Friday is Native American Heritage Day, so celebrate by making plans to attend the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Art Market, which returns to the museums in Washington, D.C., and New York next weekend, on December 2nd and 3rd. This annual event invites lovers of art and craftsmanship to meet Indigenous artists and learn about traditional Native arts and contemporary Native creativity. At each location, more than 30 artists will offer authentic, hand-crafted works of art, including jewelry, fashion, photography, and pottery. Serious collectors and casual shoppers will find one-of-a-kind pieces at a wide range of prices.

During the market, guests will enjoy music by singer/songwriter Jesse Alan Horn (Potawatomi Nation) and DJ JonRay in New York; and multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer Quetzal Guerrero, known as QVLN, along with DJ Sunny Z, at the museum on the National Mall.

Museum members will have early access to the market during a preview party at both locations, on December 1st, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Textile and Attire-related artists include:

Washington, D.C.
Porfirio Gutierrez (Zapotec)
Susan Hudson (Navajo)
Weaving for the Future Cooperative (Maya-Mam)
Glendebah Smith (Navajo)

New York
Bobby Brower (Inupiaq/Native Village of Barrow)
Charlene Laughing (Navajo)
Penny Singer (Diné)

There will also be a wide range of jewelry designers, as well as artisans in basketry, pottery, beadwork, and much more.

Major funding for this program is provided by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Image above, work of Porfirio Gutierrez by Joe Coca

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In November 1969, a group of Native activists sailed across San Francisco Bay and occupied Alcatraz Island, home to the infamous prison that had closed in 1963. The occupation lasted until the summer of 1971, when federal authorities besieged the island by cutting off the electricity and water supply before government agents and local police removed the dozen or so remaining inhabitants. The year 1969 also saw the publication of the pamphlet “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process,” written collaboratively by Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), Rolland Meinholtz (Cherokee), and students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It called for the combination of contemporary theater practices with performative and ritual aspects of Native societies in an effort to bring marginalized Native stories and cultural forms to a reimagined stage.

The large survey exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross / Tagish First Nation) at the Hessel Museum of Art, opens with archival documents in vitrines highlighting these two historical moments. Pages of “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process” are given pride of place at the entrance next to undated, grainy black-and-white videos of Native performances in dialogue with its ideas. The pamphlet’s spirit continues in another early gallery that projects videos of full-length performances by the New York City–based Spiderwoman Theater, founded in 1976 and currently the longest-running female Native performance troupe. Various printed materials pertaining to the group accompany the videos, which present adaptations of Aristophanes and cabaret.

For millennia, Native artistic expression has been sewn into the activities and objects of everyday life, and while societies and cultural practices constantly change, the emphasis throughout “Indian Theater” on performance would seem to be a way of activating the works on display and not have them exist as static artworks fastened to a wall, plinth, or floor. Nearly all of the exhibition’s painted and sculptural works feature objects that are always in close proximity to a body: shirts, shoes, gloves, condoms, masks, earrings, etc. Bob Boyer (Métis) painted geometric Native designs on blankets, while Dyani White Hawk’s (Sičangu Lakota) conjoined abstract panels are inspired by Lakota beadwork and quillwork.

Sometimes the Native body is on display, as in James Luna’s (Payómkawichum / Ipai / Mexican) video The Artifact Piece (1987), in which he rests motionless on his back in a display case wearing only a loincloth as museumgoers gawk. Dana Claxton (Lakota) takes the nearly opposite approach with four LED fireboxes (2018–19) that feature photographic portraits of individual figures with their faces and torsos covered by beaded objects, which the wall text notes are gifts and inheritances from friends and family. This is the subject as constituted by relation and literally embedded in social and cultural formations. In Claxton’s illuminated images, the sitters are hidden and effaced while simultaneously enhanced in being scaffolded and supported by the largesse bequeathed to them by the living and the dead.

This “right to opacity,” as Édouard Glissant terms it, takes a significant twist in “Indian Theater,” albeit perhaps unfortunately tucked away in the didactics. Labels for both Beau Dick’s (Kwakwaka’wakw, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation) mask Yagis (ca. 2005) and a display case of vinyl recordings of Native songs and music discuss work not meant for general consumption. In 2012, Dick took forty of his masks from his commercial gallery and ceremonially burned them; three LPs of field recordings made by ethnomusicologist Ida Halpern contain songs that were not intended to be heard by people outside of the community where they were performed, although other recordings of Native songs were made available for museumgoers to play on a turntable.

Emphasizing performance, as “Indian Theater” insistently does, is a way of keeping the works on display open-ended and in conceptual flux for audiences viewing the show. The exhibition also features an extensive set of Native performances throughout its duration. When Native activists took over Alcatraz Island, they read an at-times-sardonic proclamation addressed “To the Great White Father and All His People.” Documentary footage of its recitation appears in Sky Hopinka’s (Ho-Chunk Nation / Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) video Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) along with landscapes shot in what feels like a 1970s, blissed-out Super 8 mm film aesthetic. Self-determination as a performative mode need not be dour and severe, as Sunflower Siege Engine in particular and “Indian Theater” in general affirm.

“We are losing our ways,” said Ty Smith, project director for Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio (NAICCO).

“Unfortunately, as each generation passes, the less and less of our identity is there and exists as it once did. We’re even at a point in time where you know we talk about putting our elders to rest with tears in their eyes. And those tears represent their concern as to what’s going to happen, what’s going to become of the next generations to follow,” Smith continued. “And [the elders] see so much in terms of how native people have conformed to mainstream society, how we’ve become more and more assimilated, how the campaigns of ‘kill the Indian and save the man’ have actually been successful and are still playing themselves out today. And it becomes very concerning.”

As a means of preserving these ways, in 2019 NAICCO launched a Land Back fundraising campaign aimed at purchasing property it could call its own. At the time, leadership stressed the importance of having a home, which would allow the organization to strengthen its programming and maintain a greater sense of ownership over its future. “What our people have talked about is how awesome it would be to call a place home, here in Central Ohio. A place where we could gather, where we could be ourselves, and where we can be open to expressing the parts of our lives that are important to us,” Smith told Matter News in 2022. 

In the run up to Native Heritage Month, which continues through the end of November, NAICCO’s Land Back campaign surpassed the $250,000 goal set by organizers. The center has continued to fundraise, though, with an aim of purchasing at least 20 acres of land as a home base centered on conservation and the preservation of Native traditions. These traditions, Smith said, are essential to preserving Native culture, and Indigenous people have “put everything on the line – even their own lives – to make sure that these ways [are] carried on.”

The term “Land Back” emerged about a decade ago, according to Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective. First used by Indigenous artists, the mantra has since evolved into a wider anti-colonial stance and a call for Native sovereignty. Its roots, however, run far deeper, stretching back centuries to when Natives were first forced off of ancestral lands. “Our people have been fighting … to reclaim lands since colonization,” Krystal Two Bulls, director of NDN Collective’s Land Back campaign, said in a 2021 interview with Teen Vogue.

But Smith said the Land Back NAICCO campaign differs from the broader movement both in scale and approach. “We can’t operate like a nation. We aren’t a tribe. We’re a humble little, non-profit, urban Indian center in Columbus. And so, everything that we’re going to do is by way of our own hand,” he said.

Smith said that what’s most meaningful to the organization is continuing to write a new, successful chapter so that urban Native people in Ohio can feel a deeper connection to their cultural roots, while also building a greater sense of inter-tribal community.

“Some people will think, originally, Land Back is about just that in itself. And a big part is that it is about reparations – now, rightfully so. There are nations that live in their ancestral homelands, and they have all the right and reason to seek Land Back to these sacred sites, these ceremonial grounds and places that have been there since time and memorial,” Smith said. “We understand that we have to live in a modern way. It’s been about planting seeds. Seeds are traditions and culture. What we’re really saying is that we’re investing in our youth. This is us putting our best foot forward, all of the strength of our energy forward to try and create this space that they can call home. It allows and lends itself for them to hang on to who they are.”