Flagpole was commissioned by the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver in 2017 as part of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebration. The focus of the piece is 150 years of colonization. For decades the Canadian government refused to acknowledge its role in the atrocities committed at the federally funded Residential School system. During most of the 20th century, these legislators forcibly removed Indigenous children from their home communities and housed them hundreds of miles away in dormitory residential schools. The kids were there to receive an Anglo-Christian education but were subjected to horrible abuse of all kinds. It is estimated that between 3200–6000 children died while at the schools. Few records were kept of these suspicious deaths but the families who lost their children always remembered them. Their lives remain in the memories and stories of the survivors.
Since the start of the 21st century, Indigenous communities across the country have lobbied the federal government to fund the search for these lost children. Starting in 2021, using ground penetrating radar, communities began to locate their lost children. As of 2023, 2472 human remains have been found in unmarked graves at several sites of the former schools. This is painful and ongoing work but necessary for all of us to move forward. I want my flagpole to function as a device to expose the unseen, and to be a symbol of distress and assimilation. The inversion of an institutional flagpole is an anti-monument and points to the failures of a nation.
