When Photographs Fail, When Monuments Fall: Photography and Reparations in Canada

Abstract

Photography was an instrumental tool in Canada’s Indian Residential School system throughout the first half of the twentieth century, used by the government to promote, obscure, reveal, and conceal the violence directed at Indigenous children in state care. Though these static images—designed to contain their children subjects—failed to rouse civic intervention at the time, they are being revisited in the present as documents of a settler colonial past that needs to be redressed. Reading several of these archival school photographs against contemporary images of the recent toppling of a statue of Egerton Ryerson, one of the architects of the Indian Residential School system, this article considers the reparative work that photographs can perform in the civic imaginary. Drawing on the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, I propose that reparation is an ongoing and unfinished process that mirrors the open and contingent nature of the event of photography: one that is not ‘concluded’ in photographic capture.