This week, for maybe the first time, an eagle beat its wings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The grand plumage belonged to a traditional dress worn by Acosia Red Elk (Umatilla, Cayuse & Nez Perce), who stood, arms outstretched, in front of Thomas Sully’s monumental portrait of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) on view in the museum’s American Wing. Queen Victoria and the British Empire, if one remembers, played a crucial role in the colonization of what is today known as Canada, including the establishment of the residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their culture. Red Elk attended a boarding school, though its conditions had improved by her time, she said. Critics point out that Victoria’s colonial legacy lingers in the form of government inaction around the crisis of clean drinking water on First Nations, as well as the disproportionate violence experienced by its members. But at that moment, the frame that held Queen Victoria’s portrait was overlaid by an augmented-reality artwork by the Indigenous Futurist Josué Riva. The artwork appeared after a museum visitor scanned a QR code with their phone and pointed the phone’s camera at the portrait (though any device or tablet would have worked). On the phone, a black-and-white moving rendition of Red Elk took Victoria’s place to deliver a message to the viewer: “Be a Good Ancestor.” Images of Acosia Red Elk from October 14, 2025 performance at the MET.Photos by Aaron Huey. Courtesy of Amplifier “[Rivas] told me to think of a message I want to say to the future,” Red Elk told ARTnews. “I always think about how you make others feel when you walk away from them. The ripple effect of our responsibilities—so that’s what we came up with.” Riva’s artwork is titled Standing Strong (2021), and he is one of 16 North American Indigenous artists that came together for “Encoded,” an unsanctioned AR exhibition hiding within the Met American Wing’s famed artworks and sculptures. The show was co-curated by Tracy Rector and brought online by Amplifier, a nonprofit media lab that partners with artists on projects of political conscience. “Encoded” launched on Monday October 13—the date the United States formally recognizes as both Indigenous Peoples Day and Christopher Columbus Day. It will wrap on December 13.It’s “unsanctioned” because Amplifier didn’t seek permission from the Met for their intervention. (The Met did not reply to a request for comment from ARTnews.) If anything, gallery attendants ranged from perplexed to mildly annoyed by the noise that accompanied many of the artworks. For example, bells ring when users activate Modeegaadi by Cannupe Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara & Lakota). Modeegaadi features several dancing figures adorned with bells and beads, and obscured by masks that recall the great curved horns of the bison that once populated the Northern Plains. The figures stomp and sway through seven landscape paintings dated roughly to the mid- and late-1800s, when settlers of European descent, backed by the U.S. army, slaughtered some 5 million bison within 20 years: a cultural and economic disaster for Indigenous tribes. Modeegaadi’s dancers flit across landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and their peers, calling to the fallen bison—and calling out to the viewer: Did you think these lands were born empty? Do you consider the role Western art history plays in canonizing this narrative?Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midéegaadi: Fire, (2021-ongoing). Thomas Cole, ‘View on the Catskills – Early Autumn’, oil on canvas, (1836-37)Courtesy the artist and Amplifier“The American Wing is a room of stories often told without us,” Nicholas Galanin, another participant in “Encoded,” told ARTnews. “It is a cathedral built to worship an imagined nation, painted over stolen land, one that names ideas of beauty but not the cost. When I walk through there, I feel the weight of how these institutions shape a vision of America that depends on our disappearance.”Galanin (Tlingit and Unangax) collaborated with Amplifier on three works. Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan (2006), meaning “We will again open this container of wisdom that has been left in our care,” is a blend of video, song, and dance merged with Winslow Homer’s famed The Gulf Stream, depicting a boat rocked by stormy waters. Never Forget (2021) sees the words “Indian Land,” in the style of the HOLLYWOOD sign, placed on 1865 Wyoming landscape by James Francis Cropsey. And then there’s How Bout Them Mariners (2014), which addresses the 2010 murder of John T. Williams, a deaf Indigenous woodcarver killed by a Seattle police officer. Williams, carrying a carving knife and totem, could not hear the officer’s commands before he was shot four times. Galanin’s work addressing his killing targets My Bunkie (1899) by Charles Schreyvogel, a painter known for his valorizing of Westward expansion. My Bunkie depicts a violent clash on the plains, in which a soldier rescues a bunkmate from implied Native attackers. Galanin added a video of a Tlingit with a knife, and uses as its soundtrack the police recording of Williams’ killing and aftermath.The work for “Encoded” began almost four years ago, Amplifier executive director Cleo Barnett told ARTnews. “Because we amplify artists and movements the intention was always to find ways to put the stories of artists into spaces like the Met that would otherwise not be allowed in,” Barnett said. “Our job is to identify the empty spaces for artists to fill.”Nicholas Galanin, ‘How Bout Them Mariners’ (2014). Charles Schreyvogel, ‘My Bunkie’, oil on canvas (1899).Courtesy the Artist and AmplifierShe added that the Amplifier team was lucky enough to find an anonymous Indigenous donor who came forward and made this possible. Barnett and Aaron Huey, Amplifier’s director of immersive design, told ARTnews how they mapped every gallery, studied its lighting, and overlaid the artwork digitally without altering the Met’s space. Each artwork provided unique challenges, in particular those paired with three-dimensional objects, like the Puma pelt/textile piece created by Priscilla Dobler Dzul to cover the naked body of the “Mexican Dying Girl,” on view in the American Wing atrium, which on any day ranks among the museum’s busiest spaces.I toured the exhibit with Red Elk and the Amplifier team, with our first stop being “Mexican Dying Girl.” People stared, visibly startled by the sight of her Indigenous dress. Tourists asked for photographs like she was a living artwork, and leaned dangerously over the bannister of the glass mezzanine for a better look. In the galleries, visitors gravitated to our group to hear Red Elk speak, some even breaking off from official Met tours. I don’t know what kids learn in school now, but in my memory of the American school system, there was no chapter on the original inhabitants of the un-ceded land now known as New York State. And only in recent years have surveys of contemporary Indigenous art started entering major museums and centers with any frequency. To say, the Lenape were violently displaced to make room for Manhattan some 400 years ago, but New York City is still home to one the largest Indigenous populations in the United States (with respects to Red Elk’s own tribal affiliation). That her presence could spur such gawking at an encyclopedic museum like the Met felt like a neither all bad nor good statement on the popular imagination, which struggles to place Indigenous culture in contemporary contexts. There’s a chasm in what museum-goers know about the land they walk on but also an apparent eagerness to fill it, if cultural institutions only provide the chance. “Art is never neutral,” Galanin said. “It carries the memory of the Land and the power that shaped it. Creation is a ceremony, a return to responsibility—not decoration but direction and responsibility.”