Dreaming our Futures: Ojibwe and Ochéthi Šakówiƞ Artists and Knowledge Keepers

Dreaming Our Futures features twenty-eight Native painters, primarily Dakota and Ojibwe, who live in the Midwest or have family or tribal connections here. The artists represent a range of generations, professional experience, and genres—including traditional, historical, contemporary, and conceptual themes. The volume presents full-color reproductions of art by each painter, along with bilingual artist statements, biographies, and essays on the representation of Indigenous people in historical context; storytelling and the creative process; and scholarship on several specific artists. The renowned Grand Portage Ojibwe artist George Morrison declared, “I have never tried to prove that I was Indian through my art. Yet, there may remain deeply hidden some remote suggestion of the rock whence I was hewn, the preoccupation of the textural surface, the mystery of the structural and organic element, the enigma of the horizon, or the color of the wind.” The variety of images painted by this g