PORTLAND, Ore. – A toddler in a taffeta dress standing on a boarding school
chair, superimposed in front of a man walking on the moon. A still life of
cancerous lung tissue. Pulsating collages with Van Gogh-esque disturbance
palpable on wide sweeps of prairie land where objects like a red buffalo
are suspended in a darkly fractured sky.

Those are some of the images Portland’s Lewis & Clark College gathered
together for its exhibition titled “Encounters: Contemporary Native
American Art.” The showing was timed to coincide with the school’s fall
symposium on the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. Although the Corps of
Discovery did not reach the Pacific Northwest until 1805, it departed from
St. Louis and began pushing West in the fall of 1804. Thus the 200 year
commemoration of the event is under way.

Considerable boosterism and boy scout-type hoopla is taking place along the
route Lewis and Clark took to explore the northern country between the
Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean. But many tribes and some non-Indian
groups like Lewis and Clark College are offering more thoughtful, incisive
interpretations of the journey that marked the beginning of dislocation for
the continent’s first people.

To ferret out the rest of the story, director of the college’s contemporary
art gallery, Linda Tesner, invited seven Native artists whose work
investigates the more troubling chords this period of history struck.
Chords that resonate with land loss, death, environmental destruction, and
the imposition of pervasive cultural hegemony that is more alive today than
common public sentiment recognizes.

Salish and Kootenai artist, Corwin Corky Clairmont’s series of collaged
monoprints is called “10,000 Years Indigenous People, 200 Years Lewis and
Clark.” Wrote the artist, “It is my hope that the print series will show
the determination and growing strengths of our Indian nations to face the
challenges of the future, while not forgetting the more than 10,000 years
that guided the decisions that maintained the rich and harmonious lives of
our ancestors.” In keeping with his pre- and post-contact themes, Clairmont
depicts the beauty of the indigenous world even as he sears elements of its
dislocation into the viewer’s heart with bold splashes of primary colors
and jewel tones.

Member of the Colville tribe, Joe Fedderson, whose “Urban Indian Series:
Cinder Blocks”, was on loan from Portland’s respected Froelick Gallery,
also deals with the intersection between history and modernity. He uses
patterns from the Columbia Basin and Inland Plateau region – mountains,
butterflies, stars, parking lots, cinder blocks – to get at a resolution of
sorts between what has been and what is. “My interest lies in the zone,”
wrote Fedderson, “where the signs tenuously dissolve into a modernistic
aesthetic while still maintaining direct ties to the Plateau designs.”

A determined insidious power also propels the art of Algonquin tribal
member Nadia Myre. Her deconstructed American flag panels fill an entire
wall of the exhibit and are done on blue stroud cloth from England, the
same type wool trade cloth that settlers lusting after land contaminated
with smallpox and gave to Native people during the 1800s. Three video
installations of Myre’s that explore the uses to which film can be put, as
well as a compelling enlargement of the 56-page Canadian Indian Act of 1876
with red and white beading obliterating sections of the offensive text,
were also included in her politically implicit offering.

In the gallery’s middle room, also dominating an entire wall, hung Flathead
and Salish photographer Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work, “Two Hundred
Years: Change/No Change.” Quick-to-See wrote: “Today we live in a world
that whitewashes our country’s history,” To redress that problem, the
artist hangs 20 portraits of men and women, and asks the viewer to decide
which ones are American Indians. Quick-to-See wants people to know the
tribes are still here. That they have endured through “holocaust, genocide,
and poverty,” by “using humor and art as part of a cultural support
system.”

Jeff Thomas, Iroquois and Onondaga, takes on public monuments with his
camera lens. Over and over he finds that works given to the period of
contact show “the brave explorer opening the ’empty’ land to civilization
and development, while the simple Indian guides him along.” Thomas uses his
photographs to dispel this idea in his “Scouting for Indians” series.

Gail Tremblay, Onondaga and Micmac, who teaches at the free-thinking
Evergreen College in Washington state, comes next in the alphabetical
listing. Her installation that looks at “health problems associated with
long-term cumulative effects of radiation exposure,” required no less that
a small room unto itself. There viewers watched a video amidst larger than
life diseased organs. Tremblay’s outcry against the trail of uranium
tailings and radioactive waste that corporations and the federal government
have left in the wake of mining and nuclear development is loud and
anguished. She writes that “the U.S. government targeted reservations
because they are by treaty sovereign nations, and U.S. citizens in
surrounding communities and states have no control over them.”

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, of the Dine (Navajo), Seminole and Muskogee tribes,
was raised in the Southwest in Rough Rock, Ariz. Rough Rock is way out in
Navajoland, but that didn’t stop Tsinhnahjinnie, the daughter of artist
Andrew Tsinhnahjinnie and school teacher Minnie Tsinhahjinnie, from
collecting vintage photographs of first Americans via eBay. By enlarging
postcard images and juxtaposing them against various backgrounds,
Tsinhnahjinnie seeks to give witness to oppression. “What I do with these
vintage images,” she said at a Lewis and Clark College lecture, “is take
and appropriate from white photographers and give new meaning, or maybe
just a deeper meaning.” In addition to her collages, the artist exhibited a
video presentation at the gallery. Goers watched while the American flag
burka swathing a Native woman standing on a high desert plain in the Navajo
reservation with her hands bound, metamorphosed into a somber swirl of
despair.

Using photographs and video and paint and fabric, seven tribal people put
messages out that those at Lewis and Clark College heard loud and clear.
Not only heard, but supported. The elite private school might be on the
periphery of the nation in Portland but it’s doing its part to get the idea
out that the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial truly is a commemoration of a
deeply-ambivalent era in history when two dramatically different cultures
encountered one another.