The Omaskêko Cree artist ties the well-being of the animals to that of the Indigenous people with whom they have long lived symbiotically — not in nostalgic terms, but in futurist ones.

In a conversation with Duane Linklater published in the brochure for his current exhibition, 12 + 2, at Dia Chelsea, filmmaker and scholar Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) distills the intertwined erasures effected under colonialism in North America. Over the course of the 19th century, parallel to the systematic literal and cultural genocide of Native people, settlers killed millions of buffalo, till there remained only a few hundred; even now, when other large game populations are rebounding as part of free-ranging herds, buffalo are for the most part only allowed on private land, national parks, or reservations. “Indigenous people and buffalo are conflated in the settler mind and have been from the beginning; we are buffalo, and they are us,” she said. “And so, just like settler colonialism needs Indigenous people to be constrained and contained, it’s the same for buffalo.”

Linklater not only lets buffalo run free in 12 + 2, conceptually at least, but in the installation, performance, and paintings on view he also reimagines the world in their terms. Given the mutual identification, coexistence, and interdependence between Native people and the species across millennia, the move is an act of imagining the Earth in and through a lens of Indigeneity. Seven of the beasts, which the artist fashioned out of wire and papier-mâché before scaling them up to two or three times their natural size, make themselves at home in two vast galleries (together they’re titled “wallowposition”). Their faceted planes and visible seams where components connect give them a slightly robot-like appearance. They are eyeless, featureless really, covered in dun-colored plaster that mimics mud. But they are also vivid, animate, and expressive — adorable, even. One kneels on its front legs, perhaps drinking water. Another has plopped itself on its side, legs flailing in the air. Yet another, an adolescent with long legs and a head smaller than the rest, seems to be caught mid-trot, while a baby sploots on the floor.

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