We Carry History by Lisanne Garrett

Tyler Tarbon Lansing is Navajo. He is an American. He is a Marine Corps veteran. He carries the history of his people, and he has served a country whose relationship with that history is deeply and painfully intertwined.

I was drawn to Tyler because I don't believe these identities cancel one another out. They live together.

In this work, his portrait is layered over the words of the Navajo Treaty of 1868, the agreement that allowed the Navajo people to return to a portion of their ancestral homeland following their forced removal to Bosque Redondo. The treaty remains visible through Tyler's image because history does, too. We carry it with us.

The original portrait was made by photographer Joseph Kayne using the nineteenth-century wet-plate tintype process. I bring his photograph into my own practice through silkscreen, translucent vellum, painting, drawing, and hand embellishment, layering past and present both physically and metaphorically.

For Be My Icon, I wanted to honor a man who embodies something deeply meaningful to me: that Indigenous identity, patriotism, service, memory, and pride can occupy the same body.

The past is not behind us. It lives within us.

And still, we are here.