“To be a native artist is to be insistent. You have to insist to deploy. You’re not often invited to deploy.” In an artist talk with his wife, art historian Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds discussed his art career, including his Walker commissioned installation, Building Minnesota (1990), before taking questions from the audience.
Heap of Birds has exhibited his works at a number of venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of the American Indian, and many others. Since 1988, he has taught Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. His seminars explore issues of the contemporary artist on local, national and international levels.
New Postcommodity Codex Investigates Land, Systemic Violence, and Minnesota History
Taking its title from the GPS coordinates for Bdote, the birthplace of the Dakota people, Postcommodity's newest artwork is a codex, a pictographic story, examining the Twin Cities's past and present in terms of its relationship to migration, violence to the land, and Indigenous sovereignty. A Walker Reader exclusive, 44.8968° N, 93.1501° W continues thinking by the Indigenous collective from its 2017 Artist Op-Ed, a poetic examination of migration, "nativism," and the year 2043, when whites in the United States are projected to become a statistical minority.
Delina White: Celebrating Gender Nonconformity in Indigenous Fashion
"As Natives, we are underrepresented. It’s my philosophy to represent all people in our community." In advance of Indigenous Spirit: Gender Fluid Fashion, a June 13 showcase of designs by Delina White of IAmAnishinaabe, Minneapolis-based, Lakota-born non-binary artist Juleana Enright caught up with the White to chat about the future of Indigenous fashion and the inspiration behind this gender-fluid collection.
A New Gaagiixiid Story: Gwaai Edenshaw on Indigenous Language and Making the First Film in Haida
"One of the things we held high was the question: who are we making the movie for? We decided that the movie we were making was for Haida people." Michael Wilson interviews Gwaai Edenshaw, co-director of Sgaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife), the first feature film in Haida, about Indigenous language, the process of creating modern Indigenous works rooted in tradition, and the role of an entire community in bringing the film to reality.
The (Un)Covered Wagon: An Arapaho Filmmaker Unpacks the Complexities of an Early Western
Missy Whiteman has a complicated relationship to The Covered Wagon, a 1923 silent film considered one of the first westerns: it's deeply racist, yet it's a source of pride on the Wind River reservation, because many Arapaho people—including her relatives—appeared as extras. As curator of the INDIgenesis film festival, she selected the film for opening night, where it will be recontextualized through a contemporary score performed live by Michael Wilson (Anishinaabe), special guests, and a presentation of historic photos shared by her father, Ernest Whiteman. The photos offer a frame for her understanding of the legacy of her people, family history, and work as a filmmaker today. Here, she shares these images along with music, text, and audio from a recent conversation with her father about The Covered Wagon and its meaning then and now.
“Please, Don’t Discover Me!” On The Year of the White Bear
In the early 1990s, Cuban-American artist/writer Coco Fusco and Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña joined forces to examine the unbalanced relations between the regions that make up the Americas and the complexities of what it means for those individuals who reside between cultures and languages. Their collaboration resulted in the exhibition The Year of the White Bear and performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, both of which were presented at the Walker in 1992. Performance studies scholar Leticia Robles-Moreno offers a reading of how their project asks us to re-evaluate questions of colonialism—past and present—and the potency of containment.
Giving Voice: Tanya Tagaq and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children Movement
The music of Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq is timeless, writes filmmaker Missy Whiteman, connecting centuries of Indigenous living and thought to this current moment. And with Tagaq returning to the Twin Cities for the second time, this moment couldn't be more opportune, as activism around a cause close to Tagaq's heart—the plight of murdered and missing indigenous women and children—ramps up across the region.
Beyond the Guest Appearance: Continuity, Self-Determination, and Commitment to Contemporary Native Arts
Recent political and cultural events (such as the Walker’s own installation and subsequent dismantling of Sam Durant’s Scaffold and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests) have elicited a new wave of critical conversation about the state and future of contemporary Native arts practice. The Walker's recent panel discussion—featuring artists Nicholas Galanin, Ashley Holland, Candice Hopkins, and Steven Loft, and moderated by Dyani White Hawk—was intended to add to and extend conversations that have been happening online, among peers, and in live panels across the country.
Out of Line: Nicholas Galanin Rejects the Traditional/Contemporary Binary
While Nicholas Galanin's art often melds seemingly disparate elements—an AR-15 modified with Tlingit engraving, a mashup of Princess Leia and a 1906 photo of a Hopi-Tew woman, a bear skin rug clad in a US flag—he rejects a binary often applied to his work: the one that divides it into contemporary and traditional elements. "Like colonial national borders cutting through land and people who have lived here longer than those invented lines, these lines drawn through creative production are also an attempt to control."
How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?
Why is Jimmie Durham the artist—or, at least, one of very few artists—selected for a major touring retrospective? Why isn’t more art by Native Americans collected, contextualized, and presented by major institutions? And why is there so little representation—both within museum staffs and in the critical art press that covers them—of Native American, First Nations, and indigenous peoples? In a recent Skype conversation, a panel of Native artists and thinkers—Kathleen Ash-Milby, Jeffrey Gibson, Luzene Hill, Dyani White Hawk, and Candessa Tehee—address these questions.
As a complement to the works on view in Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, we highlight Durham's role as a writer with a Walker Reader exclusive, a never-before published essay, written by the artist in Naples in 2014—on, fittingly, books, art, and the language of "identity."
“The Most American Thing Ever Is in Fact American Indians”
How is it that Indians are present everywhere—in place names, popular culture, advertising, sports team names, weapons systems—yet barely present in history and largely absent from the great national debates of our time? At his August 31 talk, author and curator Paul Chaat Smith examined this question through twin lenses: Americans, the new show he curated at the National Museum of the American Indian, and the controversy surrounding the identity of Jimmie Durham, an artist whose Cherokee heritage has been questioned.
Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds: Native American Artists as Agents of Social Change
In her talk, titled "Speaking Truth to Power: Native American Artists as Agents of Social Change," Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds discussed decolonization; the writings of Jean Fisher; and the work of artists including her husband, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, and Jimmie Durham.
Heap of Birds is a citizen of the Diné/Navajo Nation and a PhD candidate at Middlesex University London in the School of Art and Design. Since 2007, she has been an instructor in the Native American Studies department at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she is affiliate faculty in the Women and Gender Studies program and the Center for Social Justice. Ketchum-Heap of Birds has lectured and written widely on contemporary issues in Native American art.
