Description
In Back to Our Roots, Dennis evokes a scene of ancestral return interrupted by the persistent shadow of colonial violence. A Native figure stands grounded beside the gnarled roots of a great tree — a symbol of belonging, memory, and cultural endurance. His posture is calm, reflective, and almost ceremonial. Yet behind him, a woman approaches with a firearm, her movements furtive, echoing centuries of intrusion. The tableau captures a haunting paradox: as Indigenous people seek to reconnect with the land, the settler state continues to respond with fear, suspicion, and force.
Dennis layers time in this image, contrasting the rooted stillness of Indigenous presence with the aggressive restlessness of settler colonialism. The woman’s gun, like her stealth, becomes a metaphor for the enduring mechanisms used to police land, identity, and sovereignty. Rather than reenacting history, Back to Our Roots stages its repetition — a visual meditation on the cost of return in a nation where the origin story still requires erasure to survive.
