Episode #39
Cannupa Hanska Luger, A Field Manual for the Future
What do you do when your own success prices your community out of your work? And what happens when a Vietnam-era Army survival manual — built quietly on stolen Indigenous knowledge — lands in the hands of the artist whose ancestors that knowledge was taken from? In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Cannupa Hanska Luger — the acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation — for a conversation about survival, storytelling, and the permeability of time. Luger's new PEN-recognized book, Surviva , began as a government-issue field manual his wife found in an Army surplus store — one issued to soldiers during the Vietnam War, the same era his father served. By redacting and illustrating over its pages, Luger transformed it into an artifact from the future, a catalog of his practice Future Ancestral Technologies. Luger traces the twin inspirations behind the book: a cattle-rancher father whose war lives in silence, and a Native artist mother who raised five kids on an art career and became, in his words, his real "field manual" for survival. He reflects on imposter syndrome and why he calls himself a maker of make-believe, on fatherhood and the idea that a relationship isn't a thing but a process, and on his grandfather — a self-taught orator and tribal councilman who lobbied Washington as a dam flooded 42% of their reservation. And he unpacks New Myth , asking who the monsters of our age really are — extractive industry, media, corporate greed, the manufacture of panic — and why the answer to slaying them is simpler, and harder, than any hero's tale.
