I’m not one to make political art or known for that at least largely but there are things that have to break the surface. I don’t consider myself a brand or a company I’m just doing what an artist does and that is create. It’s less common I’ve learned in recent years that one can appreciate things from a far spectrum that don’t fall within a genre or group. As someone who grew up playing music from my teen years I valued the musicians who would look at the value of that range. I recall a friend who was a guitarist who appreciated the pop music in the likes of Hall and Oates as much as he could appreciate Tom Waits.
In my small world of art in genre there are factions that tie into culture and actually stem from a long line of beliefs. The reason I note this is that like anything with time, things change and like the tide rising and falling out there comes change like the sands of times on the shore.
I can’t say when I first saw or heard about any music festival where people wore headdresses but it became a thing for a time. Coachella was definitely part of that ultimately and when I noted to people how much it dug into me they said I was being too sensitive. It was just a few days ago when I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with David Choe as a guest when he shared a story about being at a crosswalk in LA the day Parasite won the academy award with calls coming over to him in congratulations celebrating a milestone he had nothing to do with.
It made me recall a similar story from comedian Aziz Ansari on Jimmy Kimmel sharing something that has since been taken down but the jist was that same sentiment. When Slumdog Millionaire won awards people were patting him on the back as to say aren’t you proud and he admitted yeah I felt pride and his response was great. “wow, are white people must be hyped all the time, Back to the Future, that’s us! Titanic, that’s us! Every movie but Slumdog and Boyz in the Hood, that’s US”!
It brought me back to this idea Choe talked about though about American Asians keeping their heads down because they have threat of being ‘sent back’ to where they come from. Equally it brought up this story from Sherman Alexie who was interviewed once sharing a story about being at a car accident scene when he venture out of his car and confronted by someone who told him “go back to where you came from” and despite that context it was clear he didn’t mean go back to your car it had to do with him being, NOT white.
I could wax on and be judged for whining about things but for whatever reason I feel compelled to share this experience as someone who is Native American who has felt like a stranger in the land of my ancestry.
I remember this from my early friends of high school when people would talk about going somewhere after graduation to backpack and travel. I responded to this friend with the notion I’d want to travel in time where I would not feel like a stranger. The reaction was puzzling and very well understood until I explained that people with Irish roots romanticize Ireland and so on and so on with cultures and places.
It brings me to this revelation of what bothers me about our culture as costume. When I went to Taiwan and met the people I experienced how frustrated they were at how they were perceived as manufactures and slave labor. They retained their language and culture in a way on number levels far greater than our Native population. They looked to us in reverence for our survival amidst great pressures to assimilate and disappear. But like oil and water there are some things that don’t mix.
Ultimately for whatever reason it might be, the language and culture are still here. This is not to say that life is perfect by living in ways that once were. In fact I think of the teacher I learned German from sharing a story about a small town on the East Coast who isolated so much they retained old Germanic language so when Germans came to see them they were locked in a time period that seemed foreign.
When I do public work in way of sculpture whether residency or demonstration I’m often met by people who judge the tools I used even though the majority of them are of my making based on traditional methods replacing stone with steel. Steel that I have worked into shapes myself that were developed for the wood types we use for sculpture here, mostly Alder and Red cedar.
The most common critique is how I am doing something, wrong. That I am not doing things as were read about in books using stones and beaver teeth to execute ‘authentic Native American art’. This judgment I’ve learned to keep my head down but over time I shed my skin to not live in a book or restrict myself to confines of perceptions of outsiders because in art there are no rules.
A friend who worked in language from Vancouver, BC told me to refrain from using the term ‘evolve’ because it leans into the concept that we are primitive and uncivilized. This was a large basis of the Alaska-Yukon Pacific exposition that posed non Eurocentric American culture as superior. It intentionally excluded Coast Salish people and pitted Filipino culture against Japanese as a high contrast. The idea was to say to western cultures new to the territory that Native American culture was obsolete and that other cultures were to aim at a way of life that was an answer.
