SUKO Magazine

Kent Monkman and Canada’s Colonial Ghosts

Written By Sylphia Basak, March 2026

Kent Monkman, The Going Away Song, 2022
Acrylic on canvas 60x90”

The boy stares at me with eyes clouded by tragedy, a face lined like an old man’s. The children behind share variations of the same steely look; mixed with fear, anguish, determination, resolve and grief. Not only their own, but of all who came before them.

The Going Away Song is a depiction of November 27, 1885. The day when Indigenous children from the Battleford Industrial School (1883-1914) in Saskatchewan were taken from school and forced to watch the mass hangings of eight Cree and Assiniboine men - some of them their own relatives - who were sentenced to death for their acts of resistance. The executions were ordered by Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to show them that "the white man governs."

Those hanged included:
kâ-papâm-ahchakwêw (Wandering Spirit) - whose song also acts as the title of the painting
papamê-kisik (Round the Sky) kitahwahkên (Miserable Man)
manicôs (Bad Arrow) nahpasê (Iron Body)
apisciskôs (known as Little Bear)
Itka (Crooked Leg)
Waywahnitch (Man Without Blood)

- (Description from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)

Taking place in the same month as Remembrance Day, this particular anniversary is often completely ignored in discussions of Canadian history. I myself didn’t know of it until seeing this painting at the exhibition.

A central tenet of Kent Monkman’s art is the erased histories of Indigenous peoples’ of Turtle island. An inversion of European depictions of the “Other” and their romantic depictions of colonialism. Such is the case of The Going Away Song, which is a depiction of the European conquering of Turtle island through the eyes of those whom they sought to erase.

Kent Monkman, The Annunciation, 2024
Acrylic on canvas 48x60"

Monkman is a Cree visual artist and member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation) in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada). His art explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience, through an Indigenous, decolonial lens. Through his work, Monkman depicts the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous life across a variety of artistic mediums including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. Often a muse in his work, Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle appears as a “time-travelling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples” (Monkman’s official website).

In his Montreal exhibit, History is Painted by the Victors, Monkman's work is an amalgamation and recontextualization of “historic painting.” He pulls motifs and stylistic inspiration from North American and European art, and reverses the narrative of them to retell these histories through an indigenous lens. Monkman uses Greco-Roman and romantic-inspired technique, even directly paying a sort of satirical homage to specific paintings, such as A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Mrs. Testickle (Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego) is depicted in several paintings as gazing directly at the viewer, breaking the fourth wall and defying colonial depictions of

Georges-Pierre Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86

Kent Monkman, Sunday in the Park, 2010
Acrylic on canvas 72x96”

Indigenous women as passive subjects to Europe’s conquest of Turtle Island. Even the land itself, which populates the backdrops of many of his paintings, acts as an inversion of European romanticization in many ways, the nature in Monkman’s grandest landscapes is as alive as his subjects in the foreground, beautifully capturing the depth and scale of the natural environments of Turtle Island.

Canada’s relationship to its role in imperialism is somewhat unique, at least in comparison to its more overtly villainous partners - the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In that, globally, our cultural reputation is not necessarily predicated on the horrors we have enacted on others, despite being at best complicit and at worst, active perpetrators in the colonial-capitalist system, especially towards indigenous people. Yet, for so long we have gotten away with our veneer of polite liberalism, not being “as bad” as our southern neighbours. Our acknowledgment of Canadian history is done largely through a lens of avoidance and moral grandstanding.

Kent Monkman, , 2019
Acrylic on canvas 120x102”

Kent Monkman, , 2025
Acrylic on canvas 25×20”

A lovechild of cultural values of the United States and United Kingdom with the same rising costs of living, but without any of the global cultural influence. As the runt of the imperial core, we lag behind our siblings-of-empire. We hesitate to dive headfirst into fascism like the golden child, America. Instead, we are fed it in spoonfuls, so we can digest it without even knowing. We don’t send state mercenaries to disappear immigrants, we simply implement policy which restricts their entry. We hire them as service and agriculture workers and rescind any chances of them becoming permanent citizens. We don’t outright ignore the genocide of Indigenous peoples from which our nation was built, we acknowledge our country as their land as we continue to steal it. We don’t deny the existence of a climate crisis, we only grant private developers access to bulldoze natural habitats for condos and pipelines. We don’t directly finance Israel’s genocide of Palestine, we only make and send the parts of weapons with which that genocide is carried out. We only allow private companies and institutions to invest in weapons manufacturing and say nothing as people are bombed, starved and shot at while receiving aid. We don’t light the fire, but we do nothing and watch the flames spread.

Kent Monkman, 2017
Acrylic on canvas 84x126” Collection of the Denver Art Museum

In the wake of ICE’s newfound wave of unfettered power, manifesting in openly killing (white) civilians in the street (prior to this year, deaths in ICE custody or at the hand of ICE mercenaries were largely Black and brown people who were privately imprisoned and often of “negligence), many liberal Canadians have expressed gratitude to be living in ‘safer’ country. However, statistics show police-related deaths are on the rise. And this holds particularly true for Black and indigenous people across the country.

Beyond leftist spaces, there is still an uncomfortable truth which lies at the heart of Canadian identity, one which must be reckoned with if we are to survive the internal collapse of our neighbours down south, especially if we are to anticipate ICE patrolling our streets come summer. We are every bit as complicit in modern colonial-capitalism as America and the UK are and we are equally responsible for dismantling what is done within our borders, and for breaking down the supply chain this country has formed as a means of carrying out imperialist projects globally. Indigenous women make up 16% of all female homicide victims, and 11% of missing women, yet Indigenous people make up only 4.3% of the population of Canada (Assembly of First Nations). ICE has five head offices in Canada. A factory in Brampton manufactures their trucks. Honeywell, a company with a factory in Mississauga, manufactures the engines for the F-35’s used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza.

Canada’s colonialism is not a ghost. It is alive and well, and hides behind the bravado of others. It was not so long ago that those children were kidnapped, their hair cut, forced to leave their life behind and were stuffed into their kidnappers' idea of humanity. It was not so long ago that they were forced to watch their elders die. It was even more recently that their bones were found in the courtyards of those prisons. One of the most powerful thorough lines of past and present is The Going Away Song, followed by individual portraits of modern indigenous leaders, in which we see the great-great-great granddaughter of kâ-papâm-ahchakwêw (Wandering Spirit), the late Pauline Shirt (1943-2024).

Kent Monkman, , 2021
Acrylic on canvas 60x40”

Kent Monkman, , 2020
Acrylic on canvas 60x36”

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort by mainstream art institutions to depoliticize art. When we visit the art museums of Europe and the Americas, they are often filled with a combination of stolen artifacts from the global south, and with paintings of European high society, romanticized depictions removed from the context in which they were created, and entirely erasing those on the periphery of these societies, thus proving Monkman right. That history is indeed “painted by the victors.” Beyond portraying the violence of the past however, Monkman again defies the colonial gaze in his depictions of the threads of residence connecting the past and the present. Mrs. Testickle, for example, is often, in modern iterations of Indigenous cultural wear, and louboutins. Monkman chooses to depict the inherent victory of survival, despite the onslaught of atrocity brought to his people. He depicts the solidarity which exists between Indigenous people and immigrant communities of the global south. The colonial gaze operates in art largely through its romanticization of the past,which not only erases the history of “The Other,” but leaves a void in the present and future in which it is presumed that our systems will continue to operate as they wish; at the whims of the rich and white. Monkman chooses to fill this void through his artistic depictions of present political movements and surrealist amalgamations of past and present. In portraying the present as history, Monkman leaves a blank space for the future that is far more hopeful for the oppressed than for his European historic counterparts.

Kent Monkman, Resurgence of the People, 2019
Acrylic on canvas 132x264” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The themes of this exhibition are integral in how Canadians must reexamine our history and positionality within the colonial-capital empire today, particularly as the Western world races rapidly toward accelerated fascism. It forces Canadians to reckon with our complicity in the colonial systems. The depiction of the brutal truths of our past - from MMIWG2S, residential schools, modern state repression, environmental destruction - we can no longer use the veneer of “niceness” as a shield for our discomfort. The subjects facing their viewers send a clear message:

“Don’t you dare look away.”

You can view Monkman’s collected works here.