Nicholas Galanin
By Jessica Lanay
May 15, 2025
The Alaska-based Lingít and Unangax. interdisciplinary artist Yeíl Ya-Tseen Nicholas Galanin is contributing to an expanding global dialogue critiquing museums for not repatriating Indigenous remains and artefacts, as well as the United States’s own systemic erasure of Indigenous histories. Galanin’s ‘life work’, as he calls it, is equal parts visual expression, refusal and mutual aid; his focus is to test to what extent those three elements might make a di.erence in the present. His main demand is staunch, bare and consistent: everything that has been taken from Indigenous peoples must be returned– the artwork, the remains of ancestors, the seeds and, most urgently, the land.
In 2019 Galanin withdrew the artwork White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018) from that year’s Whitney Biennial. In the work, the black background of a rug is interrupted by an oblong rectangle formed from stippled shades of white, blue and grey, mimicking the appearance of the cosmic microwave background captured on old televisions once broadcasts were finished. Hung on the wall, the aspect of the artwork as a ‘prayer rug’ gestures towards the American worship of capital and media. This, Galanin notes in a 2020 Craft in America short video, is central to promoting a white ideation of human homogeneity through misrepresentations of othered peoples that confuse a fantastical history with history itself.
Galanin was the first of eight artists selected for the 2019 Whitney Biennial to withdraw from the exhibition in protest of the presence of Safariland... Warren B. Kanders on the institution’s board. Safariland manufactured teargas, among other products targeted at the military and law-enforcement markets. Later that year, Galanin published a statement in ArtNews regarding his withdrawal: ‘For me, it was about more than just tear gas,’ he writes. ‘Tear gas is a means of biological warfare designed to clear space. Today, it is used at Standing Rock in North Dakota, at the border between the US and Mexico, in city streets. Kanders and the war profiteers who supply tear gas and other weapons have no place guiding our cultural institutions.’
Galanin’s body of work ranges from taxidermy to sculpture to installation. This year, the artist will debut a new 2.3m-tall sculpture titled I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) at the Boston Public Art Triennial. The cast-bronze sculpture, green with intentional oxidation, includes 25 carved sections of Lingít iconography assembled with renderings of tourist art that appropriates Lingít aesthetics. The figure appears like a humanised totem, kneeling as it attempts to rebuild itself from the pieces in front of it. Featuring a split head, one stylised arm and wing, and half a totem face for a hip, the work speaks to Indigenous salvaging, preservation and adaptation of long-practised communal aesthetics. The installation encompasses many things: corporate appropriations of Indigenous arts, the undervaluing of Indigenous artists and their long-held practices, and the idea – as Galanin put it in a 2023 conversation with urban geographer Joseph Pierce accompanying his exhibition Interference Patterns at Site Santa Fe – that the non-Indigenous “want to have our objects without us, have our land without us.”
Originally from Sitka, Alaska, close to the state capital of Juneau, Galanin was communally trained by the latest in a family line of kootéeyaa (totem in Lingít) master sculptors and jewellery makers, including his grandfather, father and uncle. Also academically trained, Galanin received a BFA in jewellery design from London Guildhall University, and an MFA in Indigenous visual arts from Massey University, New Zealand. A descendant of the land and its history, Galanin shares an intergenerational memory of conquest by Russia and the United States, and the presence of Japanese corporations that exhaust timber resources in the region. In an installation work titled We Dreamt Deaf (2015), a mid-roar polar bear is posed in a prone position, struggling to rend its upper half from the back half that is flattened into a rug. As the flat obliteration of its form spreads across the floor, the creature melts into an inert object. The polar bear was shot during the 1970s in Shishmaref, Alaska, by someone Galanin described in a lecture last year as a “white sports hunter." The artist notes that the small town of Shishmaref is dissolving into the sea. Of the work’s title, he states, “We are all implicated in the participation in the anthropocentric industrial dream that renders us deaf to our impact on all of our relatives human and nonhuman, speaking to colonisers and colonised, to generations past and future, the humans as an animal forgetful of our place in the world.” The artist returns this particular ancestor to the world with a new purpose: to give a warning.
Galanin’s warnings insist that Western timescales – focused on an alienating level of productivity and parasitic gain – are insufficient for what the future demands of the human species. In their place, the artist proposes a Lingít and Unangax. cosmology and attempts to instruct the viewing public, within and outside of his communities, to see these not as an exoticised, mystical ‘tradition’, but as a valuable technology for moving forward. Between 2017 and 2018, Galanin, together with a handful of apprentices, created a kootéeyaa and
learned to sculpt a dugout canoe, also known in Lingít as yaakw. The 12m healing kootéeyaa was a group sculptural-project that honoured the Lingít T’aaku Kwáan family clan that lived at the site now known as Douglas, which was demolished in 1962 and turned into a boat harbour and parking lot. The healing kootéeyaa was raised on the site, vaulting abstracted renderings of animals and spiritual creatures in combinations of stark white, pearly black, dark orange, bright red, with the accent of a shade of blue between teal and sky over the faces of ancestral figures. In a photo of the raising of the kootéeyaa, a man named John Morris is present; he was a child when he and his clan were removed from the site. Commissioned by the National Park Service and the Sealaska Heritage Institute, the project of the yaakw supported an apprenticeship to learn the craft from master sculptor Steve Brown. The yaakw project began with a red cedar tree that is, Galanin states, “older than America”. Imagine something possessing a semblance of a memory of before what came to be. Both instances of community art production reintroduce technologies of the human experience often taken for granted, such as community learning, meaningful learning from elders, purposeful remembrance and preservation of survivance skills. Galanin’s communal lifework recalibrates our impulses from craving instantaneous consumption and quick fixes to developing careful, cyclical practices that transform our relationship with the environment and each other. As Galanin’s works preserve and extend knowledge, they also encourage mutual aid to create a material difference in the lives of the people he serves. In 2021, for the Desert X biennial in Palm Springs, Galanin installed Never Forget (2021), a 110-by-18-metre sign that reads ‘Indian Land’. A redrafting of the ‘Hollywood’ sign that is grafted into global cinematic memory, Never Forget challenges the Indigenous erasure this last represents. The sign stands on the land of Indigenous Americans that the United States refused to incorporate as tribes because they did not meet standards for recognition outlined by California state and the federal government. Without incorporation, land claims were ignored, and the Hollywood sign was used to encourage the development of segregated white communities in the area. The installation accompanies a crowdfund campaign for the Native American Land Conservancy to help it purchase land historically occupied by various Indigenous communities.
In his well-known installation Neon American Anthem (white) (2023), a text in neon lights on the wall reads, ‘I’ve composed a new American national anthem/ take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe’. In front of the intense glow of this invitation are doormat-size round-cornered squares of fake grass with a single daisy in the upper righthand corner. The work is intended to call in people from a deeper level than the political or the identitarian struggle. Societies built intentionally to fail particular people over others restrict interpersonal growth and curtail the possible experiences available to a person in a lifetime, producing profound pain. Kneeling before the commercially produced neon text on fake grass models the alienation of the contemporary moment, representing reality somewhat like a movie set. Galanin speaks to inviting in different symbols from protests for racial justice to dialogue with his Indigenous methodology of resistance. In the past, the artist’s installation has provoked audience participation in the form of heartsearing spectator screams; it does so to the extent that one host, the Seattle Art Museum, attempted to establish sonic limits on such reactions.
Galanin received emails from viewers reporting that gallery attendants told them they were only allowed one scream because the museum found the public acts of grief and catharsis interruptive. This year, at the same time as the Boston Public Art Triennial, Galanin will open a solo exhibition, Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land), at MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), also in Boston. Sharing the same name as the exhibition is the installation of a monumental suspended Lingít box drum, beat by a robotic arm at the speed of the average human heart, in a darkened room. The Lingít box drum is an essential element to many ceremonies, a device of transliminal calling in some instances. The kinetic, suspended box drum is made of red cedar and marked on both sides with a Lingít symbol of an abstracted life force, connected by an umbilicallike line to the womb of a red circle. The encircled figure reads as something yet to be born from an environment controlled by a redundant, machine process. The piece is thinking about the future Indigenous folk that will emerge from the unpredictable and precarious engagement between capitalist productivity and Indigenous survivance. As the prominence of Indigenous scholars and artists increases, the collective pressure to return historically Native American and Indigenous lands to their community has resulted in reparations. In 2023 the state of Kansas returned a portion of Kaw Nation lands in Lawrence. Galanin dreams out loud, through his artwork, of such events. An example is his installation World Clock (2022). A framed piece of manila cotton-paper reads, in ink calligraphy, ‘The New York Times: Manhattan Returned to Lenape’. Actual issues of The New York Times sit on the floor beneath the framed future headline. Operating like an archive from the future, the installation allows us to imagine a reality where everything will be returned, not to relive the past, but to reclaim its best technologies in the world to come. The way things are will not survive into the future. One must wonder, for all of the normalized violence of American history, how it will stand up to 10,000 years of process, memory and knowledge. There is a future possible in which everything since 1492 is remembered by those who remain in the same manner as one might recall a deadly fever: grave but passing. In the same aforementioned conversation between Galanin and Joseph Pierce, Pierce discusses Indigenous cosmologies and their framing of humans as children in relation to the maturity of nature and of other animals. Galanin recovers this idea in works similar to We Dreamt Deaf, such as Architecture of return, escape (2022). In this series, Galanin recovers taxidermy animals or their hides, and in refusal of their recategorisation from ancestor / creature to object, he uses those hides as a canvas to display maps of escape for Indigenous art and remains. He blues the skin side of the hides and then adds floorplans of art institutions in chalk, institutions such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in the past refused repatriation of such holdings in its collections. The series of works in Architecture of return, escape speak to the limitations of knowledge in a humancentric framework; sharing floorplans for escape for knowledge and energy exceeds those limitations because it implies agency. The dominance of a humancentric perspective, and a limited one in terms of how to be human, fails to liberate us from our systematised waste and destruction that replaces a sincere and connected collaboration with the environment, and each other, with the purchase of simulacra of that. This extensive and expanding hole in the human experience represents a catastrophic loss, something to grieve openly. Galanin centres loss and return as factual, unavoidable and possibly beautiful aspects of existence, including when our bodies are what is lost and mandated to return to the ground. In reply to the standard response from museums – that the works will su.er outside of institutional possession – Galanin states that “these are materials that our communities know how to harvest, how to handle.”
He continues, “I would like to go back to conversations of [kooteeya] and totem poles, monumental, visual language carved into red cedar, that will return to the land after it is stood long enough in its spot… where it came from… like our bodies.”