An exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum features the works of international Indigenous artists who explore Indigenous history, culture and representation through a contemporary lens.

It’s called Native America: In Translation, which took three years to make.

The exhibition highlights 10 featured artists’ perspectives on community, identity, heritage and the legacy of colonialism on the American continents.

“The exhibition in my mind starts with this work by Marianne Nicolson. It’s a really large photograph; it’s on the wall at the bottom of the stairs as you come into the gallery space,” says Ariel Pate, the assistant curator of photography.

Paul Smith with the museum’s Native Initiatives Advisory Group for a tour.

Pate continued, “And it shows a cliff in sort of beautiful natural area, and there’s a really prominent painting on the face of the cliff.”

The image is 30-feet wide and 28-feet-tall and was originally painted in 1998.

“It’s located in Kingcome Inlet, which is in what we call British Columbia, but which is actually the ancestral homeland of the Dzawada’enuxw Nation. Marianne Nicolson is of that nation and this work really welcomes people into that territory of the Dzawada’enuxw people and lets them know that the Dzawada’enuxw people are there today,” says Pate.

Native America: In Translation is on display in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts, on the lower level of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

I followed Pate and Smith’s lead wherever they wanted to take me along the tour.

Next was a series of six photos by Alan Michelson. Paul Smith, with the museum’s Native Initiatives Advisory Group for a tour, has a personal connection to the images. He says they struck him.

“Being from the Oneida Nation, we are not sovereign to Wisconsin; we’re from New York and people don’t know our story a lot of times and how we ended up here in Wisconsin,” he says.

“People often don’t know that the Iroquois Nation, which the Oneida nation is a part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, that we [Oneida] were the United States’ first military ally. And that allyship between the Oneida and the United States broke up our confederacy. The other nations in the confederacy sided with the British,” Smith explains. “The Oneida were the only one of the confederacy to side with the Americans. After the Revolutionary War, the Oneida helped with the victory over the British quite decisively over in upstate New York area, and you can see how that relationship devolved in these pictures.”

Smith says the images show in sequence, “From being Upstate New York, to signs celebrating the Army destroying our villages, and the movement, and the fire, the treaties broken and then our Wampum belt.”

Pate describes the painting at its significance. “So, it’s a work that’s six panels, and each of them a different image is projected onto a bust of George Washington,” Pate says. “Sort of taking this, you know, figure from American history and projecting historical documents on it that reflect this really tortured relationship between the Iroquois Nation and America.”

Both Pate and Smith say not enough people in Wisconsin know this history.

Further inside the gallery there is a room full of photos by Martine Gutierrez.

The images are from a fashion magazine she created in 2018 called Indigenous Woman.

“It’s big. It’s really colorful. The cover looks just like Andy Warhol’s interview. There’s a lot of like really glamorous images in it and Martine made this because she felt that as a trans Latinx woman no one was going to put her on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so she needed to make her own,” says Pate.

Pate says in each of the photos, Gutierrez is the model, the stylist, the photographer and the editor.

“And also a woman of Indigenous descent and sort of thinking about how we think about Indigeneity as authenticity. And you know as a trans woman she really works hard to have people acknowledge her as who her identity is and have people take her for who she is,” says Pate.

Pate and Smith agree that this exhibit is historic.

It showcases Indigenous people in media in a contemporary fashion from Indigenous perspectives, versus as just historic figures. And they hope Native audiences who see the show feel welcome to the museum.

Native America: In Translation is on display until June 25.

Details

By Stacy Thacker

May 03, 2023

Larrisa Fasthorse found her voice and her superpower through being a playwright. 

On April 20, Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota) became the first Native American woman playwright produced on Broadway with the debut of her original work, “The Thanksgiving Play.”

The play — starring D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley and Chris Sullivan— tells the story of four white presenting people attempting to devise a culturally sensitive first Thanksgiving play for Native American Heritage Month. The characters try so hard to do everything right that they do everything wrong, Fasthorse said. 

Fasthorse says she wanted to challenge herself to write a play about contemporary Indigenous issues through white presenting characters. 

This play is also an opportunity for people to come together and enjoy being in a space where they can share laughter, happiness, joy, and truth, she said. 

“I’m really happy with it and how it came out and the things it deals with,” Fasthorse said. “As Native people, a lot of the history that I’m talking about in this play, we know it. It’s not news to us. It’s news to everybody else.”

When Fasthorse started working in film and television 15 years ago, she was frustrated with the inaccurate representation of Indigenous people. 

Shows like Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs that depict contemporary Native life with Indigenous-specific humor with Native actors weren’t around back then. 

“I sold a couple of shows, but they were just getting watered down the way they’re portraying Indigenous people, and I didn’t have the power to change that,” Fasthorse said. “In film and TV, the studios own your work — you don’t. So, they can change whatever they want.” 

But then Fasthorse was commissioned to do her first play in 2012 and everything took a positive turn. 

“I was really excited because the theater was willing to do things right, to hire Indigenous consults, to hire language consultants, hire other Indigenous artists to work around the show,” she said.  

Fasthorse grew up in South Dakota, where at a year old, she was adopted by a white family. Her adoptive parents worked to help her keep a connection to her Lakota culture and people.  

“But growing up, that’s hard — you are separate, and I always worried about not being enough of anything,” Fasthorse said. “Not being enough white, not being enough Lakota, all the things.”

Not feeling enough and being stuck in between was reinforced when a casting director in California told her it was a problem that she wasn’t quite white — and they could tell. 

“Now I realize how much that’s my superpower,” she said. “I’m a bridge. I’m a bridge that can translate between cultures,” she said, adding she can take contemporary and historical issues and translate them for a white audience and weave in Lakota storytelling.

“I was really fortunate as a Native playwright around the country to be working quite a bit, getting commissions and having them produced,” she said. “But then I couldn’t get second and third productions; my plays would just kind of be once and be done.”

The process grew increasingly frustrating, and the fight to hire Indigenous actors also became an issue. But eventually, she says, she cracked the formula, and “The Thanksgiving Play” opened doors. 

Fasthorse describes “The Thanksgiving Play” as a dark satirical comedy that depicts historical events accurately. 

She added the Indigenous crew found the truth and humor in the story to be a relief. 

Although her plays tell historical truths, Fasthorse emphasizes that her primary aim is to create art. 

“A lot of my art does educate, but it’s first and foremost art,” she said. “It is not education.” 

Her first writing mentor, Merata Mita, a Māori filmmaker, producer and writer from New Zealand who passed away in 2010, told her that she could either be an artist or an educator, Fasthorse said. 

“Now, some art educates, and some education is artistic,” Fasthorse said. “But you have to choose which one you are. So, I’m very much an artist.”

Fasthorse encourages Indigenous artists to stay true to who they are/

“Everybody has to find their people and if you aren’t being true to who you are and your voice, your people can’t find you,” Fasthorse said. “Your voice is something they don’t have and if you don’t stay true to that, the people who love what you have can’t find you. If you try to please everyone, you will please no one, including yourself, most importantly yourself.”  

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