The Protectors is a series of paintings by Kent Monkman that honors Indigenous land and water protectors across Turtle Island. Started in 2016 and inspired by resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, this series of paintings encompasses sites and acts of resistance such as the invasion of protector camps in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in 2020 and associated police arrests of unarmed Indigenous youth that continue today. Scenes of the US military storming the Sacred Stone Camp and the RCMP invading the Unis’tot’en camp evoke disturbingly similar historic attacks on Indigenous villages—from the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 to the Oka Crisis exactly 100 years later in 1990. The Protectors draws on the compositions of historical paintings of military confrontations through the ages, further complicated by the backdrop of raging wildfires. Together, the works in The Protectors bring to the forefront the contemporary and historical Indigenous resistance and survivance erased from settler versions of art history.

“The history of Indigenous struggle is a counterflow against another, privileged stream of history.” (Nick Estes, “Waves of History,” Revision and Resistance: mîstikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 105)

“Monkman forces each one of us to witness the real, while demanding we undo the unreal. The act washes over us like waves of history, ebbing and flowing, oscillating between love and rage. It hurts and heals. Water is life.” (Nick Estes, “Waves of History,” Revision and Resistance: mîstikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 111)