G. Cournoyer

it was a white sheet spread across the floor. The artist had sanded down depressions at particular spots so the sheet could sag down beneath the floor’s level. The sheet was a map of the Dakota Territory (not the territory itself) spreading west to the Snake River and beyond. And each depressed area was red with pig’s blood at a spot on the map where Indian men, women, and children had been slaughtered in the name of the speckled cow and the ex-Confederate soldiers who rode around on horses before barbed wire came to be. The bigger the spot, the higher the number that had been murdered. The thought was maybe if the blood sunk in, the reality of what had been done here might, too. That MItakuye Okasin might come to be understood by even those who did not speak in the mother tongue.

The artist didn’t know what to do about the blankets that had the disease and that were distributed far and wide among the tribes when the cold set in. She just knew she needed to find a way, outside of paint, to connect.