Sonny Assu, Leila’s Desk, 2013

Inherent, 2014, a 1970s school desk similarly overlaid with copper leaf, recalls Assu’s own high school years during the 1990 Oka Crisis, when a classmate’s racist slurs—“the freeloader, the drunk, the dumb”—laid bare the “inherent” anti-Indigenous prejudice embedded in Canadian society. The piece links his experience to his grandmother’s, revealing the generational persistence of racism within educational spaces. Here, copper again transforms a symbol of colonial discipline into one of cultural resilience. Assu’s question “How do we challenge hate that is so deeply ingrained?” becomes a challenge to viewers, making the work a decolonial act as much as a personal testimony.

Both works enact a creative, ceremonial, and immersive encounter between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, one built on respect, humility, and mutual accountability. In Assu’s hands, the school desk, an object designed to contain and to discipline, is converted into a conduit for the transfer of intergenerational knowledge. By linking Leila’s experience to his own, he weaves a kinship narrative that extends to all Indigenous families touched by the violence of colonial education.

Assu creates works that confront Canada’s colonial history and the enduring legacy of residential and day schools. Working at the intersection of Indigenous iconography and the material culture of colonialism, he engages Indigenous visual knowledge—a living archive of memory, relation, and resistance. With Leila’s Desk and Inherent, he transforms objects of assimilation into acts of visual sovereignty.

In the framework of art, truth, and reconciliation—understood here as a form of truth that connects personal intuition, societal beliefs, and the natural world—these desks are animate archives. The copper leaf is wealth restored, offered back to the community and to future generations. In this way, Leila’s Desk and Inherent resist erasure, counter the imposed shame of the colonial classroom, and invite active witnessing. They remind us that truth telling is indeed about exposing harm, but it is also about reasserting presence, wealth, and cultural continuity in the face of ongoing colonial legacies.