Robert Houle, Parfleches for the Last Supper, 1983 

As Houle explained, he created the work “out of a desire to combine a single continuum of the effect of Catholicism and Saulteaux spirituality.” In doing so, he collapses the Last Supper and Saulteaux spiritual practice into a single ceremony of communion. In his reimagining, the gospels become decorative flaps on the parfleche bodies, while quillwork motifs reference shamanistic powers. Even Jesus’s panel is placed off-centre, subtly subverting classical hierarchies. Parfleches for the Last Supper thus critiques the religious “civilizing” mission of residential schools while asserting Indigenous spiritual sovereignty—and marks Houle’s bold turn toward addressing Indigenous representation and colonial history in his art.

Decades later, spurred by a nightmare and the 2008 apology to former residential school students from the Government of Canada, Houle embarked on his Sandy Bay Residential School Series, 2009, Over twenty-four consecutive days, he made twenty-four oilstick drawings on paper, each a fragment of memory: rows of dormitory beds, bleak playgrounds, looming faceless priests and nuns. Rendered in loose, urgent strokes, the images resemble film stills of trauma, each overlaid with handwritten captions in Saulteaux—the language he was forbidden to speak as a child. Captions such as “Night Predator” or “outhouse abuse” sit alongside Saulteaux words for “pain” or “fear,” turning the drawings into an emotional archive. As Houle has explained, writing these words in his mother tongue was integral to his healing—a process of pahgedenaun (letting it go from your mind), a term associated with a 2019 exhibition of these works at the Carleton University Art Gallery. The combination of image and Indigenous text confronts viewers with the raw, personal dimensions of the school experience while modelling a form of visual sovereignty, reclaiming not only the story but the language in which it is told.