 My name is Leonie Bradbury. I'm the curator and residence here at Emerson. And I'm also the foster chair of contemporary art theory and practice. We are sitting inside the exhibition, Future Ancestral Technologies, not should be featuring the work of Chinupahanska Luka. Tonight's event, Future Traditions, the arising of the Native Album Guard will feature Dr. Adams Bray, who's an Emerson faculty. Before we get started, I just wanted to explain for full disclosure that we will be live streaming this talk. You people in the audience will not be on camera. But if you do ask a question, that question would be recorded. And the organization that's here live streaming with us today is called Howl Ground. And Howl Ground TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world's performing arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and to develop our knowledge comments collectively. So they had approached us if they could have permission to film this event today. And I think it's an incredible initiative, and we're happy to participate in it. So I will now introduce Dr. Adams Bray, White Earth Anishinaabe, teaches Native American Global Indigenous and American Literatures here at Emerson. His research examines the intersection of Native cultural production and US federal Indian policy over the past two centuries. His monograph, Our War Paint is Writers Inc. of 2018, is a comparative literary history of writing by and about the Anishinaabe people since the 19th century. Spray asks, what does it mean for Native writers and artists to embrace the honor guard, along with its deep mistrust of the traditional? In his talk this evening, Dr. Spray will discuss the history of the rise of Native American experimental art and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries and its surprising roots in the US efforts to promote the idea of Native artistic tradition, in quotes. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Adams Spray. Hi, I'm Dr. Adams Spray, from the Dijikazkawawa in Dunjiba, Kiksari in Dodem. My name's Adam Spray. I come from the White Earth traditional Navi Nation in Minnesota. And my plan identity is this Kiksari of the Sun House at Shokong in Arringo, Alaska. Those are my in-laws, people who took me in and gave me a name. I tell you that, I always start by saying that, to tell you who I am, where I'm from, and most importantly, to whom I have obligations. That's always important for us to do. Another thing I'd like to do before I begin is just to recognize that we are on the land of the Massachusetts people, along with their Wampanoag and Nipmunk relatives. And that our occupation of this space right now is predicated on acts of violence that have happened historically and continue today. So I've gotten that out of the way. I want to just informally and hopefully in a fun and engaging way talk to you about the history of how we go from traditional Native American art to the avant-garde, not that these two things are separated or not happening at the same time. They absolutely are. But asking the question, how do we go from Native American art as an intensely social practice to a form of expression that is mediated by all sorts of implications and capitalism? So to begin, I'm going to start with a personal obituary, which is my engagement with this diptych called Lifestyles from 2007. I'm not going to tell you the artist, because the artist himself is not a good person and does not deserve a lot of recognition. You can look it up if you want. But my engagement with this work stems from an exhibition of Anishinaabe art in New York in 2014 at the National Museum of the American Indian. And I caught myself staring at this diptych and coming to a sort of profound and profoundly sad realization that the obviously ironic depiction of middle-class Native life in these two photographs was a pretty accurate depiction of what my own house looked like. And it set me on sort of both an existential crisis, but also a line of inquiry into Native American contemporary art, culture, and practice. So some of the questions I had is how did we get to a place where not only can we imagine a middle-class Native couple, like myself and my partner, being skewered as sort of the subjects of an Ikea catalog? OK, right. What were the economic and historical forces at work that led to not just this being a possibility, but also this becoming itself a piece of art to be consumed? And the answer to that question is one I'm going to be talking with you about tonight. And to understand it, we have to go back. And by back, I mean all the way back, unfortunately, back to the beginning. One of the first things, and if the scene's redundant or unnecessary, I apologize, but I actually think oftentimes it is important to say Native Americans have existed on this continent and been making art since time immemorial. So I know it's sort of hard to see that these are additional epictographs from the Great Lakes. Native American art in various forms and various material practices has been around forever for as long as people have occupied this continent. That being said, Native American art, historically, did not operate in sort of what we think of as modes of art that are more familiar with us today. By which I mean sort of commodity, as commodities. Instead, Native American art existed in a complex relation of social practices, ceremonial, intercommunal, et cetera. In the 19th century, after colonization, I know I'm jumping quite far ahead from time immemorial to the 19th century, but bear with me. In the 19th century, the idea of collecting Native American art really started to take off. There had been some people who'd collected what before then would be thought of as artifacts, but really thinking about Native Americans as producers of art, kwa, art is sort of a 19th century phenomenon. Part of this comes into being because of the mass dispossession of Native American cultural artifacts throughout the 19th century by anthropologists. But also, in the case of this slide here, as part of the settler state, in this case, the settler state of Canada's efforts to break down tribal practices, societies, and religions. So these are pieces of art that ended up in Western museum collections that were confiscated from the Kwa Wuk Wuk people in the 19th century after their traditional potlatch, which is a ceremonial giveaway, was made illegal for its communistic, anti-capitalist sort of implication in the 19th century. They would take away the material that Native people would use to promote their own social practices, but then would sell it the objects they confiscated as art pieces. So we see some of that at work. The situation, the specific idea that I'm trying to trace, however, is really a 20th century idea. And to understand it, we have to go to now next, New Mexico. So early 20th century New Mexico is a very fascinating place for anybody who's familiar with it. In the early 20th century in New Mexico, you have this weird confluence of high modernist, Euro-American high modernist practitioners and Native people existing simultaneously in the same place at the same time. So here we see Awa Sera's mountain sheep dance. Awa Sera is part of the San Indovanzo self-taught school where Pueblo artists were mentored by the wife of a superintendent of the Indian School of Santa Fe. She promoted Pueblo painting, Pueblo style painting, but also in its traditional sense, but also sort of updated from modern sensibilities. So in this piece, we can see echoes of a traditional style, but also in its flatness and its use of negative space, a very sort of modernist sensibility beginning to emerge. At this time, there is a growing attention to primitivism in both the visual arts and also the written literary arts. This engagement with primitivism is less of a celebration of indigenous cultures and indigenous identities, and more as T.S. Eliot will put it, a way of engaging with useful, raw material for the artists to engage with and refine. So as Eliot says, but as he, meaning the artist, is the first person to see the merits of the savage, the barbarian and the rustic, he is also the first person to see how the savage, the barbarian and the rustic can be improved upon. So this rhetoric of improvement is not just an aesthetic sort of sensibility, but also literally written into U.S. federal policy at the time. In the late 19th, early 20th century, we have institutions like Native American boarding schools, efforts to reform tribal nations into sort of acquisitive capitalist polities, a whole bunch of things going on that follow the same logic that Eliot's promoting here. Native culture, native people are there to be improved upon by their betters. And this is exactly what begins to happen, especially in Santa Fe during this time. So we have artists like George O'Keefe or D.H. Lawrence or any number that we could talk about Mabel, Dodge Bluen, Alice Corbin, Henderson, a bunch of people passing through Santa Fe at this time who are self-consciously engaging with tribal themes, tribal histories, tribal cultures in their own artistic practice. And part of this is this sort of second wave of American modernist cultural production that tends to get lumped in with an American avant-garde, at least in the Euro-American sensibility. So the association with the Native Americans with the avant-garde has a long history in the United States, but for my purposes, what I really want to trace is how that relationship was exploited and intensified by the US government. So under the direction in part of several of the artists and writers who were in Santa Fe at this time, you have the promotion of legislation called the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935, which stopped to promote the economic welfare of Indian tribes and the Indian wards of the government through the development of Indian arts and crafts and the expansion of the market for the products of Indian arts and craftsmanship. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board had several purposes that went beyond this. They also policed the identity of people who were producing, quote unquote, Native American art. And they, I should say, this board that was instituted was all non-native. A strange sort of interesting historical interlude is that Vincent Price is one of the first members, that Vincent Price is one of the first members of the board and actually chairs the board later on in the 60s. Actually, well, get into that. But the Indian Arts and Crafts Act makes formal this recognition that art can be an avenue towards economic development and the increasing sort of capitalization, capitalist exploitation, however you want to say it, of Native people. Oh, I should also mention one of the big promoters, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act is Rene de Harnencourt, who was one of Nelson Rockefeller's personal art collectors and also one of the leading luminaries of an institution we call the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So under the direction of Rene de Harnencourt, there is a landmark exhibition that's put together by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of Native American art specifically at the Museum of Modern Art, right? So most of the material that was depicted in this exhibition is traditional art or traditional at the time, right? We're not talking about contemporary or experimental Native art, but rather, the traditional arts being presented as modern, right? And this has, and I'm following Joy Gritton's fabulous book on this here. This has a couple of different reasons, none of which have to do with Native people themselves or if so, only incidentally. First and foremost, there is a desperate need in American modern art at this time to separate itself from Europe, either the sort of fascistic modernism that comes about in Germany or the sort of communistic lineage of modernism that's coming out of Russia at the time. By presenting Native American art in this new and most pretty new at the time context, it provided American modern art a indigenous lineage to fall back on that was not just non-European, but in some ways, anti-European, right? The exhibition did not actually do a great job of drawing attention to Native artists specifically, but rather Native traditions generally and was very explicit about its commodification of those cultural practices. So in the attending catalog, we can see this. Many contemporary travel products can be used without adaptation in modern homes and as part of modern dress. Some of these may find a place in our houses and wardrobes simply because of their decorative value, but many combine utility with aesthetic merit, right? So already we see some very interesting conflation of sort of aesthetic value with use value. Again, with no attention paid to the production of this art, I find it very hilarious here that the tribal identification of this piece is identified and its location is identified. It makes no mention of the artist, but it makes sure to say that whoever lent it, who owned it originally, did so anonymously, right? So there's some levels of irony there. The show at MoMA was a big success and René de Harnencourt was also interested along with the US government, I should say, in the promotion of Native art. Now, art's education had been done in the United States at boarding schools since at least the 19th century. There's a great book on this, I can't remember the author, but the title is called Colonized by Art, or Colonized through Art, which is about the history of arts education in boarding schools. Most of that arts education had been directed at bringing Native students into a sort of Western artistic tradition of mimetic representation. However, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board had a different idea. They wanted to create a space where tribal artists could pursue their own traditional artistic practice, refined and improved all T.S. Eliot by instruction in Western artistic traditions. So with that in mind, in 1962, there was established on the campus of the Santa Fe Indian School, the Institute for American Immunizations. IAA started off as a post high school program, non degree granting, where young Native artists who were identified early on, usually in a boarding school or otherwise government run school context as having artistic talent, were sent to develop that talent. While IAA, those first generations of students were pushed gently towards adapting sort of the aesthetic tenants of modernism. Not only that, but their time was split between artistic education or historical education, but also things like how to make small pop talk at dinner parties. So the education was simultaneously artistic and practical, but also directed at making them sort of properly middle class subjects of the art market. That was intentional and very specifically done. The early documents around IAA suggest that one of the goals that the federal government had in promoting it was to de-tribalize Native artists and de-tribalize Native art by taking these people out of their communal contexts, turning them into middle class artists who could then circulate in places like New York City, Chicago, Paris, et cetera. So we can see a pretty direct through line from Native American boarding schools and their assimilation project and these sort of arts education happening at IAAI. One of the first instructors at IAAI is a Lasuano artist named Fritz Scholder. I'm sorry for the quality of this picture and its watermark. But Fritz Scholder was a very interesting figure in the development of IAAI if you really push students not to do any sort of experimentation in their own practice while simultaneously carving out a space for himself as a very experimental Native American painter of various kinds of subject matter. Fritz Scholder leaves IAAI in the 70s but also sort of leaves his mark as it were in terms of creating pieces like this that developed him a great deal of attention in the art market. So this is Indian with a beer can from 1969. I see Scholder not as a sort of Genesis point but as one of the early manifestations of what I'm identifying as a native avant-garde and I mean that very specifically as not just natives doing the avant-garde later but what does the avant-garde mean to Native people? So here with Scholder's piece we can see it's sort of challenging of authenticity by having an Indian with no real visual signifiers of Indian besides his skin color and potentially his bracelet set in a context ostensibly or imagine at a bar with a can of beer which itself is a sort of very aggressive commentary on Native American identity in 1969, right? So one of the things that I identify in the native avant-garde is this push pull of authenticity and representation. Challenging stereotypes while also promoting some stereotypes and not allowing the viewer to sort of settle in to their understanding of Indianness and its interaction with the art which is very different than say what was happening at MoMA in 1942 where people are just kind of engaging with what they think is traditional in the bar. All right, so as I is getting off the ground we have this sort of second wave of modernism or post-modernism happening and we have another wave of primitivism this time from people who are doing performance art such as Yes, a Voice, his piece from 1974 I like America and America Likes Me which was presented as an apology to both the landscape and peoples of North America for the actions of Europeans by way of this apology he locked himself in a room with a coyote for seven days. As far as I understand it native people were neither consulted nor involved in the production of this piece. I still think it's really interesting but just to get us to think about Voice's idea that he can speak on behalf of Europeans but also towards indigenous people without them being present is something interesting. But for the first time, arguably for the first time because of the success in institutions like IAI and also greater access to higher education arts education by Indian artists in the mid 19th century, we also have another listening artist artists like James DeLuna who are taking these practices these sort of avant-garde performance art practices and using them to critique the way in which native peoples bodies and artistic objects had been presented in your American history. So in this piece, James DeLuna actually put himself on display late in a museum case I think for an entire day as a commentary on the commodification not just of native art but in museums that is but also native bodies which is a whole another thing that the United States still to this day has tens of thousands of indigenous human remains sometimes even on display still. All right, the last sort of policy shift that I wanna draw our attention to and for me one of the most interesting is an update to the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935 that happens in 1990. This strengthens the ability of the AICB to police authenticity in native art. So what I've exerted here is part of the strengthening it is unlawful to offer or display for sale or sell any good with or without a government trademark in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization resident within the US. As far as I know this is the only piece of government legislation that allows the government to authenticate art produced by people of certain races as being produced by those races. Now the irony of this being that it is it falls within the purview of the federal government the same excuse me the same federal government that has been doing its best to de-tribalize, dispossess and assimilate native people is now defining native identity for the purposes of the American market. So that leads me more or less to the present day and I wanted to show you some more examples of what I'm identifying as the native avant-garde and talk a little bit about what that means or what I think it might mean. So we'll move to the contemporary visual arts. First I wanna talk about this piece by Brian Youngin, Jungin I can never know how to pronounce his name, prototypes for a new understanding. This is his series of sculptures and installations produced between 1988 and 2005. As you can see they have obvious similarities visual similarities with Northwest Coast art. Brian Youngin himself is from the Northwest Coast tribe. They look like the traditional what we call form line sort of art that is common in the Pacific Northwest. And yet in terms of their production they are produced using as you can probably tell already Air Jordan sneakers, disassembled and then reassembled to look like traditional forms of art. Though there's some they're not engaged with directly sort of traditional designs. They're more imaginative free designs. At the same time there are included in these pieces signifiers of authenticity like the hair which is his common feature of Northwest Coast art. Traditionally you would take hair from people that you had captured in battle not the scalp but just the hair and incorporate it into the art to sort of sanctify it or make it a ceremonial object. Youngin's commentary on the way in which native art operates in the same sort of circulation, motive circulation as the Air Jordan can't help but draw attention to sort of Marx's construction of the commodity fetish. And I think this is very important for understanding the Native American avant-garde. This is as close as I am to having a thesis statement. This is a work in progress that I'm developing. But essentially my thesis about the Native American avant-garde is it's an extended, and this doesn't apply to all Native American contemporary art but rather very specific set of set, Native American art that is involved in an extended sort of commentary or meditation on the commodity fetish as applied to native cultural production. So Marx's idea of the commodity fetish being that it's what allows us to blind ourselves to the social relations that produce an object. In this case, the uncomfortable association being made is between the sweatshop labor that produces the sneakers and the slave hair, that's the term for it, the slave hair that's also integrated into the piece. Drawing an uncomfortable connection with traditional Northwest Coast practices, historical practices, cultural practices and commodity fetishism. But never really resolving that contradiction. All right, let's move on to the piece. The Native American avant-garde that I'm trying to identify is specifically and I think self-consciously responding back to prior articulations of the avant-garde in the Western canon, Western artistic tradition in that it has a sort of uncomfortable association with kitsch and it's playing with those registers of low and high culture, working class and bourgeois culture. This is the sort of secondary feature of this art is that it really is thinking through class in a way that I think is unresolved but very interesting which is to say the increasing distinction of Native Americans, Native American communities as being having class, right? So if we think back to the arts education having an IAA and the attempt to make sort of proper bourgeois middle class Indian artists, well the product of that division class distinction is the emergence of a Native middle class and it's not just art that's doing this, there's a lot of policy changes having at the same time where we're starting to see increasingly a divide between lower and upper class Native people that have and have nots in a way that isn't really properly understood or theorized even in academic discourse. So when you read Star's piece here is obviously a commentary on the Thanksgiving but also the Thanksgiving Tableau but also the Last Supper, that's the name of the Last Thanks but also what's important about it to my mind is its presentation of highly refined foods of the kind that you would see Native people especially in remote reservations out west relying on these highly processed food products that become sort of the basis of modern subsistence in reservation communities, especially the more remote ones. All right, moving on. Another aspect of this and maybe even a subcategory of this is the emergence or I should say increasing popularity of Native pop art, right? Steven Paul Judd, I'm also thinking of Echo Rock, Echo Rock, what are the Echo Rocks? Bunky, Bunky Echo Rock, Bunky Echo Rock and others. And this is really an artistic practice that I'm really split on. What we're seeing in this new emergence of Native pop art which is really popular in Native communities and perhaps the least sort of academic of these artists that I'm talking about is simply taking objects of sort of commodification from normative Euro-American culture discourse and bringing them into a Native context without much commentary. So we see a lot of this like the form line adaptations of like Batman or Superman, I can't remember how this does that, or Bunky Echo Rocks own practice of sort of painting Yoda in a headdress and sort of traditional Pawnee regalia. This I think is a commentary on commodity and commodification but I also think it is, might have to have a conversation with y'all to try to figure this one out a little bit more. But let's just say that this is part of the archive of material that I'm thinking through. Lastly, I'm gonna show you a piece that I encountered just this last weekend in Toronto at the Biennial up there. These are two pieces by Dana Clarkston. Now in the artist statement that I read, the artist presented these as celebrations of Native women's fashion and cultural identity. But what struck me in looking at them is the way in which identity is actually obscured through a sort of spectacular overindulgence in material objects and sort of the spectacle of these objects divorced from any sort of cultural context presented on a body in a black background in a way that can't help but draw attention to their materiality but also their existence as commodity. And these pieces are, especially this piece, what they make me think about in thinking through commodity and its relationship to Native art is not just the way in which commodification obscures the social relations of production. And here I'm thinking of Peter Berger's theory of the avant-garde, right? That the avant-garde is meant to reinsert artistic practice into social life, right? Capitalism comes in, divorces art from religion nor society and turns it into a commodity when the avant-garde reacts against that. But I'm also thinking through the way in which Native cultural production creates surplus value through its identification as Indigenous art, by which I mean. One thing that I think is true of a lot of the artists under consideration is that all of them are attempting or have attempted, in one way or another, to distance themselves from the, or I shouldn't say these artists specifically, but you see a lot of this, of the Native artists trying to say, I don't want to be understood as just an Indigenous artist, right? Trying to articulate their artistic practice on a sort of equal playing ground with other contemporary artists. At the same time, there is a sort of market force that wishes to always identify them as Indigenous, even as they resist it. And part of what I'm thinking through with this is the way in which that identification of an Indigenous artist and more specifically their art as quote unquote, native art is a kind of surplus value, right? Where the surplus value is not the alienated labor of the artist, but rather the alienation of the collective labor of the artist's community, ancestors and traditions that is used to for sort of capitalist profit seeking. Not necessarily by the artist, but by the infrastructure of arts education, promotion and display that we have working today. So my own work on this is focused primarily not on the visual arts, but on the literary arts where we see a similar attention to questions of materiality, the objectness of text, its circulation, and its sort of removal from cultural context. So this is DJ Nanna Cockpicks under Erasure from her collection, Corpse Whale from 2012. I'm not gonna go into this too much, but essentially I see what's going on in the native contemporary arts, at least some of the artists that I'm talking about are happening also in Native American, especially poetry, contemporary avant-garde poetry, which is a return to avant-garde techniques from the mid-century to both comment on and sort of the commodification of native arts, but also, and this is where it gets really interesting, DJ Nanna Cockpick herself is a graduate of Institute of American Indian Arts, where she was instructed specifically by Arthur Z, who taught poetry there for a long time, in sort of traditions of the avant-garde, misty poets, language poets, the New York School, et cetera, et cetera. And so one of the things that I think is really important to think about is the way in which this avant-garde is not just a sort of natural organic response to capitalism, but as it is of itself, a government mandated aesthetic being promoted in schools run by the United States government. And thinking about the sort of circularity or insularity of these avant-garde works as being kind of the point, their rejections of authenticity, their idea that culture can be divorced from context, or their warning of that, all serves a greater purpose of breaking down tribal polities and turning native artists rather than participants in their communities into sort of transparent, well, not even transparent, autonomous bourgeois subjects. And that's, so we have to keep that in mind, that this isn't just an organic avant-garde, but rather really promoted US policy sense at least in the 1930s. So with that in mind, let's talk about politics. Where do I see this coming from? I've given you some of the historical antecedents. I also want to just draw some of the political implications of this a little bit. First, I think, obviously, most obviously, this art is indeed conversation with questions that have been around for a long time of native appropriation, appropriation of native cultural materials. So you've probably heard about this, Urban Outdoors getting sued in 2011 for its use of the term Navajo, which actually was brought to court under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. They were sued for saying that this was Navajo and it wasn't produced by Navajo people. The Navajo Nation took them to court and lost. It was determined that by the courts that the Navajo Nation hadn't defended its trademark on the term Navajo since it had been used in a commercial sense for most of the 19th and 20th century. And therefore they did not have a claim to it. So obviously, Urban Outfitters is easy to dislike, let's talk about something that for a lot of native people is more close to home. Pendleton, non-native-owned company that has, for the better part of the last century, both been an important source of sort of materials for giveaways, potlatches, and other cultural events in native communities. I got a potlatch blanket for graduating from high school. I got a potlatch, a Pendleton blanket for graduating high school. I got a Pendleton blanket for getting married. I've given away a Pendleton blanket to continue how many times, right? And yet Pendleton itself, even though its market towards native people is actually fairly minimal, most of its market is in selling the idea of Indianness and Indian cultural identity that it has developed through its long economic relationship with native people to non-natives and in sometimes very uncomfortable ways. So here we see the Mickey Mouse Collection Spot Howl that takes a popular native-themed card from Pendleton's collection and just simply adds Mickey Mouse to it. There's other more egregious things that Pendleton does, like selling hand-stitched pictures of like pugs wearing headdresses and all sorts of stuff, right, that we can talk about. And yet, and yet, and yet, I as a middle-class native person not only have all these Pendleton blankets, but we'll often see me walking around with like a Pendleton sort of swag bag and a Pendleton hat and that sort of thing too, as a signifier of the nativeness and also in a class status. And it's not just non-natives and doing some of the things that I think this artist is responding to, it's also native people. So Louis Gong in the last 10 years has tried to develop an alternative to Pendleton in a company called Eighth Generation in which he's selling wool blankets that were designed by native people, not all Pendleton blankets, actually a very small minority of Pendleton blankets that are designed by native people. At Louis Gong shop, the blankets are designed by native people and sold in a native-owned store but produced in China, which is a point of contestation in and outside of native communities. So, and lastly is a sort of a point of meditation, and I'm not trying to call anyone out here, but I just want to think about sort of the promotion of native art in this commodity, in the form of commodity, by thinking about this piece specifically, a luxury medicine pouch produced by Anishinaabe artist, Louise Solomon. I want to read that as a very ironic thing, a medicine pouch, a sign of Anishinaabe's sort of spiritual practice in which one submits themselves to cosmological power through an act of pity being redeployed as a luxury object, right? And just thinking through that. I know that's, I'm not offering you a lot of conclusions about that, but it's something I'm thinking through. I also want to just draw your attention to something that showed up in the New York Times just last weekend. This is a story about the establishment by the Canadian government or in collaboration with the Canadian government with the Dorset Cape Eskimo Arts Collective, and I'm not a cultural insider here, and I would like to hear from community members about this. The article was written by a non-community member, but the picture it painted was actually pretty grim in the sense that this arts co-op, which was established in the 1970s to promote Indian arts, right? Around which a community had built up houses and all that sort of stuff, ended up creating a sort of vicious cycle of dependency where Inuit artists would relocate to this community in order to make art, in order to afford the means to go do their subsistence practices. It follows the story of one Inuit artist who's trying to buy a snowmobile through sound art, and she increasingly has to make more and more art and spend more and more time making more and more art in order to afford the snow machine that will allow her to travel the distance necessary to do her traditional subsistence hunting and gathering. And to my mind, that really strikes me as echoing back to the old factory system of the fur trade in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, though like I said, I'd like to get more information about that from community insiders. Politically, I think it should be clear at this point that my interest in this has to do with my interest in capitalism as it has been applied unevenly and violently onto native communities. And one way of thinking about this is through Glenn Cothard, the name political theorists, thinking in red skin white masks, that the state insists that the accommodation of indigenous cultural difference, so in this case art, be reconcilable with one political information, namely colonial sovereignty, meaning the sovereignty not of indigenous people but of the settler state, and one mode of production, namely capitalism. And I think in a final sort of analysis, this is art that is trying very hard and very desperately to comment on the role capitalism has played in native communities, yet is dependent for its promotion and circulation on those same sort of capitalist markets and elite spaces. Now this isn't a new thing, other avant-garde movements have been stuck in this sort of double-blind, I mean that is the history of the avant-garde as a practice. But it's worth thinking about in terms of native communities because there are still alternatives within and among those communities of non-exploitative, non-capitalist practice. Now the thing about those is I don't have slides of them because we don't have access to them. And part of the reason they still exist is simply and precisely because we don't have access to them. And so it's worth our consideration that if we do have an investment in native societies and the coherence of native cultural traditions, especially if they're non- or anti-capitalist cultural traditions, it may mean losing access to native cultural productions. One commentary on this, and then I'll open up for questions that I think is really interesting and a very rich sort of meditation on this dynamic is Nick Bellannon, Plinkett artist, Unceremonial Dance Mask from 2017. I'm simply gonna show the video without commentary and then after the video's over I'd be happy to answer questions. So let me boot up the video for you as artists statement about this piece. The Unceremonial Dance Mask reflects the resilience of culture and community, not form. The destruction of memory remains evident as the mask is danced in the firelight it remains unceremoniable. The dance can be profound, which in my mind I always read the little addendum but not with that. So I open it up for any questions you might have and I mean that any questions. I know I kind of dumped a lot on you, especially without a lot of context. I know opportunities to learn about indigenous history or a few far between so I invite all questions and all comers. Why do you use the term avant-garde? It's a self-conscious thing on my part in part because I want, I want to draw attention to how wrong it is to use. Okay. I mean the avant-garde is a, you know, early 20th century fact was done by dead white guys and parents, right? And but in my mind I think, and I think these artists, though they may be hesitant to say so themselves, but I think in their, in this aesthetic of mixture of kitsch and tradition in commentaries on commodity and art, right, are really going back to that historical avant-garde moment and in the early 20th century, but not organically, not out of a sense of aesthetic development that they're late getting there, but because they're being taught it in school as what other people did when they were confronted with questions of authenticity, community, society, and commodification, right? And so, especially with the poetry, I mean it doesn't come through in the art, maybe perhaps much, but in the poetry, there is this constant sense, especially when you see native people like engaging with forms like language poetry for example, which is an avant-garde poetic practice that kind of had it hated in the 70s, mostly almost actually entirely white and mostly male like poetic practice, right? And I think what we see embedded in the art, I could have spoken to this more, is this commentary that the avant-garde, qua avant-garde as this effort to kind of break from cycles of identity and tradition is actually really embedded in whiteness in ways that native people can't get away from. So it's not the avant-garde, it has to be the native avant-garde in that full formal construction where that native is doing that sort of value-added thing that I was talking about before. But I like the contradiction that it presents that we have native people who are always seen as in deep dialogue with tradition and a sense of historicity, taking up practices that were developed with people who wanted to make radical breaks with history and tradition. And I think these artists are, but also not, right? Vastly on that for like another hour or two. Recently, this last week, saw the phrase indigenous futurism. I did and I was wondering if you had heard about that phrase and how that's being used within our context or in relation to avant-garde. I mean, we're in it. I mean, Chinupa's show is all about the indigenous futurism. Futurism as a concept, I mean, you have to think through futurism's historical valence as an avant-garde movement that was closely aligned with fascism and its desire for return and vitality in sort of cultural authenticity. And so, I don't think indigenous people are sort of thinking through those valences of futurism. I think they're more playing off of the paradox of imagining a future for native people, right? But that being said, there are all these associations that come along with it that are embedded in the use of the term and its history of mobilization, right? That are worth thinking through. I don't think it's as easy as saying we can simply claim indigenous futurism without understanding that there's a whole weighted history there. You just think when, and again, I eat this artist here, sure, or any of this, but I feel like it's being used in more relation to Afro-Tutorism, right? I mean, I think that's more, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, more professional. Yeah, and I think so, and I think, I think there is a way in which that there have been indigenous speculation for a long time, right? You know, I'm thinking 1970s, there's a book by Martin Kruse Smith, who most of you might know more from his Gorky Park novels and that sort of thing called Worse by Thrillers, but he's actually quite well known. His first novel is called The Indians One, and it's a counterfactual history of Native American military leaders getting together in 1876, and you have Stan Guati, and you have Geronimo, and Crazy Horse, all in a teepee together, planning to overthrow the US government, right? Like, that is what we think of as sort of today as indigenous futurism, but it wasn't identified as such, right? I think thinking about the use of the term futurism is worth thinking about in all the contexts it shows up, given its cultural heritage or its history, though I'm not as conversant with the Afro-futurists, sort of, I'm sure that's a conversation that's already happening in that discourse here. Indigenous futurism, for me, you know, as a practice, as Chidup is practicing it, I think is, it's an attempt to imagine, artistically, and outside the double-bind that I'm talking about here, that Native culture is always being intervened upon by capitalism, right? And so various forms of indigenous futurity that we see emerge recently, including Chidup's work here, is trying to imagine this sort of apocalyptic break with the past. So again, it's sort of avant-garde, but more terribly avant-garde, sort of the apocalypse comes and we can go back to our traditions, they have to change, but we can go back to them, that I think is useful in some contexts, and not as useful in others, and it just sort of depends on how it's mobile. So, I think there's some amount of indigenous futurism that's very much sort of driven by a sort of anti-colonial fantasy that may not be politically useful, and then there's some indigenous futurisms that are very politically engaged and thinking through the nuts and bolts and materiality of what does it mean for indigenous peoples to have a future, and what will the necessary preconditions be for the kind of futures that indigenous peoples want to have, right? Does that make sense? But yeah, I mean, one of the problems that I was running into as an English professor is that we run into terms as people use them, and my definition of indigenous futurism might not be what everybody else thinks it is. So, if that makes sense. Well, chi ma kwa chi, guys. Thank you very much for coming out. I appreciate it. Hope it was interesting. And I wish you a good one.