"This self portrait torn vertically in half, one eye swollen black and blue, reflects multiple layers of violence enacted through religious indoctrination and state enforcement of division between humans and non-human animals and by further dividing humans from each other. Half human (animal) references the dehumanizing language and policies used to justify genocide and violence towards Indigenous and non-European people in the Americas. The work’s title asserts all humans as a single type of animal, resisting non- Indigenous epistemologies that espouse human supremacy and false moral division from non-human life.

The work specifically targets Blood Quantum, a colonial and settler legislated genocide against Indigenous communities. The policy of tracking and measuring Indian Blood was (and continues to be) a fundamental tool in removing Indigenous people from 'legal' claim to live, farm, hunt and fish on ancestral lands throughout North America. Simultaneously African blood was tracked and measured down to a single drop; not to erase the African, but to retain oppressive claims of ownership under colonial and subsequently settler law.

The diptych is a record of my act of tearing my own image in two. The internalization of Blood Quantum legislation by Indigenous people and communities causes Indigenous people of mixed heritage to tear themselves into pieces daily. The work asserts that belief in, and enforcement of, the non-Indigenous concept of Blood Quantum slowly erodes and erases connection to Indigenous Identity and culture and perpetuates violence, while damaging the rights and responsibilities of people descended from Indigenous Nations."

— Nicholas Galanin on The violence of blood quantum…