2009
University Of Minnesota Press
Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith is a difficult book to synopsize because it is a collection of speeches that careens through modern art, the “weird politics” of Indian life, the proliferation of romanticism and stereotypes, the artistic purpose of film, the glories and failures of the
American Indian Movement, and the promise and problems of the
National Museum of the American Indian (25). The inconsistency of the volume is both wonderful and frustrating for a reader hoping for a more sustained critique from one of the leading cultural critics of our time. However, many of the speeches in the volume are funny, easy to read, and touchingly honest.
Smith is at his best in the speeches included in part three, “Jukebox Spiritualism,” particularly “From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.” In these essays, Smith discusses his heritage and his own struggles with identity as a “suburban Indian” teenager who desperately “longs to be a stereotype” (166). Frequently, he stops recounting his family history and revises it, remarking “I could just as easily tell it this way” (165). In a particularly poignant moment, he discusses the work of his grandfather who “should have been a self-hating, colonized oppressor, yet he carried out the duties of a spiritual leader on both sides of the family” as a means to illustrate that the false binary – “traditional” or “sell-out” – leads to formulaic conclusions (166-7). This reflection connects to a question he asks in an earlier chapter: “Are Indian people allowed to change? Are we allowed to invent completely new ways of being Indian that have no connection to previous ways we have lived?” (91). These are haunting and pertinent questions for Indian people today and for those engaged in Indian politics or cultural work and challenge the romantic stereotype set for Indian people by dominant society through film, art, literature, and advertising. In rewriting and re-envisioning his own history, Smith shows that everyday life is more complicated than pre-packaged images and argues that we must embrace the “ocean of terrifying complexity,” of modern life and create “new ways of seeing and thinking” (10, 75).
“Jukebox Spiritualism” lays the foundation for how Smith comes to view modern Indian politics and art as an Associate Curator for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. In “From Geneva Lake to Finland Station” Smith asserts that the “extraordinary tension between the imagined past and the messy, uncooperative realities of our present is a crazy-making factory running twenty-four hours a day” and this “crazy-making factory” produces “absurd questions in Baltimore” as well as “transcendent art in Vancouver” (171). For Smith, the contradictions that plague Indian life, both in the past and currently, are a delicious mess, rich with significance, and are best embodied by the great Indian artists of our time, from filmmakers to installation artists, including Faye HeavySheild, James Luna, Erica Lord, Zacharias Kunuk, and many others. The essays about James Luna, “Luna Remembers,” and Faye HeavyShield, “Standoff in Lethbridge,” are some of the most lyrical essays in the volume, and it is apparent that Smith believes art has the potential to encompass complexity as well as make space for change. As he stands in the middle of an exhibit Faye HeavyShield is in the process of setting up at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2004 called blood, he marvels at the power of her work, the “blast of patented HeavyShield hushed silence that greeted me even before I had a chance to take it all in. Whoosh” (105). This “whoosh,” or the inarticulable transformative force one feels when standing before a powerful piece of art, is what Paul Chaat Smith believes can combat romanticism and change the way society views Indian peoples and cultures.
This is important, because as he notes in “On Romanticism,” dominant society has always been attracted to the romantic, tragic Indian, and the real tragedy is that Indian people are coming to believe this image themselves. “On Romanticism” is a perfect example of Smith’s style, which begins by using Kurt Cobain to discuss the “new age of objectification” of Indian peoples. As the essay progresses, it stylistically embraces complexity, bringing together language, film, Native religions, romantic stereotypes, and the purpose of museums (16). He argues in this essay that too much Indian art relies on “expected protest” and “authenticity” and questions how a museum should engage in these “weird politics” in productive ways in the strongest essay in the entire volume, “Ground Beneath our Feet” (26, 25). Smith is incredibly honest about the potential the NMAI has to combat these stereotypes and the hopes he has for the museum, but is also fully aware of the enormous potential for failure.
“Ground Beneath Our Feet” is yet another example of Smith’s eclectic style as he weaves together disparate points in time and space, wielding: the Nixon administration, the occupation of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, the fact that the history of the world was forever changed by the contact of two previously separated hemispheres, and the presence of Indian artifacts beneath the nation’s capital as the last piece of land available for development in Washington D.C. is set aside for the National Museum of the American Indian (53). Smith notes he had doubts about the viability of a national museum dedicated solely to Indian experiences in the past, but was drawn to the project almost despite himself. As an Associate Curator for the NMAI, he argues that the museum must attempt to encompass national and international history and more; to embrace contradictions and the ludicrous. He writes:
. . . the new Indian museum must tell stories from throughout the hemisphere and throughout time. It is a task that is at once absurd, impossible, and urgent, and it must be done well because the chance won’t come again soon. It must be a place of memory, memorial, hope, and grief; a place where questions are as important as answers and no facts are beyond dispute and a place that honors the Indian past and Indian future. (62) This quote is indicative of Smith’s overall ideology regarding Indian cultural work: it must engage, embrace an opening-up or enlargement of issues, rather than attempt proscriptive answers. Rather than seeking answers or a neat presentation of a people long since regulated to a vanishing past, visitors to the museum need to change their view of the NMAI as the only Indian space in our nation’s capital and come to realize this entire country and hemisphere is Native America. His hope is that the NMAI will cause a reckoning “where the most important exhibit comes after everyone leaves, as visitors, for the first time, look closely at the ground beneath their feet” (63).
Unfortunately, not all of the essays maintain the strength or clarity of “On Romanticism” or “Ground Beneath our Feet,” and the essays together are inconsistent. If the afterword – which explains how the volume came together and what it comprises – were the
foreword, much of the confusion the reader feels moving through the essays would be addressed before it arose. Although I can envision these essays being taught in a variety of classrooms within a variety of departments, including art and literature, the volume is accessible to any reader and illuminates the strange nexus created by Indian art and national politics as Indian artists across this nation work for social and cultural change. If the worst thing I can say about this volume is that it left me wanting a more sustained treatment or critique of these complex issues, that hardly seems indicative of failure. At the end, I left the book hoping that, like Smith asserts of great art, this volume was merely an opening-up of issues he intends to consider in greater depth in the future.
North America 
