- Indigenous artists often straddle a space created by white anthropologists between art and craft.

Today's guest grapples with that dichotomy.

Creating art from tradition that, in its time, was purely practical.

And seeing his own contemporary activism viewed as art when it was, in fact, protest.

He's Cannupa Hanska Luger.

This week on Story in the Public Square.

(intro music playing) Hello, and welcome to a Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Cannupa Hanska Luger, a multidisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the three affiliated tribes of Fort Berthold.

Cannupa is joining us from his home in New Mexico.

Welcome to Story in the Public Square.

- Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- We want to talk about your body of work.

It's extensive and it's impressive, but for starters, tell us, when did you know that you had art in you?

When did you know that you had a creative perspective that you wanted to share?

- I would say relatively early.

As far back as I can remember, I've been creative.

But I imagine that's probably true for every human being.

If you could go back far enough, we drew, we colored, all of these sorts of things.

I just leaned into it.

- And did I read this right?

That your mother was a working artist, as well.

Is that correct?

- Yeah, that is correct.

So I was around it, the market of art, my whole life and kind of understanding the ins and outs of it as a career didn't seem inaccessible to me.

- So you also, during your childhood, and still now spend time at the Standing Rock Reservation.

That's where your father lives, is that correct?

I mean, he is another influence, obviously, in your life.

Tell us about that.

- That's correct.

Yeah.

My father lives in Fort Yates, North Dakota, which is also where I was born.

My brothers, as well, still live in Fort Yates.

Cattle ranchers.

- Let's get into some of your work.

How about the Mirror Shield Project?

That came out of the protest and opposition to the proposed pipeline through Standing Rock, which of course made international headlines everywhere.

You were participating in that, but the Mirror Shield was something unique and special.

Talk about the evolution of that and what it meant and what it became, and who participated, too.

- Yeah.

The Mirror Shield Project was really built out of necessity.

It was a mirrored surface in a shield form to protect the water protector, standing on the front line facing the opposition.

There were private companies, police force, brought in from all over the place, National Guard.

In fact, all there trying to protect the right of an oil company and the pipeline that was running underneath the Missouri River.

And as everybody knows, this was almost a year long engagement.

I guess it came out of necessity, the design.

I never really thought of it as art, which was kind of interesting.

I thought of it more so as protective.

- Cannupa, what are the water shields?

What were they made of and what were they used for?

I mean, it became a type of art.

But it also had a protective value, as you were describing.

- You mean the mirror shields?

- The mirror shield, yeah.

Exactly.

- Yeah.

The mirror shields were exactly that.

They were a shield with a reflective surface to The reason they were designed and the materials they were made out of was really trying to answer a question.

Which was, "I'm one person.

What can I do?"

That question popped up quite a bit in my social media feeds as I was traveling back and forth to Standing Rock.

And I think a lot of people, who were engaging to protect water from this oil company, were putting their bodies on the front line.

And we've seen some of the footage from there where percussion grenades were shot directly into the crowd, rubber bullets, pepper sprays, and even water hoses were brought down on people, standing and trying to protect the water.

And so the shield was designed to help protect them on on the line.

The concept was that they could be used like a Roman file line, or something along those lines, where you could interlock the shields with each other.

But the materials was really dependent on what I could get access to at a major box store, hardware store, that could be found across the country with ease.

And so the design came out of, "what could you build in the parking lot of one of these box stores," and send that to the people in Standing Rock.

And so the materials were Masonite or some sort of sheeted ply and a Mylar, like a reflective mirror-Mylar.

We even used window tint that you could get relatively inexpensively from a hardware store to put on your home windows, and a little Spray 77, or some sort of spray adhesive, and paracord.

The design was really simple and it was created to be simple so that I could get participation from many different people to answer the question, "I'm one person, what could I do?"

One person buying these materials could make six shields.

And those six shields would stand on the front line protecting a hundred people behind that front line which were then, in turn, standing in front of the camp, which had thousands of people in it.

And then you consider that they're protecting water for eight million people downstream.

So it was an idea of, by participation and by providing a prompt, one person could actually do a lot.

And that's what the design came out of.

- [G. Wayne Miller] That's true.

- Now it was hidden as art.

The art aspect of it was kind of subterfuge to allow these shields to make it into the camps and protect people on the front line.

- Well, that's actually the question that I wanted to ask you next.

These served a very practical, immediate purpose.

Have you been surprised by the interest in the in the so-called art community for exhibitions of the mirror shields?

- Yeah.

I'm surprised by it.

The biggest surprise for me is a question that I ask myself every time that this work is exhibited, which is to the institution, "Where were you when we needed you?"

I think that's an ongoing question, as Standing Rock is not an isolated event.

That there are continued efforts to annex land and face environmental racism, that's been implemented by the United States, on its indigenous population, for as long as this country existed.

- So let's get into another one of your projects.

And it's everyone, the missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, queer, and trans relatives, Bead Project.

Tell us about that.

Again, we discovered this reading the New York Times piece, it had art to illustrate it.

And again, it totally blew us away, both for its artistic purpose, but also for the message that it was sending, the story that it was telling.

The importance it was bringing to such an important issue.

Tell us about that.

- Yeah.

This project was built out of, in the wake of the Mirror Shield Project.

That was the first time that I considered using the population to help create a body of work.

And what I found was, especially using platforms like social media, the desire to do more is very high.

The Bead Project, I asked people to make a singular bead.

And really this was visualizing data.

This data that was gathered from Canada, due to the truth Truth and Reconciliation Acts, they actually gathered information around the number of people missing and bodies found of indigenous women in Canada.

And with that data, you also got mapping locations where people disappeared.

And there were just incredible correlations by gathering that data that informed me, in the process of making this work, as far as locations of disappearance.

And that correlated almost blatantly with extractive industry in Canada.

I think the violence that indigenous people have faced in relationship to extractive industries is, it's a matter of dehumanization.

How do you allow people to understand and truly see our humanity is a challenge.

It's funny that in the 21st century, you would still consider having to have this conversation.

But the data has the power for systems to create safeguards and laws to protect people.

But data gathering is incredibly dehumanizing.

And it was strange to me to consider that the solution for dehumanization is dehumanization.

Visualizing that data was a way to rehumanize the data.

That these are not singular ticks, but these are human lives.

And each bead is a representation of a dot in that data.

A tally mark, you know?

That allowed the population to better understand the depth and the scale of this loss.

And also became a way to have some catharsis for people who were suffering the loss of a loved one.

They could create a bead and have it, understand it.

It is represented in the data gathering and just rehumanizes the system that we use to create safeguards and protocols and laws, really around protecting populations.

- So what's your sense of everyone's impact on the public discourse?

Understanding, awareness, of missing and murdered indigenous people?

Did it foster conversations?

Did it raise awareness?

Did it achieve that objective?

Again, art related to the politics and policy of the situation.

Talk about that because I'm guessing it really did have an impact.

- Yeah.

I think that the power of art has always been to communicate and to share stories, to share experiences and histories.

Art has a profound power for us to examine and understand the depths of situations, but it also creates an anchor from one cultural group to another.

And those anchors are great platforms to build bridges across.

Having a large-scale piece that's looking at data and allows everybody in, who experiences it, to understand the scale of that, I think has a profound effect.

Also, just being able to describe the situation and have a visual context or cue is, it allows people to understand it outside of systems of data gathering.

And even the number 4,000, which is what the number was that was brought from Canada, is a single number.

I understand it as the number 4,000, which is just one number.

But when you understand that 4,000 is 4,000 individual pieces, then you recognize that scale.

This is why the piece is called Every One, because it's about counting every single one and being able to see it.

I think that has, psychologically, that affects people more than the singular number of data gathering.

- Cannupa, your work has been described, and I want to get this right, as, "process oriented, not object oriented."

I'm curious what that means to you and whether or not you agree with that characterization.

- Yeah.

I would say that my practice is multifaceted.

I definitely make objects.

I'm surrounded in my studio by things.

But from my definition of art, art is a verb.

It is a process.

It is an intergenerational experience that I'm learning how to work with different materials because of generations before me that have worked with these materials.

Not to mention other systems that are developing material science and adapting to these new materials is a process.

It just is.

So most of art, for me, does inhabit the process base.

But out of that process are byproducts.

And those byproducts are the objects that are celebrated through the market of art.

They're housed in museums.

The object itself travels further than I can.

And if I'm successful in my attempt in the creative process, then every object that exists as a vessel, that holds a story.

So its function still exists, which is also a part of the process.

- So another of your projects is Future Ancestral Technologies.

And I know you're very passionate about that.

Having talked to Ginger before we went on the show, Ginger being your wife and and manager.

Tell us, in a nutshell, what is Future Ancestral Technologies?

- Yeah.

Future Ancestral Technologies is an exploration into speculative fiction.

I am a science fiction fan.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I am always marveled about how the process of designing ideas for our future creates a beacon for us, as a culture, to navigate towards.

And rarely do you see indigenous technology exhibited in science fiction.

Rarely do you see us exhibited in science fiction.

The violence that you face with that is that we do not exist in the future.

So rather than facing all of the microaggressions and strangeness of our current world, I could imagine a future that celebrates our technology and moves us towards a more sustainable future.

I've been developing all of these works and regalias and ideas to build upon our cosmologies, our indigenous cosmologies, to celebrate the technology that we have been developing.

That I've been seeing appropriated and resold as green economies in the 21st century, without any sort of acknowledgement or recognition of the contributions of indigenous people on our current world.

It's called Future Ancestral Technology to look at time through an indigenous lens, which is not a linear trajectory into a future.

But rather, a radiating sphere of influence.

And that's not just within human generations, but it celebrates more than human kinship relationships to environment and earth and try to reestablish the connection of human beings to, as another one of the living things on the planet Earth.

I think once we recognize, understand, and accept that we have not carved ourselves out of natural order, the sooner we'll be able to adapt and be in right relationship with the environment that we live in.

- So, like a lot of your work, this project is multimedia.

Incorporating lots of different elements.

Maybe you could just give us a brief overview, particularly for members of our audience who are not familiar with your work, of what are the elements that go into this.

And again, it's multidimensional, multimedia.

It's not just simply one costume, one regalia.

It's a lot.

Anyway, I've spoken a lot.

You give us the overview.

- Yeah.

It's interesting, the way that I've been building this science fiction, isn't in a novel form, where you're telling one story.

But rather, in my studio, it's like adapting to a role-playing game interface.

There are systems that exist and I'm trying to adapt to them, that I've imagined.

And so the methodology, the premise of of materials that I use, are all based in a future context with a certain number of rules that I have to adapt my artistic practice to, which is What is fun and exciting about it, and why it is multifaceted.

Because one of the components to this future culture that I'm developing is that we are living in the wake of our present.

The industrial, mass production of materials, the emphasis on single use materials, has created mountains of waste.

The material that I like to use and build the regalia for these future communities is based on repurposing materials of our present.

I am conscious about that and use repurposed materials in the development of these future artifacts.

I'm using a lot of secondary materials.

I have a connection to industrial felt here in New Mexico, where I get secondhand felt that is cut into strips.

It's a byproduct of another industry.

As well as, I use used sporting goods equipment.

I use acrylic, yarn Afghans.

The idea is to transform and repurpose materials that we would have, that would be filling landfills in our future, and developing a culture out of that.

Like I had said before, it's like a role-playing game, where I develop a system and try to adapt my practice to it.

And in the process, celebrate what we would make regalia for, in the first place.

Which is, from an indigenous lens, and particularly from Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, which is where I'm an enrolled member.

Lakota influence.

There are ceremonies that take place, that are a part of the protocols around being in right relationship with the Earth.

Where you are celebrating the natural forces.

And you are asking to participate with and facilitate a healthy environment for everything to thrive in.

And so the ceremonies that we perform are endurance performances, that put us in right relationship with our natural environment.

So, I'm sharing a bit of that.

And it's not as they exist presently, which I don't think I have the right, to share publicly.

But if I imagine it in a future setting, then that allows me to kind of navigate the complexities of indigenous culture.

Particularly in spiritual or ceremonial context.

- Cannupa, can you elaborate a little bit?

Do you feel a special obligation as an indigenous artist?

whether to your community or to making your community better understood?

Or known by the broader world?

- Yeah, for sure.

I think native people in the United States are viewed as one-dimensional entities.

Most of the museums that house our work exhibit us in a historical context.

We have been relegated to the past.

And that our cultures exist within those spaces.

But even having Standing Rock become a hashtag and exhibited on an international level, it opened up channels of understanding that indigenous people are vast and complex in their cultural variations.

I don't think that the larger, popular culture understanding of indigenous people celebrates the complexity of our cultures.

That we are not one-dimensional entities, but rather, multifaceted.

And that the cultures that are under the umbrella of native American or indigenous are varied, and complex, and oftentimes contradictory.

The scale of our inhabitation in the Americas is vast.

And with that vastness, there are variations in environments and those environments, actually, are what informed our cultures.

The cultures, the languages, the dances, all of these things are as varied as the environments that you travel across the Americas.

- When I was listening to you earlier, talking about the connection to the planet, I couldn't help but think of climate change.

Clearly, that has to be in your mind and in some of your art.

Just talk about that briefly because almost out of time here.

- [Producer] About 30 seconds.

- Yeah.

Well, climate change has always been happening.

I think it's important to recognize that we are related to the environment and our influence, presently, is having devastating effects.

And we are not navigating or listening to each other, let alone the environment, at a fast enough pace to adapt ourselves to the environment.

But I think climate change has always been happening.

And people and other living things have always had to navigate and adapt to those changes.

It may not be comfortable.

We are pushing ourselves in a place that we have to recognize.

That the planet, as an entity, will be fine.

The species that are inhabiting it presently will suffer the consequences of our choices.

And so, just recognizing that there is a place for us in the natural systems.

How we find ourselves back to understanding what our responsibility is to environment, I think, is the solution that we need moving forward.

But it's going to take generations.

- Cannupa, that is a great point.

It's where we need to leave it.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week.

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