The Friday sunset welcomed me as soon as I walked out of the parking garage. I didn’t see it at first, eyes flitted downward as my fingers fumbled with my keys. I gave up on trying to unknot my lanyard, a tangle of “William & Mary Chartered 1693” braided in green and gold. Eyes raised, readjusted, they watered in the contrast: the colors of the sky layered in organized brilliance. A breath of pale blue crowned a swatch of fairy tale pink, a soft incendiary pulling me forward. This was the first work of art I saw that October night at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, situated neatly in the Museum District of Richmond, Virginia’s capital.

The museum was bustling. On Friday nights, the VMFA extends its hours, opening its galleries to nighttime visitors, business casual 30-somethings traipsing around in animated conversation with nearly empty champagne flutes. As a shy 20-year-old college student, this was not my crowd. I skirted past a conga line of White people dancing to “Despacito” in the museum’s foyer and approached the information desk. “Excuse me,” I ventured when the woman sitting behind the desk hadn’t made the effort to detach her eyes from her computer screen. “Where is the Native American art exhibit?”

“Hear my voice,” she responded. I listened closely. “Take the far stairs up one flight, then walk all the way back and to the right.”

The directions sounded pretty straightforward, but I’m prone to getting lost, so I surreptitiously grabbed a map and then stumbled back through the swarm of amateur dancers, this time wiggling to the “Monster Mash.” “Quite the cultural hodgepodge,” I thought to myself.

Not until I reached the gallery’s entrance did it register that Hear My Voice was the name of the exhibit, not the prophetic command of the woman behind the desk.

Hear My Voice: Native American Art of the Past and Present, on display at the VMFA from August to November 2017, gathered a total of fifty-six works to showcase the ways in which Native American art speaks of a shared experience, knowledge, and history while also emphasizing an endless diversity in subject matter, medium, time, and location. Visual media introduces a dimension to Native narratives and individual autobiographies that may not always be accessible or equivalent in written form alone. The exhibit organized around three dialogues, illuminating how Native American artists communicate with nature, their community, and the outside world, and how these intersecting relationships inform their identity, their process, and their product.

A large cross section of a cedar tree opened the exhibit, topped with several bronze figurines, each walking across the cedar in uniform succession from left to right. This 2017 piece is called Bloodlines: The Matriarchs, and it was crafted by Holly Wilson, a Cherokee artist. The work was inspired by Wilson’s desire to recreate her history and her bloodline. Cut lengthwise, the cedar reveals lines telling its life and history. The figurines that walk along the tree’s rough surface are Wilson’s conceptualization of the Cherokee legend of the Stick People, spirits that would run through the night and call out your name. She reimagines the Stick People as her own family ancestral line. This merging of shared story with personal history reflects an inseparable connection between the individual and the collective — between intrinsic drive and extrinsic encounter — that permeates the entirety of Hear My Voice. I followed in line behind the Stick People, and started my exploration of the exhibition by walking in the same direction they faced.

NATURE

Through visual narratives, Native Americans have memorialized a connection to the natural world, celebrating its life-sustaining resources and understanding that human life is only one part of the whole realm of existence. Native peoples have attributed particular places with special significance based on history and purpose, honoring sacred lands as spaces for religious practice or spiritual importance. White settlers give names such as “North America, “The New World,” or “The West” to the land that Natives have always recognized just as “Home.”

Visual media draws upon the connection between artist and nature, underscoring the power of place to determine the artist’s identity, their niche in the landscape, and their relationship to everything around them. Four Directions/Stillness, a 1994 oil paint diptych by Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee painter, makes clear distinctions between physical and spiritual forms of existence while also recognizing their simultaneous juxtaposition and interdependence. WalkingStick depicts a cross on the left side of the diptych as an emblem of collective human memory and the recognizable cardinal directions of the natural world. Opposite the cross is a portrait of a rock formation from Bandolier National Monument in New Mexico, a personal image engrained into the individual memory of WalkingStick.

Beyond the artist’s connection to the natural world, the nature of the Hear My Voice exhibit itself influences the visitor’s experience and the connections they form with these unique Native narratives. Whereas the nature of the Native artist’s world is forest and clay and wind and rain, the “nature” of Hear My Voice is its physical construction, including its arrangement in space, the way it fits into (or sticks out of) the terrain, and its material interaction with the surrounding environmental elements.

The gallery space dedicated to Hear My Voice is not large by any means, but its absence of walls, save for the ones designating the perimeter of the space, and other interior barriers lends it a freedom and openness that the visual media deserves. Upon entering the space, I could clearly see every piece of art. Not in a way that overwhelmed or denied each work its due space, but in a way that emphasized the interconnected nature, amalgamating separate individual works into a larger, louder tableau. This superimposition resonates with the relationship the artist assumes with the natural world and the role nature plays in Native narratives, valuing the individual human voice as well as its place in the larger geography of sound and story.

The exhibit is arranged so that the visitor may tour it in any direction: walking to the right, to the left, in-and-out, and back around again. Asking me to define my own path encouraged me to familiarize myself with a foreign space, forcing me to trace and retrace my steps into the ground until I started to form my own patterns with the environment.

The material construction of the gallery space itself was plain with soft lighting and unadorned walls, mostly white, gray, and light blue. The minimalism of the space did not perfectly suit the vibrant color and resilience of the Native American art, but it succeeded in providing adequate display without distracting from the Native narratives themselves.

COMMUNITY

Native art exemplifies best the delicate interplay between individual and community. For Native peoples, inclusion in a community shapes both personal identification and narrative creation. Signifiers of community are expressed through unique materials, specific iconography, and even particular colors or patterns on clothing or other personal items. These choices and arrangements, inspired by sacred significance, pragmatism, and stylistic preference, emphasize individual production and consumption while connecting to a community.

For instance, Tara Bradby’s 2013 Jingle Dress for Kathryn (Bright Eyes) Soule assembles colorful fabrics, hide, metal, and turkey feathers to create a dress for traditional dance in a Chickahominy powwow arena. The dress is custom made to fit Bright Eyes Soule, a young Chickahominy girl. Its individual construction is designed to fit the body of one specific individual, but its color and craft exemplify the tradition and values of the Virginia Chickahominy tribe. The dances that Soule performed in this dress sought to bring healing to those in need, stressing the importance of individual effort in building community strength. This marriage of form and function, likewise a marriage of person and tribe, reveals Native stories and visual media as more than just a reflection of artist, but as an inseparable relationship between artist and community.

Just as artist and community form multiple points of inevitable, if not indispensable, interaction, art itself engages with the community in which it is displayed. Hear My Voice is a traveling exhibit, with the VMFA serving as its place of genesis. Richmond, Virginia is a city of layered histories and cultural heritages, including some which persist in permanent memoriam and others which wane in neglectfulness. As the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond is the site of several Civil War-era Confederate monuments and celebrated battlefields. However, before it was a terrain of patriotic history and American Exceptionalism, Richmond was an important village for the Powhatan Confederacy and a home for an indeterminable number of Native peoples who were displaced or killed when Captain Christopher Newport led White settler explorers up the James River to colonize its surrounding lands.

On a subsequent visit to the Hear My Voice exhibit, I spoke with a group of three docents, one of whom was a member of the Monacan Indian Nation, situated, in part, near Virginia’s James River. The docents told me that before Hear My Voice opened to the public, the VMFA held private preview screenings of the exhibit for some of the locally-based featured artists, as well as members of nearby Powhatan and Monacan tribes. The VMFA wanted to show its respect for the peoples who have always called this land “home,” to receive feedback on how to best display the visual narratives, and to foster a lasting connection between the VMFA community and local Native communities. This coalition of community seeks to uplift and amplify Native voices where they have so often been silenced. To this extent, the community values personal contribution as essential to the formation of the collective, unified whole.

THE OUTSIDER

The history of Native peoples in North America is a history of changing relationships. The colonization of Native lands by Europeans led to violent confrontations and irreconcilable losses. Forced migration, both large and small-scale, resulted in the mixing of Native tribes and the introduction to lands unrecognizable within their preexisting geographic literacy. Native narratives document these relationships and this history of movement and unrest. Native art continues to endure and respond to this ever-changing story. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor introduces the phrase “survivance” to describe the act of Native self-expression as affirmation of the active presence of Native peoples, alive not as victims but as survivors and resisters.¹

In 2006, Wendy Red Star, a Crow (Apsaalooke) Native artist, photographed herself in four different images, known collectively as Four Seasons. Red Star mimics the lifeless diorama scene of the Native American familiar to many natural history museum displays. The effect is humorous and discomfiting, questioning the validity of an Anglo-European perception of what it means to be Native.

As a White, non-Native visitor in a space dedicated to the resilience and dynamism of the Native American voice, I must question my own role as “The Outsider.” Hear My Voice not only welcomes the presence of the outsider — it requires it. “Hear my voice” is a command, albeit not one spoken by the infomation desk employee but by the color, lines, shape, and space of Native art. The Native artists compiled in this exhibit supply their voices, individually strong and collectively indefatigable. White settlers must visit and supply their own attentive listening.

Unfortunately, each time I have toured Hear My Voice, attendance has been sparse. On my first visit to the VMFA, throngs of people danced and drank, socializing amongst each other but not interacting with the Native art a mere flight of stairs away from them. A lot of talking, not a lot of listening. I am grateful that the distracted chatter falling from unaware tongues did not interrupt or invade the space of Hear My Voice, but I am disheartened that White settlers continue to overlook striking narratives of existence and resistance.

For the visitor that does engage with these works of art — letting the individual artist, the shared history, and the collaborative memory do the speaking — the effects are simultaneously quieting and uproarious.

I lingered in the Hear My Voice gallery long enough that by the time I was ready to leave, the commotion in the museum lobby had dwindled. In the expanding quiet, I listened to my footsteps pulse and swing, the ground rising to meet me just as I brought myself down to meet it. Outside, the candied sunset had exhaled into a sigh of unbreakable onyx. Stars twinkled in a grainy buzz, and the moon, complete and circuitous, hung where the pink once faded into blue. The whole drive back to Williamsburg, I faced the moon, and we were one: full, full, full. I was restless and in the best way possible.

It is my hope that pieces such as this one, made readily accessible through online production and consumption, uplift Native voices and inspire understanding, curiosity, and activism. Much like the creation of identity, community, and artwork, the Internet is an ever-changing, ever-expanding work of progress that is editable, personal, and shared. This is why I think online publication works best for this story.

In Network Sovereignty, Marisa Elena Duarte reframes information and communication technologies not as mere barriers and emblems of colonialist expansion, but as “means for overcoming colonial disconnections.”² Proponents of net neutrality contend that open Internet access — and ideally, in the future, guaranteed universal Internet access for all — presents unlimited opportunity and possibility for Native American communities, particularly those in more isolated rural areas who can benefit from instantaneously connecting to other Native individuals across the globe. Duarte presents information and communication technologies as narrative opportunities for advocating for “Native sovereignty…self-governance, self-determination, and decolonization,” shifting the role of the Internet “from one of exploitation to one of Indigenous possibility.” Native-created Internet offers a space to Native peoples that suggests they need not choose between community, tradition, or modernity; technology can act as a bridge connecting all three. The Internet is ever-expanding, creating space within once static boundaries. This place-making is self-determined while also powerfully communal, providing new platforms for Native peoples where not enough exist in real life and amplifying voices that refuse to be silenced.

1. Vizenor, Gerald, editor. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
2. Duarte, Marisa Elena. Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country. University of Washington Press, 2017

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Additional resources

Visit the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, the next location of Hear My Voice. Opening February 17, 2018 and on display through July 22, 2018.

Virginia Native Tribes and Languages, including additional links to the websites and online resources of individual tribes in Virginia.

More visual media from Kay WalkingStick and Wendy Red Star.