11/02/2025
“The Eagle That Flies With a Country on Its Wings”
In this painting, the eagle’s body is not made of feathers but of history. Its wings are mosaics of scenes — riders crossing plains, lodges against mountains, ceremonies, faces, tools, migrations — fragments of a world that once lived in the open air and now survives in memory and art. The bird does not merely fly across the sky; it carries a civilization beneath its wings.
The sun behind it glows like an ancestral fire, not rising or setting but witnessing. Against that halo, the eagle becomes a silhouette of resilience. It is the paradox of Indigenous survival: though taken from land, the land still lives inside them — arranged not in fields and borders, but in stories, songs, and inherited sight.
The forest below is dark, almost silent, as if the earth itself pauses to watch the flight. In that stillness the painting tells a truth: that what was scattered can remain whole if someone remembers it. The eagle’s eye is sharp, not nostalgic. This is not a backward-looking elegy but a statement of continuation. To fly is to endure. To endure is to refuse disappearance.
In the end, the image teaches that a people do not vanish while they can still name what they have lost — and carry it forward in spirit. The eagle flies not for itself but for everything nested inside its wings — a moving archive, a sky-borne testimony that history is not finished simply because someone tried to end it.
🎨Artist and narrator: Elvis Becker
