Kent Monkman’s painting series Knowledge Keepers focuses on the children who were forced by the Canadian government to attend “residential schools,” or more accurately, work camps. Students removed to the schools—a practice which began in Canada during the 1830s and continued well into the 1990s—spent most of their time undertaking forced labour in an assimilationist project designed to cut them off from Indigenous knowledge, language, and family bonds. In these new paintings, Monkman honours the history of resistance in the institutions and depicts Indigenous children reclaiming their identities in intimate moments together, sharing knowledge and comforting each other.

The Knowledge Keepers compositions take inspiration from the works of the Barbizon school. An offshoot of the nineteenth-century naturalism movement, Barbizon artists frequently portrayed scenes of field labourers as a counterpoint to the unpopulated landscapes of the Romanticism period. Their paintings were distinguished by stark silhouettes, muted tones, and “golden hour” lighting. Monkman draws from these techniques to portray the reality of Indigenous children’s experiences in the camps. Out in the fields, they perform grueling labour from sunrise to sunset while wearing ill-fitting school uniforms.

Despite the punishing drudgery of incarceration, Indigenous children in the paintings foster a close relationship to the land and to each other. Away from the prying eyes of nuns and priests, they whisper together in their own languages, draw syllabics in the dirt, and share traditional teachings about the stars. These stolen moments of intimacy, comfort, and tenderness become acts of resistance and cultural resilience in the brutal, unloving environment of the work camps.

Knowledge Keepers shines a light on the labour performed by child workers in residential schools, but it also highlights a sense of hope. As Cree scholar Wilfred Buck has discussed, what was lost to Indigenous people can be brought back again through dreams. Children like those depicted in Knowledge Keepers represent the fierce determination and resilience to maintain Indigenous knowledge and the possibility of returning to our ways of knowing.