Americans

Abstract

Americans is the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian's (NMAI) effort to elucidate on the nation's shared consumption of Euro-American imagery of Indigenous people. The exhibition invites the public to reevaluate their comfort with the ways in which American “Indians” have been portrayed across various media and utilized as a means to imbue brands, products, and ideals with those qualities Indigenous people have been historically burdened with. Americans highlights key moments in U.S. history that have served as the catalyst of the nation's most pervasive ideas about Native Americans. Pocahontas, Thanksgiving, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the Indian Removal Act are summoned as themes to complicate the central gallery of the exhibition composed of a visually arresting, dizzying display of ads, album covers, military weapons, and institutional iconography. Americans asks why these are the stories people know, how these stories impact the national imagination, and what these images expose regarding the United States' relationship with both specific and general representations of Native Americans.Curated by Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Cécile R. Ganteaume, Americans signals a recent departure from the NMAI's original Native American community-collaborative approaches to design. Since opening in 2004, the NMAI established its “mission to present the diversity of Native views and experiences” (Evelyn 2006, 54). Americans, however, positions the non-Native gaze as central to its arrangement, targeting stories and images most significant for Americans of European descent. In Officially Indian: Symbols That Define the United States, the companion book to the exhibition, Ganteaume elaborates on how “real and imaginary relations between Americans and American Indians … are embedded in the U.S. government's official and semiofficial uses of American Indian imagery. A close examination of the imagery reveals far more about the United States than it does about American Indians” (Ganteaume 2017, 21). Likewise, Americans speaks to an audience beholden to, not affected by, the images on display, only including their subjects when it enriches our understanding of why American settlers created them. Tribal members were explicitly consulted for specific objects, but within the context of the exhibition, these engagements are in danger of seeming cherry-picked to suit a monolithic narrative. Fortunately, Paul Chaat Smith's mantra, “American Indians are simultaneously everywhere but nowhere,” places the imagery in sharp relief with their Eurocentric visions, opening a space for the elephant in the gallery: contemporary Native Americans.The central gallery of the exhibition is a grand salon where Art Nouveau-style posters of Native women holding consumer products hang alongside Native American caricatures gracing magazine covers, military insignia, or sports logos. Colorful, nostalgic two-dimensional renderings are punctuated by the inclusion of dolls, medallions, or an actual “Indian” motorcycle and “Tomahawk” missile, adding dynamic texture to the tapestry of images comprising the walls. At the far end is a digital collage of Native American stereotypes in film and television, echoing the jumble of imagery throughout the central gallery. An interactive console offers further information about each image's subject matter. The gallery does not direct the viewer, allowing the visitor to pick from the field of pictures surrounding them. The overwhelming quantity gives a sense of the various ways Native Americans entered an American visual lexicon; however, displays often lack critical analysis on what these images evoke. Americans targets a more general audience, but the interplay between history and its produced imagery is often teleological: the visual archive presented to the audience is normalized. Viewers are not called to challenge the reception or distribution of these images; they are left participating in their consumption.The process behind how non-Natives came to view and imagine Native Americans is the task of the side galleries. From the central gallery, five rooms branch out to tackle a featured theme. “Queen of America”1 demonstrates the NMAI's capacity for robust research, chronicling how the emerging nation intertwined their fate with the life and legend of Amonute (Powhatan, 1596–1617), better known as Pocahontas.2 A reproduction of Constantino Brumidi's (1805–1880) fresco at the U.S. Capitol best represents John Smith's (1580–1631) fanciful retelling of his encounter, which produced a powerful myth that would later be cannibalized into feather-crowned “Indian Queen” symbols of independence for the colonies. Similarly, Simon van de Passe's (1595–1647) 1616 engraved portrait depicting Pocahontas in European dress enticed viewers abroad to favorably regard the colonial project. These images evolved into caricatures of the “Indian Princess” for the women's society, Degree of Pocahontas, illuminating thorny aspects of how Pocahontas became symbolically linked with Jamestown aristocracy, including the “Exception Rule” that granted Whites with lineage claims to Pocahontas their property rights despite their “Indian” blood. A video installation shows audience reactions to Pocahontas, their responses spanning from pop culture references of the Disney movie to relating the tragic story of a young woman swept up by political forces. The room's strength lies in how the selected imagery brings up problematics regarding a primarily White narrative of a Native woman packaged for a White audience. The viewer learns how the myth of Pocahontas preys on the life of the same person, combining with imagery perpetuated over time to generate national pride at the expense of Native realities.“The Invention of Thanksgiving” screens an artfully created animation narrated by Paul Chaat Smith. The short video project reprocesses images found in the central gallery's myriad representations of Native Americans. Adverts from the 1950s become hollow-eyed graphics, combining with flaming brains and naïve, pencil-line drawings of Native people to create a sinister association with the holiday. Smith explains how, like slavery, Native Americans are the “other” challenge to defining the United States as a nation. Cartoonish imagery of Native Americans is a “protective layer to not get too direct about it.” Smith reassures how, despite the problematic imagery, Native peoples have become a “powerful idea,” celebrating that “however imperfectly we remember … we are remembering Indians.” The ending betrays a sense of helplessness, as Smith ponders the alternative to being misrepresented: not existing.“The Indians Win” gallery on the Battle of Little Bighorn relies on the tension between how Whites portrayed Natives and how Natives portrayed themselves. The U.S. Army's unexpected defeat began an obsession with the stoic, warrior Indian as representing all Indian nations, thereby making their eventual colonization feel like a victory over a worthy foe, instead of as the theft of land and resources. The single battle romanticized expansionist efforts into the American Southwest, resulting in Plains Indians becoming the visual marker of Indian-ness within a U.S. imaginary to this day. A monumental narrative painting by Strike the Kettle (Lakota), follower of Chief Sitting Bull, evinces how Natives were already portraying themselves in art. Strike the Kettle highlighted the role of women preparing special meals and materials for what may be a naming ceremony: scenes that generate a counter-history to depictions of warrior men engaged in battle. His painting's complex visuality of women relatives and ceremonial objects does not become part of the “Wild West” iconography displayed across the room, silently testifying to what American settlers chose to obfuscate. The gallery also contains a Walter Benjamin reference, “Indians in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but rather than probe how the ubiquity of Native representation diluted their context/meaning, the phrase is a nonsequitur to draw visitors toward interactive displays where one can turn levers to create a “stereotype” or twirl pictures like a zoetrope. Interactive replicas of analogue forms do not critically engage the context in which images were consumed, thereby reinforcing the problematic representations the gallery purports to challenge.“The Removal Act” gallery visually emphasizes Andrew Jackson's grand design to usurp Southeast Native American territory. The gallery cedes substantial real estate to quotes, historical data, documents, and portraits of politicians on their legacy regarding “Indian policy” but limits Native presence to a quote from a letter from John Ross (Cherokee, 1790–1866) to John C. Calhoun (1782–1850). The term “genocide” and images of the suffering of Native populations are conspicuously absent, despite examining an event that stripped Native Americans of their cultural landscape and directly led to many deaths. Only a small image of poet Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee, 1897–1982) alludes to early 1900s Comanche and Cherokee activists who popularized the phrase “Trail of Tears.” Interestingly, Bronson's use of Plains Indian garb echoes the “Indians Win” display, pointing to how her public persona benefited from prior misconceptions of “Indian” stereotypes, but there is a missed opportunity to view Bronson's representative choices alongside Pocahontas to compare the ways Native women have embodied cultural ideals.Americans is more an explication of how these images appeared and less a critique of how Native Americans are portrayed. The viewpoints of “image” and “history” are barely conceptually integrated; they collide throughout the exhibition, not in a way that creates tension, but in a way that renders them incomprehensible to each other. These images still captivate us, Native and non-Native Americans alike, arresting our attention away from other instances in which Native Americans have been hiding in plain sight. From code-talkers in each World War to steel beams in Manhattan's most iconic buildings to the entertainment industry, Natives continue to be “everywhere and nowhere” (Smith 2009, 10). Americans does not peer into these tangible instances, instead electing to privilege what American settlers wanted to see and how we chose to remember it.