Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and 'New Materialisms' in Contemporary Art
Third Text, 2013
Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour of theorizing the agency and liveliness of matter. The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite dialogue among a wider host of agents, raising the possibility of an ethics that binds humans to the material entities upon which our livelihoods depend. However, any vision of global environmental justice is incomplete without engaging longstanding indigenous philosophies of materiality. The authors devote the first portion of this essay to an analysis of why it has been difficult for the ‘new materialisms’ to incorporate indigenous intellectual traditions into discussions of non-human agency, focusing on contemporary arts discourse. They then turn to a discussion of recent works by Native North American artists Jimmie Durham, Rebecca Belmore, Will Wilson and Jolene Rickard, which incorporate indigenous understandings of material with an acute awareness of the contemporary, global challenges of co-habitation.
Indigenous Art and Sovereignty Inspiring Change against Environmental Degradation
eTropic, 2020
This special issue on “Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity: In(ter)ventions, Recycling, Sovereignty" constitutes a body of creative contributions and academic articles addressing numerous forms of artistic practices of the Pacific Islands, Australia, French Guiana, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Inspired by Indigenous artists and writers whose practices and creativity help reimagine sustainable ways to inhabit the world, this introduction and our special issue interrogate contemporary environmental issues and the legacy of colonisation. They examine how Indigenous artists and writers, and artists working with Indigenous artists and communities, have for decades raised awareness about environmental issues, and encouraged people to regain their agency to struggle against environmental degradation and further destruction of Indigenous people’s societies and health. This introduction contextualises the concepts and Indigenous terms used by artists to express their ...
This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.
The Indigenization of Ecological Art
BA Fine Art, 2022
How contemporary artists Amar Kanwar and Hamish Fulton use indigenous practices to critique the human intervention of nature. Study of contemporary ecological art, its roots in western history and how pioneering land artists focused the conversation to indigenous voices as a major part of regaining environmental awareness.
Book Introduction: Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation
Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, 2017
This is the introduction to my book, available from Duke University Press. To order at a 30% discount please visit https://www.dukeupress.edu/art-for-an-undivided-earth and enter the coupon code E17HORTN during checkout In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.
Antipode, 2024
Indigenous Peoples are gaining renewed attention within both policy and academia, as examples of "resilience" and of non-humanist, non-modern ways of relating to nature, which might, it is hoped, provide tools to withstand the socio-ecological crises associated with "the Anthropocene". This paper argues that such representations obscure both their own colonial foundations and the ongoing forms of racialised dispossession and ecocide faced by Indigenous Peoples today. Instead, we conceptualise indigeneity and nature as deeply entangled categories that are co-produced with capitalist modernity. Engaging anti-colonial and Marxist scholarship, and drawing on our long-term research with Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Colombia, we highlight how discursive and material assemblages of indigeneity and nature are dialectically linked to capitalist processes of dispossession and subaltern efforts to contest these. We further highlight how romanticised accounts of non-modern nature-cultures are unsettled by the violent world-making of colonial capitalism and the unequal burdens placed on Indigenous territories and bodies. We use an ethnographic vignette from the Bolivian Chaco to illustrate the messy everyday ways in which real Indigenous people navigate, contest, endure, and make do amidst the contradictory processes of racialisation, dispossession, and conditional recognition that characterise their positioning within colonial capitalism. In doing so, we show how thinking from the sacrifice zones of extractive capitalism unsettles contemporary debates on decolonising nature in the Anthropocene.
"All Our Relations" as an Eco-Art Historical Challenge: Lessons from Standing Bear's Muslin
Ecologies, Agents, Terrains (Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press), 2018
This essay centers on a muslin painting of the Battle of the Little Bighorn completed by the Minneconjou Lakota man Standing Bear in 1899. I consider how this powerful object transmitted Lakota principles of interconnectedness indicated by the prayerful phrases, "all our relations" and "water is life," between nineteenth-century Indian Removal and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. EXCERPT: How might the ecological webs we spin incorporate, rather than obfuscate, violent dislocations that connect past and present? What kind of “eco–art history” might we compose to confront, critique, and cross traumatic divisions engendered by settler colonialism, a process out of which our discipline was forged and with which it remains entangled? Such questions bind ethical activism to a scholarly praxis attentive to Indigenous and environmental justice in the twenty-first century. They also prompt a deeper engagement with past materials as a crucial means of transmission, as I will explore in relation to an artwork created by the Minneconjou Lakota man Standing Bear at the turn of the twentieth century.