American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The large-scale retrospective exhibition Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (re)introduced self-identified “Cherokee” artist Jimmie Durham to a mainstream audience. Despite efforts in the 1990s to unmask the impostor, who has no known or recognized tribal affiliation, once again Durham was occupying space as a Native artist in the art world. This article addresses larger issues that face the field of Native art and Native representation in museums as a whole, offering personal reflections and a brief review of the exhibition as well as a biographical overview of the artist.

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.”

This article examines how Jimmie Durham’s false claims to Cherokee identity demand a radical reassessment of the entirety of his body of work and the scholarship that supports it. This essay takes into account the extent to which Durham’s work—much of which consisted of sardonic critiques of Native American stereotypes—depended upon its enunciation by an authentic Native voice. Now that this voice has been determined to be false, his work and the vast supporting archive require reevaluation.

This article charts Durham’s use of “strategic ambiguity,” whereby the uncertainty at the center of the controversy has ultimately served to protect the artist and his livelihood. Durham is the subject of nearly four times more articles and books than any other contemporary artist who identifies as Cherokee. It is almost impossible to interpret Durham’s work outside the perspective of a Cherokee identity. Although some articles offer the usual dual admission—that he identifies as Cherokee and that his heritage has been questioned—they nonetheless offer praise for Durham’s work as both authentically “Native American” and progressive in the contemporary art world. In refuting the various reasons given for the artist’s lack of tribal enrollment, this article emphasizes that art critics’ insistence on referencing Durham’s Cherokee “heritage” is crucial because if the artist is not Native, his work becomes not simply meaningless, but even insulting.

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.

This article considers the artistic career of self-identified Osage painter Yeffe Kimball (1906–1978). Following the stylistic trends of modern American Indian painting as largely defined by non-Native critics and a male-dominated art world, Kimball’s works were accepted into major exhibits. How Kimball was able to “pass” as an American Indian artist is the core of a larger narrative—one that demonstrates and provokes critique of how her fraud took advantage of, but also contributed to strengthening, an exclusionary, devaluative settler-colonial dynamic of expropriation that continues into the present. This article critiques the manner in which museums and art schools defined societal values of “Indianness” that marginalized Native artists. Examining Yeffe Kimball’s successful ethnic fraud affirms a patriarchal, assimilationist narrative and the extent to which European-American identities, institutions, and art practices control American Indian imagery.

This article builds on work examining how hundreds of thousands of white French descendants in the northeastern part of the continent have been shifting into “Indigenous” identities in the past two decades or so. The first part of the paper explains the workings of “aspirational descent,” that is, when a French woman from the 1600s is turned into an “Indigenous” ancestor for the purpose of claiming indigeneity in the present. The second part of the paper explores the creation of “family lore” by several French descendants using aspirational descent in courtroom testimony. Overall, the author illustrates how stories about long-ago Indigenous ancestry in white settler families, such as that of Elizabeth Warren, often involve creative interpretations of childhood stories that rely on the logic of elimination inherent to settler colonialism.

The general lack of funding for arts and humanities has prompted museums to search for additional resources, especially geared to diversity. This financial need has resulted in many cultural institutions directing their efforts to an increased inclusion of American Indian communities and their cultural heritage. These efforts toward inclusion, however, often are often misguided in that the selection of artists, experts and consultants do not accurately reflect the constitution of our communities. In fact, the arts are particularly susceptible to individuals who have falsified their cultural credentials in an effort to be selected for coveted opportunities to perform, exhibit or guide American Indian arts. The incorporation of American Indian art into non-Native institutions, in particular those that do not have experience working with Native communities, must be grounded in ethical practices that are defined by source communities.

This commentary essay examines several individuals who wrote books for children and made claims to Native identity that are fraudulent, or otherwise problematic. Asa Carter, for example, posed as a Cherokee named “Forrest Carter” and published The Education of Little Tree, put forth as the autobiography of someone who had been on the Trail of Tears. So popular that it was published in Korean, Turkish, Czeck, Slovenian, and Spanish, in 1997 Little Tree became a feature film. Although the author’s fraud was exposed in The New York Times, the book continues to be published. Jamake Highwater, posing as a Blackfoot/Cherokee, won the most prestigious children’s literature award, the Newbery Honor given by the American Library Association, for Anpao: An American Indian Odyssey, in 1978. Paul Goble is a British writer who loved American Indian stories so much that he moved to the United States to live near Plains tribes, where he was given a Native name. Both that name and the ways he spoke of the gift led people to believe that he had been adopted into the Lakota tribe. Like Carter and Highwater, but more prolific, Goble’s books sell well in a market that retains narrow and stereotypical views of Native peoples. The essay concludes by discussing the ways that the works of Carter, Highwater, and Goble impact publishing today.

This commentary essay, a co-written dialogue, attends to the ongoing phenomenon that has plagued American history known as “playing Indian.” In oscillating between the simultaneous conquest and dispossession of Native people, this phenomenon allows “white” Americans to define, mask, and evade the multiple paradoxes that stem from settler-colonial violence. Simas and Mitchell have worked extensively in the dance field. As their conversation discusses both the histories and the strategies of these “performances,” the coauthors explore the repercussions of non-Native people’s attempts to perform Native experiences through dance paradigms in particular. They link the aesthetic and fiscal consequences of “playing Indian” to the trauma of erasure and invisibilization that has continued to haunt Native experience.