There are stories that can never be forgotten. They linger in memories, in emotions, and sometimes even in stone. In Bourglinster stands a sculpture today that is more than a work of art. It tells a story of loss, of inheritance, and above all of love.
In 2001, Native American sculptor Rollie Grandbois of the Chippewa, also known as the Ojibwa, came to Luxembourg together with his wife Rebecca and their ten-year-old daughter Shayna.
He worked for more than six weeks on a sculpture that reflected his culture, his identity, and his view of the world. However, the piece was never quite finished, like a pause in a story still waiting to be told. His plan had been to return to Luxembourg to bring the work to completion.
That return never happened. In 2016, Rollie Grandbois died, and with him, the project in Bourglinster seemed to stand still in time.
But stories sometimes find their own way of being told.
25 years after Shayna stood beside her father in Luxembourg as a 10-year-old, she has come back. The place is the same. The sculpture is still there. And with it, the memories.
Since her father died, she said, she has tried to carry on the tradition and the legacy he left behind as best she can. There are not many sculptors in indigenous art, she added, and certainly few women working in such a dusty, demanding, and at times harsh profession.
She is now a sculptor in her own right, walking in her father's footsteps. With every cut into the stone and every fine detail she carves, more than a sculpture takes shape, namely a link between past and present.
For Shayna, the work is more than a job. It is a dialogue with her father, a way of voicing what was left unsaid, and a way of carrying his legacy forward.
She believes he would be proud of her for being there to finish his sculpture and to carry indigenous art onward. "I really think he would be very proud", she repeated.
The sculpture, titled "Soaring Eagles", stands for strength, for freedom, and also for the guardianship of a culture that has been suppressed for centuries. For many indigenous peoples, art is not just expression but survival, an identity they have not lost despite everything.
For the Grandbois family, the work is also a circle closing. Rebecca, Shayna's mother, sees her daughter standing where her husband once stood, and the feeling is not sadness but elation.
She believes he is looking down on them, and is sure he is guiding Shayna to finish the sculpture as he would have wanted. At the same time, she said, he is also giving their daughter the freedom to interpret in her own way what he began, and to complete what he started here 25 years ago.
In two weeks, the completed sculpture will be formally presented to the municipality of Junglinster, of which Bourglinster is part. It will stand quietly and strongly, watching over a story that spans continents like a witness etched in stone. It is a story that shows how art is sometimes not merely inherited, but lived on.
