panelists (lt. to rt.): Mario Cara, Gerald McMaster, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Nancy Mithlo, Robert Jahnke, Mina Sakai
These included Mario Cara, who has served as lecturer, instructor and professor at numerous colleges and universities, most recently The College of Staten Island, CUNY, where he is lecturer in art history; Gerald McMaster, a Cree/Canadian artist who is curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Nora Naranjo-Morse, a clay and installation artist from the Santa Clara Pueblo; Nancy Mithlo, who teaches art history and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has curated projects for the Venice Biennale; Robert Jahnke, Maori artist and Head of School at Massey University in New Zealand; and Mina Sakai, an artist and musician from the Ainu indigenous peoples of Japan.
Cara opened the program with a comparison between "essentialist" and "anti-essentialist" viewpoints. He noted that Essentialism, which developed out of 1960s Feminism, focuses on a core, inherited essence of being, often located in the body. Conversely, Anti-essentialism posits that identity is constructed, not inherited. According to Cara, "the cosmology of most native communities is based in essentialism".
James Luna, Artifact Piece (1987)
He mentioned influential works of native art that have addressed these topics, including James Luna's "Artifact Piece" (1987), in which the artist lay in a glass case on view among the other exhibits at the Museum of Man in San Diego. Artist Erica Lord reprised this work in "Artifact Piece, Revisited" (2008), adding gender onto the layers of meaning from the original. Both works critiqued the passivity inherent in museum displays of native cultures. Da-Ka-Xeen Mehner's "Blood Quantum" (2007) was also discussed, in regards to the scrupulous examination, even down to the DNA level, of native identity.
Gerald McMaster, a Canadian Cree artist and curator, spoke next, elaborating on his curatorial project "Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World". He spoke with interest on how photography has been taken up by contemporary native artists, and on its difficulty as a native art form, due to the lack of history or tradition, contrary to other media, in particular craft forms. Traditional photography, such as that of Edward S. Curtis, involves indigenous participants as the subject in a fictionalized narrative. McMaster stated that "identity is grounded in seeing and looking," and "everything we take in makes us who we are."
Erica Lord Artifact Piece, Revisited (2008)
Nora Naranjo-Morse, who lives in Espanola, just north of Santa Fe, spoke on her experience creating "Always Becoming", a temporal site-specific installation at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This work, consisting of five ephemeral forms built of rock, straw, wood, and clay was made by the artist in 2007, with the help of a number of assistants, mostly native and immigrant laborers. She noted the difference in how the indigenous craftspersons saw the work, as opposed to passing tourists and politicians.
Nancy Mithlos spoke on the difficulty for native artists in communicating beyond the "secondary narrative", i.e. "the problem in the other guy's mind", to a primary narrative which is geared toward one's community. She elaborated on oppression as being rooted in three forms, that of power, prestige, and wealth, and commented on an article by Duane Champagne on indigenous realities, speculating on a time in which we might see its continuity as "a line not interrupted by the colonial moment."
Da-ka-xeen Mehner Blood Quantum (2007)
Robert Jahnke opened with a passage in Maori, commented on the fact that no one in the audience could understand what he spoke, and then said this was being "essentialist". He spoke of his own heritage as one who was born in a small Northern Ireland village, with German, Samoan, Irish, Scottish, and Maori ancestry. To Jahnke, the danger essentialism can create is one of exclusivism, which can ignore the hybridity of bloodlines.
Lastly, Mina Sakai spoke of her experience living as one of the only thirty-thousand Ainu peoples in Japan, a small indigenous group who is just now in the beginning stages of their own cultural repatriation. She said that very few of her people, mostly elderly, still speak her language, and that it is in danger of disappearing. She told of the group of performers she works with to preserve Ainu art, dance and music forms.
The various participants brought a wealth of perspectives to the symposium, with their broad backgrounds in artmaking, curating, writing and instruction. They each pledged to continue the threads of this weeklong collaboration, through further research in their individual fields.
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