1:45 - 3:00 p.m., 3201 Hart Hall
"Translation and Indigenous Poetics: A Comparison of the Poetry of Luci Tapahonso and Aku Wuwu"
D Dayton
Department of Comparative Literature
Abstract: As a key feature of their poetic mode, translation pervades indigenous writers' work. Although notalways interlingual translation, indigenous writers actively utilize what the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz has called the “continual resistance . . . carried out by the oral tradition” and what the Muskogee poet Joy Harjo and Spokane writer Gloria Bird have called “reinventing the enemy's language.” In this view, translation is not a mode of loss or incommensurability between languages or cultures, but is instead a powerful awareness and articulation of both deeply rooted traditions and contemporary expression: the core of indigenous poetics. Therefore, the first part of my presentation will be a preliminary (and open-ended) discussion of the possibility of translation as a method and a mode useful in understanding indigenous poetics in a global framework. The second part will then turn to two poets, the Navajo poet Luci Tapahanso and the Nuosu Yi poet Aku Wuwu from southwest China, who both actively utilize multiple forms of translation in their work.
"A Picture Perfect Indian: Re-Writing Edward Curtis’s Legacy through Hupa Woman 1923 or Mary Baldy Socktish"
Cutcha Risling Baldy (Enrolled Hoopa Valley Tribe [Karuk & Yurok])
Department of Native American Studies
Abstract: Ethnographic photographers have played a significant role in the societal, political and historical representations of Indian people. Many ethnographic photographers fancied themselves the preservers of Indian history. Ultimately, though, the photographs are not presented as being about the Native people. Instead legacies of Indian photographs are attributed to the photographers with little to no mention of the person in the photograph and their continuing legacy.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the photos of Edward S. Curtis. The number of biographies and articles exploring Edward Curtis’s life, legacy, and motivation reaches into the hundreds if not thousands. But the photos included in these collections present the Indian peoples as “subjects” in these pictures. This continues to place the utmost importance on the “picture perfect” Indian, instead of presenting these Native peoples as real people and creating a more complete picture of Indian history through the eyes of Indian people themselves.
The continued contribution of Curtis’s work lies in the re-writing and re-righting of this narrative in an effort to decolonize the historical record. In many ways the “re-writing” and “re-righting” of Curtis’s photographs involves participating in “engaged resistance” and “visual sovereignty.” The focus should not only be on Curtis, his history and his process, but also on the agency, and biography of the Indian people that participated in Curtis’s project. This paper presents the story of one famous Curtis Photograph known as Hupa Woman ©1923 and offers a re-telling of this photograph to reclaim this photographic and historical space.
"Visualizing the Andean Modernity: Indigenous Migrants and Racial Perceptions in Postcolonial Peru (1850-1980)"
Jose Ragas
Department of History
Abstract: This papers aims to explain the visual trajectory of Indigenous migrants during the Age of Mass Migration in the Andes and beyond. As thousands of peasants moved into the coastal areas and especially to Lima, the capital city of Peru, both elites and state makers aimed to manage this extraordinary flow of people. For Limeños (Lima’s inhabitants), the sudden presence of Indigenous migrants aroused mixed feelings that permeated their relationship towards newcomers. Intellectuals and writers soon projected these images of migrants in visual representations that allow us to examine the early perceptions of migrants in newspapers, essays, comics, and television.
The perceptions of Indigenous migration reflected both desires and realities that local elites had about development and modernization of the countryside. Although the bulk of these visuals expressed social distance and racism at first, we later witness a more gentle twist in the perception towards Indigenous newcomers. More strikingly, from the 1960s on, Indigenous peoples themselves appropriated these characterizations in visual media and started to use them for their own purposes, providing a more benign image of rural migration while challenging the dual identity between whites and Afro-Peruvians. My paper ends in the 1970s when the image of Indigenous migrants became international with “Simplemente Maria,” a TV soap opera that was exhibited in the continent and helped to insert migrants into the urban milieu.
"The Business of Fancydancing: Visual Sovereignty and the Double-Edged Consciousness"
Bayu Kristianto
Department of Native American Studies
Abstract: Smoke Signals is regarded as a magnificent breakthrough in Native America, which made it a frame reference in any Native American film analysis. However, not much has been written about Alexie’s film, The Business of Fancydancing. Out of 123 scholarly articles focusing on Alexie’s works, only a handful actually grapple with this particular movie, which mostly focus on the idea of a Native writer having to cope with the tensions of living in two worlds, i.e. the white world and the Native world, and the place of homosexuality in the discourse of Native American art and cinema. One crucial theme missed by scholars is the notion of visual sovereignty in the movie. This paper is aimed at delineating the issue of visual sovereignty represented by Sherman Alexie in the movie. How does visual sovereignty play a key role in the movie? In what way does the movie make the notion of visual sovereignty complex and multifaceted? How does Alexie’s take on visual sovereignty have a double-edged consciousness facing Native people in the United States? I argue that Alexie is conducting visual sovereignty using the movie The Business of Fancydancing, in which he reverses the privilege of whiteness which the white audience used to enjoy in Hollywood movies in which Indian people were insignificant characters. Alexie is enacting the decolonizing methodology of indigenizing by which he centers indigenous images to the center of the camera and the movie screen. However, he directs this sovereignty to both the dominant society and Indian people themselves as he is critiquing the limiting tendencies of reservation life. What is taking place is both the exercise of visual sovereignty and double-edged consciousness as Native people are questioned about their so-called “complicity” in acts of colonization, or their love-and-hate relationship with the colonizers.
D Dayton
Department of Comparative Literature
Abstract: As a key feature of their poetic mode, translation pervades indigenous writers' work. Although notalways interlingual translation, indigenous writers actively utilize what the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz has called the “continual resistance . . . carried out by the oral tradition” and what the Muskogee poet Joy Harjo and Spokane writer Gloria Bird have called “reinventing the enemy's language.” In this view, translation is not a mode of loss or incommensurability between languages or cultures, but is instead a powerful awareness and articulation of both deeply rooted traditions and contemporary expression: the core of indigenous poetics. Therefore, the first part of my presentation will be a preliminary (and open-ended) discussion of the possibility of translation as a method and a mode useful in understanding indigenous poetics in a global framework. The second part will then turn to two poets, the Navajo poet Luci Tapahanso and the Nuosu Yi poet Aku Wuwu from southwest China, who both actively utilize multiple forms of translation in their work.
"A Picture Perfect Indian: Re-Writing Edward Curtis’s Legacy through Hupa Woman 1923 or Mary Baldy Socktish"
Cutcha Risling Baldy (Enrolled Hoopa Valley Tribe [Karuk & Yurok])
Department of Native American Studies
Abstract: Ethnographic photographers have played a significant role in the societal, political and historical representations of Indian people. Many ethnographic photographers fancied themselves the preservers of Indian history. Ultimately, though, the photographs are not presented as being about the Native people. Instead legacies of Indian photographs are attributed to the photographers with little to no mention of the person in the photograph and their continuing legacy.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the photos of Edward S. Curtis. The number of biographies and articles exploring Edward Curtis’s life, legacy, and motivation reaches into the hundreds if not thousands. But the photos included in these collections present the Indian peoples as “subjects” in these pictures. This continues to place the utmost importance on the “picture perfect” Indian, instead of presenting these Native peoples as real people and creating a more complete picture of Indian history through the eyes of Indian people themselves.
The continued contribution of Curtis’s work lies in the re-writing and re-righting of this narrative in an effort to decolonize the historical record. In many ways the “re-writing” and “re-righting” of Curtis’s photographs involves participating in “engaged resistance” and “visual sovereignty.” The focus should not only be on Curtis, his history and his process, but also on the agency, and biography of the Indian people that participated in Curtis’s project. This paper presents the story of one famous Curtis Photograph known as Hupa Woman ©1923 and offers a re-telling of this photograph to reclaim this photographic and historical space.
"Visualizing the Andean Modernity: Indigenous Migrants and Racial Perceptions in Postcolonial Peru (1850-1980)"
Jose Ragas
Department of History
Abstract: This papers aims to explain the visual trajectory of Indigenous migrants during the Age of Mass Migration in the Andes and beyond. As thousands of peasants moved into the coastal areas and especially to Lima, the capital city of Peru, both elites and state makers aimed to manage this extraordinary flow of people. For Limeños (Lima’s inhabitants), the sudden presence of Indigenous migrants aroused mixed feelings that permeated their relationship towards newcomers. Intellectuals and writers soon projected these images of migrants in visual representations that allow us to examine the early perceptions of migrants in newspapers, essays, comics, and television.
The perceptions of Indigenous migration reflected both desires and realities that local elites had about development and modernization of the countryside. Although the bulk of these visuals expressed social distance and racism at first, we later witness a more gentle twist in the perception towards Indigenous newcomers. More strikingly, from the 1960s on, Indigenous peoples themselves appropriated these characterizations in visual media and started to use them for their own purposes, providing a more benign image of rural migration while challenging the dual identity between whites and Afro-Peruvians. My paper ends in the 1970s when the image of Indigenous migrants became international with “Simplemente Maria,” a TV soap opera that was exhibited in the continent and helped to insert migrants into the urban milieu.
"The Business of Fancydancing: Visual Sovereignty and the Double-Edged Consciousness"
Bayu Kristianto
Department of Native American Studies
Abstract: Smoke Signals is regarded as a magnificent breakthrough in Native America, which made it a frame reference in any Native American film analysis. However, not much has been written about Alexie’s film, The Business of Fancydancing. Out of 123 scholarly articles focusing on Alexie’s works, only a handful actually grapple with this particular movie, which mostly focus on the idea of a Native writer having to cope with the tensions of living in two worlds, i.e. the white world and the Native world, and the place of homosexuality in the discourse of Native American art and cinema. One crucial theme missed by scholars is the notion of visual sovereignty in the movie. This paper is aimed at delineating the issue of visual sovereignty represented by Sherman Alexie in the movie. How does visual sovereignty play a key role in the movie? In what way does the movie make the notion of visual sovereignty complex and multifaceted? How does Alexie’s take on visual sovereignty have a double-edged consciousness facing Native people in the United States? I argue that Alexie is conducting visual sovereignty using the movie The Business of Fancydancing, in which he reverses the privilege of whiteness which the white audience used to enjoy in Hollywood movies in which Indian people were insignificant characters. Alexie is enacting the decolonizing methodology of indigenizing by which he centers indigenous images to the center of the camera and the movie screen. However, he directs this sovereignty to both the dominant society and Indian people themselves as he is critiquing the limiting tendencies of reservation life. What is taking place is both the exercise of visual sovereignty and double-edged consciousness as Native people are questioned about their so-called “complicity” in acts of colonization, or their love-and-hate relationship with the colonizers.