Unsettled borders and memories: a “local” indigenous perspective on contemporary globalization

Abstract

This article provides a case study of decolonial counter-memory in contemporary indigenous artist Alan Michelson's 2009 Third Bank of the River. Installed inside the lobby of the tri-national border station between the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Canada, and the United States—the most legally disputed territory in North America—Michelson's artwork recovers the seventeenth-century Two Row wampum belt as model for reforming relationships at the border. This wampum belt memorializes a commitment between the Haudenosaunee and European settlers to co-exist in balanced interdependence and remains a key touchstone in indigenous political philosophy and activism. Interpreted in the post-9/11 build-up of state power at the disputed border zone, Third Bank proposes a model of international dialogue and nation-to-nation diplomacy that contrasts with the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism. It thus stands out as an important indigenous perspective on the widespread interest in memory in global contemporary art, in which artists are recovering a new viewpoint on contemporaneity through the reconceptualization of historical pasts.Mark Watson is an assistant professor of Art History at Clayton State University in Atlanta. He received his PhD in modern American art history from Columbia University in New York in 2012. His research interests include contemporary art and theory, modern American art, Native North American art, and the relationship of art to countercultural social movements. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art, Art History, Third Text, and the edited volume, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (University of Minnesota, 2011).