In 2021, Haida artist Tamara Rain Bull placed 215 pairs of children’s shoes and stuffed animals on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The display was intended to stand for the unmarked graves found that year at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Bull’s unsanctioned memorial has remained on those steps for two years. For many, it has been a space to gather and grieve for the thousands of Indigenous children who never returned home from residential schools, a staggering visual representation of loss and heartbreak.
But for others, the memorial means something else entirely. “[T]his is pretty straightforward, what they’re doing,” said former Vancouver city councillor Gordon Price in a 2022 interview with CBC reporter Angela Sterritt. “It’s theirs; that’s what I think they think about it. And [it’s] permanent: this is how we do shame and guilt. We will never not have a reminder.”
