Cannupa Hanska Luger

I was born on the Standing Rock reservation. In the late ’70s, my parents built a house into a hill on the res, a really interesting house that people might call an earthship. The whole front of the house had tall south-facing windows, and when you looked out you’d see the pastures, the corrals for horses and working cattle, and a big brown and white steel barn. North Dakota is relatively flat, but I grew up on the Missouri River. As you get closer to the river, the landscape begins to roll into the river valley and you can see some rolling hills. A glacier came through during the last ice age and sheared the tops off all the hills. I remember tall grass—in my memory it’s always golden. It’s never the green grass I remember, it’s the dry grass.

I have been in nature my entire life. My parents split up when I was two years old, so I ultimately grew up in two places. My mom moved to Arizona for the art market. She had custody, but I’d spend my summers with my dad on the cattle ranch in North Dakota. My parents gave us a lot of independence, and sometimes I’d spend the entire day outside with my two younger brothers. There’s a creek that runs between the house and a grove of box elder and oak trees we would play in. It was far enough that you could stay there all day and blame it on not being able to hear anybody call out for you. But even in the Southwest, I was constantly in the yard or hiking. Our home was at the very edge of Scottsdale, on a little run of a road with about 50 houses surrounded otherwise by desert. We’d always play in the arroyos. I would call those my first memories outside, rather than in nature, because I’m in nature right now in my studio.

There was no Native art market to me at first. It was just art, period. Even as I gained exposure to cable television and to the world outside my rural upbringing, I experienced the thriving Native art markets of Phoenix and Santa Fe, so I didn’t recognize Native art as separate from any other model. But as I got older, I started to resent the burden it placed on my mom, and I started to see the little idiosyncrasies that separate Native art from the general art economy. Art collectors are hyper-reliant on us being a part of the contemporary; they just don’t want to see our lives as contemporary. I think they find a lot of joy in having a deep-time relationship to place through this anecdote of an object. They feel like they’re benefiting a marginal community without ever having to see what that community really looks like. They hold an idea of our communities in their imagination, and they encourage us to generate this romantic version of our experience through their dollar.

The primary source for my understanding of the Mandan Hidatsa people is that I am Mandan Hidatsa people. I witnessed it by observing my surroundings, my environment, and my family, by listening to stories. In our culture, when an elder tells you a story, you are obligated to focus completely. I remember my grandfather and his friends at the little table in our kitchen, drinking weak coffee for hours as they told stories, slipping in and out of Hidatsa.

The only time my people were ever mentioned in public school was during the chapter on Lewis and Clark. Only one person is talked about specifically and with any detail: Sakakawea. Somewhere along the way, I started seeing the lithographs from Karl Bodmer and George Catlin. They documented my people on their travels up the Missouri River, bringing an anthropological gaze to what they considered to be a disappearing population. Those encounters were ultimately the source of our greatest loss of life, from smallpox and other diseases. The moments Bodmer and Catlin met our communities stood right at the precipice of that transformation, right before smallpox wiped out 90 percent of our population.

Through my time with the Bodmer archive, I learned that my experience growing up was unique. Because of the printing press, because of lithography, because of centralized education models, I quickly realized that the majority of people's knowledge of my culture is transmitted through this narrow filter. If I told true stories from my experience, they would land in the phenomenal or the metaphysical for the general population. They would be reduced to fantasy. But learning about an entire population through a series of lithographic prints is also an absolute fantasy. In order to heal some of our past, I think it's important for the majority population to engage with these historical moments. I’m always interested in meeting my audience where they’re at, and lucky for this audience, I had to navigate the same educational systems they did—albeit from a different perspective. So how do we participate in the secular make-believe?

For the Dripping Earth exhibition, I had access to Karl Bodmer's original watercolors. I grew up thinking the lithographs were his art, but I found out that they were actually produced by others based on his watercolor paintings. So every image was one step removed from the communities they depicted, made by people who never saw them. He was a landscape painter so he understood shadows and details, but he didn’t understand anatomy. So he would hide the hands and feet under regalia and robes or behind held objects. This allowed me to access some of the customary techniques of our ancestors that had changed by the time I was born. Before that, I only had stories, and my mental image was filled with my people as I knew them. I’d hear these ancient stories, and I guarantee they had Wranglers on in my imagination. I knew my people and our stories, but the Bodmer archives helped me understand more about who we once were.

I was surprised by how far the lithographs traveled. When I was a kid, I watched cartoons produced in the ’50s, and their cultural sensitivities were fucking bleak. Anytime Native people showed up in a cartoon, the same dance would appear around a fire, around a tipi, around a totem pole. It was this synchronized up-and-down dance of wild Indians. Even as a kid going to powwow, I thought, “I've never seen this dance. But it has to come from somewhere.” And then I found it in the lithographs. There's an image of a Mandan village with buffalo dancers frozen in a moment: dancer-up, dancer-down, circling. I was like, “Holy shit, that's the source material for this dance.” The lithographers assembled a narrative from Bodmer's images, and that became the model for animators to illustrate Native people.

The bodies in the lithographs were modeled after French bodies. They were drawing from Bodmer’s watercolors but they changed them quite a bit, pulling from other small illustrations he made during his travels to build imaginary vignettes of Mandan life. Yet it was presented as an authenticity, and it became the source material for a lot of future depictions of Natives. The only way I can engage with this is to expose that idea and invite people to meet me somewhere in the middle. I actively participate in the memory and history of my people through this exposure, providing an opportunity for my audience to see what I see, when I see, what we’ve always seen.

The Dakota Access Pipeline crossing is about 30 miles from my birthplace, and I return home to North Dakota every summer. My brother is still there, and he was working for the tribe's environmental protection agency. I remember he called me to say that he’d just gotten out of these talks, that the pipeline was trying to traverse the river. They had originally proposed crossing the river north of Bismarck but the city lobbied against it, so they moved it just above the res, about half a mile north of Standing Rock. That’s some bullshit right there. And it was happening in my life, so I wanted to do something about it. The tribe put out a huge call, and the water protectors came—the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ camps, all sorts of people—and soon it became part of the zeitgeist.

It was art second. Above all, it was a protective shield designed for deployment. When I shared the design on social media, I was just responding to time and place. I think it was around October, starting to get cold—and North Dakota is cold, cold. People don't fully comprehend the depth of cold you can experience in North Dakota. It was around then that the police started using fire hoses on the water protectors. The visual had a strong impact given our historical record, seeing police use fire hoses on non-white bodies. But nobody fully considered how lethal those fire hoses were in the North Dakota winter. So the mirror shield design came as a response to that. We designed something to protect us against water, against rubber bullets, against percussion grenades.

It was often described as a protest against an oil pipeline. It was never about protesting oil; it was about protecting water. When you build your narrative around Native people fighting against oil, it reinforces these tropes of primitive people fighting against modernity. That is not our rhetoric. We were trying to communicate that water is infinitely more valuable than oil. The folks on the frontline weren’t just trying to protect those waterways for themselves. They were protecting it for every single body below the pipeline, and that included a lot of the police, a lot of the private security firms, a lot of the National Guard folks and the racist police from South Dakota. I thought, “This is your water too.” So the mirror shields put them on our frontline, facing themselves.

On social media, people kept asking how they could help. Rather than likes and shares, the shields were an opportunity to actually make something useful. I designed it in the parking lot of a large hardware store, using materials you could find anywhere for under $60, including shipping. It was a way of turning our allies into accomplices. The state had checkpoints to block anything they deemed a “weapon,” which even included canned food. If canned food is a weapon, a shield certainly is. So we hid the shields as art. I never considered them art, and I still don’t. The object itself is not art. But the process of creating it, the activation of the population in support of our protection—I think that is art.

The word “SURVIVAL” is printed in Helvetica on the surface of the original field manual. Having that word printed on a book by the Department of War—there was so much irony there already. I knew I had to fuck with it. I was just talking to my dad about it, and he has no memory of the manual at all. I don’t understand why a Native person would, because it’s all just Indigenous knowledge. There’s very little knowledge in it that I wasn’t already exposed to by my elders.

It's called SURVIVA because I don't think it's about survival. It's about recognizing abundance in our environment. It's about an ethos in which the survivor is the model—which is exactly what every biological organism is doing, looking to its immediate world and finding abundance rather than scarcity. If there is any future for us here, it will require that change of perspective. Scarcity works great if you control the resource. When you look at the landscape and recognize there are no true food deserts, you begin to shift your perspective around what it means to be alive, and who controls this idea of scarcity. So, whose survival? Who gets to survive? All of us. Not through the techniques you'd glean from the book, but through this primary concept that the world we inhabit is abundant, and can provide for us as long as we don't get in the way.

Dystopias and utopias are both modeled on a homogenized culture and a majority rule. Therein lies one of the greatest problems: We have never been singular. The plurality of cultures that have developed across the land, including the Eurocentric colonial model, were all land-based. They are all from a place. And we create policies that are supposed to benefit us collectively, but fail to because we are not singular.

The climate crisis, imagined at its worst, resembles biblical end times. There are worse fates than that. And guess what? You can survive biblical apocalypse. The funny thing is that from the moment of contact, Native people have been trying to describe this to the settler—all the way to this conversation. There is a way to engage with the land. There is a way to belong to a place. It’s not global, it’s hyperlocal. How you engage with your environment, how you affect the immediate place you’re surrounded by, is part of the slow work of belonging to the place. All of our cultures have protocols and taboos to form the right relationship with the environment.

We have tried to teach that over and over and over. And somehow, we haven’t lost our generosity. Through genocide, through relocation, through environmental collapse, through apocalypse, we haven’t lost our generosity. All the way up to right now: As an artist, the primary source of my work is the same generosity my ancestors held, which is to share that there is a way to belong to this place. Consider it. It's what we are longing for as a species, and somehow capitalism, colonialism, and consumerism have fooled us into believing that belonging could be replaced with belongings. And it's just not true.

Playing with futurism is so dangerous, because there is an innate fascism in imagining our futures. I think the key to it is in the imagining itself. If I can present the idea of a future that is not singular, but rather jumps around between the customary practices of cultural maintenance and the lived lives of everyday people, I can encourage the population to imagine alternatives to what we’re presently experiencing. We’ve relinquished our agency to systems of control so that we’re only able to respond when we’re in crisis: “You have to act now to address this immediate problem.” Anything I present in the present, I hope to God it doesn’t exist in the future. I hope we imagine an alternative that makes even my speculative fiction obsolete. I think the solution for our survival—our surviva—lives in the mind of a future person who is regularly encouraged to imagine an alternative. That is what’s missing in our present.

I think our climate crisis is language that's trying to describe something else, and it's being communicated in seasonal wildfires, increased hurricanes, diseases, global pandemics. It's being communicated in a form that we can no longer ignore, and we have to find a word for it. Here in the United States, they love to talk about freedom as the reason we impose such violence on our environment and our population. They say the benefit of it all is that we get to choose. You have no idea what freedom is. It’s not the freedom to choose between this or that; it’s the freedom to generate choices. As long as there is scarcity in our minds, our choices become scarce as well. But the reality is that we have the freedom to imagine alternatives for our future. That's what Future Ancestral Technologies is all about—like it or hate it, it encourages you to imagine your own possibilities in your own future. Everything we have experienced up to this point is, in fact, make-believe. And we can make-believe alternatives.

Well, we’ve built our entire careers on make-believe, haven’t we? I think artists are grossly underutilized as a force for change, because we've been co-opted by the market. My work is expensive—not by choice, but because the market sees increased value as success. But with projects like the mirror shields, the art object is the byproduct of the art. I can share art, which by my definition is the process, with a general population outside of those economic models. My source material is the world in which I live.

I spend a lot of time in the studio working on projects, but it's work that generates a life in public. And because I have a life in public, I have to pay attention. I get to pay attention, in fact. I think exposure to a variety of populations and publics gives artists access to a process that can then be questioned. We're pretty good at visualizing data. We're pretty good at communicating complex ideas, because we are not asked to provide clear definitions, but rather to invoke inquiry from our audience. That has always been artists’ secret power. We’re effective because it's not our idea that is dangerous. It's the ideas that the population gains from our presentation of inquiry.

It's more of a submission than a collaboration. I think we're all collaborating with it, you know? I’ve never done anything alone. We’re in the weather. We’re part of the weather. When a conversation breaks down, it reduces itself to weather. I often pretend I’m not working with nature, I think we all do. We pretend we’re not part of it, and that the things we despise aren’t part of it either. But the weather is a constant collaborator. When building GIFT at the University of Michigan, I encouraged them to consider—through the process of dealing with the environment, the rain, the changing weather patterns—submitting to the will of something greater than themselves.

The primary driver for this monument was to acknowledge our effect on the past, rather than to present something for our future. I’m trying to repair damage that has already been done by generating something that will outlast us all. I don’t think we can get to transformation without acknowledging the source of harm. I don’t see a future for bison in North America without us first acknowledging our participation in the annihilation, and the benefit of that annihilation that still exists in our lives today. The Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the sacrifice of those bodies. By exposing our complicity in their absence, I think we can drive the general population’s interest in their return.

I’m trying to time travel. That’s it. I’m building a time machine that will allow us to reach into our history, to repair the memory of something we’ve denied, and in doing so, to generate the space necessary for the bison’s return. I don’t want to view them as a commodity or a resource, to value them dead, but rather to consider what might be possible with their living presence.

We are but one of the living things. The hybridization of these bodies has been customary to my people since time immemorial, and it wasn’t about hybridity or trendy posthumanism. It’s about establishing and recognizing that my body is also your body, and in return, your body is also mine. It’s about blurring the edges of our classifications, and recognizing that even a keystone species is useless without the rest of the arch. It's just a block on the ground. When we get hyper-focused on the singular, we miss the details of complexity. And the complexity exists in the edges of not knowing where one thing ends and the next begins. We are part of a grand continuum that is not easily comprehended, but is ultimately very simple. So simple, you know?

The hybridization of these forms is a customary practice I want to maintain far into our future. The dances of Indigenous populations around the world are not shamanistic windows into primitive cultures, but rather an advanced technology that recognizes more-than-human kinship, embedding a model so deep in culture that it can still be presented in song and dance.

I definitely don't want to be embalmed. But at the end of the day, I don't think there's anything they could do to my body that would keep it from the earth. Even in the most elaborate, romantic burials—embalming, entombment—we always eventually return. I'm excited to relinquish the responsibility of navigating this weird jeep, you know? It sounds great. Somebody else can get something out of it after I'm done. Ideally, I'm consumed by something. I have a strange fantasy of getting eaten by an animal, right there at the end. I’m happy to be consumed by plants, but every time I go hiking, I imagine it being an animal. And it’s funny, I’m not afraid of it. I think that would be the best outcome.