This Timely Exhibit Features Native American Artists Who Are Dismantling Identity Politics

You will not find Indigenous Woman at your local Barnes & Noble. You cannot subscribe on Amazon. Although it’s just as glamorous as Vogue and Bazaar, the best way to peruse this glossy fashion magazine is by visiting the Princeton University Art Museum.

Indigenous Woman is edited by Martine Gutierrez, a trans artist of Mayan descent. Gutierrez is also the art director, the photographer, the stylist, and the model. She founded the magazine in 2018 and has produced a single 128-page issue. With that publication, she not only fulfilled her personal desire to become a cover girl, but also cross-examined the fashion industry’s values.

Gutierrez is not the first person to spoof the genre, nor the first to critique the industry for lack of inclusivity. What makes Indigenous Woman compelling – beyond the artist’s virtuoso performance in every role on the masthead – is the layer of self-examination: Against a backdrop of identity politics, in which people are expected to define the necessary and sufficient conditions of their being as strictly as a logical proposition, and to declare their personal allegiances for all eternity, Gutierrez responds with a montage of possibility. Inspired in part by her change in gender, her shape shifting constitutes a refusal to conform even to conventional standards of otherness.

Otherness, and control over the ways in which marginalized peoples are defined, are central issues in the Princeton University Art Museum exhibition. Featuring the work of nine contemporary North American artists of indigenous descent, all of whom use photography in their practice, the exhibit expands upon a special issue of Aperture guest-edited by the Apsáalooke (Crow) photographer Wendy Red Star. Consistent with Gutierrez’s perspective – and with Red Star’s own art – most of the participants look askance at identity as a construct.

In some cases, the resistance is subtle. The Yup’ik artist Jacqueline Cleveland documents the complex meaning of foraging in a series of photographs documenting life in the Yup’ik tribal region of western Alaska. Several of the photographs show traditional harvesting practices and foods, but Cleveland is equally attentive to the packaged goods that supplement the Yup’ik diet, such as Cup Noodles and Tang, which must be foraged in other ways. Contradicting the identity imposed upon Alaska Natives as hunter-gatherers living outside the confines of civilization – a modern-day permutation on the myth of the noble savage – Cleveland shows material evidence of survivance: a pragmatic approach to preservation of traditions by peoples whose lands and lifeways have been decimated by colonization.

Other work in the exhibit more aggressively challenges identity, including typical characterizations of figures with whom mainstream society identifies. For instance, the Mohawk artist Alan Michelson uses an iconic bust of George Washington as a surface upon which to project maps showing the Iroquois villages destroyed by his armies. By these means, Washington is given a new identity: Instead of Founding Father, the first President is named Hanodaga:yas, meaning Town Destroyer.

Michelson is concerned with memory, and the false memories that support settler culture. Koyolzinth (Karen Miranda Rivadeneira) is interested in the latent memories of the Manta people of the Ecuadorian coast, from whom she is descended. In an extraordinary series of black-and-white photographs, she represents the story of the Sky Woman, who fell from the heavens and gave birth to the first people according to Amerindian oral tradition. Koyolzinth’s photographs directly evoke Sky Woman, embodying her as a nude figure in rugged outdoor settings. But there is more than meets the eye. These images simultaneously show the act of recollecting Sky Woman’s story through contact with Earth’s surface, a practice reflected in the word iyarina, which means “to remember by reflecting and contemplating the land” in the Kichwa language of Ecuador.

The land becomes a source of identity in Koyolzinth’s work, a role that is often voiced in oral tradition. Unlike the social construction of identity, which typically depends on differentiation and discrimination, this identification is unifying, much as the Sky Woman is the mother of everyone. Iyarina is the origin of self-identification. The process need never end.