Drawing on Identity: Inkameep Day School Art Collection
Curated by Gayle Cornish, on loan from the Osoyoos Museum
The drawings featured in this exhibition were created by children of the Osoyoos Indian Band who attended the Inkameep Day School, near Oliver, British Columbia, on the Nk’Mip Reserve. Between 1932 and 1942 these students and their teacher, Anthony Walsh worked together to create drawings, paintings, stories and plays that honoured traditional Okanagan language and culture. The arts became a way for the students, aged six to sixteen, to depict their everyday realities and their evolving sense of identity, growing up in mid-twentieth-century British Columbia. Their world was complex, layering Okanagan traditions and stories, old and new ways of life, an evolving agricultural economy, and North American popular culture.
Between 1863 and 1984, thousands of First Nations children across Canada were separated from their families and communities and sent away to government-run residential schools. These schools focused on cultural assimilation, deliberately and completely suppressing Native language and culture. There is little documentation of what aboriginal children’s lives were like in Canada between the first and second World Wars that is not associated with life in the residential school setting. The drawings from Inkameep Day School tell a very different story from those of many First Nations schoolchildren in the mid-twentieth century. This exhibition, comprised of 33-56 pieces, gives rare insight into how these children lived their lives and saw their world, and into the ongoing national dialogue around the history of evolving ideas of Canadian identity and citizenship.
In 2000, UVic visual anthropologist Andrea Walsh embarked on a partnership with B.C.’s Osoyoos Indian Band that has become a model for collaborative anthropological research with Indigenous communities. Nk’Mip Chronicles, the cornerstone exhibit of the band’s world-class Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre (and a VAG showcase exhibit in 2003), is a rare collection of aboriginal children’s art that, according to Walsh, documents “an important period in the cultural history of native art and identity production, circulation and consumption in B.C.” In turn, the success of Chronicles has triggered a series of related initiatives attempt to reunite indigenous people with missing objects/art/information. “In the process of reuniting, we then have the opportunity to begin to decolonize.”
The drawings featured in this exhibition were created by children of the Osoyoos Indian Band who attended the Inkameep Day School, near Oliver, British Columbia, on the Nk’Mip Reserve. Between 1932 and 1942 these students and their teacher, Anthony Walsh worked together to create drawings, paintings, stories and plays that honoured traditional Okanagan language and culture. The arts became a way for the students, aged six to sixteen, to depict their everyday realities and their evolving sense of identity, growing up in mid-twentieth-century British Columbia. Their world was complex, layering Okanagan traditions and stories, old and new ways of life, an evolving agricultural economy, and North American popular culture.
See Also
About the Inkameep Day School Art Collection – The Osoyoos Museum