Residential School Women's T-Shirt

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The remains of one of the residential schools in Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, just off the northern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. An excellent museum, the U'mista Cultural Centre, is nearby and explains what happened during the period the schools were operating.

As of 2015, this building no longer exists so this is a true reminder of the history of the area and of the residential school system.

These two images depict my interpretation of what it must have been like for the children in the schools. First, they were removed from their parents and culture and perhaps their only ray of hope was looking out the windows at the scenes of natural beauty that reminded them of home. Perhaps they also thought of escape and how they might achieve that, maybe even in a traditional dugout canoe...

I began photography with a Brownie camera my parents gave me as a child sometime in the 1950s. In the 1970s I finally graduated to an SLR and actually won a few contests, then took a hiatus through the 1990s but picked up digital photography in earnest in the mid-2000s. Now, many years later, it still excites me to venture out and try to find what the world is all about in my own way through this wonderful medium. To me, photography is about capturing the hidden meaning, the emotion, and the invisible in a given moment in time. It transcends mere composition and lighting. When it's done well, we sit up and take notice, we pause over an image, and if everything is perfect, we might even feel that slight tingling up the spine. While I try...