Dead Indian Stories, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds

Artist Edgar Heap of Birds describes this series:
“The welcoming freedom of ‘Miss Liberty’ is not a positive offering for Indigenous peoples of this continent; it is an invitation and act to plunder the natural resources and end Indigenous lives. The genocide of Native peoples on this continent has been and continues to be an ongoing raid and pillage that we must endure. One hundred million Native lives have been lost, hemisphere wide, from so-called Euro contact.
The monoprints titled Dead Indian Stories are made in the face of unending Indigenous poverty, deficient educational opportunities, poor housing, police injustice, very high rates of suicide, lack of political representation, and dishonored treaties of promise.
Native nations lost their viability and harmonious human birthright in coexisting with this Earth after violence of so-called ‘liberty and democracy’ was perpetrated upon countless Indigenous families of these once kind lands. Today Native communities are at a severe status of recovery from U.S. / Euro brutality and loss. Will Native peoples ever truly recuperate and heal from such profound harm in the name of ‘Freedom’?”