For more than a century, just one statue has stood outside the Museum of Fine Arts Huntington Avenue entrance.

As of Thursday, there are now three.

Two new sculptures by internationally renowned artist Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, offer a contemporary and authentic portrayal of what it means to be indigenous in America. The artist chose to highlight two contemporary local cultural stewards: Aquinnah Wampanoag member Julia Marden and Nipmuc descendant Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines, Jr.

Gaines holds a piece of paper with the stance of an orator, while Marden dons her own regalia and raises a turkey feather fan in a gesture of honor. She is an artist and a specialist in twining, a traditional weaving technique. He is an activist, public speaker and builder of “wetus” or traditional homes and “mishoonash” or dugout canoes.

Both sculptures will be on view for a year. The MFA commissioned Michelson for this project and produced this in partnership with the Boston Public Art Triennial.

“As opposed to the Plains rider sort of frozen in time and that idealized war bonneted stereotype,” Michelson said, “these are living subjects, important to their communities, modeling not just their bodies. They’re role models as well.”

His installation re-contextualizes the sculpture Appeal to the Great Spirit, which has occupied the center of the museum’s entrance plaza since 1912. The equestrian bronze sculpture by American artist Cyrus Dallin is one of the most reproduced images of the MFA’s collection and often critiqued for encapsulating a western trope of Native American nations as a vanishing or dying race. Michelson’s installation, cast in bronze and gilded in platinum, is a kind of response to this appeal. It’s called The Knowledge Keepers.

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“Shine is something that takes on a metaphysical dimension for Northeastern native peoples,” Michelson said. “Originally it was copper and shell and crystal that were the sort of substances that would provide this sort of shine and then it later moved to silver. So I’m referencing that long trade in silver and the fact that my Haudenosaunee people became silversmiths.”

Michelson watched as a crane slowly lowered his two sculptures into place Thursday morning. Each sculpture floated, glinting in the morning light above the crowd, above the museum.

“These two empty plinths on either side of the staircase, they have never held sculptures before. We thought it was an amazing opportunity to give a contemporary artist a platform, literally two plinths, on which to make something really meaningful,” said museum curator Ian Alteveer.

“[The figures] are not passive, their gestures, they’re not appealing, they’re not prostrate, but they are active and they are addressing us as we approach them,” he said.

The Dallin statue always perplexed Michelson, who was raised in Boston. He would pass it on his way to Boston Latin School and later when he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. “What is a statue of an anonymous Plains rider doing in front of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston?” he asked with the announcement of his commission.

The process to make these statues was complex and required a three dimensional scan of the models. During the technological process, Marden and Gaines stood in a dome with more than 200 high definition cameras all pointed at them.

The cameras go off simultaneously.

“From those images a digital sculptor puts it all together into a seamless whole,” Michelson said. “And that is 3D printed.”

The materials traveled around the world in pieces, first from Brooklyn, on to Shanghai to produce an initial wax mold, and finally to the Urban Art Projects Foundry in upstate New York. The foundry created a bronze cast in parts, which were then welded together.

The final touch included polishing and adding the platinum, a material normally used in electronics and spacecrafts. In this way, the statues pull focus from the past to the future. Michelson said he wanted his work to be accessible to all, but especially Native American communities.

“I hope they see the pride that it speaks to,” he said. “And the you know, maybe an overused word, survivance. That we’ve survived all this. Everything that was thrown at us. And we’re going strong. To the future.”

Dallin’s figure, created by an artist who lived and worked nearby for most of his life, was made to honor Native Americans. But similar to Boston’s Emancipation Group, a bronze recasting of the Freedmen’s Memorial by Boston artist Thomas Ball, neither indigenous people nor the formerly enslaved people who paid for the original Freedmen’s Memorial were given the chance to have a say in their own story.

Some have asked if Dallin’s sculpture should be removed as the Emancipation Group monument was at the end of 2020.

“This is an ongoing question,” said MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum. “Each generation has to do what it needs to do…I’m much more of the belief that something has to be recontextualized, that opportunities have to be taken for artists to have a platform for their voice. I think that’s what we’ve done.’

At the same time, Teitelbaum said he doesn’t think anything is permanent.

For now, Michelson’s site specific work stands in the face of a sanitized history. To see the sculptures of contemporary cultural ambassadors does not allow for their erasure. In their garb, their expression, and their shine, the sculptures tell their story in its fullness.

“It’s what Stephen Dedalus talks about in Ulysses, ‘I’m trying to wake up from the nightmare of history,” Michelson noted “If history is a nightmare, I think it can wake us up. I don’t think we awaken ourselves.”