Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Ursula Johnson, ITHA: The Livingroom, 2021

A gloomy living room. The tv is on in front of a recliner.

ITHA: The Livingroom, an installation by Mi’kmaw interdisciplinary artist Ursula Johnson (b.1980) of Eskasoni First Nation, Nova Scotia, recreates a domestic space that appears warm and ordinary at first glance: an archetypal 1980s Mi’kmaw living room complete with crocheted blankets, patterned chairs, framed prints, and a glowing television. Yet, as the viewer looks closer, the scene unsettles. It stages not nostalgia but a confrontation with the intergenerational effects of residential schools, the commodification of Indigenous identity, and cultural erasure.

The television anchors the work. Instead of sitcoms or news, it plays the “ITHA Home Shopping Network,” a satirical broadcast offering kitschy items decorated with stereotypical Indigenous imagery. Each item is priced using Mi’kmaw–Crown treaty dates—$17.52 for 1752, for example—turning sacred agreements into consumer price tags. The absurdity is sharp. Treaties, meant to affirm nation-to-nation relationships, are reduced to commodities, just as Indigenous cultures were historically commodified for settler consumption. This biting humour destabilizes the comfort of the living room, exposing the depth of colonial intrusion into everyday life.

A plexiglass box with engraved sides in a gallery.

The installation also confronts the legacies of residential schools. English-only entertainment hums from the television, echoing the silencing of the Mi’kmaw language in the schools. Religious icons and settler decor dominate the walls, displacing cultural items from their rightful positions in Mi’kmaw homes. Johnson’s use of satire and mimicry aligns with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Call to Action 83, which urges Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to create works that foster reconciliation through critical engagement with history. Here, reconciliation begins with discomfort rather than with resolution, forcing audiences to reckon with complicity and erasure.

Importantly, Johnson roots this critique in tradition and treaty. ITHA—an acronym for Indian Truckhouse of High Art—takes its name from the truckhouse clause enshrined in the 1752 Mi'kmaw Peace and Friendship Treaty, which established Mi'kmaq rights to trade and exchange with the Crown. By invoking this treaty instrument as both title and framework, Johnson situates her installation within a longer history of colonial negotiation and Indigenous assertion. Her practice emerges from Mi’kmaw basket-weaving traditions passed down by her great-grandmother, Caroline Gould. Basketry, historically undervalued as “craft,” becomes the conceptual weave binding this installation’s pieces together: everyday objects, satire, and embodied memory interlace to create a living testimony. By transplanting cultural resilience into a space infiltrated by colonial symbols, Johnson asserts Mi’kmaw survivance.

The installation’s domestic setting is crucial. The living room is where many Survivors returned after residential school—spaces where trauma and resilience met in silence, prayer, television, and daily routines. By reconstructing such a room, Johnson reveals how colonial systems extended beyond the walls of the schools into the intimate textures of family life. Yet, she also reclaims this space. THA becomes a call to attention, a demand that we look, listen, and account for what has been ignored.

First displayed in the Blue Building Gallery in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded Mi’kmaw territory, ITHA: The Livingroom refuses to let reconciliation slip into abstraction. It demands accountability by making colonial violence visible, even in the most ordinary corners of life. At the same time, it honours the endurance of kinship, creativity, and humour as strategies of survival. Johnson thereby situates art as truth telling—an urgent call for collective reflection, healing, and the unending work of reconciliation.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Ursula Johnson, ITHA: The Livingroom, 2021

Gallery of A New Generation of Witness