Jane Ash Poitras’s Family Blackboard is a mixed media collage created in 1989.  The piece deals with the lack of and misguidance of Native education.  She used traditional Cree iconography along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, torn phonebook pages, airplane tickets explaining passenger’s rights, invalid credit card numbers and an altered Canadian dollar bill which Queen Elizabeth wears a feather.  Potras’s work is narrative in nature and is built upon a combination of symbols of her own heritage and the native heritage, modern cultures, and the language of contemporary art.  She believes she and her artwork can assist in reestablishing a common pride and identity for North American First people.  She also wants to provide a greater understanding of first nation’s culture to those who view her artwork.  This piece exemplifies this idea by presenting the different symbols of cultures and time.  She also exaggerates the variety of different ways/correctness within different cultures.  For example, the variety of symbols used by many different cultures for writing.  If a child is not taught these symbols they are insignificant to them through out life.  She is presenting a loss of history and culture by the narrow, misguided or possibly neglected education of Native Americans.
 Poitras was born October 11 in 1951 and raised in a foster home in Edmonton, at age six, after her mother’s death.  Her academic achievements include a B.S. in Microbiology and a B.F.A. from the University of Alberta and a M.F.A. in Print Making from Columbia University in New York City.  Poitras spent her childhood denying her Cree roots and ancestry.  She rediscovered her identity in adulthood and has since devoted her art towards reviling within it.
 Within the Family Blackboard, she adds a page from a Cree dictionary defining the word “orphan.”  This relates not only to her past but also to her cultural heritage that has been orphaned by the future generations and abandoned by others.  She expresses a vanishing race that has suffered general public neglect and discrimination for over 100 years.
Like Morrisseau, Poitras is trying to use her art to restore cultural pride of Native Americans.  With her extensive research and comprehension of First Nation History, through her art she hopes to reshape history so that others can read, understand and forge a link between past and present.  Morrisseau stuck with his ancestor’s symbols and iconography, but Poitras branched out combining both ancestor’s symbols, and modern symbols from a variety of cultures.  She combines these symbols with blazing colors and mixed media to get her message across.  She is a Native American who at age six lost her mother and her heritage only to find it again in adulthood.  She uses the influence of modern culture to remind and restore her own estranged historical culture.  She uses their methods and means as an interpreter in her message of cultural pride.