Survivor Truths: The Art of Reconciliation

My name is Andrea Walsh and I’m an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Smyth Chair in Arts and Engagement at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Robert Aller was a professional artist and specifically he was a painter. He instigated the extracurricular painting classes at the Alberni Indian Residential School. He was born in Manitoba and he spent time in Montreal and he ended up on Vancouver Island in Port Alberni in the 1950s. He was formally trained and this included being taught by Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer.

Survivors who remember his classes remember him as a gentle man with a soft voice, and a person who asked them questions about their ideas. One Survivor summed up his teaching by saying, quote, “He didn’t tell us what to paint. He showed us how to use the paint.”

I became involved with the Aller Collection after the University of Victoria received paintings created by Robert Aller through a gift from his estate. When the curators of the university’s gallery collected these works, they were shown a vast collection of children’s art that Mr. Aller had collected and exhibited not only from British Columbia, but also from Manitoba and Ontario.

Importantly, these works of art were created by Indigenous children to whom he had taught painting. The curators knew of my work with Indigenous children’s art and my interest and commitment to bringing these works back to people who created them or to their families. And Mr. Aller’s family agreed to include the children’s art in the estate gift. Importantly, the university has not accessioned these works into its collection. We’ve been caring for them as we work with communities to facilitate their return.

We reconnected the paintings with Survivors and their families with the help and leadership of Survivors themselves. Shortly after students and faculty completed a survey of the paintings from the Aller estate, we received permission from UVic to attempt to return the paintings to Survivors whose names appeared on the paintings.

We received permission from hereditary leaders to begin this work by bringing the paintings to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s regional event held in Victoria. There the paintings were on display with the story of their creation as well as the emerging project to return them to Survivors.

Working with Survivors who had contacted other Survivors through family and community networks, we began to notify people about the existence of the paintings and that we at the university and Survivors from the Alberni Residential School were working together. This group of Survivors includes people who themselves have paintings and those who do not, but were resident at the time when they were created and they know the children who attended Mr. Aller’s classes.

After the paintings were viewed by Survivors and the public in 2012, the TRC funded a commemoration event in the spring of 2013, where we officially returned the paintings to Survivors. At this event, we were surprised that after we gave back the paintings to Survivors, the majority of people asked for their paintings to stay at the university for their physical care. And importantly, they asked to begin work together on education initiatives with the artworks.

Over the last 10 years, Survivors, their families, and ourselves at UVic have collaborated on multiple exhibitions of the artworks and we give presentations together to schools and to public interest groups.

In the fall of 2023, the Survivors launched a nonprofit society with the support of faculty and students at UVic. The society is the Alberni Indian Residential School Survivors Art and Education Society. The society hosted its first Orange Shirt Day gathering with a paintings display that included educational tours for youth, in 2023.

The power of the paintings is rooted in their creation by children, and they’re a direct connection for Survivors to their own childhoods, and they have, for many people, been a source of healing from trauma. And for families, they are often the only thing a child has of their mother or father or relative from their childhoods.

For those of us who are outside of these private relationships, the paintings are opportunities to bear witness to children’s lives at a time when they were living in unimaginable conditions in the schools. They’re powerful because of what they portray, scenes of home, territory, relatives, ceremony, and cultural knowledge, and dreams and ideas of their futures. These were aspects of children’s intellectual activity and creativity that were denied in the schools.