Mark Atleo, Sockeye Salmon,1960s

Mark Atleo (Kiikitakashuaa, Ahousaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) created his Sockeye Salmon painting when he was seven years old while attending the Alberni Indian Residential School in the early 1960s. It depicts a deep-blue salmon marked with bright yellow and green patterns, its body caught within the black lines of a fishing net, surrounded by swirling purple waters. Rendered in tempera paint, the image reflects what he had learned in his early life: before being taken to school, his grandfather had taught him to tie knots and fish. Created in an institution designed to sever Indigenous children from their language, culture, and family, this simple yet vibrant depiction of a salmon in a net is both a personal memory and a profound act of cultural survival. 

The art class in which Atleo made this painting was led by volunteer teacher Robert Aller, who encouraged children to paint what was important to them rather than replicate European models. While residential school classrooms typically silenced Indigenous voices, Aller’s approach allowed moments of truth-telling through children’s art. Survivors later recalled how many children painted images of home, family, and culture—subjects denied to them in daily life. In Atleo’s case, the sockeye salmon carries layered significance in Nuu-chah-nulth traditions.

Salmon are not only a source of food but are understood as living relatives who return each year, sustaining both physical life and cultural continuity through reciprocal relationships among people, waters, and the more-than-human world. The salmon symbolizes abundance, sustenance, and renewal. By painting the salmon, Atleo was not simply depicting an animal but expressing a worldview in which human life is inseparable from the cycles of the natural world. In doing so, he asserted visual sovereignty: a child’s capacity to affirm identity and cultural ties even under oppressive conditions. Years later, he explained that the salmon and net symbolized the “circle of life” his grandfather had shared with him, linking ancestral teachings from the past to his own experience as a child and to the knowledge carried forward into future generations. In capturing these lessons, the painting preserved ancestral knowledge that the school sought to erase. 

The significance of this painting deepened decades later when it was returned to Atleo as part of a University of Victoria project led by Dr. Andrea Walsh which reunited survivors with artworks that Aller had preserved. At a Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Vancouver in 2013, Atleo was ceremonially presented with his long-forgotten painting. He was overwhelmed: he had repressed memories of his early years and no recollection of ever making the piece. Seeing it again was like “turning the telescope the right way,” unlocking grief and suppressed memory while also reconnecting him to his grandfather’s teachings and to the joy of fishing. 

The return of the painting became a catalyst for healing. Atleo has described how the image opened him up emotionally, enabling him to speak about his experiences and reconnect with former classmates and family. Sockeye Salmon exemplifies how children’s art created under the shadow of residential schools carries cultural knowledge across time. What begins as a child’s memory of fishing becomes a vessel of resilience and testimony, grounded in relationships among people, land, and water, returning decades later as a source of truth, healing, and renewal. Today, he uses the painting as a teaching tool, sharing its story with younger generations and the broader public. In doing so, he transforms a personal act of childhood expression into communal testimony.