"Healing Phase" Exhibition Opening

Healing Phase is a collaborative exhibit from Spillway Fellows Bee Kakac & Nipinet Landsem.

Mni Sota Makoce, the land now called Minnesota, is a place that carries stories of creation, migration, harm, and healing. This land is covered in scars from colonial expansion, resource extraction, and industrial development— scars that are proof of a lack of relationship to the land. These wounds have become background noise to the cadence of modern life, whether because the abuse is hidden in depopulated and rural places, or because extraction, industry, and urban expansion are seen as progress instead of colonial violence. The last five hundred years of colonization have conditioned us to accept harm as necessary. We’re used to the white noise of colonial injury. We often do not recognize the violence that is happening around us, to our relations, our kin. We need a paradigm shift. 

Healing Phase is a collaborative exhibit that asks what it would take to reject the current status quo, the constant bleeding of the land and its people, and move forward with radical optimism into an Indigenous future focused on Land Back and reciprocal relationships. Through Bee Kakac’s drone photography and Nipinet Landsem’s illustrations, it asks us to reimagine our relationships with eight places across the state, sacred places, Dakhota and Ojibwe and Michif places that have been transformed by the impacts of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, industrial agriculture, and the constant growth of settler colonial spaces. It asks us to build relationships with these places, to learn to see them, and to move forward with different priorities. 

We cannot go back. We can’t turn back time. We can only move forward in a good way, and build relationships that heal.

Healing Phase is on view September 19 - November 23, 2026, at the Winona County History Center (160 Johnson St, Winona, MN 55987).

This exhibition is part of the Spillway initiative of Art of the Rural. Spillway is a long-term, collaborative initiative grounded in the cultures, communities, and histories of the Upper Mississippi River region. We are deeply grateful to the Jerome Foundation for their support of the Spillway Fellowship Program, and to our community partners for their collaboration: the Honoring Dakota Project, Engage Winona, Winona County Historical Society, and The Cedar Tree Project.

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