Through Paradox: Conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger & Ginger Dunnill

This episode presents a candid and vulnerable reflection into the experience of one family of creatives and how they are making it work. 

Creatives and life partners, Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and Producer Ginger Dunnill speak about their journey together for over a decade, making art, producing content and always being ‘one step closer to almost being done’. The focus of their conversation is on the last two+ years; navigating the pandemic, travel, making art and caring for family. This episode is shared in a hope to offer insight to others who may feel overwhelmed by the pressure to participate in the artworld in a sustainable way for mental and physical wellbeing.

About the artists:

Cannupa Hanska Luger & Ginger Dunnill on location filming Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth project, 2021

Multi-disciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger communicates stories of 21st century Indigeneity through social collaboration, performance and monumental installations which incorporate ceramic, steel and fiber. He exhibits, lectures and produces projects globally.

Broken Boxes Podcast creator and host Ginger Dunnill centers collaboration to create a living archive in support of intersectionality. She has organized exhibitions and social engagement projects globally, activating transformative justice practices.

Music: Tears Of Fire, Glad As Knives, 2011
This episode is now streaming on Apple Music & Spotify

On This Site: Interview with Jeremy Dennis

This episode we hear from Afro-Indigenous photographer Jeremy Dennis who shares insight, concept and approach around their practice. Jeremy also describes a myriad of exciting projects they have going on including Ma’s house, an old family home on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, NY that he and his family have been renovating.

Learn about all the projects mentioned on this episode and how to support the work at www.jeremynative.com

Jeremy Dennis is a contemporary fine art photographer and a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY. In his work, he explores indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. In his work, he explores indigenous identity, cultural assimilation, and the ancestral traditional practices of his community, the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Dennis' work is a means of examining his identity and the identity of his community, specifically the unique experience of living on a sovereign Indian reservation and the problems they face. He currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation. 

Nothing Happened Here. Jeremy Dennis, 2016

Jeremy Dennis Artist Statement: 

My photography explores indigenous identity, cultural assimilation, and the ancestral traditional practices of my tribe, the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Though science has solved many questions about natural phenomena, questions of identity are more abstract, the answers more nuanced. My work is a means of examining my identity and the identity of my community, specifically the unique experience of living on a sovereign Indian reservation and the problems we face.

Digital photography lets me create cinematic images. Nowhere have indigenous people been more poorly misrepresented than in American movies. My images question and disrupt the post-colonial narrative that dominates in film and media and results in damaging stereotypes, such as the “noble savage” depictions in Disney’s Pocahontas. As racial divisions and tensions reach a nationwide fever pitch, it’s more important to me than ever to offer a complex and compelling representation of indigenous people. I like making use of the cinema’s tools, the same ones directors have always turned against us (curiously familiar representations, clothing that makes a statement, pleasing lighting), to create conversations about uncomfortable aspects of post-colonialism. For example, in my 2016 project, “Nothing Happened Here,” stylized portraits of non-indigenous people impaled by arrows symbolize, in a playful way, the “white guilt” many Americans have carried through generations, and the inconvenience of co-existing with people their ancestors tried to destroy.

By looking to the past, I trace issues that plague indigenous communities back to their source. For example, research for my ongoing project “On This Site” entailed studying archaeological and anthropological records, oral stories, and newspaper archives. The resulting landscape photography honors Shinnecock’s 10,000-plus years’ presence in Long Island, New York. Working on that collection has left me with a better understanding of how centuries of treaties, land grabs, and colonialist efforts to white-wash indigenous communities have led to our resilience, our ways of interacting with our environment, and the constant struggle to maintain our autonomy.

Despite four hundred years of colonization, we remain anchored to our land by our ancient stories. The indigenous mythology that influences my photography grants me access to the minds of my ancestors, including the value they placed on our sacred lands. By outfitting and arranging models to depict those myths, I strive to continue my ancestors’ tradition of storytelling and showcase the sanctity of our land, elevating its worth beyond a prize for the highest bidder.

Music/Samples featured on this episode: 
Zero 7- Futures (feat Jose Gonzales)
Excerpt recording from James Baldwin, Why We Need Artists

This episode is now streaming on Apple Music & Spotify

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Revolutions of Pattern: Interview with Lehuauakea

This episode I speak with artist Lehuauakea. Lehua is a māhū or Queer, Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian and mixed heritage interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, or the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. We caught up this summer on the ancestral lands of the Tewa/Towa people of what is now known as Santa Fe, NM during their residency at the School for Advanced Research this summer where Lehua was working on making some large scale Kapa and other projects. We chat about the intention Lehua takes in how their culture is embedded in all they make, their ways of practicing art and producing kapa, and how the act of making keeps Lehua connected deeper to their land and ancestry.

Opening the episode we hear an audio recording from the late Kanaka Maoli activist Haunani Kay Trask. This excerpt is from a speech Trask gave On the 100th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, in 1993, where Trask famously spoke in front of Iolani Palace.

About Lehuauakea:

O Haumea Kino Pāhaʻohaʻo (detail). Lehuauakea

Lehuauakea is a māhū mixed-Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Lehua’s Kānaka Maoli family descends from several lineages connected to Maui, Kauaʻi, Kohala, and Hāmākua where their family resides to this day.

Through a range of craft-based media, their art serves as a means of exploring cultural and biological ecologies, spectrums of Indigeneity, and what it means to live within the context of contemporary environmental degradation. With a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of ʻohe kāpala (carved bamboo printing tools), kapa (bark cloth), and natural pigments, Lehua is able to breathe new life into patterns and traditions practiced for generations. Through these acts of resilience that help forge deeper relationships with ʻāina, this mode of Indigenous storytelling is carried well into the future.

They have participated in several solo and group shows around the Pacific Ocean, and recently opened their first curatorial research project, DISplace, at the Five Oaks Museum in Portland, Oregon. The artist is currently based between the Pacific Northwest and Pāpaʻikou after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Follow the work of Lehuauakea: 

Website: https://lehuauakea.com 
IG at @_lehuauakea_ https://www.instagram.com/_lehuauakea_/

Music featured on this episode by Hawane Rios
Songs: It’s Everything & Warrior Rising 

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

This episode is now streaming on Apple Music & Spotify

Skywalkers & Vulnerability: Interview with Marie Watt

This episode we are in conversation with artist Marie Watt. Marie is a member of the Seneca Nation and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

This conversation took place in February of 2021 at Camp Colton during a residency Marie Watt and collaborator Cannupa Hanska Luger were in, hosted through the Portland based organization, Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation. Tucked into a cedar forest in the Pacific Northwest for two weeks, the artists and their families hung out in a pod as the artists worked to create together a new monumental work for their two person exhibition Each/Other: Marie Watt & Cannupa Hanska Luger. The piece is a canine form, created out of bandanas stitched with messages sent to the artists from around the world. 

http://mariewattstudio.com

https://www.denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/each-other

Music: A Fly In The Hand by Alice Russell

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 2

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi , airs August 9th on FX. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European descent. 

In this conversation the artists reflect on the process and outcome from Sterlin’s journey on creating the television series Reservation Dogs. They also talk about Native humor, colonization, fruit flies, equity for women in the film industry, their mullets, anxiety in dealing with the press, boundaries, honesty, Indigenous community responsibility, Billy Jack hats, Indigenous film crews, fatherhood and so much more.

I hope you enjoy this little pre-party before you get to see the premier of Reservation Dogs on August 9th on FX. 

Also check out Sterlin’s podcast ‘The Cuts’ where this conversation and others with the creative team from Reservation Dogs and Sterlin will be airing and ‘The Cuts’ archive is thick, including an interview with his collaborator Taika Waititi.

Watch Reservation Dogs Trailer: https://youtu.be/RoHewFAkrWU

Follow the artists work: 
www.sterlinharjo.com
www.cannupahanska.com

Music: ‘Rumble’ by Link Wrey

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

This conversation was hosted by Cannupa Hanska Luger of Broken Boxes Podcast