Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo David Titterington Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. ix + 185 pp. Illustrations, contributors, index. $39.95 paper. We use Making History at Haskell Indian Nations University (mentioned more than once in its pages), because the book is a perfect demonstration of new pedagogies and fresh theoretical approaches to the rich, creative lives of Indigenous people. Countless little surprises and new insights fill the text, and while traditional approaches to art history often deprioritize the artist in favor of theory and analysis, Making History presents a much-needed "view from the inside." Making History is more than just a book of essays. It is a catalogue of almost 200 artworks from the Institute of American Indian Art's (IAIA) historic collection (some works, such as Bill Soza War Soldier's Ghost Dance triptych, cannot be found elsewhere or online). It is also a student workbook with vocabulary lists, writing prompts, sample interview questions, and large margins perfect for taking notes, as well as a teacher's manual with sample handouts by educators at the top of their fields, all connected to IAIA. This book is the first of its kind. The authors demonstrate the research practices they describe so that, as one critic put it, teaching and modeling simultaneously take place on the page. The constant use of "we" and "us" makes the reader feel included and spoken to. As editor and contributor Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) explains, "our focus is on providing a scaffold of resources for emerging Native arts scholars, Native and non-Native readers, students, and academics who wish to understand the tenor and tone of what this field is about and how to approach teaching and learning about Native American Indian arts" (xvi). Although the text's focus is on Southwest artists, there is some Great Plains representation. In the chapter "Mapping Indigenous Space," John Paul Rangel (Apache, Navajo, Spanish) writes about the work of Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho), Anita Fields (Osage/Muskogee Creek), and Norman Akers (Osage), each focusing on the physical and psychological geographies associated with the Great Plains. There are also multiple perspectives on the Ghost Dance phenomenon, and an essay by IAIA museum director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee) on the work of C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma), who uses objects to bring to life her memories of Kansas and Oklahoma. Similar to the visual arts, poetry activates deep memories and alter-logic, and Mithlo bookends the six chapters with two poems by Indigenous authors that further help unsettle [End Page 107] our ordinary thinking. There are also four "gallery" sections of 102 colored plates. It is not clear how the galleries relate to the chapters, for each chapter also contains its own images, and so we are left wondering if they are perhaps a cache of images for the student reader to draw from in order to curate their own imaginary exhibition. As Cree scholar Shawn Wilson would put it, engaging with this book is ceremony. Although one impressive work cannot redress the lack of resources available to teach Indigenous art from Indigenous perspectives, Making History is a start, and mandatory reading for any serious student of art history. David Titterington College of Humanities Haskell Indian Nations University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln