Rebodying Stereotypes: Contemporary Indigenous Artists and the Body
Alejandra Velazquez
Citation:
Abstract: In this piece from the 2022 Tools of the Trade symposium, the author analyzes how artists James Luna and Wendy Red Star utilize their bodies to subvert stereotypes through their representation of systemic issues, museums, and Indigenous presence. Using a decolonial and feminist lens, the piece deconstructs how the works of Luna and Red Star allow the artists to play with Indigenous stereotypes in different ways to create their own versions of themselves, through the portrayal and use of the body alongside their culture.
Keywords: Indigenous artists, colonialism, performance art, satire, body politics
The Indigenous body has been used as part of the American Narrative for years to the benefit of the white American. From sports teams to movies, to butter, Indigenous bodies have been stereotyped in grotesque ways, portraying Indigenous people as “backward savages” or “disappearing.” Indigenous identity has been stripped down to a few basic characters, such as “the alcoholic” or the “wise old Indian,” providing oppositional roles for Indigenous people to play at once. In museums, rather than portrayed as people still in existence, Indigenous people are oftentimes only portrayed or talked about in past tense through the use of dioramas, which make them appear stuck in time. Artists James Luna (Feb. 9, 1950 - Mar. 4, 2018) and Wendy Red Star (b. 1981), from Payómkawichum and Apsáalooke backgrounds respectively, look to reframe these portrayals of Indigenous people and take control of the narrative, creating art dealing with identity and body politics. Through the use of satire and subversive humor, Luna and Red Star play with the expectations imposed on them. In this work, I analyze how artists James Luna and Wendy Red Star utilize their bodies to subvert stereotypes through their representation of systemic issues, museums, and Indigenous presence. Using a decolonial and feminist lens, I analyze how the works of Luna and Red Star allow the artists to play with Indigenous stereotypes in different ways to create their own versions of themselves, through the portrayal and use of the body alongside their culture.
James Luna was an Indigenous artist of Payómkawichum, Ipi, and Mexican-American heritage. Born in 1950, Luna is most known for his performance and installation works where he portrayed the way American culture, especially museums, dealt with Indigenous people.[1] One such work is Petroglyphs in Motion (2000). Petroglyphs in Motion started out as a performance piece in Santa Fe, New México.[2] In the performance, Luna presents a non-linear narrative where he, as a petroglyph or rock carving, embodies different personas: the Coyote, the Leather Guy, the Saxman, and the Shaman. The performance started with Luna emerging from a blanket to the sound of drumbeats. After walking around the space, he turns around making a pose, returns from where he emerged, and disappears from the audience’s view. Luna then proceeds to emerge again, this time dressed and acting as one of the different personas, always making the same pose before returning and changing costume.
Through the performance and subsequent stills, Luna plays with the idea of what it means to be a “real Indian” in the eyes of the Western media and public.[3] Luna’s choice of starting as a petroglyph highlights how Indigenous people are to this day seen as primitive and uncivilized.
By transforming from petroglyph to more modern personas such as the Leather Guy, Luna showcases how modernity is not actually that far from what the Western world sees as “prehistoric” or “primitive.” This is highlighted by the quick transformation from petroglyph to persona— which reflects on the length of time between colonization robbed the Indigenous peoples and now. Luna’s choice also reflects on how the white Western world often relegates Indigenous art to the “prehistoric” section of textbooks and ignores contemporary Indigenous presence. Luna’s over-the-top embodiment of the different stereotypes allows audiences to come to terms with the true harshness behind them. Combined with the fluidity of Luna—changing from one persona to the next—the exaggeration of the stereotypes forces the audience to recognize the caricaturistic essence and lack of respect or truth that they hold for Indigenous people.
While the performance took place in a traditional theatre setting, audience participation was key. Dr. Lara Evans, the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts, experienced Luna's performance first-hand in Santa Fe, New México. In her blog’s recounting of the performance, she notes how the audience reacted to the Saxman passing around a panhandling cup with enthusiasm, giving money and business cards and even phone numbers. Yet when Luna embodied the Drunk and passed around a panhandling cup, he was met with disapproving glances and shock.[4] This clear distinction between the audience’s responses to the different stereotypes that Luna embodied highlights how, even within these stereotypes fabricated by the Western world, perceptions of the stereotypes shift depending on people’s acceptance of certain factors such as homelessness or alcoholism. A lack of awareness of these issues as systemic issues, as opposed to personal issues, shifts the blame to the individual and allows for the systemic issues to go unchecked. In Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” they define internal colonialism as “the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people… [which] involves the use of particularized modes of control...” such as forced displacement. They conclude that “[s]trategies of internal colonialism [that is, the uneven development of a country as a result of the exploitation of minorities] are both structural and interpersonal.” Tuck and Yang’s definition of internal colonialism does not shy away from stating that individual people can perpetuate colonialism. In the case of the audience’s reaction to Luna’s different personas, the audience continues to feed the discrimination and colonization faced by Indigenous people to this day.[5]
Figure 1: Wendy Red Star, The Last Thanks, 2006, Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Wendy Red Star and Sargent’s Daughters, NY.
Yet internal colonialism is not something inherent to a person, rather, it is something that they are taught by society at large, such as in school. Wendy Red Star’s work reflects just that. Wendy Red Star is an Apsáalooke artist. Born and raised in Montana, inside the Apsáalooke reservation, Red Star uses a multimedia approach that weaves together the historical and contemporary.[6] In her photograph, The Last Thanks (2006), she makes use of plastic props to portray a Thanksgiving scene (Fig. 1). In this photograph, Red Star is seated at a table, hands outstretched like Jesus’s hands in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with plastic skeletons wearing paper feather headdresses to either side of her like disciples, as well as three fake windows in the back. On the table, there are canned foods, grocery store sweets like “Little Debbie’s,” and “American Spirit” cigarettes alongside twenty-dollar bills. Behind the skeletons, a blow-up Thanksgiving turkey stands wearing a pilgrim hat, its shadow looming over Red Star. Red Star utilizes highly saturated colors and props to create a playful tone. The paper feathers and their colors call back to famous children’s school activities around the Thanksgiving season. Yet the series of skeletons is a stark reminder to the audience of the genocide faced by Indigenous people in the United States. The food displayed on the table, very different from traditional Thanksgiving food, recalls the food deserts — areas with limited access to affordable nutritious food — faced by Indigenous people, especially those living in reservations, as well as the high levels of diabetes and other “lifestyle diseases” that these food deserts cause.[7] The photograph satirizes the widely promoted perception of the first Thanksgiving. The playful tones emphasize the stark contrast to the realities faced by Indigenous people, as well as satirizing one of the most famous and widely recognized artworks. Red Star’s positioning as Jesus and the only human present, is indicative of the resurrection and resilience of Indigenous culture despite these systemic barriers. Through the positioning and portrayal of her body in this photograph, Red Star utilizes Indigenous stereotypes to show their ridiculousness, while portraying the resilience of Indigenous people and the control that Wendy Red Star has over this narrative.
Figure 2: James Luna, The Artifact Piece, 1987 Chromogenic print 20 x 84 inches 48.3 x 218.4 cm 12 elements, each 10 x 14 inches Edition of 6, 2 Artist's Proofs (Inv# LUNPP031.1). Courtesy the Estate of James Luna and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
As previously mentioned, stereotypes of Indigenous people are reinforced and promoted continuously by institutions such as museums. In one of Luna’s first performance pieces and perhaps his most recognized work The Artifact Piece (Fig. 2), Luna positioned himself inside a glass case whilst lying still, almost naked.[8] The case included museum labels for Luna, as well as of various objects located in the case, such as his college degree and scars. The Artifact Piece was first performed during 1985-1987 at the Museum of Us, previously the Museum of Man, in San Diego. Throughout the day, visitors would approach the glass case, unaware that Luna was a person and not a cast figure as they first assumed. Luna would sometimes stretch or yawn, scaring visitors who had gotten close by, disrupting their objectifying gaze. Yet, more often than not, people would not stop observing, some even going as far as to touch him. This performance highlighted how museum practices of portraying Indigenous people in glass cases has led to the continuing dehumanization and exoticization of Indigenous people, reducing their worth to less than the White American. Similar to Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña's performance The Couple in the Cage (created 1992), where Fusco and Gomez-Peña performed as two fictitious Indigenous people who are being paraded around institutions in a cage to showcase in the Western world, Luna's performance displays the exoticization of the Indigenous body in institutional settings.[9] It is very telling that visitors would touch Luna once they found out he was a real person; while most visitors are aware that touching museum artifacts is prohibited, these audience members deemed it acceptable to touch Luna, a complete stranger to them, and as such viewing him as less valuable than other objects. For Luna, this piece was important to showcase how museums actively and blatantly misrepresent Indigenous people when portrayed alongside anthropological items, such as animal bones. This misrepresentation is found in both the lack of repatriation of Indigenous objects as well as how museum’s displays curate the general public’s ideas associated with Indigenous people and cultures.[10]
Similar ideas can be seen in Red Star’s photography series Four Seasons. In Four Seasons: Fall (2006), Red Star situates inflated animal balloons against a background painted to represent an idealized setting. The scene recalls the landscape paintings of the 1800s during the time of Manifest Destiny, which glorified colonization and idealized the United States as virgin land ready for development. Similarly, in Four Seasons: Spring, Red Star sits in front of a creased idyllic backdrop, the crease emphasizing the landscape’s artifice. Next to her are cardboard cut-outs in the shape of animals, as well as fake plants and AstroTurf. In this photograph, the background recalls 1970s idealized Western nature landscapes, yet the creases and faded colors suggest how “old” and unachievable such nature scenes in reality are due to climate change and colonial-corporate destruction of the environment. Red Star sits highly posed in the photographs, looking straight at the camera. Through these photographs, Red Star is playing with the stereotype that Indigenous people are closer to nature, through the use of recreating an outside scene with an all-plastic setting.[11] The juxtaposition of Red Star alongside these idyllic landscapes challenges the conception of the “Vanishing Indian” by putting her present-day self in juxtaposition with landscapes that no longer exist in such capacity. Not only that, but the layout of the props, as well as Red Star’s positioning in the photographs, calls back to anthropological dioramas presented in museums. These dioramas are meant to be educational by depicting a “slice-of-life” of different Indigenous people, showing them grinding corn, weaving, or preparing hunting materials. Yet these dioramas create the illusion that Indigenous people are extinct through the use of the past tense on labels, the location of the dioramas in proximity to other extinct objects, and simply the physical stagnation of them. Once again, it is significant that Red Star is the only living thing present in the pictures. It is a direct response to the use of dioramas in museums that depict Indigenous people as long gone.
This idea of Indigenous people as extinct is further explored and challenged through Luna and Red Star’s work. In Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1991) (Fig.3) Luna stands wearing one of three outfits (Western clothing, Payómkawichum war-dance regalia, and a loincloth) as he proclaims:
Figure 3: James Luna, Take a Picture with a Real Indian, 1991, Chromogenic print; silver gelatin print 24 x 112 inches 40.6 x 61 cm 5 elements, 16 x 24 and 24 x 16 inches Edition of 6, 2 Artist's Proofs (Inv# LUNPP025.1). Courtesy the Estate of James Luna and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
“Take a picture with a real Indian. Take a picture here, in [location] on this beautiful [day] morning, [...] America loves to say ‘her Indians.’ America loves to see us dance for them. America likes our arts and crafts. America likes to name cars and trucks after our tribes. Take a picture with a real Indian. Take a picture here today, on this sunny day here in [location].”[12]
Most accounts of the audience’s response show people hesitating at first, only to quickly line up after one person is brave enough to do it. The performance continues until Luna or the audience becomes ashamed or humiliated.[13] Unlike in The Artifact Piece, this performance piece requires more active audience participation. While audiences in The Artifact Piece could have downplayed their curiosity by turning around or walking away, the open invitation to observe in Take a Picture leads audiences to publicly gawk and “other” Luna. For all of these performances, Luna uses his body to depict Indigenous stereotypes. But the performance is not just in his body. The performance is in the reaction of curiosity and othering which comes from the audience.
For many Indigenous people, there is a sense of a need to perform for non-Indigenous audiences, falling into the stereotypical categories set out for them, so as to better be able to succeed in American society. Yet in Luna’s performance, Luna is shifting the established and unbalanced social norms by asking non-Indigenous people to perform through the stereotypes and expectations he has set out for them. Not only that, but through this performance and the act of taking a picture with Luna, Luna establishes the presence of Indigenous people in the present day. In accounts of audience participation, many mentioned they had never met an Indigenous person in real life, or would earnestly tell Luna of a great-great-grandmother that was a Cherokee Princess. Many expected a cultural showcase, which for many is the only reason they would realize they encountered an Indigenous person and were disappointed when that did not happen. This expectation of a cultural showcase, as well as this exoticizing and “othering” has been seen in other contemporary performance pieces such as Gómez-Peña and Fusco's The Couple in the Cage, which highlight that the audience themselves are the ones who hold and reveal these racist notions without much prompting from the artists.[14]
Figure 4: Wendy Red Star, Amnia (Echo), 2021. Archival ink on paper, board. 661⁄2 x 9 1⁄4 x 19 in. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent's Daughters; from the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX.
By setting out to capture these pictures, Luna creates an established connection in people’s minds to the continuing existence of Indigenous people. On a similar note, Amnia (echo) (2021) is a part of Red Star’s “revisioning” that is, revising and envisioning, both the Indigenous past and the Indigenous future (Fig. 4).[15] Amnia (Echo) is composed of three pedestals. Each pedestal features a portrait of either Wendy Red Star, Julia Badboy — Red Star’s paternal great-great-grandmother—or Red Star’s daughter Beatrice. The portraits “echo” behind the initial photograph, growing larger and larger. Red Star created this artwork after she found a picture of Julia Badboy in the archives of the National Museum of the American Indian, located in Washington, DC. The repetition, or “echo” of each photograph, serves multiple functions. First, it highlights the matrilineal aspect of the Apsáalooke, recontextualizing within the audience preconceived notions of gender dynamics within the overall Indigenous community and specifically the Apsáalooke. Second, it allows for establishing the presence of each of these Apsáalooke women. They take up space, they grow, they are in a community. While the portraits themselves are small, they invite the viewer to come closer. Unlike other works by Red Star, which are bigger and allow for the audience to view and explore from afar, Amnia (Echo) asks for the viewer to come closer and into a more intimate space of communion. Finally, the decision to make this work not just one featuring Julia Badboy but also one that features Wendy Red Star, and more importantly Beatrice, brings to mind the legacy and the continuation of the Apsáalooke, placing them unquestionably in the twenty-first century and beyond. Alongside “Take a Picture,” these artworks don’t just play with stereotypes, but fully establish the presence of Luna and Red Star in contemporary art and the United States, as well as cementing their legacy in their respective communities and history.
The portrayal of Indigenous bodies in the artworks of Luna and Red Star reveal how deep-rooted colonialism and anti-Indigeneity continue to exist in the mainstream culture of the United States. Using satirical measures, their artwork provides no room for non-Indigenous audiences to question the continued effect of colonizers to Indigenous people. These artists deal with the expectation of being a “real Indian” as expected by the Western world by focusing on a satirical approach to their bodies. Their artworks deal with the concepts of power and “othering” that are observed through audience reactions to the artworks, such as the audience’s reaction to Luna’s performances. The darkly humorous approach to Indigenous bodies, as seen in Red Star’s work, reflects the desires of Indigenous communities to provide a safer future to younger generations. The artworks shift who is in power, allowing for Luna and Red Star to keep agency over their narrative.
Endnotes
[1] “James Luna Biography.” Artnet.com. http://www.artnet.com/artists/james-luna/biography.
[2] Kerry Swanson, “James Luna: Petroglyphs in Motion,” Exhibiton Catalogue of ASpace Gallery, October 2015.
[3] Luna’s term of choice
[4] Lara Evans, “A First-hand Account of James Luna’s Petroglyphs in Motion, as performed at Site Santa Fe in 2000,” Not Artomatic, April 2010, https://notartomatic.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/a-first-hand-account-of-james-lunas-petroglyphs-in-motion-as-performed-at-site-santa-fe-in-2000/
[5] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012), 1-40.
[6] Morgan Mentzer, “Wendy Red Star.” Women in the Arts: Galvanizing, Encouraging, Inspiring. Vol 1, November 2018. https://www.arts.gov/stories/magazine/2018/1/women-arts-galvanizing-encouraging-inspiring/wendy-red-star.
[7] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
[8] “Remembering Artist James Luna (1950-2018),” Creative Capital, March 14, 2018. https://creative-capital.org/2018/03/14/remembering-artist-james-luna-1950-2018/.
[9] It is important to note that neither Coco Fusco nor Guillermo Gomez-Peña identify as Indigenous, and neither hold ties to an established Indigenous nation. The reference to their artwork is to showcase contemporary performance artworks related to Indigeneity.
[10] Kenneth R. Fletcher, “James Luna.” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution Magazine, April 1, 2008. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/james-luna-30545878/
[11] Megan Griffiths, “Wendy Red Star - Native American Photographer.” Hundred Heroines, December 17, 2020. https://hundredheroines.org/featured/wendy-red-star/.
[12] Susan Harris, “James Luna: Take a Picture with a Real Indian.” The Brooklyn Rail, December 15, 2020. https://brooklynrail.org/2020/12/artseen/James-Luna-Take-a-Picture-with-a-Real-Indian
[13] Jess Righthand, “Q And a: James Luna.” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution Magazine, January 1, 2011. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/q-and-a-james-luna-74252076/
[14] Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Couple in The Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. Performance art, 1992-1993.
[15] Salma Monani and Nicole Seymour, “How Wendy Red Star Decolonizes the Museum with Humor and Play.” Edge Effects, October 8, 2020. https://edgeeffects.net/wendy-red-star/.
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