Jeremy Dennis’s photograph, Moccasins, was included in the exhibit at the Ucross Art Gallery in Wyoming.

This fall, the president of Aaniiih Nakoda College (ANC), Dr. Sean Chandler, served as the curator for an exhibit of Native American artists, which appeared first at the Ucross Art gallery in Ucross, Wyoming, and then at Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana. “The Language of the Land” included works by Steven J. Yazzie (Diné, Laguna Pueblo, European), Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Indian Nation), and Danielle Shandiin Emerson (Diné).

Yazzie said, “Through my photography I engage in a meditative exploration of place, weaving together concepts of iden­tity, memory, and perception. My process often parallels my video work.” The exhibit included a mesmerizing video flight over badlands in the Navajo Nation. Yazzie lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

Emerson’s heartbreaking poems are pasted onto layered shale panels in the exhibit. Her biography says, “My father used to read car manuals to me because I didn’t have access to literature written by Native and Indigenous women.”

Dennis uses digital photography to create cinematic images that he hopes question and disrupt the post-colonial narrative that “results in damaging stereo­types, such as the ‘noble savage’ depic­tions in Disney’s Pocahontas.” Some of his photography has honored his tribe’s 10,000-plus-year presence on Long Island, New York, but the images in the exhibit seem to derive from his stay at Ucross.

“I hope this exhibit brings viewers what it has brought me, for it is the language of the land that heals,” stated Dr. Chandler. The ANC president earned a Doctor of Education in educational leadership from the University of Montana and a Master of Arts in Native American studies from Montana State University-Bozeman. He is the son of the college’s previous president, Carol Falcon Chandler. The artists featured in the exhibit received the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Artists in 2024. Funding for the fellowships and associated public pro­grams was provided by grants from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund and the Wyoming Arts Council.