In Boston’s sprawling Triennial exhibition, an Indigenous artist’s evocations of cultural extinction haunt
By Murray Whyte
June 13, 2025
A dull thud, regular, muted, persistent, fills the stairwell at the MassArt Art Museum: Thump-thump, thump-thump. It’s strange but familiar. Then it hits you — it’s the rhythm of a beating heart, but its source is far from human.
In a vast chamber at the top of the stairs, a giant cedar box drum, a ceremonial instrument for Northwest Coast Indigenous cultures, hangs from the ceiling, trussed by thick rope. It’s immersed in a torrent of video, silently swirling around it, images of rushing water that makes the drum feel submerged. A spot-lit robotic arm pivots and strikes the drum again, and again.
A bear, in the signature red-and-black Northwest Coast Indigenous style, is emblazoned on the drum’s cedar hide, paint worn through on the spot where the robot makes contact: Thump-thump. It feels like a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie, where human rituals are carried out centuries past our own extinction — traditions preserved for no one, executed by an automaton, efficient and flawless. Here, it seems, the robots have won.
The spectacle, penetrating and unnerving, is the work of Nicholas Galanin, 46, a registered member of the Sitka tribe in Alaska and one of the most accomplished Indigenous contemporary artists in the country. Just outside in Evans Way Park, his “I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),” a bronze sculpture of a blocky, patchwork Tlingit totem pole, is one of the marquee offerings of the Boston Public Art Triennial. The MassArt installation, called “Aáni yéi xat duwasáak (I am called Land),” is an indictment of the threat Native American culture has endured under centuries of colonial rule, and the eerie intimation of extinction looms large here. But its warning is broader and holistically dire: Disconnection from the land and sea ends badly, with humanity writ large the ultimate loser. In the quest for domination, no one — nothing living, at least — wins.
Galanin, who is Tlingít and Unangax̂, has always worked on broader themes of Indigenous resilience and self-determination in the wake of centuries of colonial exploitation and dominance. Outside, “I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),” doubles over in an apparent attempt to reassemble itself from fragments of its own body; it’s an icon of Northwest coast cosmology and tradition re-ordered in a dystopian future.
Galanin’s work often has a wry, gallows-humor edge, and the laughs are pretty grim. It’s hard to argue they should be otherwise. But the future is important to Galanin, and his insistence that there is one is not to be ignored.
His work in recent years has included the giant text installation “Never Forget,” a stand of blocky white text anchored in the Southern California desert in 2021 that read “INDIAN LAND” in the same font and size as the “Hollywood” sign in Los Angeles. The implication is both literal and an indictment of the blithe erasures of popular culture: The 1923 “Hollywoodland” sign on the same site was the name of a whites-only real estate development. Galanin intended no empty gesture: The piece was an invitation to local landowners to become collaborators, and explore restoring land to local tribes from whom they had been taken generations before.
The inversion, blunt and confrontational, takes stock of shameful history, while projecting, unabashedly, a future goal. The landback movement is real, in motion, and has marked some successes at least north of the border: In Canada, Indigenous land claims have resulted in two dozen land repatriations covering more than a third of the nation’s land mass. Gains in the US have been much more modest, but they’re just as real: In 2023, then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the federal Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations had restored 3 million acres across 15 states to tribal trust ownership.
Here in Boston, Galanin wades into a particular history with a knowing wink. Northwest Indigenous motifs — the familiar red and black depictions of whales, ravens, bear, turtles, among others, using simple geometric forms — are among the best known and most popular Native American icons in the country, reproduced and sold as tourist trinkets by the million.
Land is a commodity too, Galanin knows; as a piece of public art, “I think it goes like this” nods to an Indigenous resurgence that needs to be more than cultural and aesthetic, but rooted in the earth — a progression that remains too slow, and now hampered by a federal government with different priorities. Since January, the Trump administration has cancelled 18 executive orders from the Biden administration that enhanced tribal sovereignty and self-governance.