Ganteaume and other NMAI staff worked
with Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa), president of the Native American Journalists Association, and John Smock, the director of photo- journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, to select two projects that stood out from the 12 that photojournalists sub- mitted. While they cover vastly different top- ics, both photo essays tell “unique, contem- porary stories not well known to non-Native audiences,” says Ganteaume. For the first, “The Genízaro Pueblo of
Abiquiú,” Diné and Ho-Chunk photojournal- ist Russel Albert Daniels lived among the resi- dents of this small community during the fall of 2019. These Spanish and American Indian descendants have lived in this pueblo in north- west New Mexico for more than 250 years. Smock says that Daniels’s work has “a timeless quality.” His black-and-white portraits, Gan- teaume says, “just have a way of getting directly to people’s characters.” In this issue, Daniels talks about his experience living among the Genízaro people and his own journey to be- coming a photographer. Also in this issue, Salish and Kootenai
Outside the National Museum of the American Indian in 2019, Métis artist Jaime Black performs a tribute to the hundreds if not thousands of North American Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered or disap- peared during the past four decades. The dresses in her REDress Project instillations represent those now gone.
encapsulated the spirit of the protest: U.S. Marine veterans were leading the protestors in a perfect V formation, as if into combat. One of them wore a red Tlingit robe and another was waving her tribe’s flag. Urness says she began to cry: “It was fate.” Her award-winning photo has been displayed in several museums and was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Since the Standing Rock protests, other
Indigenous affairs have gained national media attention and inspired artists to create works that heal. The tragedy of Native women being raped, abducted and murdered, known about for decades, finally began to be acknowledged in the mainstream press as demonstrators in red dresses were seen across the United States and Canada. The ongoing crisis prompted Métis artist Jaime Black to launch the REDress Project, a series of red dress installations, one of which was displayed outside the National Museum of the American Indian in 2019. The dresses eerily floating in the wind symbolize those who are gone. This year, people throughout the world
have turned to all forms of art—paintings, drawings, music, dance, sculpture and more— to cope with the depressing fear and isolation caused by the coronavirus. Tsawout First Na- tion Howard La Fortune in Victoria, British
10 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2020
Columbia, has been a wood carver for the past 40 years. He carved a bear mask out of yellow cedar that emulates the masks everyone is now having to wear for protection from the corona- virus because “a bear symbolizes strength, and that is what we need about now to get through all this.” After his mask won first place in First American Art magazine’s virtual exhibition of COVID-19-inspired masks called “Masked Heroes,” he received requests for several more. Even though La Fortune’s masks aren’t for medical protection, he is writing “COVID-19 Pandemic 2020” on each of them because, he says, his customers “want to remember.”
FOR NATIVE COMMUNITIES
Stories, whether told through words, images or art, have immense power to move people and cross cultural boundaries. However, In- digenous peoples are not always in control of their own narratives. That was the inspiration behind NMAI’s new photo exhibitions for “Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field,” which are featured in this issue and online at
AmericanIndian.si.edu/developing- stories. NMAI’s Cécile Ganteaume, who curat- ed the exhibitions, says the museum wished to collaborate with Native journalists in the telling of their own stories.
photojournalist Tailyr Irvine talks about the challenges of interviewing her family and friends on her Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana for her photo essay, “Reser- vation Mathematics: Navigating Love in Na- tive America.” This exhibition dives into how U.S. government regulations that use the con- cept of American Indians’ so-called “blood quantum”—or amount of tribal affiliation in a person’s ancestry—to determine tribal enrollment eligibility impacts their choice of partners. Ahtone says that while this is an is- sue known to every Native American, “putting faces to the issue is important.” Irvine’s work, he says, puts “a human touch to it.” Journalists and photojournalists are pro-
fessional storytellers who objectively pursue and report the facts. However, everyone’s life experiences invariably shape what one sees and hears. Smock says the field of photojour- nalism is “reinventing itself” to respond to the growing need to give members of tradi- tionally underrepresented groups “more of a voice in how their story is told.” Ahtone says, “mainstream media tends to be reporting about communities rather than reporting for communities.” On the other hand, as Chero- kee Nation journalist Bryan Pollard writes in “More Than News” in this issue, Indigenous media “is an engaged partner, serving its com- munity and its audience with depth, clarity and perspective.”
PHOTO BY NMAI STAFF
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