Multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Galanin works at the intersection of conceptual and material practice, rooted in his Lingít and Unangax̂ background and his relationship to Land. Working in diverse media, he celebrates Indigenous cultural continuum, refuses the legitimacy of colonization and occupation, and fights cultural erasure.

In the exhibition, The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change, Galanin reflects on the distance between peace and justice by centering the enduring Indigenous protection of Land in the face of expansive extraction. He relates: “We can sharpen our vision of the present with cultural knowledge and memory. These works embody cultural memory and practice, reflecting persistence, sacrifice, violence, refusal, endurance, and resistance.”

The exhibition includes photography, monotypes, large and small sculptural works in bronze, ceramic, and wood, and an interactive installation. Through his layered work, Galanin centers Indigenous knowledge and responsibility to Land, inviting consideration of our collective interdependence and connection.

Post-colonial Fever Dreams and Memories of Vision is a series of monoprints drawn from Nicholas Galanin’s relationship to Land and Lingít culture. His images are created from memory, story, experience, teachings, and research; they are depictions of motion and form, becoming, transforming, and lingering. As the title suggests, these prints gesture toward the overlaps between feeling and knowing, remembering, and forgetting, what can be seen (and what cannot) under the continuing pressure of settler-colonial frameworks. Each image is unique, fixed only for a single imprint; trailing motions in ink evidence the artist’s hand tracing out memories and visions. Post-colonial Fever Dreams and Memories of Vision is a meditation on the persistence of Indigenous connection to Land, embedded in every layer of consciousness.

The title, Translation Approximation, references the gaps between different languages and the cultures that shape them. When literal or exact translation is not possible, approximation using available vocabulary and concepts is used to communicate ideas, information, or understanding. This sculpture uses a round bronze survey marker that reads “Lenapehoking” (homelands of the Lenape), fitted into a rock gathered near the Hudson River to communicate with a material and practice used by the settler-colonial state. Survey markers are used for triangulation points, fixed stations for surveying projects, and typically set up by a government. This type of survey marker is intended to be permanent as under U.S. law it is a misdemeanor to intentionally remove or destroy one.

There is no equivalent translation attempts to describe the immeasurable nature of Land, using forms understandable to colonial and settler thought. The installation shifts the objective of Land surveying instruments and markers. Instead of supporting measuring equipment, the tripod supports a solid rock from a coastline in Galanin’s home territory. The rock allows a visitor to align their view of the surroundings with its facets and points from numerous directions as an immobile feature of Land that offers navigation. The mobile purpose of the tripod removes the rock’s capacity to act as a wayfinder as if the Land is to be looked through, instead of looked to for guidance.

The installation is completed with a pile of survey markers tied with strips of polar bear hide and fur in place of fluorescent marking flags. The recognizable marking stakes are no longer intended to stand apart from Land as white survey flags signifying excavation locations. Instead of cutting off and claiming Land, the markers piled together signify what is held beneath the surface in relation to what is supported above: unequivocal dependence on Land.

The Reenactment (Inversion) photo series documents the burning of an Indonesian carved imitation of a Lingít totem pole on a beach near the artist’s home in Sheet’ Ka (Sitka, Alaska). Russian, European, and Anglo-American settlers along with missionaries burned totem poles throughout the coastal Land now known as Alaska and British Columbia. The destruction of these poles by invading people attempting to colonize the Land for wealth extraction confused totems for religious iconography. Believing the totems to be representations of deities, they were deemed heretical.

Settler colonial invasions of the Americas used religious missions as a tool to divide and conquer Indigenous communities, to remove and replace traditional knowledge and cultural practices rooted in the Land with belief systems emphasizing obedience to a spiritual ruler (and by proxy to the political rulers claiming to be ordained by religious figures). In burning the Indonesian carved imitation totem, the reenactment is an inversion of past destruction; both destroying the imitation and appropriated form and creating new works of Indigenous art rooted in reality.

Pause for Applause is an interactive installation reflecting on the performative nature of Land acknowledgments that are frequently empty. A mark placed on the floor with gaffer tape signals where to stand to read from two teleprompters which are positioned on each side of a mirror hung in front of the participant. The text scrolling on the teleprompters reads:

“We acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional, ancestral lands of ____[Insert Indigenous Nation or Tribe]____.
We honor their past, present, and future generations, and recognize their enduring connection to this Land.
We commit to respecting our ____[Insert Indigenous Nation or Tribe]____ as we continue to learn and grow on this shared Land.”

The repeating text offers no acknowledgment of past invasions, thefts, genocides, forcible displacements, kidnappings, or continued occupations. The only acknowledgment is of existence. That Indigenous people continue to exist on their homelands, and in proximity to thier homelands, and that these homelands are now shared and will continue to be shared.

The primary audience for participants is their reflection in the mirror. Whether the script is read aloud or silently, viewers are speaking to themselves, ensuring that the work is individualized to each participant’s experience and identity relative to Land and Indigeneity. Participants and viewers of participation are invited to consider what the purpose of Land acknowledgements are, to consider what they mean depending upon who is using them, and to what end they are being enacted.

I don’t think it was supposed to go like this (in memoriam) is a unique bronze sculpture that has been cast from a split Indonesian-carved imitation of a Lingít totem pole, stacked as firewood. The work functions as a kind of memorial for the countless totems along the coast of the Pacific Northwest that were cut down and burned during Russian, European, and Euro-American invasion and settlement of the region. The source material layers a recent history of appropriation and erasure.

The representation of cultural material is not accurate, but a counterfeit version created to enrich European and Euro-American entrepreneurs profiting from access to low-cost Indonesian skilled labor and Indigenous cultural material. The work’s title references Galanin’s series of sculptures of painted, chopped, and splintered totems in various arrangements entitled, I think it goes like this, each suggesting the possibility of reassembly. In this work, there is no attempt to reassemble the splintered pieces, they are immovable, welded together in a permanent remembrance, titled with the refusal that this was inevitable.

The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change is a series of four cast-bronze fish clubs, created from an original cedar carved by Nicholas Galanin. Each club has a unique patina and corresponds to a cardinal direction. Fish clubs have long been important tools for Indigenous peoples of coastal Alaska and continue to be used to kill large fish once pulled on board a fishing boat. Traditionally carved from wood with animal forms rooted in Lingít culture, they reflect the maker or owner of the club, or the club’s purpose.

Today, fish clubs are mass produced, most closely resembling short baseball bats. Unlike historic Lingít fish clubs that return eventually to the Land or Sea, unless they are contained in a museum collection, Galanin’s bronze clubs are made with persistence in mind. These objects retain their function; fully capable of killing a large fish, they also demand considerable strength from a person to wield them due to their substantial weight. To someone unfamiliar with these tools, they might be mistaken for war clubs that are typically longer and often with sharp protrusions. This possible confusion is an opportunity to reflect on the regularity with which settler-colonial entities and individuals confuse Indigenous insistence on responsibility to Land and Water for an existential threat.

Land claims persist worldwide, from Indigenous communities that are intent on protecting ancestral Land and ecosystems, and from settler-colonial occupations intent on expanding control over wealth extraction on Land and Sea viewed as “resources” rather than life sources. These types of Land claims have always been diametrically opposed in theory and practice. The persistence of settler-colonial Land claims (and Land use) have rapidly created climate changes accelerating toward climate collapse and increasing extinction of species. The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change (North, East, South, West) are permanent markers of Indigenous responsibility to Land based on subsistence rather than control.

3D Consumption Illustration presents an endpoint of colonial wealth extraction. Three cast bronze sections of firewood cut from a totem rest on a set of brass andirons like those in wealthy European and Euro-American homes during the invasion and settlement of Alaska. The totems burned by colonial incursions and missionaries along the coast of Alaska were never exported as firewood to heat the homes of wealthy heads of state or financiers of exploratory expeditions. Instead, they are signifiers of the wealth extracted and exported to heat those homes.

Fur, fish, and minerals, followed by oil and timber, have been extracted and exported from Alaska to build fortunes wielded as weapons of control over Indigenous people. Totems were burned as an act of conquest and destruction, not for practical necessity. The time and labor required to prepare and carve a totem, and the cultural knowledge and teachings involved are immeasurable in contrast to the light and heat a few logs cut from it can provide. The material and cultural wealth stolen in the quest for “resource” extraction was exponentially more significant than the comfort its destruction has provided.

A carved totem pole made in Indonesia for the commercial market nearly disappears into an expanse of floral wallpaper. The Imaginary Indian (Garden) interrogates the ways in which Indigenous culture is commodified by and for non-Indigenous communities, in this case tourists visiting Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The Imaginary Indian series layers the colonial desire to conquer and collect culture with subsequent desires to imitate colonized cultures. The fetishization of early contact and pre-contact Lingít art during the early 1800s has resulted in skeletal, ghost-like objects in gallery and museum collections. The series points to the romanticization of these works as a form of colonization of culture, dependent on devaluing current cultural artistic production, while reflecting the attempt to disappear the Indigenous into the European.

A ceramic likeness of a police battering ram, Shattering ram (keep your peace), is glazed with police blue and finished with gold luster, evoking the dress uniform worn by police forces throughout the U.S. for public and private press events. Shattering ram (keep your peace), as its title suggests, is shattered into fragments, and displayed as an artifact of a collapsing structure of violence, emphasizing the brittleness underlying the threat of violence.

Real battering rams used to force entry cause unnecessary damage with the potential to injure people; they are a tool to instill fear as much as to force entry.* The history of policing in the U.S. is rooted in patrols (paid by enslavers) to track down people who successfully escaped bondage, and the military policing of the prison camps that Indigenous people were forcibly confined to.** Shattering ram (keep the peace) speaks to the fragility of systems built on the oppression and disenfranchisement of people through systemic racism and capitalist hierarchy that criminalizes poverty and seeks to maintain control over the working class with the fear of criminal poverty.

*Firefighters routinely force entry without the use of battering rams due to the unnecessary damage they cause and the risk of injury they pose.
**These prison camps eventually became what is known today as the Reservation System.

The photographic self-portrait Artist carrying the weight of imitation (after Christ carrying the cross) references the compositions of numerous depictions of Christ carrying the cross in European painting. From Bosch to El Greco, these paintings depict suffering and self-sacrifice as a necessity for redemption within Christianity. Galanin’s photograph replaces the cross (a torture device) with an Indonesian replica totem, carved to imitate Lingít totems.* In these images, the artist literally carries the weight of the imitation, and references the weight of cultural appropriation combined with capitalization on culture, expectation, and fantasy. The specific references to Christian iconography emphasize the continuing legacy of Church missionaries whose misunderstandings and fears of totemic art contributed to the destruction of cultural objects and knowledge in the name of “salvation” and “civilization.” The object Galanin carries in these works is neither a cross, nor a Lingít cultural totem, it is a signifier of more than suffering and self-sacrifice. Together with the object he carries, Galanin embodies the reality of bearing up the weight of intersecting colonization, capitalism, racism, ignorance, and forced religious conversion.

*European and Euro-American entrepreneurs and consumers have created a market for imitation totems, often carved in Indonesia to mimic the totemic art of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of what is now called North America. These poles are carved quickly from soft tropical wood instead of cedar and are sold significantly cheaper than totems carved by artists belonging to Indigenous communities in the Pacific Nothwest.

The Eye opener series, one for each cardinal direction, are porcelain pry bars, each decorated with a unique floral pattern. Their material makes them useless for prying things apart, adjusting under pressure, or forcibly opening a physical point of entry. They are decorative objects, stripped of the purpose of the design that they mimic. The intention of these sculptures then, as the title suggests, is to pry open collective vision; specifically, around the effectiveness of tools we accept or are allowed. The Eye opener series are displayed on cushions to further emphasize their fragility and precious nature. They are signifiers of permissible resistance, allowable revolt, and performative struggle against control.