Adrian Stimson, Sick and Tired, 2006

Opposite the windows stands an Old Sun infirmary bed, its rusted springs exposed and spotlighted so the cast shadow reads like a stretched hide. Across the frame lies a bison robe folded as though covering a body—cadaver, ancestor, bundle. For Stimson, the bison compresses the colonial experience: the animal’s near-extermination parallels the colonial power’s deliberate assault on Niitsitapi lifeways, but its survival also indexes cultural regeneration at the core of Niitsitapi being. The bed concentrates what residential schools produced systemically—illness, exhaustion, death, spirits broken by confinement—and the many children who longed for home and suffered on such institutional cots. Joined in this charged tableau, bed and robe operate as a material reliquary of genocide and survivance, forcing viewers to confront the bodily cost of the residential regime even as Niitsitapi presence endures.

In reassembling these remnants, Sick and Tired operates as counter-memory: it reclaims institutional debris as an Indigenous archive, collapsing past and present into a process oriented toward forgiveness, healing, and a state of grace. Viewers do not receive a moralistic text; rather, they enter a sensorial field of light, shadow, fur, and iron in which they must shoulder the role of witness, echoing Niitsitapi ceremonial Protocols that assign a responsibility to remember and retell.

Stimson’s multidisciplinary practice moves between biting performance, as in Buffalo Boy at Burning Man, 2004, and elegiac installations that confront colonial violence, such as Iini Bison Heart, 2020. Sick and Tired marks a pivotal turn in contemporary Indigenous truth telling, redirecting national attention from abstract policy to the material architectures that contained and attempted to erase Indigenous children. Situated within broader exhibitions on residential schools, the work extended Stimson’s long project of mourning, satire, and survivance, showing how material culture can expose a national crime while offering a site for communal catharsis. Sick and Tired thus transforms colonial fragments into Indigenous visual sovereignty—memory made tactile, grief made shareable, and healing set in motion.