More-than-human collaboration and resilience in modern Native American art, 1930-1980
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
During the twentieth century, the American and Canadian governments regulated or eliminated Indigenous relationships with particular animal populations, such as sheep, eagles, salmon, and sled dogs, as a means of evacuating land for white settlement and extractive industries. Government-supported arts institutions, such as schools, museums, and print co-operatives, were intended to replace subsistence practices and assimilate Native communities into a capitalist economy. Native artists working under the auspices of these programs often depicted Indigenous-animal relationships that both local and national environmental laws impeded. Through a series of four case studies that address environmental policies and Native artistic responses in their regional contexts, my dissertation will argue that the entanglement of colonial-environmental policy with Native artistic modernisms paradoxically produced the conditions for Native graphic arts to embody and transmit Indigenous ecologies to Native communities and beyond. I will also demonstrate that this transcultural exchange paved the way for the development of ecological modernisms in the United States and Canada, Indigenizing our understanding of American art history.
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Keywords
Cheyenne, Indigenous, Inuit sled dogs, Kiowa, Navajo, Sled dogs