More-than-human collaboration and resilience in modern Native American art, 1930-1980

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.