At the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, Indigenous Artists Rewrite the Record

Among the exhibition’s more visually imposing works is Canoe (2003) by Bonnie Devine (Serpent River First Nation, Anishinaabe, and Ojibwa). Suspended from the ceiling, the sculpture takes the form of an Anishinaabe canoe used for rice gathering. Devine sewed together hundreds of pages from her MFA research and writing on treaties, ecological knowledge, and Indigenous craft practices. Together, the pages overlap to form a thin, woven structure that appears almost weightless. Its fragility—including its inability to be placed in water without breaking down—reflects the precarity of Indigenous land rights. “We cannot ignore that 99 percent of the treaties between Native nations and the US were broken,” says Well-Off Man. 

Works such as Leah Mata Fragua’s Making Big Steps with Corn (2025), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s The Changing Shape of America (2000), and Chris Pappan’s Scars of History I (2018) also address questions of border and homeland. “For Indigenous peoples, political borders are meaningless,” Well-Off Man says. She points to the role of maps in restricting inter-tribal movement. “For centuries, they have freely roamed Canada and North America. It’s especially problematic when you look at how tribes are affected at the US-Mexico border.”

Right to Remain(s), Goshorn’s funerary basket, is constructed in a traditional Cherokee single-weave using unconventional materials inscribed with reflections from Native community members. Well-Off Man explains that Goshorn asked participants to consider “belonging and what it means if remains of ancestors are not in the homeland but in private and institutional collections.” One handwritten line reads, “This is our land mixed with our blood.” Another reads, “Earth is the dust of the bones of our ancestors.” Here, the notion of remains takes on material form, subject to the same conditions of exposure and decay. Ultimately, Goshorn’s Right to Remain(s) distills the exhibition’s central premise that paper, long used to control, can also be mobilized as a material of resistance and sovereignty.

Learn more about select artists from this region of the United States on the Homo Faber Guide.