TOTEM: As Monument & Archive by Erin Turner

TOTEM: As Monument & Archive is a new book from This Land Press that considers the artist-built environment—Ed Galloway’s Totem Pole Park in Foyil, Oklahoma—as a site to discover and spill out the complexities of place by examining the shifting perceptions of aesthetics, Native representation, and transhistorical remembering.

This publication brings together research and projects from artists, curators, activists, historians, politicians, and journalists, who consider site through the lenses of the monument and the archive, focused primarily on Oklahoma, although representative of the discourse of a nation. At a time when the meaning of monuments is being scrutinized and revised, this project considers the politics of the archive as a way to acknowledge seemingly silent (in)visibilities. 

The research presented in these pages recounts a public project designed by Erin Turner that centers contemporary Native thought at a sculpture park built in Oklahoma in the 1930s as a memorial to the American Indian by a non-Native artist, Ed Galloway (1880-1963). TOTEM: As Monument & Archive is an intervention. Through a large-scale restoration project, she centers the idea of ephemerality as methodology, considering the act of restoration and collective acknowledgment of the monument itself.

This book contains a preface by Alicia Harris (Assiniboine); an essay by Erin Turner; seven transcribed lectures by Pablo Barrera (Wixarika), Graham Lee Brewer (Cherokee), Ashanti Chaplin, Dr. Russell Cobb, Yatika Starr Fields (Osage, Cherokee, Creek), Annalise Flynn, Dr. Emily Moore, Apollonia Piña (Mvskoke, Chickasaw, Xicana); 200 images; an artist index; an index; and a bibliography. 

Praise for TOTEM: As Monument & Archive

"Erin Turner's TOTEM is the fascinating account of an Oklahoma white man's homage to Native Americans in the 1930s. Simultaneously sympathetic and analytical, the collected texts address the contradictions between stereotyping and good intentions, entangled histories and local politics. In a unique educational approach,Turner contextualizes this vernacular public art in its time and in our very different epoch."
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Partial Recall: Photographs of Native Americans

"Through conversations with artists, historians, journalists, and Indigenous voices, Erin Turner turns this unusual roadside park into a living forum for reckoning with history, representation, and place. The result is an invitation to look again at familiar landmarks and discover that their meanings are far more complicated—and far more alive—than first appears." 
—Michael Mason, writer and former This Land Editor-in-Chief.

“TOTEM offers more than a centennial critique of appropriation and Indigenous [mis]representation along Route 66: Turner and her collaborators probe deeply into how and why a “totem” park materialized in Oklahoma, approaching Galloway’s well-intentioned public artwork within the context of a country seeking a national aesthetic through Native American art forms. TOTEM engages contemporary Indigenous voices to deliver concise, layered, and promising examinations on how this monumental site
reflects the way we use art to tell stories about ourselves.”
—Pablo N. Barrera (Wixáritari), Curator, RiddoDuottarMuseat, Kárášjohka, Norway

Paperback. 
7.5" x 9.5". 176 pages.
Printed in the United States.
Published by This Land Press, LLC.
ISBN: 978-0-9962516-6-2
©2026. All rights reserved.