For Nicholas Galanin, Art Is a Tool of Indigenous Resilience and Resistance

Amid growing interest in and recognition of contemporary Indigenous practices, Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit-Unangax̂ artist and member of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, has made his name in the contemporary art scene with an original multimedia practice entirely dedicated to reclaiming and championing Indigenous narratives. His work envisions a future in which culture, land, and identity are protected and celebrated. 

Based in Alaska, when not traveling for his multiple projects, Galanin brings Tlingit traditions, symbologies and techniques to contemporary art practice to articulate a powerful statement of Indigenous resistance and survival in opposition to historical wounds of removal and appropriation. Through his multimedia and multifaceted practice, he tackles the complexities of Indigenous identity between colonial erasure, collective amnesia and cultural misappropriation. Operating always on political ground and overtly outspoken in his positions, Galanin has nurtured an art practice that has had its controversial moments. Notably, he was one of the first artists who asked that his artwork be pulled from the 2019 Whitney Biennial in protest of the presence on the museum’s board of Warren B. Kanders, owner of the company Safariland, a manufacturer of tear-gas canisters and other weapons used against protesters around the world.

Having participated in multiple Biennials—his work is currently in both the Toronto Biennial and the first Abu Dhabi Biennial—Galanin’s relevance has been further cemented by several high-profile institutional acquisitions. You can find his work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, LACMA, the Brooklyn Museum and the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts.  Galanin was also recently awarded the prestigious Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s Don Tyson Prize—a $200,000 biennial award celebrating individuals or organizations that “change the way we look at, think about or experience” American art. 

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During Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist hit the headlines again, not with the flashy artwork we might expect in that context but instead with another highly provocative site-specific public work, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) installed at the Faena Hotel. There, 45-foot tall white sails towered over the luxurious beachfront, just as a 15th-century galleon had been buried under the sand and was now emerging with its heavy history of colonization embedded within. “At the time of initial contact for a lot of our communities, those sails were the first things we saw on the horizon,” Galanin told Observer a week after the installation’s debut. “The work speaks toward the collective liberation of humanity. It speaks towards capitalism at the core of some of the colonial violence that communities are faced with.”

Painted on the fluttering white sails were two questions: “What are we going to give up to burn the sails of empire? What will we build for our collective liberation?” To complete this work, Galanin invited Indigenous artist Jaque Frague (from Pueblo of Jemez) to activate the installation with a graffiti performance that answered those provocative questions. “Land Back” asserted the red graffiti, echoing an entire Indigenous movement. “It’s about returning the land to Indigenous care,” Galanin said. “Returning not just the land, but also the culture, ceremonies and language.” The now-iconic public work calls upon the sovereignty of Indigenous people while expanding the conversation toward the need for a drastic change in our relation with the land by recovering Indigenous knowledge in opposition to capitalistic and anthropocentric behavior. 

The installation in Miami parallels and expands on Galanin’s current show at Peter Blum in New York, “The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change,” in which he further elaborates on the thread between land claims and environmental causes, emphasizing the enduring Indigenous protection of Land in the face of expansive extraction. As the artist explained in our conversation, the exhibition looks at methods of dividing land and removing Indigenous people from it along with their cultural memory and knowledge of responsibility to Land, highlighting the timelines of that process through photography and sculpture and retracing some key moments in our civilization that have consolidated this detrimental and perverse paradigm. Violence is still occurring, he reminds us, and often, we acknowledge the remembrance of Indigenous trauma to please ourselves rather than because of any particular feelings of guilt. Pause for Applause displays a generic land acknowledgment text on two teleprompters on either side of a mirror. Visitors are invited to approach the installation and read the text silently or aloud to their reflection in the mirror, pondering the weight and futility of those words if not accompanied by action.

Another work in the show tackles the way Christian beliefs provided colonizers with the justification and ideological framework to see Indigenous people as fauna or nonhuman, which let them simply take over land, utterly ignoring the inherent human rights violation. “The question is, can you dismantle the tools of oppression? Can you dismantle oppression with the tools provided by the oppressor?”

In The Reenactment (Inversion), Galanin creates this revelatory inversion of the destruction by colonizers and missionaries of Indigenous totem poles along the coast of Alaska, showing in photographs a pile of wood chopped from a counterfeit totem pole burning. Another captivating image depicts the artist carrying a counterfeit totem on his shoulders, bent in the effort like Christ carrying the cross, appropriating and reactivating with a twist this classic Christian iconography. The imposition of Catholicism with the subsequent removal of ancestral Indigenous wisdom and spirituality and the parallel appropriation and objectification of its symbols are all themes evoked by this powerful photographic self-portrait. 

Other works in the show include reliquaries, tools, and other items embedded with Indigenous knowledge and culture, which stand as powerful symbols of resilience and survival that must withstand the tests of time so modern peoples can connect with past generations. For Galanin, these cultural artifacts become carriers of collective memories and identity—both powerful tools of resistance against erasure and marks for new place-making practices. His approach to working with objects raises questions about belonging, identity or misappropriation. “Indigenous art has too often been romanticized, fetishized and homogenized through a Eurocentric lens, all in the service of lies about who we have been, who we are and who we can be,” Galanin wrote in a piece for Artnews following his withdrawal from the Whitney Biennial. Years later, he continues to revitalize the traditional role of art as a cultural symbol that reunites communities around shared narratives and values while retracing authentic Indigenous heritage through contemporary art to confront its manipulation and oppose its erasure.

Nicholas Galanin’s  “The persistence of Land claims in a climate of change” is on view at Peter Blum Gallery through January 18.