Scott Strong Hawk Foster is often out in the woods early enough to greet the sun. Joined by loved ones, the artist, who has Hassanamisco, Mohegan, and Cherokee lineage, finds solace in appreciating the land and photographing wildlife. He once told his son to collect the most beautiful leaves he could find. Then five years old, an age when curiosity paired with a defined task makes magic, he returned with a bursting handful of orange and red.
Foster photographed his son’s full hands against his black sweatshirt—they commanded some strange attention. Three days later, the artist, who found himself taking polaroids at family gatherings as a child, asked his mother to don her tribal regalia and stand in the harsh light of their sliding glass doorway. The contrast let all else fade away. “All I saw was her,” Foster explained.
Fifteen years later, he has carried the inspiration from those initial compositions into more than 350 portraits of Indigenous people from southern New England in an ongoing series titled Ways of My Ancestors. At dawn, on the Sunday before his latest project was unveiled to the public, Foster stared in awe at the entrance to Quincy Market at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, where ten twelve-foot, black vinyl banners now disrupt the usually colorless granite columns with depictions of Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Mi’kmaq, and Massachusett people across generations. Adorned in family and cultural heirlooms, their portraits are presented as monumental interventions through the City of Boston’s Un-monument initiative.
“We walk in spaces all the time. We see them, but they don’t see us unless we’re wearing feathers or dressed in our traditional clothing. We’re doctors, we’re lawyers. We’re in every aspect of public service; we’re politicians, garbage collectors, salesmen, nurses, mothers, fathers, daughters,” said Foster. “You need to see us and acknowledge us.”
A crowd of attendees from across New England gather at the opening ceremony for Ways of My Ancestors – Imagery: Lighting the Path to Awareness at Faneuil Hall on November 19, 2025. Photo by Marianna McMurdock.
Above the main entrance to Quincy Market now hangs a towering portrait of Thomas Spirit Tree Green, tribal council member of the Massachusett tribe, the state’s namesake meaning “At the Great Hill.” Donning a storied deer cape gifted by the neighboring Nipmuc tribe, his gaze holds passersby.
The large-scale installation celebrating the region’s thriving contemporary Indigenous cultures now encourages curiosity and respect in a city that is only beginning to publicly contend with its history of atrocity, displacement, and cultural genocide. Just last month, over one hundred protestors marched from the Massachusetts State House through Faneuil Hall, in support of the Indigenous Legislative Agenda. Organizers have pushed for the state to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day; enable educational opportunities for Native youth; and remove the offensive image of Thomas Little Shell underneath a sword from the state’s flag and seal.
Today, Foster’s subjects hang in quiet-yet-bold reverence for their cultures which have resisted centuries of erasure, just feet away from where their ancestors were once sold into slavery.
“If you close your eyes you can probably hear the shackles and feel the grief and the sorrow as we were put on slave ships,” Foster said to a crowd of about eighty that had gathered on a cold November night for the project’s debut, shortly before leading them around Quincy Market in a celebratory stomp dance. “But now we stand before these beautiful banners of members of our community to celebrate that we’re thriving. That we’re still here, and that now we can speak and no longer be silent.”
The joy and pride evident in the faces of Foster’s photographs stand in stark contrast to the portraiture of Indigenous peoples available in textbooks and historical archives. Since its inception, photography was used as a tool of subjugation to dehumanize and reinforce the narrative of Native peoples as savage, in order to somehow justify the horrors committed against them at the hands of European settlers.
Often produced by celebrated white male photographers commissioned by the Department of the Interior, sorrowful images from federal Indian boarding schools crystallized the mission from US Army Captain RH Pratt to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Photographs of children and tribal leaders made before and after their forced assimilations are ensconced in public consciousness, revered as measures of success at the time and used to solicit funding from private donors.
Modern US history instruction largely omits contemporary and pre-colonial Native American ways of life entirely, including civil rights gains made in the American Indian Movement. A 2024 American Historical Association study—drawing on a survey of 3,000 educators and a review of curricula nationwide—confirmed previous scholarship that instruction on Indigenous histories dropped off sharply after the end of the Plains Wars. As one Alabama unit plan phrased it: “Conquered, the Native American way of life is all but lost and assimilated into a new American Nation.”1
Foster now serves to correct the archive in a markedly public way. He joins a host of contemporary Indigenous artists like the late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. A citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, Smith produced paintings and collages that interwove traditional tribal symbols with contemporary maps and American iconography. “Art should reveal the unknown, to those who lack the experience of seeing it,” said Smith in 2020.2
Scott Strong Hawk Foster explains the dreams for his project to an installation assistant on the morning of November 16, 2025. Photo by Marianna McMurdock
Countless Indigenous image makers have been working for decades to change the public’s subconscious stereotype without large-scale public recognition. Since she was a teen in the 1890s, Jennie Ross Cobb, the first recorded Indigenous woman photographer, made candid imagery of her Cherokee friends and family with a box camera and glass plate negatives. Cobb documented Indigenous survival through informal portraiture at a time when communities were broken up yet again due to the expansion of railroads and forced relocation of Native children to federal Indian boarding schools. Now, over a century later, a collective of artists, called Indigenous Photograph, documents, preserves, and reimagines their documented image.
Members like Matika Wilbur, descendant of the Swinomish and Tulalip peoples, have taken on projects that counteract absence and erasure. Wilbur humanizes each sovereign nation in the US through photojournalistic-style portraiture in Project 562, her images ranging from young people in sweatshirts herding horses to elders in regalia on their ancestral lands.
“I think we became a figment of people’s imagination,” said member artist Cara Romero of the Chemehuevi people in a recent interview with New Mexico PBS. “People were missing a connection to us as human beings. As living human beings.”3 Adopting a fine art style of portraiture, Romero produced a series, First American Dolls, that questions and pokes fun at the commodification of Indigenous art and culture. Now her work teeters on the fantastical in high-contrast, vibrant portraiture that imagines a Native future beyond only survival.
Foster’s Ways of My Ancestors is a celebration of past and present resilience. Its installation at Faneuil Hall is his third presentation from this body of work in the region. Selections are now on view alongside “An Indigenous Present” at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, and were previously exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester and Umbrella Arts Center in Concord.
Attendees, past portrait subjects, and Scott Strong Hawk Foster engage in a stomp dance, singing along the length of Quincy Market to reach more portraits on its East side on the night of November 19, 2025. Photo by Marianna McMurdock.
Unveiled to the public with speeches, poetry, and drumming on November 19, the installation brought together dozens of residents from across the region, including portrait subject Charles Eagle Tail, a local chef whose robe and eagle feathers signal his status as a Mi’kmaq knowledge keeper. The contrast between the portraits and their setting, beset by sparkling garlands in the center of Boston’s commercial square known for holiday shopping, is at once bizarre and powerful.
“It’s a step in the right direction for Boston, reclaiming and centering its Indigenous history, which goes back over [thousands of] years. It’s nice to have these really large images that welcome you in this place full of tourism,” said Megan Odell, an attendee researching Indigenous histories.
What began as a personal undertaking to document the beauty in cultures he witnessed, including his own, Foster’s work has morphed into an educational resource project that challenges contemporary depictions of Native peoples as extinct and brings people into a historically unforgiving space.
“It’s times like this where we can honor ourselves and also come together. Seeing each other away from our jobs and in more of a community setting, I think that’s a beautiful thing,” said Cheryl Cromwell, member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the first tribal health strategist for the state’s Department of Public Health, at the opening celebration. She noticed something unique in Foster’s work after commissioning him to capture their tribal health summit last year. “When you see the people and you know them, it’s like, yeah, that’s the person inside. He doesn’t only physically capture it, it’s like a spiritual eye.”
On weekends, Foster continues to wake up before sunrise to pack his car with gear and drive to powwows across New England, where he produces more black backdrop portraits for the series, filling a critical gap in documentation. Because of the painful legacy of photography in the broader community, he first gains trust by explaining the attempt: to honor.
—1 Whitney E. Barringer, Lauren Brand, Scot McFarlene, “American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools,” American Historical Assocation, https://www.historians.org/teaching-learning/k-12-education/american-lesson-plan/.
—2 “Meet Jaune Quick-to-See Smith,” Carnegie Museum of Art, July 1, 2020, https://carnegieart.org/resource/meet-jaune-quick-to-see-smith/.
—3 Cara Romero: Refocusing the Narrative, August 2, 2025, by ¡COLORES! A Production of NMPBS, Youtube, 11 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyFfmhB_uHA.
“Ways of My Ancestors – Imagery: Lighting the Path to Awareness” is on view at Faneuil Hall until January 14, 2026.
