“Color and form are the building blocks of my art practice and connect me to my Piikani heritage.”

 

Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, Montana) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation (Blackfeet) of Montana and a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani are one of the four nations that comprise the Blackfoot Confederacy, collectively known as the Niitsitapi (Real People). Born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, Last Gun works across media to explore color, form, and abstraction, drawing inspiration from land, cosmos, cultural narratives, and lived experience. His practice pushes the boundaries of Piikani modernism, situating Indigenous
visual language firmly within contemporary abstraction.

Last Gun frequently references Blackfoot painted lodges and their rich iconographic vocabulary,
exploring the dynamic relationships between color, shape, land, and sky. Painted lodges are
visual masterpieces of the Great Plains, depicting the world and cosmos through natural
surroundings, symbolic animals and helpers, and the upper realm that connects to the Sun,
Moon, and Morning Star. These ancestral visual systems serve as both conceptual and formal
foundations for his work.

The use of antique ledger paper in Last Gun’s drawings evokes the history of ledger art, which
emerged among Plains Indigenous peoples in the late 19th century during forced relocations
and imprisonment by the U.S. military. Plains artists began drawing on accounting ledger
pages—materials introduced through colonial systems—as a way to continue pictorial
storytelling when buffalo-hide surfaces were no longer available. Those original drawings often
depict battles, cultural practices, and responses to upheaval during an era of intense colonial
violence and disruption.

In some of Last Gun’s works, handwritten records of taxes, debts, cash, or property—remnants
of colonial and capitalist bureaucracy—remain partially visible beneath his geometric
abstractions. This juxtaposition foregrounds the tension between Indigenous cosmologies and
the structures of settler governance and economic control. In reclaiming and transforming these
materials, Last Gun reanimates instruments of colonial record-keeping into expressions of
Indigenous visual sovereignty.

Last Gun has exhibited widely at institutions including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center
(Snowmass Village, CO); Hockaday Museum of Art (Kalispell, MT); Missoula Art Museum
(Missoula, MT); Bates Museum of Art (Lewiston, ME); Newberry Library (Chicago, IL); The 8th
Floor (New York, NY); Museum of the Plains Indian (Browning, MT); Contemporary at Blue Star
(San Antonio, TX); and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), among
others. Most recently, he was featured in the 12th SITE Santa Fe International, curated by
Cecilia Alemani.