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Dec 9, 2024

"The human is a territory." --Bayo Akomolafe

Ancestors in Focus

The “Descendants Project” amplifies the voices of Native Peoples whose ancestors were photographed over a hundred years ago, one of whom is Shawnee Real Bird. She grew up on a reservation, and “wondered what I would connect with that could become a portal to the old way of life I longed for.” Shawnee searches to fill the gap in the territory of her ancestral DNA and in her heart – stories and landscapes from before their forced transition from nomadic freedom on the plains to the isolation of reservations, boarding schools, and language repression. She paints a brushstroke here, another there: Her great-great-grandfather’s photograph; horses her dad so loved; flying at the same altitude her people once sought visions atop mountains, “always striving to preserve what makes our Apsáalooke hearts strong... All the generations of cowboys and medicine women that make up my ‘blood quantum’ stand behind me… Only the contents of our hearts will reveal our creation stories to be the same.”