Where does art belong? Who should be the gatekeepers of creations that have long since been stolen, bartered, and traded? In her artist talk at the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, Wendy Red Star engaged with the idea of archives, historical narratives, and creative expression of Native Americans in a postcolonial world. For some indigenous communities in the United States, the question of artistic ownership has recently been a fraught one, especially when it comes to ancestral works. If a piece of art “belongs” to a museum, whether through means of forced repossession or purchase, it is often stored away from the public eye in airtight subterranean vaults, or only made accessible during opening hours to museum visitors. But if a piece is in possession of the native community from whence it originates, it might be appreciated in a more personal context and celebrated for its cultural significance.

As Beth Piatote, Associate Professor of Native American Studies and Comparative Literature, suggested during Red Star’s talk, the realm of the archive replaces private life with the public eye. As a result, indigenous people are forced to find “intimacy and connection in institutional spaces.” When a community has fought for the reappropriation—or, as Red Star calls it, rematriation—of artistic pieces from museum archives, it can be particularly heartbreaking to see pieces that rightfully belong to that community on display, and have to leave them behind. 

Red Star describes the evocative experience of encountering her own grandfather’s belongings in a museum where she was not required to wear gloves, an experience uncommon in archival spaces. To hold an ancestral object so intimately in one’s hands in the context of a sterile environment focused on the long-term preservation of an object produces a distinctly surreal feeling, one undergirded by a sense of rebellion. As Red Star suggested, it feels “forbidden” to touch these objects directly. But the curator emphasized that the archival materials had been dispossessed, affirming, “these are yours.”

Indigenous art often eludes the control of Native communities: heritage pieces, including practical items like brushes, clothes, accessories, and other personal objects, end up in museum archives and exhibitions of indigenous art that are not curated by Native communities themselves. 

But Red Star acknowledged that even if rematriation might be ideal, other compromises might be more realistic. “We just need to see those things,” she stated. If museums and archives are not going to provide Native people with unequivocal access to Native art, Native communities, she suggested, should at least be compensated for the depreciation of their cultural heritage by the institutions that reap the benefits of their history.

In the hands of museums curated by non-Native people, it seems, Native art is at risk of being cast in over-indulgent and fantastical exhibitions. Indeed, Native art has long offered a source of spectacle for white audiences. We might frame the place of Native art in the Eurocentric cultural consciousness in parallel to that of art from West Asia and North Africa, which has produced a fantasy of what Edward Said theorized as orientalism. The concept of orientalism is highly applicable to Western attitudes about Native art, in which indigenous practices are viewed as mystical when seen through the lens of Eurocentric cultural consciousness. Orientalism is a worldview based on a constructed binary opposition between the ideology that informed manifest destiny and the communities that were directly impacted by it, and a tool of colonial and imperial domination. The contextual nuances and history of these communities, and especially knowledge acquired through lived experiences, are lost on non-Native artists, scholars, and archivists who have subjected Native art to mystification and mythologizing in ways that erase the interpersonal significance that the objects hold. The displacement of Native art from its place of origin perpetuates imperialism in the name of cultural enrichment and the generation of knowledge.

Non-Native art curation also obscures the deeply specific nuances of the interpersonal meanings that art objects hold for Native communities, distorting their meanings to fit harmful narratives. Mainstream US American culture has invented a contradictory understanding of indigenous peoples: on the one hand, Native culture is often described as highly spiritual, even supernaturally enlightened, and thus in need of rescue from its own distance from civilization; on the other hand, indigenous people are also described as victims of the colonialism that has forcefully “civilized” them. A postcolonial lens allows us to understand these perspectives as symptoms of a white savior complex and white guilt, but also a reductive depiction of Native identity that defines it only in relation to that of the white settler. A greater appreciation and understanding of Native art would combat this narrative, but understandings must come from the Native communities and the familial units of tribes.

Red Star’s accession series, a collection of artworks based on archived pieces from a museum, actively inverts these injustices by combatting the erasure of Native narratives through the creation of new, alternative rhetorics. The series uses catalog cards from a museum collection, painted and illustrated by anonymous artists of anonymized pieces, which lack the context of Native objects such as their purpose, place of origin, use, and other significant details. Red Star recontextualizes the objects they depict by photographing them with similar objects at Crow Fair, an event where Red Star’s own tribe celebrated their cultural heritage and shared identity. 

The depreciation of cultural heritage undermines the private, personal power of art. Mainstream culture in the US simultaneously collects art from Native communities while excluding Native people from decisions about how their art is used and presented. The lack of cultural capital produced by white settler tradition encourages a drive to collect and deprive other communities of their art by constructing archives and other vault-like structures that decontextualize and diminish the value of art in relation to its community. Rematriation, as Red Star puts it, is an endeavor that challenges the colonial epistemes of today and would take away from the revenue that museums acquire from the voyeurism of museum-goers. But in Native communities, art circulates as an alternative form of wealth, playing what is arguably a more valuable role in a different kind of economy. Taken away from the prying eyes of a public that would reduce its meaning to a white fantasy, indigenous art poses an even greater subversion: rematriation can lead to the reanimation of Native autonomy.