Kevin McKenzie, Being Indigenous, 2024

As part of McKenzie’s exhibition Edge of Seventeen, Being Indigenous is a deeply autobiographical work that navigates grief, memory, and identity through the lingering legacy of residential school trauma, popular culture, and Indigenous resurgence. McKenzie’s father survived the Lebret Residential School, and his early death when the artist was seventeen left him with both the weight of loss and a responsibility to carry forward what his father had taught him. The painting functions as a node in this emotional and cultural inheritance—it is an act of reclamation.

In Being Indigenous, the trauma of the residential school becomes generational, internalized, but also something that is confronted. McKenzie’s personal passage through losing his father and navigating spaces without those traditional teachings fully passed to him makes the work one of partial inheritance and ongoing reconstruction. It resists smooth narrative closure. Instead, it holds both absence and presence in tension: the absence of a father’s voice, the presence of his values, loss and memory, damage and creativity.

In this way, the work resonates in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) and the era of residential schools. It enacts the TRC’s call for memory, for telling the truth, and for recognizing intergenerational trauma. But it also goes beyond these calls; it demonstrates what reconciliation might look like from an Indigenous subject who is committed to regeneration. The creation of a contemporary Indigenous identity that incorporates resonances with pop culture, youth forms, rural culture, transnational influences, and ancestral practice is itself an act of resistance.

A further dimension is McKenzie’s use of popular culture as a means of giving voice where official structures attempted suppression. For instance, honouring his father’s passion for hockey is not nostalgia alone. It connects with the cultural importance of sport as identity and belonging but also with colonial histories that often excluded Indigenous participation or appropriated cultural spaces.

In Being Indigenous, McKenzie offers neither victim narrative nor triumphalist resolution. Rather, the work is vulnerable and generative, wounded but not defeated. It invites the viewer into a space where identity is being made, where grief and celebration coexist, and where being Indigenous is a constant becoming rather than a fixed state. This painting is a powerful counterpoint to colonial narratives. It asserts that Indigenous identity cannot be erased, and it shows how memory, personal loss, material culture, and creativity fuse to construct new capacities for survival and belonging.