ABSTRACT:
Despite the prevailing acceptance ofhomogenized global sensibilities in media product many American Indian and other indigenous artists continue to articulate a sovereign, bounded, and discrete identity based on land, Jamily, and memory. Both material (embodied knowledge) and ideological (the interconnectedness o/people, the earth, and culture) enable communal paradigms rather than individualistic or gendered identities to rise to the fore. Given these parameters, how can the testimonies of native women’s lives as artists inform the debates o/indigenous feminisms? Drawing jrom Native women artists’ narratives, transnational feminist scholarship, and ethnographic and historical texts, the author demonstrates how indigenous communities become gendered communities as a result of colonialism
“I’ve been talking about pottery-making as a real feminine journey. And I’ve been talking about my ties to my community as a very feminine, symbolic connection. It’s all about … I don’t know what it’s all about, but it has to do with femaleness in a big way. Femaleness, femaleness. My community is female. My culture is female. I’m female. My art-making is female. Everything is female and it’s very interesting and important to me that you can crown it all with one big bow by saying, “Yeah, I’ve got this cord that I’m symbolically tied to my community, and by the way, my artwork is a part of that symbolic cord, and I can’t ever stray from it because I know where I belong.” In the most … I don’t want to get away from it. Because I know who I am, and I know where I’m at, and I know where I’ve got to be. (Naranjo 1991)
Tessie Naranjo’s poetic description of herself as a female, an artist, and a cultural person resonates with a certainty, a sense of place and belonging. Her narrative creates a bounded space; a gendered assertion of identity tied to place, process, and community. This simultaneous claiming of the feminine and of tribal responsibility signals a sensibility that runs counter both to implied requisite freedoms of the modern artist as well as to societal resistances championed by Western feminist ideologies (Okin etal. 1999). Naranjo’s holistic orientation tells of the challenges inherent in interpreting contemporary Native women artists’ lives. Although their experience is grounded in the realities of indigenous womanhood and arts commerce, Native women in the arts are terms not easily defined either as fine artists or feminists. In fact, the women I interviewed generally dismissed any form of labeling altogether.1″
Susan M. Williams and Joy Harjo note, “Feminism is not a word found in tribal languages”