Native American Artists’ Use of Irony in Works Restating the Past

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 8 (1998) : 43-49. Native American Artists’ Use of Irony in Works Restating the Past Gülriz Büken History has recorded that the whites who came to America did not always acknowledge the existence of the Native Americans of North America, including the First Peoples of Canada, as that of a human race with a rich cultural heritage of its own. Instead, these interlopers created images that have varied considerably over the last half millenium reflecting both European and Native American social history during specific periods. These images more often than not have been, as Patricia Trenton and Patrick T. Houlihanphrase it, “paradoxical stereotypes” of Native Americans as “bloodthirsty savage and heroic warrior; hopeless drunkard in need of protection; victim of deceit, corruption, and greed, grudgingly but philosophically accepting his fate” (7). As Michael Dorris, a Modoc Indian, has noted “Indian peoples were perceived not as they were, but as they ‘had’ to be” (qtd. in Deloria 401). However, the early imagery of “exotic primitives living in a state of nature” rapidly became altered as the whites began to perceive what North America’s natural resources could offer them (Trenton and Houlihan 7). As a result this image was transformed into a “series of images . . . useful in justifying wholesale dispossession,” as William W. Savage Jr. explains (6). And, as frontiers were pushed westward, the Indian became branded as “an impediment to civilization, a barrier to Manifest Destiny [in the case of the United States], and a radical militant” (Trenton and Houlihan 7). Their situation forced many Native Americans to become political activists in order to assert their rights to land reclamation and Indian sovereignty. Others sought alternative means of repossession. Native American artists, for example, considered their mission to be the correction of entrenched misconceptions by using their art to retell Native American history from their own perspective. They produced creative work such as mixed media installations, paintings, and sculptures to contest and deconstruct outmoded stereotypes of “Indianness.” They employed in these works the visual language and techniques of western art and western cultural icons, thereby turning these elements against the whites, which resulted in “parody and ironic recontextualization,” as Allan J. Ryan so aptly critiques it (168). This article surveys a number of such works by Native American artists who through their art both challenge the dominant Euro-American viewpoint and depict aspects of their colonized past from their own perspective. As will be seen, the artists whose works are introduced below are primarily contemporary artists coming from different areas and using different methods of artistic expression to break through and/or dispel stereotypes and document different experiences. The works discussed take up such themes as religion, indoctrination and education; political issues; history, acculturation, and issues of dual identity resulting from acculturation. A major aspect of the Indians’ colonized past has been their enforced conversion to Christianity. In Carl Beam’s etching on paper, Calvary to Cavalry (1989-1990), the artist pairs an early crucifixion scene with an archival portrait of five Native men. The etching, focused on the missionized past, is not merely a rebuttal of the colonized past per se, but reveals, I believe, the critical role missionary work has played in the process of colonization. Drawing upon the hidden forces of this work, it becomes obvious that Calvary toCavalry contains a political critique as well. Ryan insightfully observes that this etching is “a searing commentary on the harrowing missionary-military alliance” (194), for in reality it was the Indians who were crucified at the altar of Christian Anglo-American culture, and subjected to forced removal from their “motherland.” This practice of “Christianizing through force while colonizing through faith” is also addressed by Jane Ash Poitras in her five-piece painting/installation The Virgin Bullet (1991). Again Ryan considers that “Like the title of the piece itself, it is a distressing yet riveting elision of imagery. Like a volley of gunfire or a hail of bullets frozen in mid-flight, the shells presage an impending disaster” (194). The violence committed against the Native Americans under the cloak of religion is also interrogated by Ron Noganosh in Dominus Vobiscum (1988), which consists of a rosary placed in a plexiglass-covered and walnut-framed display case. For Ryan, Noganosh’s bulletrosary is “a biting backlash on the injustices conducted against the Native children in mission schools”—the church-run residential schools where, for several decades, countless Native children were subjected to various indignities. The Yucci/Muscogee artist Steven Deo’s wood and cloth photographic collage The Indoctrination (1995) provides further commentary on the indoctrination of Native American children by “civilizing” them in federal boarding schools. In this case it is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School founded and directed by Captain Richard H. Pratt whose theory was: “Kill the Savage, Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (qtd. in Harjo 85). Deo’s collage consists of two rows of 10 photographs depicting life in that schoool In a similar vein, Beam’s Forced Ideas in School Days (1991) presents an indictment of the people and the policies that allowed residential schools to become popular. The upper half of this work consists of a group photograph of the artist with his classmates at the Catholic boarding school. To the left of the group is an inscription: “The artist as a young captive in an insane world of fools who will go down in history as the most perverted humans ever to walk on the face of the earth . . . the truth unfolds slowly but surely like a tide almost.” The ironic force of the work is emphasized in a text to the right of the photograph: FORCED IDEAS in School Days/ . . . I remember all my friends and I going to church everyday because we were supposed to change from being Native to non-native, probably never white . . . and yet, in spite of severe brainwashing everyone did remain native. I’m sure Christ would have enjoyed that. (Qtd. in Ryan 200) These painful, deeply inscribed memories of those days defined by submissiveness, confinement, and conformity are projected onto the painting. Other Native American artists focus on political issues. For example, the military campaign waged against the Plains Indians in the latter half of the 19th century is the target of Edward Poitras’ series of four installations entitled Small Matters (1988/1999) which the artist himself calls “a little ambush. It’s an amenable piece but with big content” (qtd. in Ryan 189). Described by Karen Duffek and Tom Hill, Poitras’ installations are “a series of small fencelike enclosures nailed to a gallery wall,” which introduce “sep (...truncated)