Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Quill Christie-Peters, Portrait of Ste. Margaret’s Residential School and All It Could Not Contain, 2018

Painting of a gray building with multi-coloured spirits bursting from it.

In Portrait of Ste. Margaret’s Residential School and All It Could Not Contain, Anishinaabe artist Quill Christie-Peters (b.1992) renders the facade of the school in muted grey, its rectangular windows symbolizing surveillance and confinement. This rigid geometry is disrupted by vibrant Woodland-style colours, fluid forms, and cascading figures. Painted in turquoise, crimson, black, and magenta, these spectral presences burst through and beyond the school’s walls, their movements expansive and uncontainable. They embody the children, spirits, and stories the institution sought to suppress but could never destroy. Christie-Peters’s refusal to fix them in static suffering aligns with the concept of survivance.

Circles recur throughout the painting: orbs cradled by figures, cosmic seeds, and cellular constellations that counter the school’s rigid rectangularity. These circular motifs invoke Indigenous cosmologies of balance and renewal, asserting continuity against the linear logic of colonial education. Sacred landscapes emerge from the abstract forms, dissolving institutional authority into luminous fragments and blood-red accents. What appears at first as a school portrait is reframed as a vision of cultural continuity that exceeds containment.

A man and an older woman in full regalia, carrying an orange t-shirt, lead a parade.

The painting’s searing orange ground further amplifies this reframing. Orange recalls the collective mourning of Orange Shirt Day and the grassroots memorials that followed the confirmation of the presence of unmarked graves at residential school sites. Across Canada, orange fabric, children’s shoes, and floral offerings have been laid on the steps of churches and legislatures, transforming sites of power into spaces of grief and accountability. Christie-Peters’s use of orange resonates with this visual language: the school is not isolated in grey but engulfed in a field of memory, grief, and public defiance.

Exhibited in spilling out, spilling over at the University of Saskatchewan in 2022, Portrait of Ste. Margaret’s Residential School and All It Could Not Contain exemplifies Christie-Peters’s commitment to art as a sovereign act. By channelling her father’s lived experience at this school while refusing to reproduce trauma as spectacle, she reorients representation toward resurgence and continuity. Memory here is personal but also intergenerational, threading past violence into present resistance and future sovereignty.

Ultimately, this work is both memorial and defiance. Like the Orange Shirt Day commemorations it visually echoes, it demands that remembrance remain unsettled, ongoing, and collective. In this way, Christie-Peters affirms that, in addition to being a witness to colonial harm, Indigenous art is a practice of truth telling that transforms mourning into survivance and containment into ongoing renewal.