Creative Conciliations

ICCA Digital Publication Short Introduction

By Jonathan Dewar, Tarah Hogue, and Jennifer Robinson

As we write this introduction, we are mindful of how time often places things where they need to be. June 2025 marked ten years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada held its closing event in Ottawa and presented the executive summary of the findings contained in its six-volume final report (released December 2015), including the 94 Calls to Action “to further reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous Peoples.” Following this anniversary, this collection considers the evolution of (re)conciliatory arts practices in Canada and urges us to continue the work first ignited and catalyzed by Survivors. 

Creative Conciliations brings together conversations, reflections, and artistic responses that have unfolded over more than a decade among artists, curators, researchers, students, community activists, knowledge holders, and Elders/Old People. Contributors are united in their shared commitment to reckoning, reclamation, and restitution—using creative acts to wrestle with the enduring impacts of colonization and to nurture meaningful dialogue around visual culture and aesthetic action/practices tied to (re)conciliation in Canada (Martin and Robinson 2016).

The idea for this publication was planted on Syilx territory in 2018, during the Indigenous Summer Intensive at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO). Coordinated by the Department of Creative Studies, the Indigenous Summer Intensive “brings together students and visiting artists, curators, scholars, writers, and creative practitioners in residence … around explorations of Indigeneity” (2018 Program, 2018). Since its inception in 2013, this annual program has served as a vital gathering place and site of cultivation, nurturing the thought and creative action from which this project takes root. 

 In the Okanagan heat of July, we gathered in one of the UBCO classrooms to mark the closing of Beyond Reconciliation: Indigenous Arts, Public Engagement, and the Aftermath of Residential Schools, a five-year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), led by Keavy Martin, Dylan Robinson, David Garneau, Ashok Mathur, and Jonathan Dewar. Our gathering was convened as a moment of reflection—on the artistic work that had emerged since Beyond Reconciliation began in 2013, and on the broader landscape of practice unfolding in the years surrounding and following the TRC. As Jonathan mapped out a timeline of these arts-based actions on the classroom board, we recognized that some significant projects had yet to receive the benefit of critical reflection, and that there remained an ongoing need to engage both creatively and critically with the possibilities and problematics of artistic gestures shaped in relation to the TRC. From this, the current project took shape—ultimately leading us to take on the role of editing this volume in response to that call. 

All three authors of this introduction recall—from our own creative, curatorial, scholarly, and deeply personal experiences, sometimes in overlapping spaces—a time when reconciliation was not yet a buzzword, and the silences surrounding the Indian Residential School system—and colonialism more broadly—were profound. These silences were first broken by Residential School Survivors themselves, and, over time, by those in their lives who were intergenerationally impacted by the legacies of these experiences, as well as by those who listened, witnessed, and took up the responsibility of speaking out alongside them. 

Jonathan has written of the pathbreaking work initiated in the 1970s by the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association and the first Shingwauk “Reunion” in 1981, as well as the “Gatherings” that followed in subsequent years. He quotes author, playwright, and poet Armand Garnet Ruffo, who recalled, “[In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s] nobody talked about it … We played right by the residential school. When I’d ask my mother, what’s that building, she’d say, don’t worry about that and then eventually it was torn down” (Dewar 2017: 81). Ruffo noted, as have many others, that during those years, prominent authors like Jeanette Armstrong and Tomson Highway addressed the silences “in an oblique way, not hitting it dead on” (Dewar 2017: 81-82) but laying the groundwork for others to follow—such as Basil Johnston, whose Indian School Days (1988) offered an autobiographical account of his time at the Spanish Indian Residential School. 

Prominent artists such as Alex Janvier and Joane Cardinal Schubert helped surface buried truths through artworks that foregrounded affective experience and personal testimony. Janvier made his first paintings at Blue Quills Residential School, which he was sent to at the age of eight. Janvier created many paintings over his life, such as Cultural Orphan Annie (1989) and Blood Tears (2001) that documented “his experiences at the residential school and their effects.” Curator Greg Hill (2021) continues, “While this period of his life greatly affected him, he continues to produce extraordinary paintings that assert his unassailable sense of self and strength of spirit, rousing us all to find the light in ourselves and to be better.” Cardinal Schubert’s 1989 installation The Lesson placed audience members—some of them Survivors—inside a reimagined Residential School classroom that turned the gallery into a place of reckoning. Only a year later, in 1990, Phil Fontaine—then head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs—became one of the first Survivors to speak publicly about physical and sexual abuse, and the cycles of harm affecting Indigenous communities. He did so prominently on CBC Television’s The Journal with Barbara Frum and many Survivors have described this moment as another catalyst. 

As a growing number of artists, curators, and writers advanced the work of breaking the silences around these issues, grassroots and collective movements gained momentum—as did calls for justice. During these years, advocates across the country began to demand that those responsible for Residential School legislation, policies, mission, and administration tell the truth as well. At roughly the same time, various health, healing, and social movements were emerging within and across Indigenous communities. Many communities also began demanding and, in some cases, receiving apologies from the churches that had operated particular schools (1986-94). In response to the 1990 Kanesatake Resistance, also known as the Oka Crisis, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was established in 1991. Its Report, released in 1996, continued the unprecedented national attention given at long last to these issues, with the devastating impacts of the Residential School system on Survivors and their descendants figuring prominently throughout the report. 

RCAP also paved the way for the creation of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) in March 1998—a national Indigenous-led organization with a mandate to encourage and support community-based, Indigenous-directed healing initiatives addressing the legacy of abuse suffered in the Residential School system and its intergenerational impacts. 

Civil litigation against the churches and the federal government was launched in the early 1990s, eventually leading to the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which was finalized in September 2007. The Agreement included financial compensation, statement-taking and national events, support for commemoration, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. All of these components would prove to be fertile ground for the artists, curators, and scholars who would engage critically and creatively with concepts of truth, healing, and reconciliation.

This project, in fact, grows out of the generative legacy of the intersections – purposeful, fortuitous, and accidental – that unfolded during the Settlement Agreement years and beyond. Art and artists played prominent roles, in various ways, at the TRC’s National Events. Notably, Jaimie Isaac curated the art program for the 2010 Winnipeg event, where she also introduced her partnership with Leah Decter and the collaborative project (official denial) trade value in progress. The 2013 exhibition Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential School exhibition was presented alongside the Vancouver National Event. Artist Carey Newman’s monumental installation Witness Blanket, was featured at the 2014 Edmonton Event and again at the TRC’s closing ceremony in Ottawa in 2015. 

Throughout these years, artists and scholars came together in a variety of ways to question how and why art is essential in an age of reconciliation—if such a thing exists at all. One such moment of reckoning came in 2009 during a gathering organized by the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (now the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones) at the National Gallery of Canada. Curator Neal Keating presented Mush Hole Remembered, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by R.G. Miller portraying his memories of residential school. The presentation’s theoretical framing and use of graphic imagery elicited strong emotional responses from attendees. Both Jaimie Isaac and Jonathan Dewar have reflected on this moment as a catalyst for a critical consideration of the frameworks through which Indigenous trauma was being displayed and mediated within institutional settings. “After this experience,” Issac writes, “I recognized how important Indigenous curatorial presence is as a foundation in exhibiting difficult knowledge relating to Indigenous stories not only for the victims, but also for the witnesses, audience, and those involved in facilitating discussion” (Isaac 2016: 59). Dewar similarly links this event to a shift in David Garneau’s thinking, tracing how his reflections on this moment—and his subsequent conversations with curators and researchers—would inform several future projects discussed below that refused institutional reconciliation frameworks and advanced otherwise approaches to curating, relation, and responsibility (Dewar 2015: 117–20).

In October 2011, a two-day gathering was hosted by the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). As part of a project funded in part by a TRC research grant and the AHF, a small group of artists and curators joined a research team “to help think through possible approaches and avenues toward effective and ethical research practice, not only grounded as necessary in reconciliation theory but also contributing to reconciliation practice” (Dewar and Goto, 2012: 5). From this gathering came the 2012 publication Reconcile This!, which its editors describe as “a pre-catalogue of an ‘exhibition’ that may or may not one day materialize post–Reconcile This!” The publication was closely followed by Reconciliation: Work(s) in Progress, a two-day symposium and five-day incubation artist residency hosted by the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in September 2012. 

In 2013, a month-long artist residency titled Reconsidering Reconciliation was held at TRU in partnership with the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. It resulted in two notable outputs: 1) the TRC-funded Practicing Reconciliation – a collaborative study of Aboriginal art, resistance and cultural politics: A report commissioned by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (published in 2013, and cited in the TRC’s Final Report in 2015); and 2) The Land We Are: Writers and Artists Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (2015), edited by Gabrielle Hill and Sophie McCall—long-time collaborators on these interrelated projects.

Further overlapping with these initiatives was a project led by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin called “The Aesthetics of Reconciliation in Canada,” which culminated in the 2016 edited volume Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Robinson, Martin, and their colleagues attended the Reconciliation: Work(s) in Progress symposium in 2012, where the initial planning for what would eventually become this project, Creative Conciliations, began to germinate. Central to this work was the idea of aesthetic action—an approach articulated by Robinson and Martin as a means of using artistic practice not only to represent or process reconciliation, but to intervene in its very terms and conditions. Their research developed into the SSHRC-funded project Beyond Reconciliation, which itself evolved into the Creative Conciliations Collective—a group (the same group named above who gathered in the UBCO classroom in 2018) that eventually grew to include the lead editors of this volume, Tarah and Jennifer. Over time, the individuals involved in these overlapping initiatives formed a sustained constellation of practice—collaborating across residencies, symposia, exhibitions, and gatherings that collectively shaped the evolving field of Indigenous-led creative inquiry in Canada. This included projects funded by the Canada Council’s {Re}conciliation program, such as O k’inadas and #callresponse. They also found resonance within broader gatherings like Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires (2017), co-founded by France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly. This multi-year initiative sought to “place Indigenous arts at the centre of the Canadian arts system. Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires also asserts that creative practices by artists of colour, who have roots around the world, play a critical role in imagining the future(s) of Canadian art making.” (About, n.d) These examples—among many others that could be cited—give shape to the community of thinkers, makers, and doers, and the expansive network of ripples and interconnections that have shaped the field of creative practice in Canada in, around, and since the TRC.

As this evolving constellation of projects, gatherings, and publications demonstrates, Indigenous artists and curators have not only engaged with reconciliation—they have reshaped its terms, critiqued its institutionalization, and imagined alternatives grounded in relation, refusal, and resurgence. Yet even as this field has grown more expansive and self-determined, the broader cultural sector has consistently positioned art as a tool for reconciliation and healing. This has brought with it challenges and contradictions, particularly in the wake of the TRC’s Final Report, which envisioned “a process of truth and healing leading toward reconciliation and renewed relationships based on mutual understanding and respect” (About Us, TRC). Within this institutional framing, art is often called upon to bear emotional, pedagogical, and reparative weight—but what are the risks of placing such demands on creative practice? And who, ultimately, is the healing for?

While the TRC’s framework was rooted in the imperative of truth-telling, scholars such as Audra Simpson have critiqued the logic that follows—wherein Indigenous peoples are asked to perform their trauma “in order to transcend to better wellbeing,” while settler colonialism remains structurally intact (Simpson 2016). These tensions are particularly visible in the exhibition and circulation of artworks that address the residential school system and its ongoing legacies. As Lara Evans writes, “Each artist took risks in creating this work… the artist could find creating the work traumatic, rather than healing, although the work may be successful in evoking healing for viewers. Or a piece may be cathartic for an artist yet does not provide a similar effect for viewers” (Evans 2013:11). What Evans articulates is the complex, asymmetrical impact of trauma-related work: the labour of representation often falls on Indigenous artists, while the benefit of catharsis may be experienced primarily by settler audiences.

Jaimie Isaac similarly reflects on this dynamic, cautioning against the instrumentalization of Indigenous pain in service of aesthetic or pedagogical outcomes. Following the 2009 Mush Hole Remembered presentation, she wrote, “By employing aesthetics to affect transformative pedagogy and prescribed reconciliation, there are associated risks in using the experiences of others’ pain to achieve these ends” (Isaac 2016: 60). The question is not whether art can be healing, but rather under what conditions—and for whom—it might be expected to serve as a proxy for justice or repair.

David Garneau has spoken directly to these concerns, asking: “Why are we Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal curators presenting Aboriginal pain to a primarily non-Indigenous audience? What do we hope to achieve?” (Garneau as quoted in Sandals 2013). In his writing and curatorial practice, Garneau remains critical of institutional frameworks that position reconciliation as a return to harmony, rather than an ongoing site of tension, difference, and negotiation. He instead proposes the concept of “irreconcilable spaces of Aboriginality”: intellectual and aesthetic territories that do not seek resolution, but rather insist on sovereignty, opacity, and refusal (Garneau 2012; 2015). As he writes, “The theory that public display of private (Native) pain leads to individual and national healing… anaesthetizes knowledge of the existence of pre-contact Aboriginal sovereignty” (Garneau 2015: 35). Within dominant institutions, he argues, exhibitions risk being designed according to settler expectations—text over speech, reconciliation over conciliation, closure over continuity.

Creative Conciliations emerges from within this lineage of refusal and responsibility. Rather than reinforcing the expectation that art should deliver catharsis or closure, this project asks how creative practice might hold space—for grief that is not performative, for truths that exceed institutional narratives, for relations that unfold beyond policy or apology. Contributors to this collection have been wrestling with whether reconciliation remains an adequate framework from which to address the need as well as the problematics of truth-telling and response to the Residential School system in Canada. Through our collective work, we have witnessed how reconciliation frames the structuring of relations between Indigenous people and the settler state. It can function as a call to action—a responsibility taken up by settler allies or accomplices rather than Indigenous Peoples. It has shaped public space, national discourse, and the lenses through which we may now encounter one another. It has also invited man of us to witness, to learn, and to share, in the hope that the past is not repeated.

But reconciliation, we know, can also function as a settler move to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012). To speak of reconciliation should not be so easy, and yet we see how the language of reconciliation has been readily adopted by institutions—whether art galleries, museums, and universities, or various levels of government—as a way to signal progress, often without meaningful accountability. Within these frameworks, we are left asking: Who is reconciliation really for, and who does truth-telling ultimately serve? As we look back on the last decade, we share a collective recognition for the need to continue interrogating these structures in order to shape a world otherwise. We see this other world, and we are committed to trying to get there. 

Even as we critique the commodification of healing—the expectation that Indigenous artists must perform catharsis for settler audiences—we also recognize art’s quieter, more radical possibilities. Beyond institutional framings, creative practice can nurture spaces where conciliation is not a transaction but a slow, mutual unfolding. This is not the reconciliation of reports and quotas, but the work of showing up, day after day, in gestures both humble and defiant. In these unscripted moments, creative practice becomes a language of love—not as sentimental abstraction, but as the daily labour of listening, of refusing to look away, and of holding space for one another’s unfinished stories. As curator John Hampton observes, art helps us “see the air that surrounds us”—the colonial structures we inhabit, yes, but also the fragile threads of care that persist despite them.

Engaging with the current discourse of (re)conciliation in Canada through creative practices and arts-based research is necessarily challenging. This discourse is not fixed—it is fluid and in motion, a shifting landscape. We position the essays in this volume as a collective effort: to reflect, to respond, and, at times, to refuse reconciliation. Together, they ask how Indigenous artists—and their accomplices and allies—are provoking dialogue about what reconciliation might mean beyond the TRC. In doing so, contributors interrogate state-led reconciliation agendas while centering dialogues, collaborations, exhibitions and artistic productions that move through acts of creative conciliation.

 We follow the thinking of contributor David Garneau who invites us to consider how acts of conciliation— rather than reconciliation—can bring people together for the first time, building  relationships that are “perpetual” and “ongoing” (Garneau 2016: 31; see also his chapter in Reconcile This!). To help ground our shared inquiry, we invited contributors to consider: To what extent does reconciliation still dominate conversations about Indigenous lives and relationships with Canada, and how does art participate in these conversations? What relationships or experiences of space are excluded from government or institutionally framed reconciliation agendas, and how are artists refusing these framings to go beyond? How might conciliation function as both a concept and an alternative to reconciliation? And what do acts of creative conciliation look, sound, taste or feel like?

As editors of this collection, asking our contributors to write about the time that is now—and to reflect on the time that has passed—has been a daunting task. Together, we have shaped this volume in a time marked not only by profound political unrest and international conflict, but by overlapping crises that have shaken the foundations of social, political, and ecological wellbeing. We are living through escalating global violence, intensifying climate catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, and widening social inequality—all of which were thrown into sharper relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic’s disruptions fractured familiar rhythms, stretching and compressing our sense of time, and at moments, making it feel as though time itself had disappeared. 

As we carried this project, we have also borne witness to active land disputes across Canada that underscore the ongoing struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and environmental stewardship—from the protesting of pipelines in Wet’suwet’en territories in northern British Columbia, to the blockades resisting old-growth logging in Pacheedaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island, to the burning of Indigenous-owned fisheries in Mi’kmaq territory on the east coast. Our writing is also situated within the tremendous wave of grief that swept through these territories beginning on May 27th, 2021, following a statement by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation revealing preliminary findings from a ground-penetrating survey at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. These collected writings sit in direct relation to this painful context of colonial policies aimed at severing Indigenous families, extinguishing Indigenous cultures, and enacting violence against Indigenous children. We hold space in our hearts for the communities across the country who continue the work of bringing their children home. As editors, we recognize that for some contributors, these histories and realities carry deeply personal weight. We are grateful for the strength and willingness with which these experiences have been shared as part of this publication.

The essays, conversations, poems, and creative reflections presented here form a record —of memories and practices, of responses to and refusals of reconciliation discourses. Truth-telling grounds many contributions: Jason Baerg’s account of residential school impacts on his Métis family and Tarene Thomas’ poetry of resistance and love confront colonization’s legacies with unflinching intimacy. Conciliation emerges as methodology for Leah Decter and Cheryl L’Hirondelle as they dissect the relational tensions and possibilities of their performance Founder. Curatorial reckonings materialise in David Garneau’s remembrance of Moving Forward: Never Forgetting at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, offering not an analysis but a return—to the gestures, relations, and responsibilities that shaped the project—foregrounding care, collective process, and the tensions of working within and alongside institutions. Toby Lawrence extends an institutional critique through her methodological focus on curatorial hospitality, questioning whose social contracts govern relational practices. Charlotte Townsend-Gault’s contribution returns to the politics of vision on the Northwest Coast, exploring how Indigenous artists and communities navigate the fraught terrain of visibility and refusal. Artist-reflections by Cathy Busby, Keavy Martin, and Peter Morin engage their respective practices: Busby’s embedding of the TRC Calls to Action within educational architecture; Martin’s deconstruction of the politics of repair; and Morin’s activation of Indigenous material epistemologies. Together, these works mark not reconciliation’s endpoints, but waypoints along its perpetual, uneven path.

As editors, we have also come to recognize our own working relationship as a form of creative conciliation. Through ongoing conversations, we’ve shared our histories and deepened our individual and collective understandings of colonialism as it continues to shape life in Canada. These exchanges have been, for us, gestures of relationship-building and mutual recognition. And perhaps—at its core—(re)conciliation asks for this kind of love: an imperfect, persistent practice of showing up with care, across difference, and without the promise of absolution. Love, in this context, is not a softening or a substitute for justice, but a commitment to doing the hard work of confronting structural violence, supporting redress, and upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations. It is a practice that must remain as ongoing, as unfinished, and as necessary as the work of conciliation itself.

Amidst the uncertainty of this moment, we know that life continues. In stewarding this project, we’ve sought to create a way of working that honours the uneven motion of time—making space for the shifting rhythms of creative and emotional labour. Throughout the editorial process, we’ve aimed to offer support when needed, and time for contributors to process and shape their ideas at their own pace. In this, we’ve come to understand that taking time is not simply a logistical allowance, but a methodology—one grounded in respect, reciprocity, and care. It is a refusal of urgency as a colonial demand, and a commitment to processes that unfold in relation.

In 2024, this publication became supported by a unique partnership between the ICCA and Wilfrid Laurier University Press. This partnership has enabled the collection to come to life in a digital space where the ideas shared by our contributors resonate with both the anniversary of the TRC and the dialogues emerging through ICCA’s program Digital Publications: Decolonizing Arts Publishing. These chapters will later be shaped into an expanded print manuscript supported by the WLUP, as part of the publisher’s ongoing commitment to their Indigenous series. By transforming this digital publication into an analogue form, we hope this project will contribute to the vital work of documenting the evolving history of artistic and (re)conciliatory practices in Canada that have shaped how artists, scholars, and communities reckon with the legacies of colonial violence and imagine new possibilities for justice, sovereignty, and relationship.

And so, as we close this introduction—what we hope will serve as a chapter in an ongoing conversation—we extend our heartfelt thanks to the contributors who have weathered many storms alongside us. We are also deeply grateful to the ICCA for bringing this project home under a renewed light and energy—one that keeps the collection grounded in, and contributing to, the vital work ICCA continues to do in support of Indigenous artists and curators. May we continue to meet one another in the difficult, necessary work of truth-telling, of imagining otherwise, and of shaping relations—both for the first time, and across time.

References & Further Readings 

Archibald, Linda, Jonathan Dewar, Carrie Reid, and Vanessa Stevens. “Rights of Restoration: Aboriginal Peoples, Creative Arts, and Healing.” Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal 23, no. 2, 2010, pp: 2–17. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/08322473.2010.11432334.  

Asch, Michael. Borrows, John, and James Tully. Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2018.  

Batycka, Dorian. ‘White Supremacy Has to Be Undone’: The First Indigenous Leader of a Public Art Gallery in Canada on Decolonizing Museums.” Artnet News 15 Feb. 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/john-hampton-interview-1943193?fbclid=IwAR1inKvFPqSeBcW1UhU-IRhHjnfEGA3D7XW65QgLy-u5LbGQuNYBbNukSYk. Accessed 31 October. 2025.

Belcourt, Billy Rae. This Wound is a World. Frontenac House, 2017. 

———. NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field. House of Anansi Press, 2019. 

———. A History of My Brief Body. Hamish Hamilton, 2020. 

Brady, Miranda B. and John M.H. Kelly. We Interrupt This Program: Indigenous Media Tactics in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.  

Bruneau, Jaclyn Bruneau, Ginger Carlson, and Natasha Chaykowski. “Editorial: Gather.” C Magazine Autumn vol. 147, 2020, pp. 14-15, https://cmagazine.com/issues/147/editorial-gather. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Castellano, Marlene Brant, Archibald, and Mike DeGagné, eds. From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools. Aboriginal Healing Foundation Research Series. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008. 

Collison, Jisgang Nika, Lucy Bell, Lucy Sdaahk K’awaas, and Lou-ann Neel. 2018. Indigenous Repatriation Handbook. Prepared by Royal British Columbia Museum and Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay. Victoria, BC: Royal BC Museum, 2019. https://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/indigenous/repatriation-handbook. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Conrad, Diane, and Anita Sinner, eds. Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based, and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship across Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. 

Couchie, Aylan. “’Zeal Without Wisdom’: Rushing for Reconciliation.” C Magazine, no. 139, August. 2018. https://cmagazine.com/issues/139/zeal-without-wisdom-rushing-for-reconciliation. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2014. 

Craft, Aimée and Paulette Regan. Pathways to Reconciliation: Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020.

Dewar, Jonathan. Dance with us as you can…: Art, Artist, and Witness(ing) in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey. PhD Dissertation. Ottawa: Carleton University, 2017.  

Dewar, Jonathan and Ayumi Goto eds. 2012. West Coast Line 74 Special Issue: Reconcile This!  https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/wcl/issue/view/255/73 . Accessed 5 June. 2025.

Evans, Lara. “Curatorial Statements,” NET-ETH : Going out of the Darkness: An Art Exhibition Catalogue. Vancouver: Malaspina Printmakers, 2013, p. 11.

Fraser, Crystal and Sara Komarnisky. 2017. “150 Acts of Reconciliation for the Last 150 Days of Canada’s 150.” ActiveHistory.ca-History Matters. 4. Aug. 2017, http://activehistory.ca/2017/08/150-acts-of-reconciliation-for-the-last-150-days-of-canadas-150/. Accessed 31 October 2025.  

Gaertner, David. The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021. 

Garneau, David. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation.” West Coast Line 74, vol.

46, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 28–38. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/wcl/issue/view/255/73 . Accessed 31 October 2025. 

———. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, Healing”. Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Eds. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2016, pp. 21-41.  

——— “Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care.” C Magazine no. 145, Spring 2020, pp. 29-35, 2020. https://cmagazine.com/issues/145/writing-about-indigenous-art-with-critical-care. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Gaudry, Adam and Danielle Lorenz. “Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconciliation, and Decolonization: navigating the different visions for Indigenizing the Canadian Academy”. AlterNative vol. 14, no.3, 2018, pp: 218-227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801187853. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Government of Canada. “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada”. 12 December. 2024

https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1524494530110/1557511412801. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Government of Canada. “Indian Residential School Agreement 6 September. 2021. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015576/1571581687074#sect1 . Accessed 31 October 2025.

Gregory, Helen and Kristy Robertson. “No Small Matter? Micromuseums as Critical Institutions.” RACAR (special issue: Critical Curating) vol. 43, no.2, 2018, pp: 89-101. 

Hampton, John and The Wood Land School. “Inside a Year-Long Experiment in Indigenous Institutional Critique.” Canadian Art, 2. May. 2017. https://canadianart.ca/features/indigenous-institutional-critique-case-study-wood-land-school/.  Accessed 31 October 2025.

Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham, eds. Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Hill, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle, and Sophie McCall, eds. The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015.

Hill, Greg. “Alex Janvier: Rising Above Residential Schools”. National Gallery of Canada Magazine, 30 September. 2021. https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/alex-janvier-rising-above-residential-schools. Accessed 31 October 2025.

Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani and Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text, vol. 38, no. 1 (142), 2020, pp.1–16. DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067 

Hunt, Dallas. “Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral History.” Canadian Literature vol. 230/231 (Autumn), 2016, pp: 25–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i230-1.187955 

Igloliorte, Heather. SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2017. 

Igloliorte, Heather and Carla Taunton. eds. The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada. London/NY: Routledge, 2023

Issac, Jamie. Decolonizing Curatorial Practice: Acknowledging Indigenous Curatorial Praxis, Mapping Its Agency, Recognizing Its Aesthetic Within Contemporary Canadian Art. MA Thesis, Kelowna: University of British Colombia Okanagan, 2016. 

Joseph, Bobby and Cynthia Joseph. Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality. Vancouver: Page Two Books Inc, 2019.  

Johnston, Basil. Indian School Days. Indian School Days. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989

Justice, Daniel Heath. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions, 2015.

Lowman, Emma Battell, and Adam J. Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Winnipeg, Manitoba; Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2015.

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Tarah Hogue is a curator, writer, and cultural worker based in the Treaty 6 and 7 territories and the Métis homeland. In 2020, she became Remai Modern’s inaugural Curator (Indigenous Art) and recently transitioned to Adjunct Curator. Previously, she held curatorial fellowships at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, served as a visiting curator at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, and was curator-in-residence at grunt gallery in Vancouver. Her recent curatorial projects include Storied Objects: Métis Art in Relation (2022), with advisor Sherry Farrell Racette, which received an AAMC Award for Excellence, and the mid-career survey and monograph Adrian Stimson: Maanipokaa’iini (2021). In 2019, Hogue received the Hnatyshyn Foundation-TD Bank Group Award for Emerging Curator of Contemporary Canadian Art. She has authored catalogue essays for artists such as Maureen Gruben, Henry Tsang, Tania Willard, and Jin-me Yoon, and her writing has appeared in C Magazine, Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. She holds a master’s degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Queen’s University. Raised in central Alberta, Hogue is of Métis and white settler ancestry and is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, with relatives from the Red River communities of St. Charles and St. François Xavier in Manitoba.

Jennifer Robinson is a settler-Canadian (English/Irish/Scottish) visual anthropologist living on lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. Currently, she is Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria and a Research Associate with the Visual Stories Lab, where she has contributed various curatorial, collections, education, and repatriation projects since 2012. Jennifer is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research where since 2021, she has taken part in several harm reduction-focused projects under the Canadian Managed Alcohol Program Study. Since 2019, she has worked as a freelance consultant on behalf of museums, galleries, cultural centres, and Indigenous nations on various projects that support community-engaged advocacy through creative and participatory research methods and collaborations.