Cannupa Hanska Luger: Unziwoslal wašičuta

Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum. Through installation and land-based work, the series developed an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration-based technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. The project also prototyped designs for objects and their use and advances new materials and new modes of thinking within Indigenous methodologies. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, Future Ancestral Technologies conjured innovative life-based solutions for a highly adaptable lifestyle to live with the land, not off the land.

Luger’s installation revealed the relationship between Northern Plains technology and broader forms of knowledge within an Indigenous centered continuum to dream of a future that embraces solutions and survival. Centered in the installation was a Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure or TIPI, surrounded by an eight-point abstracted star pattern to create an inverted landscape. Witnessed is a future dream space which is not ours to inhabit, but rather asks us to pay attention to our own relationship to place. Through this science fiction motivated installation, Luger challenged our collective thinking to imagine a post-capitalist, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other, and the artist asks us to consider how we will dream of our collective future.

The visual language of the tipi and designs like the star often become pop culture symbols used to define and not always accurately describe complex and geographically diverse Indigenous peoples and cultures. Luger reclaimed and recontextualized the technology of his ancestors by placing the past and the future in dialog to demonstrate the interconnected relationships between human beings and the land.

“Consider first that this installation is not an object in space, but in time. Then imagine it is not a relic of the past but in fact, we are. Now we may relax our gaze and realize that this installation is not inverted, but that our current world is upside down. Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials to present future landscapes of harmony.”

- Cannupa Hanska Luger

Photo by Brendan George Ko

About the Artist

Cannupa Hanska Luger (born 1979, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota; lives Glorieta, New Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses social collaboration in response to timely and site-specific issues. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, technology and repurposed materials, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st Century Indigeneity. 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. Luger combines critical cultural analysis with dedication and respect for the diverse materials, environments, and communities he engages and provokes diverse audiences to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring, often presenting a call to action to protect land and water from capitalist exploits.

Cannupa Hanska Luger's Website