“In my public school education, Crow history was not taught,” Red Star told Nadiah Rivera Fellah, co-curator of “A Scratch on the Earth,” a mid-career survey that premiered at New Jersey’s Newark Museum of Art in 2019. “Learning that history felt revolutionary to me, and it inspired my desire to learn about the history of the Crow Nation and reeducate myself with knowledge which I could then share visually with a broad audience.”
As an undergrad, Red Star learned that the very campus on which she was studying — Montana State University in Bozeman — was Crow territory that had been ceded along with more than 30 million other acres as part of land grabs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In response, she created a 2004 installation of tipis staged in strategic locations across campus — busy walkways, common areas and the 50-yard line of the football field. “I wanted everyone to know that this is Crow territory,” she told Rivera Fellah.
While pursuing her master’s degree in art and Native American studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, Red Star started feeling homesick and in need of a Crow connection.
“In a twisted way, I knew that I could go to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and find Crow material,” Red Star explained during an artist talk hosted by UCLA’s Hammer Museum.
While she did find some Crow moccasins on display, their location within the museum — in a dark gallery beyond a dinosaur exhibit — made the bigger impression. Red Star was also taken by how much the museum’s Native American dioramas resembled her home state of Montana.
“It was then that I realized that we were sort of set up as the viewers in that institution to place everything in the past,” Red Star added.
Arguably Red Star’s best-known work, Four Seasons makes for an apt point of entry into “A Scratch on the Earth,” which recently landed at the San Antonio Museum of Art and will remain on view through May 8. Although partly rooted in institutional critique, Four Seasons also brings Native culture into a contemporary context — in technicolor with a keen sense of humor to boot — while raising questions of authenticity with its pointed juxtaposition of “real” and “fake” elements.
According to the wall text accompanying her nearby Family Portrait Series from 2011, Red Star — who is of Apsáalooke and Irish American descent — has concluded “that the most ‘authentic Indians’ were those of her father’s generation, who embodied the complex traits of both Native and popular cultures, without the pressure to conform exclusively to either.”
That point of view reverberates throughout “A Scratch on the Earth,” which borrows its title from the Crow word annúkaxua. The “scratches” in question are the marks the U.S. government made on Native lands through legislation such as the General Allotment Act of 1887. Also known as the Dawes Act, that aggressive, assimilation-driven policy divided tribal lands with a firm focus on agriculture and disrupted many historically matrilineal societies.
Those scratches are on full display in Red Star’s Map of the Allotted Lands of the Crow Reservation, Montana — A Tribute to Many Good Women. To assemble this site-specific installation, Red Star used social media to collect photographs of Crow women wearing elk-tooth dresses and then placed transparencies of them atop their ancestral land plots on a giant map of Crow territory circa 1907.
In stark contrast to the regalia and showmanship on parade in Um-basax-bilua, “Where They Make the Noise,” Red Star’s 2011 photographic series My Home is Where My Tipi Sits offers a glimpse of everyday life on the reservation — albeit without people. Working in grids of nine, the artist trained her lens on five distinguishing characteristics of the Crow reservation: churches, signs, broken-down cars, HUD homes and sweat lodges. Presented from an almost photojournalistic perspective, the collected grids dispel preconceived notions of reservation life since the “rez” cars, homes and churches look immediately familiar. Easily the most enlightening is the portion dedicated to sweat lodges — ceremonial saunas used for physical and spiritual purification. While traditionally made from willow saplings and hide, the modern-day sweat lodges Red Star captured are covered in blankets, sleeping bags, even tie-dyed sheets.
To highlight the continued importance of sweat lodges in modern times, Red Star created the 2019 piece Sweat Lodge by building a geodesic dome and covering it in a stylish tapestry of blankets, rugs and sleeping bags. Museumgoers are invited to sit inside the room-temperature structure and watch Monsters — a 14 minute video Red Star created with fellow artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin. While the 360-degree projection “highlights transformations in the Crow Reservation’s lands over time and mythical stories of Crow culture,” it doubles as an atmospheric space for contemplation and — like it or not — will inevitably set the stage for many selfies.
During her talk at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Red Star explained that she began noticing two ubiquitous images of Native American war chief Medicine Crow during her college years. His face stared back at her from paperbacks at the bookstore and bottles of Honest Tea at Whole Foods. Beyond raising questions of cultural appropriation, these experiences prompted her to investigate their provenance.
“I started thinking about what this meant, who these commercial entities were … and wondering if they actually knew he who he was,” Red Star explained. “And with that sort of simple question, I started to ask myself, ‘Well wait a minute, what happened that day when he sat down to take that photo?’ And what I learned was that photo was from a delegation trip that happened in 1880. And not only was it Medicine Crow who went on that trip from Montana to Washington, D.C., to sit with the U.S. president at the time, but five other Crow chiefs attended. … And the reason why they went there was because the U.S. government was trying to put a train through a large tract of our hunting territory. So, they went there to basically fight on behalf of our community and our land base. And the photographer of those portraits is Charles Milton Bell.”
From that realization and further research into the Crow chiefs in attendance, Red Star created the 2014 series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation. Using Bell’s black-and-white portraits as bases, Red Star outlined details — ermine trim, military-inspired jackets, brass hoop earrings, eagle feathers, hair extensions — and made annotations in red ink. As with her Crow Fair timeline, the marks Red Star made hold as much weight as the images themselves. Here we learn that Medicine Crow “looked like a devil in his war bonnet of feathers, furs and buffalo horns,” according to Army captain and photographer John Gregory Bourke; that Old Crow participated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1884; that Pretty Eagle’s body was sold to a collector for $500 and kept at the American Museum of Natural History for 72 years; that Plenty Coups had 11 wives and once shook hands with Prince Albert of Monaco; and that Two Belly — aka Pregnant Woman — could kick your ass with his piercing eyes alone.
“I really became obsessed,” Red Star said of the drawings during her Hammer Museum talk. “So much so that I wanted to figure out a tangible way to engage with these animals. I found an advertisement where you could take children’s drawings and then submit them to this company that would then turn them into a soft toy. So, I decided, ‘Why don’t I try doing that with Medicine Crow’s drawings?’”
The resulting series — 2014’s Zoo Softies — is perhaps the most whimsical aspect of “A Scratch on the Earth.” They’re adorable, weird and covetable — and sadly not reproduced for purchase in the SAMA gift shop.
If you approach “A Scratch on the Earth” in the order it’s presented at SAMA, the vibrant 2016 series Apsáalooke Feminist offers an uplifting parting glance. Creating something of a call-and-response with her Four Seasons from a decade prior, it depicts the artist alongside her daughter Beatrice — both donning braids and elk-tooth dresses in a stylized setting. The mother and daughter duo have collaborated on several projects over the years, but Beatrice opted to “retire” from the art world around the age of 11.
Wisely, SAMA has followed suit with its own acknowledgement. Immediately upon entering the exhibition space, viewers are presented with a draft of the land remembrance that follows. The community is also invited to share feedback on the land remembrance draft through a suggestion box and accompanying QR code that can be found in a reading room near the exhibition’s exit:
“The San Antonio Museum of Art is mindful of its location on the ancestral lands of the First Peoples of this area including the Esto’k Gna (Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas), the Tehuan Band of Mission Indians, the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation, and the many other local Native People who have connections with this land. We also remember the peoples whose names and contributions have been erased over time, including migratory peoples of Cemanahuac.”
On February 25, Wendy Red Star will be the virtual keynote speaker at SAMA’s Mays Symposium. Details and registration can be found at samuseum.org.
“Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth”
$10-$20, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.- 7 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday through May 8, San Antonio Museum of Art, 200 W. Jones Ave., (210) 978-8100, samuseum.org.
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This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 8, 2022.