Recorded on April 4, 2025, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims by Shari Huhndorf, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Shari Huhndorf was joined in conversation with Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, and Luanne Redeye, Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
This panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and the Department of Ethnic Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.
About the Book
Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.
Podcast and Transcript
Listen to this panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
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CORI HAYDEN: Hi, everyone. Welcome so glad to have you here. My name is Cori Hayden. I’m in the Department of Anthropology. I’m the Interim Faculty Director of Social Science Matrix. And I am thrilled to welcome you to this fantastic panel, one of our Author Meets Critics series today to celebrate and discuss Shari Huhndorf’s book, Native Lands: Culture and Gender and Indigenous Territorial Claims.
We have with us, as you can see, Lauren Kroiz, Luanne Redeye, and Bernadette Pérez as our moderator. And thank you all for being here. And thank you, Shari, for the gift of this book. Very excited to discuss.
So this book was published just last year, 2024, by UC Press. And it’s a really wonderful analysis of the role of visual and literary culture in Indigenous movements for territorial rights, and offers a really nice and powerful Indigenous feminist perspective, really thinking through the intersection of gender justice and land-based activism.
Today’s event is co-sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department, the History of Art Department, or yes, Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Research on Native American Issues. And I do want to give a special thanks to the preceding and returning faculty director, Marianne Fourcade, and to Ambrosia Shapiro, who both really put this event together last year.
I am the lucky free rider. I get to come to these amazing events. And I also want to thank the Matrix staff who are making everything run so smoothly here. Now our program manager Sara Harrington, Chuck [INAUDIBLE] back there, and [INAUDIBLE] in the front office. So thanks to all of you.
Before we get started, I am duty bound to advertise some of our upcoming events. April 7, a Matrix on point event on the new gender gap– thinking about gender and labor and wealth inequality globally.
April 9 at 12 o’clock, global perspectives on anti-blackness and gender violence with one of our Matrix faculty Fellows. Panels on technology in China, border control, the law and politics of antitrust. As you can tell, a range of things hitting all dimensions of social science research on this campus and the world. So please keep an eye on that on our website if any of these are of interest to you.
But back to the event of the day and the reason that we are here. Let me introduce our moderator, Bernadette Pérez, and then she will take over from there. Bernadette is Assistant Professor of History here at Berkeley. She focuses particularly on the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West.
Her work hits multiple subfields of history– from race and environment to labor migration colonialism. In its broadest and most finest point, she studies empire and capitalism in action. Welcome, Bernadette. I will turn it over to you. Thanks so much for being here. And Thank you to you all.
BERNADETTE PÉREZ: All right. Thank you so much, Cori.
[APPLAUSE] All
Right. Can you hear me? It’s good? OK, wonderful. OK, so welcome to the Matrix. We are on the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone. And it’s my honor to introduce our panel today, celebrating Professor Shari Huhndorf’s new book, Native Lands– Culture and Gender Indigenous Territorial Claims.
Thank you to Cori for introducing me and to Sarah and everybody here at the Matrix for bringing us together. My role is to just introduce the panel. I’m going to give a sense of the structure of our conversation today, and then I will turn it over to our three panelists.
OK, so Shari Huhndorf is class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies here at UC Berkeley. She’s the author of three books– Native Lands, which we’ll be talking about today, Going Native– Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, and Mapping the Americas– The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture.
As well as being co-editor of three different volumes, including Indigenous Women and Feminism– Politics, Activism, and Culture, which won the Canadian Women’s Studies Association prize for outstanding scholarship. She also serves beyond our institution in a variety of capacities and has won many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim.
And has served on the Board of Trustees at the Smithsonian’s museum of the American Indian, where she also chairs the repatriations committee. She is currently completing a community history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971– the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in US history.
So she will begin today speaking for about 20 minutes, and then she’ll be followed by our two other panelists who will each speak for about 10 to 15 minutes before we will open the floor to Professor Huhndorf to respond, as well as for audience Q&A.
Next to Professor Huhndorf, we have Lauren Kroiz who is an Assistant Professor of History, of Art here on campus. Her research and teaching focuses on art and modernism in the United States during the 20th century.
And she has taught a range of topics in the history of American art, photography, material culture, and modernism, including courses on avant gardism, race and representation, thing theory, technologies of imaging, meanings of medium, and globalization.
Kroiz is the author of Cultivating Citizens– The Work of Art in the New Deal Era, as well as Creative Composites– Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle. And then our final panelist today is Luanne Redeye who is a portrait and figurative artist who questions modes of representation through visual storytelling and personal archive.
Her artwork draws connections to the land and kinship of her home community, holding memories, stories, and imprints of her familial relationships. She is a citizen of the Seneca Nation and Hawk clan, and grew up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York. She received her MFA in painting and drawing at the University of New Mexico, and has been supported through many residencies as put on a number of exhibitions.
And has received multiple grants from various institutions, including Kent State University, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, New American Paintings, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. So I want to welcome our three panelists today, and I will cede the floor to Professor Huhndorf.
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SHARI HUHNDORF: Is the microphone working? Yes, is the microphone working? No, it is. OK, I’ll try to speak louder. Thank you, Bernadette, for that very kind introduction and for agreeing to be here to moderate. Your own work is so exciting and inspirational. I’m really happy to be in conversation with you.
And just a couple more words of thanks before we get started. So thanks to Cori and to Marianne and to Ambrosia for the invitation. To Sarah and the Matrix staff for pulling together the event, which is so labor-intensive. Thank you for doing that. Really excited to be in conversation with Lauren and Luanne.
And I was just saying to Lauren before we got started that I’m a little daunted to be in conversation with other art historians and artists because I myself have no training in art history, nor am I an artist. And it was kind of a risk to talk about art. So they’re going to tell me all the things I missed. Really glad about that. I might need to rewrite the book.
And also thanks to you for being here. It is a lovely day outside. It’s Friday afternoon. It’s lunchtime. So thank you for taking the time to be here as part of this conversation. OK, so I think I have about 20 minutes and I’m going to spend that time laying out the major argumentative threads of the book.
So the story of the book begins in the late 1960s, which, of course, was a watershed era in native North America for multiple reasons. And one is the political movements that emerged during this era have been absolutely transformative in the native world.
So when we teach Native history, we usually talk about this era as marking the emergence of Red Power. And the Red Power Movement took as one of its strategies a series of occupations of places across the country as a means to draw attention to Native claims to the land, both in the past and the present.
And, of course, the first sort of major occupation of that era took place in our own neighborhood here in Alcatraz Island. So what happened as part of the occupation of Alcatraz– this was a group of mostly young Native people who called themselves Indians of all tribes who occupied Alcatraz beginning in 1969 for about 19 months.
And think about that– that is like a huge feat to occupy that land for a 19-month period. So they occupied that land for 19 months. And we usually think of that as the major event that catalyzes the Red Power Movement more broadly.
So the occupation ends in 1971. And Red Power takes off, but usually it kind of wanes, like the groups that were important to red power are still around. But that period wanes in the late 1970s. But one of the things that is really important about that era is that despite the waning of these particular events and groups is that the late 1960s marks the era of emergence of a new era of land claims that we are still in today.
So if we think about some of the contemporary events that are important in this sort of ongoing activism around Native land claims, we might think about what happened in 2016 on the Standing Rock Reservation, the protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline that drew representatives from more than 300 native tribes, mostly from North America, but also from across the Americas.
And thousands of other supporters who came and went during these weeks of occupation and really drew global attention to campaigns for Native rights. We also might think about the more decentralized Land Back movement which is ongoing, which is a series of Native endeavors to reclaim traditional territories, not necessarily always as like to get that land back to own that land, but that’s part of that broader project.
But also includes things like efforts to assert traditional stewardship over traditional lands to regain hunting, fishing, and gathering rights on traditional territories. And that’s really an ongoing, again, decentralized and widespread movement at the moment. And we might also think about the recent practice of land acknowledgments as being part of one of the outcomes of this sort of ongoing era, this press for Native territorial claims.
So what’s new about that? So we might say that Native politics have always and forever centered around getting land back in the, at least since Europeans came to this land and dispossessed Native people.
But this era is different for some reasons. And one of those reasons is that the activists during this era have employed a new set of strategies to assert their claims to territories. So some of those strategies are legal strategies.
And one thing that’s remarkable about this era is the assertion of the common law doctrine of Aboriginal title to assert the native legal claims to land. And, of course, what Aboriginal title is, is a common law doctrine that says that long histories of use and occupancy, Native use and occupancy of land underlie legal claims in the present.
So that’s been a really common argument used to assert native land claims in the present. The other thing is the increasing reliance on treaty rights to assert legal claims. So those of you who know something about Native history know that the United States signed 371 treaties with Native nations, unilaterally broke all of them, every single one. That happened in different ways.
But nevertheless, if you read the US Constitution, you know that treaties remain the law of the land. And Native communities have used that status of treaties as the law of the land to assert their claims with actually a great deal of success.
Another important strategy of this era is to bring to light the brutal violence of dispossession. So the histories going back hundreds of years of the ways that Native communities have been dispossessed and the horrible violence of that process, and the fact that narrating those claims gives native communities a moral and ethical claim to territories. And that, too, has been an effective strategy.
And then finally, one thing that’s important about this era of land claims and the kind of strategies that activists use, is that these activist movements are tied to a sort of broader process of Native cultural revitalization that I was going to say commenced, I’m going to say recommenced in the late 1960s.
And activists have made this sort of strong argument that various land-based practices are really integral to Native identities. And that, too, has been a critical part of the arguments to reclaim lands in this era.
So this era starts in the late 1960s, and activists have used these strategies, and they’ve achieved some remarkable and unprecedented victories with regard to land claims during this period. So thinking back to that period, late 1960s, early 1970s.
In 1970s– sorry, 1970, the Nixon administration, which many people are surprised to learn, was like the friendliest presidential– Native people here are nodding. Nixon was the best president for Native people. And we can talk about that in the Q&A if you want to. Yeah, wow, kind of shocking. But he really was for so many reasons.
And I’m just going to name one of those reasons and there are others. There’s a whole set of policies that have really transformed the politics of Native communities in the United States. But one of those events was that in 1970, the Nixon administration facilitated the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo.
And that was an important event because it marked the first return on the part of the federal government of Native lands to Native communities. So really a landmark event. So that’s 1970. The following year is the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
And that is actually– Bernadette said this is a book I’m finishing right now. That is my home community. That land claim settlement took place in my home community. My family was really involved in lobbying for it.
That’s an important story to me, but it’s also an important story nationally in a way that’s not always recognized in the Native world. Like Native Alaskan, Native California, actually, not always thought of as being central in native politics.
So as part of that settlement, 44 million acres of land in Alaska were acknowledged to be Native land returned to Native communities, also $1 billion returned as part of that settlement. And just to give you a sense of scale.
So if we’re to think about all the reservation land in the United States combined, that’s about 56 million acres. So in Alaska, one land claim settlement was 44 million acres. So that’s big. Not returned as reservation land. And that’s a complexity, but not a conversation for now.
So thinking about events that were important in this period north of the border, in 1973, in Canada, the Calder Supreme Court decision recognized for the first time the notion of Aboriginal title, which I just mentioned, those sort of histories of use and occupancy as giving rise to Native legal claims.
That this Supreme Court decision, for the first time, recognizes Aboriginal title as a foundation for Native land rights in Canada. And subsequent to that decision, there have been 25 new treaties in Canada with Native nations. And one of those agreements in the 1990s established the Inuit controlled territory of Nunavut.
And then finally, we might think about more contemporary events in addition to the ones I just mentioned– Standing Rock and others we might think about, the numerous public and private returns of land to Native communities, like sometimes churches, sometimes individuals, sometimes townships, including in California, returning land to Native communities as a result of this activism that was catalyzed in the 1960s and continues to this day.
So, not incidentally, this period that starts about 50 years ago was also a period of the outpouring of creative expression in the Native world. So thinking again about those early years, this is the year– these are the years of the emergence of what became known as the Native American Renaissance.
So all of this native literature, art, poetry, also filmmaking, filmmaking and technology becomes accessible during this time. And we see this huge outpouring of creative expression that gains national and international recognition.
So one key event in this history of cultural production is the fact that in 1969, N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made of Dawn. This body of work, usually we think of Native American Renaissance as starting in the late 1960s, continuing through the ’80s. And we’re still in an era of outpouring of Native cultural expression.
We have an artist here who’s part of that. We usually think of this as the post-Renaissance era. But some of the same concerns and themes cut across these eras. So one of the things that we see in this body of work is a concern with the revival of Native cultural traditions of various kinds, including language.
A lot of use of Indigenous languages, especially in– well, not just especially in literary texts and films. Sometimes film is used as a means of language revitalization. Other sort of belief systems– traditional belief systems and practices, including land-based practices, are really important in this body of work.
And so some of this focus on traditions in this body of cultural expression, has focused on land. And sometimes not only on traditional beliefs about land, but also about the kind of activism that’s taking place around land.
And so just as an example of that, I want to turn to– yeah, here it is, the cover of the book. So I didn’t actually talk about this painting in the book. Sometimes the covers come after. I wish I would have had time to write about it. So I’m just going to say a few words about it now.
So this is a painting– it’s called memory Map by the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. She created this in the year 2000. And she created this whole series of map paintings. And there’s so much to be said about this work, and maybe we could talk about it in some detail in the Q&A, but I just want to read– this is the epigraph to the book, something that she said about her map paintings in an interview. So this is a quote.
We are the original owners of this country. Our land was stolen from us by the Euro-American invaders. My maps are about stolen lands, our very heritage, our cultures, our worldview, our being. Every map is a political map and tells a story that we are alive everywhere across this nation.
So just in that quote, you can see some of the themes that have been important in Native activism. So this notion of the brutality of the history of dispossession, these are stolen lands. This kind of invocation of a Native presence, the assertion of Native claims. We are the original owners of this territory.
The assertion of an ongoing native presence, we are alive everywhere across this nation. And she’s one of these artists and there are many. And I just I talk about many of them in the book who really think of their work as being part of this broader endeavor of reclaiming native territories.
So the center of the book is to think about that connection between cultural production and territorial claims in the post-1960s era and continuing, of course, into the present. And specifically, the book asks how artists and writers have used their work to advance native community efforts to reclaim lands and what possibility culture holds to shift understandings of Native people and lands in ways that advance Indigenous territorial claims.
So, what can culture do that perhaps other forms of expression can’t do? How can culture force us– what can it force us to see? And maybe, how can it force us to see the world differently? And again, how are these representations advancing this sort of broader political project?
So to think about that question about the connection between culture and land claims, you have to think historically about the ways in which culture has been instrumental in the dispossession of Native people.
And I’m not going to say that much about this just for the sake of time, but I’m just going to mention a couple of important histories. There have been scholars. Edward Said is one. There are other scholars in the new American studies who thought about the ways in which literary narratives, in particular, have advanced processes of imperialism and colonialism across the world.
So a really good example of this is the publication of Edward Said’s Cultural Imperialism in– was it 1993? I’m looking to my left. Thank you, Lauren. 1993, where he says– and I’m paraphrasing here, so I’m going to get the quote a little bit wrong.
He’s talking about the use of the novel in European imperialism. And he has a really striking argument about the ways in which questions about who owns the land, who works the land, who occupies the land, who should determine its future. He says those issues were decided in part through narrative.
And this argument was picked up by scholars working on American empire to think about how in the context of not only internal colonialism in the United States, but global imperialism, the way that American literature played a fundamental role in imperial expansion.
There’s also been, outside of literature, this sort of long history of colonial image-making that has also been integral in dispossession. And I’m just going to show a couple of examples of this. So again, we can say so much about this image. But long history of colonial image making that shows native people as unworthy holders of the land. They’re savage, they’re violent.
And those are ideas that find expression not only in visual culture, but also in law, policy, history writing during these eras. Images that show the process of expansion as progress. Everyone knows this painting, right? Everyone’s seen this American Progress. You see, look what’s happening to the native people. Just being kind of they’re there in the darkness, being pushed off the canvas of American life.
This is the notion that we call manifest destiny, which, again, was important not just in artistic culture, not only in visual culture, but became important in law and policy. And also works that just erase Native people altogether. And that problem of erasure has been so critical in the native world.
If native people are deemed to be disappearing, vanishing, those are all terms that were commonly used, not existing, then the land is there for the taking. So in this history of representation, it’s not just images of Native people such as this one in the darkness being pushed off the canvas there, but it’s also representations of land and the nature of land that have been crucial to dispossession.
And just a couple of words on this– an entire libraries of books have been written about these issues, the ways in which, for example, in the early modern era, the emergence of modern cartography. So maps, surveys drawn to scale that reduce land to a grid, to empty space, the way that, that was integral to the transition to land as property, which in turn was foundational to Native dispossession.
In the realm of art, and again, just to gloss an important body of scholarship, the way that landscape painting was integral to dispossession and so much work on that. Some of this came out of geography, and I’m thinking of the work of Dennis Cosgrove who talked about the ways in which the emergence of perspective in painting created this illusion of realism.
And this is a loose paraphrase of a quote, that he says created the sense of mastery over space that was closely bound up to the physical appropriation of land. Other scholars from the realm of literary and visual culture– and I’m thinking here specifically about [INAUDIBLE] Mitchell, has taken that work and talked about the ways that landscape has been integral to global imperialism.
And then in US contexts, others have written about the ways in which landscape was a fundamental force in Westward expansion in the United States. And I’ll just show another image. So this is a painting by Albert Bierstadt who was an artist who was part of the Hudson River School. He created this painting as part of– he accompanied a military expedition West.
So this military expedition is creating surveys of the American West I think right there about that connection between the material dynamics of conquest through the military and like the painter is accompanying the military survey.
So he created this image. This is a composite image of sites in the Sierra Nevadas that he encountered on that military expedition. And there’s a lot to be said about this painting. Again, we could spend the rest of our time together talking about it, but I’ll just say a couple of words about it.
And that is, it was part of a body of work that helped people in the East, visualize land in the West. To visualize it, to think they understand it, to make the land seem empty, to make the land seem desirable for possession.
And there’s some scholarship that indicates that this widespread circulation of paintings like this really had a material role in increasing the number of people going West to settle what was Native land. So these representations of land really crucial to dispossession.
So a central argument of the book is that if culture can advance ideas about Native people and Native lands that facilitate dispossession, so too can it facilitate native efforts to reclaim land. And that is a process that’s traced by the book.
So the book analyzes key works of artists, writers, and filmmakers in the post 1960s era that undertake– that use a number of strategies that include heightening the visibility of Native people.
And that becomes important. If we think about how the erasure of Native people was integral to dispossession, what happens when you make native presence on the land visible, that that’s part of this broader political project.
These works narrate long native histories on the land that are the basis of Aboriginal title. That happens a lot in literature. These works represent the violence of dispossession. So, again, think back to those strategies that I mentioned as being really integral to land activism during this period.
So this work is really narrating those histories that become part of the moral claim to land. And they also use cultural production as a means to revive traditions. Again these themes of traditions, traditional languages, traditional practices really integral to this era.
And in particular, advance traditional understandings of land that challenge the notion of land as property. So works like visual and literary works to think about the sacredness of land, to think about the native meanings of land that really negate that idea of land as empty space, land as property.
So that’s one theme of the book, like to think about the ways that artists and writers use these strategies, sometimes by taking up really specific histories of dispossession and contemporary land conflicts. And some of the works I look at– look at particular policies, look at particular events and build a fictional world around them.
And sometimes these works just take up these issues more generally by revising colonial image-making practices that are associated with dispossession. So I’ll just turn to another word now. But I’m going to lock this in your head– this Bierstadt painting. Wrong direction.
So this is a work by Kent Monkman. Do you see? He’s revising Mount Corcoran. So Kent Monkman is a contemporary artist in Canada– a cree artist, who’s been called the rock star of Indigenous art in Canada.
And he’s most famous for his landscape paintings and what he typically does in his landscape paintings is he takes these canonical works and he revises them. And I’m just going to read a quote about what Monkman says about his work.
Europeans and North America had stolen our land. They created this whole document called art history around their exploits. I felt that borrowing from their landscape paintings would be a way of reclaiming some of the land they had stolen from us.
So you see how directly he’s like aligning his work with various land claims movements. Oh, my gosh, so much to be said about this painting. Maybe we can return to it. What does it mean to assert a Native presence on the land? One of the things that this figure– this is Monkman’s alter ego. He calls her chief. Oh, why am I blanking out? Ego. Thank you. e Egotistical mischief. Egotistical. Thank you.
So he’s like egotistical, egotistical. OK. Thank you for that. She’s looking back at us. What does it mean? So images aren’t so good at conveying histories. This is an image that really tries hard to do that. There’s a lot to be said about this document that’s on the easel. The easel– that’s actually a historical document. We can maybe talk more about it later.
These figures who are lying supine on the ground. There’s also a historical reference there. I’ll just give you a hint. They’re supposed to be Custer’s soldiers. So there’s also a historical narrative that comes to bear on this painting that, again, all of these elements together are part of this project of turning landscape painting against itself to assert Native claims.
OK, I’m a little over time, so I’m going to try to be really quick. The second theme of the book is about– is really the assertion that when we think about this history of Native dispossession and when we think about ongoing native campaigns for territorial rights, we have to think about gender, that gender is really integral to that process.
And to underscore the importance of this point, I’m just going to read a brief quote from the Native Studies scholar Joanne Barker. And here’s what Barker said in a publication that came out just a few years ago.
She said Native Studies scholars– and this is a quote, frequently compartmentalize gender, sexuality, and feminism, bracketing them off from the analysis of more serious political issues such as governance, treaty, and territorial rights.
So one of the tasks of Indigenous feminists in recent years has been to take apart that distinction between the politics of gender and sexuality and more serious issues like political and territorial rights.
And there’s been a lot of work done on this. And I think of this book as contributing to that process, in part by focusing specifically on gender and dispossession and the implications for contemporary Native land politics.
And thinking in particular about the way that the gender dimensions of dispossession become legible in and enacted through, sometimes through culture. So to get to that point, just briefly, there are a couple of histories that we might think about.
We might think about the early centuries of European expansion, where iconographies of the Americas took shape, often as the body of an Indigenous woman, and how that notion of the Americas as a woman really became a rationale for the conquest of land and people.
We might think about how in the era of colonial nation building, that these sort of colonial allegories of settlers who married or had children with Native women became these kind of foundational narratives of nation states. And the most obvious example in our context is Pocahontas– the figure of Pocahontas, who’s really integral to settler American identity.
And we might also think about the kind of material dimensions of this process where women have historically been removed– Native women have been removed from positions of power and from the very beginning when Europeans came in, wouldn’t recognize Native women’s leadership through the late 19th and early 20th century eras of assimilation.
Where fundamental part of the project of settler colonialism was to impose the patriarchal nuclear family as the center of social organization. And to displace kinship networks that often were matriarchal or at least accorded native women positions of power.
So if we’re to think about a task of contemporary Native artists and writers, and returning to the book looking at some of this work, one of the things that Native women artists and writers during this period do is they endeavor to bring to light this gendered– this history of the marginalization of Native women.
And to show how it was really integral to settler colonialism, so that gendered violence, sexual violence becomes part of the broader critique of dispossession that becomes really important in this era. Another crucial task of these artists and writers is to draw out the effects of those histories in the present.
and the way that those histories of marginalizing native women, histories of violence against Native women, really shape the social positions of Native women now. And then thirdly, these artists and writers attempt to conceive of a political project that draws together land claims with gender justice for Native women.
So just to give a brief example of that, that I think about in the book. So the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that most people have probably heard about, this is a major issue in the native world, has been one of those events that has also prompted this kind of outpouring of creative expression. There’s a lot of artist activism around this issue.
And just to take one example of this, and this is my final image, I promise– almost final. This is a work by the Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore. It’s a work that was created in 20– sorry, 2007, called Fringe. And she created this photograph in the aftermath of the Pickton murders in Canada.
So the Pickton murders were the most notorious serial murders in Canadian history. Robert Pickton murdered more women than any other serial murderer ever in Canada. He was arrested in 2002.
And one of the kind of interesting things about the Pickton murder– significant things about the Pickton murders that initially went unremarked was that among the 49 murders to which he confessed, probably half of them were of Native women.
He was in Vancouver, BC, and he found his victims on the street of Vancouver. The Aboriginal population of Vancouver is about 3%. So when you think about half of the victims being Native women, that’s tremendous overrepresentation.
And one of the things that happened in the early media coverage of this event is there was like no recognition of that fact. I mean, Native communities knew it. They knew their women were disappearing. They had lobbied for police investigations for years to no effect.
And then once picked in his court and OK, there’s a serial murder, the press didn’t acknowledge at all the fact that Aboriginal women were overrepresented. So Belmore was one of the artists that really took to draw attention, not only draw visibility, we might say not only to the fact that so many Native women had been among the victims, but also to call attention to why.
And we don’t have time to talk about this image, but we might think about the ways in which the beaded fringe on her back, like a red beaded fringe is a sort of cultural signifier of indigeneity. And how she ties that to the violence on this body.
We also might think about where this was displayed. So the last image was– the photograph was circulated in museums as this lightbox display. But she initially mounted this image in this downtown Montreal as a billboard, so much to be said about that format that we could talk about visibility and about commodification and other things.
But the site was really significant because what she did was she mounted this billboard above this building, which is the Center for the Grand Council of Cree Nation.
And what she’s doing in choosing that location is to draw attention to the ongoing presence of Native people in the city. People tend to think about Native people as existing elsewhere, never here to draw attention to Native people in the city, and also to reclaim urban spaces as Native spaces. She’s defining this as Native space.
So we might think about that, too, as a way of drawing together these concerns about gender and really asserting– bringing to bear this critique of dispossession, to assert Native Claims in the present. OK, I’ve gone over. I’m going to stop there.
BERNADETTE PÉREZ: Thank you so much. That was very helpful.
[APPLAUSE]
LAUREN KROIZ: I’m an art historian, so I can’t talk without slides. Can everybody hear me? I have to crane my neck to look at them. Thank you all so much. And, Shari, thank you for this really important book.
I’m really excited and honored to be in conversation with you all about Native lands. I wrote out my comments so that I could try to stay on track, because there are so many things that we could say and talk about this book.
I have been recommending– I’ve been finding myself recommending it to all my students working on a wide variety of projects. So I could get down a lot of tangents. I’m personally wrapping up a project that’s about women’s suffrage, ideas of artistic materiality, and the unstable divide between object and subjecthood.
So I really know how hard it is to connect artworks and politics in ways that allow for the gap between the two to exist and to really signify. So reading Native Lands, I appreciated the way the book works with art across media, including literature to link, as Shari puts it, Indigenous cultural production and Native land reclamation.
So layering this intersection with complex considerations of land and gender, revealing, for example, ties between histories of colonial dispossession, which we’ve heard about, violence against Native women and contemporary movements for land sovereignty.
So here are two key artworks from the text, or what I take to be two key artworks from the text. Crucially, in native lands, culture has no generically good or stable value. As Shari succinctly puts it, quote, “If culture makes place to enable dispossession, Indigenous art, film, and writing endeavor to remake place to support Indigenous territorial claims.” End quote.
So starting from settler colonial images like the one on the top that help enact Native American erasure and dispossession, the book moves to study more contemporary Native cultural production as self-representation, including as in the image on the bottom, which we’ve heard a little bit about already.
So you see here that range in two images– baptism of Pocahontas from 1840 by the White male painter John Gadsby Chapman, which hangs in the US Capitol on the top, and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2007 photograph fringe, which appeared as a billboard. And Shari just described that better than I could.
So here– let me see, images of the artworks in the world since their site is such a crucial part of the book’s argument, I think. So through Shari’s readings, we see how artworks might not be solutions to political or social questions, but how they might allow the construction of what we might call capacious new archives.
Often, archives tied to specific major land claims and legal cases of violence against Indigenous women. And along the way, the book asks if dominant culture forms and genre can even advance Indigenous political claims, which I think is such a crucial and complex question, and one I want to keep us coming back to.
So Chatman’s work, we could say, is in the dominant cultural form of history painting. It’s part of a long lineage of images in which, as Shari points out, the task of representing America falls to the figure of the Indigenous woman.
Conceiving land as property is an invention of capitalism, but the violence of that invention and colonial violence in general is obscured by recasting conquest as sexual consent. And she offers a really productive and brilliant reading of this preparatory drawing by a Dutch artist for the allegory of America, which is from– this drawing is from 1580– around 1587.
And here we see Amerigo Vespucci and an allegorical female figure representing the continent. And they’re in a sort of erotic encounter. The female figure is labeled with America, which is weirdly a feminized version of the navigator’s own name. So we’re sort of doubling twinning there too.
Alongside a reading of the image, Shari gives a quote from a 1504 letter from Vespucci, which describes resistance led by Native American women, where women attack sailors with great sticks. And this kind of conjures a world where to quote the book, quote, “Native American women speak on behalf of their people and lead efforts to repel invaders.” End quote.
And Shari uses this account as a starting point for a new interpretation of this allegorical image, one that sees women’s resistance and violence communicated in the letter that’s kind of lurking in the image, but also contained.
The club we can see is beside her, but it seems abandoned. And the depiction, you can probably see in the back here of cannibalism is pushed to the background, signaling a kind of inherent inferiority rather than any real danger.
And I was struck by the way that Shari suggests this– sorry, this 1504 account might also take the image out of the realm of allegory into a kind of recasting of a historical event, that also shows us the way that patriarchy is neither neutral, natural, or universal.
And I was struck, too, by the comparison of the letter and the preparatory drawing made me wonder about the possibilities of an image in relationship to a text. And I’m super skeptical of this idea of immediacy.
And as an art historian, I probably shouldn’t be fetishizing texts. But I began to wonder if there’s something possible in the letter and maybe this is something we can talk about that has some of that surprising negotiation with difference, and with the limits of empire and patriarchy that aren’t or isn’t viable for an artist working on an image that’s so painstakingly drawn and planned for high level reproduction.
In turning to baptism of Pocahontas, Native Lands unpacks the image, and this is an image that presents itself as removed from issues of land and as more about the redemption of a Native American woman through settler colonialism, particularly through religion.
Shari draws our attention to the seated figure oriented towards the viewer on the right. And she shows how what could be an image of Indigenous resistance becomes framed as a contest between good and evil, seen in religious terms.
We can see here the light that breaks over the way of the flag, the priest, and the Indigenous woman suggests the way that indigeneity might be assimilable to Whiteness, particularly through the domination of Indigenous women.
More than a century old, Shari notes that even in the present, this painting is framed by the architect of the Capitol’s office with a label as depicting an event that simply, quote, “helped to establish peaceful relations.” End quote. And even though I know this book came out before the most recent presidential inauguration, I still had to check the notes to see what present was being considered.
And I’ll say, coincidentally, I’m currently writing about a marble statue of White women, which you see on the left, suffrage leaders, that’s positioned directly across from the Capitol dome, from the baptism– so it’s positioned directly across the Capitol dome from the painting– the baptism of Pocahontas.
And considering the contemporary life of historical works was one of the moments in the book that powerfully suggested the stakes of writing in and as part of an unfolding history, which can feel, I think, really difficult given the long timescales of academic writing. This book, for example, also references the 2021 discoveries of thousands of unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools, which is still being investigated.
As a White woman myself, and thinking about this juxtaposition in the capital also seems to underscore Shari’s crucial point about structural violence, that violence against Indigenous women is a legacy of history brought about by colonial practices.
As she puts it, quote, “Conversations surrounding gendered violence often presuppose that women’s vulnerability cuts across boundaries of race and class. But Indigenous women in Canada and the United States fall prey to violence at a higher rate than women in any other group.” End quote.
As I read it, though, the book isn’t oriented towards whiteness, it’s more towards thinking through complex negotiations of solidarity and particularity within and among Indigenous communities and nations. The idea that Indigenous people might be United by a common attachment to the land threads through the book.
However, Shari points out, quote, “Whereas the experience of colonialism does in fact draw native people together across geographical boundaries, culture distinguishes them from one another.” End quote.
So Native Lands attends to this complexity, allowing for the way setting aside cultural and national specificity might be both a colonial trope of erasure, but also a means for pan Indigenous solidarity.
So thinking about this issue of solidarity and particularity, I think, can return us to the question of if and how dominant cultural forms and genre might advance Indigenous political claims. It might return us to Belmore’s fringe, which is one of the three visual works considered in native lands that were created in response to the arrests that Shari talked about.
I’m going to skip since we’re a little bit behind time. Belmore’s artwork is a photograph, but it’s one in which beating figures essentially. As Shari writes, the fringe of beads is a racial signifier that also suggests violence, and helps us think about the way that gender and violence might be intertwined here.
The deep scar here is special effects makeup. And it kind of interrupts our expectation that a photograph will reflect reality. But it also brings together what we might think of as Hollywood artifice and a suturing practice beating that might be thought of as traditional.
And that Shari positions here the woman’s body is what she terms an anti-allegory, a figure of protest rather than of submission in challenging audiences to see Native women and to see them differently, I’m interested in how much work beading does here.
How is the fringe that also points to the fringes in which murdered Indigenous women have been pushed by colonialism that still operative in the present? She also considers Belmore’s 2002 performance. This is called Vigil.
And it begins with the artist silently taking up a bucket and sponge and scrubbing the street in order to evoke colonial histories of domestic labor. And this beginning reminded me of a work by a White Jewish feminist artist, Meryl Youkilis, whose work you see at the bottom.
And she began cleaning New York streets in the late 1960s as part of what she called maintenance art. And it brings up similar questions, I think, about domestic labor. However, crucially for Belmore, this cleaning is only the beginning of a performance which the artist describes as including, quote, “all the elements of classic ritual.”
First, establishing a bounded liminal space through this cleansing. And this beginning, I think, helps to suggest the difference from canonical White feminist practices, but also the relationship between artistic, spiritual, and political power that also threads through Native Lands.
Shari does some great readings on this, looking at Louise Eldridge’s novels, which I’ll just skip over in the interest of time. And then she thinks about the ways that cartography and capitalist ideas of land ownership might be, quote, “the removal of spirit from everything.”
And the novels– these novels suggest an expansion, I thought of what might be seen as political action, an expansion that includes maybe even something like the arrival of a tornado as a political enactment.
She mentions Inuit women who’ve memorialized missing and murdered women with stone structures traditionally used as landmarks. And I could imagine a very different book that’s about stones or baskets or beading, which is not to say these forms don’t appear.
We learn about Walk the Walking with our Sisters Project, which was initiated by the [INAUDIBLE] artist Christina Belcourt, and which includes beaded moccasin tops donated by friends, families, and allies to commemorate missing and murdered women.
We also learn about Erica Lord’s Native America Land Reclamation from 2000 and installation that includes prayer ties, which are made from the red stripes of the US flag that hold soil from Native American territories.
These works are, I think, all we could say, legible as dominant cultural forms, their photography, their installation. But I hope we might also think about the continuation or the revival of maybe non-dominant cultural forms for political work. And I’ll just wrap it there to say, again, thanks for this capacious new archive.
[APPLAUSE]
LUANNE REDEYE: Yeah. So, of course, wanting to start by thanking Shari for the invitation and thinking of me. I always feel so secluded in the art building, so to get an invitation to leave my studio is really nice. And, of course, to Cori for organizing this and the chance to meet Lauren and Bernadette.
I did want to say that this semester, I’m teaching in Indigenous perspectives in art class in art practice, and you’re receiving an invitation to read the book and then speak on the panels was, of course, came at a nice time.
And the information is very salient to the things we’ve been discussing in class, specifically on topics of land-based art and place-based artwork, and especially in speaking about the artists relationality to land and place and translating that for the students of thinking of their own connections to places they come from.
And we did take time at the beginning to speak about Berkeley as a place. And of course, that relationship to the art building being previously called Kroeber and then the Hearst. And that was like a whole week and a half of time where we probably could have spent a lot of time talking about that.
And then our conversations leading into, of course, bodies like Brown bodies, Black bodies, and relating to land. And I did show the artwork of Rebecca Belmore in those sections because one, I really love Rebecca Belmore’s work, but we had the opportunity to watch her– I guess, it’s a performance technically, but it’s much more than that of Vigil.
So the stills are really tough because you don’t really feel like the visceral parts of the performance and in which she’s using even her own body as part of the artwork. Ripping like thorny roses through her mouth and nailing her– the dress that she’s wearing to these different electrical poles and trying to pull herself away as like symbolizing these struggles that would have happened at that specific place in which Picton was frequented and was a known area for that.
And so it was just really nice to former students also, but also the class to have these conversations like spread across beyond like our class or our own area as well and see how they connect to each other. So it was really nice. Thank you.
I thought as part of my few slides is to talk a bit about my work, as well as it relates to place-based identity and land-based identity and the ways in which I referenced that within my work. And as part of my introduction, I did want to take a moment to introduce you to my grandmother, Sadie. She’s the woman in the dark blue.
And then also in the photo is my aunt Sheila who’s standing next to her, and my aunt Rachel who’s kneeling, and then me as a young child. And I was raised by my grandmother. So some of my most sacred time was spent with her.
And since moving to Berkeley, I’ve been finding myself thinking of her a lot more often, and especially thinking of her role in my journey here, because I feel personally, I wouldn’t be able to have these conversations if it weren’t for her. So I really consider my artwork for her. And so I always like to bring in that gratitude anytime I talk about my artwork and to bring her forward in these moments.
So I work across the mediums of painting and drawing, printmaking, beadwork and textile. But at heart, I do consider myself a painter. Like even today, when I was getting ready, I was like, I got paint on my arm from yesterday. I didn’t realize was there.
And so I feel like I’m primarily a painter, portrait, and figurative artist. And in my studio practice, I create images that I want to see which are anchored in my commitment to Indigenous representation. So I incorporate visual storytelling and photographs from my personal archive into my artwork.
And it’s with those images that I draw connections to land and kinship to my specific community. And as was mentioned in the introduction, my work melds these personal narratives of familial relationships and which carries a lot of intimacy within my work.
So there is a strong emotional component to my work for me personally. And so when I’m creating, I carry these memories and stories and pictures with me. And so I’m really holding on to those imprints that I’m looking at.
And so this painting in particular is a newer direction of my work. I’ve been exploring how to meld these various mediums that I work across. So painting, printmaking, like screen print and beadwork.
Here, I didn’t physically beat onto the Canvas. Instead, I translated the designs into these more graphic shapes and then treated them as if they were in screen print, like giving this sort of gradation or ombre effect.
And the designs themselves, you carry symbolism and meaning within Haudenosaunee communities. And now I bring these designs into my work [INTERPOSING VOICES] create accessibility through visual language.
And this visual language, for me, I feel activates the museum or a gallery spaces for Indigenous identities. And I want to offer a sense of belonging in those spaces, especially when Indigenous representation isn’t often seen in contemporary art spaces.
So this is a painting of my friend Lily. The designs are very specific to her, and that she beaded a pair of earrings for me and gifted to me. And then I translated those designs into the painting. So there’s the flatness of the aesthetics of screen prints against the more gestural qualities of paint.
Forward. There we go. At first, I thought I would skip over this, but I’d like to include a bit about this painting. So the portraits I created are of people that I know in their everyday life, such as family, friends, community members. So I’m often looking to the relationships that we hold with each other and then share the stories of my family by weaving together these narratives of home and identity.
So before I move on, especially in context to the book as it speaks about ownership. And I want to take a moment to emphasize the language that I use in talking about my work and about the images that I paint.
My approach to my artwork starts with photographing, and I consider the camera as my sketchbook. And I work from these photographic sources for my paintings. And when thinking about the histories of photography and painting, which we’ve seen already touched on the propaganda of painting, there is this difficult relationship between photography and painting and Indigenous people, and that relationship is extractive and appropriative.
And I’m mindful of this relationship and place value in consent and collaboration as a way to be sure that I’m not engaging in those same practices. And although my work is about my family, I still ask for their consent and participation in the creation of my work.
I also, in speaking about the language I use about my work, I try not to use words like capture, take, or shoot because especially as I’m painting people, it makes it sound like I’m kidnapping someone. So I don’t want to fall within that.
And even in painting, rather than saying subject, I use the person’s name or their pronouns. So of course, don’t view the people that I’m painting as subjects to display. They’re complex people with complex stories. And my paintings are really just showing or sharing a brief moment within their histories, within their stories.
And I mention this because, right away in the introduction of the book, like reading about the ideas of Western ownership. And then for me, just my education being through public universities and my education of art history, being focused on Western art or European art.
And then again, their ideas about ownership or extraction. So I’ve been trying to– I know it’s been a lot of work undoing some of that learning. And even in my class that I’m teaching this semester became a lot about learning and unlearning those histories.
So when I’m home, I’m basically documenting my time together with my family and friends, and then these images become these snippets or these moments in time with them. So from this slide forward, I’ll focus on work that I’ve made over the past year, which we can’t find on my website because I’m really bad at updating it.
So again, place is a significant component of my work. So in a new series I’ve titled Inheritances, I’ve been focusing on embodying a cultural and familial care through my personal archive of family photographs and also historical photographs.
And the images in the work do bring a lot of joy to me, but also empathy and sadness and nostalgia. And as I’ve been working with the images, trying to welcome and also reconcile those emotions that they bring or evoke.
And inheritances centers meaning in materials and materials connection to place, and then memories within those materials and all of this intertwined with Indigenous knowledge and personal healing.
So a brief context for how they’re made. So the images are translated into cyanotypes. And then I tone those cyanotypes using organic materials, some that I’ve bought from the store from the farmer’s market, but others that I’ve brought from home, connected to where I’m from.
And then it’s a kind of a time-consuming process. But then the tone prints are then paired in conversation together with other images to emphasize the kinship of the figures in the histories of the community. So I did want to show a really briefly just the process.
So I take my cyanotype image, which is then processed and fixed to the paper. And with organic materials, I steeped them in hot water, creating essentially a tea bath with those organics. And then you just soak the paper in those tea baths or the prints in that tea bath for 45 minutes, maybe up to three hours. It really depends on the organic material.
And it’s the tannins in the organic or the compounds or the pH of that, that helps to alter the cyanotype. And after you’ve removed them and rinsed them, they give a variation of different colors. So in this example, it’s coffee and black tea and fruit tea. So again, a stronger tannin or stronger compound material will affect the print even more and also stain the paper.
And so I’m bringing it back to that first image. Is it that way? OK. THere we go. Thank you. So as I began this work, I did a lot of experimenting, utilizing materials that were accessible to me, focused on really what colors I could achieve with the various organic.
So a lot of it was food scraps, which was nice. Just eat a couple sweet potatoes and save the scraps and banana peels. I have two small kids, and so they helped by saving all their strawberry tops, which was fun.
They really had a lot of fun bringing me the materials. My freezer was is full of Trader Joes and food scraps at this point. But I really wanted to explore how also color could trigger memory in these images for me as well.
I might skip forward if I can, just to end on one final image. And then yes, OK. So this work is about what I inherit or what I carry from the histories of my community and from my family. So I’m thinking of these histories and finding ways I can tend to or maintain or care for these relationships.
And with bringing a lot of care into the work, for me, it’s taking tangible forms, but also intangible forms. And the care and regeneration has been through the beadwork as part of adorning the prints after they’ve been toned.
So the adorning becomes, for me, a means of pattern making, but also pattern breaking. And in creating this work, I’ve navigated ways to reconcile past events I’ve experienced, my family has experienced, and discover how creativity can serve as a guide towards healing.
And also, it’s been really great because I’ve had these photographs out quite a bit at home. It’s been a means to also share their faces and memories and stories with my young children, especially given that my home is in New York. We don’t get to go home very often. So I’ll end there. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
BERNADETTE PÉREZ: Thank you so much. And your work is incredible. And these were wonderful presentations. I think what we’re going to do at this point is just open up to you all. And if there are ways to weave some of the comments into audience questions, that’d be fantastic. But we’ll keep an eye out for hands and pass around a microphone. Sarah will have the microphone.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much. Congrats, Shari, on this amazing book. I actually got the chance to teach a chapter from it in my grad course this semester, and it was– the chapter on fringe, actually, and it was really amazing.
I was just teaching yesterday in that grad class Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, in which he talks about this court case in which an Indigenous song was played in a court or performed in a court, the White judge was like, why are we listening to this song right now?
It has no place in the court. But the defendants were talking about how this song is not just an aesthetic object, but ontologically a presence of history and of land and actually a carrier of legal authority.
So I’m trying to think about– because your book does so much work thinking through the legal and political activism alongside and in connection with the cultural practices. How some of the contemporary Native artists you’re thinking about are challenging or working with the ontology of the art object, as a legal argument, as a literal historical presence, as a real presence of land and not just a detached aesthetic object in Western terms.
Even though they are borrowing and working with some like dominant forms, as you were talking about, are there ways that they’re changing those to bring in these different ontologies of what cultural practice means in these native communities, specifically aligned to these legal and political activism they’re trying to support.
I’m thinking about that amazing cover image, which I would love to hear more about too. The thing that strikes me about that is like palimpsest. But the palimpsest is reversed. It’s the US grid, US settler political system that’s in the background.
And the native symbols and histories are in the foreground rather than the reverse, which would be like, oh, that’s the natural thing. Like, is it palimpsest? There’s traces of Native presences, but the US is on top of it. This seems to reverse that in a really powerful way, which seems to be one of these instances of this is very much not just an artwork. This is historical presence ontologically.
SHARI HUHNDORF: I think more about it. But just to go back to where you started, that question, sometimes in Native Studies in the United States, we look over our northern border with envy because Native Aboriginal politics are so much more visible, so much more talked about in Canada.
And there have been some real advances in the legal system that we don’t have here. And that includes the new treaty process, like the United States stopped making treaties with Native nations in 1871. But Canada just restarted that process and has made all these new treaties.
And it’s not just what’s going on in terms of opening that door. It’s the evidence that’s used in cases. And I can’t remember the name of that case, was it Delgamuukw? That you’re talking about. It might have been Delgamuukw where it was a case in Canada that said that Native stories and Native traditions can be used to substantiate Native Claims to land legally.
And there’s also, increasingly in Canada, scholars working on Native law as it manifests through traditional stories, thinking about traditional stories of themselves as articulating a system of law that we can then teach and use in communities. And so we don’t really have that here. But what we do have here is that same kind of work as you’re suggesting being done in the realm of culture.
And just to use an example from literature, I’m thinking about Louise Erdrich’s tracks which I write about in some detail here, which talks not only about the long native histories in that particular place that she’s writing about, talks about the violence of dispossession and the gender dimensions, the primary character experiences rape as part of her efforts to keep her land.
But also invokes these sort of traditional beliefs about land that manifest through traditional stories as a way of– she wrote that book at the time, and I didn’t mention this in my preface.
She wrote that book not only to reflect on a past, but also to engage in a debate that was going on at the time that she wrote about the aftermath of allotment and this case that said that land title on the White Earth Reservation was actually faulty because of the fraud that happened through allotment.
And so the issue of land was reopened, like who owns the land– she wrote a piece called Who Owns the Land? That was about that. And she was thinking about the novel as a way of intervening in that debate about who owns the land now. And so yeah, that’s just say what’s happening in law in Canada is happening through culture here, but it’s not recognized necessarily as having that same kind of political weight.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for the talk. It’s beautiful. My question is about venues. Obviously, the example of the Pocahontas painting in the capital is a very clear venue. And Yeah, I’m curious when we’re thinking about these land-centered art practices, is there a return– excuse me, a return of the art to the land in a certain way?
Is there any directions in closing the loop artistic practice that is not only about the land or even with the land, but also for the land and resides with the land as a venue? I don’t know.
SHARI HUHNDORF: Yeah. So that is such an interesting question. And where my mind’s going now is that for artists who are attempting to engage in this kind of work of land reclamation, getting a venue that’s really high profile has been crucially important.
And it’s interesting to think about issue of venue so that Corcoran painting, thinking about landscapes so that Corcoran painting is in the National Gallery of Art. Yeah, it’s in one of these big national.
So Monkman recreates this painting, but it’s not in the National Gallery of Art. This one’s in Denver Art Museum, which is a great art museum. But it doesn’t have the same kind of audience and the same kind of exposure as the National Gallery of Art.
So that’s one thing that’s going on is this sort of deliberate effort, maybe even to think about land, but to get as big an audience as possible in these kinds of works. But that’s not to say there’s these other political movements in the native world that are about bringing things back home, bringing things from our campus, from our museum back home.
And thinking about the ways in which when you bring those materials to your communities, they mean something different, they participate in these efforts of cultural revitalization, language revitalization, recovering collective histories, telling stories about ourselves within communities that go to rebuilding identities and that has political articulation.
So these two things going on at once. And I would say they’re part of the same big picture. But some of the works that I’ve been looking at here, including that Belmore image, is a big Billboard, have been about getting these ideas, these images out into very public space to people who don’t see Native people at all, maybe, or who need to see them differently.
LUANNE REDEYE: Actually, your question makes me also think of post commodities work. Was it titled, do you remember when? Is that it? It’s a collective group of three artists. And the first iteration was at the ASU– Arizona State Art Museum.
And they physically cut out like the slab of concrete and lifted it in the museum space so that it showed– so it showed the dirt. The dirt underneath finally had air. And part of the installation was placing that concrete slab on a pedestal and having it face that empty hole that was there.
And above that is a microphone or speakers that is playing songs of the particular nation that, that museum is located on. So it became this physical act of reclaiming and removing, but also revealing parts of the land that hadn’t heard these songs in so long.
And then they did another iteration of that in Sydney in South Wales. I forget the gallery, but it was a similar installation, but they’re again playing songs of that particular land. And so that made me think of venue, but also ways in which artists can– I don’t know, in this case, like reveal the land that was underneath. And also in a way, have visitors or viewers then take stock of, where am I standing right now?
SHARI HUHNDORF: And do you remember this work by Rebecca Bulmer? And I can’t recall it very well, but it’s where she has a big megaphone. It’s called something like voice of the land. And it’s a performance. She has this huge megaphone on the land.
And there was so much to be said about that, including, what it means to think about the land as having voice and giving voice to that place, agency, that sort of a piece with what you’re describing.
BERNADETTE PÉREZ: Fortunately we are out of time. So wonderful, wonderful panel. So we’ll Thank everybody for coming. And check out the book if you can.
[APPLAUSE]
