Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Indian Residential School: Leaving the Shallow Graves and Going Home, 2022

orange figures walking at night in across a valley

In the large acrylic painting Indian Residential School, Leaving the Shallow Graves and Going Home, contemporary artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (b.1957) of Tsartlip and Syilx First Nations, British Columbia, depicts a procession of spectral child figures crossing a scarred landscape of shallow graves during a deep-indigo night toward a distant horizon. They are returning home in spirit form. Yuxweluptun describes this vision as completing a journey and granting closure to memories long held in anguish within Indigenous communities.

The figures advance in uneven step, each differently transformed. Luminous oranges and acid greens pulse against the dark ground; ovoids, U-forms, and other Northwest Coast design elements articulate joints and ribs; and mask-like heads recall carved ceremonial personae. At the centre strides a multicoloured skeletal child crowned with a stark-white skull—death laid bare yet vibrant with spirit energy. Flanking companions bend forward like guardians or witnesses; smaller beings grasp spectral toys or hold out attenuated hands, suggesting unfinished childhoods. The elongated shadows they cast insist these are bodies as well as memories; what was buried has weight.

Dramatic portrait of a young woman with a background of of a red, white, black and gold roundel.

Yuxweluptun has said he is showing the world the truth: Indigenous children were abused, starved, experimented upon, and killed. By painting them walking out of their graves, he refuses the erasure encoded in unmarked burial sites and archival euphemisms. The exodus becomes indictment and release—an insistence that those who were taken must be seen returning and that communities can welcome them back ceremonially even when physical remains are lost. The night sky, with its crescent moon and brooding cloud bands, holds the scene in a threshold light between worlds, amplifying the painting’s funerary but defiant tone.

Formally, the work fuses Indigenous visual systems with Western pictorial conventions. Coast Salish / Northwest Coast formline designs contour the spirit-children, while the sweeping lateral landscape and staged march recall Euro-American history tableaux. This hybrid language is central to Yuxweluptun’s long project of Indigenous surrealism: bending space, colour, and origin stories to speak political truth and accelerate healing.

Commissioned in 2021 to honour Canada’s inaugural National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the painting debuted publicly in 2022 at Heffel Galleries in Vancouver and Toronto before being auctioned. The hammer price of $157,250 was donated in full to the Orange Shirt Society and the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, extending the work’s commemorative intent into direct support for Survivors and for education.

In Leaving the Shallow Graves and Going Home, Yuxweluptun makes a deliberate choice to memorialize how Indigenous children were treated in Canada’s residential school system and to make that history resound in public memory. As memorial, manifesto, and medicine—understood here as a form of cultural and spiritual healing—it visualizes the children Canada tried to forget, invites their spirits to travel home in dignity, and summons viewers to accompany that journey—an act of witnessing essential to any meaningful reconciliation.