Description
We Are Still Here, currently on view in
Living Conduit – Indigenous History and Present Day, South Ocean Gallery at South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Freeport, NY, October 3, 2026 – November 21, 2026
We Are Still Here states what colonial accounts of disappearance continue to deny. Native people live, work, raise families, and make culture on Long Island today. Standing in regalia at a storefront, the person pictured occupies an ordinary contemporary street. Indigenous identity belongs in this present, including places where the public has been taught to recognize Native people only as figures from the past.
The series title The Lazy turns attention to a colonial accusation. English colonizers dismissed Native work and land use when they did not resemble European property and cultivation practices. Describing inhabited land as idle helped justify taking it. Today, vacant storefronts and seasonal houses can remain empty while their owners' claims are protected. The comparison exposes whose absence is tolerated and whose presence is made to seem insufficient.
The sign answers that history through a direct statement of continuity. Regalia does not place a person outside modern life. Neither urban development nor a change in property ownership makes Indigenous relationships to a homeland obsolete. The storefront setting also puts the claim before the people who pass through these spaces every day. Recognition requires more than accepting that Native people survived: it means acknowledging communities' authority to speak about their representation, land, and future. The staged encounter does not assign a particular history of dispossession to this building. It brings a larger contradiction into the street, where property is readily recognized and Indigenous belonging can remain contested. We Are Still Here insists that the people whose disappearance was predicted are present to answer that prediction themselves.
Artwork Details
Title: We Are Still Here
Year: 2016
Medium: Metal Print
Size: 30 x 40 inches
Edition: 1/10
