On November 29th, 1990 the United States government passed the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, distinguishing what can be labeled as “authentic” United States Indian products. Throughout the 1990s artists grappled with and challenged the concept of “authenticity” in art and museums – many of these artists identified as Native American or American Indian. Unfortunately, authenticity wasn’t the protection these artists were working towards. In fact, they intended to debunk the myth of authenticity entirely. Many American Indians sought to expose the term as racist, citing the very nature of the 1990 act as proof. Many explored the very nature of authenticity and truth through the historical subjectivity of museums’ method of creating an exhibit and choosing artifacts. Others illustrated what it meant to be “authentically” Native by questioning our European-American societal beliefs of American Indians. These artists are engaging in a form of visual cultural studies by exploring how visual representation throughout history has shaped society’s understanding of cultures: for example, how visual representations in museums shape our perception of a culture’s historical identity. In this paper I will explore how three artists attempt to tackle the social issues and implications of the “authentic” American Indian, and how this ideology has led European-American society to romanticize the Native American community. To preface, I will discuss entire installations as singular artistic pieces to explore the ways in which artists criticized the practices of museums and sought to redefine visual cultural studies.
The first artist I will discuss is Fred Wilson and his Mining the Museum; an exhibit aimed at displaying the flawed methods in which curators choose authentic artifacts to tell history, and the ways in which European-American society has given a limited representation to life as an American Indian. To begin the exhibit, Wilson displayed a large trophy in the shape of a globe, for a “Truth in Advertising” award. This is where Wilson introduces his criticism of the subjective nature of truth and authenticity, and provokes the viewer to question their own definitions of truth and how it is characterized.
To criticize the way in which museums display history, Wilson provides the viewer with six column stands, three of which have busts of important historical figures: Henry Clay, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Andrew Jackson. The other three columns do not have marble busts, and stand as a reminder of the absence of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, and Benjamin Banneker; all of whom are historical figures of color that were born in Maryland – all characteristics that the previous three were missing. This is not only a comment on the lack of representation for people of color in museums and history, but also a comment on the way in which historians and curators have selectively chosen moments and characters throughout history and severely understated the violent nature of colonization. This understatement is a common product of museum culture; where power relations, representations, and cultural identities shape curator practices.
To emphasize this point and introduce other problematic practices of museums, Wilson addresses Native American heritage, and forces the viewers to confront their racist and outdated perceptions of Native American society. As viewers enter the room they are met with the “Portraits of Cigar Store Owners”, which include statues of cigar store Indians with their backs turned toward the viewer, each confronting a portrait of a modern American Indian. In the same room viewers found a display case with various arrowheads labeled as “Collection of Numbers.” These pieces served to comment on how visual representations – inside and outside museums – shape our understanding of current societies, no matter how ancient and racist they are. The case of arrowheads can be seen in many revealing lights: the compulsion and pathology to collect items rather than tell stories, the history of how those items were obtained, and what intellectual history they serve. Wilson was not the first artist, and certainly not the last, to question museums’ off-putting culture of ownership and collection.
In Jimmie Durham’s “On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian” the viewers are challenged to revaluate the importance of artifacts and museological display and the role they play in telling history. The name of the exhibit is a humorous nod to the fact that there is not any Museum of the American Indian. The artist begins his installation with an entry text and info graphics that depict the violent and restrictive effects of colonialism on the American Indian culture. On the left side the viewer is provided with a series of graphs illustrating the “Current Trends in Indian Land Ownership.” Initially the maps show Indians owning all to most of the land, gradually sizing down to small dots on the map of the United States. On the right one sees various photos from postcards that accurately depict the European-American perception of American Indian culture: a tourist surveying for the white buffalo – a part of the outdated trope of the primitivism of American Indian culture. This entry text works to introduce the viewer to the violent history of how American Indians went from “owning” all of the land – which also serves as a comment on the western ideology of ownership that was imposed upon Native Americans – to owning whatever is allowed to them by the colonizers, while also provoking the viewer to question the stereotypes they’ve placed on modern American Indians.
Later on in the installation Durham displays an artifact and labels it “Pocahontas’ Underwear”: a pair of red underwear with feathers and beads. This can be interpreted as a comment on the nature of museums to collect anything Indian, regardless of its historical value. This desire is rooted in a colonialist ideology of ownership; if they can acquire it, they can control it. The obscure nature of putting underwear on display is meant to comment on the offensive nature of many artifacts; somehow by placing someone’s underwear or excavated remains in a casing, it is no longer offensive that they have completely dehumanized the historical character, and stolen their belongings to “preserve” history. It is largely a colonialist/European-American desire to preserve history through indistinct, stolen objects.
The final work I would like to explore is James Luna’s “I’ve Always Wanted to Be an American Indian”, which is a photo essay describing the euro-ethnic romanticized perception of what it is like to be an American Indian, while also putting forth the real experience of being an American Indian. Through his written explanation Luna describes the small reservation he lives on, and how many different tribes have been pushed into those 8,541.25 acres. Personally, I found this fact reason for pause. Throughout my education and experience going to museums I have never been taught about the actual logistics of living on a reservation – so I naively assumed that reservations were tribe specific. While I appreciate Luna’s description of some of these tribes as his tribe’s family, I found it quite simplistic and racist to force tribes onto the same reservation. To me, it echoed the same reductive description society assigns to the Arab world. For example, when people argue that Palestinian refugees born in other Arab states should just conform to that state’s identity. Tribes had very distinct cultures and ways of living, some of which were nomadic. To force multiple tribes onto the same land is to assume that these tribes have compatible or even identical cultures, which is far too simplistic. Later on Luna provides a five-year snap shot mirroring the devastating facts with the hopeful ones; 42% of the tribe has diabetes, an unemployment rate of 47%, two people graduated with master’s degrees, thirty-nine births, etc.
One photo I found particularly interesting was a photo of what appears to be a church. This could serve as a reminder of religious colonization the Native Americans were subjected to throughout history. Perhaps reminding viewers that even the conditions of living on a reservation were engineered in a specific way as to educate and force assimilation upon American Indians. It should provoke the viewer to think about the ways society perceives authentic modern day American Indian culture as beads and feathers, when in actuality the culture of Native Americans was shaped into the colonizers – except for the feathers and beads that the colonizers allowed and forced them to keep to this day. The viewer should be provoked to question even the feathers and beads, and how that is still considered modern American Indian culture, but simply because that is the culture the colonizer desires to own. Luna ends his essay with the line “This isn’t the feathers, the beads of many colors, or the spiritual glory that people who are culturally hungry want” to leave the viewer with the reminder that much of their perception of American Indian lifestyle is based on a socially constructed visual history that romanticizes the colonizer/colonized relationship.