In Boston’s sprawling Triennial exhibition, an Indigenous artist’s evocations of cultural extinction haunt

“A dull thud, regular, muted, persistent, fills the stairwell at the MassArt Museum: Thump-thump, thump-thump. It’s strange but familiar. Then it hits you — it’s the rhythm of a beating heart, but its source is far from human.

“…The spectacle, penetrating and unnerving, is the work of Nicholas Galanin, 46, a registered member of the Sitka tribe in Alaska and one of the most accomplished Indigenous contemporary artists in the country. Just outside in Evans Way Park, his “I think it goes like this (pick yourself up),” a bronze sculpture of a blocky, patchwork Tlingit totem pole, is one of the marquee offerings of the Boston Public Art Triennial. The MassArt installation, called “Aáni yéi xat duwasáak (I am called Land),” is an indictment of the threat Native American culture has endured under centuries of colonial rule, and the eerie intimation of extinction looms large here. But its warning is broader and holistically dire: Disconnection from the land and sea ends badly, with humanity writ large the ultimate loser. In the quest for domination, no one — nothing living, at least — wins.”

Read more in the Boston Globe.