The Reclamation of Belonging: Indigenous Public Artworks’ Relationship to Land and the Decolonization Movement

Clarissa Gucwa

PhD Candidate, Tulane University

ABSTRACT

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds is a Cheyenne and Arapaho scholar and artist who engages history, language, and land within his public artworks. His piece Reclaim is a steel highway sign originally sited on the Purchase College campus that shares the same graphic design as other highway signs; it is a steel rectangle with a green background and white typeface. However, this sign reads: “NEW YORK, Purchased? Stolen? Reclaimed?” This paper will examine this work’s relationship to the Neuberger Museum of Art and to Land as an Indigenous philosophical construct. This relationship has changed from its inception as part of a biennial public art exhibition at the Neuberger to its transformation beyond ephemeral when it was accessioned into the permanent collection and from its physical reclamation of land to its subsequent displacement when it was removed. Understanding Reclaim’s relationship to colonial institutions and Land as an Indigenous philosophical construct allows for a deeper understanding of how language, history, and movement can center Land and become successful acts of decolonization.

The Reclamation of Belonging: Indigenous Public Artworks’ Relationship to Land and the Decolonization Movement

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds is a Cheyenne and Arapaho scholar and artist whose multidisciplinary artwork includes drawings, acrylic paintings, works in glass, and outdoor sculptures that explore themes of autonomy and the reclamation of land, language, and history.^[i] I first encountered Heap of Birds’ public artwork Reclaim (1997, Figure 1) while conducting research on the Neuberger Museum of Art’s outdoor sculpture collection. The research file included a photograph of the artwork in its original location on the right side of a road on the Purchase College campus. Depicted in the photograph was a steel highway sign, similar in design and size to other highway signs; it is a rectangle with a green background and white, light reflective typeface. Written in English, the sign includes the words “New York” at the top followed by the words, “Purchased? Stolen? Reclaimed?” each on its own plane aligned to the left while question marks align to the right mimicking guide signs that inform travelers of the distance to the next destination.

While reading through the list of outdoor sculptures in the collection, I found that Reclaim was the only work currently in storage. The Neuberger Museum of Art, founded in 1969, has an outdoor sculpture collection that includes approximately seventeen works,^[ii] most of which are on view year-round on the Purchase College campus. These sculptures have become part of the fabric of the school itself as symbols of creativity and dedication to the arts. The fact that one sculpture was not installed was striking because of the pride taken in these public works. As I pursued more information about Reclaim, through conversations with staff at the Neuberger, I was told that the research files for this piece were closed to the public, including graduate students like myself. The clear connection this work has to the land continues to prompt the question, what happens when an artwork conceptually grounded in Land is separated from it? As a settler living on Indigenous land that has yet to be repatriated, I acknowledge how I have and am benefitting from the past and present colonization of the land and its people, as well as my responsibility to participate in the process of decolonization,[iii] with the guidance of Native peoples.^[iv]

Land as an Indigenous philosophical construct will guide this conversation about Reclaim. Sandra Styres defines Land, with a capital L, as a foundational being that reflects and centers Indigenous knowledge and philosophy. The term Land connects land and place by recognizing its “duality (not oppositional or dichotomous) that refers not only to place as a physical geographic space but also to the underlying conceptual principles, philosophies, and ontologies of that space.”^[v] Land has agency within conceptual, experiential, relational, and embodied constructs of space and place, and is a critical element of decentering colonial relations and recentering Indigenous thought.

In conversation with Heap of Birds, he described how Reclaim was not conceived as part of a series and was intended to be a temporary intervention on the college’s campus.^[vi] The piece was originally part of the Neuberger Museum of Art’s 1997 Biennial Exhibition of Public Art, which sought to enter the current debate of what defines public art. Former Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs, Dr. Judy Collischan, described public art as “a temporal exhibition of work on public display requiring no special entry fee for viewing.”[vii] This definition alludes to the removal of barriers of access that are normally present in museums or galleries and points to a shift in the 1990s toward “new genre public art”[viii] in which artworks interact with the audience to build community. The temporality of public art is also central in this definition. When Reclaim was removed from its original location, accessioned into the museum collection, and then displayed in the museum space (Figure 2), it moved beyond its ephemeral nature, which impacted the relationship between Reclaim and Land. Understanding this work’s position outside of Heap of Birds’ other series as well as its conception and relationship with the Neuberger Museum of Art will provide an opportunity for a new understanding of this work. In conjunction with a new understanding of public artworks’ relationship with Land, this awareness provides a greater understanding of place and land in art. It is through this understanding that Reclaim centers Land through language, history, and movement as acts of decolonization.

Previous scholarship on Heap of Birds’ public artworks often frames the land and its relation to the work in terms of “site specificity”^[ix] or as an example of “land art,” however, I hesitate to position Reclaim within those categorical boundaries. Land art is made using the landscape and natural elements as the materials to create an art object. Heap of Birds work engages with Land as a system of knowledge which is not the same as using land as an artistic material. The canon of land art is shaped by non-Indigenous artists such as Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson who began engaging directly with the landscape as a material in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholarship on their work often lacks thoughtful analysis and respectful recognition for ancient Indigenous cultures and communities’ influence. Heap of Birds is no doubt aware of European and colonial art legacies and canons because he consciously addresses and decenters colonial practices in his work. However, by citing these artists as the precursors for Heap of Birds’ work it continues to center these artists and creates an art historical narrative that places Indigenous and Native artists in the margins.

Likewise, site specificity does not provide the tools for analyzing Reclaim’s reclamation of Land as an act of decolonization. Miwon Kwon defines site specificity as “the cultural mediation of broader social, economic, and political processes that organize urban life and urban space.”[x] Reclaim does have a relationship with site and colonial processes at work in this space. However, site as an intermediary of these relationships does not encapsulate the relationship that Reclaim has with Land nor the power that Land has within reciprocal exchanges of meaning. Site specificity centers colonial networks whereas Land centers and upholds Indigenous belief systems and is active within reciprocal relationships allowing decolonial work to occur. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, Shawnee scholar Glenn T. Morris, and Mohawk scholar and activist Taiaiake Alfred describe issues surrounding the adoption of European ideas to structure understandings of postcolonial systems as distortions of Indigenous epistemologies and cultures, therefore, “In order to decolonize indigenous peoples, a return to indigenous epistemologies and languages is required.”[xi] This distortion often occurs in art history when non-Native artists and ideas are positioned as a precursor and theoretical foundation to Native artists and their work.

As a participant in the global contemporary art world, the artist has stated that his mission is for his art “to reset history, to be truthful about what happened to Native people.”[xii] Clear connections can be made between Heap of Birds’ installation and public artworks and the work of installation artists in the twentieth century. However, connections to Indigenous culture, history, and language provide a deeper understanding of the work. As a multidisciplinary artist, his painting and printmaking practices demonstrate connections to Indigenous modern artists such as George Morrison (Ojibwe) and Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota), whose abstract paintings were rejected for not being “Indian enough.”[xiii] These artists’ understandings of modernism and abstraction built a foundation for Native artists like Heap of Birds and established a language of criticism and theoretical work for critiquing Western concepts of authenticity and identity. Fellow artist James Luna’s (Payómkawichum) installation and performance art also addressed questions of authenticity and the relationship between Native artists and institutions. Heap of Birds addresses these same questions through his public artworks. Additionally, sacred sites and geometric forms that are important to Indigenous communities are fundamental to many of his public works. Together, all these influences and methodologies are integral to understanding Heap of Birds public artworks and their relationship to Land.

Language is an integral part of Heap of Birds’ work and is foundational to Indigenous philosophy as the basis of Indigenous thought.^[xiv] Although perhaps at first read the sentences written in Reclaim are seen as a satire of Native pidgin used in movies,^[xv] I argue that Heap of Birds is also usurping English through Indigenous knowledge frameworks and language structures. The three words listed below New York on the sign are conjugated verbs in the past tense, but they do not form complete sentences in the English language. Indigenous languages of what is now North America, however, are often polysynthetic languages. In a polysynthetic language, a single word can be used to express a morphologically complex statement that would require multiple clauses in English.^[xvi] Polysynthetic languages reflect a different relationship to the world and how language is part of culture. While each language is unique and complex, many Indigenous languages express relationships to objects and people. This is demonstrated through grammatical structures and storytelling as part of teaching polysynthetic languages, reflecting the relationship between language and culture.^[xvii] This use of Indigenous language structure becomes a disruption of the English language and knowledge framework. Understanding land and history through an Indigenous conceptual framework of language repatriates power to Indigenous people because English is no longer the default language system for meaning-making and communicating. The use of language as a tool for colonization is brought to awareness through the different experiences and understanding of the language included in Reclaim, which depends on the knowledge and experiences of the audience.

A settler audience may attempt to complete the sentence in English by filling in the subject and object of the verbs, potentially asking the questions “Who stole New York?” and “Who purchased New York?” The answers to these questions lead to the settler audience’s recognition that they are the subjects of these sentences and are culpable for participating in New York’s colonization and present-day practices of colonialism that exploit Indigenous people. A Native audience may approach this language differently. This audience might read “New York” and consider other names for this place, recognize the land as a foundational being, and hold awareness for the relationship between the land and Native communities. The verbs “purchased” and “stolen” might reflect memories and stories of loss and displacement told to them by their community and families. The final word, “reclaimed,” might be understood as a potential action because of the affix “re.” The Native audience is already aware of the struggle against colonialism and the process of decolonization that would make reclamation possible. They become the subject of this act of reclamation that occurs both in the recognition and understanding of language and the centering of Indigenous thought through language. The complex back and forth between the ideas and stories told within these English words and their relationship to the artist, a settler audience, and the Native people of New York creates layers of disruption that reflect the role of language in acts of colonization and reclaim Indigenous languages as part of the work of decolonization.

Heap of Birds also draws on land and its relationship to language to visualize form through what he calls “word warriors.” In an artist statement from the exhibition, “Born of Sharp Rocks”^[xviii] the artist describes how he found his use of language through arrowheads, or “sharp rocks,” from his home in what is now Oklahoma. Sharp rocks are formed from the land and can still be found throughout the place that Heap of Birds calls home. The transformation of “sharp rocks” into what Heap of Birds calls “word warriors” reflects the relationship between Land and language as part of the multidimensionality of place.^[xix] Not only does the concept of language itself become a literal translation of elements of the earth, but it also reflects the Native land that Heap of Birds still resides on in Oklahoma with his family.

The town of Purchase, New York inspired the creation of Reclaim because of the layered implications of the English word “purchase.” Names as part of language and the colonization of places are central to Heap of Birds’ work in disorienting settler histories and recentering Indigenous experience. As previously noted, his public artworks live in what Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon has termed, the “charged locations that can be implicated in an unsavory history of conquest.”^[xx] Reclaim asks the state of New York (not a far leap linguistically from the State University of New York) to question its own history of colonization. The “official” history of Purchase, New York tells us that the land was purchased multiple times by different settlers who claimed that a legal purchase was made through payment to an Indigenous person and that land and deed were thus transferred from Native to settler.^[xxi] The land Purchase College is on was originally a working farm owned by the Thomas family, who enslaved several people to work the land.[xxii] Reclaim works to unravel these histories and raise awareness through design and language. The design of the highway sign is recognizable as a visual aid for conveying information about where the viewer is located physically. In the initial moments, the location information provides a sense of awareness confirming what the viewer likely already knows – they are in Purchase, New York. This awareness is disrupted by the conjugation of the verb “purchase.” No longer is Purchase a place, it is now a past action that alludes to the history of New York, the town of Purchase, and the enslavement of people on the land that is now the Purchase College campus. Suddenly, the audience’s location is no longer secure. Despite this linguistic placement in the past, the practices of colonialism are ongoing and are brought to the viewer’s attention through the question marks at the end of each verb, ending with “Reclaimed?” Punctuation completes the unraveling of Purchase’s history of colonization. The “official” history of congeniality and legality is no longer a statement of fact, and the audience is forced to confront these histories and their impact on communities that occupy this land today. The question marks push the viewer to ask questions about this history and consider what it would mean for Purchase, New York to be reclaimed.

Heap of Birds chose a specific place on West Loop Road after traveling around the road several times. West Loop and East Loop roads form one large loop around the college campus. The choice to position this work within a circular path reflects the circularity of journeys, stories, and time in Indigenous thought^[xxiii] and disrupts dominant Western linear constructs. Movement on this circular path is not only part of the artist’s experience in creating but is also part of the audience’s participation. According to Heap of Birds, it was intentional for the audience to experience Reclaim briefly while traveling along the Loop road, much like the experience of any other sign.^[xxiv] This brief encounter with a sign designed to inform and placed as a guide does not inform but rather questions the “facts” the audience believes and disrupts the constructs of colonial history and memory. The location of the work in this place bestows authority to direct and inform. It is the land itself and the art in relation to the land that forces the viewer to question history and their involvement in it. This displacement of knowledge also echoes the displacement of Native people from their native lands and forced migration to reservations. The audience embodies this movement and displacement and must consider not only the forced removal of the past but the continued displacement of Native people from the land and settlers’ roles in this displacement.

The activation of the work through audience experience and movement also includes the type of audience that the artist has in mind when placing these works outside. When asked how he navigates Land centered works being displayed in a gallery or museum, Heap of Birds stated that he has work for museum shows and public works that are placed outdoors. If it is a museum show he will do something outside that is free so that everyone has an opportunity to experience art.[xxv] This consideration for how museum space can be exclusionary due to cost and other factors is important in considering the impact of the work in different spaces. Reclaim’s position on Purchase College’s campus anticipated an audience that included students, faculty and staff members, and area residents. These audiences do not have to pay to see the work, but they could experience different feelings of inclusion and exclusion as part of the campus’ academic community and the suburban community in Purchase, New York. The audience’s engagement with Reclaim also reflects the influence of James Luna (Payómkawichum) and Vito Acconci whose performance and installation art requires the audience to be physically present and for an interaction between the art and the audience to occur. Heap of Birds and Luna engage the audience differently through “activated spectatorship” a concept often understood through Claire Bishop’s analysis in her book Installation Art. In this text she examines the work of contemporary artists including Acconci, who Heap of Birds met and worked with during his graduate work at the Tyler School of Art. Bishop notes that in Acconci’s later work, the viewer’s interactions with the installations were “hoped to raise consciousness directly, and to produce an active relationship to society at large.”[xxvi] Acconci’s attention to audience and the way the work produced the interaction is reflected in Heap of Birds’ attention to audience participation that is guided by Land. The audience’s impact and relationship to the artwork is even more evident when the artwork moves into a gallery space.

In 2016 Reclaim was displayed at the Neuberger Museum of Art in the Landed: Surveying New Geographies exhibition. In this exhibition, the work was suspended from the ceiling across a corner. Due to the fact that the records for this work remain sealed, it is unclear why, or when, the work was removed from its original location. Reclaim’s display in Landed: Surveying New Geographies presents an opportunity to examine the effect Land centered artwork has when installed indoors. While some may argue that Land continues to interact with the work while it is positioned in the museum, this misses the point that Land is no longer centered when the artwork moves into the museum space. Nor is the artwork reclaiming land, and therefore successfully decolonizing land, when it is separated from it. This displacement of the artwork also displaces the relationships between the artwork, audience, and community, all of which occur through the centering of Land. Ultimately, this engagement is impacted by the work’s display in a gallery space where authority does not come from relationships to Land with a capital L but instead from the museum as an institution. Artists like Luna have identified, and challenged, the museum’s power that seeks to define Native American culture within the boundaries of natural history and anthropology exhibitions. Others like Oscar Howe have resisted museums’ definitions of “Indian Art” that exclude Indigenous artists while exploiting their cultural artifacts and drawing inspiration from their cultural production.[xxvii] These systems of power are at work here in the displacement and display of Reclaim without consideration for its grounding in Land nor respect for the artist’s intentions, preferences, or knowledge.

When artworks conceptually grounded in Land are moved into the gallery space the audience no longer has the embodied experience of moving on the land. The audience’s interaction and embodied experience with Reclaim are dismantled because of the lack of physical engagement with the land. Reclaim’s original location does not allow the audience to have a choice in participation. This lack of choice is a result of the audience’s engagement in traveling on the land and engaging with the sign’s language in a brief instant. When the work moves into the gallery, the audience’s experience begins with the intention of seeing this particular work or the work of this particular artist. If the artist becomes the focal point of the work, then the community is displaced from the piece. Heap of Birds considers himself a foreigner in places outside of his home in Oklahoma.^[xxviii]  Therefore, his public artworks must be a collaboration with the land’s hosts and the community. This engagement is reflected in the location of the work on the land in a public place where members of the community can interact with it regularly, instead of interactions that are dependent on the museum for facilitation. The land is the mediator of the audience’s experience.

This disjuncture can create the opportunity for a potentially different audience, the “art” audience, to consider what it means for an Indigenous public artwork designed within the constructs of Land, capital L, to be displaced. The museum offers this audience the opportunity to spend an extended period with the work rather than a brief experience. The audience can now decide how much attention to pay to this artwork. The art audience experiences the work as a platform for considering how this artwork addresses settlers and colonization in different spaces. Now that these questions are posed to the “art audience” it asks them to question their role in the history that is being told within the museum space and who has been traditionally included or excluded from that conversation. A new disruption in knowledge is experienced in the museum space because of the displacement from land. It is clear that this is a highway sign and therefore it prompts the question, how did it come to exist in the first place? Why is it now being displayed indoors? How does this artwork converse with the decolonization movement when it is in a museum? These points of contention only further demonstrate the importance of land to the work as not merely site, material, or property but as a philosophical foundation that impacts the experience of the artwork and how it materializes decolonization.

Heap of Birds often discusses the land as the beginning and the end.^[xxix] As a conceptual framework, it is the foundational being that guides the audience’s engagement with Heap of Birds’ public artwork. Centering Land in this way creates an opportunity for language, history, and movement to become successful acts of decolonization. This success is possible when Reclaim can interact with the land, but the work is less successful when it is displaced. Reclaim’s relationship with Purchase College and the Neuberger Museum of Art brings awareness to the university’s role in colonialism and the museum’s displacement of Indigenous art. In order to handle artwork in this position and in different spaces with care and respect, consideration of Land as an Indigenous philosophical construct presents opportunities for a deeper understanding of meaning through audience interaction, responsibility, and support of decolonization. Acknowledging colonialism and its ongoing impact would create an opportunity for the Purchase College community to develop a plan for the decolonization of land, the inclusion of Indigenous history and knowledge, and for recognizing the authority of Indigenous leaders in all spaces. Additionally, this activist work would allow for better exhibition practices that decenter settlers and a singular narrative of history and art. It would also generate more collaborative research efforts by making information accessible to all and recognizing networks of knowledge as positive systems of social relations. A commitment to decolonizing Purchase would create opportunities to gain knowledge and build meaningful relationships with Native communities in New York. These relationships would create a supportive community of both Native and settler audiences as they decolonize land together. 

Reclaim is a work of art that poses its own questions but does not provide answers. This reflects my experience asking questions about the history of this work and its relationship to the Purchase College campus that remain unanswered. Reclaim continues to question settler roles and the colonization of Land here in New York. At present, Reclaim poses these questions to you from its location within the Neuberger Museum of Art’s collection storage space.

ILLUSTRATIONS

ENDNOTES

^[i] Bill Anthes, “Introduction,” in Edgar Heap of Birds, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 1-3.

^[ii] Public Art Object List, August 19, 2022. Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York.

[iii] Decolonization is defined here as the repatriation of land and life to Indigenous people.

^[iv] Rebekah Garrison, “Settler Responsibility: Respatialising Dissent in ‘America’ Beyond Continental Borders,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 13, no. 2 (September 26, 2019): 62, https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.13.2.07.

^[v] Sandra D. Styres, Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha (Land) (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 49.

^[vi] Edgar Heap of Birds (artist) in discussion with the author, October 2022.

[vii] Judy Collischan, “When Are You Going to Paint It?” in Neuberger Museum of Art 1997 Biennial Exhibition of Public Art (Herlin Press, Inc., 1997), 3.

[viii] Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain : New Genre Public Art (Seattle, Wash: Bay Press, 1995).

^[ix] Bill Anthes. “Ethics in a World of Strange Strangers: Edgar Heap of Birds at Home and Abroad.” Art Journal 71, no. 3 (September 2012): 74, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2012.10791103.

[x] Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 3.

[xi] Joanne Baker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” In Sovereignty Matters, Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 25.

[xii] William S. Smith, “In the Studio: Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds,” Art in America, September 25, 2017. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/in-the-studio-hock-e-aye-vi-edgar-heap-of-birds-63298/.

[xiii] George Morrison’s work was rejected in 1946 and Oscar Howe’s was rejected in 1958. Howe published a letter addressing his rejection and criticizing narrow views of Native art that restricted artists and their work.

^[xiv] Styres, Pathways for Remembering, 26.

^[xv]  Lucy Lippard, “Signs of Unrest: Activist Art by Edgar Heap of Birds,” In Most Serene Republics, ed. Kathleen E. Ash-Milby and Truman Lowe (Washington, D.C: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 24.

^[xvi] Sarah Kell, Polysynthetic Language Structures and their Role in Pedagogy and Curriculum for BC Indigenous Languages (Final Report contracted to the Aboriginal Education Team, British Columbia: Ministry of Education, 2014), 5.

^[xvii] Kell, Polysynthetic Language Structures, 72.

^[xviii] Edgar Heap of Birds, artist’s statement accompanying the exhibition Born from Sharp Rocks, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986, as cited in Jean Fisher, “Remembering the Future: tradition and modernity in the work of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds” in Most Serene Republics, (Washington, D.C: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 40.

^[xix] K. H. Basson, Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the western Apache, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 7.

^[xx] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985), 190-194.

^[xxi] Charles Washington Baird, Chronicle of a Border Town: History of Rye, Westchester County, New York, 1660-1870, Including Harrison and the White Plains Till 1788 (Anson D.F. Randolph, 1871), 96-97.

[xxii] Barbara Kay, “History Doesn’t Repeat, But it Often Rhymes,” The Purchase Phoenix, November 3, 2021. https://www.purchasenews.org/post/history-doesn-t-repeat-but-it-often-rhymes.

^[xxiii]Styres, Pathways for Remembering, 118.

^[xxiv] Edgar Heap of Birds (artist) in discussion with the author, October 2022.

[xxv] Edgar Heap of Birds (artist) in discussion with the author, October 2022.

[xxvi] Claire Bishop, Installation Art, A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 66.

[xxvii] Mindy Besaw, Candice Hopkins, Manuela Well-Off-Man, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018).

^[xxviii] Taylor Dafoe, “‘I Am Mistaken as the Spokesperson of Native America’: Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds on What the Art World Doesn’t Get About Native Art,” Artnet News, January 17, 2020. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hock-e-aye-ii-edgar-heap-of-birds-interview-1755741.

^[xxix] Blomley, “Artistic Displacements,” 799.

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AUTHOR BIO