As a child, Jim Denomie moved to Chicago as result of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a United States law created to encourage Native Americans to leave reservations and assimilate into the general population. Continuing the Ojibwe oral and visual storytelling tradition, Denomie created paintings–and later on sculptures–that looked closely and critically at the history between the U.S. Government and Native Americans. His works share histories left out of traditional schooling, documenting the different forms of violence perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples in the United States today. Deploying humor, caricature, and a vibrant painting style of rapidly applied brushstrokes, Denomie captures the ongoing fight of Native Americans for the right to self-determination and to occupy their constantly threatened homelands. Denomie's work also portrays various forms of mystic affective encounters as a metaphor for reconnection with the territory, more-than-human worlds, sacred knowledge, and spiritual forces. The artist combined personal experience with images appropriated from the mainstream media to create paintings that flit between flares of pain, irony, and rage. At the time of his death, Denomie was preparing a major survey of his work for the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2023-2024).