Pitaloosie Saila, Strange Ladies, 2006

Far from home, Saila encountered figures of religious, medical, and bureaucratic colonial authority whose presence left a lasting impression. In Strange Ladies, she portrays three pallid women—a fashionably veiled lady she had glimpsed in Montreal, a stern nun, and an aloof nurse—set against an eerie yellow field that underscores the malaise of her hospital stay. “I remember being afraid of those nurses,” Saila later recalled, and her choice to render them in stiff, detached poses speaks both to her childhood fear and to the broader trauma of Inuit removal from land and kin. In this way, Saila’s autobiographical imagery can be read alongside the sculptural work of Oviloo Tunnillie (1949–2014), whose practice likewise reflected on her experiences in southern tuberculosis treatment centres, linking both artists through shared histories of displacement, bodily vulnerability, and resilience.

Although Strange Ladies does not depict residential schools directly, it resonates with the same visual themes of cultural estrangement, erasure of identity, and the fear engendered by colonial systems. By focusing on the women’s Western dress consisting of veiled hats, starched habits, and clinical uniforms, Saila heightens the absence of Inuit clothing, which are rich repositories of identity, status, and collective knowledge. Traditional garments declare one’s role and community; here, their absence becomes a marker of exile and powerlessness. The sparseness of the composition—no hospital beds or signage, only the three figures arrayed in silent judgment—forces viewers into ethical witnessing. These Strange Ladies stand in for all the so-called help that came at the cost of autonomy and cultural continuity.

Saila’s portrayal of female agents of colonial control complicates assumptions about gender and power. By showing these women as complicit in supposedly benevolent institutions—religion cloaked as charity, health care as salvation—she subverts narratives of universal sisterhood and exposes how humanitarian rhetoric masked coercion. The result is a disturbing inversion: the women who “cared” for her body also participated in a system that treated Inuit as passive bodies, medically quarantined and spiritually detached.

In an Inuit worldview that prizes memory as living testimony, Strange Ladies functions as a visual archive. Memory is medicine; recalling injustices is a communal obligation. Through her lithograph, Saila witnesses her own fear and channels the wider Cape Dorset tradition of art as cultural preservation. These three figures and the violent backdrop they imply demand that we remember the many ways colonial systems uprooted Inuit lives. They remind us that displacement was not confined to residential schools but extended into every institution that claimed to help. For readers concerned with institutional violence, cultural resilience, and Indigenous visual sovereignty, Saila’s Strange Ladies stands as an essential testament to the cracks in colonial benevolence and to the enduring power of Inuit memory.