San Antonio artist Joe Harjo (Muscogee) knows his name alone will identify the maker of his new art exhibition Joe Harjo: Indian Removal Act II: And She Was. But Harjo acknowledges that he is not alone in bringing his work to fruition.
Like many museums, The Contemporary at Blue Star includes a land acknowledgment on its entrance wall. This now-standard practice recognizes that institutions in the United States stand on ground once occupied by Native American peoples.
Harjo’s twist on the practice is a people acknowledgment that pays homage to the family members and ancestors who gave him his blood and his breath.
“I’m using the people acknowledgment as a way to acknowledge the shoulders that I’m on, the people who made this possible,” Harjo said during an exhibition walk-through, gesturing to his body.
Subverting words
The exhibition subtitle And She Was refers to the replacement of the matrilineal line of his ancestral Muscogee people with the patriarchy of the Christian church as the land that became the U.S. was overtaken by European colonizers.
Harjo explained that Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull in 1452, the Dum diversas, that gave license to occupy territory and enslave any non-Christians. (The doctrine was repudiated by the Vatican last year.)
Language, however, can be subverted to divulge new meanings and inherent contradictions.
Anchoring the gallery’s south wall, a large wall painting reads MOTHERLAND in eight-foot-high all-caps white letters on a blood-red background. Closer inspection reveals that the letters are made up of smaller words reading NATIVELAND repeated hundreds of times.
Similarly, a large-scale installation piece titled Land Acknowledgment III & IV demonstrates that symbols, too, can be shown to have multiple interpretations.
Lengths of red fabric folded over a cable stretched taut between two pillars drape onto the floor. A familiar white strip of fabric holding the fabric lengths indicates that the piece is a deconstructed U.S. flag, and a reminder that the red stripes represent blood — meant originally as that of colonists who spilled blood to secure their country, but here also representing the blood of Indigenous peoples displaced by aggressive U.S. colonialism.
‘Babygirl’
The exhibition’s matriarchal theme is a lament for a lost culture, Harjo said, while also a sincere honoring of the women of his family line.
Harjo’s great-great-great-great-grandmother was among the Muscogee forcibly removed from their lands in what is now Alabama, Georgia and northern Florida and made to march to reservation land in Oklahoma, a tragic moment widely known as the “Trail of Tears” but called “The Long Walk” by Harjo’s people.
When Indigenous survivors of the forced march arrived, they were made to sign a register. Harjo’s orphaned ancestral matriarch was signed in as “Babygirl” because she did not know how to sign her name in English and her captors did not acknowledge her Muscogee language.
One room in the exhibition is dedicated to Babygirl, with an eight-minute video and a framed print from Harjo’s Indian Performance footprints series that features his footprints in red paint. The titles in general refer to an unnamed “Indian” engaged in mundane activities such as taking a shower or checking Facebook, activities a presumably extinct people would not be expected to engage in.
In And She Was, a group of six Indian Performance prints are titled for multiple Indians, among them “removed from familiar wind, deafened” and “removed from fertile land, starving.” The arresting barefoot print accompanying the Babygirl video reads “Indian holding a weapon,” in this case “breath,” signifying that the mere act of breathing, of being alive, is an affront to those who would have attempted the extinction of Native peoples.
Frank conversations
Reflecting on Harjo’s subversion of The Contemporary’s land acknowledgment with his people acknowledgment, curator Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray said she appreciates his ability to deftly critique the very institution that is supporting his work.
In part, that’s because she remains unsure what purpose land acknowledgments serve, even as they have become common practice in art institutions. “Frank conversations” with Indigenous artists led up to The Contemporary adopting the practice in 2019, she said, but “everybody had a different opinion.”
Harjo said, “the thing about them is that they don’t function. They’re sweet, often. They’re kind, and I think they are a first step or an attempt to say something, but most of them don’t have any action behind them. They don’t really function to engage Native people now.”
More important than to acknowledge the past is to acknowledge the Indigenous people that are still here, he said. “Can you get them into this space? Can you interact with them in a way that’s beneficial?”
Admission to The Contemporary is free, with donations encouraged. Joe Harjo: Indian Removal Act II: And She Was is the second of a three-part exhibition cycle, with the first installment shown at the Galveston Art Center, and the third installment to go on view at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth in the fall.
