“ NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey — “It’s a good day to be Indigenous,” Thomas Builds-the-Fire declares in the 1998 Native comedy, Smoke Signals — a fitting prelude to the staggering monument to Native resilience that is Indigenous Identities at the Zimmerli Art Museum, the late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s final curatorial salvo. Rooted in a circular worldview in which humanity is inseparable from nature — in stark contrast to the linear, extractive logic of American colonialism — the exhibition is the most extensive display of Native American art to date, numbering 100 works by 97 artists. I was struck in particular by the haloed elk in Norman Akers’s “Drowning Elk” (2020), which drifts in a lake of crushed plastic bottles — a quiet martyr. I felt that I found a spectral stand-in for Quick-to-See Smith, the show’s late curator, who walked on just days before the opening. An artist and environmental activist, Smith’s passing feels like a final warning: a departure from a world too broken to be saved.”