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Artist’s Statement: Kent Monkman’s Death of Adonis is an homage and a challenge to the 1888-1889 painting The Last of the Buffalo by German-American artist Albert Bierstadt. A painter of the Hudson River School tradition, Bierstadt is known for his romanticized American landscapes. Bierstadt painted The Last of the Buffalo at a time when the buffalo had been almost completely wiped out in North America. In this work, he portrays an Indigenous hunter targeting the remaining buffalo, falsely accusing Indigenous people of destroying the species. However, the historical reality is that nineteenth century settlers drove the buffalo to near extinction. Hunters in pursuit of profit slaughtered buffalo en masse, stripping their hides for industrial production and collecting their bones for use in fertilizer and bone china, then leaving their corpses to rot on the plains. This carnage went hand-in-hand with the Canadian and American governments’ campaigns to clear the Plains of Indigenous peoples in order to make way for colonial settlement. Monkman’s Death of Adonis reverses the blame Bierstadt placed on Indigenous people for the destruction of the buffalo and assigns it to settler populations.