Sáandlaanaay

Sáandlaanaay is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates installations, textiles, and assemblages using materials that carry history, such as cassette tapes and antique beads, to explore cultural memory and survival across her Mexican, Kaigani Haida, and Scottish heritage.

Sáandlaanaay transforms objects of memory into statements of cultural endurance and self-determination. Her practice moves across installation, textiles, assemblage, and conceptual work to examine what happens when inherited knowledge survives erasure. Rooted in Mexican, Kaigani Haida, and Scottish ancestry, she develops work deeply attentive to cultural memory and the conditions of disconnection and return. She works with materials that carry history—cassette tapes, deer leather, antique and copper beads, woven patterns—layering them as both shield and testimony. She orchestrates belonging through beauty-making rituals that refute ideas of authenticity placed on Indigenous artists, reorganizing understanding of identity through Haida storytelling, Mexican masking metaphors, and poetry in visual language to highlight tensions between an Indigenous past and colonial present. The through-line: that knowledge lives in the hand that makes, in inherited impulses toward creation and connection, and that resilience doesn't require permission.