Canada Day 2025

No Pride in Genocide

Below are a few illustrations of paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman from his major solo touring exhibition, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.

Launched in response to Canada’s 150th Anniversary celebrations in 2017, Monkman’s exhibition challenges mythologies around Canadian nationhood from an Indigenous perspective. As told by Monkman’s shape-shifting, time-travelling, gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, this critical examination of Canada’s history reveals the devastating impact of European cultures on Turtle Island as well as the enduring resilience of Indigenous Peoples.

To tell this story, Monkman curated archival objects and original work by other artists along with his own original artworks.

A fitting response as Canada Day is marked once again, is found in the foreword to the exhibition booklet.

In the voice of Miss Chief, Monkman writes that we cannot forget that the years since confederation “have been the most devastating for Indigenous people in this country: deliberate starvation, the reserve system, the legacy of incarceration, the removal of children to residential schools and the sixties scoop, sickness and disease, persistent third world housing conditions on reserves, contemporary urban disenfranchisement, violence and poverty. The fact that Indigenous people continue to survive all of this is a testament to our resiliency and strength.”

Paintings by Kent Monkman

Compositional Study for The Going Away Song, 2022: The painting deals with the 1885 hanging of eight Indigenous men in Battleford, Saskatchewan, following the North-West Resistance.

The Scream, 2017: This scene depicts Royal Canadian Mounted Police, priests and nuns ripping Indigenous children away from their parents to send them to residential schools.

The Scoop, 2018: The kidnapping of Indigenous children from their parents in the 1960s are shown in this work.

A Mother’s Grief, 2017

For the full exhibition program, click here.

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