Blood Memory and the Arts: Indigenous Genealogies and Imagined Truths

Abstract

For generations (and as some might argue, since contact), American Indian artists have grappled with the varied responses of a consumerist Western audience unversed in the interior logic of indigenous aesthetic impulses.1 The public exchange of Native arts as goods for cash, trade, or opportunity has resulted in a largely object-based academic inquiry in the service of ethnography, voyeurism, and consumer class aspirations. The marked history of these objects and their circulation has to date effectively stood in for serious arts scholarship, obscuring and at times obstructing a more accurate reading of aesthetic expressions informed by the rich legacies of oral history, traditional exchange processes, religious uses, and even metaphysical interventions with the divine that are enacted in the private and often-interior settings of indigenous lifeways. Like Native literary theory, Native arts scholarship is “haunted” by the visionary complexity of indigenous arts practices. The inherent intellectualism of indigenous visual arts, design, performance, and media exceeds the means by which we have to describe them, even in our own contexts of Native arts teaching, learning, and enacting in national and global settings.