American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 2010, Seattle police officer Ian Birk shot master carver John T. Williams, a hearing-impaired Nuu-chah-nulth artist, four times as he walked down a city sidewalk. Birk initially claimed that Williams had aggressively run towards him with a knife drawn, but official research contradicted this justification, showing that the artist was fatally wounded on his side and back by the officer’s shots. This article analyzes Native artistic responses to the killing, archival sources, and the author’s visit to the John T. Williams Memorial Totem Pole, an artwork located in Seattle Center, to show how the artist’s tragic death reveals the disjuncture between the nation’s criminalization of Native individuals, and its formalist appreciation for Native art.

Painter and visual/performance artist Kent Monkman (Swampy Cree) intervenes in colonial art history by reinscribing two-spirit people into dominant discourse. Following Qwo-Li Driskill’s concept of Sovereign Erotics, which privileges healing from historical trauma that is “within the histories, traditions, and resistance struggles of our nations,” this article traces the counternarratives in Monkman’s art.

Purépecha people, which includes Pueblo indigenous communities from westcentral Mexico, have a long migration history to the American Midwest. Purépecha migrations northward are documented as early as the sixteenth century. This article follows the intergenerational post-migration experiences of the author’s family to examine and consider contemporary Purépecha aesthetic acts as conscious articulations of identity and place. Tracing family photos and narratives across international borders and into intimate, gendered spaces, this article illustrates how the daily aesthetic choices of migrant indigenous peoples—including bodily adornment, assertions of spatial boundaries, and family nourishment—all activate spaces of affirmation and renewal for future generations.

James Luna (Pooyukitchum/Luiseño) describes how his performances insert the “absent Indian” into the colonial environment of the museum and shift perceptions of the figure of the Indian by juxtaposing indigenous and colonial art practices.

Land is a vital part of how the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (an indigenous name for North America), develop and interpret identity and community. While land represents a fundamental part of this conception, many contemporary scholars working in indigenous studies are analyzing the development of offland, urban indigenous spaces. Building on research that moves away from homelands towards the study of new urban communities, this article illustrates how indigenous artists confront settler colonialism when creating indigenous territory in yet another urban terrain: cyberspace. While cyberspace can be a fraught, white, and neocolonial environment, artists and curators such as Kevin Lee Burton (Swampy Cree) and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito (Mohawk) are finding ways to build and maintain dynamic indigenous spaces in the digital realm, remediating intertribal events and translating guesthood protocols into digital spaces.

This article identifies criticisms of the work of Frances Densmore in Marcie Rendon’s play SongCatcher and contextualizes these criticisms within Densmore’s own writings. The integration of physical and spiritual realities, as well as contemporary and historic settings, denies the common assertion that Densmore preserved large repertoires. Numerous musical performances remain intact within their broader context and call into question the value of the isolated and distorted recordings and transcriptions by Densmore. While Frances Densmore’s analytical working method marginalized the Native individual experience and perspective, SongCatcher examines Densmore’s work through its impact on Native individuals and communities in the past and present.

This article analyzes the representation of gender dynamics in Crecí solo con el amor de mi madre, a play written by a theater group named the Foundation Strength of Mayan Women (FOMMA). It demonstrates how the play’s critique of gender subordination in indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, reflects the socioeconomic and historical processes that have eroded gender complementariness by undermining land-based cultural practices and collective values. I also discuss why and how the members of the theater group use performance to politicize their own and other women’s stories in order to heal themselves and their communities.

Jeneen Frei Njootli conceived the project discussed in this creative piece during a fellowship with the 2014 Newberry Consortium for American Indian Studies Summer Institute (NCAIS) at the Darcy McNickle Center and Newberry Library in Chicago. The focus of the summer institute was “Indigenous Speech, Representation and the Politics of Writing.” Dinjii Zhuh: Productive Disruptions engages archival material depicting the artist’s peoples, who make up the Gwich’in Nation. Since time immemorial they have made their home in the arctic, spanning the border. “Dinjii Zhuh” is the Gwich’in word for “people.” Stanley Njootli Sr., Deputy Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin government, has said that this is the most honest name that Gwich’in can call themselves, as it was what Gwich’in called themselves and each other before the words “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” “Native American,” “Indian Act,” or “First Nations” were part of our vocabularies.