The Brooklyn Rail

Beautifully designed by Opaskwayak Cree graphic designer Sébastien Aubin in a way that highlights the multifaceted works of contemporary Native North American cultural practitioners (visual artists, filmmakers, choreographers, musicians, designers, architects, writers, and scholars), the idea for this nearly 450-page book was envisioned by Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson years ago. That a project like this would take almost two decades to realize is not surprising given the extent to which it traverses diverse communities (Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Native Alaskan) and art scenes. In his introduction, Gibson writes that rather than assembling a comprehensive publication, the book is “one artist’s take on the field of contemporary art and culture by Native and Indigenous makers.” Considering that the amount of information, documentation, and analysis in this hefty book is staggering, one can’t even begin to imagine what a definitive project on this transcultural community of makers would look like or if it is even possible. This immediately becomes apparent as one moves through its pages, the sheer volume of which magnifies how mainstream artworld institutions and scholarship are complicit in the erasure, gatekeeping, and misappropriation that have been central to the settler colonial project in North America.

Richly illustrated with hundreds of artwork reproductions, film stills, photographs of performances, and musical scores, the book’s images are arranged in groups between texts so that they seemingly interact while being placed in relation to an essay, poem, reflection, or interview. Historian Philip J. Deloria’s essay describing the little-known exchanges between Oglala Sioux artist Charging Elk and German Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin, for example, is complemented by Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton’s 2018 photograph of a man holding a lasso suspended in mid-air. The rope meanders like an uninhibited water passage as he stands next to a lowrider bike adorned in Lakota motifs. Wearing flared leather pants, a fringed long sleeve shirt, and a top hat, he invokes the performers of traveling vaudeville shows like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show of the late 1800s, where lasso was first introduced to American and European audiences by Mexican charro Vicente Oropeza.

In his essay, Deloria, who is of Dakota descent, details the brief yet significant friendship that developed after Benjamin met Charging Elk, a former child performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show who was abandoned in a local hospital and later lived in a small farming village in southern France. Adopting the Plains Indian Ledger tradition of drawing, Charging Elk was interested in modernist aesthetics of the time, and had been combining a range of ideas, including Lakota knowledge and mysticism, into his drawings. The two men bonded over discussions about knowledge production and the metaphysical origins of art, language, and thought. In the end, Charging Elk accompanied Benjamin on his trip through the French Pyrenees, often physically propping up the weathered philosopher, who sought to escape the Nazi incursion into France. Before they departed, Benjamin entrusted him with the delivery of a suitcase full of his writings, which fellow German philosopher Theodor Adorno was expecting to receive in the US. Charging Elk thus emerges as a key figure in the history of Western philosophy. Deloria’s discussion of this formative moment toward the end of Benjamin’s life is bookended by an analysis of modernism in general, its failures, appropriations, and colonial roots, and the ways in which Native and Indigenous artists “indigenize” modern forms and styles in order to “recraft them as interventions and transformations, to make the modern one’s own.” According to Deloria, this becomes not only an act of survival and resistance but of continuity, and is indicative of the “near-timeless state of the Indigenous present.”

All of the book’s included texts similarly contain a wealth of previously buried information or obscured thought. Brothers and collaborating artists Adam and Zack Khalil describe the cultural innovations that have emerged from their Ojibway community, specifically among artists who have used new media to adapt traditions and stories that had long remained hidden due to a Christian missionary ban. As the pair often collaborate, they reflect on the artistic strategies that shaped their 2016 documentary film INAATE/SE/ (it shines a certain way. to a certain place./ it flies. falls./), which was inspired by the significant contributions of their late mother Allison Boucher Krebs, an Indigenous scholar, activist, archivist, poet, and photographer. Their essay ends with Kreb’s poem “Native Videographers Strike Back,” which notes that “Native videographers open the aperture extending the depth of focus beyond the doctrine of discovery.”

Each section of the book is essentially that, an opening of the field beyond the parameters of the so-called Western canon with a multigenerational selection of artists who—and here I echo the observations of Carcross/Tagish First Nation curator and scholar Candice Hopkins—use obfuscation as an act of refusal and a way to “constitute” their own audiences. Artists like Salish and Kootenai painter and sculptor Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the late photographer and performance artist James Luna (who was of Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican descent), and Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon, are just a few of the dozens whose work appears to reverberate in ways that speaks directly to Native and Indigenous audiences. This concept of reverberation is outlined in an essay on sound artists and musicians by Plains Cree and Denesųłiné scholar and multidisciplinary artist Jarrett Martineau. Martineau takes the reader through the idea of the “decolonial noise of Indigeneity,” and although he is writing about specific media, his analysis can be applied more broadly. Overlapping themes, histories, and creative strategies—in addition to outward displays and forms of solidarity—are evident throughout An Indigenous Present, and likely reflect not only Gibson’s incisive work as an editor but also a creative network that is held together by a commitment to future forms of collectivity.

An interview with Candice Hopkins conducted by Gibson revisits her decades-long work with Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Native Alaskan artists. Hopkins touches upon issues such as an artist’s accountability to one’s community and the potential of Native and Indigenous scholarship to serve as an intervention and form of advocacy, cutting through the historical amnesia that settler colonialism instituted and continues to rely on. Gibson later interviews Quick-to-See Smith about her role as an organizer and curator beginning in the 1970s, the history of which reveals a direct lineage to the groundbreaking work of the subsequent generations that are highlighted in the book. Quick-to-See Smith also recounts working within “the marginalized art world” during the height of multiculturalism alongside others such as Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains and Black artists Mildred Howard and Howardena Pindell, pointing to yet another history of interconnected struggle that most institutions have yet to fully acknowledge. The breadth of An Indigenous Present makes it akin to a collection of primary documents; it is not a book that can be experienced or processed in one sitting, rather it is something that will require revisiting in the coming years as North American museums and universities begin to take a serious look at their colonial origins and institutional culture.