Dennis, a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, explores in his work Indigenous identity and culture, histories of colonization and assimilation, and the ancestral practices of the Shinnecock people. His 2016 project Nothing Happened Here was borne from his frustration at the economic and cultural damage of the erasure, especially in school curricula, of Indigenous people. The absence of Shinnecock history in Long Island textbooks was especially flagrant, given the thriving Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, where he lives.

All the photographs in the series feature non-Native subjects going about their lives seemingly unbothered by the multiple arrows that pierce them. They are ignorant of the history of the land they live on and, more significantly, of the continued and uninterrupted presence of Indigenous people. Dennis understands the arrows as a metaphor for the “shared burden” that stems from a history of colonization that hasn’t been rectified or often even addressed.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)