Native
American
Art

When Zig Jackson was a broke college kid in the 1970s, he found himself wandering the country with his beloved camera, taking pictures that nobody wanted of people who had been shoved to the edges of the American landscape.

He was born and raised on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the seventh of 10 children. His name there was Rising Buffalo, and he was an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes — Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara. He endured brutal treatment at one boarding school for Native Americans or another, coming out of the experience with not much other than an artistic vision and vague plans for a better life. He wanted to show Native Americans as they were, with an eye that was as humorous as it was empathetic.

“I was just a lonely kid driving in my VW bus, driving to reservations to take my pictures,” he says now. “I didn’t have any idea anyone would want them.”

Time, talent and perseverance paid off. In 2005, by then a well-established art photographer, he donated — at the Library’s request — 12 large silver gelatin prints of his work, becoming the first contemporary Native American photographer to be actively collected by the Library. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who passed away earlier this year, in 1998 had become the first modern visual artist to be collected by the Library.

These acquisitions formed a watershed moment. The Library already had some 18,000 images of Native Americans — including the iconic images taken by Edward Curtis in the early 20th century — but nearly all of those were the work of non-Native artists. Many portray Native Americans in the soft focus, romanticized light of an exotic other — the “vanishing Indian” motif — that manipulated history and isn’t reflective of the modern world.

The Smith and Jackson acquisitions, though, proved to be the start of a two-decade-and-counting project to preserve a unique viewpoint on American history and culture — art from the descendants of the continent’s first peoples.

The Library now holds more than 200 prints and photographs by more than 50 contemporary Indigenous printmakers and photographers from the United States, Canada and Latin America. These artists have won fellowships and awards from the nation’s top rank of artistic supporters, such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Many have works in the nation’s most prestigious art museums and private collections.

The project was originally led by Jennifer Brathovde, a reference specialist for Native American images in the Prints and Photographs Division. It now involves staff from multiple divisions, who coordinate their work with the National Museum of the American Indian to build complementary collections and avoid duplication.

The artists include well-known names such as Wendy Red Star, Jim Yellowhawk, Shelley Niro, Kay WalkingStick and Brian Adams. More than 100 photographs, including 38 more from Jackson, have come in over the past five years.

Thematically, these show concerns about the environment, personal and communal identity, social justice and the passage of daily life in kitchens, living rooms and back porches. These are presented in a blend of modernist, abstract, figurative and traditional styles, often with bright new images colliding with traditional art forms. Taken together, they give the nation a widened viewpoint on American art and history.

“We continue to add new works, most recently by Rick Bartow and Lewis deSoto,” says Katherine Blood, fine prints curator in the Prints and Photographs Division. “And we’ll keep going.”

The images come with all sorts of backstories that enhance their impact.

Consider Inuit photographer Adams’ story about one of his most well-known photographs — that of fellow Alaskan and Inuit tribal member Marie Rexford, chopping up bowhead whale flesh for a family Thanksgiving Day dinner in Kaktovik, Alaska, in 2015. It was the cover image of his photo book, “I Am Inuit,” and is a frequent item in his exhibits.

Kaktovik is a village of about 300 people on Barter Island, which lies in the Arctic Circle. Even in summer, the average temperature is just above freezing. On a recent February afternoon, the temperature was -24. Muktuk, the blubber and skin of the whale, is a traditional food of the Inuit.

Adams was shooting with medium format film (the negative is 6 by 6 centimeters) and had decided the entire project would be shot with natural light. Given the latitude and that it was late November, he had precious little daylight in which to shoot.

Adams, detailing what you see in the frame: Rexford’s entire family is inside the house behind her, butchering the whale. She’s come outside to place the muktuk on a clear sheet of plastic, which can barely be seen in the dim light. She’s using the stick in her hand to separate it so that it doesn’t all congeal. She’s going to let it freeze, then wrap the chunks in plastic to store for the holiday.

“There was only 40 minutes of daylight at the time,” Adams says. “I had brought a tripod, and luckily there was a LED streetlight behind me. I shot it at one-eighth of a second, a really slow shutter speed, with the aperture wide open. I was like, ‘Marie! Hold still!’ I took about three frames, and we went back to what we were doing.”

The image, though, is so striking and well composed that it has found a lasting place in Alaskan culture.

WalkingStick, a member of the Cherokee Nation, in 1995 became the first Native American included in the influential “History of Art” textbook by H.W. Janson. The Library now has five of her works, including a tongue-in-cheek lithograph from her artist’s book, “Talking Leaves.” (The 45-page book is huge; 2 feet wide and 2 feet high, with a wooden cover with a cross on it.)

In a lithograph from that book, “You’re an Indian?,” made at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the scrawled text reads, “You’re an Indian? I thought you were a Jewish girl from Queens who changed her name.” On the facing page is a self-portrait in which she’s wearing her favorite hat and a nonplussed expression.

WalkingStick, 90, said in a recent interview that quote, like all the others in the book, were actual remarks that had been made to her by non-Native peoples (in this case, a good-natured art gallery owner in New York in the cultural hubbub of the late 1960s, when it wasn’t uncommon for artists to try on other names).

“The idea of the book was that people had trouble seeing me as an Indian because I didn’t look like I was an Indian in the movies,” she says. “My mother was Scots-Irish, and I suppose I have her skin. But I made the book out of stupid things that otherwise intelligent people had said to me.”

Shelley Niro, a multimedia artist of Mohawk descent born in New York, has always drawn inspiration from the region’s geography and her place in it.

“Knowing the Iroquois people lived in New York state, it tugs at my heart,” she said. “It’s not sentimental or nostalgic, it’s something else. … It’s memory. My father would talk about what his grandmother would talk about, and that’s four generations back. So, whatever he told me about that territory really stuck with me. I just feel that part of that landscape is mine.”

Jackson’s most influential work is likely his series of black and white photographs, all featuring him as a Native American in an elaborate headdress, confronting lost lands and history, often with him in front of a “Zig’s Reservation” road sign. In the near distance of one photograph, giving the image an ironic twist, are modern American features such as a power plant, a city skyline or just vast open land.

Now 68, he’s retired from teaching and lives in Savannah, Georgia. But the days of taking those photos, of rambling across the country from reservation to reservation, left him with lifelong bonds that don’t fade. Most of those are positive, he says; others, like the shared memories of the beatings and abuse he and his friends endured in boarding schools, are not.

“I keep in contact with all of them,” he says. “We tell each other we love each other to this day.”