Constance DuBois. Maria Soledad Apish Trujillo and her children, 1906. Photograph from the Constance DuBois Collection, Museum of Man, San Diego, . Used by James Luna in Apparitions, Emendatio, 2005. Installation detail. Venice, Italy.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 Ambivalent Entertainments: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive

JANE BLOCKER

For years I have pursued the search for a mortuary olla among the Diegueño Indians of Southern California, and, like a will-o’-the- wisp, it has allured only to escape me. The Indians all knew of these burial jars, and the whereabouts of some were known to the initiated; but to meddle with them was sacrilege. An educated Indian girl . . . wept when it was suggested that her grandfather should secure one for my benefit. It was represented to her that it was to be used for the benefit of science and not to satisfy an idle curiosity; that those thus buried were so long forgotten that it was not like disturbing the remembered dead. 1

In the first decade of the twentieth century, ethnographer Constance Goddard DuBois spent a great deal of time trying to dig up the bones of Diegueño and Luiseño Indians in the hills near San Diego. Despite the sacrilege of her efforts, she considered this an important scientific pursuit, one from which she could not be dissuaded by sentimental tears. Hers was a search for bones and artifacts, specifically those of the forgotten dead. In 1907, when she finally succeeded in unearthing two mortuary jars, she described the contents of one of them for the readers of American Anthropologist: Mingled with the earth which had fallen into it were many fragments of bone of comparatively large size, as large as could be made to pass through the mouth of the jar. These included fragments of a skull; a piece of the jaw-bone with one tooth still in place; many smaller bits of bone; fragments of charcoal; a perfect arrowhead showing evidence of having been in the fire. 2 Ultimately this physical evidence, which she had sought for years and for which she was willing to trespass the desires of the peoples to whom it belonged, yielded rather paltry conclusions and an article of only about a thousand words. Simply put, these jars proved to DuBois that, despite the Catholic Church’s prohi - bitions on cremation, the Diegueños buried the ashes of their

Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 52–77. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 dead in jars whereas the Luiseño did not. This was by no means noteworthy, because, as her account makes clear, her native infor - mants had already told her as much. Indeed one might claim that DuBois, to the degree that she describes her own longing—the years-long pursuit, the allure of buried artifacts—suffered from what Derrida describes as “archive fever,” the symptoms of which include having “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a home - sickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” 3 DuBois’s fever leads her to engage in a convoluted logic by which she first rejects the testimony of the living in order to pur - sue the dead. Once among the dead, she laments the loss of them as living. Thus she fully situates herself in the logic of the archive, which, as Rebecca Schneider explains, is a “trace-logic emphasizing loss—a loss the archive can regulate, maintain and institutionalize—forgetting that it is a loss the archive pro - duces. ”4 Notwithstanding the protests of her native informants, DuBois produces these bones as loss, as forgotten, declaring that it is not as if she were disturbing the “remembered dead.” Moreover, her claims produce the native peoples whom she studies as lost, as both forgetful of their own history and as on the verge of being forgotten. The very purpose of her salvage ethnography is to pre - serve the natives’ past because she assumes that the natives and their culture are in the process of disappearance. Her approach confirms Schneider’s assertion that “In the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh.” 5 Dismissing the memories of living natives, DuBois searched instead for bones that could tell her the truth about the past, bones that housed memories to which she as a scientist had unique access—as though she imag - ined that the jawbone she pulled from the clay urn could still speak, could still whisper the secrets that her flesh-and-blood informants could not. The dichotomy between flesh and bone upon which DuBois’s method relies is the topic of much recent debate in performance studies, which has attempted to understand the relation between history and the body, between the archive and performance. Schneider’s essay, for example, is written in direct response to the claim, first made by Peggy Phelan but subsequently repeated by many others (including myself) that performance is given to disappearance, that it eludes the archive and does not fit with its logics. 6 Although their respective claims yield somewhat different results, both Schneider and Phelan suggest that performance and the body constitute unique epistemologies that might be radically or generatively deployed against hegemonic ways of knowing. 7 In part, this essay is an attempt to work through these debates once

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 again, but within the specific context of native history and per - formance; it is also an attempt to think about embodied ways of knowing in relation to globalization, which is an important mechanism for the viral dissemination of this dichotomous logic. In this context, the story of Constance Goddard DuBois serves as an example of precisely where and how the archive, the body, globalization, and epistemology intersect. DuBois’s method is a persistent aftereffect of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonization and the dissemination of Western philosophy, which, as Walter Mignolo has argued, had a central role in drafting “a global design.” 8 Globalization, Mignolo sug - gests, is as much an effect of epistemology as it is of commerce, religious indoctrination, or physical violence. Key to the hege - monic European episteme is the supreme value given to alpha - betic systems and thus to denotation (wherein one thing, one sign, reliably and perpetually stands for another) and the rejec - tion of embodied forms of knowing. He describes a tension “between hegemonic epistemology with emphasis on denotation and truth, and subaltern epistemologies with emphasis on per - formance and transformation.” 9 DuBois’s belief in scientific truth, in the importance of written histories and their logic of denota - tion, secures her power to look for bones rather than flesh, to dig up a stable paleontological record while questioning the testi - mony of those whose liveness meant a suspicious potential for transformation. Long before Luiseño artist James Luna was born, his family was entangled with globalization and its hegemonic epistemes, ensnared by its archives, museums, ethnography, and photographs— tools that are commonly used, despite DuBois’s claims to the con - trary, to disturb the remembered as well as the forgotten dead. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his people had been the object of scientific scrutiny and repeatedly had their pictures taken and ancestors dug up by amateur ethnographers such as DuBois and Edward H. Davis, a field collector for the Museum of the American Indian in New York (now part of the Smithsonian Institution). One day in 1906 Luna’s great-grandmother, Maria Soledad Apish Trujillo, posed for DuBois. The photograph shows Trujillo seated with her barefoot daughter in her lap, the little girl’s small bare legs casting bent shadows on her mother’s floor- length apron. Luna’s great-grandmother, wearing a cotton print dress, looks off to her left while her daughter looks directly at the camera. Despite the familiarity of the image, the ways in which it could be at home in any family photo album, it is a “scientific” photograph taken by DuBois just prior to the publication of her study “The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California” (1908). Indeed, this photograph does not belong to Luna. In order to look at it, he must go to the Museum of Man in San Diego,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 where it is catalogued and archived. The Museum of Man was the site of Luna’s first staged insub - ordinate critique of archival logic, a subaltern epistemology. In his most famous performance work Artifact Piece (1987), Luna lay in a museum display case, wearing only a breechcloth, next to a vitrine filled with his “native artifacts,” such as his college diploma, a picture of Jimi Hendrix, divorce papers, and ceremo - nial rattles. This living diorama was complete with didactic labels that identified the source of various scars on Luna’s body as if he were himself a cultural artifact made available to scien - tific scrutiny. In Artifact Piece, Luna seemingly gave flesh to and reanimated the ancient remains that Constance DuBois had fer - vently sought, so as to perform the contiguity between the living and the scores of dead to which the museum makes claim through its collections of their carefully catalogued relics. This performance, to the degree that it both participates in and desta - bilizes the logic of the archive, can be described in Schneider’s terms as an act of “body to body transmission,” an embodied archival form in which the past (not only Luna’s past or that of his ancestors but the past of the museum itself) remains, is remembered, is repeated, and is passed through the flesh of the living body. 10 “When we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects),” Schneider writes, “but as the act of remaining and a means of reappearance (though not a metaphysics of presence) we almost immediately are forced to admit that remains do not have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh.” 11 James Luna. Artifact Piece , 1987. From the perspective of the history of first peoples, this recog - Performance originally staged at nition takes on even greater importance because Native the Museum of Man, San Diego, California; this version performed have routinely suffered under the dictates of the archive, the at the Whitney Museum of methodologies of the ethnographer, and the procedures of the American Art, New York. Photo: museum. In an interview with Luna, a reporter asks, “Can you Fred Scrutin, provided by James Luna. imagine a world in which one is Indian, but not in relation to the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 past in any way?” 12 The answer is “no” because the Indian is, in his own body, a museum. He is on perpetual display for a culture that views him as a walking artifact. His flesh is turned to bone. Writer and critic has lamented with regard to Native Americans: “If there is any people on earth whose lives are more tangled up with museums than we are, God help them.” 13 The solution to that problem, however, may not be as straightfor - ward as Mignolo’s and Schneider’s arguments seem to imply, because museums are not only the repositories of native artifacts and the final resting places for Indian remains, they are also the sites where, as Native Canadian writer Thomas King explains, Indians are turned into “entertainment.” Among the many exam - ples he offers on this point is Ishi, the famous Yahi Indian whom the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber brought to the Anthropological Museum at the in San Francisco in 1911, where “each Sunday afternoon, for about two and a half hours, he demonstrated Indian arts and crafts—arrow making, hide prepa - ration—for the curious of the city.” 14 “Somewhere along the way,” King concludes, “we ceased being people and somehow became performers in an Aboriginal minstrel show for White North America.” 15 This fact complicates the liberatory claims that Mignolo makes on behalf of subaltern knowledge and that Schneider makes on behalf of performed memory: “To the degree that it remains, but remains differently or in difference, the past performed and made explicit as performance can function as the kind of bodily transmission conventional archivists dread, a counter-memory— almost in the sense of an echo.” 16 As a minstrel performer, Ishi engaged in a bodily transmission of his own past, but he did so at the behest of the archivist, who did not so much dread as exploit the echo reverberating in him. The museum secures the Indian’s presence precisely because of his quaint oral traditions, pecu - liarly embodied forms of remembrance, mysterious rituals, and lack of a written history. In addition to its potential for being counterlogic, body-to-body transmission can also be absorbed by and mobilized in the service of the archive and its hegemonic ways of knowing. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault remarks with regard to Artifact Piece, “It has not always been clear that the per - formativity of everyday life is analytically separate for the Native from public performance.” 17 In what follows I examine two related phenomena, both of which fall under the rubric of the museum as the site of perfor - mance: the controversy surrounding the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and a collection of artworks that James Luna presented in 2005 at the Venice Biennale as a representative of the NMAI and the Smithsonian Institution. 18 The museum and Luna are tangled up with archival logic and with the entertain - ments that are often engendered when Indian bodies perform the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 past. Each must consider carefully its/his position with regard to the question of bones versus flesh. In addition, both are caught in the snare of globalism. Both are products of early modern global - ization, and both operate within contemporary forms of the global, specifically the global trade in art and culture. 19 Ambivalence is a strategic response to these questions, controversies, and entan - glements. Although not a solution to the problem of archive versus body, bones versus flesh, nor a means of finding the errors in archival logic, ambivalence is an emotion the elaborate perfor - mance of which refuses to answer a leading question. Ambivalence in this context need not be a completely negative condition. Nor is it simply an emotion that accompanies the crisis generated by two equally problematic choices. Rather, ambivalence is a condi - tion that skeptically occupies two places simultaneously, that teases even as it feels the tug of powerful forces, that knows better than to put all its eggs in one hand-woven basket. The controversy surrounding the NMAI, which opened in Washington, DC, in 2004, is the result of an intellectual problem. How can such an institution properly conceive the history of diverse peoples occupying an enormous region over the course of millennia while at the same time account for the complexity and disorder of those cultures’ contact with, struggles against, and assimilation of and by equally diverse cultures from other parts of the world over the course of centuries? In short, the his - tory of native peoples in this hemisphere is troublesome because it is rife with “mestizo phenomena.” “The study of mestizo phenomena,” Serge Gruzinski writes, “raises a problem of intel - lectual tools: how should we conceptualize mélanges?” 20 That particular question gains considerable urgency within the con - text of a museum of the “American Indian,” a museum that must not only understand the process of mélange but must be wary of the intellectual tools, such as archives and museums themselves, that have been used with violent effect against native peoples. As Amanda Cobb explains: It is important to note that in spite of the role museums have historically played and continue to play, and in spite of a very real anger and bitterness that Native Americans harbor for them, Native peoples . . . love and value museums for no less than the reason we hate them—for the simple fact that . . . “they have our stuff.” 21 Thus the NMAI approaches history (both ancient and contempo - rary) with considerable ambivalence. The museum and its exhibitions, which were designed in con - sultation with hundreds of people in Indian tribes throughout the , Canada, and Latin America, cannot afford simply to present the history of native peoples in this hemisphere; it

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 must also, at the same time, put its intellectual tools on display like so many artifacts behind glass. The following wall text, written by Chaat Smith, appears at the entrance to the Our Peoples exhibit: This is about history and about the past, two different things. The exhibit that surrounds you now examines the alchemy that changes the past into stories, histories we tell about it. This gallery is making history and like other makers of his - tory it has a point of view, an agenda. . . . We present evi - dence to support our belief that our survival as the original people of this hemisphere is one of the most extraordinary stories of human history. Here we have done as others have done—turned events into history. 22 Chaat Smith prepares the museum’s visitors for the subjective, political, contingent, individual, and contested stories the museum tells. The exhibitions into which one is ushered by this text eschew chronology, linearity, anonymity, and scientific or art- historical authority. Chaat Smith’s museology might seem to make space for flesh but not bones, to privilege the live event of the past over its museological representation, and to view history as a betrayal of the real, the work of false appearances, theatri - cality, and masquerade. But the situation and his response to it are not as simple as that. The museum must make a play of his - tory; it must stage the ambiguity, violence, and epistemological chaos that not only constitute the superimposition of diverse cultures but that destabilize historiography itself. Indeed the museum’s displays and wall texts present artifacts and tools, even intellectual tools, as having a remarkable liveness, a physi - cal presence that embodies the past. Our Peoples consists of a series of walls on which objects are displayed behind glass. The objects are arranged neither chrono - logically nor by tribe nor by geographic region but by material and morphological similarity. One first encounters hundreds of sculptural objects, many made of wood, carved or fashioned in a remarkable variety of styles to represent human figures, masks, and portrait busts. This display tells the story of the incredible complexity and diversity of native peoples in the hemisphere and belies the monolithic connotations of such words as Indian or native. Directly engaging the museum’s own name (The National Museum of the American Indian), conferred by an act of Congress in 1989, the didactic wall text cautions that these original peoples were not “Indians” and had never heard of “America.” These words—imbricated with early modern European exploration and colonialism (the confusion with the East Indies, the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci), as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, domestic and foreign policy, and popular culture—are

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 in themselves examples of the bewildering mélanges to which Gruzinski refers. Next to this display is a group of objects from throughout the hemisphere, all made of gold: jewelry, masks, tools, and adorn - ments, again in a stunning variety of styles, shapes, and sizes. Informational text explains that gold was not used in the Americas for coinage until the period of colonization. The gap between this display and the subsequent one marks the transition between the lives of native peoples as they existed before contact with Europeans and their lives after contact. A group of gold coins embossed with emblems of European countries and their American colonies is featured next. Seeing this, one has the sense that the materiality of gold, its “fleshiness,” has been betrayed and forever changed by the violence of minting. This is gold forcibly taken from the New World and made into a system of sig - nification, representation, and economic power removed from but still uneasily maintaining its innate material and therefore spiritual and animate properties. This gold serves trade and translation, exchange and equivalence between and among very different cultures. Adjacent to this gleaming collection is another display telling the story of metallurgical transformation. Here one sees an array of blades: swords, sabers, rapiers, and knives. These objects, placed together, make vivid the ways in which the economics of gold requires the violence of domination through the sword. They are also examples of the decorative arts in which crafts - men—European, African, Creole, and native—shaped and deco - rated objects according to their regional traditions and a dazzling array of foreign influences. The violence implied by these blades is symbolically escalated in the adjacent display of guns, which includes revolvers, Winchester rifles, six-shooters, and hand - guns. Guns and swords are implements used by both Europeans and natives in their long history of bloody conflict. They have also been used, however, in a complex history of hunting and trade, of anthropology and demonstrations of supposedly out - moded customs, of crime, of international warfare and U.S. military service, and of entertainment (from Wild West shows to contemporary films) in which whites and Indians both collabo - rated and competed. These exhibits of metallurgy yield to two final displays con - sisting of paper, perhaps the colonizer’s most destructive tool: one shows hundreds of Bibles in every conceivable native lan - guage, and the other shows treaties. These exhibits demonstrate how Christianity and the law have served (and in some cases con - tinue to serve) as tools of genocide and dispossession against native peoples in the Americas, as well as how they have been intentionally used and strategically adopted “by Native peoples

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 in order to keep their cultures alive . . . to ensure their futures.” 23 Bibles and treaties, guns and swords, coins and artifacts were simultaneously used to subjugate and liberate native peoples. They are objects introduced, transformed, forgotten, embell - ished, and exploited by Italian, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French colonizers, by missionaries and sailors, by natives from Alaska to Chile, and by Africans. They defy traditional notions of authentic native artifacts and so are presented in narratives of deep ambivalence. These displays are examples of what Gruzinski has called the “mestizo mind”; that is, they suggest that the museum’s director and curators seek to understand and to confront directly the his - tory of native peoples in this hemisphere as a history of mélange. However, “mélanges are apparently always placed under the sign of ambiguity and ambivalence. Such is the supposed curse hang - ing over the heads of composite worlds.” 24 Unfortunately, that curse is still alive and well, as evidenced by the criticism that the NMAI originally received from a number of sources unwilling to accept the fragmentation, nonlinearity, unpredictability, ambi - guity, creativity, and mistranslation by which the superimposi - tion of native, European, and African cultures is marked. That the museum does not employ the proper intellectual tools, the proper archival logic—which includes specifically categorical purity, chronological development, scientific explanations, the telos of “complete” understanding, and academic credentials— was an objection made by a number of critics—most famously, National Museum of the Edward Rothstein of the New York Times and Marc Fisher and American Indian. Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories. Paul Richard of the Washington Post— when the museum first Exhibition view. Photo: Katherine opened in 2004. 25 Most of their criticism focuses on the Our Fogden, provided by the National Peoples exhibition and its displays produced by individual Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Indian tribes about their histories, cultures, present circumstances, Washington, DC.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 and what Rick West, founding director of the NMAI, has repeat - edly called “survivance.” Fisher, for example, describes these displays as like “a trade show in which each group of Indians gets space to sell its founding myth and favorite anecdotes of sur - vival.” 26 Here he places embodied forms of history—myths and anecdotes, which, for him, constitute an ersatz history subject to cheap commercialism—in opposition to the presumed authen - ticity of artifacts. Bones over flesh. Richard, unintentionally describing exactly the kind of mestizo phenomena with which Gruzinski is concerned, complains that there are eight thousand varied objects, some spectacular . . . offered to the eye. What’s missing is the glue of thought that might connect one to another. Instead one tends to see totem poles and T-shirts, headdresses and masks, toys and woven bas - kets, projectile points and gym shoes, things both new and ancient, beautiful and not, all stirred decoratively together in no important order that the viewer can discern. 27 The problem with this archive, according to Richard, is that its logic does not conform to a recognizable order, to a familiar chronological value-laden episteme. Rothstein’s critique is similar. Recognizing that the NMAI curators are caught in the contradic - tion of having both to use the museum’s logic and question the damaging effects of that logic on native peoples, he remarks, It does no good to respond to something that one feels is inadequate, which I imagine is the response to traditional museum exhibitions, with something that is pure pap. I would wager that there are any number of scholars of American Indian history who know far more about these tribes than the elders of the tribe. The point isn’t that a museum should allow American Indian tribes to tell their own story. The point is that the museum should be able to give a complete portrait of the tribes and their history so that you actually know something of the truth. 28 Like Constance DuBois, Rothstein ignores the flesh-and-blood natives by whom he is surrounded and seeks instead the bones of the archive. Moreover, his unquestioned faith in complete knowledge is symptomatic of a colonizing logic, one that leaves no aspect of the Other unknown or unclaimed. While such journalistic critiques have diminished somewhat in the years since the NMAI opened, they persist, largely because of subsequent controversies about the departure of Rick West as a result of a scandal involving what some considered excessive salaries and lavish travel expenses, and the hiring of Kevin Gover, viewed by some to have mishandled Indian Trust funds when he worked as assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Department

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 of the Interior. 29 In addition, with the passage of time scholars have begun more systematically to address the merits and limita - tions of the museum. Writing in 2006, historian Steven Conn describes the experience of attending the NMAI as “ultimately disappointing.” 30 He acknowledges the contradiction of trying to “build a museum to display cultures which have a deep ambiva - lence about the notion of being displayed,” but goes on to assert: We might and should argue over which stories get told and how, but the notion that original objects can convey an immediacy and a “realness” to a narrative is at the heart of what a museum is. Nowhere at NMAI are we asked to pause to consider an object, to study it, to admire it, to ask ques - tions of it. Apparently the curators at the NMAI have little faith in the power of objects to convey meaning. 31 Although Conn’s critique is more complex and nuanced than those of his colleagues in the press, like them Conn is bewildered by the lack of attention to artifacts in this museum, is confused by the organization of displays, and is suspicious of narratives that are not produced by museum professionals. Although legiti - mate and thoughtful critical analyses of the NMAI have been pro - duced, most recently in Amy Lonetree and Amanda Cobb’s anthology, they tend to get stuck on this problem of archival logic, on the question of whether knowledge is possible in the museum and whether it is best conveyed by objects or bodies. 32 Lonetree’s essay thoughtfully weighs this issue, noting that many native critics are disappointed by the NMAI’s lack of overt acknowledgment of the genocide perpetrated against the hemi - sphere’s first peoples. The museum’s emphasis on survival and on the experiences of contemporary Native Americans has led, in her view, to a serious lack of attention to the millions of native dead. 33 The museum has been so keen to discover flesh, it has neglected bone. As the success or failure of the NMAI continues to be debated, I urge the museum to maintain the use of one of its most effective tools, mestizo logic. Some of the critics I have examined need a mechanism such as mestizo logic to reconceptualize the relation between the seemingly incompatible categories of past and pre - sent, bones and flesh. Such logic might help us to consider how bodies can be understood as artifacts and archives, how bones and objects act and are alive in the present. Other critics still question that logic and are unable to see any “important order” in that logic’s superimposition of disparate objects, motifs, and practices. They view the ambivalence inherent in composite worlds as something to be avoided rather than something filled with generative possibilities. This is an exceedingly shortsighted view. Not only does it misrepresent the plain historical facts of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 colonization by trying romantically to recuperate and categori - cally to isolate pure, stable, and unchanging Indian cultures untainted by Europeans (and yet somehow more fully under - stood by them), but it also fails to appreciate either the historio - graphic challenges or the creative potential of mestizo worlds. James Luna’s complex work Emendatio was first installed and performed at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Luna was sent to Venice as a representative of the Smithsonian Institution and the NMAI. His work in Venice was an extension of the NMAI and was similarly engaged with the problem of disturbing the remem - bered dead, of the relation between bones and flesh. Moreover, Emendatio was crafted by a mestizo mind, and it performs an exposition on the theme of ambivalence. First, it completely rejects any kind of categorical purity, any intellectual appeal to authenticity, which is, according to Paul Chaat Smith, “not a goal for Indian people, but a prison.” 34 To dismantle the concept of Below: James Luna. Altar to purity, Emendatio displays and highlights commonalities between Pablo Tac, Emendatio, 2005. early modern globalization (i.e., that of the fifteenth through eigh - Installation. Venice, Italy. Photo: National Museum of the teenth centuries) and the global art world of the twenty-first American Indian, Smithsonian century. Second, it views mélanges as in a constant state of trans - Institution, Washington, DC. lation and mistranslation, where errors are simultaneously cor - Opposite, top: James Luna. Altar rosive and threatening and rich sources of creative production. to Pablo Tac, Emendatio, 2005. Indeed the work’s title refers to the act of emending or correcting Installation detail. Venice, Italy. Photo: National Museum of the a text, which suggests that translation is a process of negotiation American Indian, Smithsonian and exchange. Third, Emendatio not only reveals ambivalence to Institution, Washington, DC. be an essential component of composite worlds but also rehabil - Opposite, bottom: Cathy Nelson itates ambivalence as an important and necessary political strat - Rodriguez. Portrait of Pablo Tac, 2005. Oil on canvas. Collection egy in the face of subjugation. In Luna’s hands, ambivalence, a of James Luna. Photo: Katherine power (valence) that pulls in two opposite directions simultane - Fogden, provided by the National ously, is a hybrid answer to the problem of hybridity. Fourth, the Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, work embraces entertainment not simply as a feature of domi - Washington, DC. nant culture’s consumption of its racial others but as a radical

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 tactic of survival. Emendatio consisted of three installations and a performance. One installation was an altar erected to Pablo Tac, Luna’s sym - bolic ancestor, and dedicated to “forced and accepted accultura - tion.” 35 Tac, a Luiseño Indian born in 1822 in southern California at Mission San Luis Rey, wrote a history of his people and was the first person to produce a Luiseño grammar and a short Indian- Spanish dictionary (he did so when he was thirteen years old). In Tac’s Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey (1835), he identifies himself as a Quechnajuisom, that is, as one of the peo - ple of Quechla, a preconquest region in southern California. 36 At the same time, though, he also considered himself such a devout Catholic that he traveled to Rome in 1832 with Father Antonio Peyri (a Franciscan missionary from Spain) to study for the priest - hood. He died in Rome in 1841 at the age of nineteen. The altar Luna dedicated to Tac included Catholic imagery and ritual objects as well as material references to Luiseño traditions. The altar stood in front of a row of salvaged wooden pews and a wooden balustrade. An LCD monitor, mounted on the front of the altar, displayed a video montage that included images of Venice and the Vatican, as well as the Venetian Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The wooden altar was draped with a lace and linen tablecloth, and instead of the crucifix normally positioned at the center was a pair of objects each placed on its own small basket and standing inside its own wooden box that once contained bottles of expensive wine. On the left was a chalice used in the Catholic mass. On the right were two eagle feathers standing upright. Along with these artifacts was sage, a shell, and lit candles. Luna also hung a tapestry decorated with geo - metric patterns and inscribed with a quotation from Tac about the history of Indian dances. Nearby, two parody display cases, recalling those used in traditional natural history museums or cathedrals frequented by tourists, included such things as a ball-peen hammer, modified with geometric markings and leather strap to resemble a tomahawk; the vessels and kit used by Catholic priests for the administra - tion of last rites; a feather; a rattle set in a basket; and a gold-plated incense burner accompanied by a bundle of sage and some incense. The altar also included a portrait of James Luna as Pablo Tac, painted by Cathy Nelson Rodriguez. This visual and spatial experience was enhanced by music composed and recomposed by Jorge Arevalo. Arevalo’s “sound track” included the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 ambient sound of church music and church bells, a Luiseño “Eagle” song, and a cover of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (humorously invoking the stereotypical reference to the white man as a “pale face”). The second installation was composed of a series of projected photographs, early-twentieth-century ethnographic images in black and white documenting mission Indians from southern California and superimposed with contemporary reenactments of the same images in color. One sequence of fading and emerg - ing images included the black-and-white photograph Constance DuBois took of Luna’s great-grandmother replaced by a color photo of Luna’s niece with her daughter seated on her lap. In the third installation, Luna projected a video image from the ceiling onto the sand-covered floor. The still, black-and-white photograph of a Luiseño woman grinding acorns was manipu - lated by the videographer, Eto Otitigbe, so that it spun around in a circle—first clockwise, then counterclockwise. In this, it mim - icked the accompanying sound of a bull-roarer—a flat piece of cottonwood, about the size of a playing card, strung on a cord. Used by the Luiseño to call in the spirits, the piece of wood is twirled rapidly on the string until it buzzes. Finally Luna staged what critic Walter Robinson called a “hybrid über-Indian” dance in the courtyard of the Palazzo Querini Stampalia. 37 First he created a dance circle: To set the stage Luna appears dressed as an “ordinary Indian”—jeans and T-shirt reading “You don’t know me.” He arranges a circle of stones. The perimeter of the circle is quartered by arrows stuck upright into the lawn and by tins of Spam. The stone-and-Spam circle is doubled by little sachets of sugar and insulin syringes. There are acorns, a staple of native California, and a woven blanket. 38 Once the circle was complete, Luna proceeded repeatedly to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 cross into and out of it for a period of four hours, every day for four days, as he changed between different costumes. Critic Blake Gopnik explains, There were the usual trappings, moccasins, loincloth, an eagle feather, a war shirt, a Winchester rifle—most of which have little to do with Luna’s own West Coast culture. And then there were strange updatings and hybridizations of such clichés: his war shirt had sports webbing on the sides; his loincloth was a blue thong with cheesy leopard spots. 39 The characters Luna performed were similarly composite, rang - ing from the breechcloth-clad Indian; to the Mexican cholo in leather jacket, bandana, and shades; to a scantily clad Italian gon - dolier; to the Indian lounge lizard (or lounge Luna, as he called it) complete with shiny burgundy tuxedo and a red felt hat with a feather. The final character, a Plains Indian dancer, delivered an acorn as a gift to Rick West, who was in the audience. Inside the circle Luna rhythmically danced by jogging in place to the beat of a ceremonial rattle. One of the most fundamental positions that Luna’s Venice Opposite, top: James Luna. work takes, with regard to conceptualizing mixed worlds, is to Apparitions, Emendatio, 2005. abjure categorical purity. The mestizo worlds of missionary colo - Installation detail. Venice, Italy. nialism and twenty-first-century globalization are marked by Photo: Mark Velasquez, provided by James Luna. contradiction, uncomfortable hybridity, and radical inauthenticity. Opposite, bottom: James Luna. Luna demonstrates this by inviting the ghost of Pablo Tac, a con - Spinning Woman, Emendatio, flicted figure if ever there was one, to haunt his work. As though 2005. Installation detail. an exemplar of the NMAI’s Bible display, Tac identified as a Venice, Italy. Photo: National Museum of the American Indian, Quechla but accepted Catholicism and venerated its missionar - Smithsonian Institution, ies despite the violence of their establishment of the first mission Washington, DC. in California long before he was born and the tyranny of their Below: James Luna. Emendatio, colonial administration during his lifetime. When I asked James 2005. Performance. Venice, Italy. Luna if these two positions were not irreconcilable, he told me, Photo: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian “you wouldn’t ask that question if you were from here. Pablo Tac Institution, Washington, DC.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 moves between Catholicism and tribalism. Is he any less Indian because of it? No.” 40 More than the vanquished Indian stripped of his native traditions and beliefs, Tac worked within the system of Catholic education to produce his own history, to record the rules of his people’s language. While the missionaries mistrans - lated native beliefs, customs, and languages, seeing them as barbaric, superstitious, and childlike, Tac did some creative mis - translations of his own. 41 He used his position as translator to insinuate his own worldview into that of the Catholic Church. As historian Lisbeth Haas explains, Ch añichñis, the word Tac uses for God, had nine conjuga - tions of verb tenses and a plural form, while Spanish Catholicism insisted on one God, in the singular, and the concept of God could not be rendered as a verb. Thus Ch añichñis expressed a concept of God that remained very specific to a Luiseño perspective and embodied different characteristics from the Spanish God. 42 In a similar gesture, Luna’s installation and performance employ numerous juxtapositions, translations, and mistranslations that testify against purity as an epistemological premise. Rather, Luna’s strategy is one of performing a “lived association with his - torical epistemologies.” 43 As though adopting the logic of the NMAI’s display cases, Luna juxtaposes objects the materiality of which pulls against and complicates their ostensible purpose or symbolic importance. For example, he places incense next to sage, two substances united by fire, which when burned are thought to have potent, spiritually purifying effects. More than mere artifacts of two opposing, monolithic cultures, however, these substances are products of mestizo worlds. Sage, a plant James Luna. Emendatio, 2005. commonly associated with North American native ritual, is actu - Performance. Venice, Italy. ally native to southern Europe and to Central America. Incense, Photo: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian too, has an arcane and circuitous pedigree. Although associated in Institution, Washington, DC. Emendatio with the rites of the Catholic Church, incense migrated

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 from Somalia and Arabia to North Africa and Mediterranean Europe. Like sage, incense functioned as an artifact of trade in the global economies of the ancient and early modern periods. One might first look at the juxtaposition of these two substances as a simple commentary on the coming together of distinct cultures, a cliché of multiculturalism. However, that juxtaposition reveals the randomness, ambiguity, mistranslations, and erasures that are fundamental to mestizo phenomena. In addition to sage and incense, Luna juxtaposes the altar and the wine box, referring not only to the Catholic liturgy and the communion rite but also to the unexpected fate of commodities (in this case, both wine and Catholicism itself) within global cap - italism. Here wine is both a liturgical artifact of a church, the nonwhite membership of which is growing exponentially, and a billion dollar international industry (once dominated by European countries such as Italy) in which California has taken an increas - ingly dominant role. The installation also places rock and roll side by side with church music, thereby invoking the complex history by which European musical traditions were imported to the Americas where they combined with African traditions, which were in turn changed and altered to produce gospel music, jazz, blues, and rock, all of which were then sold by the international music industry. One more juxtaposition compares Venice, the city in which the Biennale takes place, and the Venetian Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Luna humorously demonstrates how Venice, the city of canals and gondoliers, is a simulation, a picturesque commodity in a tourist economy that can be exported, replicated, and sold even in the desert. Venice is translated into English and transported to America, a place that centuries before had been shipped in the opposite direction. One can see another reference to this exchange in Luna’s appearance as an Indian sharpshooter with a Winchester rifle. Not only does the image recall Wild West shows and episodes of Bonanza, but it refers to the spaghetti westerns in which the Old West was manufactured in Italy and shipped back to the United States. While one might be tempted to see Sergio Leone’s films and the Vegas canals and high-end shops as cheesy imitations of the orig - inal American frontier and original Venice to which they refer, Luna works hard to weaken our sense that either original repre - sents a pure origin. When he dons the gondolier costume in his performance, the gondolier becomes simply another stock char - acter among many that natives (native Californians or native Venetians) are called upon to play for international tourist audi - ences. In this way Luna challenges his audience to consider how the native, the local, and the traditional have for a long time been the products of global trade. 44 As George Yúdice writes, “Culture is invested in, distributed in the most inclusive ways, used as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 an attraction for capital development and tourism, as the prime motor of the culture industries and as an inexhaustible kindling for new industries dependent on intellectual property. . . . [C]ulture as a resource circulates globally, with ever increasing velocity.” 45 Global capitalism and routes of trade are evident not only in terms of the array of objects that decorate these installations and serve as props for Luna’s performance. They are also central fea - tures of both Tac’s and Luna’s passages across borders. Each man traveled from southern California to Italy as a representative of his tribe, a bearer of its customs and habits, and as a neophyte in a new country. Each man acted both as a translator, working between different languages, and as someone who emends or cor - rects translations. Tac traveled, via a ship called the Poc ahontas, between the New and Old Worlds, between tribal and Catholic, between Indian, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. He was exchanged as an exotic token in a world of religious and economic domina - tion. Father Antonio Peyri, writing to a colleague, describes the two Indian boys he brought from California to the College of the Propaganda in Rome as “very talented, and they are very much appreciated by the entire College for being from such distant countries, true Indians, and of good comportment.” 46 Luna like - wise traveled between the New and Old Worlds, between his daily life as a counselor at a community college and the exoticiz - ing world of the global art market (where his being a “true Indian” from “such distant countries” was similarly “very much appreciated”). He moved (more freely than Tac) within and across contemporary circuits of globalization, between American com - modity culture under the North American Free Trade Agreement and Italy under the European Economic Union. As Luna explains, the missionary is simply an early modern version of multicultur - alism, a familiar condition in which he has repeatedly been called upon to perform. 47 The composite worlds of globalization engender profound ambivalence. As Gruzinski warns, “mestizo processes do not per - mit unambiguous answers.” 48 To the degree that ambivalence involves the anxiety of conflicted desire, it is also an intellectual tool, one that makes a joke of being two things at once. This is a joke with which Indians are familiar, primarily because it is one that whites do not seem to get. Whites tend to find their Others most entertaining when they are only one thing at a time. “As long as I dressed like an Indian and complained like an Indian,” King explains, lampooning his position within the native min - strel show, I was entertainment. But if I dressed like a non-Indian and reasoned like a non-Indian, then not only was I not enter -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 tainment, I wasn’t an Indian. Stay with me. Therefore, if I dressed like an Indian and acted like an Indian—and here it would help if you’ve seen the witch skit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail —I must be . . . entertainment. 49 The Monty Python skit and King’s invocation of it show the spe - ciousness of essentialist reasoning, the real danger (to the witch or the Indian) of the logic of purity. That ambivalence, the logic of two things at once, would be an appealing epistemological tool and that entertainment (particularly that which is based on the hyperbolic performance of corrupt reasoning) might also have its strategic functions is unsurprising. That James Luna understands the entertainment value of that joke is evident in the fact that he—the wry performer of Artifact Piece, a critique of museological practice—appeared at the Venice Biennale as a representative of the Smithsonian Institution, the largest complex of museums in the world. While in Venice, he also represented the NMAI, a highly controversial museum that ironically seeks to use museology, a discipline that has tradition - ally victimized native peoples and participated in their genocide, to give voice to Indians throughout the Americas. As contradic - tory as these tactics may seem, contradiction and ambivalence merely recognize the simple fact that for natives there is no out - side of the museum. Edward H. Davis. Northern That Luna’s Venice project plays with ambivalence, that it Diegueño Elders during rites wittily satirizes the museum’s being two things at once, is perhaps held in 1907 on the anniversary most evident in its engagement with documentary photographs of chief Cinon Mataweer’s death. Photograph from the Constance that stand as artifacts of the museumification of Indians. One of DuBois Collection, Museum of Emendati o’s installations includes a black-and-white image of a Man, San Diego, California. Used Luiseño woman who, oblivious to the camera lens trained upon by James Luna in Apparitions, Emendatio, 2005. Installation her, sits on the ground and toils. Clothed not in native costume detail. Venice, Italy.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 but missionary dress, she is grinding acorns between two rocks. She is making wee-wish, a traditional food the preparation of which requires tedious labor in which acorns are dried and ground to a fine flour that is then boiled in water like oatmeal. A second photograph, taken by Edward Davis, documents a group of native elders from 1907. Like the woman who grinds acorns in her gingham dress, the men are the very image of mélange. They wear suit jackets, vests, and canvas trousers, but their clothing is also decorated with native adornments: feathers, woven sashes, headscarves, and feathered hats. In their hands they clutch feath - ered plumes, which they raise in a celebratory gesture. In another performance by Luna, one called Take a Picture with a Real Indian, which he first staged in 1991, he challenged the authenticity-promoting and origin-centered ideologies of ethnography by offering gallery-goers the opportunity to have their pictures taken with a “real” Indian, whatever they conceived that to be. They could choose between Luna dressed in a leather breechcloth, in khakis and a T-shirt, or in a feathered headdress and beaded breastplate. Participants were allowed to take a Polaroid with them, but they were also required to leave one for the artist. As Luna instructed, “Take a picture, leave a picture.” All of these photographs are images of bodies being remem - bered, where memory is a form of entertainment for white audi - ences. The images were specifically taken to document what whites consider to be—now as in the early twentieth century— dying civilizations and lost customs needing to be remembered, preserved, and captivatingly performed. They are images of “real” Indians doing “real” Indian things: grinding acorns for a curious anthropologist, doing a photo-op in a shabby suit and feathered headdress for a documentary photographer, posing for the tourist’s camera. As entertainment, these photographs police what constitutes the real. This is the process of museumification at work: the authenticity of the artifact (the photograph, the stone tools, the Indian costumes) is secured, its value compounded, by the performative demonstration of habitual labors. The docu -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 mentation of those labors in turn prepares them, and those engaged in performing them, for collection and display. Flesh is made bone. One might easily condemn this practice but for the fact that even as the ethnographer, curator, and historian take a picture, they also leave a picture. They take something from the native, exploit him for their own interests, but they also preserve the very things that their presence has endangered. Moreover, they document their own roles (violent, benevolent, patronizing, and curious) in the production of mélanges. Their gaze is preserved on the photographic paper; their desires are suspended in silver nitrate. Thus they engage in a kind of trade, the inherent inequity of which is neither new to nor completely invalidating for Native Americans. These Indians not only submit themselves to the doc - umentary effects and mnemonic practices of someone else’s cam - era lens, they also insinuate themselves and their traditions into a visual discourse working hard to make them disappear. For native peoples, doing what you have always done—grinding acorns, performing ceremonies, just standing there—is by defin - ition a form of defiance against a camera, the very presence of which implies that you won’t be doing that activity much longer. So they succumb to entertainment and become part of the joke. But in Emendatio Luna has the last laugh. He superimposes new photographs over the old ones, insists on ambivalence in the face of the logic of purity, and turns that logic into parody. To insist on ambivalence, to tell the joke of two things at once, means that one cannot reject out of hand even the single-minded logic of entertainment. As Charlotte Townsend-Gault writes, “Emendatio provokes a suspicion that it is all an elaborate decoy,

an extended, entertaining diversion, in order to maintain and pro - Opposite: James Luna. Take a tect something. Or, using one way—the art-world performance Picture with a Real Indian, 1991. way—of encoding knowledge to overlay or replace another way Performance and installation. Whitney Museum of American 50 of encoding knowledge.” Art, New York. Photo: Sheldon In one such superimposition, the photograph of Diegueño elders Collins, provided by James Luna. yields to a color photo of Luna and four of his friends imitating Below: James Luna. Apparitions, the poses of their forebears. Like their ancestors, these men hold Emendatio, 2005. Installation up Indian artifacts (in this case, ceremonial rattles) for the cam - detail. Venice, Italy. Photo: Mark Velasquez, provided by era. They are part of the long tradition of the aboriginal minstrel James Luna. show. But also like those earlier men, they are dressed as “non-Indians,” this time in jeans and T-shirts; ten - nis shoes, loafers, and Top-Siders; sunglasses and baseball caps. As a result, by the convoluted logic of purity, they are not Indians, and they are not entertainment. As is typical of Luna’s other works, in Emendatio he combines

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 and hybridizes stereotypes, plays between U.S. and Italian tourist kitsch, sets the stage with ambivalent props that suggest the good and bad, the comic and serious effects of Indians’ association with whites. His work is a performance of the body in memory; it is filled with his own memories—eating Spam and wee-wish, looking out from his home on the mountain at the landscape of his native California, reading Pablo Tac’s history, driving by the old missions and the new casinos. The work as a whole is also filled with selective, imaginative, and mestizo memory, the creation of strange hybrid customs and pop culture–inspired characters. Emendatio is, in a word, entertainment. But, as Thomas King says, “maybe being entertainment isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s what you’re left with when the only defense you have is a good story. Maybe entertainment is the story of survival.” 51

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 Notes 1. Constance Goddard DuBois, “Diegueño Mortuary Ollas,” American Anthropologist 9, no. 3 (July–September 1907): 484. 2. DuBois, 485–486. 3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression , trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 91. 4. Rebecca Schneider, “Archives: Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 104. Emphasis in original. 5. Schneider, 102. 6. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146–166. In addition to Schneider and Phelan, see also Aleksandra Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 83–95; and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia, 1996). 7. While Phelan suggests that performance’s ontology, which is constituted by disappearance, allows performance to elude the archive, representation, and commerce, Schneider counters that such a position accepts the archive’s logic too readily. She attempts instead to imagine how the body in performance might remain despite its seeming disappearance. 8. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. 9. Mignolo, 26. 10. Schneider, 102. 11. Schneider, 103. Emphasis in original. 12. Blake Gopnik, “Indian Artists in Venice: Off the Traditional Path,” Washington Post, 24 July 2005, NO1. 13. Paul Chaat Smith, “Luna Remembers,” in James Luna: Emendatio, ed. Truman Lowe and Paul Chaat Smith (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 2005), 32–33. 14. Thomas King, The Truth about Stories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 64–65. 15. King, 68. 16. Schneider, 105–106. Emphasis in original. 17. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “ and James Luna on Location at Venice: The Allegorical Indian Redux,” Art History 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 743. 18. In 2008, Luna performed Emendatio at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis and at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York. 19. For an eloquent treatment of this topic, see George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 20. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York: Routledge, 2002), 31. 21. Amanda Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian: Sharing the Gift,” The American Indian Quarterly 29, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2005): 364. 22. See Cobb, “The National Museum of the American Indian,” 378–379. 23. James Volkert, Linda R. Martin, and Amy Pickworth, National Museum of the American Indian Map and Guide (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 52. 24. Gruzinski, 9.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 25. Edward Rothstein, “Museum with an American Indian Voice,” New York Times , 21 September 2004, E1; Edward Rothstein, “Drawing Battle Lines in Museum View of War,” New York Times , 11 November 2004, E1; Edward Rothstein, “Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?” New York Times, 21 December 2004, E1; Marc Fisher, “Indian Museum’s Appeal, Sadly, Only Skin-Deep,” The Washington Post, 21 September 2004, B1; Paul Richard, “Shards of Many Untold Stories: In Place of Unity, A Melange of Unconnected Objects,” The Washington Post, 21 September 2004, C1. 26. Elizabeth Archuleta, “Gym Shoes, Maps and Passports, Oh My! Creating Community or Creating Chaos at the NMAI?” The American Indian Quarterly 29, nos. 3/4 (Summer–Fall 2005): 427. 27. Claire Smith, “Decolonising the Museum: The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC,” Antiquity 79 (June 2005): 428. 28. Edward Rothstein, “Profile: The Mixed Reviews of the Museum of the American Indian,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 17, 2005. 29. See, for example, “American Indian Museum Trustee Expresses Outrage at Gover Hiring,” Char-Koosta News (Pablo, MT), 27 September 2007, 9; Dwight A. Gourneau, “Kevin Gover Unquestionably Best Choice to Run NMAI,” Indian Country Today, 26 September 2007, A5; Jacqueline Trescott, “Indian Museum Director Stepping Down in 2007: W. Richard West Jr.’s Vision Defined an Institution That Confounded Some,” Washington Post, 27 October 2006, C1; Deborah Howell, “Was Museum Director Treated Fairly?” Washington Post, 10 February 2008, B6; and Pablo Eisenberg, “Same Old Smithsonian: After an Appalling Year of Scandal, an Appalling Lack of Action,” Washington Post, 14 January 2008, A21. 30. Steven Conn, “Heritage vs. History at the National Museum of the American Indian,” The Public Historian 28, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 69. 31. Conn, 71. 32. Amy Lonetree and Amanda J. Cobb, The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 33. Amy Lonetree, “Acknowledging the Truth of History: Missed Opportunities at the National Museum of the American Indian,” in The National Museum of the American Indian , ed. Lonetree and Cobb, 310–313. 34. Chaat Smith, “Luna Remembers,” 28. 35. James Luna, interview by author, 21 June 2006. 36. Pablo Tac, Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey, ed. and trans. Minna Hewes and Gordon Hewes (San Luis Rey, CA: Old Mission, 1958), 22. Originally published in The Americas 9, no. 1 (July 1952): 87–106. 37. Walter Robinson, “Festive Venice,” Artnet Magazine, http://www .artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/walrobinson/robinson6-10-05.asp. 38. Townsend-Gault, 744–745. Luna obtained the T-shirt in Washington, DC, when visiting the NMAI. The back of the shirt reads “FBI Witness Protection Program.” 39. Gopnik, NO1. 40. James Luna, interview by author, 28 April 2006. 41. Evidence abounds of European misinterpretation of Indian cultures. For examples specific to the California missions, see Zephyrin Engelhardt, San Luis Rey Mission (San Francisco: The James H. Barry Company, 1921); and Zephyrin Engelhardt, The Missions and Missionaries of California, 3 vol. (San Francisco: The James H. Barry Company, 1912).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 42. Lisbeth Haas, “Pablo Tac: Memory, Identity, History,” in James Luna, ed. Lowe and Chaat Smith, 51–52. 43. Townsend-Gault, 750. 44. For more on this, see Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1998). Many thanks to my colleague Michael Gaudio for bringing this book to my attention. 45. Yúdice, 3–4. 46. Engelhardt, San Luis Rey Mission, 84. 47. James Luna, interview by author, 28 April 2006. 48. Gruzinski, 81. 49. King, 68. 50. Townsend-Gault, 751. 51. King, 89.

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