Brings to Light

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Jaimie Isaac, “My Inheritance,” 2013

hardware, found wood and archival transparencies on acrylic slides (left); and “Alexander School,” 2014, painted laser-cut wood sculpture, light and audio recording; installation view at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg (photo by Karen Asher)

A model of the Fort Alexander Residential School on the Sagkeeng First Nation sits on the floor in a dark corner of Jaimie Isaac’s exhibition, Brings to Light, in Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg. Lit from within, its boxy façade casts soaring reflections of windows on the gallery walls. But something else also pours from this austere sculpture – the voice of Isaac’s grandmother, Mary Courchene, telling her story.

Now an Elder, as well as an Indigenous education activist, Courchene was just five when she started attending the school, an hour’s drive north of Winnipeg. She says she felt profoundly lonely for the next 10 years but also describes how she found moments of resistance and ways to stay connected to her family and culture. 

The first of these moments came during her first year at school, after she realized she could see her home through one of the dormitory windows. She describes how her loneliness dissipated when she saw her mother hanging laundry outside their house. These stolen moments of connection, she says, were how she survived her time at residential school. 

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Jaimie Isaac, “Knowledge As Territory: 4 Ways” (detail), 2022

mixed media on birch and hardware, installation view (photo by Karen Asher)

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Jaimie Isaac, “Knowledge As Territory: 4 Ways,” 2022

mixed media on birch and hardware, installation view (photo by Karen Asher)

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Like many Indigenous people, Isaac, the chief curator of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, as well as an artist, carries this intergenerational legacy of survival. Her grandmother has contributed to her art practice for years, and other relatives are also supportive. “My family encouraged me to bring to light these histories to reflect and pay respect to the survivors, those that never came home, and those still struggling,” says Isaac.

Isaac, whose show continues to Feb. 17, uses the metaphor of the window in another work, a series of archival photos displayed in wooden lightboxes. Lit from the rear and arranged in two rows on a wall near the model, they glow like embers. “I wanted people to think about looking through a window,” she says. 

The images show children in classrooms and church, as well as posing for class photos outside the school. In one picture, a group of children in a boxy sleigh are pulled across the snow by two horses. The work, My Inheritance, illuminates the stories not only of these children but also their families and the broader history of intergenerational trauma.  

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Jaimie Isaac, “Restitution Repatriation,” 2022

school desk and chalkboard, installation view at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg (photo by Karen Asher)

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Jaimie Isaac, “Restitution Repatriation” (detail), 2022

school desk and chalkboard, installation view at Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg (photo by Karen Asher)

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At the front of the gallery, amid brighter lighting, is a blackboard. Lines printed on one half of it offer an encouraging affirmation: “GIGA ANISHINAABEMOWIN MIINAWAA!” It translates to: “I will learn Anishinaabemowin!” The other half lets visitors participate by adding words in Anishinaabemowin from Pocket Ojibwe for Kids and Parents, a book that sits, along with chalk, on the blackboard’s ledge. The piece counters the residential school system’s determination to dole out punishment to destroy children’s connections to their own languages.

Across from the blackboard are four circular knowledge panels made from birch. This interactive installation celebrates the medicine wheel and Indigenous knowledge of the land, language and medicine – including tobacco, cedar, sage and sweet grass – as well as epistemology and cosmology. 

Courchene never told her children about her experiences at residential school when they were growing up. Only years later, when she gave a public presentation, did they finally hear her story. Her greatest regret, she says, is not passing down her language to them. She now teaches Anishinaabemowin to others, including Isaac. ■

Jaimie Isaac: Brings to Light at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg from Nov. 24, 2022, to Feb. 17, 2023.

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