THIS IS NOT OUR LAND, WE ARE ITS PEOPLE, 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Durational land based action on public lands in North America (From SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide)
Since 2015—through a proliferation of forms including sculpture, regalia, film, photography, poetry, painting, and installation—acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been weaving together strands of a new myth. Collectively known as Future Ancestral Technologies, this expansive body of interrelated works reimagines Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.
For Uncommissioned, Luger presents a new activation titled THIS IS NOT OUR LAND, WE ARE ITS PEOPLE, unfolding over several days as a site-specific durational action. In this work, the artist traverses an undisclosed area of public land in North America, embodying a future variation of the author-character from his recent book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide. This action bends space and time as we follow the character through a just small portion of his long journey.
Rooted in the ethos of Future Ancestral Technologies, this subtle activation is a gesture of recognition and urgency—responding to a moment when public lands across the so-called United States are increasingly under attack through privatization, extraction, and the rollback of protections. Here, the land becomes collaborator, teacher, and witness.
In the final presentation, Luger shares a field recording of his voice reading excerpts of original writings and redacted poetics from SURVIVA—addressed to the very land he has walked—overlaying the video of his movement across that terrain, remembering story, place, and time as one continuum. Brought together as a time-based media work, THIS IS NOT OUR LAND, WE ARE ITS PEOPLE centers Indigenous thought, speculative fiction, and the re-Indigenization of performance itself. Rather than staging spectacle, this work offers an intimate call to be in right relation—with the land, with each other, and with the futures we are already shaping now.
“The land knows the story of our survival. This action is just a translation—an attempt to listen deeply, respond respectfully and dream that message forward.”
All photo and video documentation is courtesy of the artist, Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2025
On Site
About the Artist
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.
Through large-scale installation, sculpture, performance, time-based media, and community engagement, Luger activates cultural continuity, ecological repair, and collective care. His bold visual storytelling builds frameworks for reimagining systems, grounding artistic practice in Indigenous worldviews, critical inquiry, and material experimentation.
Luger’s work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sharjah Biennial. His work is held in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. He is a 2025 National Geographic Wayfinder Award recipient and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, among numerous honors.
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