Knowing Native Arts by Nancy Marie Mithlo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knowing Native Arts by Nancy Marie Mithlo Benjamin P. Davis Nancy Marie Mithlo. Knowing Native Arts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 272 pp. Hardcover, $34.95. Knowing Native Arts, an essay collection spanning thirty-five years of scholarship, makes several contributions. Scholars studying the art of Emily Arthur, Marie Watt, Tom Jones, Edward Curtis, and Jimmie Durham will gain from how Nancy Mithlo reads these texts with a focus on questions of political histories, Indigenous self-determination, and cultural authenticity. For instance, she highlights how Arthur’s screen print Re-Remembering (Not History), hosted first by the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, “inserts the veiled histories of assimilation and imprisonment into Saint Augustine’s celebratory anniversary” (54). Accounting throughout for differences in theoretical [End Page 141] approaches as well as media, Mithlo underscores a different method in Watt’s Witness, a reclaimed wool blanket: “While Arthur brings the past forward into a contemporary Florida landscape, giving Southern Plains leaders a chance to return home, Watt has traveled backward in time, bringing along her two daughters to witness the deeply infused cultural protocols of First Nations peoples” (58–60). And in her chapter “Decentering Durham,” one of the multiple essays she has written on the Durham controversy over the years, she insists that “supporting a political cause does not require that you fabricate your identity” (200). Following the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association statement on “Indigenous identity fraud,” she adds that belonging is not merely a matter of who you claim to be; it is about who claims you (201). Through Mithlo’s perceptive lens, page by page Knowing Native Arts becomes more than a book about aesthetics. It operates less through a central claim and more as a constellation: taken together, the essays illuminate media, methods, and histories of fine arts often excluded from museum spaces and academic discussions. Read this way, Knowing Native Arts becomes about ethics and politics. The idea in art history that “aesthetics are nonpolitical,” Mithlo writes, “privileges the art object as separate and detached from considerations of statehood, nation, and citizenship” (102). But this is not to say that political art is “akin to a propaganda poster” (103). Rather than proceed via such an “unambiguous reading,” Knowing Native Arts offers a “broader reading,” arguing that “political art is art that is meant to disturb, question, and undermine social standards” (103). It is the way that Mithlo’s set of readings speaks to broader political questions today that I want to consider in the rest of this brief review. Perhaps more interesting to readers of this journal than continuing to summarize her discussion of the aforementioned artists, I think, will be a sense of the politics Knowing Native Arts both suggests and performs. Mithlo is an expert on material culture in more ways than one. “The field of Native arts is a tough gig,” she states in her conclusion. “There is a lack of recognition, a lack of resources, simply a lack” (229). Her chapters consistently attend to the material conditions that permitted or precluded her scholarship. She does this in a substantive, not symbolic way. Many academics, even and especially those trained to write about political economy, discuss the production of their books at most by citing a [End Page 142] prestigious grant in the acknowledgments section. Like many academic books, Mithlo’s emerged from a series of presentations she gave around the world. Unlike most academic books, Mithlo acknowledges this genesis, beginning her chapters by detailing where she first presented the materials. In her final chapter, she even includes a section of email correspondence, which shows the reader how ideas and interventions actually travel and gain traction (218–21). The effect of this writing style, chapter after chapter, is to provide a way into the actual proceedings of an academic’s life. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Mithlo’s style with a view toward actual changes in the accessibility of the academy. She provides a point of relatable entry in what is otherwise a competitive and often demeaning context. “The academy is not neutral,” Mithlo says early on (9). She begins...