Volume 68, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Indigenous Knowledges in North America / Guest Editors: Birgit Däwes and Kerstin Knopf

Indigenous artists are introducing traditional knowledge practices to the contemporary art world. This article discusses the work of selected Indigenous artists and relays their contribution towards changing art discourses and understandings of Indigenous knowledge. Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau led the way by introducing ancient mythos; the gifted Carl Beam enlarged his oeuvre with ancient building practices; Peter Clair connected traditional Mi'kmaq craft and colonial influence in contemporary basketry; and Edward Poitras brought to life the cultural hero Coyote. More recently, Beau Dick has surprised international art audiences with his masks; Christi Belcourt’s studies of medicinal plants take on new meaning in paintings; Bonnie Devine creates stories around canoes and baskets; Adrian Stimson performs the trickster/ruse myth in the guise of a two-spirited character; and Lisa Myers’s work with the communal sharing of food typifies a younger generation of artists re-engaging with traditional knowledge.

Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies are connected to tribal lands, resilience, and claims for sovereignty. These ways of knowing offer an indispensable resource for Indigenous communities in surviving and resisting assimilationist policies. Modes of Indigenous knowledge are not only discussed in academia and practiced in local spaces but are also integrated into artworks that promote public access to First Nations political agendas within settler nation states. Knowledgescapes can be created as conversive artscapes. They can be placed translocally but also re-integrated into First Nations lands. A reworking of the land as a tribally marked space can be traced in artworks that attack bio- and geopolitical manners of settler societies. The land-marker, place-maker, and artscape Cliff Painting (1998) by Marianne Nicolson shall serve as an exemplification of a specific knowledgescape – created for Indigenous audiences to support their claims, and for non-Indigenous audiences to open up a dialogue on colonial issues within a step-by-step decolonizing discourse.

This essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.

Focusing on First Nations traditional medicine, we investigated whether traditional knowledge of medicinal plants can be validated by modern scientific methods of molecular and cellular pharmacology and whether this information is of value for improving current therapy options. Based on two projects on medicinal plants of the Gwich’in – a First Nations group on the Canadian North West Coast – we found that extracts from several plants traditionally used medically were able to kill tumor cells, including otherwise multidrug-resistant cells. Investigating medicinal plants from Indigenous communities raises questions about ownership, appropriation, and commercial use. At the same time, because of the intricacies of patent law, publishing scientific investigations on medicinal herbs represents an effective way to prevent biopiracy. Therefore, research cooperation between industrialized and developing countries, and between Western and non-Western knowledge systems will facilitate ethically sound ethnopharmacological research and merge a diversity of competencies and knowledges.

In the early twentieth century, the US’s federal policies regarding the production of Native American art in off-reservation Indian boarding schools shifted from suppression to active encouragement. Seen as a path to economic stability, school administrators pushed their students to capitalize on the artistic traditions of Native cultures, without acknowledging or valuing these traditions as part of an extensive body of Indigenous knowledge. Although this push contributed to the retention of some cultural practices, administrators, teachers, and other members of the local community often exploited the students’ talents to make a profit. At Sherman Institute (now Sherman Indian High School) in Riverside, California, Native students of today are free to creatively express their own cultures in ways that strengthen their communities and promote tribal sovereignty. In this article, I will argue that the art program at Sherman Institute served to extinguish Indigenous knowledge and expertise as expressed through culturally specific weaving practices.

This paper reads the Isuma ‘Fast Runner’ trilogy – Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001), The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), Before Tomorrow (2008) – as contemporary digital video instantiations of Inuit cultural memory and knowledge (re-)production; as fixed audiovisual texts ironically documenting and archiving a repertoire of traditional cultural folkways, reinscribing them in the present as still-living cultural practices. This is achieved in the films through Isuma’s unique approach to cinematic style, combining long takes and natural light with the freedom and unpredictability afforded by the digital format. In the end, Isuma’s openness to post-literate media forms emerges as an ideal approach to the representation of specific posthuman Indigenous identities.