This paper examines the technology of bow and arrow as a symbolic and material nexus between Indigenous cultural techniques and colonial projection. Using Jean O’Brian’s framework of ‘firsting’ and ‘lasting,’ it draws a line from depictions of arrows in one of the John White/Theodor de Bry images from late 16th-century Virginia to a 1917 photography from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Da-kota showing a ceremony of ‘the last arrow.’ Both scenes reveal colonial strategies of overwriting Indigenous ontologies and, in doing so, illustrate the visual and ma-terial dimensions of imperialism and colonial violence, and how they endure into the present.