Terran Last Gun’s drawings are sometimes composed of blocks of color set against yellowed sheets of paper and little more. Yet these are not just any papers, for Last Gun, a citizen of the Piikani Nation, has utilized century-old ledger sheets, some of them given to him by his father. That places Last Gun within the 19th-century Plains Indian tradition of ledger art, which saw artists draw battle scenes on top of used sheets from accounting books and the like. This act of appropriation—taking the materials of one’s colonizers, then using them to tell a new story—is given new life by Last Gun, whose abstractions refer to portals pervasive in Blackfoot lore. His doorways and windows open onto planes of yellow and pink, holding out the possibility of rehabilitation following so much violence.
