Camping Out with Miss Chief: Kent Monkman's Ironic Journey

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the many ways Cree artist Kent Monkman uses irony, parody, and camp humor to subvert mythologized visions of the American West that excluded Native Americans or treated them as a dying people, frozen in time. Monkman thrusts himself into large-scale western landscapes in the form of a transgender, camp alter ego named “Miss Chief” who disrupts multiple romanticized views of the American landscape. In true trickster fashion, Miss Chief at once shapes and disrupts history, serving as a corrective to a settler narrative that imagined a future without a Native presence.