Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume.

Amherst College’s Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection’s abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality.

Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

Heid E. Erdrich writes from the present into the future where human anxiety lives. Many of her poems engage ekphrasis around the visual work of contemporary artists who, like Erdrich, are Anishinaabe. Poems in this collection also curate unmountable exhibits in not-yet-existent museums devoted to the ephemera of communication and technology. A central trope is the mixtape, an ephemeral form that Erdrich explores in its role of carrying the romantic angst of American couples. These poems recognize how our love of technology and how the extraction industries on indigenous lands that technology requires threaten our future and obscure the realities of indigenous peoples who know what it is to survive apocalypse. Deeply eco-poetic poems extend beyond the page in poemeos, collaboratively made poem films accessible in the text through the new but already archaic use of QR codes. Collaborative poems highlighting lessons in Anishinaabemowin also broaden the context of Erdrich’s work. Despite how little communications technology has helped to bring people toward understanding one another, these poems speak to the keen human yearning to connect as they urge engagement of the image, the moment, the sensual, and the real.
 

Many of the poems in National Monuments explore bodies, particularly the bodies of indigenous women worldwide, as monuments—in life, in photos, in graves, in traveling exhibitions, and in plastic representations at the airport. Erdrich sometimes imagines what ancient bones would say if they could speak. Her poems remind us that we make monuments out of what remains—monuments are actually our own imaginings of the meaning or significance of things that are, in themselves, silent.
     As Erdrich moves from the expectedly "poetic" to the voice of a newspaper headline or popular culture, we are jarred into wondering how we make our own meanings when the present is so immediately confronted by the past (or vice versa). The language of the scientists that Erdrich sometimes quotes in epigraphs seems reductive in comparison to the richness of tone and meaning that these poems—filled with puns, allusions, and wordplay—provide.
     Erdrich's poetry is literary in the best sense of the word, infused with an awareness of the poetic canon. Her revisions of and replies to poems by William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others offer an indigenous perspective quite different from the monuments of American literature they address.