The decolonial struggles of Indigenous people around the world are interconnected by their shared histories of oppression, land dispossession, and cultural erasure. Palestine represents one of the ongoing decolonization conflicts, rooted in a prolonged struggle against occupation and displacement. The shared experience of fighting for the right to exist on ancestral lands, preserve cultural heritage, and attain political autonomy fosters profound solidarity among Indigenous and other oppressed groups, uniting them in a common narrative of resistance and resilience against colonial legacies.
Edgar Heap of Birds, part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, embodies this struggle through his art. Throughout his career, he has brought visibility and justice to the colonial crimes against his people imparted by the settler-colonial project of England and the United States.
In 2020, during the Covid pandemic lockdown and in the midst of Trump’s presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted across the United States. Inflamed by the murder of George Floyd - the movement stepped up against the systematic normalization of police brutality against African Americans across the country. The title is a tribute and gesture of solidarity between the oppressed populations of the United States whose decades-long necropolitical regime is based on racist and discriminatory policies from its founding to today. The themes in "Tribal Lives Matter" resonate deeply with the Palestinian struggle, the condition of apartheid, and systematic political historical erasure and dispossession. This work reveals the ongoing colonial tactics that have been applied at different points in history to various global territories in order to control, settle, and claim indigenous land.
The monotype print installation chronicles numerous violent events towards the indigenous tribal communities in the US. These locations are all places of death and massacres at the hands of European colonial invaders. The events remain largely unknown and unacknowledged, the perpetrators hold no accountability and harm goes without repair. Like protest signs against a general amnesia, they only scratch the surface of the violent history of dispossession, death, and land theft from the diverse tribal nations that once spread across the landmass that today forms the basis of the United States of America.
24 primary prints and 24 ghost prints. Each print is 22x30.
