Indigenous Futures, Native American Artists at Haines Gallery

As the land known as the United States of America celebrates its 250th anniversary in its current iteration, Haines Gallery’s new show views this past through a different lens. 250 Years, Indigenous Futures, a group exhibition featuring Native American artists, recognizes 1776 as a single moment in a land that spans centuries beyond that date, for the people who lived here before, during, and after. The artists in this exhibition show practices, beliefs, creativity, and adaptability that prove these things have not been left in the past, nor have they stagnated. Instead, these stories, past traumas, and techniques have been brought forward to tell the ongoing realities of the past 250 years.

We Grow Our Own Medicine: Interdimensional and Intertribal Healing by artist Victoria Canby for Haines’s Gallery’s 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

Victoria Canby’s triptych We Grow Our Own Medicine: Interdimensional and Intertribal Healing shows pencil and gouache on paper drawings of squash, beans, and corn. These are known as the Three Sisters. The plants, when grown together, create symbiosis and cohesion that makes each stronger. Canby’s work stands as a firm reminder of nature’s strength through connection.

“The corn is a scaffolding for the beans. The beans offer nitrogen into the soil. The squash protects the roots of both the beans and the corn. They also create a perfect meal, which can nourish communities throughout the year. Food not only represents survival, it also represents community,” Canby says of her work. A Bay Area artist, Canby grew up listening and learning from elders of the Miwok and Pomo in the North Bay.

Canby’s work has always been a strong advocate for community-based projects, filled with themes of native wisdom, magic, and the medicinal power of plants. Two of her murals can be seen at Clarion Alley in San Francisco.

Mural by Victoria Canby in Clarion Alley, San Francisco. “This mural is meant to recognize how plants continually offer Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas pathways to our ancestors and tools to heal our communities and planet.” - Victoria Canby

Jamie Okuma’s OF LOVE AND SACRIFICE: MOTHERHOOD is a marvel of single-stitched antique glass seed beads on a brain-tanned hide handbag. Surrounded by curved metal spikes, two faces from Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) are rendered in painstaking detail, their faces frozen in moments of intense emotion.

OF LOVE AND SACRIFICE: MOTHERHOOD by artist Jamie Okuma for Haines’s Gallery’s 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

Placing these images in dialogue with Payómkawichum (Luiseño) beadwork techniques, the message of maternal love, and all of the strength, pain, and power behind it, makes a powerful impact.

Reverse side OF LOVE AND SACRIFICE: MOTHERHOOD by artist Jamie Okuma for Haines’s Gallery’s 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. Photo by Vita Hewitt.

250 Years, Indigenous Futures spreads across sculpture, photography, and film. These artists engage contemporary culture, Nation-specific visual traditions, and personal histories to create a cohesive experience. Artists Victoria Grace Canby, Jordan Ann Craig, Sky Hopinka, Brad Kahlhamer, Terran Last Gun, Jamie Okuma, Wendy Red Star, and Keith Secola show us subjects who meet our gaze: resistance, survival, and, most importantly, a continued presence using the knowledge of the past but with a lens toward the future.

The show leans on both the shared emotions that make us human as well as individual experiences that define Indigeneity in the United States today. This exhibition gives us the opportunity to understand the diversity of experiences among the Indigenous People of the Americas.