This work showing Indian Residential School boys praying to “get the hell out of here” is by Judy Chartrand, a contemporary artist of Manitoba Cree heritage based in Vancouver. She is one of five nominees from the Pacific region for the prestigious 2024 Sobey Art Award.
The full list of 30 nominees from across Canada is here. The short list will be announced June 11.
If you are not familiar with the horrific record of Canada’s residential schools, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has an overview here. At least 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis children were taken from families and forced to attend residential schools far from home from the 1830s to 1996. Sexual and physical abuse was widespread at the schools, run by the Catholic church and other denominations.
The easiest take-away from the Commission is:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that residential schools were “a systematic, government- sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.” The TRC characterized this intent as “cultural genocide.”
Read more about Canada’s shameful heritage of Indian Residential Schools, Missing and Murdered Woman and other indigenous indignities in the posts outlined below.
The Studio Ceramics Canada site (here on WordPress) has a fabulous bio of Judy Chartrand, here.
Image credit: Judy Chartrand, Indian Residential School Boys Praying We Get The Hell Out of Here, 2018. Low-fired clay, glaze, mixed-media, 50.8 × 139.7 × 47 cm.
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So powerful and how horrific, the reality of it all.
And still reverberating harm. Just an awful heritage of horrific abuse.
There is so much of it everywhere. I don’t understand how evil and greedy people can actually be. Horrible.