SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide (Preorder)

PREORDER
Publication date: 09/02/2025

About the book

An ambitious, world-envisioning work of Indigenous futurism.

Since 2015—through a proliferation of forms including sculpture, regalia, film, photography, poetry, painting, and installation—acclaimed multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been weaving together strands of a new myth. Collectively referred to as Future Ancestral Technologies, this sprawling series of interrelated works seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.

Part graphic novel, part art book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide offers readers a view beneath, beyond, and between the lines of Luger’s ever-expanding artistic universe. In this ecstatically hybrid work, Luger transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing—deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text. An epic and timely meditation on planetary life in the midst of transformation, SURVIVA boldly presents an earth-based, demilitarized futuredream that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge as critical to humanity’s survival.

SURVIVA is the first title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate. 

About the author

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental installations, sculpture, and performance to communicate urgent stories of twenty-first-century Indigeneity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota. Luger’s bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. His work is in numerous permanent museum collections and has been exhibited around the world, including at the Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates; the 81st Whitney Biennial, New York; the 14th Shanghai Biennale; and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Gardiner Museum in Toronto; and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Georgia. Luger has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, United States Artists, Creative Capital, the Smithsonian Institution, the Open Society Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. Luger currently lives and works in Glorieta, NM.

Praise for SURVIVA

“Cannupa Hanska Luger has created a wondrous book of survivance, a story to carry in pocket and study at every opportunity. At once a dystopia (earth is near destroyed) and a postcolonial fantasy (the colonizers abandon the planet for good), SURVIVA is a work of artistic brilliance that draws our attention to the simultaneity of ruins and futures. Rich with dreampower and evocation, these pages illustrate the mysteries of space-time, the dissolution of boundaries, and the relational universe described by Indigenous quantum mechanics. Read carefully, SURVIVA has the power to bend time itself, lifting us from past and present into futures innumerable.”
—Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Playing Indian

“SURVIVA offers Indigenous wisdom for a shared future built on ancestral knowledge in radical relation. This is a survival guide like none other.”
—Candice Hopkins, curator of the Forge Project

“SURVIVA is not just another riff on a sci-fi depiction of some imagined future. Luger’s poetic and visual interventions are clear directives for all of us to ready our minds, bodies, and spirits as we continue to move through the future together.”
—Jeffrey Gibson, artist and editor of An Indigenous Present

“Cannupa Hanska Luger’s SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide boldly reimagines our conceptions of time and history as it interweaves past, present, and future. This inventive work challenges our collective narratives, pushing us to rethink the art of survival through a lens of transformation.”
—Hank Willis Thomas, artist and cofounder of For Freedoms

“Cannupa Hanska Luger is a mad genius able to weave parables from tomorrow with lessons from yesterday into a stunningly prescient and wise field guide you should read right now. This is not a book. This is a time machine.”
—Jordan Klepper, The Daily Show, Comedy Central

“SURVIVA feels everlasting and also like it will self-destruct after you read it.”
—Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker, Reservation Dogs (Hulu/FX)

Book details
160 pages | Paperback | 8.3 in. X 5.4 in. | ISBN: 9781961814264 | e-ISBN: 9781961814271
Publication date: September 2nd, 2025