TEDxMileHigh 2022

Read The Script:

How my. Nu Gregg Deal, me nanea. Nu Kooyooe tukadu. Nu Kooma, nu na’a, nu tubodu, nu Numu gooba tu yadoo’adu. 

A few months ago, I was scrolling on Instagram when I came across this photo on a Shoshone friend’s account. This is a “corpse tag” – a tool used by bounty hunters in the 1800s in what was then called “Wyoming Territory.” 

To clear the way for Western expansion, Bounty Hunters were paid to hunt down Native people, murder them, and turn in their bodies, body parts, heads, or literal skins for payment. When I saw this I could hardly believe it and immediately did a google search. Lo and behold, I found some for sale on eBay! I also found these handcuffs from the Standing Rock Agency, also with a corpse tag. The same Standing Rock from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests from 2016.

As I am sure you can imagine, I was shocked to find these actual artifacts for sale on eBay. I mean, you can’t buy Holocaust artifacts or Nazi paraphernalia on eBay. These corpse tags are stamped with official “property of the US” and “Department of the Interior” on them. They were going for a few hundred dollars, but I forwent the bidding process and reached out to the seller to buy them directly. 

It’s strange, being a Native Person, and being able to buy an artifact off eBay that has direct ties not just to the elimination of Native People, but the concerted effort to eliminate an entire continent of people dictated by the United States Government. Even stranger when I get an email back from the seller saying, “Enjoy your purchase!”

I’m a husband, a father, a contemporary artist, sometimes activist, always a disrupter and member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. I used these corpse tags as part of a triptych called “These Things Happened”. I made this piece because so many of the details of how Indigenous people were often hunted down and murdered have been omitted from history.

Knowing your history is a tool for survival for Native people in what I could only describe as hostiles on our homelands.  And it’s the center of my work. I question everything from colonialism to racism, stereotype, misrepresentation, and appropriation.

Non-native people have told me that my work is shocking, even heavy-handed, but that’s not surprising because of the systemic misunderstanding of Native people. 

I have 5 kids, and we speak about this at length. My oldest kid, Sage, has pointed out the inconsistencies in the way American Schools teach this history. They talk about the first Thanksgiving feast, where Colonists dined on Indigenous foods. But conveniently leave out the part where they promptly murdered the same Indigenous people who lent a helping hand. When Sage was in elementary school and first learned about Columbus, they said, “How can you discover where people already are?” We now use the word “Columbusing” as a Verb in our home.

The end result of these historical inaccuracies is that what most Americans know about Native people is rooted in fiction.  It’s why Johnny Depp, a white man, can play Tonto in Disney’s “Lone Ranger”. It’s why a pretty white girl can wear a headdress to a music festival and unironically state that she thinks she has some Native American blood in her family line. It’s why a sports team can use racial slurs, heavy stereotypes, gross caricatures, and that old Hollywood-styled war cry openly, and state that they think they are “carrying our legacy”. Erasure is real, and this is a main reason that at least 40% of Americans believe that the Native people of this continent are extinct. 

So why would anyone think Native peoples are extinct? I’m gonna use a word not often used, but accurate considering how Native people have been historically engaged by the Federal Government: Genocide.

After World War II, when the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials against Nazis, it was stated that much of the horrific actions of Nazi Germany used to torture and eliminate Jewish people was inspired by the way the United States of America dealt with its original people.

Genocide is the attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. And according to the United Nations, it’s defined by 5 specific actions. Let’s see how the United States stacks up:

• Killing members of the group – done.
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group – done.
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part – done 
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group- done. 
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group – done

Let’s start with that last one: this is a piece called “The Place Where Spirits Get Eaten”, the title inspired by the late great Indigenous poet, and philosopher John Trudell who said,  “Protect your spirit, because you’re in the place where spirits get eaten”. This pile of chairs with sharpened legs represent the American Boarding School. 

Run from 1879 to the early 2000’s, Native kids were forcibly removed from their homes, forced to have their hair cut, and forced to abandon their given names for good Christian names – all in an attempt to erase their identity. They were physically abused, sexually abused, and some died, and many murdered. The first major Boarding school is in Pennsylvania, the “Carlisle Indian School” has a cemetery with at least 180 children buried there, 14 of which are under a headstone titled “unknown”. Can you imagine? 

This piece, in its simplicity, represents the weaponization of schools. On one chair braids of human hair. My two oldest kids and I cut our hair last year specifically for this piece.

And it’s not just boarding schools that our country has tried to hide. Maybe you don’t know that many reservations are the most economically poor places in our country. While roughly 80% of Native people live off the reservation, many of those also live in poor areas of the United States. This is by design.

You might not know that a significant amount of Native women in the 1970’s had been forcibly sterilized without their consent by government-run health facilities as part of Indian Health Services, which is part of Health and Human Services. 

Across the United States, massacre sites sit invisibly, often mislabeled as “battles” where entire communities were attacked, murdered, and imprisoned, all in the name of Western progression.

Right here in Colorado, as many as 163, mostly women, children, and elders, were murdered in 1864 at the Sand Creek Massacre. I say “as many as..” because the soldiers mutilated the bodies after firing on the camp, making them hard to identify. 

The funny thing about Genocide is that if you uphold its principles, the people on the receiving end of it seem to no longer exist, even when they do. Romanticism, misrepresentation, appropriation, characterizing, and stereotyping are tools of the quiet efforts of genocide if not outright invisibility.

This piece is called “Visual Blood Quantum Color Chart”. It’s a series of carefully painted plastic “Indians” from a Cowboys and Indians toy set. Each colored figure is matched to the color behind them. The cabinet is entirely white, a metaphor for being surrounded, and adorned with bullet casings and horse hair. 

This entire piece is about the way non-Native people gatekeep Native people. Saying things like, “You don’t look like an Indian”, “But how much Indian are you?” “But you didn’t grow up on the reservation”, and “You’re not even that brown”.  No doubt, the comment section of this video will be littered with statements like these.

This work is called “Never Forget”, a line you may recognize from September 11th. But here, it’s not in reference to that. This 25’ long, 8’ tall piece uses textile patterns familiar to my people and our Tribal home in Western Nevada at the base of the Sierra Mountains. Placed overtop of these splatters, textiles, and drips are matte black illustrations with paint that literally absorb light. Photos are a bit difficult, so let me show you what is painted in that matte black. These stereotypical images go back as far as the 1940s. They represent the Americanized version of Native Americans, like this white boy wearing a headdress and putting his hand over his mouth in that old Hollywood “Indian war cry”. The title “Never Forget” refers to how the United States, its government, and its citizens have treated this continent’s first peoples throughout history and in popular culture and how frequently we’re told, “That happened a long time ago, get over it.” Those same people would remind us, as they will continue to do every 9/11, to “Never Forget.”

But now more than ever, I believe it’s important not to forget the sins of the past.

Luckily, I’m not the only native artist building a contemporary legacy of our stories to uplift ourselves from these harmful misconceptions. People like –

• Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilber,
• Diné visual artist, graphic designer, and muralist JayCee Beyale
• Erika Wurth, an incredible author of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent
• Queer Ute and Apache visual artist and badass beader Chelsea Kaiah
• Steve Yazzie, a Diné and Laguna Pueblo artist, and filmmaker

Collectively, we’re working towards a future of equality, with space for non-Native Americans and even non-Native Canadians so can begin to understand Native people – past and present.

Too often, history is taught from the perspective of the so-called “victor” – and that affects all of us, Native and non-native people alike. It’s not just eliminating words from your vocabulary like “lowest man on the totem pole,” “off the reservation,” reference to your “spirit animal,” or turning your meeting into a “powwow.” It’s about understanding the brutal history of Colonialism and taking action to repair it. Are you inviting Native people into your spaces? Are you talking about the true story of…. Thanksgiving? Are you thinking critically about the problematic representations of Native people in popular media and beyond? If you’re struggling with these things, are you allowing a semblance of compassion for a people who have been on the receiving end of this violence and oppression? Understanding our story is the only way to understand YOUR story, and the land you reside in, your homelands for thousands of years. Indigenous people don’t just deserve to exist, and even tell our own stories, but you, YOU, also deserve to know the truth. Truth. How can we possibly move forward without it?

Thank you.

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