Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online Page A

Bird stood up at four board meetings to explain that the remains must be reburied, but, like Sitting Bull, she became inaudible when she became challenging: her remarks were ignored in the meetings themselves and were absent from the board minutes. It took five years of statewide Intertribal Reinterment Committee effort to achieve her goal.
    The Smithsonian alone has the remains of more than eighteen thousand Native Americans in its collection, demonstrating yet again that Native Americans are considered artworks on the same order as their baskets. No matter how recent, indigenous burial sites were regarded as legitimate sites for archaeological digs until Congress passed the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. But the same year that legislation liberated Native American remains from museums, another law put live artists back in: that law mandates that no one may describe himself or herself as a Native American or Indian artist unless that individual is a registered member of a federally recognized tribe or is able to demonstrate a heritage of a quarter or more “Indian blood” (a definition that American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill calls arithmetical genocide, since within a century no one will meet the genetic criterion, no matter what their cultural experience). No other ethnic group in the United States is thus certified—in somewhat the same way Old Masters paintings are authenticated or discredited. Punishment for unauthenticated artists or the exhibitors of their work can include up to fifteen years in prison or a million dollars in fines. Supposedly drafted to prevent imposters from cashing in on the Santa Fe art market, this law immediately caused several Oklahoma museums to close down and excluded uncooperative artists from many other arenas.
    Jimmie Durham, for example, was scheduled to have a show at the nonprofitgallery American Indian Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, but the gallery faced closure or loss of funding, because its legal mandate is to show Native American artists and the part-Cherokee Durham, a prominent AIM activist in the 1970s, has declined to be certified by the federal government. The show was moved to another venue, and soon after, the artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie made this law the subject of an installation at the San Francisco Art Institute, drawing an analogy between registration numbers and concentration camp numbers. Durham writes:
    To protect myself and the gallery from Congressional wrath, I hereby swear to the truth of the following statement: I am a full-blood contemporary artist, of the subgroup (or clan) called sculptors. I am not an American Indian, nor have I ever seen or sworn loyalty to India. I am not a “Native American,” nor do I feel that “America” has a right to name me or un-name me. I have previously stated that I should be considered a mixed-blood: that is, I claim to be a male, but only one of my parents was male.
    For a lot of tribes, the primary war nowadays is to prove that they exist; as extras from the Golden Age, they are assumed to have faded into the sunset along with the credits. Like Sandra Bullock in
The Net
(1995), a movie about a woman whose identity is electronically destroyed, or Vanessa Williams in
Eraser
(1996), the Schwarzenegger flop about the federal witness protection program, they do not officially exist; and without federal recognition of their existence, they cannot obtain the land rights and legal benefits owed to Native Americans. Proving they exist means coming up with a paper trail demonstrating cultural continuity, a peculiar demand to place upon people whose largely oral culture was violently disrupted and dislocated by the same government.
    Proving that they exist to the general public can be equally challenging. Innumerable works of art mourn (or celebrate in a giddy whirl of melancholy) their vanishing: cultural monuments from
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) to James Earle Fraser’s