More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom by Elaine Coburn

Author:Elaine Coburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2015-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Visual Sovereignty of the Indigenous Artist

As in the past, Indigenous artists challenge colonial images, skillfully refracting racist imagery and so asserting what Michelle Raheja and Jolene Rickard have separately referred to as “visual sovereignty.” Some artists deploy “new media technologies, [to] frame more imaginative renderings of Native American intellectual and cultural paradigms” (Raheja 2007: 1165–1166) that speak from Indigenous artists’ own experiences. For example, Cree artist Kent Monkman (2014) paints compelling landscape paintings in the vein of Kane’s historic landscape portraiture because Kane’s work is now iconic as representations of a pre-Canadian landscape: of the earth as wild and empty land and Indigenous peoples as noble savages. Monkman mimics Kane’s grand painting style in order to then radically Indigenize and queer the narratives produced by Kane’s work. To do so, Monkman inserts his seminal figure, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, challenging narratives of the past that are rife with White heteronormativity. In Monkman’s paintings, Miss Chief, in hot pink stilettos, mesh, fringe, and shiny regalia, is subject and object, painter and model. She flouts the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been represented in gendered and heterosexist European race-thinking. Monkman also engages material culture, video and digital technologies, as in his presentation of the Boudoir de Berdashe, a full-size teepee installation — and the home of Miss Chief (National Gallery of Canada 2014). In this way, Monkman critically speaks back to the silencing of Indigenous peoples and visual imperialism’s legacies (Monkman 2014).

Like Monkman, Shelley Niro, a Mohawk artist, confronts visual imperialism through her work. In particular, her photography and filmography challenge hypersexualized images of Indianness and the tradition of fixing Indigenous peoples to a past presence. She puts forth images of Mohawk women as “everyday” people and as consumers of popular culture (Niro 2014). By drawing on a multitude of resources and a number of representational strategies, artists such as Monkman and Niro challenge the confining tropes produced through the long history of dehumanizing Indigenous peoples through images.

Many Indigenous artists, working around the globe, critically confront legacies of Eurocentric visual imperialism; often, they address representations of Indianness as harmful misrepresentations of actual Indigenous peoples, responding to the ways that visual archives confine Indigenous peoples to the past. They draw on rich strategies to reflect humanized images of Indigenous peoples that are attentive to the complexities of Indigenous pasts and present realities. Here, I examine two works in greater detail, one by mixed media artist Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) and the second by mixed media artist Terrance Houle (Blood). Belmore’s Artifact #671B (1988) and Houle’s Urban Indian Series (2007) direct attention to the seriousness of lingering racist and sexist imaginings of Indigenous peoples, raising awareness around their persistence in contemporary society. Houle and Belmore “represent back” and challenge White North America’s image machine, but they also “write forward” (Cobb 2005: 128) by insisting on Indigenous visual sovereignty.

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