Three Sisters-:original oil painting
Three Sisters is my Ojibwe response to Millet’s The Gleaners. Three women in ribbon skirts and protective masks, the Three Sisters of corn, beans, and squash, plant a lush green field beneath a horizon of smokestacks. Instead of scraps, they are sowing the future. Part of my Social Justice and Resistance series, the painting presents Indigenous knowledge not as the past but as a solution to monoculture farming, fossil fuel pollution, and the environmental cost of AI.
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Three Sisters is a contemporary oil painting rooted in my perspective as an Ojibwe artist and my ongoing exploration of social justice and resistance. It is my response to Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), one of the most recognized images of rural labor in Western art. Millet painted three women bent over a harvested field, picking up the scraps left behind. I kept the composition, but I changed the story.
My three figures wear ribbon skirts, and they are not gleaning. They are planting. They are the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, the Indigenous planting system in which each crop supports the others, enriching the soil and feeding communities for generations. These women are not taking what remains. They are giving, tending a field that is lush, green, and alive.
The women wear masks. For me, the masks are protection from the harms of capitalism and extraction, and possibly from surveillance. They speak to what it takes to keep doing this work in a world that tries to profit from the land, and from us, at every turn.
Behind them, industrial buildings and smokestacks stretch to the horizon, polluting the air as far as the eye can see. At first, this contrast may feel sad or jarring. I want it to. But I also want viewers to look again. Indigenous knowledge is too often treated as something from the past. In this painting, it is a solution for the future, an answer to monoculture agriculture, to oil and gas pollution, and to the growing environmental cost of AI.
The Three Sisters sustained Indigenous people for generations without depleting the land. That knowledge is still here, and we still need it.
Three Sisters is part of my Social Justice and Resistance series, where I explore contemporary issues through an Indigenous lens. By placing Ojibwe women at the center of a canonical European painting, I am also asking whose labor and whose knowledge art history has chosen to see.
The original is painted in oil on canvas, 1 inch deep, with fully painted sides so it can be displayed without a frame, if true.
Title: Three Sisters
Artist: Le’Ana Asher, Ojibwe
Series: Social Justice and Resistance
Year: 2026
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 16 × 20 in.
Depth: 1 in.
Edition: Original, one of a kind
Signature: Signed [front/back]
Framing: Unframed [
Certificate of Authenticity: Included
Shipping: Professionally packed and shipped with tracking and insurance
