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At the entrance to the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ “Paper Trails” exhibition, a waterfall of blue paper triangles cascades from the ceiling. Each individual triangle could fit in the palm of my hand, like those paper triangle “footballs” my friends and I used to flick at each other in middle school. The blue colors come from photographs of rivers, which the artist, Faye HeavyShield (Kainai Nation), has been photographing for over 15 years.

Some of the river fragments look dull and muddy, while the bright turquoise and ultramarine ones really pop. Some appear to be a single, flat color, while others show a rippled surface sparkling with sunlight. HeavyShield returned to the rivers across a range of seasons and lighting conditions, so each triangle represents a discrete moment of looking. She mixes and matches the triangles — icy blue next to purplish ones, dark next to light — such that the images, captured from different vantage points and at different times of the day or year, get conflated into a single, multifaceted vision of a river that seems to remember its past.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, no one can step into the same river twice, because it’s never the same river, and we’re never the same person. That was the basic gist of those early analytical cubist paintings by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, too, where fragmentary glimpses of the same object, viewed at different times and from different angles, are brought together into one impossibly multidimensional picture. HeavyShield turns 15 years of river-gazing into a cubist waterfall of paper triangles.

But why paper?

Last month, I wrote about “Pulp,” a works-on-paper show at the gallery Smoke the Moon, which both played into and against stereotypes of paper as something cheap. For the Indigenous artists in “Paper Trails,” cheapness is not paper’s main association. Rather, it stands for settler-colonial bureaucracy: the paper of broken treaties, deceptive maps and genocidal Congressional acts.

In everyday parlance, to “follow the paper trail” is to dig through written documents in search of the truth. But there are aspects of truth that can never be captured or contained in paper form. HeavyShield may photograph the same river thousands of times, but each image looks different, and no single image can ever capture the river’s “essence,” if such a thing even exists. Beyond the bounds of documentation, real rivers just keep rolling along, unconcerned with our human knowledge systems.

In another room, HeavyShield has installed a series of paper cones on the wall. The cones, roughly the size of party hats, are pink, orange, brown and beige. Some are striated like marble, and others are speckled like terazzo. All of them, it turns out, are ultra-close-ups of the artist’s skin. There is an even greater variety of colors and patterns in these cones than in her blue triangles — which just goes to show the total absurdity of categorizing people by skin color, as colonial administrators, for centuries, did. Everyone’s skin contains a multitude of colors.

According to the wall text, HeavyShield’s cones are meant to evoke teepees on a rolling landscape, not party hats, as I imagined. The salient point is that she takes something organic — skin — turns it into something inorganic — paper cones — then masses the inorganic cones until they begin to look organic again. Her river piece follows a similar process, whereby the organic flows of the river are chopped into triangles, then reassembled into a new, three-dimensional form that’s wavy and flowing. Nature is cataloged, flattened and fitted into bureaucratic systems, as represented by paper. The paper is then folded or curled into naturalistic forms.

I linger on HeavyShield’s art because it provides a key to understanding much of the work in “Paper Trails.” From the ledger art of Chris Pappan (Osage/Kaw/Cheyenne River Sioux) and Terran Last Gun (Piikani) to a carved-out anthropology book by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit and Unangax), these works flip the colonialist logic of paper inside out. Many take two-dimensional photographs, texts and other documents and turn them into three-dimensional sculptures, as HeavyShield does, pulling us away from the language of signs, symbols and linguistic abstractions back to the basic truth of paper as material, which we can understand tangibly in relation to our own bodies.

Bonnie Devine (Serpent River First Nation/Anishinaabe/Ojibwa) has created a full-scale Anishinaabe rice-gathering canoe by sewing together hundreds of pages from her graduate school research notebooks. This work is self-reflexive, since some of the pages actually describe how to construct an Anishinaabe canoe. Sustainable land and water use by Indigenous communities along Canada’s Serpent River is a central theme in the research, which she contrasts with highly destructive practices, such as uranium mining, enabled by colonial-era treaties. The text of one such treaty, the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850, is stitched into the canoe alongside texts celebrating Indigenous knowledge.

Devine’s large but lightweight paper canoe hangs from the ceiling, as if floating heavenward — the physical embodiment of a prayer. And what is the prayer? Perhaps it’s for the Serpent River to be returned to Indigenous management after many decades of mismanagement and reckless resource extraction. Devine made this sculpture in 2003. In 2024, the government of Canada reached a $10 billion settlement with the 21 First Nations of Northern Ontario, Canada — the Robinson Huron Treaty Settlement — which might be seen as an answer to that prayer, or at least a good first step.

Some of the most affecting works in the show are relatively humble and intimately scaled. A micro-origami lidded jar by Rain Scott (Navajo/Acoma) absolutely blew me away. From a distance I thought its intricate crenellations indicated that the jar had been 3D printed. Up close, I could see that each bump was, in fact, a hand-folded paper shape, a little tortellino, no bigger than a fingernail. If you know anything about origami, you know it takes much more skill to work small than big, and this piece obviously took many hours of precise, meticulous folding. He weaves the origami shapes into a radiating starburst design, typical of Acoma pottery, to create something that feels both ancient and contemporary.

“Paper Trails” includes work by 22 artists, so we’ve barely scratched the surface of the incredible work on view.

The exhibition was co-curated by Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paìute), Erika Knecht and MoCNA’s chief curator, Manuela Well-Off-Man. In their curatorial statement, they acknowledge the material legacy of paper as “an instrument of control and erasure,” noting that the artists in the show hope to “reclaim and reconfigure” that legacy for themselves and their communities.

This is not an exhibition to rush through. So, if I’ve piqued your curiosity, and you do decide to check it out, please give yourself ample time. You may want to pick up a copy of the catalog, as well, which contains insightful contributions from Indigenous scholars and artists. It’s a scholarly show, but it’s also one that takes us beyond scholarship, beyond printed matter. The paper objects communicate in a language of embodied materiality. We don’t read them. We feel them.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ���. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at .