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and black-robed clergy swarming across a sunlit yard outside a modest house. Mothers claw, kick, and stretch their arms toward children being wrenched away, two male relatives lie felled in the grass, and a Mountie on the porch directs the roundup as others pursue fleeing youngsters into the fields. The emotional fulcrum is the mother in blue, body torqued forward, mouth open in a sound we cannot hear but instantly understand: the existential cry that gives the painting its title. Monkman’s reference to the famous work by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is deliberate. Where Munch’s terror is undefined, here, the reason for the scream is incontrovertible.

With The Scream, Monkman seizes a genre long used to glorify empires—the nineteenth-century European history painting—and repurposes it to expose one of Canada’s least-pictured state crimes: the forcible taking of Indigenous children to place in residential schools and, by extension, the Sixties Scoop of Indigenous children from their families and contemporary child-welfare removals. Painted for the cross-country exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the canvas crystallizes countless Survivor testimonies into a single, searing tableau.

Paintings line the walls of a dimly-lit gallery with green walls.

A figure in red regalia dances against a black background.

Monkman collapses time through costume. Authorities wear historically specific uniforms and many Indigenous figures appear in mid-twentieth-century dress, signalling that state-sanctioned child apprehension spanned generations. A cleric hoists a toddler whose underwear is exposed; this vulnerability foreshadows the physical and sexual abuses that awaited. Ancestral witnesses in the forms of crows and raptors wheel overhead, with one crow even diving at an officer, while storm clouds mass beyond the bright foreground—nature mirroring moral darkness. Colour and light heighten the impact. The lush summer palette of green grass and blue sky makes the violence more jarring; in contrast, Mountie red slashes the composition like wounds across the land. Monkman’s baroque staging, including diagonals of straining limbs and choreographed clusters of struggle, guides the eye cinematically; yet, it denies aesthetic detachment. Viewers are trapped: to look is to witness, to look away is to refuse that responsibility.

The Scream is unusual in that Monkman’s Two-Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, does not appear within the scene. In accompanying texts, she admits the pain is too deep to narrate. Exhibition installations intensified the encounter: darkened galleries, cradleboards, and children’s crafts positioned this work as vigil as much as painting.

Widely circulated online and acquired by the Denver Art Museum, The Scream entered public consciousness as an image of cultural genocide in action. Educators deploy it to open conversations that statistics alone cannot, Survivors recognize their families’ stories, and settler viewers confront complicity. In reclaiming the massive scale of national art for Indigenous truth, Monkman transforms a scream of grief into a public demand for accountability—art as testimony, commemoration, and a call to act in the unfinished work of reconciliation.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Kent Monkman, The Scream, 2017

Gallery of A New Generation of Witness