How Indigenous Art Shapes Canada’s Process of Repair and Reconciliation

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A new book by Gallatin’s Eugenia Kisin examines the role of aesthetics in protest, history, and cultural resistance and preservation

Starting in the early 19th-century, the Canadian government pursued a variety of legislative efforts to dehumanize and oppress Indigenous people, including members of Haida, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, and Nisga’a Nations, whom they felt were not assimilated into Euro-Canadian culture.

Among these efforts, the government established the Residential School system. These church- and state-run institutions were filled with Indigenous children who were taken from their homes and often subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse, resulting in the death of more than 3,000 children. The school system lasted more than a century and by the time the last school closed in 1996, approximately 150,000 children had been residents.

In 1885, the Canadian government banned potlatches—festive and legal ceremonies held by Indigenous tribes in the Northwest Coast comprising feasts, dancing, and gifts—as a way to discourage Indigenous culture and law. And in the 21st-century, Indigenous tribes have organized and opposed the development of oil pipelines on tribal land, sometimes victorious, other times reconciling with continued development. The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which had been delayed for years and was heavily protested for expanding through tribal lands, was approved in 2024.

One common thread in all these scenarios is art—art employed as protest, history, and cultural resistance and preservation. In Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation, Gallatin associate professor Eugenia Kisin unpacks ways that Indigenous people in British Columbia have created and disseminated art on pressing social issues—negotiating meaning, reclaiming works of art for their communities, and reconciling conflicting feelings about government oppression, while creating art through government support.

In 2013, Kwakwaka’wakw chief and artist Beau Dick joined more than 100 Indigenous people at British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly to revive a traditional practice that had not been performed for decades. He cut a copper—a shield-like ceremonial object—on the legislative steps, a symbolic shaming ritual for the government’s exploitation of land and resources. “Bewildered media coverage fixated on what the breaking of copper means and makes tangible for Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Canada…but almost immediately, a parallel conversation emerged among critics, gallerists, and scholars about whether and how to claim this work as art,” Kisin writes.

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