This work uses archival images with care and caution. Archives have often recorded Native and Indigenous peoples through colonial lenses that flatten difference, stage people as objects of study, or detach them from the living relations that give those images meaning. Here, the archive is not presented as neutral truth. It is treated critically: as a record of colonial looking, but also as a site where fragments of presence, struggle, memory, and self-representation can still be encountered.

Some material reproduced in this project uses the term “Indian.” Although that word carries the weight of colonial classification, it is retained only when directly referencing specific archival titles, captions, organizations, or historical documents. At the same time, some people and movements have continued to use the term as an act of reclamation and as a political signifier within their own grounded histories.

The resistance movements invoked here are not interchangeable. Each emerges from distinct lands, nations, languages, legal orders, and histories that remain complex and specific to the people who live them. What can be recognized across them is not sameness, but a recurring commitment to defending land, water, non-human relations, and the Indigenous peoples who continue to live despite sustained colonial attempts to erase them.