Persistence story. gahl hal káaygaagang / she was born with it. (Within an Inch of Your White),2025

etched cassette tape, walnut loom, woven merino wool yarn, devil’s club, dentallium shells, mother of pearl buttons, United States Department of Interior archives from Southeast Alaska, mulberry paper, white feather, cord, snail shell, crystal, glass beads
16.25 x 10.25 x 7.5 inches

Ancestral faces are burned into this Insecure Mix. She carries the story of my second great-grandmother’s dispossession. She is adorned with documents from the National Archives Catalog, the stories of totem poles from two of my ancestral villages, Sukwaan and Howkan. These sacred belongings were scouted and removed by agents of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Howkan totem was slated for relocation to the Sitka totem park; the Sukwaan totem was sold by my second great-grandmother, Jaat Giigangaa or Minnie Nix, in English. It was purchased for two hundred dollars and sent to a tourist shop in Juneau. In the same document that records the transaction, the agent notes that “the people have nothing with which to feed or clothe themselves,” for the winter.

She is made of materials that have carried knowledge and protection through generations: devil’s club beads; dentallium and mother of pearl as adornments of relation and status; and a partially woven Ravenstail pattern. She remains suspended in a loom, still in progress. gahl hal káaygaagang/she was born with it, upholds that knowledge lives in the body, in the hand that makes, in the inherited impulse to create and connect even under erasure, and that what was used against us can be held as power.