All Things Sacred
Love, Resilience, and Sovereignty in Linda Infante Lyons’s Alaska Native Icon Series
Keywords:
Alaska Native, Alutiiq, Sugpiaq, Alaska, art, icon, portrait, multispecies, adaptation, resilience, colonialism, decolonization, sovereignty, loveAbstract
This article will explore how the contemporary Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) artist Linda Infante Lyons’s Alaska Native icon portrait series embody the Indigenous ideas of love and resilience. In our times of global climatic and environmental change and the pandemic that disproportionally affect and displace historically underrepresented and underserved communities, it is vitally important to seek out the core of Indigenous social health, wellbeing, and sovereignty through diverse origins of resilience. To accomplish this mission, this paper will shed light on Lyons’s quest of colonial past and the contemporary revival of Alaska Native expressive tradition through the cross-cultural and multispecies entanglement—love— between humans and nonhuman kin as it has been steeped in creative expressions.
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