Uneasy Terrain: Image, Text, Landscape, and Contemporary Indigenous Artists in the United States

Instead of saying, I'm listening, watching—attending. The thesis here is not, strictly speaking, "mine"; and it articulates itself as an image, not as a sentence, though its marks are partly words. With this essay I respond to Flathead artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's theory of race and landscape as she transcribes it on canvas in Buffalo.¹ In this complex pictorial and textual composition—as tall as a person and two arm spans wide—Quick-to-See Smith engages in the crucial social and aesthetic project of establishing Indigenous sovereignty, or collective agency, over representational practices. As Lakota scholar Vine Deloria suggests, from its origins in the discourse of theology in East Asia and Europe to its deployment by colonial powers negotiating disbursal of territories, the term sovereignty has had a series of relationships to and meanings for Indigenous peoples. Ironically, in the era of "self-determination," sovereignty has been a key to collective agency for American Indians while simultaneously participating in paradigms of political power and commodification of space that are often at odds with Indigenous civic theories and practices. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker acknowledges the semantic difficulties imbedded in sovereignty, observing that, in a political move abstracted from land-based sovereignty, some Indigenous scholars have developed the notion of "intellectual sovereignty," an "attempt . . . to decolonize the theoretical and methodological perspectives used within analyses of indigenous histories, cultures, and identities from the legacies of intellectual colonialism" (25). Similarly, Quick-to-See Smith and many other Indigenous U.S. artists decolonize the theory and method of landscape within the broader context of visual art to construct what might be named an artistic sovereignty, a concept that closely parallels what Osage literary scholar and University of Oklahoma professor Robert Warrior in Tribal Secrets signified as "intellectual sovereignty."

Quick-to-See Smith calls works such as Buffalo "narrative landscapes" (cited in Lippard, Mixed Blessings 113), assemblages of images and texts with the land as their unifying point of reference. Buffalo appropriates image-and text-based tools of colonialism and genocide: the map's outline of a continent (with its fiction of white and/or settler-colonial sovereignty, in which, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, "possession and nationhood are . . . constituted symbiotically" [21]), the portrait (with Catlin's paternalistic fable of Native cultures' demise), and the painted landscape. Meanwhile, Quick-to-See Smith draws on Native sources for language and iconography, collaging pages from a Flathood newspaper into her composition and forming the maplike outline as a buffalo petroglyph. She furthermore directly indicts U.S. economic and cultural practices ("money is green . . ."). In simultaneously complex and forthright ways, the piece articulates a critique of Western art's history and of its colonialist intent, thinly veiled behind claims of art's universal appeal.

Like many contemporary Indigenous artists in the United States, Quick-to-See Smith seeks to clarify existing relationships among race, place, and economics as well as to create new relationships. In particular, she and her peers combine image and text to interrogate the genre of landscape painting as a stage for fantasies of racialized white manifest destiny. These artists require viewers to don, as Quick-to-See Smith puts it, a "cultural-turning-around headset" to engage with "a different way of thinking" ("Interview Transcript") about the place "we" call "our" "homeland." Their verbal-pictorial critique of the hegemony of American landscape art draws on two phenomena: first, landscape's historical support of colonialist efforts to displace Indigenous peoples, and, second, the widespread but undertheorized practice among artists and writers of color of fusing image and text to refute racism.² I explicate these phenomena below as a preface to a discussion of several works by Quick-to-See Smith, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, and Charlene Teters.

Landscape Art: Painting "America" within a Frame

By one definition, a landscape is "that portion of the world visible by an observer from a specific position" (Conzen 2, cited in Lorch); by another, landscape is a genre of painting Dutch artists established in the seventeenth...