Re-envisioning Native Cultures in Public

All too frequently, Native identities, cultures, and histories are either completely absent from the public sphere or, if present, perpetuate longstanding myth-conceptions and grotesque stereotypes. A range of actors, from the unwittingly misguided to the willfully malicious, contribute to this ongoing repression, misrepresentation, and reductive simplification of the richly varied histories and experiences of Native peoples in the United States. The forces working against this tide are increasingly diverse, too, particularly as members of Native communities here in New England and elsewhere align with other groups to complement and extend their own rich traditions of resistant activism.

A Participatory Discussion

“Re-envisioning Native Cultures in Public” is a participatory forum. Its title refers to our objectives for this session: 

• to examine the subtle as well as overt strategies that continue to repress Native cultures in the public sphere, and 
• to re-envision—together, as a public—possibilities for challenging the dominant culture’s status quo.

To model, and not merely discuss, the necessity of the public dimension for such re-envisionings, our panel members have been reaching out to and inviting the participation of Native groups and others in the region. Also, the session is open to the public free of charge. (Thank you, NEASA.)

Share Your Experiences, Ideas, and Questions

To begin the session, we will outline some of the more significant problems and opportunities encountered in our own interventions in the public sphere. But, since the aim of the session is to provoke dialogue, we invite you to share your work, ideas, and questions here, in response to this post and others that our panel will be posting during the week. 

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

To help get the pre-conference discussion rolling, let me (Clarissa Ceglio) introduce the topic that I will touch on during my opening remarks: decolonizing the digital. Scholars, particularly those working in Postcolonial Digital Humanities, have noted—and call us to challenge—the ways in which digital spaces perpetuate historical and new forms of oppression as well as sustain whiteness as the normative category. 

What's wrong with this picture? 
A sample of Microsoft Office clip art 
categorized as "Native American."

The Microsoft Office clip art selected to illustrate this post is one such example. Perhaps you are familiar with this feature. If, for example, you want to add a copyright-free illustration, stock photograph, or similar visual element to a Microsoft Word document, simply select “insert” followed by “illustrations” and “clip art.” Then enter a search term to find images appropriate to your needs. The three cartoons shown here are a subset of the options yielded by searching on “Native American.”  I tried Indigenous, American Indian, First Peoples, and names of specific groups. I also searched for African American, Asian American, Hispanic, and Latino/a. The returns for these search terms included photographs of contemporary individuals staged to communicate such concepts as white-collar professionalism, academic achievement, loving family unit, recreational fun, member of multicultural group, etc. Not so for Native Americans; only one photograph in that group shows individuals in a contemporary setting. And, as if to confirm the invisibility of whiteness, terms such as European American, Anglo American, etc., each return a null set. (And the results for "white American" are quizzical.) Of course, there are better ways to secure fee-free images to illustrate a blog post or other communication about issues of Native representation. But consider that a reported 1 billion people worldwide now use Microsoft Office and that for many mainstream users, such as grade school teachers, this clip art is a go-to resource. But, we already know what's wrong with this picture; so, how might we productively re-envision this and other digital spaces? 

Please chime in by commenting here, on Twitter (#NEASA2013), on Facebook, and at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center on Saturday, September 28 at 10:45 am.

~Session panelists are:

Trudie Lamb Richmond, a Schaghticoke Elder, an activist involved in Native cultural and political issues for nearly 50 years, the past director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s Public Programs, and, recently, author of  “Weaving the Truth in the Absence of the Sacred: Wampum and Wampum Belts,” Connecticut Archaeology Bulletin 74 (2012);

Ruth G. Torres, a Schaghticoke community scholar and educator whose interests and research include examinations of Connecticut’s public policies related to the state’s indigenous peoples;

Clarissa Ceglio, research assistant for the University of Connecticut's Digital Media Center and a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University, whose work as a public historian includes a collaborative effort to bring Native histories and voices to Connecticut Humanities' online state encyclopedia project, ConnecticutHistory.org ; and

Session chair and moderator, Amy Den Ouden, who is an associate professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (2005) and co-editor of Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States (2013).