Boundless K-12 Curriculum: PLACE

What does it mean for a culture when access to homelands change?

Painting with a yellow background, an abstracted whale skeleton on the left half of the canvas and a red poppy flower in the right corner.
Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock, American, born 1980)

Collider Study #1, from BREACH: Logbook 21, 2021
Mixed-media, clay, acrylic on canvas.
Museum purchase with Wise Fund for Fine Arts
2022.22

Collider Study #1 depicts the skeletal remains of Tofu, a young humpback whale that was struck by a shipping boat off the coast of New England in 2007. Its flipper extends in reach towards a red poppy in bloom. Shinnecock (or People of the Shore) no longer have access to hunting or harvesting whales, as their ancestors did.

“What strengthens my work is the connection of being from an Indigenous culture, whose history lies strongly in the sustenance and ceremony of the whale, but whose current cultural practice does not practice whaling. I do not have access to materials gifted by the whale. The tooth, bone, and baleen would have been used in the past to make our cultural patrimony. What happens when there are no whales?

– Courtney M. Leonard

Discuss why Courtney M. Leonard might have placed the imagery of a poppy flower next to a whale skeleton.

Courtney M. Leonard's painting with an arrow pointing to the red poppy connecting it with an image of a magnifying glass icon with the poppy in the middle of it.

How does Leonard’s art connect acts of remembrance and whale relatives in a way that shows a continued relationship with homelands?

Learn More about Courtney M. Leonard
overlapping concentric circles made by ripples in water.

Boundless K-12 Curriculum

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