Ya Tseen — Ixwsiteen (I See You)

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Ya Tseen — Ixwsiteen (I See You) (2025) Era: Post-Pandemic Indigenous Avant-Garde (2025) - Sub Pop-era Indigenous experimental music video, released as a single from Stand On My Shoulders ahead of its January 2026 release; thematically rooted in political witness and Tlingit cultural continuity. Exceptional. This video represents a convergence of Indigenous political art, fine-art visual practice, and experimental music video at a historically significant moment. As a work written for Aaron Bushnell and rooted in Tlingit ceremony and conscience, it documents a distinct mode of political witness absent from mainstream music video archives. The quantitative profile — extreme darkness, near-static motion, amber warmth — is aesthetically singular and analytically legible. High preservation priority for Indigenous cultural heritage collections and political art archives. Context: Released November 2025, 'Ixwsiteen (I See You)' is a politically charged elegy written for Aaron Bushnell, framed by Nicholas Galanin as a meditation on witnessing, complicity, and conscience. Galanin is a Tlingit and Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist from Sitka, Alaska, whose visual and sonic work operate as inseparable streams. The project name Ya Tseen — meaning 'to be alive' in Lingít — was adopted after his father's passing in 2021 as an act of cultural continuity and filial responsibility. The song sits within a broader body of work that explicitly positions Indigenous survival, land connection, and political resistance as intertwined. The video's extreme darkness and flame-temperature warmth evoke ceremony, grief, and the act of bearing witness — aesthetics consistent with Galanin's fine-art practice shown at major international biennials. Director notes: The video was released on November 4, 2025 via Sub Pop Records as the lead single from Stand On My Shoulders (Sub Pop, January 16, 2026). The song was written for Aaron Bushnell. Given Nicholas Galanin's established interdisciplinary visual art practice — with work shown at the Whitney Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Desert X, and by the New York Public Art Fund — it is plausible but unconfirmed that Galanin directed or co-directed the video himself. No production company or crew credits have been indexed in any reviewed source.