The articulation and advancement of a qualitative (and some might charge imaginative) approach to contemporary Native arts criticism characterized by attention to the body, the experience of belonging, and the implications of these attributes for collective memory and place by way of blood reckoning reflects indigenous collective thought and political realities in meaningful ways. Blood relationships reference not only biological heritage or race but also, in an expanded sense, the internalized memories of communal history, knowledge, and wisdom. Blood memories are powerful political tropes mobilized to call attention to the legacies of colonialism in contexts as diverse as battlefields, boarding schools, and sacred sites. This common tribal value of multigenerational remembrance runs directly counter to prevailing Western traits of individual achievement, lack of transgenerational memory, and transcendence of one’s genealogical fate and place of origin. Drawing from the work of documentary filmmaker and theorist David MacDougall, the author explores the possible philosophical and emotional dimensions of audience reception and its impact on the Native arts world. MacDougall’s use of corporeal knowledge imparted by the gaze is useful for highlighting lens-based artistic practice, the power of biography, and the curatorial strategies of embodiment, including the senses, possession, and emotional connections among subject, maker, and viewer. Examples of work featuring Chippewa filmmaker Marcella Ernest and Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones are mobilized in an effort to illuminate these theoretical implications.

This section of the AICRJ special issue on fraud looks back to a 2017 group conversation (first published in First American Art Magazine no. 19 (Fall 2017): 84–89) as four Native American scholars and artists respond to the then-traveling retrospective exhibit Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World in light of Durham’s long-standing claims to Cherokee identity. In “Decentering Durham,” Chiricahua Apache scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo argues that, “Cultural institutions continue to accept his platform, and, in doing so … deny Indigenous cultural sovereignty to name our own members and leaders.” Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee artist, discusses Durham’s appropriation of the writings of historic statesman Zeke Proctor in “Not Jimmie Durham’s Cherokee.” In a “Walk-through at the Hammer,” Luiseño-Diegueño performance and installation artist James Luna (1950–2018) muses on the aesthetics of Durham’s work and the value of community belonging. Summarizing the 2017 perspective in “A Chapter Closed?,” artist and editor America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) hopes that, “after a multigenerational, multi-tribal effort … art historians and curators will cease … positioning [Durham] as our representative in academic literature.”

The traveling art exhibit Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (2017–2018) demonstrated three powerful art world tendencies: the use of fraud as an artistic register, the assertion of the artist as authority, and the decontextualization of the arts as an object-centered analysis. These three approaches are congruent with capitalism and the private market, while simultaneously negating Indigenous values of community-based knowledges that operate largely outside the commercial sphere. An analysis of these competing art world values reveals the complicity of public museums with private gain and not education, their stated mission. Ethnic fraud demonstrates how art institutions and their staff employ “selective worth” as a means to cloak the arbitrary exertion of power and simultaneous rejection of Indigenous studies as academic discipline built on the value of tribal sovereignty. Serving as a backdrop for these conversations are a discussion of the history of Native approaches to museology from the early tribal museum era forward and an examination of current “reformist” and “radical” approaches to theorizing Native arts.