Tania Willard, Be a Good Girl, 2007

Willard deliberately chose woodblock printing as her medium. The physicality of carving into wood parallels the embodied discipline imposed on Indigenous children—training, punishment, and repetition inscribed on their bodies. At the same time, woodblock printing, historically used to reproduce images and texts in multiples, speaks to the mass dissemination of colonial ideology. By reappropriating this medium, Willard asserts survivance, refusing erasure through acts of creative presence.

Willard’s work resonates with the Happiest Future series, 2012, by Sonny Assu (b.1975), which includes works that deliberately mimic vintage propaganda posters. Like Assu, Willard strategically inhabits the visual language of colonial persuasion to turn it against itself. Assu’s appropriation of poster formats exposes the racist stereotypes and national myths that circulated in the Canadian imagination, while Willard’s woodblock echoes the mass teachings of the classroom, where colonial values were drilled into Indigenous children. Both artists deploy irony: Assu through slogans that parody settler pride and Willard through the seemingly benign command “Be a good girl.” Each transforms instruments of control—propaganda and pedagogy—into platforms of truth telling.

In doing so, Willard insists that the story of residential schools cannot be told without attending to gender. The disciplining of Indigenous girls into domestic servitude and silence was central to the project of assimilation. Yet, her work also honours resilience: the figures, though regimented, are not erased. Their presence, multiplied and inscribed into the woodblock, testifies to endurance.

By reclaiming “women’s work” as a site of resistance, Be a Good Girl destabilizes colonial narratives of obedience and reasserts Indigenous cultural continuity. The work demonstrates how Indigenous artists retool the forms of colonial power—posters, prints, slogans—not to perpetuate them but to unmask their violence and to reframe history through Indigenous sovereignty and survivance.