Throughout my experience at the Museum of Anthropology, the art pieces brought to light the many issues Indigenous people faced and still face today. As I walked through rows and rows of artwork, holding the devastating stories of oppression, but also the beautiful stories of culture, love, and family. The pieces that struck me the most was ‘Her First Day of School’ and ‘His First Day of School’ by Dionne Paul. The artworks depict the immense oppression against Aboriginal children within the era of residential schools in Canada. The artworks compare the residential school system with modern day schooling. Dionne Paul describes the first day of school as a day that is “typically synonymous with nervous yet proud parents sending their clean, well fed, well dressed children off to a safe learning environment to play and meet new friends and then return home”, although for Indigenous families “the first day of school was for many decades, was the opposite experience”.
Kramer would describe Paul as an artist warrior: she was “able to unsettle the museum visitor by disorienting their expectations. Myself, as a museum visitor, the artworks did disorient my expectation. In fact, many of the artworks within the museum did, although Paul’s piece in particular blew me away, in the sense that my mind couldn’t break away from the piece.
Looking into the eyes of the children within the piece, you see a happy child, smiling from ear to ear. But for the Indigenous children shown on the overlaid image, that was not the case. The two images represent the lives of thousands of Indigenous children and families, and the struggles they faced throughout Canadian history.