American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Community-based Indigenous digital storytelling is powerful, as it supports communities in taking charge of how their stories are told and how they are heard. The researchers reflect on their own experiences in digitizing and assert that the filmmaker’s relationship to the community is fundamental to the process. The inclusion of Elders and community members in editing the stories is crucial as the story is transformed from an oral to a digitized story. Iseke and Moore identify relationships, marked by respect and reciprocity, that influence how editing decisions are made. In collecting digital stories, oral traditions are honored and resistance to the prevalence of texts in the dominant society is promoted.

Controlling temporality has a tremendous political and social force. Many of the “facts” about Indians are implemented through received Histories-with-a-capital-H, and thus Indians and indigenous people come to be defined by a performance of temporality. This article complicates the historical grand narrative of Hawaiian colonization and problematizes the ongoing renditions of Hawaii as paradise. It addresses the historic performances of Native Hawaiians as they sought to maintain sovereignty and control in Hawaii from 1796 to 1826 and analyzes not only the performances of the historical moment but also how the history of Hawaii is written in such a way as to enact a settler performance. The article moves beyond English-only documents to examine Hawaiian- language documents, which disrupt settler histories and contest the circulating images that continue to picture Hawaii as a discovered paradise and exotic land. Native Hawaiians’ kapu, or spoken law that is localized and specific to situations, provides us with a narrative that accounts for complex personhood and Native Hawaiian desires in relation to dealing with various foreign entities. Rather than just refute the stereotype or assert that the colonial historians “just got it wrong,” this essay provides an account of a complex political moment, in which gendered performances became key to the ways in which Hawaii still performs in the role of US empire.

In this article I examine how white possession functions ontologically and performatively within Australian beach culture through the white male body as lifesaver, surfer, and soldier. I draw on Butler’s idea of performativity in that a culturally determined and historically contingent act that is internally discontinuous is only real to the extent that it is repeated. Raced and gendered norms of subjectivity are iterated in different ways through performative repetition in specific historical and cultural contexts. National, racial, and sexual subjects are in this sense both doings and things done.

Hawaiian music and performance has historically played a crucial role in the construction of Känaka Maoli in the global imagination. Through a close reading of the album, The “O” (2006), released by Hawaiian hip-hop artist, Krystilez, I offer a critically informed examination of contemporary Kanaka Maoli cultural production, articulating the intersection of Native identity and performance in modern Hawai‘i. This article examines the gendered contradictions and possibilities within Hawaiian hip-hop, which I situate vis-à-vis the spread and appropriation of hip-hop in the postindustrial global economy. Whereas “native” forms of music have played a role in the paradisiacal construction of Hawai‘i, Krystilez’s woven narratives are multilayered and contradictory; they exhibit defiant forms of indigeneity that speak against US hegemony in Hawai‘i, while simultaneously utilizing state logics of racialization to claim legitimacy. These songs draw upon the post–civil rights discourse associated with US hip-hop, but also presents a place-based, anti-citizenship narrative based on indigeneity. I foreground an indigenous feminist critique of colonialism to unpack how Kanaka Maoli self-representation generates cultural resistance that rests its “performance” on gendered and racialized tropes of “Hawaiianness” and “blackness” simultaneously. I also consider the ways in which the lyrics found in Hawaiian hip-hop reconfigure narratives about land, place, and space, with growing implications for Hawaiian diasporic connectivity. Through an analysis of contemporary Hawaiian hip-hop, this paper aims to reconsider and expand popular notions of Hawaiian performance in order to arrive at a more complex rendering of Kanaka Maoli identity.

The articulation and advancement of a qualitative (and some might charge imaginative) approach to contemporary Native arts criticism characterized by attention to the body, the experience of belonging, and the implications of these attributes for collective memory and place by way of blood reckoning reflects indigenous collective thought and political realities in meaningful ways. Blood relationships reference not only biological heritage or race but also, in an expanded sense, the internalized memories of communal history, knowledge, and wisdom. Blood memories are powerful political tropes mobilized to call attention to the legacies of colonialism in contexts as diverse as battlefields, boarding schools, and sacred sites. This common tribal value of multigenerational remembrance runs directly counter to prevailing Western traits of individual achievement, lack of transgenerational memory, and transcendence of one’s genealogical fate and place of origin. Drawing from the work of documentary filmmaker and theorist David MacDougall, the author explores the possible philosophical and emotional dimensions of audience reception and its impact on the Native arts world. MacDougall’s use of corporeal knowledge imparted by the gaze is useful for highlighting lens-based artistic practice, the power of biography, and the curatorial strategies of embodiment, including the senses, possession, and emotional connections among subject, maker, and viewer. Examples of work featuring Chippewa filmmaker Marcella Ernest and Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones are mobilized in an effort to illuminate these theoretical implications.

Indigenous artists have been striving to expand the discursive categorization of their work beyond the inherent limitations of “Indian Art” for decades. Ever since the Red Power movement reawakened indigenous peoples culturally and politically, inspiring them to be heard in their own voices—as opposed to the stereotypes perpetrated by pop culture—artists from all tribes and walks of life have created an impressive body work, capturing the too often overlooked lives and realities of the contemporary indigenous world. Jim Denomie (b. 1955), Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, adds his unique Nanabozho-inspired images, charged with an irrepressible sense of humor and bold insights, to the visual discourse on indigenous culture and history, which he developed growing up in the Philips Neighborhood of Minneapolis, leading the life of a modern, not to mention educated (he has a BFA from the University of Minnesota), urban Indian.

This article focuses on the performance work of Anishinaabeg artist Rebecca Belmore. It bridges her creative work with the living histories of the indigenous people that are part of the cities of Toronto and Vancouver. I argue that her performance work creates, records, and stores indigenous stories of place, creating a living archive. I show how the artist’s ability to use her body as a tool shifts the colonial gaze to a space that can communicate the link between the land and indigenous stories of place. In selected performances, Belmore’s body becomes a vessel, creating a visual and embodied text that narrates indigenous stories of place that confront the historical implications of space in Canada, which is colonized, racialized, and gendered. I argue that Belmore’s performance and installation work builds a geographic imagination that (re)maps the city space through her gendered, colonized body. This presence shifts the colonial gaze to challenge white settler ideologies in the occupation of space through indigenous stories of place. I argue that Belmore’s performances and installations are both the site and the sight of the colonized gendered body, which forces the viewer to be aware of the geopolitics of space.

This article compares four Navajo lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) films. It emphasizes cinematic gaze, anti-LGBTQ2 violence, Navajo transgender women, Navajo cosmology, Native lesbian feminism, and two-spirit community activism. Directed by Euro-American Lydia Nibley, the Two Spirits (2009) documentary recounts Fred Martinez’s queer hate-crime murder and affirms Martinez’s Navajo sense of being a two-spirit effeminate male, or nádleeh, especially as related by Martinez’s mother, Pauline Mitchell, and the nádleeh scholar Wesley Thomas. Through interviews with the author, nádleehs Elton Naswood and Michelle Enfield praise Nibley’s film, featured by the Public Broadcast System’s Independent Lens nationally in June of 2011. They also voice a need for greater two-spirit and Navajo transgender women activist representations. In contrast to Two Spirits, the Miss Indian Transgender Arizona short overtly affirms a Native transgender identity. It is one of many short films that the activist NativeOut.com makes available online. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s (Navajo/Muskogee/Seminole) art installation film, An Aboriginal View with Aboriginal Dreams (2002), visually interrogates Navajo gender, sexuality, and sovereignty within a context of contemporary US/Navajo nationalism, the Iraq War, and gender suppression. A Native feminist perspective lends Tsinhnahjinnie’s film a foreboding sense that US militarism in the Middle East increases heterosexism on the Navajo Nation, a dynamic that culminates in the 2005 Diné Marriage Act, which restricts marriage to heterosexual couples. Finally, Carrie House’s (Navajo/Oneida) I Am short centers on diverse two-spirit activisms that Two Spirits mutes. Through a comparative analysis of the Native LGBTQ2 representations in Two Spirits, Miss Indian Transgender Arizona, An Aboriginal View with Aboriginal Dreams, and I Am, the essay foregrounds Navajo LGBTQ2 gazes that are culturally grounded, activist, and critical of US, Navajo, and Native American national heterosexisms.

This article roots out the relationship between American power and masculine desire in the popular film Night at the Museum (2006), which is so powerful that Theodore Roosevelt’s gaze facilitates the Indian model of Sacagawea to come to life. It is Roosevelt’s (Robin Williams’s) gaze followed by the spectator’s eye that continues the fraught romantic trope of Indian-white relations, emptying out colonial violence and political realities. These contemporary simulations of Indians, just like Curtis’s early 1900 plates, are entangled in networks of power and capitalism. Indigenous simulations and performances have always been engaged in these circuits of capitalism and power structures.