10/12/2026
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day from Machigonne, in the Dawnland, the land we now call Maine. This beautiful piece from our collections is by Mi’kmaq artist Loretta Gould, and is entitled “Blue Hummingbirds of Summer,” a 2020 drawing atop Gall & Inglis’ 1850 map of Canada and Arctic Regions of North America.
In 2020, the Raven Makes Gallery in Oregon commissioned “The Homelands Collection,” a series of map-based artworks where they asked Indigenous artists from across North America to create ledger-style, narrative artwork on antique maps of their traditional and contemporary homelands in an effort to “decolonize the map.”
We purchased two works from the Homelands Collection (released in four separate series, 2020-2024), as they help to center indigenous knowledge and worldviews in our collections, and serve as key counter-narratives to traditional western conceptions of geography and cosmology. The celestial work, “Sky Boy,” was created by Dallin Maybee (Arapaho/Seneca), an accomplished artist, public speaker, and lawyer who currently serves as the Assistant Director of Development at the Native American Rights Fund. Loretta Gould, a Mi’kmaq painter and quilter from the Waycobah First Nation, created “The Blue Hummingbirds of Summer” atop a map of Canada and the Arctic.
We invite you to take some time today to learn more about the land you spend time on: https://www.whose.land/en/
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Collection: Osher Map Library Collection
Name: Blue Hummingbirds
Barcode: 57809
Image Number: 57809.0001
Creator: Gould, Loretta
Publisher: Gall & Inglis
Date/Date Range Produced: 2020
Language: English
Dimensions: 52 x 64 cm
Accession Number: OML-2020-5
Permanent URL: https://oshermaps.org/map/57809.0001
