“I will never forget the day the media announced the discovery of a mass grave of two hundred and fifteen Indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc community. It was May 27th, 2021, and that was just the beginning. Today, the numbers have grown into the thousands. The following weeks and months continued to reveal a situation that is sickening. I am angry. This is my response.

The Truth and Reconciliation Project aims to bring awareness, compassion, and action to this very dark period in our country.

I wanted the work to be presented on a large scale, so that viewers would be confronted with the size of the problem. There are 139 images in this show – one for each residential school in Canada.

While I carefully chose pictures to illustrate what I was feeling, I worked in close collaboration with the owners of Native Renaissance Gallery. Any image that concerned the team was discussed and dealt with accordingly, ensuring images were not culturally offensive in a way I may not have understood. This process alone was deeply informative.

I asked myself how each picture could affect the viewer – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. I want Indigenous people to feel supported, seen, heard, and loved. I want settlers to feel the horror and see the truth – but also beauty, resilience, and innocence. I want settlers to feel moved toward action. But I do not wish to cause anyone trauma. This work is my personal response to Canada’s shameful residential school legacy, but the story of each image does not belong to me.

Since I usually work from photographs, I felt my technique could do justice to these very old historic photos and bring them alive here in the present. The style mimics how my grandfather used to colorize photos when he owned his camera store. In a small way, I wanted to honor him and the respect he had for the Cree people in Saskatchewan, where he grew up.

I don’t want my work to cause discord. Everything in the gallery must get along. I have been traveling to this gallery since high school to get moccasins and look at the corn husk men and masks. This gallery is special to me. And this community, where I now live, means a lot to me.

Creating this series has taught me so much, from the critical importance of language to the damaging effect that cutting hair had on children. I have learned more about our unjust systems and that real change can only happen with systematic reform. The more I learn, the more I respect and admire Indigenous views on family, education, and our duty to care for and protect the land and water.

Living in this community, listening to stories of survivors, and just spending time with people helped inform the work in this show. I also listened to podcasts, radio documentaries, and immersed myself. I cried most days. I have been difficult to deal with at times during these 5 months, and I thank all who endured my moods. I have absorbed a great deal of pain and hurt in this process. Viewers may feel some of that in this work. I hope so.

Most of all, though, I have witnessed Indigenous people’s capacity for forgiveness. It is humbling, inspiring, and I’m trying to embrace this in my own life, in my own healing.

If we can face the truth together, perhaps we can reconcile. But first, we must be honest about what happened. This body of work is my attempt to illustrate the hard truth we need to face as a settler nation that has benefited from systematic oppression and abuse of the Indigenous population, Canada’s first peoples.

I invite you, the viewer, to take away the truth and at least one action you feel compelled to commit to, to help us walk the painful and hopeful path to reconciliation together.”

Ken Leighton