Humans are small. Small and relatively young—when compared to the nature around us.
That’s what artist Marlena Myles hopes people grasp when looking at her newest work In Relation to What Connects Us. She’s from the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation in North Dakota and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Myles created four panels digitally, now vinyl wrapped at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Memorial Union in Minneapolis. It’s a busy thoroughfare for students (current and prospective), faculty, and staff. Her art, which debuted this summer, is “creating an immersive space,” she says.
The mural includes colorful, geometric depictions of the Dakota creation site Bdóte, where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers sacredly meet just eight miles away. There are insects, fish, plants, and ground squirrels—inspiring the U’s gopher mascot—amid skylines of the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The culturally significant Milky Way, Tipi, and Kapemni appear as well.
It all ties together, Myles says, to one another and the land’s history.
“I want people to become more aware that everything around us is interconnected,” Myles says. “And I just wanted to make the human the smallest, I guess, because we’re like the youngest people on this planet compared to the trees, insects—everything is millions of years old, whereas humans, we’re pretty brand new. So we should be learning from the natural world around us.”
‘Interwoven Within the Earth’
The mural partnership started when the university asked Myles for a land acknowledgement piece in the student center’s entryway. Then, it was empty, save a few aerial photos of the campus. Myles got to work sketching and contemplating: What piece could she make to teach Dakota significance to the traditional homelands the university sits on?
MARLENA MYLES, ARTIST“I was thinking about creating within the pieces that like the plants and animals will be bigger than like the skylines, because people are putting themselves first when they’re thinking about this being a city, and they think of it as humans first . . . Whereas we need to plan around the rivers or plan around the natural relatives that live here and even the star knowledge that’s above us.”
Dispersed within the mural are words from 40 or so students. Myles hosted a fill-in-the-blank activity inspired by the ground squirrel; students could finish the sentence “The path I dig helps others to . . .” and “We’re all connected beneath the surface through . . .”
“Those words became part of . . . interwoven within the earth. And all these students are coming from different communities, and they’re getting an education to go back and be able to serve their communities, most likely,” Myles says.
“I just wanted that energy to be built within that mural too. So, you can see it from far away and up close you get different stories coming at you,” she adds. “It’s just kind of like the world around us: If you get closer to a singular plant, you see a lot more details than you do from far away when you see a prairie of plants.”
American Indian Studies professors will take students to the mural; have them examine and learn from its visuals.
“It’s helped them understand Dakota people more and more or help them look at the land differently,” Myles says. “And Dakota people, we don’t need a written language because the world around us stores so many layers of knowledge within it.”