Faye HeavyShield, Sisters, 1993

Abraham Anghik Ruben (Inuvialuit, b.1951) grew up immersed in a nomadic hunting life until, like thousands of other Inuit children, he and his siblings were taken into the residential school system. He comes from a large family of fourteen children, several of whom were taken in stages to mission schools. His older brother, the artist David Ruben Piqtoukun, and his sister Martha were among the first to be removed to the mission school in Aklavik in 1955. The Last Goodbye (2001) embodies one of his earliest and most searing memories: the moment his mother sat with them before their departure.

Anghik later recalled that his brother was only five years old, his sister a little older, and that the family did not see them again for three years. This intimate domestic moment—his mother’s embrace of her children—becomes the subject of a monumental carving in Brazilian soapstone, transforming a personal family memory into a shared visual testimony of the residential school experience.  

Formally, the sculpture emphasizes mass and containment. The mother’s large, rounded figure envelops the children, her arms encircling them in a protective embrace. The softness of the curves and the stone’s mottled green surface evoke endurance and shelter, yet the mother’s downcast face, carved with understated sorrow, reveals the pain of separation. The children lean into her, the boy pressing his face against her body, the girl turning outward, suggesting both dependence and the inevitability of departure. The title, The Last Goodbye, underscores the permanence of the break: though the children would return, their lives and their fluency in their language would be irreversibly altered. 

After more than a decade in boarding school, Anghik left formal education following Grade 10 and later studied at the Native Arts Centre at the University of Alaska, where he began to gather and interpret ancestral stories that shaped his early sculptural practice. The sculpture carries layered meaning. At one level, it honours maternal love as a site of cultural and emotional continuity. At another, it records the violence of colonial policy, which targeted precisely that maternal bond by removing children from families and communities. Anghik’s mother becomes an archetypal figure: not only his own mother but a representative of all Inuit mothers who endured the trauma of watching their children taken away. In this sense, the work functions both as memorial and as testimony, speaking to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to honour survivors and their families. 

The Last Goodbye holds a distinct place within Anghik’s body of work. While much of his later sculpture explores Norse, Inuit, and shamanic cosmologies, blending ancestral narratives across cultures, this work is grounded in lived experience. This sculpture captures what Anghik called “the dark night of my soul”—the spiritual and cultural dislocation of being stripped of language, family, and identity at residential school. This experience of separation would also shape the life and work of his brother, David Ruben Piqtoukun, whose own artistic practice reflects the enduring impact of residential schooling. In contrast to his mythological works, this sculpture distills the pain of a single moment into universal form. 

The Last Goodbye is not simply an artwork but an act of remembrance. It holds in stone what words often fail to convey: the silence of mothers left behind, the bewilderment of children sent away, and the enduring legacy of loss that continues to shape Indigenous communities today.