Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Rain Cabana-Boucher, Laying Flowers, 2021–24

A diptych of a white sheet on which orange beads are arranged, facing a similar work on deerskin.

In Laying Flowers, Michif and British settler interdisciplinary artist Rain Cabana-Boucher (b.1995) creates a profoundly moving installation that embodies both grief and resistance in response to the unmarked graves at former residential school sites. At the heart of this work is a white plinth covered with a tanned hide on which orange glass beads are scattered. The beads, symbolic of both children’s lives lost and the contemporary Orange Shirt Day movement, spill across the hide, simultaneously fragile and enduring. On the surrounding walls, small clusters of orange beaded flowers are meticulously arranged in grids, their repetition evoking both absence and persistence. Each flower is a gesture of care, an act of ceremony, and a refusal to forget. The visual austerity of the gallery space amplifies their presence, compelling viewers into a quality of sustained, responsible attention.

The work resonates with Indigenous principles of kanawâpâtahmowin—seeing with responsibility, vision, and creativity. In this framing, Cabana-Boucher transforms beadwork, which has long been a medium of storytelling and exchange between Indigenous and settler societies, into a counter-currency to capitalist values. Beads, once central to Indigenous economies and trade, are here reclaimed as a measure of remembrance and cultural sovereignty. Their careful placement on hide and wall invokes ancestral practices of making things while also standing as a contemporary political act that critiques the commodification and erasure imposed by colonial institutions.

An artwork depicting 415 hanks of braided hair.

Raised in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and deeply connected to historic Michif communities, Cabana-Boucher situates her practice within an intergenerational continuum of memory and survivance, an active presence grounded in survival, resistance, and the ongoing assertion of Indigenous identity. Her work, gathered under the exhibition title For Love, Loss & Land, interlaces beadwork, sculpture, and performative installation into a living archive that focuses on Indigenous sovereignty, shared witnessing, and collective mourning.

In Laying Flowers, mourning is never passive: it insists on a shared relationship, demanding that settler and Indigenous viewers alike recognize remembrance as inseparable from justice. Like 415 Braids, 2021, by Saige “Nalakwsis” Mukash (b.1996), which memorializes children through strands of hair, Cabana-Boucher’s beaded flowers carry the weight of individual lives while building toward collective memory.

Cabana-Boucher’s work also resonates with paintings by Allen Sapp (1928–2015) of the residential school experience, where trauma and cultural continuity coexist. While Sapp’s images bear witness through narrative figuration, Cabana-Boucher insists on abstraction and repetition, allowing the empty spaces between beads and flowers to speak as loudly as the materials themselves. The silence embedded in the installation mirrors the silence imposed on Indigenous children—yet, here, it becomes a space of resurgence.

By invoking the ceremonial gesture of laying flowers, Cabana-Boucher affirms the persistence of Michif and Indigenous presence across time. Laying Flowers is not a monument in the traditional sense; rather, it is a dynamic, relational archive. It is rooted in grief but oriented toward care, ensuring that mourning becomes an ongoing practice of love and accountability. In this way, Cabana-Boucher’s work aligns with the broader vision of Indigenous visual sovereignty: art as truth telling, as a vehicle for survival, and as a call for justice that refuses closure. In this, it joins a growing lineage of Indigenous counter-monument practices, such as Indian Act, 2000–2002, by Nadia Myre (b.1974) or beaded depictions of disease by Ruth Cuthand (b.1954), which transform archival trauma into acts of reclamation. Together, these works deny erasure by weaving memory into form, insisting that remembrance itself is a radical and enduring practice of sovereignty.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Rain Cabana-Boucher, Laying Flowers, 2021–24

Collection of A New Generation of Witness