Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit), The American Dream Is Alie And Well. US Flag, felt, .50 cal ammunition, foam, gold leaf, plastic, 2012.

Patrick Dean Hubbell (Diné) “HONORING OUR FOREMOTHERS” oil, acrylic, oil stick, charcoal, natural earth pigment on canvas, mounted wood stretcher bar, 2020

Part 1: Remixing

Indigenous American artists are in a particularly privileged position to spot the various effects of colonialism and U.S. Empire, and we find this especially true when surveying contemporary indigenous pop art.

Pop artists like to remix imagery from the dominant culture, but what does it mean when indigenous artists do this? There are many reasons artists remix information, but for this essay, I will focus on the work by anti-colonial Native Pop artists, specifically those that remix the American flag. The central metaphor here is “remixing,” meaning repurposing, sampling, cutting up, and remaking. As we see in the examples above, in some cases indigenous artists create by taking material from the contemporary world–a tennis shoe, a highway sign, or baseball cap–and “indigenizing” it. This is done in stereotypical ways, but often by owning the stereotypes: Brian Jungen skins Nike shoes and adds long black hair to make bird masks; James Luna indigenizes a MAGA hat by adding beads, feathers, and an apparent mis-spelling. (It’s the German spelling of America, and on a hat that already symbolizes white supremacy to many people, the comical “K” communicates many things at once.)

Indigenizing is also done in non-stereotypical ways. Take for example New York Purchased, Stolen, Reclaimed (1986), where Edgar Heap-of-Birds remixes the signs of the state, the literal state highway signs, with questions from Indian Country. He often says that street signs connote settler authority, and we read and trust them automatically, without thinking. The artist subverts that authority and trust by turning a sign about distance into a sign about resistance. There is nothing around that says this object isn’t “real,” or that it is installation art. It totally fits in! I asked Heap-of-Birds where he fabricated New York Purchased, Stolen, Reclaimed, and he told me the name of the manufacturer, and then chuckled that the same company manufactures the actual New York state highway signs. “They are almost completely identical.”

What did Picasso and Steve Jobs say? “Good artists copy, but great artists steal.” This approach to art-making and information sharing is rampant across creative platforms, now more than ever, which is why our culture has been unofficially dubbed remix culture (with a complimentary remix studies). We are “a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce new products.” In his book, Remix Culture, Harvard Law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, relates this historical phase to the evolution of computer file sharing permissions. He says there are generally two types of files: Read Only (RO) and Read/Write (RW), and we are currently watching the older form shift into the newer as more people learn to program and become producers.

“Program or be programmed,” as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff puts it, and it appears this metaphor of sharing permissions is extremely useful when looking at Indigenous art from all over the world. Colonized people repurpose and remix the dominant culture’s materials in order to read/write them, rewrite them, and resist them. A counter-intuitive Aikido move using the power of the opponent against them, remixing also becomes a way to exercise some degree of agency and autonomy–to experience something other than “read-only.”

Merritt Johnson (Mohawk, Blackfoot, Irish, Swedish), Exorcizing America. DIY instructional video, released Feb 13, 2019

This is one reason multi-racial artist Merritt Johnson says she remixes objects from the dominant culture. Last month, Johnson released a new installment of her Exorcizing America DIY video series on youtube. Her calming voice describes exactly how to make a ladder out of an American flag, in both English and Spanish. Although they are released on the most popular video platform of all time, Johnson’s videos also play in art museums and prominent art galleries.

Video stills from Exorcizing America

You can see one at the Nerman Museum in Kansas City right now. I asked Johnson why she remixes the flag specifically, and she made some really important points we should take time to understand:

“The US flag has been used as a symbol of settler claim, ownership and to assert the sovereignty of a settler government on Indigenous land. It’s present at borders and federal and state buildings and parks as a reminder that there is no public land, there is no acknowledgment of Indigenous connection to land alongside the US Flag, as many Indigenous nations have flags. So to make the flag into something that functions to oppose the power and sovereignty of US border enforcement makes sense to me. It’s a simple action, and it’s a form of creation through destruction which is sometimes necessary, it connects to so much of life and survival in terms of how energy is converted and how living things survive. Remixing is a form of agency as well, it makes space for multiplicity and intersectionality of voices and experiences.”

Merritt Johnson is also known for weaving bomb-shaped baskets filled with corn kernels — visual reminders that indigeneity is a weapon against colonialism.

Double Agents

Through remixing, colonized people can encode their own histories into the dominant symbols, thus ensuring their survival. Dominant symbols, after all, have incredible staying power.

One striking example of this are the Mickey Mouse kachinas that were popular in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. This kachina, who is actually the ancient Hopi mouse hero Tusan Homichi dressed up as Mickey Mouse, is famous for saving his friends and family from a vicious hawk. Now his black and white war paint helps him become Mickey Mouse to fight colonialism, and the visual punning, or rhyming, or pinging opens up a window of hyperlinks into another world brimming with power, humor, darkness, survivance, and transmotion.

The large energizes the little as the atmosphere energizes the flame. After Mickey Mouse formally entered our collective consciousness in the late 1920s, his popularity helped sell more Hopi kachinas, aiding the survival of the artists and their families. But which is the large and which is the little; which is the atmosphere and which is the flame? Perhaps Mickey Mouse took off so fast in this country because we already had the older, larger Tusan Homichi whistling and dancing in our subconscious. Similarly, Art Deco took off so fast in the 1920s because U.S. Americans were already deep in the throws of Canastromania. Let’s remember that Walt Disney collected Native American baskets, paintings, and kachinas, and his love of Studio Style deer paintings led to the creation of one of his most famous works: Bambi.

The story of Tusan Homichi, the plucky “dirty rodent,” echoes the Hopi’s fight against the United States government: A little mouse is up against a humongous hawk. It’s David and Goliath, where the underdog wins not only by collaborating with the natural world but also by using their opponent’s gifts against them. The hawk is so large, so fast, and so confident, that he impales himself onto a hidden spear the mouse set up in the ground beforehand.

It’s important to note that hybrid and remixed native American art objects are not so much “collaborations” between two worlds, because lopsided power-relations don’t create an environment suitable for real collaboration. Hybridity here is more of a technology of survival and resistance; a strategy of survivance.

Through a visual mashup, a settler colonial symbol now reminds Hopi people of their own stories and spirituality, of their own strengths, and of home.

Hybrid, multiculturally encoded (and actively encoding) objects like the Mickey Mouse kachina are sometimes called “double objects,” like double agents, since they come from different cultures and can speak different languages. Our Lady of Guadalupe may be another example of a double agent. Arguably the most distributed image of all time, on one level she represents the quickest way to convert or assimilate a people: make the new God look like them so they can relate to it. But on another level, she represents the best way to stay connected to your indigenous roots in the face of genocide: make the new God look like you, so you are continually reminded of your own people. Is Mother Mary dressed up as a Native American, or is a Native American dressed up as Mother Mary? Or both!? Neither? Is this an entirely new, hybrid being? Which of the two cultures actually started the story of the Lady of Guadalupe doesn’t really matter, either. It was picked up and spread like a meme, like new technology, like medicine, maybe even like armor. We should remember that art and armor, arsenal, arms, and artillery are all etymologically related to the Latin root, “ars.”

There are Native American Mickey Mice, Native American Mothers of Christ, and now let’s look at Native American American Flags and how they too are agents of resistance.

Navajo Pictorial Weaving and “Curio Loom” from New Mexico

1874

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

Textile scholar Kate Kent calls this 19th century Navajo weaving one of the first woven pictorials. It’s not a flag; it’s a picture of a flag. Purposefully incomplete, we get to see its guts, and while half of the textile depicts a version of the American flag, the other half is a kind of “eye-dazzler,” so named for its brilliant colors and patterns. The glitches and stripes at the top reflect and integrate the bottom, and the visual glitching in the stars is oddly contemporary. This is “art for art’s sake,” meant to be displayed on a wall, not just as curio but also as conversation piece.

To the initiated, this isn’t just an American flag. Those crosses, for example, are not just “stars,” but are also symbols for the four holy mountains which demarcate the Navajo homeland, Diné Bikéyah. The cross also signifies the four directions and four holy winds, which are gods, and it is a reminder of the four worlds that emerge and unfold into ours. Navajo crosses also connote the important “whirling logs” story. Some of them are separated from their canton, forming a constellation that could be Cassiopeia, the great mother, but it could also be the tale of Scorpio or the Navajo rabbit. Also, those stripes harken back to the first-phase chief blankets. Stripes signified wisdom and power already. Like stars and crosses, they are much older than the American flag.

Jenny Anne Taylor (Uintah Ute), Nations, 2002, glass beads, leather, nylon thread, National Museum of the American Indian

Each five-pointed star in the US flag symbolizes something else as well: a state in the Union. The Kansas State motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, To The Stars Through Difficulty, really meant To The Union Through Difficulty. Jenny Anne Chapoose Tylor cuts to the chase in her beaded flag, “Nations,” and literally depicts them as state abbreviations sandwiched between the years they entered the Union. Within the sky field we can read the Pledge of Allegiance and also these two indigenous prayers:

“Some day the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die. And when she dies, you too will die.” John Hollow Horn, Oglala Lakota, 1932 “We are born free and united brothers, each as much a lord as the other. . . . I am the first and last of my nation . . . subject only to the Great Spirit. . . .” Huron, 1693

The blood red and bone white stripes are filled with the names of 456 tribes, similar perhaps to how the stripes in the Flag of Honor are filled with the names of victims of 9–11.

Taylor used more than 130,000 glass seed beads to make this American flag, which she said was a way to mourn after 9–11.

Velma Kee Craig (Navajo), BarCode / QR Code Flag, 24” x 16” wool, 2013

No Stars

Teacher, artist, poet and blogger Velma Craig indigenizes the flag by changing the materials and by subverting the symbols to reflect important indigenous issues. She lives near Pheonix, Arizona, and says: “For the “stars” portion of my American flag, I duplicated a QR code off of a sign posted in the front yard of a home in my neighborhood that was currently in foreclosure.” (Foreclosure itself was arguably invented by the United States as a way to deal with the indigenous people. Other western nations don’t allow it). Craig says weaving is an important way to work through grief, and that the act of weaving is a “continual prayer.”

Beading and Weaving the Flag

The tradition of beading and weaving the American flag goes back at least to the mid 19th century, and by exploring the range of possible motives underlying the paradoxical use of flag imagery by oppressed peoples during this period, we get a glimpse at the complicated reasons for incorporating other non-native imagery in Native American art today.

Remixing the flag was not a geographically isolated practice. We see northeastern tribes like the Iroquois and Blackfoot selling flag whimsies to tourists at Niagara Falls–little keychains and ornaments–and we see Navajo and other tribes of the Southwest weaving flags or embellishing objects with flags to sell to white tourists. Some Navajo rugs, meant for the floor, were woven to look exactly like American flags, and people would walk on them! When does representation become presentation? When does the sign become the signified? With flags, it’s really hard to tell.