128

figure 1:Artifact Piece: Visitors staring at Luna lying in the vitrine 129

[A]fter the white people came, ele- Unwittingly, they witnessed—and partici- ments in the world began to shift; pated in—Artifact Piece, James Luna’s ground- and it became necessary to create new breaking performance-installation, now an iconic ceremonies…things which don’t grow work. Museumgoers observed Luna hijack dis- and shift are dead things…. Witchery courses about Indianness in order to reimagine a works to scare people, to make them new identity free from the limitations of stereo- fear growth. But it has always been types. Ultimately visitors watched Luna perform necessary, and more than ever now, it what preeminent Native American writer and is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We theorist Gerald Vizenor has termed “postindian won’t survive. That’s what the witchery survivance,” now continuously performed in the is counting on: that we will cling to photographic traces of Artifact Piece. Three broad the ceremonies the way they were, and postmodern theses converge in Vizenor’s formula- then the power will triumph, and the tion of postindian survivance: the “self” (or iden- people will be no more. tity) as decentered, shifting, and hybrid; “race” as a social, not biological, construction; and “cul- —Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony1 ture,” articulated best by Edward Said as a perme- able organism “of appropriations, common expe- One February day in 1987, visitors to the Califor- riences and interdependencies of all kinds among nia Indian Hall at the San Diego Museum of Man different cultures.”2 Think of the word Indian. encountered the unexpected amid pottery shards Centuries of colonial discourse corralled North and fusty dioramas. Naked, except for a strategi- America’s diverse indigenous peoples under one cally placed towel, a stocky man lay motionless on race, from which emerged a cast of stock char- a bed of sand inside a display case. Labels identi- acters (stoic Tontos, long-haired maidens, nasty fied the scars on his body: needle marks from daily drunks, and healing shamans), all petrified in a insulin shots; a skin callous from a missing wed- static, impermeable Indian monoculture. In con- ding ring; an indentation on the left eyebrow from trast, postindians perform multiple identities and an alcohol-related accident. One adjacent vitrine recognize themselves as cosmopolitan bricoleurs displayed the objects from the twentieth centu- who produce transcultural knowledge.3 Postin- ry—a Sex Pistols album, a dog-eared copy of Alan dian survivance is thus liberation from a colonial Ginsberg’s Howl, and several “Kodak moments”; discourse that stifles transformation, arguably another showcased a rattle and fringed bag—ob- the postmodern subject’s raison d’être. Vizenor jects that looked “traditionally Indian.” After about himself quotes Michel Foucault’s Technologies of ninety minutes, visitors watched the man rise from the Self: “‘The main interest in life and work is the display case, careful not to disturb his print in to become someone else that you were not in the the sand, and climb down. beginning.’”4 130

figure 2:Artifact Piece: Vitrine of twentieth-century objects 131

figure 3:Artifact Piece: Vitrine of “Indian” objects

As Vizenor’s work illuminates, the “Indian” to its origins while at the same time broadcast- is an invention. Thanks to Christopher Colum- ing postindian survivance stories. Here we explore bus’s erroneous understanding of fifteenth-cen- how and why Artifact Piece and Emendatio, two tury geography, “more than a hundred million of Luna’s most significant works, perform postin- people, and hundreds of distinct tribal cultures, dian survivance in the visual landscape. Emendatio were simulated as indians,” Vizenor writes.5 After is Latin for emendation, which means “to correct America’s colonizers christened the New World’s what is erroneous or faulty.” Indeed, Emendatio indigenous peoples “Indians,” they sketched, first sets the record straight on the Indian of the Ameri- in words and then in images, portraits of their new can and European imagination. Vizenor’s concept invention. The simulated Indian’s visual genealogy of postindian survivance offers a flexible theoreti- begins with early sixteenth-century German and cal model for reading James Luna’s work that ac- Italian woodcuts (illustrations for the published commodates its multiple and often contradictory letters of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci), points of view. which spawned generations of wildly popular off- A master of postmodern wordplay, Vizenor spring, including the prints of Frederic Remington debuted the term postindian survivance in a semi- and Currier and Ives; Wild West shows; Edward nal 1994 book, Manifest Manners: Narratives on S. Curtis’s catalogue of 40,000 sepia photographs; Postindian Survivance, which deconstructs the lan- Hollywood Westerns; and, more recently, Dances guage and visual images we use to describe Native With Wolves (1990) and Disney’s Pocahontas.6 Americans.8 Postindian is Vizenor’s neologism; sur- In the two decades following Artifact Piece, vivance is an appropriation. He writes: Luna became a rock star of North American per- formance art by reinventing his identity as he The postindian, an urgent new word in tackled America’s discourses on Indianness, the this book, absolves by irony the simu- real-life problems of its indigenous peoples, and a lations of the indian, waives centuries history of mostly brutal, though occasionally fruit- of translation and dominance, and re- ful, encounters between colonizer and colonized. sumes the ontic significance of native His oeuvre documents indigenous peoples’ millen- modernity. Postindians are the new sto- nial concerns and explores how indigenous peoples riers of… survivance. (emphasis intact)9 have adapted and survived—and how they might do so in the future—despite governmental policies Postindians subvert a colonial discourse whose of extermination and assimilation.7 Emendatio, DNA is spun from “manifest manners” and “ter- Luna’s site-specific exhibition at the 2005 Venice minal creeds.” Vizenor writes: “Manifest manners Biennale, not only thrust Luna onto the global are the course of dominance, the racialist notions stage, but also provided a European platform on and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons which to trace the discourse of Indianness back as ‘authentic’ representations of indian cultures.”10 132

Terminal creeds are imposed static representations other beings or appear differently to different peo- that are thought to be real. The idea of Indian, Vi- ple.13 Postindians, Vizenor says, use trickster play zenor says, is a terminal creed: to perform new identities and (hi)stories that dis- rupt colonial discourse and defy resolution. Ever- The Indian was an occidental inven- transforming postindians defy resolution and os- tion that became a bankable simula- sification; they conjure an imaginative liberation tion; the word has no referent in tribal from manifest manners and terminal creeds. languages or cultures. The postindian is Vizenor, a self-proclaimed Métis (mixed- the absence of the invention, and the blood) of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Irish, and French- end of representation in literature; the Canadian descent, appropriates the French la sur- closure of that evasive melancholy of vivance, meaning the preservation and practice of dominance. Native stories are an imagic Francophone culture amidst a dominant so-called presence, the actual tease of human alien culture.14 One young Native scholar says that contingencies, but indians are immov- survivance is a conflation of the words resistance able simulations, the tragic archives of and survival.15 Yet Vizenor’s slippery trickster lan- dominance and victimry.11 guage is irreducible to concise theses, instead gen- erating multiple meanings. I propose that surviv- Postindians, then, name themselves, create their ance means even more than subverting simulated own identities, and write their own (hi)stories. Indians and colonial hegemony. According to Ward Using a strategy called “trickster hermeneutics”— Churchill in A Little Matter of Genocide, ninety or “trickster interpretations”—the postindian percent of North America’s indigenous population trickster reinterprets and subverts what Vizenor was exterminated from 1492 to 1892 through war, calls “official hermeneutics,” or 500 years’ worth biological terrorism, starvation, slavery, and forced of colonial discourse that, simply put, presumes diasporas.16 Furthermore, North America’s indig- to name Indians, write their histories, and paint enous peoples continue to reside in conditions that pictures that dictate how they’re supposed to look are neither colonial, post-colonial, nor neo-colo- and act.12 nial, but what Vizenor calls paracolonial, a chronic Indeed, postinidians use multiple trickster and irresolvable “colonialism beyond colonialism” strategies to accomplish their missions. Like the that bears the burdens of all colonialisms.17 shape-shifting trickster, a central character of world What, then, is postindian survivance? I sub- folklore—or perhaps the trickster-like decentered mit that postindian survivance is a tripartite strat- postmodern subject—Vizenor’s postindian breaks egy. First, it is continually performed self-defini- the rules and collapses binaries. Tricksters are sa- tion that destabilizes colonial discourse (manifest cred and profane mischief-makers who mess up manners and terminal creeds) as writes postindian meanings and have the power to transform into stories. Postindian survivance offers strategies for 133

figure 4:Artifact Piece: Luna’s body print surviving the trauma of a centuries-long—and still absent father). Finally, his personal belongings largely ignored—genocide. “Native survivance sto- are visually equated with the museum’s similarly ries,” Vizenor writes, “are renunciations of domi- displayed traditional Indian objects, implying that nance, tragedy, and victimry.”18 Finally, postindian the spears and dance regalia on exhibit are not stat- survivance stories transgress and subvert a chronic ic objects for titillating aesthetic pleasure. condition of paracolonialism. Vizenor performs Artifact Piece was not videotaped; only a doz- postindian survivance at the site of language; Lu- en or so documentary images remain. The most na’s performances occur in the visual landscape.19 essential part of the performance is impossible to document anyway: the performance that occurs “I like to think of Artifact Piece as… the beginning when images of Indians in the viewer’s imagination of a relationship between a museum and a living collided with a living Indian playing a dead one. Indian who was there to make a statement; who Ethnographic museums manufacture definitions wasn’t there to grind corn or weave a blanket, or do of Indianness, and here Luna hijacks a primary site something quaint for the Saturday crowd,” Luna of image production to broadcast his postindian said a few years ago. “I don’t even know how to stories. That the museum’s staff was unaware of fuckin’ weave a blanket.”20 After Luna left the In- Luna’s plans for Artifact Piece intensified his trick- dian Hall, a fresh “artifact” marked the spot where ster play.21 Accustomed to live weaving and pottery his living body debunked the myth of the extinct demos, museum staff never asked questions when Indian, thus disrupting signifiers of Indianness and Luna requested vitrines and a space in the Cali- discharging a new chain of postindian signifiers. fornia Indian Hall. No one imagined that James Luna’s tautological trickster play, centered on a re- Luna, resident of the La Jolla Indian Reservation definition of artifact, works in the following way: in San Diego County, was a performance artist. Because his body print is the so-called artifact of Fast-forward twenty years. Today Luna is too a time-based performative event, we thus redefine well-known to engage in the facile trickster play of artifact as the snapshot of an ongoing event, not an artist under the radar; now his challenge is to a static, self-contained object. We similarly read produce even more sophisticated feats of cunning. Luna’s Sex Pistols album and his copy of Gins- He must play his conceptual game like a mas- berg’s Howl as snapshots of events that occurred ter chess player who lures opponents into traps. in time yet continue to live as memories in Luna’s Emendatio, sponsored by the National Museum of body and mind, memories that often transmutate the American Indian, was a collateral site-specific with time and experience. Objects, then, are visual exhibition and performance event held during the portals into a constellation of ever-changing experi- 51st Venice Biennale. Housed in the Fondazione ences that produce Luna’s identity, presented here Querini-Stampalia, a fifteenth-century palazzo- as a mix of Luiseño (his mother’s tribe), American turned-museum, it was located far away from Ed (whatever that means) and Mexican (his mostly Ruscha and the U.S. Pavilion at the official Bien- 134

figure 5:Chapel for Pablo Tac 135

nale. During preview week, Luna performed a the crucifix—with a woven trade blanket, a pro- marathon Renewal Ceremony in Querini-Stampa- vocative switch given the blanket’s association with lia’s verdant courtyard garden, where he danced in biological warfare. Ward Churchill documents the guise of numerous male characters four hours multiple instances, spanning almost 200 years, each day for four consecutive days before an au- during which British forces and the U.S. Army dience of media and art-world insiders. Renewal gave Indians trade blankets and clothes infected Ceremony was the live component of a site-spe- with smallpox, which triggered epidemics that cific installation whose centerpiece was Chapel for exterminated entire tribes.23 Throughout the Bi- Pablo Tac, a simulated California Mission chapel ennale’s run, a continuous-loop video montage of dedicated to Pablo Tac, a young Luiseño who trav- Renewal Ceremony was projected on the altar’s red- eled from California to Rome in 1834 to study and-white-striped blanket. Video images of Luna for the Catholic priesthood. This elaborate instal- dancing blended with the blanket’s geometric de- lation, Art in America’s Marcia Vetrocq quipped, signs and the Spanish words written on it, a quote became “the ‘American pavilion’ to Ruscha’s ‘U.S. from Pablo Tac, which read, in part: “[I]n Europe pavilion.’” 22 Tac wrote the first Luiseño history they dance for happiness…. The Indians of Cali- and grammar before he died at nineteen from a fornia dance only for ceremony and to remember virus (his body had been weakened by smallpox our Fathers and Grandfathers, because they died the previous year). Although a Luiseño Indian, and… have been defeated in war.” 24 Luna equates Tac was raised in a Catholic mission until he was the blanket, an instrument of death, with the cross dispatched to the Vatican at twelve. Why? Two de- on which Christ died. Yet Christ’s corpse hangs in cades after Columbus named the Indians, Vasco perpetual rigor mortis, whereas Luna’s body dances de Balboa spotted the Pacific Ocean and claimed on the blanket, offering a visual image of rebirth. its waters and all adjoining lands for the Spanish But does Luna here present himself as the Savior monarchy. Key to New Spain’s settlement plans figure? Playwright Tomson Highway explains: “In were the Roman Catholic missions that Christian- the same sense that Jesus Christ stands at the very... ized local perceived savages and turned them into center of Christian mythology, we have a character a slave labor force. By the mid-1800s, twenty-one [at the very center of] our mythological universe Spanish missions dotted the California coastline; called the Trickster… Without the spiritual health among the most famous is Mission San Luis Rey, of that figure I think Indian people are completely after which Luna’s tribe, the Luiseño, is named. screwed.”25 Renewal Ceremony, Luna’s reinterpretation Playing on a video screen at the front of the of an altar typically found in Catholic Mission altar was a dream-like film that collapsed time and churches, was installed in a large room adjacent place: images of Catholic Missions fade into im- to the courtyard garden, where Renewal Ceremony ages of California landscapes, then the viewer’s in took place. Luna replaces the altar’s focal point— a gondola and someplace that appears to be Ven- 136

figure 6:Aerial view of Renewal Ceremony in the gardens

ice, yet maybe it’s the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. on the Catholic altar. In fact, Christ’s Crucifix- Visitors were allowed to sit in the chapel’s pews ion—not his Resurrection—is the central image to better contemplate Luna’s new iconographies, of the Catholic altar, in stark contrast to Luna’s while they listened to recorded organ music, also hopeful transformations. on continuous loop, that began as a Native Ameri- What, then, was the Renewal Ceremony that can melody but morphed into Procol Harem’s visitors saw projected on the altar’s blanket? As I 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” mentioned, Luna performed his sixteen-hour Re- Luna’s installation performs postindian sur- newal Ceremony during the Biennale’s preview week. vivance in several ways. On one hand he replaces Today, the National Museum of the American In- Catholic ceremonial objects with Native Ameri- dian claims to own the only videotaped documen- can ones, dethroning the imposed Almighty and tation of the performance—several hours of video reinstating indigenous spiritualities. And just as and maybe 300 photo stills—which I reviewed at Artifact Piece recolonized the museum—a pro- their archives in Maryland. 26 The image here gives ducer of simulated Indians—so does Chapel for us a bird’s-eye view of the performance space in the Pablo Tac hijack the California Mission Church, Querini Stampalia’s lush garden. In his prepara- another manufacturer of simulated Indians. On tory materials, Luna wrote, “… the performance the other hand, these objects seem to say, particu- actions follow traditional seasonal rituals… for the larly to Venice’s predominantly Catholic popu- health, well-being and regeneration of indigenous lation: “My spiritual practices are like yours.” Nations.27” He opened Renewal Ceremony by laying The object-juxtapositions elevate an indigenous a circle of stones, insulin syringes, cans of Spam, spirituality, once denounced as “primitive sav- and sugar packets, which “speak to the current agery,” to the level of holy Catholicism—or even health plight of many Indigenous nations,” Luna beyond. After all, whose altar candle is burned to writes. 28 He refers, of course, to the epidemic rates the nub? Yet when Luna replaces Christ’s corpse of diabetes, alcoholism, and cigarette smoking with upbeat images of himself dancing in Renew- among indigenous populations, in addition to the al Ceremony, we wonder who are the true savages? unhealthful government-surplus commodity food Furthermore, Luna’s myriad acts of postindian provided to some reservations. Arrows mark what survivance in Renewal Ceremony, continuously appear to be the four cardinal directions. However, performed in video images projected on the altar’s for some tribes the cardinal directions delineate sa- blanket, frustrate a complete inversion. The blan- cred space; for other tribes the medicine circle di- ket’s indigenous resurrection scene suggests innu- vided into quadrants is merely an Anglo invention merable resurrections, presented from multiple or Pan-Indian concoction.29 After delineating the perspectives, continuously reperformed—unlike performance space, Luna established what some Christ’s one-time-only, one-size-fits-all Resurrec- might call Renewal Ceremony’s performance logic tion Scene, which is not even visually represented and what others might interpret as its “ritual activ- 137

figure 7:Renewal Ceremony: Laying the circle of stones 138

figure 8:Renewal Ceremony’s Indian Characters:

8a: Loincloth and beads, 8b. half-authentic Indian (leather vest and colorful skirt), 139

8c: Gondolier 8d: Gondolier in leather underwear ity”: He appeared from behind the screen, walked A character called the Lounge Luna, who the circle’s perimeter, and stopped at each arrow to makes significant emendations to Indian simu- shake rattles and whips, or wave feathers. Next he lations as he stories survivance, wears a maroon carefully stepped over the stones and syringes, into sharkskin suit, reminiscent of James Brown or the ceremonial circle, and danced to the rhythm Bobby Darrin. When I met him last summer, of Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, and Native Luna talked about the lack of Native rock stars American instrumentals, all of which comprised a (notwithstanding Robbie Robertson, of course) soundtrack that played continuously during the and his fantasies about filling that need. Indeed, performance.30 To change characters—or trans- a 2005 installation titled All Indian All the Time form his identity—Luna exited the space by stop- at California State University at Fullerton featured ping and gesturing at the cardinal directions, and photos of Luna posing as Elvis, Bruce Springsteen, then he stepped over the circle before disappearing and Johnny Cash. In the most recent pictures he behind the screen. He danced in the guise of nu- wears what he calls his Lounge Luna suit, which merous male characters, sometimes half-naked in he wore in Renewal Ceremony. When Lounge Luna a loincloth, other times fully clothed in buckskin makes his grand entrance at the Biennale, he struts and beads, but generally in composite costumes over to the circle, occasionally stopping to effect that conflated past with contemporary; Plains menacing poses, and then stands, like a peacock, Indian with, say, Luiseño, or so-called tribal with near an arrow. Slowly, deliberately, he straddles his contemporary American. Some characters played legs and pretends to unzip his pants and urinate what is considered the authentic Indian, although on the garden’s lush grass. Unfortunately, only one their accoutrements—a rattle made from a diner- copy exists of that potent image in the world. The style ketchup bottle, a black leather vest, or a pair National Museum of the American Indian, Luna’s of turquoise slippers that looked like moccasins— family friendly sponsor, has locked the profane flout Euro-American fantasies of the imagined trickster away in its archives (more on that later). Indian, who also happens to be suspended in a ro- Still, Luna is now a postindian rock star who colo- manticized past. But then, just when the audience nizes not only pop culture but also the colonizer’s suspected they might be watching an authentic continent and the seat of Roman Catholicism it- Indian ritual, Luna thwarted their expectations of self. Entertaining as Luna’s macho tour de force authentic Indianness, just as he had caught visitors might have been, did Europeans appreciate hav- off guard during theArtifact Piece. Here, riffing on ing a foreigner urinate on their turf? Were Roman Venice’s costumed gondoliers, who offer tourists a Catholics insulted when Luna reconfigured their simulated Old World experience, Luna played a symbolically charged altar and rewrote the central gondolier in leather underwear while his assistant plot of their sacred story? Did Luna’s cheeky gon- offered him not a James Brown-style wipe of the dolier in leather underwear desecrate a beloved Ve- brow, but a refreshing cappuccino. netian icon, the gondoliera, or was he merely camp 140

figure 9:Lounge Luna, front view

entertainment? Ultimately, what did Europe think thize with the psychic violence of colonization in of this visiting foreigner who turned upside down order to forestall it. He also wants us to explore their sacred myths and ancient traditions? our differences while working together as a “global There’s more. Emblazoned on the back of tribe.”32 Would the Guggenheim put a fig leaf over Lounge Luna’s suit is a flashy appliqué with a col- Matthew Barney’s testicles? orful silhouette image of James Earle Fraser’s noto- Despite the sanitized versions of Renewal Cer- rious sculpture, End of the Trail, which has become emony that NMAI now circulates, Emendatio per- since its international debut at the 1915 Panama- forms postindian survivance by purging literal and Pacific Exposition in San Francisco among the symbolic plagues as it broadcasts postindian stories. world’s most copied and reproduced images of Portrait of Pablo Tac, a conflated portrait of Tac and Native Americans. Astride a bone-skinny horse, Luna that presided over Emendatio’s entrance, sig- the Indian warrior slumps forward, his head hang- naled Luna’s disregard for the West’s discrete units ing down to his chest. His spear dangles uselessly of time, space, and identity. Pablo Tac’s journey to on the ground; even his braids droop. The Indian Italy presaged Luna’s trip to the Biennale; and Tac, warrior is not only doomed, he is also emasculated speaking forward from the nineteenth century, of- and impotent. Not so with Luna: His trickster play fers Luna a role model for postindian survivance. has corralled Fraser’s doomed Indian inside a zig- Tac went to Rome not only to become a priest, zag Navajo pattern that has neither spirit trail nor but also to study linguistics so he could preserve escape.31 Now his ketchup-bottle rattle is raised his native language and culture by writing a gram- high in the air. He is not only the first indigenous mar book and dictionary.33 Emendatio also tells rock star, but also a strong, potent, and even funny the story of Luna, who truly went to Venice as a postindian warrior. Now maybe the simulated In- performance artist masquerading as a healer—or dian motif is forever locked away in the Lounge was he a healer masquerading as a performance Luna’s suit. artist? Either way, Luna’s high-and-low-tech trick- On the other hand, the urinating postindian ster plays continually redefine postindian art and should be rescued from NMAI’s ivory-tower ar- postindian identity. Thanks to Luna, Vizenor, and chives. In what more visceral—or comical—way Tac, who perform a cosmopolitan and ever-trans- might Luna communicate the brutal experience forming postindian survivance, the indian actually of colonization? Humor heals wounds. The pro- is vanishing. As N. Scott Momaday writes in his fane trickster performs funny-yet-serious postin- classic essay, “The Man Made of Words”: “We are dian survivance, and censoring or sanitizing his what we imagine. Our very existence consists in visual dispatches deflates their potency. Luna is our imagination of ourselves.”34 creating a mutually productive colonial encounter, and NMAI is stifling his discourse; he wants his audience to laugh at the Lounge Luna and empa- 141

figure 10:Lounge Luna, back view with raised rattle 142

figure 11:Portrait of Pablo Tac 143

NOTES

1. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Pen- tury Termination and Relocation policy in Reloca- guin Books, 1986), 127. tion Stories (1993); creating positive role models 2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New for young indigenous males in Bringing it All Back York, Vintage, 1994), 217. Home (1993); Indian shamanism in Shame-Man 3. Vizenor does not capitalize indian or postindian (1993); diabetes and cultural memory in In My and he italicizes both terms. See Footnote 11 for an Dreams (1997); the need for Indian intellectuals in explanation. Indian Having Coffee with Kerouac, Ginsberg and 4. Foucault qtd in Gerald Vizenor, “Crossbloods” in Hemingway (199?); Indian spirituality in American Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. (Ha- Indian Studies (1999); reservations in Creation and nover, NH: Weslyan University Press, 1994), 227. Destruction of an Indian Reservation; construction See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A of race in The Sacred Colors (2000); the simulated Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA: Uni- Indian and self-invented postindian in Petroglyphs versity of Massachusetts Press, 1988). in Motion (2000); casinos in Uncle Jimmy (2001); 5. Ibid., 239. the “authentic Indian” in Take a Picture with a Real 6. Literature abounds on the “imagined Indian” Indian (2001 and 2003); and, finally, the most self- in literature, visual art, and film. In addition to aggrandizing of all—becoming a rock star in All Vizenor’s essays, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The Indian All The Time (2005). White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian 8. Gerald Visenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random Postindian Survivance, second edition (Lincoln, House, 1978); Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. (Origi- Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Coloniza- nally published in 1994 as Manifest Manners: tion of American Indians (Monroe, ME: Common Postindian Warriors of Survivance.) Courage Press, 1992.); Phillip J. Deloria, Playing 9. Ibid., x. Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 10. Ibid., vii. 1998); Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indi- 11. Ibid. Since terminal creeds and manifest manners ans in the American Cultural Imagination; Ithaca, are encoded in words, language itself becomes the NY: Cornell University Press; and Alan Trachten- site of Vizenor’s transgressive postindian surviv- berg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making ance. Therefore, he samples, appropriates, conjoins Americans 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, and concocts words in order to invent a new lan- 2004). guage that “absolves by irony the simulations of 7. Issues in Luna’s work include cultural schizophrenia the indian” and “waives centuries” of translation, (a term Vizenor coined that describes the mind- dominance, and surveillance. Vizenor’s refusal to scape of natives torn between tribal and dominant capitalize “indian” and “postindian” allows him American culture) and intercultural travel in Two to recolonize language and freely imagine Native Worlds (1989); alcoholism in The History of the identity. Luiseño People, Christmas 1990 (1990); long-term 12. “Shadow Survivance” in Manifest Manners, 63–106. impacts of the government’s mid-twentieth-cen 13. In fact, Luna’s artistic practice is a vehicle for in 144

tercultural travel. Given America’s current racial (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 1–15. taxonomy, we might be tempted to imagine Luna 17. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 77. traveling between center and margin, or between 18. Ibid., vii. mainstream and minority cultures. However, in 19. In addition to being a theorist, Vizenor is also an her classic essay, “Explanation and Culture: Mar- essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright. His fiction ginalia,” Gayatri Spivak upends the center-margin allows him to perform and illustrate his critical binary: “The deconstructivist can use herself (or theories. himself)… as a shuttle between the center… and 20. James Luna, “Sun and Moon Blues,” Obsession, the margin… and thus narrate a displacement.” Compulsion, Collection: On Objects, Display, Culture Spivak proposed inhabiting an essentialized posi- and Interpretation, ed. Anthony Kiendl (Banff, Al- tion—say “Native American”—in order to decon- berta, Canada: The Banff Center Press, 2004), 147. struct it. Perhaps a more useful spatial metaphor 21. Luna’s original performance of the Artifact Piece here is Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopic at the San Diego Museum of Man was neither space, that is, the coexistence of a large number of curated nor planned by museum staff, according superimposed fragmentary possible worlds. Think to Philip Hoog, the museum’s curator of archaeo- of Luna shuttling amongst fragmentary socio-cul- logical collections, with whom I spoke on August tural spaces, or audiences composed of multiple 10, 2006. When I reviewed the museum’s file on publics, as he plays “Indian” here or “American art- Luna that same day, I found no preparatory mate- ist” there. An audience is a heterotopic space where rials, curatorial notes, press releases, or advertising Luna can simultaneously appear as different identi- matter for the 1987 work. Hoog alleges that Luna ties to different people. merely requested space and vitrines in the Califor- 14. La Survivance has been used to describe how French nia Indian Hall and then showed up. My interview Canadians, primarily from Québec, maintained with Luna in August 2006 corroborates Hoog’s ac- their cultural identity in both Canada’s Anglo- count. Of course, Luna’s second (and thus far last) phone culture and after migrating to New England performance of Artifact Piece at the 1990 Decade at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a self-pro- Show was curated by an exhibition team of cura- claimed “crossblood” of Ojibwe, French-Canadian tors from the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic and Irish ancestry, Vizenor applies the French term Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and to the crucial project of proactively maintaining The Studio Museum in Harlem. native identities in the midst of a dominant cul- 22. Marcia E. Vetrocq, “Venice Biennale: Be Careful ture. What You Wish For,” Art in America, 93, no. 8 15. Malea Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance: How (2005): 108–119. American Indians Use Survivance,” College Com- 23. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 151– position and Communication, 53, no. 3 (February 156. 2002), 396–434. 24. Lisbeth Haas, “Pablo Tac: memory, identity, histo- 16. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holo- ry” in James Luna: Emendatio, eds. Truman T. Lowe caust and Denial in the Americas1492 to the Present, and Paul Chaat Smith. (Washington, DC: Nation- 145

al Museum of the American Indian, 2005), 48–53. McMaster and Clifford E. Trafzer, (Washington, 25. Tomson Highway, Tomson Highway: Native Voice. D.C.: National Museum of the American Indian, Interview by Phyllis Wilson. (Thompson, Manito- 2004). ba, Canada: Native Communications, 1988). Also 30. In a November 2005 phone interview, Luna told me see Allan J. Ryan, Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony that Jorge Arevalo’s composition synthesizes Procol in Contemporary Native Art, (Vancouver/Toronto: Harem’s version of Bach’s Air on a G string for an UBC Press, 1999), 3. organ with church bells, upon which he overdubbed 26. I conducted research during January 29–30, 2007 “tribal” melodies, as well as musical samplings from at NMAI’s Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, rock, blues and the Catholic church. Maryland. 31. A traditional Navajo weaver incorporated the fa- 27. James Luna, “Renewal Rough Draft #8.” 3 August mous “spirit trail” (also called “spirit line” or “weav- 2004. James Luna file, San Diego Museum of Man, er’s pathway”) so that her spirit could escape from San Diego, CA. the rug she finished weaving it. Significantly, this 28. Ibid. Navajo pattern, although not woven but quilted, has 29. One also may read Luna’s performance space cum no “spirit line.” Luna captured the spirit of Fraser’s medicine circle as institutional critique. During doomed Indian, now eternally contained, even si- NMAI’s planning stages, architects and designers lenced, in the Lounge Luna suit. In addition, Luna’s held focus groups and community meetings to choice to depict the doomed Indian as a silhouette determine “commonalities” in the traditions and doubly positions the image as a stereotype, as in worldviews of diverse indigenous communities. Kara Walker’s sprawling silhouette narratives of a The circle and the cardinal directions—both based racist antebellum South. Silhouette images literally on cosmogonies—were two of the primary “com- and figuratively reduce individuals to bare, faceless, monalities” translated into the formal vocabulary undifferentiated outlines to become a screen onto of NMAI’s architectural design. One community which viewers project racist stereotypes. participant said: “We will probably come out with 32. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics the daddy of stereotypy regarding who American in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton & Indians are and what they stand for, but at least it Co., 1996). can be a more or less updated version—espoused 33. James Luna, 6 June 2005. Videotaped interview. by the Indians themselves.” See Judith Ostrowitz Videotape 12 (of 22) of NMAI’s documentation in “Concourse and Periphery, Planning the Na- of Luna’s experience at the 51st Venice Biennale. tional Museum of the American Indian,” American Audiovisual Archives, Cultural Resources Center Indian Quarterly 29, nos. 3 and 4 (Summer and of the National Museum of the American Indian, Fall 2005), 384–425. Our Universes, an exhibition Suitland, Maryland. currently on view at NMAI, clearly indicates that 34. N. Scott Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” the circle and cardinal directions are not, in fact, Literature of the American Indians: Views and In- common to all indigenous cosmogonies. See Na- terpretations. ed. Abraham Chapman (New York: tive Universe: Voices of Indian America, eds. Gerald Meridian, 1975), 96–110.