Three Sisters was painted by an artist of mixed indigenous descent (Pomo/Karuk) on a building that is an extension of the Fair Street Reformed Church which sits on the ancestral lands of the Munsee Lenape People. The relationship between the artwork and its context aims to provide an opportunity for acknowledgment, the restoration of representation and reclamation of space on stolen land. In advance of the production of this mural, the Reverend of Fair Street Reformed Church acknowledged, with the artist and her congregation, the violence, erasure and genocide caused by the Christian Church in the Americas to cultures and people that lived in harmony with the land before colonization. A commitment to an ongoing acknowledgement of harm was essential to placing Three Sisters in this charged space. The artist states ” People imagine that the Indians that were symbiotic with this land are in the past, no longer among us. But we are still HERE.”
Three Sisters, speaks to both a very personal reflection by the artist and the intergenerational trauma borne throughout Indigenous peoples of the Americas as a result of the loss of land, language, culture, identity and life resulting from the violence, oppression and genocide of colonization. The three indigenous women pictured play different roles in a pictorial imagining of what needs to happen for to heal; one is grieving (crying), one is connecting to themselves and the past (offering flower to a shadow self), and one is nurturing for the future (pouring tears of colored water onto plants that are food for the future). The mural acknowledges cycles of violence, loss and trauma carried through families and cultures that have been oppressed, murdered, disenfranchised, removed from land and resources, and victim to violence in all of its forms. It is also about the one person in any family who, perhaps, has the ability to heal by being a mediator between the past and future while also calling us, more broadly, to acknowledge our own role in the healing that is needed in our communities.