“It is a human right to have a voice and be heard”
The power of self-representation and the art of Edgar Heap of Birds
Art can be used as a powerful way to assert cultural sovereignty and justice against the one-sided, stagnant (white) American definition of Native Americans. The multi-disciplinary art of Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho) brings past to present by highlighting the colonial history and contemporary realities Native Americans face.
From Public Signs to Public Awareness
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954) is especially known for his art that mimics public signs to highlight the Native American colonial experience, both past and present. The signs contain short writings written by himself, sometimes combined with edited texts from the core of American identity such as the Declaration of Independence. By using text in his prints, public art and drawings, Heap of Birds utilizes the colonialists’ own weapon of written words – once and still used against Native people- to fight back the still existing colonial ways. In so doing, Heap of Birds advocates for Native American self-representation.
You Can’t Define Us – Aesthetic Sovereignty
The use of written English words in Heap of Birds’s art can also be seen as a protest against the way Native American art is defined by the dominant American culture. His art challenges the common conceptions of Native American art as something simple, traditional, and unchanging by making people reflect the multiple meanings his texts bear and by using modern art forms not conventionally associated with Indian art.
Heap of Birds’s work powerfully reflects the ever-changing Native American cultures. Moreover, his art asserts that Native people have the aesthetic sovereignty to determine what Native art is.
A good example of this is the controversy caused by Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold, purchased by Minnesota’s Walker Art Museum in 2017. The sculpture recreated a conglomeration of gallows used in government-sanctioned executions, including that of the 38 Dakota men executed in Minnesota in 1862. The local Native American communities condemned the sculpture as insensitive and re-traumatizing. In 1990, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis had commissioned a piece called “Building Minnesota” from Edgar Heap of Birds, honoring the same 38 Dakota men – but without controversy.
The difference is, it’s not and it shouldn’t have been the white man’s story to tell. Heap of Birds’s piece was about honouring, remembering and healing, with the consent of the local tribes. This wasn’t just art, it was part of an on-going Native American history and experience, not yet resolved.
Finding Your Place As a Native Artist
For Native artists it can be difficult to claim the right and power to determine who you are as an artist and how, if at all, you should be categorized. This is not the case with Edgar Heap of Birds, who actively builds a bridge to other American Indian and Indigenous communities and educates non-Native Americans about their misunderstandings of and indifference toward Indigenous people.
If aesthetic sovereignty is taken to mean refusal by Native American artists to utilize ideas and forms of modern Western art, then Edgar Heap of Birds can’t be said to represent it. But, in the sense that Heap of Birds draws upon them to make strong statements about Native experiences in his fight for the right of self-representation, his work clearly reflects the principles of aesthetic sovereignty. As he puts it: “It is a human right to have a voice and be heard.”
Sources:
Artforum: https://www.artforum.com/words/id=68033
Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/edgar-heap-of-birds
Homepage of Edgar Heap of Birds:
http://heapofbirds.ou.edu/Websites/heapofbirds/files/Content/3277368/EHB_Brochure.pdf
http://heapofbirds.ou.edu/Websites/heapofbirds/files/Content/3277368/reading_5.pdf
Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/385682/in-minnesota-listening-to-native-perspectives-on-memorializing-the-dakota-war/
Emily Carr University of Art + Design: http://www.ecuad.ca/calendar/edgar-heap-of-birds-genocide-and-democracy-secrets-of-life-and-death
Jstor Daily: https://daily.jstor.org/edgar-heap-of-birds-building-minnesota/
Kathryn W. Shanley, “The Indians America Loves to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation”. American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 675-702 (University of Nebraska Press)
Lippard, Lucy R. ”Moving days” in Marjorie Devon (ed.): “Migrations: New Directionsin Native American Art ” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006)
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Heap_of_Birds