Before 1980 Robert Houle's artworks were hard-edged, linear abstractions. After 1980 he began to paint loosely woven, abstract colour fields. The change was due in part to his growing involvement with Aboriginal issues and, subsequently, holistic beliefs. Indeed, his approach to many art projects is filtered through his Saulteaux spirituality. Houle fuses this approach with his training in twentieth-century modernist abstraction and colour principles, producing work whose various components blend to create a charged emotional landscape.

Beyond this, each work challenges the Eurocentric versions of Canada's history and attempts to change the misconceptions that surround Aboriginal peoples. He rejects the stereotypes of the "noble savage" and the "vanishing race" that have dominated Canadian and American history books and institutions to date. Many of Houle's recent compositions approach this task by taking historical images from the repertoire of Western art and altering them to emphasize another way of looking at the events depicted.