Very Accurate Norsemen
Artist's statement
"Very Accurate Norsemen" is inspired by Edward Curtis' work documenting the "vanishing Indian". Curtis was known to stage and edit his photos to promote his own version of Native Americans and those images still influence us today. In this series, I, a Cherokee woman, entered an alternate timeline to document the "vanishing Norseman". These photos are of counterfeit Norsemen, doing whatever I think a Norseman should do to appear as Norse as possible while representing all Norse people and Norse history. When you think of a Norseman, I hope you'll be able to only think of these images I've created. They're as accurate as they need to be, regardless of the kangaroo skins the subjects are prominently displaying upon their chests.
I created "Very Accurate Norsemen" in Summer 2020 as my final project for David Titterington's ART 100 Art Appreciation course at Haskell Indian Nations University. In the course, we learned about art as communication and we were exposed to a variety of Native American artists. Each artist we studied used different mediums to bring attention to different issues. I was especially interested in the numerous remixes of Edward Curtis' legacy and decided to continue that tradition. My version of the Curtis controversy commentary utilizes satire to make my point.
In 2022 a photo from this series was chosen to be displayed in The Heart is a Fist exhibit as part of the Kansas City Public Library's Big Read event featuring U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and her latest book of poetry, An American Sunrise. This was the first Big Read event that featured an author of color and I was honored to speak as a panelist at the concluding event, the Artists Roundtable Discussion. The Exhibit then spent some time in the Edgar Heap of Birds Gallery and the Murphy Lobby at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
This series was also selected for inclusion in the 2022 Indiverse Multimedia Festival, a festival celebrating Indigenous creativity and resilience.
courtesy of Kansas City Public Library
“One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research.
It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts on Indian Affairs. Rather the image of the granite-faced grunting redskin has been perpetuated by American mythology.”
