Robert Houle is a contemporary artist, curator, and critic who has played a significant role in the recovery of Indigenous heritage in Canada. He draws on Western art conventions to tackle lingering aspects of European colonization of First Nations people. His work negotiates the complex interrelationships and influences that shape experience day by day. Dating to his early artistic career, this illustration of seven floating faces with a patterned background was made only one year after Houle was hired as the first Indigenous Curator of Contemporary Indian Art at the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History). Houle would subsequently leave this position only three years later, in large part due to the institutional treatment of Indigenous objects and disregard for traditional knowledge. It is difficult to say if the messengers pictured here refer to those of a Christian tradition or Indigenous spirituality, as both place importance on the role of messengers as intermediaries between the creator and those on earth. Having attended a Catholic mission-run residential school, Houle frequently expressed a bi-cultural identify combining elements of his Saulteaux heritage with modernist aesthetics and spiritualism.