Children's Drawings - Art Canada

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Once-known Stoney Nakoda child at Morley Residential School, untitled drawing, n.d., pencil crayon on paper, 23 x 19 cm, Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Children’s drawings from residential and day schools are among the earliest visual declarations of truth during the colonial encounter. These tender works, made in pencil, crayon, and paint during the mid-twentieth century, speak across time with a clarity unclouded by academic critique or adult mediation. They carry presence, relation, and resistance in their simplest forms: gestures on paper that insist on being remembered. To see them through the Plains Cree concept of tâpasinahikêwin, a mark done in a truthful way, is to recognize that these are far from innocent images or quaint school exercises: they are visual acts of survivance. These drawings are not merely responses shaped within colonial systems of control. From the moment of their making, they enacted an Indigenous epistemology grounded in relation, memory, and responsibility.

The works gathered in this chapter represent only a fraction of the children's drawings that survive from residential and day schools across Canada. Many more remain held in private collections, church archives, museum storage, and family homes—some known, many still undiscovered. Others have been lost entirely: destroyed, discarded, or simply uncatalogued in the decades since the schools closed. The selection presented here has been guided by what could be responsibly accessed, reproduced with permission, and situated within the communities from which these works came.

Painting of a sockeye salmon in a net, seen from above.

A work on paper in pencil crayon depicting a plane flying over a snowy landscape.

An artwork depicting the head of a raven.

A painting of a beach, done in sinuous bands of blue and light green.

Child's drawing on paper shows a tipi set against rolling foothills, smoke rising gently as figures move across open ground.

Drawing of a boat in a harbour, the word "Stranger" appears on the side of the boat

A mixed-media self-portrait presents a young face divided by light and shadow.

Drawing of a family. There are four members depicted.

schools and suppression

Although the Historical Overview outlined the broader history of the residential school system, it is necessary to return to its structure here, for it shaped the very conditions in which children created their drawings. By the 1930s, the residential school system was firmly entrenched across Canada. Its guiding principle, articulated with chilling frankness by Duncan Campbell Scott in 1920—“I want to get rid of the Indian problem”—was to assimilate Indigenous children into the colonial body politic.

The schools, run largely by churches, sought to suppress language, ceremony, and kinship structures, replacing them with English, Christianity, and colonial discipline. Day schools, like those at Red Pheasant or Inkameep, allowed children to return home in the evenings; regardless, the pedagogy remained rooted in assimilationist logic. These institutional conditions formed the environment in which children picked up pencils and brushes: a space of coercion where, even within that coercion, acts of drawing could speak truth.

A young Cree schoolboy poses for a portrait.

One of the clearest demonstrations of how imagery itself became a weapon of this project is the case of Thomas Moore Keesick, a Saulteaux boy from Muscowpetung First Nation, Saskatchewan. In 1891, at just eight years old, Moore was admitted to the Regina Indian Industrial School, registered as “No. 22.” His likeness was captured in the notorious before-and-after photographs staged by the Department of Indian Affairs: the first shows him in traditional dress, with long braids framing his face, moccasins on his feet, and a rifle and furs beside him; the second, taken after several years, depicts him in a military-style uniform, with hair cut short, one hand on his hip, and polished shoes on his feet, posed beside a potted plant and ornate furniture.

These paired images were widely circulated as proof of the schools’ “civilizing” mission. They reduced Moore’s life to a visual equation: the so-called savage transformed into the supposedly prosperous young man. For politicians and the public, the photographs functioned as propaganda— fundraising tools that made assimilation appear inevitable and desirable. Yet, what they conceal is the violence of that transformation: the severing of language, kinship, and spirituality. The very symbols stripped from Moore—his braids, beads, and hunting implements—were the same ties residential schools sought to erase across generations.

A junior girls’ class, Alberni Indian Residential School, undated.

Moore’s story ends tragically. In 1895, only four years after entering the school, he died of tuberculosis, one of thousands of children whose lives were cut short within these institutions. His life, like so many others, is not the outlier but the norm. Today, the photographs that once served as propaganda read as blueprints of cultural genocide, stark reminders of how the state sought to transmute Indigenous children into settler ideals. They stand as visual records of erasure, a colonial alchemy enacted on the body of a child.

It is important to recognize that these institutions were not monolithic. The experiences of children at day schools, industrial schools, and residential schools varied by region, governance, and teacher. At northern mission schools, artistic expression was largely marginal. Where it appeared at all, it was folded into manual training alongside utilitarian tasks, while broader arts programming, such as music, painting, sculpture, and crafts, was consistently under-resourced and overshadowed by athletics. In the West Coast residential schools, the arts were introduced to students as a source of revenue. Schools emphasized market-ready craft production. Instruction in fine art disciplines was exceptional and largely carried out on a volunteer basis. These differences shaped the visual archive that survives: a patchwork of children’s marks that together form a map of resistance across the country. Regardless of variation, the underlying purpose of each institution remained the same: to sever Indigenous worlds. The children’s drawings that emerge from these spaces, therefore, carry artistic value as well as a geographical imprint of survivance: each mark embedded in its particular place, each school producing its own contours of truth.

Installation view of Here I am -- can you see me? by George Littlechild.

Colonial photography functioned as a technology of control, producing images that translated Indigenous lives into evidence for assimilation and erasure. The infamous before-and-after photographs of children such as Moore were staged to narrate progress, disciplining the Indigenous body into a visual grammar of colonial success while concealing the violence of loss, illness, and death that followed. Indigenous modernism repeatedly returns to this photographic legacy to expose its falsity. Carl Beam (1943–2005), for example, incorporated archival photographs into his paintings and installations to fracture their authority, reworking colonial imagery into sites of memory, rupture, and resistance. More recently, the exhibition Here I am – can you see me? by George Littlechild (b.1958) confronted the same visual archive through an intimate and ceremonial lens, reclaiming family photographs and institutional records to restore names, faces, and relations erased by bureaucratic anonymity.

Photography’s role as an instrument of suppression is neither forgotten nor accepted; it is transformed. Where official images once sought to fix Indigenous children into narratives of disappearance, contemporary artists mobilize those same images to insist on presence, accountability, and truth, extending the quiet through-line from children’s drawings to Indigenous modernism as a sustained practice of visual survivance. These later artistic interventions clarify what is already present in the children’s drawings themselves: that Indigenous visual knowledge, even in its earliest recorded forms, was never passive but actively engaged in truth telling, memory, and resistance.

Teachers, Tensions, and the Civilizing Ritual

Black and white photograph of a child painting at an easel

Why was art taught in the schools? At first glance, drawing appears benign when compared with the harsher tools of assimilation: hair cutting, uniforms, prayer, labour, surveillance, and punishment. Yet, within the logic of these institutions, art was never innocent. It formed part of the civilizing project—a means of reshaping Indigenous perception itself. Administrators and teachers believed that European-style drawing would discipline the hand and, by extension, the mind. To draw from still life, to copy biblical scenes, to reproduce straight lines and geometric order was to practise obedience and absorb the visual habits of Euro-Christian culture.

Thus, art instruction became a minor but deliberate component of colonial pedagogy. It trained children to see through a settler lens, privileging proportion, symmetry, naturalism, perspective, and the authority of the individual eye over Indigenous relational ways of seeing. Pencils and brushes were offered not primarily as instruments of self-expression but as tools of bodily and mental regulation. Art was meant to redirect Indigenous imagination.

Underlying this was a deeper assumption: that the Indigenous perspective had to be replaced. School officials frequently described Indigenous art as primitive, decorative, or superstitious. European drawing, by contrast, was framed as rational, observational, and morally elevating. In this context, even the seemingly simple act of holding a pencil became part of the assimilationist project, an attempt to overwrite knowledge carried through land, kinship, story, and ceremony.

Nevertheless, children did not simply submit to this visual discipline. In their hands, pencils, crayons, and brushes became instruments of memory. They drew animals, dances, family scenes, home territories, journeys, and ceremonies. Even within institutional constraints, they used drawing to hold on to worlds that colonial education sought to suppress. For this reason, children’s art from residential and day schools is rarely neutral. It is often a form of witness.

That is why, when Survivors encountered their childhood drawings decades later, in addition to recognizing the images themselves, many spoke of the truth the images once held. They saw in the images something they had known and preserved. Through drawing, they carried forward relationships to land, ancestors, and cultural memory, often without knowing the future significance of what they were making.

The Child’s Truth

Against this backdrop of art as discipline within colonial schooling, there were rare instances in which individual teachers opened limited spaces for Indigenous creativity to surface. At Inkameep Day School on the Nk’Mip reserve in British Columbia, Irish-born teacher Anthony Walsh encouraged his Syilx students to paint from their own stories and ceremonies. At Alberni Indian Residential School, after-hours sessions run by Robert Aller (1922–2008) allowed children to draw from memory rather than from prescribed models. These moments did not undo the colonial structure, but they created openings within it.

The situation with teachers such as Walsh reveals the paradox at the heart of children’s art in these institutions: even when educators opened small windows of cultural expression, the broader system remained dedicated to erasure. Some teachers permitted, or even celebrated, Indigenous subject matter, but others banned it outright, insisting that children reproduce European still lifes or biblical scenes. In both contexts, children navigated this terrain with remarkable skill, inserting the symbols of their own worlds where they could. In this sense, the drawings demonstrate a sophisticated social fluency: the ability to move between imposed expectations and cultural responsibility, often within a single page. Through these openings, drawing could become something more than exercise: it could become testimony.

The Plains Cree concept of tâpasinahikêwin, a mark done in a truthful way, offers a way to understand this shift. To draw is to affirm what has been seen, lived, and known. The image becomes a record of experience rather than simply a representation of it. In this light, children’s drawings from residential and day schools emerge as acts of visual truth telling.

Themes in Children’s Drawings

The works considered here span several regions and decades. Despite these differences, they share a common orientation. They turn outward from the institution toward land, animals, ceremony, and memory. They do not reproduce the school. They reassert the world beyond it.

One of the most persistent themes across these works is land as a structuring force of memory. The Beach, c.1954–64, by Gina (Daisy) Laing (b.1947) offers a clear example. Painted while she attended Alberni Indian Residential School, the work turns away from the institution entirely. Bands of blue water, shoreline, and distant land organize the image. It is not simply a landscape; it is a remembered place, grounded in her Uchucklesaht homeland, where relationships to water, family, and seasonal life shaped experience. A similar orientation appears in panoramic drawing of Igloolik, Nunavut, by Rhoda K. Katsak (née Awa). Her composition includes houses, igluit (igloos), dog teams, hunters, and inuksuit (inukshuks), while an airplane enters the scene from above. The image captures a moment of transition in Inuit life, where Qallunaat (non-Inuit) infrastructure and Inuit knowledge systems coexist. Yet, the emphasis remains on community and land. The drawing maps a lived world rather than an institutional one. In both cases, the child does not depict the school. Instead, she draws the world that sustains her. Through tâpasinahikêwin, land becomes memory made visible.

A second thematic current is the persistence of animal knowledge. These images transcend simple representations of animals—they are expressions of relationships and teachings carried through family and community. Mark Atleo’s sockeye salmon, painted when he was seven years old at Alberni, recalls teachings he received from his grandfather before he was taken to school. The salmon is caught within a net, its form rendered in bright colour. The image carries knowledge of fishing practices, kinship responsibilities, and cycles of life central to Nuu-chah-nulth culture. Decades later, the return of this painting reactivated those memories, linking childhood experience to adult understanding. Jeffrey Cook’s Raven, n.d., similarly reflects cultural knowledge rooted in Huu-ay-aht and broader Northwest Coast traditions. The large black bird, with its watchful eye, dominates the page. Raven is known as a being associated with transformation, knowledge, and creation. Through this image, Cook affirms a relationship to story and land that the school sought to interrupt.

Joseph Derrick’s image of an eagle hovering above a human figure introduces another dimension. The vertical relationship between bird and human suggests connection, transformation, or guidance. The composition echoes Northwest Coast visual structures in which the human and animal realms are interconnected. Through these works, children draw what they have been taught to know. They enact tâpasinahikêwin by affirming relationships between humans, animals, and the more-than-human world.

A third thematic strand emerges through images of ceremony, gathering, and movement. The Inkameep Day School drawings are central here, though they are not reproduced in this volume. Created by Syilx children under the direction of Walsh in the 1930s and 1940s, they are known to depict riders traversing the Okanagan landscape, dancers assembling in ceremonial formations, and scenes unfolding sequentially across the page, reflecting Syilx knowledge systems grounded in story, land, and collective life. The Osoyoos Indian Band community’s ongoing work of stewardship and return is itself a continuation of this tradition. Similarly, drawings by Stoney Nakoda children at Morley Residential School depict tipis, rodeo riders, and scenes of community activity. Horses move across open ground, linking the children to traditions of horsemanship and mobility central to Plains cultures. These images are not incidental. They record collective practices that the residential school system sought to regulate or suppress. Through drawing, children preserved these forms of life, carrying them forward in visual form.

A photograph of children on the steps of a Residential school.

But not all drawings turn outward. Some register the interior experience. For instance, a portrait by Art Thompson (1948–2003) created at Alberni presents a face divided between light and shadow. One side is visible, the other obscured. The composition conveys tension, suggesting a consciousness shaped by the pressures of the residential school environment. Even as a child, Thompson’s work registers an awareness of division, concealment, and presence. These images remind us that tâpasinahikêwin also includes the drawing of internal states. Truth is not only external and relational—it can also be psychological and embodied.

Repatriation as Ceremony

In the late 1950s, art instructor Aller introduced painting to Indigenous students at Alberni Indian Residential School. His classroom offered moments of respite; nevertheless, his role remains complex. While Aller preserved many of the children’s paintings and later participated in their return, he also removed them from the students without consent, keeping them in his private collection for decades before repatriation efforts began.

I came to know Aller briefly in the late 1970s, when we were both teaching at James Smith Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. I recall him showing me drawings he had collected, speaking of them with admiration but without acknowledging the ethical contradictions of having taken them. That encounter impressed upon me the uneasy tension between preservation and possession, a tension that continues to shape how we understand the care, custody, and return of children’s artworks today. Repatriation transforms children’s drawings from objects defined by colonial custody into living participants in Indigenous systems of knowledge.

A crowd of Residential School survivors at a repatriation ceremony.

Repatriation, beyond being the movement of objects from one place to another, is the restoration of relations that were severed through colonial collection practices. For many Indigenous Nations, images created by children are not inert documents but beings with presence, memory, and responsibility. They hold the imprint of the child’s hand, the conditions of their making, and the worlds they recall. When such works are returned, the act cannot be reduced to administrative transfer or museum protocol. It requires a return to the ethical, ceremonial, and relational frameworks through which Indigenous Peoples understand objects as living participants in community life. Through ceremony, these relations are renewed, acknowledged, and brought back into balance.

Ceremony also recognizes what was violated. When artworks were taken from children, sometimes without consent, sometimes without explanation, they were removed not only from families but from the network of relations that gave them meaning. Repatriation, therefore, involves more than giving something back; it acknowledges the rupture and invites witnesses to participate in its repair.

Andrea Walsh and Mark Atleo, Ahousaht First Nation and Survivor of the Alberni IRS.

In recent years, anthropologist Andrea Walsh, based at the University of Victoria, has taken on the work of returning artworks to Survivors and their families, treating the pieces as animate beings with agency and memory. Her leadership in the repatriation of residential school artworks has made her one of the most prominent non-Indigenous figures involved in stewarding children’s voices within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) era. With access to collections held by families, churches, museums, and private estates, Walsh mediates between institutions and communities, between archives and living relations, and between what was taken and what is now being restored. Her curatorial method, grounded in listening, ceremony, and accountability, acknowledges this responsibility. Rather than speak for the children, she works to create the conditions through which their drawings can speak again, in ways guided by Survivors, families, and cultural knowledge holders. Through this careful and collaborative approach, what once lay in drawers and storage boxes becomes a communal archive of truth returned to the relations that give these works their meaning.

That these moments are mediated through non-Indigenous actors is itself part of this history. Anthony Walsh, Robert Aller, and Andrea Walsh occupy different positions across time; yet all three remind us that the telling, collecting, and safeguarding of Indigenous children’s drawings has often been controlled by those outside the communities to which these works belong. Far from being a matter of custody, it is a matter of perspective: how truth is framed, who is authorized to speak, and what forms of knowledge are recognized. Their involvement reveals both the structural imbalance that shaped the trajectories of these artworks and the ongoing need for Indigenous-led interpretation. In the era of repatriation, the return of these drawings is, therefore, both about bringing them home and also about restoring the conditions through which Indigenous communities can tell their own truths on their own terms.

Because these works were held, interpreted, and sometimes removed from their communities by non-Indigenous actors, their return becomes part of the story of how Indigenous truths are reclaimed. Through song, processional movement, language, and the presence of Elders, the return of children’s drawings becomes an event in which truth is spoken, grief is held, and relations are re-established. This ceremonial framing prepares us to understand why the work of individuals like Andrea Walsh carries such weight: in addition to recovering artworks, it restores the conditions through which Survivors, families, and communities can once again be in relation with them.

A row of paintings stretch along a wall and narrow table.

If custody shaped the meanings these drawings carried within the colonial archive, repatriation marks the moment when those meanings begin to shift back toward Indigenous frameworks of relation, memory, and responsibility. The repatriation of children’s paintings from Alberni Indian Residential School in 2012 and 2013 illustrates how art can become testimony in motion. Forty-seven paintings created between 1958 and 1960 were returned to Survivors at a TRC event in Victoria, British Columbia. Nuu-chah-nulth women carried each painting into the hall, accompanied by singers and drummers. As Cheryl Johnson said, “The paintings can’t be stacked. Every child must be carried.” When Andrea Walsh and community collaborators returned Atleo’s painting to him decades later, he was overcome. The painting, restored to him at a TRC event, unlocked memories long suppressed. He spoke of his grandfather, of fishing, of teachings that colonial schooling tried to silence. The painting now hangs in his home, a constant reminder of resilience.

With that act, a work shifts from artifact to animate witness. Survivors see their childhood marks, long forgotten, and memories surface: of grandparents, fishing trips, village dances. What might have been dismissed as school art is a living archive—vessels of truth requiring care and dignity. Through repatriation, tâpasinahikêwin is enacted again; the drawings tell the truth not only of their making but of their return. They are reanimated as witnesses.

Drawings as Living Testimony

Where official photography sought to erase, children’s pencil marks tell truths. Where colonial imagery displays the absence or taking away of culture, acts of tâpasinahikêwin preserve presence. The wary gaze found in Moore’s “before” photograph, with its quiet hints of defiance, finds its echo in the confident lines of children’s drawings in which animals, ceremonies, and memories endure on paper despite the pressures of assimilation. This truth telling through children’s drawings extends beyond Canada, forming part of a broader transnational archive of Indigenous survivance that links residential and removal histories across settler states.

Alongside Thompson, Awa, and Atleo, many other children created works of profound resonance. Encouraged in rare cases by teachers like Anthony Walsh, these drawings and paintings became extensions of story and ceremony. Even when framed as simple school assignments, they carried knowledges that colonial education could not erase. Such works remind us that children were not merely pupils but knowledge holders. Their marks preserved law, memory, and relationship in forms that outlasted the schools themselves. When returned to families and communities, they become animate again. From static images in an archive, they re-emerge as living presences that carry responsibility and teaching into the present.

A school boy peeks at the camera from behind his artwork

Black-and-white photograph of a group of young boys doing crafts at a table.

To view children’s drawings from residential and day schools is to stand at the intersection of suppression and resilience. These works were created in contexts designed to silence Indigenous voices; however, they speak with clarity across generations. In reclaiming these drawings as acts of testimony, we shift them from artifacts to archives, from collections to relationships. They remind us that truth telling is not only adult work, nor only retrospective. Children told truths in their time, in their way, through pencil and paint. Those truths continue to speak.

This imposed way of seeing had consequences far beyond the schoolroom. Many Indigenous artists of subsequent generations, even those celebrated for their innovative, decolonial, or community-rooted practices, were first trained through Eurocentric visual regimes. Their earliest lessons in proportion, perspective, shading, and naturalism came from the very institutions designed to dismantle Indigenous visual knowledge systems. The imprint of this training is visible across the twentieth century in the work of painters, printmakers, carvers, beadworkers, performers, and photographers who learned to navigate, subvert, or reject the colonial grammar of seeing they inherited. In this way, the legacy of school-based art instruction becomes a quiet through-line in Indigenous modernism, a visual inheritance shaped by coercion yet continually reworked into acts of reclamation, sovereignty, and truth.

The continuity between childhood drawing and later artistic practice forms an essential bridge to the stories of the many Survivors who became artists, including Beam, Alex Janvier (1935–2024), Jim Logan (b.1955), Robert Houle (b.1947), and others, who carry forward the early impulses visible in these schoolroom works. The animals, ceremonies, and landforms of childhood reappear in adult work, transformed by experience but rooted in the same visual sovereignty first expressed in pencil and crayon. Children’s drawings are foundations rather than preludes: they establish the aesthetic and ethical commitments that later generations of artists would deepen, expand, and carry into public consciousness.

Colourful painting of a northern village. Children hide from a priest walking along the road.