Miss Chief at the Met
Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman remixes North American history in his new paintings at the Metropolitan Museum.
isn’t a time-traveling, gender-fluid, indigenous sex goddess exactly what art needs right about now? The Met seems to think so and has commissioned the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman, whose work often features his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, to produce a pair of 11-by22-foot paintings titled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) for its Great Hall (opens December 19). Monkman, 54, gave up abstraction to communicate ideas about the history of colonial settlement in North America to a more mainstream audience, and somehow as a result he has become “about as famous as a living painter can be” in Canada (according to the Globe and Mail). Created in part in the spirit of the carnivalesque “history paintings” of Robert Colescott, the Met commissions are pastiches that draw on works in the Met’s collection to foreground the perspective of indigenous peoples. Monkman’s canvases come to life thanks to Miss Chief; the character was previously invited to give commentary in one of the galleries of the Met’s American collection, where she was quoted in the wall text alongside Ralph Earl’s Marinus Willett (ca. 1791). She notes that, “limited by colonial blinkers,” Earl failed to “adequately depict” her “radiance” as one of the three tiny Native figures in the distant landscape, going on to detail Willett’s atrocities against Native Americans before signing soon-broken treaties with the Crees in 1790.
What attracted you to the representational language of European painting?
After several years as an abstract painter, I realized that the language was so cryptic and personal that the themes I wanted to address in my work, like colonized sexuality, were being missed. As an indigenous person, I was looking at European art very objectively from the outside and noticing that their most sophisticated form of visual storytelling had been discarded by Western artists as something passé. Unlike Mexico, where they actually painted the atrocities perpetrated by the Spanish colonizers, in the United States and Canada, there is no tradition of history painting that reveals the history of colonialism. So it’s an opportunity to fill in these gaps in the art history of this continent, to talk about these experiences of indigenous people during the colonial period and that are still continuing—I still consider colonization as ongoing.
How would you describe these works?
There are two paintings. In the first, we see settlers arriving on the shores of North America and being welcomed by the First People. Miss Chief is there, helping people ashore. Behind her are scenes populated by other indigenous peoples I drew from the museum’s collection, images of different interactions. For the second painting, Miss Chief is in a boat, posed like Washington Crossing the Delaware, along with a variety of indigenous people piloting this boat through a stormy sea. The themes are of displacement and migration: Indigenous people are being displaced again, and they’re setting sail. But it also refers to other populations around the world that are being displaced now, not just for political reasons but because of the shifting climate as well.
How did you first invent Miss Chief?
I wanted an artistic alter ego who could live inside the paintings to reverse the gaze and to riff on 19th-century American artists like George Catlin, [who] would paint Native Americans but would also place himself inside his own paintings to self-aggrandize. I wanted to create a character who presented an empowered example of decolonized indigenous sexuality and our understanding of multiple genders. She was inspired by people like We’wha, who was an accomplished Zuni potter as well as a lhamana, or two-spirit individual. She also represented her nation in Washington. I stole Miss Chief ’s first outfit from Cher’s “Half-Breed”–Bob Mackie outfit for her cultural and gender cross-dressing.