Yeah… shit’s about to go sideways. I’ll take you to Amerind. You’ll like it, looks like home., 2016

Digital intervention on an Emily Carr Painting (Cape Mudge: An Indian Family with Totem Pole, 1912)

This is an intervention that draws upon my appreciation of Star Trek and the love of understanding my culture and family history. Emily Carr’s Cape Mudge: An Indian Family with Totem Pole is a painting of my home village, and that of my grandfather and his grandfather, Chief Billy Assu. As with What a Great Spot for a Walmart! (2014), the personal connection I have to the source material for this work has made this intervention particularly satisfying.

There have been a few episodes in the Star Trek canon that have appropriated “Native American” life, culture and, most notably, stereotypes of Indigenous cultures. A number of these storylines include an extraterrestrial visit to Earth, where the aliens have intervened with or removed the Indigenous people from the land.

In the early 20th century, Chief Billy Assu, in the name of progress, urged his people to maintain traditional values yet adopt colonial ways to provide a better future for our people. Perhaps he felt adoption was better than assimilation? To that end, he destroyed the longhouses in the village of Cape Mudge, dragging them out to sea using a steam-donkey attached to a barge. Where longhouses once stood, you’ll now find single-family homes.

In the episode “The Paradise Syndrome” (1968), from Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise crew lands on a planet that is seemingly inhabited by Native Americans. Spock is able to decipher the writing on an obelisk that protects the planet, and he discovers that a group of well-meaning aliens—known as the Preservers—removed these Native Americans from Earth, transporting them, along with everything they were familiar with, to a planet halfway across the galaxy. There, these people were able to flourish, never having known the effects of colonization.