Located within a brightly lit display case in the heart of the museum of Anthropology’s Multiversity Gallery are Artist Dionne Paul’s striking Photographic prints Her First Day of School and its companion piece His First Day of School (2013). The composite images, printed on paper and hung one above the other, depict in colour the artists own daughter and son baring proud smiles as they stand ready for their first day of school. Superimposed on top of these innocuous photographs taken in a familiar style are those of indigenous children of similar age on their first day in an Indian Residential School. These discordant pictures are edited together such that the bodies of the students attending the residential schools, pictured in black and white, seem to replace those of the artists children, forming what is in my opinion one haunting image. In her artist’s statement located beneath the two pieces Paul explains how, being of Coast Salish and Nuxalk ancestry, she aimed to present us with a stark juxtapose. With the images Paul contrasts the typical experience of a child on their first day of school which encompasses myriad emotions including angst, pride, and joy ending with the return to their parents with the inhumane and abusive experience of an indigenous child forcibly taken from their family and placed in a residential school. Through this juxtaposition, the artist presents us with “visual manifestations of the crimes against humanity committed at the 139 Indian Residential Schools in Canada” (Paul, 2013). Furthermore, these images are displayed within a western museum environment among many historical and anthropological artifacts and artworks. However, Paul positions the historical images of children in residential schools against very recent, and stylistically familiar images of a culturally recognizable experience thus rejecting the idea that the wrong doings of colonial settlers, such as the creation of residential schools, occurred in the distant past. She then reinforces this point by explaining how her own father attended a residential school which as recently as 1975, the year the Paul was born. In so doing, Paul not only educates those who visit the museum, she re-contextualizes the other artifacts and artworks that surround these images, and through her own work and in her own words takes ownership of her indigenous identity. Therefore, it is my view that through her works Her First Day of School and His First Day of School Dionne Paul engages in a form of “figurative repatriation” (Kramer, 2004).
Works Cited
Paul, Dionne. Her First Day of School. 2013 Photographic image on paper. Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver.
Paul, Dionne. His First Day of School. 2013 Photographic image on paper. Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver.
Kramer, Jennifer. “Figurative Repatriation: First Nations ‘Artist-Warriors’ Recover, Reclaim, and Return Cultural Property through Self-Definition.” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 9, 2004.