In 2021, along a two-lane highway in Mandan, N.D., a giant billboard showing masked figures in clothing that was inspired by both Indigenous tradition and science fiction declared: “WE SURVIVE YOU.” Its artist, Cannupa Hanska Luger, is one of 17,000 members enrolled in the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations today.
In 2007, the Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore photographed an Indigenous woman with a “fringe” of blood (represented by red string) trickling from a diagonal scar across her back.
“To me it is a wound that is on the mend,” Belmore has said.
“She will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her.”Over the years, the Kalaaleq artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory has performed Greenlandic mask dances, or uaajeerneq, for audiences around the world: “It is a fearsome, sexy clown act,” she’s written, “that was handed down to me from my mother and other Inuit activist artists from Greenland’s movement to self-government in the 1970s.”
Persons:
”, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Rebecca Belmore, ” Belmore, “, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory
Organizations:
N.D, “
Locations:
Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nations