Presented with For Freedoms

Through installation, sculpture, video, and performance, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger foregrounds Indigenous knowledge and culture as critical to our collective survival. A multi-channel video series featuring the artist adorned in vibrant regalia, Midéegaadi is Luger’s invitation to envision the regeneration and return of the North American bison — an animal that ranged the American plains in abundance before their systematic decimation by colonial settlers. Enacting the ancestral technologies of the Northern Plains, Midéegaadi calls bison back onto the land through dance and reverence.

"For us, the buffalo are an emblem of survival and cultural adaptation; we respect the buffalo as a relative. This work expands upon a continued conversation in my practice which acknowledges the violence enacted onto the Buffalo Nation for colonial agendas while also celebrating the bison’s resilience and, in turn, our own as Indigenous people. I hope this series empowers Indigenous people and practices as central to global futures and to reflect a future space where we once again live in reverence and respect for our more than human kinships.” — Cannupa Hanska Luger

The videos and the regalia are part of the artist’s larger Future Ancestral Technologies project, an ongoing series of speculative fiction works in various formats that includes We Survive You, his billboard for LANDBACK.Art and For Freedoms in 2021.  Luger’s first artbook, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide published by Aora Books will debut this year with an exhibition and performance in Summer 2025 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC  in partnership with For Freedoms.