If I were asked to write and implement a political prescription that ensured long-term social disaster among Native peoples — something that would absolutely bring about a near total collapse of their societies and non-recovery — it would go something like this:
I would take away their art. In this way I have severed them from their mythology, philosophy, history, religion, laws and language in one stroke since those ideas are fundamentally embodied in their art. Art is the primary means by which they run what is their equivalent of Western society’s libraries, churches, courthouses, theatres and schools.
I would then write and legislate laws, enforceable at the point of a gun, which would allow me to replace their accumulated wealth of oral and spiritual knowledge and traditions with my own social philosophies, economics and religions based on a Western social system that heavily relies on avarice as its most basic social tenet or function.
I would insist on using unprovable scientific theories to describe the different versions of reality these ancient peoples allegedly harbour about themselves and I would require everyone to use the vernacular established by these theorists whenever the subject of the North American Indian was discussed, in whatever context.
Finally, I would prescribe the muzzling of the Native voice in various ways so that their experiences of reality would never become known as fact. And I would do it all in the name of freedom — freedom of speech, religion, assembly and association and so forth. After that directive had been carried out faithfully by you and my army of willing accomplices for more than seven decades, what do you think we would have created?
Well, about the only thing we could produce is a seriously dysfunctional society faced with an almost insoluble problem of adaptation and survival. How could any rational thinking person expect a group as disenfranchised as this one to simply take care of business as usual? With its limited frame of reference it’s what Euro-American society has done to Native people.
Nevertheless, it’s a testament to the genius of Native people that we were able to survive at all. It wasn’t simply the taking away of the land and resources that acted as the final coup de grace in all this. The warehousing and theft of our art objects played a role as well. Of course, these types of statements make me an academic outcast among university professors and scholars who uphold any and all Western doctrines.
Studying North American Indian art history can be a shocking enterprise to the typical non-Native Canadian university student. Over their lifetime they have been hyped with so much patriotic, ideological, rhetorical and academic dogmatism that after the first year of fine arts courses taught from the Native perspective in Native Studies, students can find it difficult to get around the feeling that they are living in a country that has simply been “invented.”
It is during the semester-long deconstruction and reconstructed analysis and evaluation of the historical dichotomy between First Nations vs. Western pedagogy that a student’s underlying anti-Indian feelings begin to emerge. In this edification process — where a student begins to learn that Western education is basically a parochial and provincial affair — communications inevitably become strained and uneasy. The typical non-Native students expect their professors to teach without qualification, the ethnocentric version of Euro-American history and not the Native perspective — so this new perspective comes as something of an eye-opener.
Logically, a Native art professor advocates an unusual look at Indian art history through the eyes and experience of the Native perspective — as the Chinese proverb goes: “what we see is behind our eyes.” After some time learning from this perspective (and learning how to use this perspective) students come to understand that the version of history they are accustomed to learning from is a patriotic hero-driven kind of history.
By contrast the First Nation student’s basic emotional response is generally expressed as calculated exoneration since these intellectually questioning individuals have probably intuited the truth of the matter all along and were simply waiting for someone in the academic world to substantiate, pedagogically at least, their as yet unexpressed opinions and personal feelings on the issue.
Non-Native students may harbour feelings of guilt, scepticism, frustration, distrust and sometimes even animosity towards their Native art professor and this is articulated in unconstructive student behaviour during the semester and negative student evaluations of the course and professor at the end where charges of being anti-Christian, anti-anthropology, anti-white, and even reverse racism and discrimination are leveled.
I have had 33 years of teaching from the Native perspective to successive generations of non-Native students so I expect this state of affairs to happen and furthermore I expect it to happen time and again in the future. It goes with the territory and there is nothing that anybody can do to change it. Knowing this, I don’t delude myself with impossible expectations of receiving the teacher of the year award. On the contrary, mine is more like fighting for my academic survival from one year to the next.
The non-Native university’s administrative and governance issues bear scrutiny here. When it is time to apply for incremental or professional advancement using criteria under the collective agreement’s teaching effectiveness article, the Native art professor’s teaching dossier must argue with derogatory course evaluations submitted by students who were dissatisfied with the message their professor felt compelled to deliver under the Native perspective and academic freedom ideal. It’s a freedom of choice issue that is spelled out in the preamble to the department’s teaching philosophy and upheld by the board of governors, whether they understand its implications or not.
And if anti-Indian students are not enough to contend with, the Native professor must also have his or her annual performance review, or professional activity report, judged and evaluated by members of an academic body who have been taught through a century of discourse that North American Indians are remnants of Stone Age people who wouldn’t know a gigabyte from a dog bite.
Generations of Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development bureaucrats and university anthropologists depend on maintaining this line of dogma to keep their jobs. If Indians were suddenly declared “civilized” by some strange quirk of reality, of what use would they be?
The Native art professor has no chance of being fairly evaluated by his or her peers as happens routinely in the fine arts department, for example. The individuals who make up an evaluation committee (known as salary, tenure and promotion committees) are more often rank and file academics from no specified discipline, who are not required to show evidence of having
anything more than rudimentary knowledge about First Nations people let alone exhibit any fluency of Indian fine art or what it means to teach that art and create from that awareness.
Most evaluation committee members would not know a Cree from a Mohawk artist, an Apache from a Navajo, a Blackfeet from a Cherokee, Native art from modern art, religion from spirituality and what all that means. Oddly enough in this mad world of Westernized education, the Native art professor is required to obtain a PhD in anthropology in order to teach courses in Native art.
As a result you are getting close to the baseline of crass paternalism and racism and for no reason other than that the professoriate is as badly-educated and uninformed as primary school students, which is where their original knowledge of First Nations people begins and ends.
The fact that Prime Minister Stephen Harper can actually say to leaders of advanced and developing nations that Canada has no history of colonialism more than shows us the truth of that statement. President Ronald Reagan once went to Moscow and told the Soviets that Americans treat “their” Indian so well that they gave them their own reservations! That is hardly a concept of reality.
It seems the only people who learn anything at all about First Nations people are anthropologists
but they do so for themselves and for their own theoretical purposes. Paradoxically the Native perspective is nonexistent in their conversations and I know of no anthropological theory written from the Native perspective. Why would any anthropologist want to learn to research and write from the Native perspective when doing so would clearly violate their raison d’etre and be counterproductive as well?
It is from within this toxic and highly-eccentric academic environment that Native Studies students are called on to learn the varied and complex philosophical concepts about Native art. In the area of studio art, non-Native students are bewildered to learn that there is something called Indian fine art. Canadian and American students are regularly taught biased attitudes about Indians from high school onward, taught that there is no such thing as Indian art, more particularly that nothing from the Native perspective is thought to exist by that name.
By the time university students enrol in first year Indian art history and studio courses, their knowledge and practical experience and behaviour must be completely reevaluated and the student reeducated about the true nature of the Native artistic experience, creativity and
expression, if they are to learn how to judge and justify its authenticity, integrity and value.
First Nations students do much better since the subject matter and pedagogy reinforce their personal and ancestral information of just exactly who they are — a knowledge they have gained through studying their own art, local history and cultural heritage.
Indian fine art as inspiration seems to be appreciated more in international arenas, such as in Europe among hobbyists and anthropologists, than in North America. But that admiration may be for the wrong reasons. The mistaken attitudes that lead Europeans to these “wrong” conclusions can be traced to Hollywood films of the 1900s and to mid-to late 19th century biases among scientists and researchers.
Through all this there has been a kind of Supra Indian created, a fictitious image that has acted to reinforce the modern and post-modern conceptions relative to contemporary Native artists — which is to say, who they are and what their art is all about.
Some anthropologists insist that the scientific stereotype of the noble savage or primitive Indian no longer exists and are no longer used by their discipline, but that is clearly debatable. With or without them, this imagery continues to exist in the books of every library in the world including your word processor’s dictionary and thesaurus, and the savage imagery exists in perpetuity in television programming.
The theoretical analysis began over a century ago with historically important anthropologists and sociologists like Franz Boas, Sir Edward B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski and their followers, who classified all human societies as moving along and through a long chronological order of time, a course of cultural and social evolution from primitive to civilized man.
With regards to the idea of the primitive and that North American Indians are in some sense chronologically more archaic, historically and culturally than their Western counterparts (therefore genetically inferior) — if you accept that premise, or any part of it, then it becomes a simple matter to assume that all Indians in 2010 must still inhabit the same kind of prehistoric ancient world as their ancestors.
It follows that they must still need to evolve into something that is self-evidently known and discussed among anthropologists as “modern man” which most likely is one of the primary reasons the term assimilation has came about as in, “We can’t allow these primitives to be left alone, we must assimilate them into civilized society.” This is the focus of much non-Native education of Native people today, whatever that idea of “civilized” is supposed to mean.
North American Indian art then, fills a vacuum created out of the dichotomy between the Native perspective and the Western perspective. It fills that schism created by the dominant academic narrative that posits the art of Western man as the highest source of knowledge, that poses as the “civilized” in art while that art of the North American Indian is allegedly savage or primitive by comparison.
The outcome of such thinking after more than a century of study and debate by Western academics and scholars are the Western world’s museums of modern art and museums of ethnography found in most Euro-American countries and cultures, more specifically the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Natural History, both in New York City, and the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
Indian artists may exhibit in the natural history and civilization museums as primitives but never are they invited to show in the two art galleries as doing Indian Fine Art writ large in their own right, although the National Gallery, of late, allows Native artists to exhibit as Artists with a capital “A” but not as Native artists per se. They are stripped of any association with their Native art history.
That invented dichotomy of art and anthropology as the Western archetype has First Nations artists effectively straddling two divergent disciplines while simultaneously opening themselves up to and for creative critical analysis and deconstruction and reconstruction of this hypocritical and distorted concept of history and that is a plus for Indian fine arts.
Western civilization’s historical and moral justifications for overrunning the continent, commonly known by the legal titles of Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, that are highly esteemed by non-Native politicians and historians of every political persuasion, are the new frontiers of imagination in Indian Fine Arts. These legal doctrines and their justifications are the fundamental mental attitudes that First Nations artists must address if the dominant academic, art and political establishments are to take Indian fine art seriously as these doctrines are the ultimate colonialist tools of subjugation.
Such a fundamental adjustment in thinking cannot happen if non-Natives alone are teaching students what they think is Indian fine art within the confines of Western academic institutions. Western patrimony will simply not allow that change to happen. It is by being principally situated outside that authority, as we are here at First Nations University of Canada, that Indian fine art can move forward and flourish.
We need look no further than what happened as recently as 1992 when North Americans and many Europeans were celebrating the 500th year since Columbus “discovered America” to see how an attitude to an accident of history is continually being renewed and redeemed and
recreated as the primary legal occurrence controlling our lives, reasserted with each succeeding generation in the Western world.
Does Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl honestly believe that First Nations and non-First Nations students can easily find Indian fine arts courses of the kind taught at First Nations University at just any university? I am reminded of a dean of education at the University of Victoria who told me Australian Aboriginals are “our” closest living relatives of apes. With authority like that sitting at the helm of popular education in Canada, Minister Strahl will be waiting another 100 years for sound information to make intelligent decisions.
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Alfred Young Man is professor emeritus at the University of Lethbridge and department head of Indian fine arts at First Nations University of Canada. His comment above is an abridged version of a paper presented to the Teach In at First Nations University on April 14, 2010.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily CAUT.
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