Powerful Native gathering
Wendy Red Star’s striking installation reclaims historical Indigenous images
Step into an alcove at the Broad museum and you will find yourself in the middle of an important Indigenous summit. Here is Chief Black Hawk of the Winnebago, decked out in a patterned robe. There is Chief Goes to War (Sioux), in feathered headdress and beaded breast plate. Bear Woman (Arapaho) sits in a tunic of fringed leather, as Freckle Face stands above her in a long skirt and patterned shawl. Welcoming everyone to the proceedings, as a larger-than-life image adhered to one wall, is White Swan, an Apsáalooke (Crow) citizen, who, over the course of a storied life, served as a military scout for Gen. Custer and later became a noted ledger artist.
This remarkable gathering was staged by Oregon-based artist Wendy Red Star, who is a member of the Apsáalooke tribe. Though it’s more accurate to call it a restaging, since the imagery she employs is drawn largely from the Indian Congress of 1898, held on the occasion of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha.
Intended to herald the development of the Western United States, the fair was a showcase for agricultural
production, featuring potatoes from Idaho and oranges from California, as well as new technology. (Think: baby incubators and plows.) Also on hand for the proceedings were more than 500 Indigenous people representing three dozen U.S. tribes for a gathering that was as much spectacle as it was an opportunity for Indigenous communities across regions and ethnicities to come together.
The brainchild of Edward Rosewater, owner of the Omaha Bee, the congress was managed by James Mooney, an ethnographer who had also studied the Ghost Dance. Whatever educational mission may have been tossed about, the event, ultimately, was meant to provide a slice of Indigenous life to the fair’s paying visitors.
“It is desired that the encampment should be as thoroughly aboriginal in every respect as practicable,” read a missive distributed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “and that the primitive traits and characteristics of the several tribes should be distinctly set forth.”
Hundreds of Indigenous people descended on the expo’s grounds on the northern edges of Omaha, camping out in tepees and wickiups. Mooney commissioned photographer Frank A. Rinehart to record the proceedings — which included taking studio portraits of all the leaders present, as well as the encampments themselves.
He also photographed ceremonies staged at the site, like a Ghost Dance, held by members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. (The ritual had emerged as a form of spiritual anti-settler resistance in the West as Indigenous dispossession reached its peak in the late 19th century.)
Rinehart’s photos (a set of which are maintained by the Omaha Public Library) serve as remarkable raw material in Red Star’s hands.
She has taken his portraits and cut away their formal backdrops, presenting the congress’ participants as silhouettes on a set of stepped shelves. It’s a design she borrowed from the expo itself: specifically, the stepped displays employed by agricultural concerns to show off regional fruits. At the far end of the display, she has included a separate set of images that Rinehart took around Red Star’s hometown of Pryor, Mont., as well as a color image of an Apsáalooke sacred site known as Baahpuuo. The entire installation is trimmed with red, white and blue bunting. (It is part of a group show at the Broad, curated by Sarah Loyer, that explores the ways in which artists have used the symbolism of the U.S. flag in their work.)
“The Indian Congress,” as Red Star’s piece is titled, is a stunner. It highlights the ways in which Native people have been put on display — in fairs, in museums, in photographs — while also subverting that very idea. The artist takes images of Indigenous figures made for the gaze of white society and reappropriates them, giving them literal dimension on the stepped platforms.
To stand among them is to look into their faces — dapper, jaunty, sad, serious, beautiful and worn — and to feel as if, at any second, you might hear their chattering voices come to life.
It is a display, ultimately, that turns the viewer into the spectacle. To walk between the stepped platforms is to feel as if all of the Indigenous figures are seated in a grand reviewing stand and that they are gazing at you.
In a talk organized by Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum last year (the piece is part of the museum’s permanent collection), Red Star said she was drawn to Rinehart’s images because they are “beautiful,” but also because they are extraordinarily well cataloged, including the name and tribal affiliation of each sitter, allowing scholars to dig into their individual histories. In Red Star’s case, that includes members of her own tribe.
But ultimately, her interest was most piqued by the gathering itself. “I was just in awe of the magnitude of 500 individual Native people gathering together,” she said. And in her work, she hoped to give viewers “maybe a tiny little bit of what that might have felt like.”
My best guess: remarkable and intensely bittersweet.