The Circle and the Rectangle: Art, Indigenous Residential Schools and the Dynamics of Oppression and Healing

This talk explores the key role played by North American Indigenous artists in confronting and healing the traumatic legacies of federally mandated residential and boarding schools. Many students experienced the abrupt transition from lives lived on the land to the rigid rectangular spaces of the school buildings as profoundly embodied experiences of constraint and confinement. Yet the limited art education made available by individual teachers in some of the schools could also introduce receptive students to Western pictorial traditions. The lecture explores the ways artists have both appropriated and resisted the spatial geometries of Western art and architecture in order to negotiate traumatic cultural losses and to create artistic projects that promote understanding and healing.