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Clutch Your Powwow Pearls, Mapping Coyote Black

Through this installation�s content, Coyote tells stories where she is the catalyst (she would say �star�). I am not only native, I am also black. To addresses the intersection of blackness and indianness I employ Coyote. Mapping Coyote Black invents the future through the past, reimagining and tricking you into seeing a new visual genealogy.

I am disrupting the mainstream definition of Indian, a definition too limited for the complexity of Native lives. Mapping Coyote Black is an installation that engages theories that challenge mainstream ideas of indigeneity, race and ethnicity; specifically lives, like my own, at the intersection of native and black. Native lives and black lives are often lived within racial intersections that remain hidden or unacknowledged for various reasons. This installation challenges assumptions about the limits of indigeneity and blackness and engages the viewer through mapping, refusal, desire, revenge, and haunting. My installation creates a new auto ethnographic narrative, a narrative mapping of untold histories that lends itself to new possible futures.

Circa Indian is a chronological installation that carries collective tribal history and individual experiences from the 1800�s to current, using textiles, painting, and dolls. The thematic focus are the women participants of the Modoc Ghost Dance ceremonies of the 1860�s whom are depicted at important stages of the ceremony; gathering, dance, singing, and rest.

Circa Indian, installation view

100 years since the dances, quilting was introduced to my family as a Sioux-Modoc intertribal exchange in the 1960�s. Now, 150 years later, the dancers have visually re-emerged to continue my genealogy, solidifying the past with the present. The figurative sculpture embodies story to transition between each painting in support of the installation thesis of locating and dissolving the boundaries of Indian art, history, and identity.