The presentation began with a reminder that the National Gallery in Washington is located on “ancestral lands” stolen from the Nacotchtank and Piscataway indigenous peoples. It is customary for certain official acts to begin with the protocol's “recognition of the country,” an act of contrition for the United States' bloody past. But this time it made more sense than politically correct: The National Museum opened “The Earth Carries Our Ancestors,” the institution’s first exhibition in 70 years dedicated to contemporary Native American art.
Its curator, artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana, has selected contemporary works by fifty artists on some of the central themes for the historical exhibition, which will later travel to Connecticut of indigenous expression: land, identity or landscape. There is sculpture, painting, collage, performance or video; abstract or explicitly political pieces; Denounce genocide or play with irony and humor.
The exhibition is a major rejection of clichés: “We don’t walk around half-naked with feather headdresses. We are no less intelligent than the white man. And we use more than just monosyllabic words,” said Commissioner Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
“I wanted to show that we are a living people with a future and not just something from the past,” explains Quick-to-See Smith, 83, to EL PAÍS, who curated “Our Land/Ourselves” in 1991 Country as an argument. “The selection aims to overcome stereotypes of Native American art, which has traditionally only been understood through expression with materials such as ceramics, fabrics or jewelry, as seen in Native art galleries across the United States. American museums.” It’s also a big rejection of the clichés that surround them, he says: “We don’t walk around half-naked with feather headdresses. We are no less intelligent than the white man. And we use more than just monosyllabic words.”
“People Like Us” (2019) by Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), made from materials used in teepees. In the exhibition “The Earth Supports Our Ancestors”. Photo courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Thanks to efforts like Washington's, 2023 was largely the year of recognition of indigenous culture in the United States, from art to cinema to books and television. A year in which Quick-to-See Smith has twice broken through what she calls her “leather ceiling,” an image that, like the glass ceiling for women, helps her explain the invisible obstacles that her Separate career from professional recognition.
In addition to curating the exhibition at the National Gallery, in the spring Quick-to-See Smith became the first Native American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Whitney in New York, which has been dedicated to American art for 92 years, but at Apparently, I hadn't attended until now thought that locals fell into this category. “All of these milestones would have been unthinkable two, three or five years ago,” remembers the artist. “When we were trying to break into the New York scene in the '80s, we did shows at a gallery we were allowed to open at the American Indian Community House, where they would give out food or bus tickets so people could come back to them.” Reservation. You know what? “We never saw an art critic from the New York Times or any trade magazine there.”
Approximately 80% of the five million Native Americans in the United States live off reservations, onto which they were forced by brutal treaty colonialism based on violence, deception and broken promises.
The same media is now celebrating the belated recognition of pioneers like you and G. Peter Jemison of the Seneca Nation in upstate New York. After including him in an exhibition, MoMA has just acquired five of the iconic drawings he made on paper bags in the 1980s, a brilliant reflection on the experience of displacement in the big city; Approximately 80% of the five million Native Americans in the United States live off reservations, onto which they were forced by brutal treaty colonialism based on violence, deception and broken promises.
The National Gallery has also acquired a sunflower painting by Jemison to expand its small collection of local art, opened with the 2020 acquisition of Target (1992), a collage by Quick-to-See Smith that trivializes the tragedy of his people who have been celebrating pop culture or sport without shame for years. “It is fair to admit that we are very late to the game, but this is just the beginning of the process of necessary updating of our resources,” promises Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art at the institution.
“Indian Canyon” (2019), by artist Cara Romero (Chemehuevi native). Photography courtesy of the artist. Cara Romero
The exhibition project began in 2020, the year in which the murder of African-American George Floyd by a white police officer in the midst of the pandemic sparked a wave of anti-racist protests across the country, giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was also a surprise test for American cultural institutions rushing to do their pending homework on minority representation, making room for them in their programs or hiring trustees and trustees.
Perhaps no sector is more committed to this task than the arts sector, always striving to identify (and make profitable) the new, and does it better when accompanied by a social alibi. And that applies both to the market – as the recent Art Basel Miami Beach showed, when the search for the next homegrown artist was a recurring topic of conversation among gallerists and collectors – and to the institutions. Also for the first time in history, the artist set to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale will be local: Jeffrey Gibson.
According to Harvard professor Philip DeLoria, the indigenous present “goes beyond survival and resistance.” “It shows a spirit of wit, irony, courage, perseverance and faith in the future.”
Gibson, a 51-year-old artist from Choctaw, Cherokee, just published “An Indigenous Present,” one of those books designed to mark an era by surveying the contemporary art of some members of the 574 federally recognized tribes. which is also a refutation of some prejudices about her. This indigenous present, according to Harvard professor Philip DeLoria, “goes beyond survival and resistance.” It shows a spirit of wit, irony, courage, perseverance and faith in the future.”
“It is now easier for young people to exhibit outside of traditional Native art circles,” Gibson said in an email last week. “Some come from families dedicated to the arts, but above all it is important that a practice of indigenous criticism and thought has emerged that is better able to decipher it. It didn't exist when I started. There were loose opinions but no structured way of thinking about Indigenous things in art.”
Thanks to “The Moon Killers,” a film in which Martin Scorsese recounts the violence suffered by the Osage of Oklahoma when whites decided to steal the oil they found on their land, Native American culture has changed will also sneak into cinemas in 2023. The director sought advice from the community and employed local actors. The result earned praise from Native American viewers for salvaging a tragedy unknown to the public and criticism for the story's focus: the characters played by Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Reservation Dogs” cleverly plays with one of the traditional clichés of depicting natives in fiction as people in contact with the supernatural
Another audiovisual milestone was the third season of “Reservation Dogs”. Created by Taika Waititi and Sterling Harjo, it is the first series to feature an all-local cast of writers (and a large portion of actors). It humorously recounts the misadventures of a group of disbelieving young people from the Muscogee Nation who have not yet assimilated their own history (“Are you Crazy Horse or Norsebull?” asks the protagonist when the ghost of a Sioux rider appears); ironically dismantles some of the stereotypes surrounding reservations, whose residents enjoy limited sovereignty under the supervision of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs; and cleverly plays with one of the traditional clichés of depicting natives in fiction as people in contact with the supernatural.
From left to right: Paulina Alexis (Willie), Devery Jacobs (Elora), D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Bear) and Lane Factor (Cheese), in Episode 1 of the series “Reservation Dogs”, written by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, directed by Harjo.PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive (Alamy Stock Photo/Cordon Press)
This was also the year that a Yale University professor, Ned Blackhawk of the Te Moak people of Nevada, won the National Book Award for nonfiction for a book called “The Rediscovery of America,” which covers five centuries of history of his country is re-examined from this perspective of indigenous struggle, survival and resurgence from a continental approach: its story begins not with the American Revolution in 1776 or even in 1619 with the first ships of enslaved people off the coast of Virginia, but in 1492 with the Arrival of Columbus.
“Some talk about indigenous power, but I attribute it to the fact that the United States is becoming more diverse and we are witnessing a racial and religious realignment,” says Ned Blackhawk, winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.
The National Book Award is one of the most important prizes in American literature and, since 2018, has been won by African American authors with books with black themes. Blackhawk, who described the experience of driving to New York to pick him up as “transformative” (“I met famous people, professional writers and television stars”), is part of a generation of academics who, as he explained in a videoconference interview , they are watching “the mythologies of American history begin to crumble.” “Some talk about indigenous power, but I attribute it to the fact that the United States is becoming more diverse and we are witnessing a racial and religious reconfiguration,” he added. “Whites will be a minority at some point in the 21st century. And my book aims to participate in this broader national conversation.”
The historian considers this moment “appropriate” for his culture. “We could see a local actress win at the next Oscars [Lily Gladstone, por la película de Scorsese], there are series and novels that speak from our experience and there is an emphasis on local fashion and design. We even have one of our own in the President's Cabinet for the first time, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland [de los Pueblo de Laguna de Nuevo México]“, he clarifies.
Blackhawk points to two titles from the late 1960s that were pioneers in depicting the Native experience in the contemporary world: Sioux Vine Deloria Jr.'s essay General Custer Died for Your Sins (which included the better-known Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee preferred, by Dee Brown and his “overly bully narrative”) and the novel “The House Made of Dawn” by Kiowa native N. Scott Momaday, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
“Native American Art” (2019) by Gerald Clarke Jr. (a native of the Cahuilla Band of Indians). Gerald Clarke Jr.
The prestigious literary award remained eluded to Native writers until Turtle Mountain Chippewa Indian novelist Louise Erdrich won it in 2021 with “The Night Watchman,” a reconstruction of her grandfather’s political fight for recognition of indigenous rights. That same year, Natalie Diaz (Mojave) won the prize in the poetry category, and the following year, Raven Chacón, a Diné artist and composer who was also featured in the National Gallery exhibition, made history by winning the Pulitzer Prize won for music.
Erdrich, comfortably entrenched in the canon, is one of the country's most respected fiction writers, and her books have been timely translated into Spanish by the Siruela publishing house. Among the generation of his successors who show signs of vitality in genres such as science fiction (Rebecca Roanhorse) or horror (Stephen Graham Jones), Tommy Orange (a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma) stands out, whose debut Ni Neither Here Nor There (AdN) was praised for focusing on “urban Indians” with an ensemble story set in Oakland that was promised to continue in 2024.
“We have been moving for a long time, but the earth moves with you, like memory,” says Tommy Orange, author of “Neither Here nor There.”
The novel has a prologue in which Orange considers changing the town's reservation “among buildings, bypasses, and cars,” either voluntarily or by force (“under the Indian Relocation Act”). “We have been moving for a long time, but the earth moves with you, like memory.”
“We emerged from the land of our mothers and our bodies will return there. We are the earth. We cannot own it, no matter how much it is proclaimed in an official newspaper,” writes poet Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo of the Muscogee Nation, the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States (she was so from 2019 to 2022), expands on this in the prologue to the anthology of Native American poetry, When The Light of the World Idea was muted, our songs came through Published in 2020, it is the most comprehensive review to date: it includes 161 authors from 90 nations and verses from the period between 1678 and 2019. “We start with the earth,” writes Harjo, of which there is a Spanish translation of his memoirs Loca Guerrera. “We emerged from the land of our mothers and our bodies will return there. We are the earth. We cannot own it, no matter how much it is proclaimed in an official newspaper.”
American poet Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation), who also plays the saxophone, at the Library of Congress in Washington on September 19, 2019. Shawn Miller (Library of Congress / Alamy Stock Photo / Cordon Press)
The selection was made from “at least 16 local poets,” one of them, Muscogee author Jennifer Elise Foerster, clarified via email. They followed a geographical criterion to cover a landscape so vast that it discourages speaking of the Native Americans as something homogeneous: after all, some seven thousand kilometers separate the Inupiat of northern Alaska from the Seminole of southern Florida. “[La antología] It does not tell a single story, just as the native poets (people) are not a single people. Rather, it is a large number of poems. It is a collection that challenges the country's literary imagination to reimagine our stories and those of our nations, people and realities, based on too many unrecognized stories, songs and peoples that formed the roots of this country and continue to thrive. So many essential voices have been left out…This should demonstrate the astonishing richness and depth of Native poetics,” argues Foerster.
The concerns of the contemporary authors who made the cut (the connection to nature, the climate crisis, living in the present with the tragic past, or powerlessness in the face of capitalism) largely coincide with those of the young artists selected for the cut were National Gallery by Quick-to-See Smith, who argues in the exhibition catalog that “more than the formal act of land acknowledgment is needed to appease Native Americans for what they have lost over generations.” For example? “For example,” he replied in the interview with EL PAÍS, “that they give us back the brains of our families.”
The artist was referring to the fact that dozens of American institutions preserve more than a hundred thousand Native American remains, as well as sacred objects looted across the country. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act mandated their return. More than 30 years later, many tribes are still waiting. In Washington, the ancestral land of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway, the Smithsonian still holds tens of thousands of these remains, in addition to a particularly macabre collection: 250 brains assembled by a race-obsessed anthropologist named Ales Hrdlicka in the first half of the 20th century. XX.
To see, read and visit
Lily Gladstone (with Blackfoot and Nez Percé ancestors) and Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Moon Killers” (2023) by Martin Scorsese.
The land supports our ancestors. Contemporary Native American Art. Exposure. National Gallery of Art. Washington. Until January 15th.
An indigenous present (An indigenous gift). Jeffrey Gibson. Art book. DelMonico Books, 2023.
The Assassins of the Moon. Martin Scorsese, 2023. Film.
Reservation dogs. Taika Waititi and Sterling Harjo. Series. Disney + (three seasons).
The rediscovery of America (The Rediscovery of America). Ned Blackhawk. Non-fiction. Yale University Press, 2023.
The night watchman. Louise Erdrich. Fiction book. Translation by Susana de la Higuera Glynne-Jones. Siruela, 2021.
Neither here nor there. Tommy Orange. Fiction book. Translation by Julia Osuna Aguilar. AdN, 2018.
My heart is a chainsaw. Stephen Graham Jones. Fiction book. Translation by Manuel de los Reyes. Carfax Books, 2023.
Mad warrior. Joy Harjo. Book of memories. Translation by Pedro Larrea. Valparaiso, 2022.
As the light of the world dimmed, our songs came through. A Norton Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry. (As the light of the world dimmed, our songs appeared). Editing by Joy Harjo. Collection of poems. WW Norton & Company, 2020.
Voiceless Mass. Musical composition. Raven Chacon.
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