Reaching back and into the future. Nicholas Galanin
By Jessica Lanay
October 27, 2025
The epistemology of US settler-colonial reality is based in domination. Soaked in the solipsistic reasonings of white supremacy, our relationship to one another upon arrival was the ownership of land and of other people. There was no alternative end for a jenga of institutions meant to exclude, and the moment we are in has been promised from the beginning. The concept of freedom was and is defined by schadenfreude and its taking pleasure in the suffering of others who are forced to be characters in a backdrop of absolute dehumanization by enslavement and displacement. Yéil Ya-Tseen Nicholas Galanin’s lifework is a razor expertly flaying away the simulacra of domination. The material realities to which we sell our labor overwrite the real calling of the human: to care for all life, to honor our vulnerability to the planet on which we stand, to learn.
Galanin’s art is, in part, a gesture toward the responsibility we must take to secure a livable future. Through the expansion of communal praxes for creating language, meaning, and respectful relations, Galanin urges us to consider the interdependency, not the hierarchy, of knowledges and consciousnesses. As we live through the death of modernity, we begin to understand time as an integrated latticework, and all of us outside of a particular racial privilege emerge from cultures of remembrance through education and practice that allow us to create communities and a future for everyone. Galanin pulls his work from entangled timeframes, reminding us of the technologies we really need to survive.
Jessica Lanay You did your undergraduate degree in London and your graduate degree in New Zealand, specifically in Indigenous arts. What were some of the core challenges of and differences between those experiences?
Nicholas Galanin They were completely night and day in a lot of ways. My time in Europe and in London was a time when we’re not allowed to show up, or we’re expected to abandon culture, identity, or visual language. I had that direct experience where I was told I couldn’t do it. And in New Zealand, I was allowed to fully explore it, embrace it. To me, the difference felt like in New Zealand they wanted me to succeed, and in London I was quite gaslit.
JL Were there strategies for survival? Were there any artistic strategies?
NG I had to adopt one, for sure. In the UK I had to not engage with my mentors in that sense of sharing all my ideas for work, and I had to develop that outside of them. I was very specialized and focused on jewelry and metalwork. There was a design aspect. My master’s program was more self-led in directions where I wanted to bring my work. But a key takeaway was that I was allowed to investigate Indigenous experience and allowed to bring it into an institutional space. I was not allowed to do that in London.
JL read about the new administration’s censorship of an exhibition at the Smithsonian that your work is included in. Are there inspiring aspects about being an artist in this moment? Frustrating aspects?
NG I feel like inspiration is always there if you listen to it. For me, this administration shows how important it is and how necessary it is for voices to create, to share, to express. Vision becomes clear. And there’s always been frustrations somewhere. Sometimes they’re just being surfaced, or they’re being clearly revealed. Back to speaking about my time in London, there was a frustration of not knowing exactly how to respond. We can return to forceful assimilation and an education system with boarding schools. That’s a similar type of system where power is saying that you can only do these things. You can’t do this. You can’t speak the language. These are extensions of that experience.
JL Do you feel that you’ve had to shift your approach to showing in institutions?
NG Navigating those systems and institutions is part of something we’ve always had to do from the very beginning of even trying to access my culture. I think those are parts of reality. And whether creating works for or because of institutional space varies. All my work is different.
JL Your works often blend different visual and linguistic epistemologies. Your public art commission for the Boston Public Art Triennial, I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) (2025), is incredibly powerful because it blends the language of consumer and imitation art with symbolisms and meanings from the cosmology of your community. What is being said in that conversation in the work?
NG There’s a reclamation of power in removing, or working with, or taking something that was created to consume us with appropriation and misappropriation, oftentimes for profit. The material of my work is doing that. It’s taking those objects and reconstructing form by presenting an idea and a voice with them while telling the story of what they are and bringing it to life. It’s definitely a material and a tool. In a world that only values something when it can be consumed or profited from, this ability to work within a voice framework and material in a very specific way protects and reestablishes our own sovereign and creative power in a way that can’t really be imitated. And I say this because a lot of our cultural work has been mined, or imitated, or reproduced by outsiders for profit. Our culture has been created to represent us and be about us. I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) is a very specific, direct, unique voice that continues the culture. But it wouldn’t be the same work if a white carver from outside of the community tried to create this same dialogue and stories. It wouldn’t be lived experience, and it wouldn’t be connected to the complexities of this conversation.
JL I struggled to find research on Tlingít and Unangax̂ iconography; I imagine that it isn’t accessible to most people as well. Are you ever concerned that a lack of knowledge impedes the viewer from fully receiving what is present?
NG I don’t ever expect anybody to have the knowledge of identifying historical work from consumer curio. I think that’s really specialized to those who have spent time around the culture and have been studying and understanding those intricacies. Material is part of it. There are so many layers to this work that they blend and branch off: bronze as a monument, and the idea of monument as power and upholding a certain narrative, history, or story, oftentimes determined by government. I know that the longevity here isn’t necessarily in the object; it’s in the knowledge, the community, and the people in the place. And that means in continuum that other ones will stand when new carvers come through and create work and represent the community.
“We are literally holding, nurturing, feeding, and caring for culture and continuum while we’re here for our lifetime.”
— Nicholas Galanin
JL Then there is the work done in community, such as the yaakw—dugout canoe—project for the National Park Services and the Douglas Village healing kooteeya, or totem. In a talk you mentioned that the cedar used for the yaakw is older than empire. If you could hold the same knowledge that the red cedar has, do you think your work would be different?
NG We are literally holding, nurturing, feeding, and caring for culture and continuum while we’re here for our lifetime. The growth rings of a cedar tree can reference the season in the annual calendar year. For me, the reference of “older than empire” in that process of working with something that comes from our land—in this case, cedar—and for our culture is a reminder of clocks and is a reminder of how humans and society can be shortsighted. If you think about the average age of empire, which is around two hundred and fifty years, and I know that the US is kind of right on the cusp, you are reminded of what survives culturally for our community. It’s instilled in a lot of cultures to know those things and to live and maintain them. And it’s oftentimes that we’re subjected to oppression, violence, and exploitation, or extraction through colonial means of forms of colonization that are only serving capital and its systems, and this is understood. The systems reveal themselves as violent and unable to sustain themselves because of the violence. When we talk about time and the things that are known in those time periods, it’s clear to me that the timeframe of our moments here are connected to longer-standing culture and history. My people have oral history going back fifteen thousand–plus years. We say “time immemorial” of stories of connection and where we come from, and the things that survive within that are the things that teach us how to survive and exist, and to care for things in space.
JL There is a way that I believe that nature will reject us before these supremacist fantasies succeed; the earth is already showing an intolerance to these systems. You’ve often spoken about making sure that the ancestry, the consciousness, the epistemology, and the cosmology are not seen as exotic as in their pastness, but instead are seen as purposeful and necessary for the future. What comes to mind when you think of what’s needed to carry forward from that space?
NG I think the important question of what comes next is also a place where things can be learned: where we can learn, and understand, and guide certain things. Even in the end of a violent, oppressive government or system, there still has to be a means of care going forward outside of that space. And I think what that means to us now is that, if we’re out fighting those things, we can’t just replace it with the same system. I think that there’s a lot of knowledge in our communities historically for ways to care for others and to do those things.