2026 Program

The Mackay Residential School Survivors Group Inc. proposes an intergenerational panel centered on the return of childhood paintings created by Cree, Dene and Anishinaabe children in the 1960s while they were students at Mackay Indian Residential School. These works were created under the guidance of volunteer art teacher Robert Aller, preserved by him for decades, and repatriated to families in 2021 through the University of Victoria and University College of the North, with a community return gathering held in Thompson, Manitoba.

For many families, these paintings were the first tangible records of their parents’ childhoods, childhoods largely undocumented due to residential school systems that disrupted family memory, language, and record-keeping. Receiving these works decades later allowed families to see their parents not only as survivors, but as children with imagination, humour, and inner lives.

Panelists who are intergenerational survivors and residential school survivors will speak to the emotional, cultural, and spiritual impact of this return. Intergenerational survivors will reflect on what it meant to encounter their parents’ creativity long after childhood had passed, how this process shaped family conversations and grieving, and how art can serve as a form of testimony when words or institutional records are absent. As many residential school survivors are now aging or passing on, this panel also addresses the growing responsibility carried by their children. The discussion will explore why this work must continue, how it can be taken up ethically and collectively, and what it means for intergenerational survivors to hold memory, care for returned materials, and ensure these stories are not lost again.

This panel centers survivor-led knowledge, lived experience, and relational approaches to healing, aligning with the conference’s focus on intergenerational harm, memory, and pathways toward collective healing.