In 2013, the artist Edgar Heap of Birds created Native Hosts, an installation on the Pitzer College campus comprising twenty sign panels recognizing sites and landmarks in the Los Angeles basin. Heap of Birds’s public artwork combined familiar place names with those in the indigenous Tongva language (for example by juxtaposing “California,” here made strange by the artist’s signature use of reversed text, with “Povu’nga,” the Tongva word for Long Beach). Evoking both a forgotten indigenous history and a contemporary urban-indigenous population that has been silenced, Native Hosts also foregrounds the conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges that face scholars of indigenous cultures when addressing potentially sensitive images and subjects — ones that indigenous communities have, in many cases, struggled to protect from broader circulation. Strategic acts of cultural and political sovereignty, these enactments of indigenous agency differ from the violent erasures of indigenous histories by the settler state. How does scholarship acknowledge these silences?
Bill Anthes is Professor of Art History and a member of the Art Field Group at Pitzer College. He is the author of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 (Duke University Press, 2006) and a contributing author to Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice by Rebekah Modrak (Routledge, 2011). He has received fellowships and awards from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, the Rockefeller Foundation/Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. He is currently participating in the four-year global collaboration Multiple Modernisms, focusing on indigenous modernisms from Africa, North America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and supported by the Leverhulme Trust in association with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. His book on the Cheyenne-Arapaho contemporary artist Edgar Heap of Birds will be published by Duke University Press in 2015.
Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho), Native Hosts, Claremont, California, 2013
Photo: Laurie Babcock. Artwork © Edgar Heap of Birds
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