Nicholas Galanin, White Noise Prayer Rug

Nicholas Galanin: My name is Nicholas Galanin, Yéil Ya-Tseen. I'm Tlingit and Unangax, based in Sitka, Alaska.

Narrator: Rather than resting on the floor, Galanin’s White Noise American Prayer Rug hangs on the wall, like a television. The image woven into its surface is static—the visual equivalent of white noise.

Nicholas Galanin: The white noise is a reference to, cultural amnesia, selective amnesia that is witnessed in our communities through history, through the telling or recounts of history, through the framework and the words, and the vocabulary used to acknowledge our reference, to Indigenous genocide on Indigenous land that's still continues today in that violence.

There's a real danger in disconnect in our communities. 

When you’re disconnected from land it becomes really easy to inflict violence on that land, whether it's environmental violence or violence on communities.