Centuries after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, harmful stereotypes about Native Americans have permeated our society and still have yet to be corrected. “All of our tropes about Native Americans come from these very static notions of what it means to be Native American,” says Raka Nandi, the Museum of Science & History’s director of exhibits and collections.
To challenge these stereotypes that pervade pop culture from sports mascots to Halloween costumes, the traveling exhibit “Savages and Princesses” has come to MoSH. It features more than 40 pieces by 12 contemporary Indigenous artists from different tribes, whose work of different mediums challenges and subverts preconceived ideas about Native-American cultures and people. “I tend to think that art is a really unique tool for having difficult conversations,” Nandi says, “and it’s a way in which you can surprise people and knock them out of their comfort zones, and so that’s what these art pieces are doing.”
One of the artists, Zach Presley of the Chickasaw tribe, was inspired after being rejected from Native-American art shows because his work was not “Native enough.” In response, Presley, who works in collage and digital art, created images with stereotypical imagery of tepees, leaders in headdresses, and the like, with superimposed lettering that pokes holes in what is expected of Native-American art, like Nandi’s favorite of Presley’s, which reads, “Here is yet another goddamn southwest painting to go above your couch.”
Other pieces are much darker. Micah Wesley’s examines the disturbing history of scalping. “There was a time when Native Americans’ scalps were taken and collected as artifacts,” says Nandi. “Hair, bones, and skin of Native-American people were displayed as curiosities, and this piece is examining the brutality that Native-American bodies have been subjected to.”
But by including artists of different points of view, Nandi says, “I hope when people come to see this exhibit that they realize the Native-American communities are incredibly diverse and the stereotypes these artists are confronting have a real impact on how Indigenous people are viewed today.”
“Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes,” Museum of Science & History, 3050 Central, on display through March 16th.