# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With 503 contributors from 201 colleges, universities, museums, and research centers, Smarthistory is the most-visited art history resource in the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sun Tunnels, 1973–76, is built on forty acres, which I bought in 1974 specifically as a site for the work. The land is in the Great Basin Desert in northwestern Utah, about four miles southeast of Lucin (pop. ten) and nine miles east of the Nevada border.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program Success! | Action Center | National Trust for Historic Preservation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program will be an annual grant program of the National Park Service, in consultation with the National Trust and members of the African American heritage community, to aid preservation efforts across the country to research, identify, document, preserve, and interpret historic African American burial grounds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
HESAPA - A LANDBACK FILM

LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are LANDBACK battles being fought all across Turtle Island, to the north and the South.

As NDN Collective, we are stepping into this legacy with the launch of a LANDBACK Campaign as a mechanism to connect, coordinate, resource and amplify this movement and the communities that are fighting for LANDBACK. The closure of Mount Rushmore, return of that land and all public lands in the Black Hills, South Dakota is our cornerstone battle, from which we will build out this campaign. Not only does Mount Rushmore sit in the heart of the sacred Black Hills, but it is an international symbol of white supremacy and colonization. To truly dismantle white supremacy and systems of oppression, we have to go back to the roots. Which, for us, is putting Indigenous Lands back in Indigenous hands.

In addition, LANDBACK is more than just a campaign. It is a political framework that allows us to deepen our relationships across the field of organizing movements working towards true collective liberation. It allows us to envision a world where Black, Indigenous & POC liberation co-exists. It is our political, organizing and narrative framework from which we do the work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
HESAPA - A LANDBACK FILM LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands. Currently, there are LANDBACK battles being fought all across Turtle Island, to the north and the South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Forty years ago, in the summer of 1982, Agnes Denes was two months into tending to her two-acre wheatfield, which she had grown in one of the busiest, most urban, and most expensive corners of the world: Battery Park landfill in Manhattan. Even back then, the trash-filled ground that lay underneath the field was valued at $4.5bn.

An act of protest to highlight the paradoxes between the urban and rural worlds, her work, Wheatfield - A Confrontation, was an ambitious four-month project that saw the area transform from urban desolation to waist-high golden wheat. Something that would have seemed unimaginable back then - and even so more today.

Although impermanent, the work is still imprinted in the memory of those who witnessed it. "Kansas had landed in Manhattan!" wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter. "It felt like a farm ... like smelling the outdoors," said curator Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz.

This glittering landscape is set in the shadow of the twin towers

The photographs that remain are remarkable. In one, we see the artist tending to her wheat, dressed in a striped shirt with high-waisted blue jeans, starkly contrasting to the grey, stocky skyscrapers of Wall Street in the background. In another, we see the Statue of Liberty looming in the distance. From a different angle, we see that the glittering landscape is set in the shadow of the twin towers.

Wheatfield didn't just challenge the two- and-three-dimensional art objects in nearby museums (historically, women have sought to find alternative spaces to the traditional institutions that have largely excluded their work). It also confronted the state of economic, political and social society. "My decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan," Denes said, "instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of the longstanding concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.

Powerful paradox ... a view of the Statue of Liberty beyond the field. Photograph: Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

"Manhattan is the richest, most professional, most congested and, without a doubt, most fascinating island in the world. To attempt to plant, sustain and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate and obstructing the 'machinery' by going against the system, was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought for the calling to account."

By situating the wheatfield between the pillars of capitalism and patriarchy, a stone's throw from Wall Street, the work called into question some of the most striking social, economic and ecological concerns. It represented, the artist said, "food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics" and referred to "mismanagement, waste, world hunger".

If this represented the state of society in 1982 - when it was possible for a two-acre wheatfield to be planted in Manhattan, financially aided by New York's Public Art Fund - what do the images tell us about the world 40 years on? Most glaringly obvious, the image of the twin towers - the archetype of capitalism - is now, hauntingly, a symbol of the lives lost and subsequent wars after the 9/11 attacks.

The setting aside of land that will benefit the planet has been a low priority - and we are now feeling the effects

The fact that it would now be impossible for a wheatfield on this scale to be installed in most cities around the world - especially New York, where land is even more expensive - shows not just the rising density of real estate, the cost-of-living crisis and the further divide between the one per cent and the rest of the world, but the mismanagement of land and the greed of capitalism.

Because the setting aside of land which will ecologically benefit the planet has been a low priority, we are now feeling the effects. By the end of this week, temperatures will rise to a sweltering 45C in France and Spain, and wildfires are intensifying in Portugal as firefighters continue to battle with the raging blazes, destroying vegetation and causing droughts.

After the four months of Denes's Wheatfieldwas up, the wheat was harvested and distributed across 28 cities around the world for an exhibition called The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger. Of course, it didn't end world hunger, but it was about taking action, one step at a time. "My work was aimed to deal with one little problem at a time," Denes said, "and to find benign solutions. I don't make my work for myself; I make it for humanity."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A field of wheat on a $4.5bn patch of New York: the prophetic eco art of Agnes Denes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our new fortnightly series opens with a response to the heatwave: a look at the artist who planted a rural idyll right beside the towering symbols of capitalism and the patriarchy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Flint Is Family (2016) - LaToya Ruby Frazier

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Photographs and short film by LaToya Ruby Frazier which document three generations of Flint women. Images were later used in a five-part story on Elle.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The original Focus show was a collective effort with women artists forming various committees to raise money, coordinate galleries, plan over 150 exhibitions and events, reach out 83 exhibiting artists, and advertise the event: the collective produced a radio spot that asked, "Can you name 10 women artists?"

Two participating artists were Ree Morton and Cynthia Carlson, who had already rejected a similar invitation in New York and regretted it.

"We were both invited to be in the show and in the A.I.R. Gallery, and we both said no, which was a mistake," said Carlson, who at the time was teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). "We didn't want to be known as a woman artist. We just wanted to be known as an artist."

"At that point, in terms of feminism or women artists, I wasn't the sharpest tack in the box," said Carlson, who became a central figure in the Pattern and Decoration art movement of the 70s and 80s.

"My students in Philadelphia were much more: 'Come on, Professor Carlson. Let's get rolling with this!' I was a little slow on the uptake, but eventually, I caught up and understood the importance of the whole movement towards women taking initiative and showing."

Carlson sent a piece to the original Focus exhibition in 1974, but can't remember what it was. Records show it was "Untitled" (1972), acrylic on wood, but no image exists.

"My memory has never been at the top of the mark. That's a reason that I don't like to lie," said Carlson, 82. "You have to remember your lies."

Carlson did not know which piece was in the current (re)Focus until a reporter told her that the organizers borrowed her 1975 piece "Sixish" from the Woodmere Museum. The piece was made by piping thick wads of acrylic paint onto a board with cake-decorating equipment.

"I always valued humor in my work, but that one is a good one," she said. "Not quite a knee-slapper, exactly, but it has a lot of humor in its seriousness."

Carlson has been averse to associating her art with gender or social issues, and was not the only one who hesitated to join group shows of women in the early 1970s. Of the 83 artists approached to show their work, 82 accepted. It's not clear who was the holdout. In one of the essays for the 50th-anniversary catalogue, art historian Judith Stein thinks it might have been Georgia O'Keefe. In another essay, curator Ruth Fine believes it was Helen Frankenthaler.

The original Focus was not without controversy. Burko remembers being threatened with a lawsuit by a local artist who was upset that he could not get his work shown because Focus had booked up all available galleries for two months.

At the Philadelphia Civic Center, the main venue of Focus, the director demanded that one artist be removed from the show: Judith Bernstein, who submitted a large-scale abstract drawing of a penis.

It was either "Bernstein comes down, or the whole show comes down." The exhibition relented, but in retaliation, printed and distributed buttons that read "Where's Bernstein?"

It proved to be a turning point in Bernstein's career.

"A few years ago, we were both on a panel together, and she was so excited to see me. We hadn't seen each other in a long time," Brodsky said. "She said, 'That was the start of my recognition.' That gave her the visibility she hadn't had before. She always says that was really the start of her successes as an artist."

Bernstein has a piece in a similar phallic vein in the new (re)Focus show, which will likely not attract the same controversy. Of the 82 original exhibiting women, 78 are represented in the new show. Burko and Brodsky could not track down four artists.

"There is a thing that happens not just in the art world, but also in other sectors of civilization: women who are really famous when they're alive somehow disappear, forgotten," Brodsky said.

One of the reasons information is sparse about the original Focus exhibition is it never had a catalogue. The organizers raised about $95,000, enough to stage the events but not enough to produce a published document when it was all over. The archives of the project are held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This time, the (re)Focus reboot has a catalogue that identifies all participating artists, the pieces they exhibited originally and the ones showing now. The exhibition was put together with curators Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, at the Galleries at Moore, and independent curator Marsha Moss.

Burko hopes it will serve as a record of what women have been doing for decades to elevate themselves collectively.

She points to the recent bestselling book, "The Story of Art Without Men," by Katy Hessel, an art writer who had a similar revelation about women and art 40 years after Burke did.

"In 2015 she discovered there were not many women in all the art fairs she was going to." Burko said. "Hello! We discovered it way back in 1974."

"(re)Focus: Then and Now" opens Saturday, Jan 27, at the Galleries at Moore and runs until March 16. Associated exhibitions run at various times until the fall.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
50 years later, women artists once again take over Philadelphia galleries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A landmark, city-wide feminist art exhibition from 1974 is reborn and updated for 2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(First [re]read of 2021, and I'm still as mesmerized as the first time around. Forever a favorite.)

All of us are readers. Some of us made the journey to the library, by walking, by bicycling, by bus, and others clicked a button on a screen. Several of us paid good money for the book, hoping, praying, that it wouldn't be a disappointment. Most could afford it, but some could not, and what a tragedy that would be!

Some of us heard good things, others picked it up on a whim. Pretty cover ran through...more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
(First [re]read of 2021, and I'm still as mesmerized as the first time around. Forever a favorite.) All of us are readers. Some of us made the journey to the library, by walking, by bicycling, by bus, and others clicked a button on a screen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dorothea Lange-well known for her FSA photographs like Migrant Mother-was hired by the U.S. government to make a photographic record of the "evacuation" and "relocation" of Japanese-Americans in 1942. She was eager to take the commission, despite being opposed to the effort, as she believed "a true record of the evacuation would be valuable in the future."

The military commanders that reviewed her work realized that Lange's contrary point of view was evident through her photographs, and seized them for the duration of World War II, even writing "Impounded" across some of the prints. The photos were quietly deposited into the National Archives, where they remained largely unseen until 2006.

I wrote more about the history of Lange's photos and President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 initiating the Japanese Internment in another post on the Anchor Editions Blog.

Below, I've selected some of Lange's photos from the National Archives-including the captions she wrote-pairing them with quotes from people who were imprisoned in the camps, as quoted in the excellent book, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

I've also made a limited number of prints of her photos available for sale at Anchor Editions, and I'm donating 50% of the proceeds to two organizations fighting to protect immigrants: NILC and ACLU. Their fight seems especially important today given the current tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric, Muslim immigration bans, and the United States terminating DACA, which-if Congress does not pass the Dream Act-means 800,000 immigrants could lose their protected status.

This photo essay was originally published on December 7, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We've updated it this year, as the organizations we're supporting continue to need your help. This month, print sale proceeds going to the NILC will be matched dollar-for-dollar by other NILC donors, so the NILC will get 100% of the value of any prints you order in December!

At Manzanar and at the Santa Anita Assembly Center near Los Angeles, army engineers supervised manufacture of camouflage nets. Huge weavings of hemp, designed to fit over tanks and other large pieces of war matériel, they were constructed from cords that hung from giant stands; the workers usually wore masks to protect themselves from the hemp dust. The army claimed that they were volunteers but they were in fact coerced by camp administrators, who were receiving requisitions for large numbers of nets from the army. (One of the first strikes at the camps occurred when 800 Santa Anita camouflage-net workers sat down and refused to continue, complaining of too little food. They won some concessions.) At Manzanar other internees worked in a large agricultural project to grow and improve a plant, guayule, that could become a substitute for rubber. With rudimentary and often homemade equipment, chemists and horticulturalists hybridized guayule shrubs to obtain a substance of tensile strength with low production costs. These undertakings were illegal under the Geneva Convention, which forbade using prisoners of war in forced labor, and as a result only American citizens were usually employed so that the army could claim that these were not POWs.

- Linda Gordon, Impounded

The government charged 63 members and seven leaders of The Fair Play Committee with draft evasion and conspiracy to violate the law. The trial judge, Blake Kennedy, addressing the defendants as "you Jap boys," sentenced the members to three years imprisonment. The seven leaders were sentenced to four years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dorothea Lange's Censored Photographs of FDR's Japanese Concentration Camps - Anchor Editions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished until 2006.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out 17 globally agreed aspirations for human development that will guide international development until 2030. They focus the world's attention on some of humanity's greatest challenges, identifying areas of action, setting targets, and listing measures that allow the international community to determine what progress has been made.

Independent news organizations are the greatest brake on bribery and corruption in both the public and private sector.

Given their centrality to all areas of development, it's no surprise that there is a growing discussion among impact investors, from private foundations to private equity funds, about the role that investing can play in helping the world meet the SDGs.

Open for Business

Unlike their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals, the UN assumes that investors will help the world realize the SDGs. In fact, the UN views private capital as essential. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that without the active involvement of financial institutions and global markets, "it would be absolutely impossible to achieve these goals."

And with the number of assets committed to impact investments spiraling - $715 billion USD according to some bullish estimates - it is little wonder that there is a move to align impact investing's social impact with the SDGs.

Impact investors have been quick to identify areas with which they are familiar. High among their investable priorities are goals targeting issues like renewable energy, micro-finance, and education - established sectors for patient capital that benefit from the added kudos of being linked to an SDG.

But there are also opportunities for social investors looking to foster broader, and arguably deeper, social impact through SDG 16: promoting peace, justice, and strong institutions.

There is an urgent need for investment in the independent media companies that are fundamental to a free press.

Independent Media: Underpinning Sustainable Development

SDG 16 covers a wide range of issues, from reducing violence - with a focus on the abuse and trafficking of children - to promoting the rule of law and reducing corruption. But unlike most goals, SDG 16 is both a means and an end. Not only do peace, justice, and strong institutions provide direct benefits to people in their everyday lives, they also give vital support to the struggle to meet the other SDGs. How can you eradicate poverty (SDG 1) and hunger (2) if you don't create peaceful societies? How do you achieve gender equality (5) without access to justice? How do you provide access to clean water (6) or affordable energy (7) without responsive institutions?

And the key to SDG 16 is investable: independent media.

Press freedom - as exercised by independent news organizations free from the control of governments, political parties, and other partisan interests - is fundamental to the development of peaceful, just, and democratic societies. These organizations foster dialogue, respect for individual rights, and good governance. As a short UN video on SDG 16 explains: "An open and inclusive society protects press freedom and your right to know, which is crucial to sustainable development."

Here are just a few examples of the wide-ranging impact independent media has on societies.

Promoting Responsive and Accountable Government

World Bank research shows a link between more press freedom and better governance and accountability. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote: "Free speech and a free press not only make abuses of governmental powers less likely, they also enhance the likelihood that people's basic social needs will be met."

Press freedom is seriously constrained in 73% of countries, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Stiglitz's fellow Nobel laureate Amartya Sen identified a link between press freedom and hunger: "In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press." This again comes back to accountability, he explained, because democratic governments - those that are subject to scrutiny by the press - have to win elections and face public criticism, and therefore have an added incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.

As the watchdog of government, independent media not only monitor the worst abuses of power, they also hold authorities to account for their promises and how they implement policies. Every year, we see numerous examples of governments being held to account by the media we work with. For example, in Ecuador, digital news site GK reported the story of a child who was sexually abused by his teacher, detailing negligence by state institutions and revealing that there was no systematic response to such abuse. As a result, the Ministry of Public Health modified protocols to improve care for victims of sexual violence, and provided training to hospital managers on the issue and to doctors on how they should report suspected cases.

Reducing Corruption

Research shows that a free press reduces corruption. Independent news organizations are the greatest brake on bribery and corruption in both the public and private sector. According to the UN, corruption, bribery, theft, and tax evasion cost developing countries $1.26 trillion USD per year. This money could lift everyone who lives on less than $1.25 a day above $1.25 for at least six years. Corruption is a pervasive problem that corrodes the impact of development assistance across many of the areas identified by the SDGs, from diverting funds meant to build hospitals to subverting equal access to education.

As an example of media making a difference, South Africa's Mail & Guardian was one of several media that scrutinized the inner workings of the Gupta family, who were accused of exerting undue influence and looting taxpayer money through their ties with Jacob Zuma when he was president. Leaked 2017 emails revealed that - in an effort to stop the Mail & Guardian's reporting - the Guptas had a secret plan to buy the company and turn it into a puppet paper. When Zuma was removed from office, the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture was established to gather evidence on how the Gupta family worked with the former president to secure government contracts and determine cabinet appointments. Hearings are ongoing.

Educating the Public on COVID-19

The importance of independent media has been demonstrated countless times throughout the pandemic, from providing reliable health information and advice to the public to exposing irregularities in procurement and supporting people returning to work after lockdown. Two examples from clients in India demonstrate how media have impacted on people's lives during Covid-19 across a range of SDGs.

Indian news outlet Scroll's investigation - "No pensions for five months: How Jharkhand's poor were left poorer during the pandemic" - highlighted how the state government failed to provide monthly pensions to one million impoverished senior citizens, widows, and people with disabilities for at least five months from July 2020. A week after Scroll published a report on the delay in disbursement, the National Human Rights Commission issued a notice to the government of Jharkhand and the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, giving them six weeks to submit a detailed report on the delays.

There is also an urgent need for investment in the independent media companies that are fundamental to a free press.

With its aim to empower young people through videos and events, the grassroots story-sharing site Josh Talks has supported millions of people during the pandemic across a range of areas. For example, it gave doctors a platform to talk about COVID-19 and the steps the public should take to reduce the risk of the virus, and later to spread awareness about the safety of the vaccine. Josh Talks also worked with partners including Facebook and UNDP to host a series of webinars that facilitated a conversation between policymakers, industry leaders, and the public about concerns surrounding COVID-19, such as mental health, the impact of the virus on small and medium businesses, and the need for social protection programs to help entrepreneurs post-pandemic.

Investing in Press Freedom

The need for media freedom is great. Press freedom is seriously constrained in 73% of countries, according to Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index 2021. And this threat is growing. The report notes "a dramatic deterioration in people's access to information and an increase in obstacles to news coverage."

There is also an urgent need for investment in the independent media companies that are fundamental to a free press, particularly in countries where this right is abused. In many regions, independent news companies are starved of affordable finance. The only capital available comes with editorial strings attached. With local banks lacking media expertise and, more importantly, not wanting to be seen to support a news organization that might be critical of the government, the only source of investment is often the state, political parties, and oligarchs.

Impact investors can help bridge this gap by providing debt and equity capital so independent media can invest in their companies, and take advantage of opportunities and reach audiences hungry for reliable news and informed opinion.

Investing in independent media goes beyond advancing progress on SDG 16. It brings the aspirations of all 193 UN member nations just a little closer to reality.
This post was originally published by the Media Development Investment Fund. It is reprinted here with permission.
Additional Resources
From Traditional Journalism to Sustainable Journalism Sustainability: A Survival Guide for Nonprofit Investigative Groups What Governments Can Do to Preserve the Press: A New Deal for Journalism Peter Whitehead, director of communications at the Media Development Investment Fund, has worked in media development, communications, and law for over 20 years. Prior to joining MDIF in 2005, Peter was a media consultant advising clients including the World Association of Newspapers, the Danish Foreign Ministry, UNESCO, and The Irish Times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Independent Media Plays a Critical Role in Meeting Humanity's Greatest Challenges

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Press freedom - as exercised by independent news organizations free from the control of governments, political parties and other partisan interests - is fundamental to the development of peaceful, just and democratic societies. These organizations foster dialogue, respect for individual rights and good governance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo via Katie Licht on Flickr.

Every step of how to make tiny books, from coming up with what you want to say to stapling your finished product into existence.

Welcome to the VICE Guide to Life, our imperfect advice on becoming an adult.

I made my first zine in high school. It was just a folded eight-page booklet that I drew on with friends at a coffee shop, then made copies of on the Xerox machine in my mom's office. All it had were our sketches, and perhaps a few provocative phrases that didn't really mean anything. But for us, it was a shareable snapshot of the creative friend group we had gathered and the ways we were mutually coping with teen angst.

My friends and I learned the medium because a cool older artist had shown us. We were immediately hooked on the idea of collaborating on cheap little books together. At the time, we weren't even really aware of the rich history behind zines and punk culture. I, at least, wasn't thinking critically about the radical potential of self-publishing, or the capacity for zines to spread political resources, help start movements, or create subcultural communities across long-distances before the internet made that easy.

I'm OK with not having known all that then. Because despite all the way that zines allow us to resist, they can also just be an excuse to collaborate, or to put something that's entirely your own out into the world. For that reason, making your first zine can be a formative experience. It can be a reason to ask yourself: What do I have to say? And to give yourself the permission to say it.

The world of zine-making is endlessly vast. If you're just getting started, here's a guide-complete with illustrations by Ambar Del Moral -to help you out.

Your zine doesn't have to be the most brilliant publication ever, or even the piece of work you're proudest of. Just make something that reflects how you're feeling or what you're thinking about at the moment.

If nothing immediately comes to mind, get together with friends (or not-making a zine solo is cool, too) and decide, first, what type of zine you want to make. The options are truly endless: It could be a poetry zine, a photo zine, a comic, a collage zine, a zine of essays, a fanzine dedicated to your favorite band or artist, or a political-manifesto-type zine. Alternatively, you can focus on a topic and go from there-perhaps you want to share recipes that remind you of home, or write about the microagressions you experience as a marginalized person, or make an informational zine about how to identify birds.

If you need some inspiration, look up whether there's a bookstore near you that sells zines. Even better: Go to a zine fest if you can. There are also zine libraries at some colleges. Plus, a lot of zine makers are active on Tumblr and Instagram. Check out Unity Press, 3 Dot Zine, Brown Recluse Zine Distro, and RE/search to start.

Zines can take all kinds of forms, some easier than others to make. There are stitch-bound zines, perfect-bound zines, accordion zines, tiny zines that come in matchboxes, large poster-sized zines that unfurl, and digital, online-only zines. There are two types of zines that I'd recommend as a place to start: eight-page folding mini zines and standard booklets made from folded printer paper.

If you decide you want to make an eight-page mini zine, all you need to do is start with one page of printer paper. Following the diagram above, fold it into eight rectangles and cut a horizontal slit down the center of the page between the four innermost rectangles. Each little rectangle on one side of the paper will be one page. If you're feeling ambitious, you can decorate the other side so that once people are done reading, they can unfold the zine into a poster. For full folding instructions, check out this handy dandy video.

If you want to make a stapled zine, that means you will be using printer paper folded in half (so that the left and right sides touch) to make a booklet. More info on how to format, print, and staple those below!

If you're creating a physical master copy of your zine, remember that each folded piece of paper is four different pages of your zine-and they are not all consecutive! The first page will be on the same piece of paper as the last page, for instance. (See the illustration above.) For that reason, all folded zines must have a page count that's divisible by four. After you've decided the number of pages your booklet will have, fold your zine and number the pages with pencil before getting started. That way, you won't get confused.

If you're working digitally, you can create each page individually and save as a normal PDF. Your pages should each be 5.5" x 8.5" and your page count must still be divisible by four.

Depending on what kinds of materials you're most comfortable with, there are a lot of ways to design your zine.

The most traditional method is analog, through either collaging or drawing. That means handwriting and drawing whatever you want the content of your zine to be. It can also mean gathering archival photos, Xeroxing images from books, cutting stuff out from magazines, and printing out text (or using a typewriter), then pasting them all together onto the page.

If you're more of a computer kid than crafty type, make it digitally. Use whatever software you prefer-Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign or Microsoft Word. (If those are new to you but you want to try them, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.) Go wild. Remember: You can also use a mixture of all of these methods. (If you're making a zine with a bunch of people, it may even be necessary, since different people will prefer to make their pages in different mediums.)

Once you're done, save the file with a CMYK color profile so that it's optimized for print rather than the internet. And a reminder: Like normal books, you don't want your text to be too close to the edge of the page, because it won't be legible once it's bound!

Decide if you want different papers for the "guts" (the inside pages of the zine) and the cover. You may consider printing the insides on normal printing paper and the cover on a heavier-weight paper-people almost always judge books by their covers, even if they're taught not to. You may want to use special paper for the insides, as well. (If you're making a photo zine, for instance, you may want a relatively thick, or even glossy, paper for your guts.) If you want something nice for either, go to your local paper store. You'll be overwhelmed by all the weights, textures, and colors available.

Decide how you're going to print your zine. If it's a small "run" (total copy count) and only a short zine, you may consider using your printer at home. If you're printing a lot, though, that can get expensive. Alternatively, you can go to a copy store where you'll pay per page and don't have to worry about how much expensive laserjet ink you're using up. Many public libraries have printers and copy machines you can use as well.

If you're working from a physical master copy, you'll need to copy each page, then feed the paper back into the printer and print onto the other side. (Do some tests to make sure you're feeding the paper in with the correct sides up). Even better: Scan your physical copy and create a PDF. Then, like with other PDFs, print with the "booklet" setting. If the printer you're using doesn't have that setting, there are websites that can help you put the pages in the correct order.

If you're making a large run of zines or printing a very colorful zine, you may consider getting it done professionally by a local press or an online printer. If you go this route, there is a higher starting cost, but the more copies you order, the more money you'll save.

The last decision is how you want to bind it all together. Stapling is the easiest and most common way to go. To do that, order your pages, create a column of two or three staples vertically down the center of the pages, and fold them in half to make the booklet. A standard stapler won't reach to the middle of the page, so buy a long-armed stapler from an art supply store or borrow one from an art studio.

Stitch-binding, where the book is sewn together at the spine with thread, is a little more work, but has a nice DIY look. To achieve it: Fold your zine in half to make a crease, poke three holes along the fold, and thread through the holes with a simple running stitch until it feels secure. You can either use normal sewing thread or thicker embroidery thread.

For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Zines with more than 60 pages may be too thick to staple or sew. You'll need to bind those with glue like a book-a method called "perfect binding." For this sort of thing, I recommend collaborating with a print shop that has the glue and binding machinery available. (It can be tough to do on your own.)

Once all your pages are together, you're done! Go and trade your zine with your friends, send it to bookstores all over the country, and enter zine fests-or just keep it for yourself and feel proud that you made your own tiny book, out of your own big ideas.

Get a personalized roundup of VICE's best stories in your inbox.

By signing up to the VICE newsletter you agree to receive electronic communications from VICE that may sometimes include advertisements or sponsored content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Photo via Katie Licht on Flickr. Every step of how to make tiny books, from coming up with what you want to say to stapling your finished product into existence. Welcome to the VICE Guide to Life, our imperfect advice on becoming an adult. I made my first zine in high school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The history of zines-short for "fanzines" or magazines-stretches back to the 1930s, when authors produced short, usually self-made publications with mimeograph machines. Early zines were associated with science fiction fans, eventually expanding into categories like comic books and rock music.

Their popularity took off in the 1970s, when they were typically produced using copy machines. Since then, zines have connected members of various movements, becoming vital tools for artists and members of communities to express themselves and build connections.

Now, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is spotlighting the power of these publications. Titled " Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines," the show begins in the 1970s and continues to the present day.

"Part of the ethos of these fanzines is that they're very open to reader feedback and participation," says Branden Joseph, an art historian at Columbia University and one of the exhibition's curators, to WNYC 's Alison Stewart. "They welcome correspondence. They welcome contributions. ... They're more open and collaborative with a community than your typical magazine, [which] has a gatekeeper function."

With more than 800 works by artists from North America, the exhibition is an expansive study of the form. Still, it is not meant to be an exhaustive history, as exhibition co-curator and art historian Drew Sawyer tells the s Veronica Esposito. "Even if we wanted to be very inclusive and seemingly comprehensive, we knew it would be impossible to claim to be comprehensive in any way," he says. "It would be delusional to think anyone could be comprehensive on a history of zines."

Some zine archives exist, such as New York University's Riot Grrrl Collection -but because many zines are so rooted in particular times and locations, they can be challenging to track down. Sawyer and Joseph tell 's Min Chen that they spent years locating artists and reviewing their personal collections.

"Our archive research included me and Drew [Sawyer] literally on our knees, in storage spaces, rifling through stuff that people hadn't looked at in a long time," says Joseph. "There were artists who had just one copy left. The ephemeral nature of the zine is really shown in the archives."

Zines are often associated with an anti-establishment outlook, and some artists consequently refused to allow their zines to be shown. Many others, however, saw the project as an essential work of cultural preservation.

"This exhibition will be the first to look at zines as a distinct medium within the lineage of art history," says Joseph in a statement. "At the same time, valorizing and including zines makes the history of contemporary art look different-introducing a host of different figures, putting familiar figures into different contexts and moving marginalized figures to positions of centrality. Far from nostalgic or outmoded, the photocopied and printed zine remains a vibrant means of artistic expression."

Over many decades, zines have waxed and waned in popularity, and "Copy Machine Manifestos" is organized into sections exploring periods of growth. "What we found were these waves of intense production that would peter off and generate other waves," Joseph tells the Guardian. "And that's really what the six sections of the show are: They're more of these waves than they are, say, decades."

Sections cover topics such as the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the queer and feminist zines of the late 1980s and 1990s and zines' continuing relevance into the 21st century.

"Hopefully people who attend this show don't come away thinking of zines as just aesthetic objects," says Sawyer to the Guardian. "It's also very much about the role they have played in the construction of cultural communities."

Some zines are accompanied by other works of art, like the first issue of Joey Terrill's HomeboyBeautiful zine from 1978. This text includes photo novellas and comic strips that parallel the multi-panel storytelling format in his painting Breaking Up / Breaking Down (1984-1985), which is also on display.

"We're trying to show the central role of zine production in contemporary art by looking at zines in relation to painting, photography, filmmaking, video performance, all these other mediums that they went hand in hand with in terms of production," Sawyer tells Artnet.

The exhibition also looks to the present day. Since 2019, a new wave of zine production has taken off, Joseph tellsWNYC. He points out that zines, which are cheap to make, enable people to buy an artist's work without necessarily being able to afford an expensive painting.

These days, zine fairs and festivals are common, and something about the format continues to resonate.

"One thing that zines have always represented is a certain type of intimacy-of distribution, of self-revelation, of reception. There's a certain physical relationship," Joseph tells Artnet. "I think that's one of the things that continues now."
"Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines" is on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City through March 31, 2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Zines Brought Power to Those on the Margins of Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum examines zines' role in art history and community building

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women Who Made Art in Japanese Internment Camps Are Getting Their Due

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A traveling exhibit will focus on the work of three Japanese American women artists, Hisako Hibi, Miki Hayakawa and Miné Okubo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Native Hawaiians Protesting Giant Telescope on Mauna Kea Aren't Going Anywhere | NBC Left Field

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mona Haydar - Barbarian [Official Music Video]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Racial Bias Built Into Photography (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sarah Lewis explores the relationship between racism and the camera.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Photos: 3 Very Different Views Of Japanese Internment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An exhibit at LA’s Skirball Cultural Center features photos that three photographers — Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Toyo Miyatake — took at the Manzanar internment camp.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Toyo Miyatake’s Photographs of Life inside the Manzanar Camp

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During World War II, the photographer made surreptitious images of Japanese Americans incarcerated in California by the US government.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to do visual (formal) analysis in art history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Museums with colonial-era collections have always known about the brutal parts of their biographies. But, through acts of purification via historical distance, they have chosen to ignore them. Museum directors now have to rethink their position as defenders of their collections in light of a different political agenda that locates people and their patrimony in a precolonial, yet radically altered, landscape.

When learning about cultural heritage, you will be directed to the etymology of the words "heritage" and "patrimony." Whereas "heritage" invokes inheritance, "patrimony" leads us to patriarchy. In French, patrie refers to the homeland, the fatherland, and during colonialism, vast swaths of West Africa were brought under this French conceptual model in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Objects taken from West Africa (the periphery) and brought back to the center/metropole were therefore conceptualized as part of the colonizer's national identity. They were used in a series of Great Exhibitions and expos to gain support for the colonial project before entering national and private collections throughout Europe.

The immediate paradox here is that, whereas objects from the periphery were welcome in the center, people were very much not. Since the independence of West African countries throughout the late 1950s and early '60s, the retention of objects and the simultaneous rejection of people has become ever more fraught. Young undocumented migrants from former French colonies stand meters away from the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, a museum in Paris full of their inaccessible patrimony. The migrants are treated with contempt while the objects from their homelands are cared for in museums and treated with great reverence. The migrants will be deported, but the objects will not be repatriated. The homeland is therefore only home to objects, not people.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a unique demographic profile. By 2050, it is projected that the region will be home to the 10 countries with the youngest populations in the world. Most Western leaders would like to see strong and stable states in West Africa, states that can provide their citizens with jobs, cultural pride, and a reason for staying in their countries and building new futures. The return of objects from museums could become central to this nation-building, undoing some of the harm of the colonial project and supporting emerging creative economies.

The objects taken from West Africa during the colonial period indexed many things, most of them problematic and racist. Some objects acted as a catalyst for the creative work of Western artists, and consequently entered the artistic canon as prompts and props (seen in the background of artists' studios such as that of Pablo Picasso). The objects that Picasso encountered at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris were the impetus for his "African period" at the beginning of the 20th century, which produced one of his most famous works,"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"(1907).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Patrimony - An anthropologist reflects on contemporary repatriation demands for African art taken during the colonial period.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Article begins

A deeply interdisciplinary visual artist creates objects that are both art and ethnography. Her installations produce space for immersive, social forms of understanding.

As a visual artist and cultural anthropologist, I create installations that blur the line between art and ethnography. For over 20 years, I have created works that use my training in both fields to expand the ethnographic text and its audiences. This interdisciplinary practice, which combines visual art and ethnographic research, opens opportunity to conduct and present research in a unique way. Here I use two interdisciplinary art projects to discuss observing and participating in the creation of both the artwork and ethnographic knowledge; embodied forms of knowledge produced through art making; and art exhibits as forms of public anthropology.

Creating images and learning about exile

Geographies of the Imagination isan art installationdedicated to revealing the internal images of exile. It is the product of collaborative art making with nine Chilean political exiles, in which I was the creator of the images guided by the exile participants and by the process, which afforded deliberate pauses for us to reflect on the work and share memories.

For over 18 months, during my tenure as artist in residence at the Center for Art and Public Life (2007-2008), I created with the Chilean exiles nine videos and 23 monoprint banners depicting their memories of and reflections on long-term exile. The participants arrived in California over 30 years ago, having been expelled by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) because of their ideas or political affiliations. They joined this project because they wanted to recall the past, and also to make their stories public as a response to the silence about their exile maintained by successive post-dictatorship governments.

The participatory method consisted of a series of sequential stages. My first meeting with Jaime was at his home and was to record his memories of forced migration and discuss a preliminary sketch of his banner. During this meeting, he described the effects of forced migration on his sense of self and belonging. He said:

I feel divided. I lived in two different Chiles and here too. I feel that I stayed somehow in the middle. I would love to go to Chile and live there because life is more placid, quiet there. I am going to retire soon. There are two Chiles: the Chile of my memories and dreams, and the Chile that changed and that expelled me and to which I don't belong. I feel that this country [the United States] has treated me well, that I have done more here than I could have done in Chile, that my rights are respected here, that social classes matter less than in Chile. But I also feel that I don't belong here. I am an outsider and I will always be one here...

The second stage was to create the first image based on Jaime's description of his divided self. I used a recent photograph of Jaime, tore it in half, and created a photo etching of the two halves of his face.

For the third stage, the exiles reviewed the images and judged their fidelity as representations of their memories as well as the aesthetics. These conversations were rich with ethnographic information about the exiles' internal views of forced migration as the images triggered further reflections on the past. Jaime's first response to the image of himself was to reminisce and evaluate his life in both countries. As he contemplated the two halves representing his life in Chile and the United States, he expressed a desire to fill them with his most important moments in both places. I suggested the use of photos that later I would etch in. For his life in Chile, he spent hours selecting from hundreds of photos as he talked about the past. He selected three: one at age four at a park with his father, another as a fifteen-year-old sailor when he joined the Navy, and one taken at the prison where he was held for three years because he refused to join with the armed forces that implemented the coup to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende. For the side representing the self that belongs to the United States, he surprised me by selecting just one photo (posing with his wife and daughters in front of his house), although he has lived most of life in the United States.

In our next meeting, Jaime contemplated the new image and cried, "I don't belong anywhere!" He later mused, "I belong to a third place, which is neither here nor there." Later, I widened the space between the two halves of his face leaving an empty space to represent Jaime's third space. When he saw this image, he commented that his place of belonging is not stationary, as characterized by a constant moving between the two selves. I asked him how I should represent his traveling self. He wanted a bird. But he also wanted an airplane. I created a bird that also looks like an airplane and connects his two sides. For the background of his split self he asked for the image of a map that represents Chile and California combined.

These meetings also became arenas in which the exiles and I verified our mutual understanding. By seeing how I portrayed them in the images I created, they had a glimpse of my views of them. My assumptions about their backgrounds were often corrected, and I had to create new images. While sometimes these moments were uncomfortable for me, as I had to face my misconceptions, they were also a fertile ground for the mutual creation of empathy and rapport.

As ethnographer and visual artist, I was able to participate and observe as knowledge emerged and evolved through our interactions, through the exiles' responses to my input and me to theirs. I could observe and use my senses and skills as a visual artist in the creation of this changing and emergent knowledge.

Creating embodied forms of knowledge

Atlas of Dreams is a project comprising ethnographic research on memorable dreams and visual art that aims at uncovering the emotional aspect of cities. For seven years, with the help of students at the California College of the Art, I interviewed over 400 residents of the San Francisco Bay Area about their memorable dreams-those that remain in the minds of people because of their strong imagery and emotional content. The dreamers classified their dreams according to the following categories: nightmares, bizarre, wondrous, healing and consoling, premonitory, repetitive, and lucid dreams. To visually present the distribution of the different forms of dreams in cities, I created artistic maps to show the location where participants narrated the dreams and at the same time capture the emotional traces of their narratives in the streets.

Dérive or drifting, a technique developed by the situationists (a mid-twentieth-century radical alliance of European avant-garde artists and writers) to uncover the emotional aspect of cities by walking without an itinerary and engaging emotionally and imaginatively with the surroundings, provided one method. The second technique I used was frottage, the act of capturing hidden textures of a surface by taking a rubbing with paper and pencil, developed by the surrealist Max Ernst. Both techniques gave me the opportunity to experientially and conceptually understand the process of dream formation as described by the dream researcher Ernest Hartmann (2014), who viewed the imagery of dreams as metaphors for the dreamer's emotions, created by our minds under the guidance of our emotions.

I drifted through the areas where I collected the dreams by car and on foot, each engendering different feelings and experiences. For example, as I drove, I was able to view the length of the street and anticipate its coming end. I felt the shape of the curves and corners from the sensations created by my body while I made turns. I transported these feelings into the creation of the grid or layout of the streets by using a knife instead of a brush or pen. Walking enabled me to feel and capture what I perceived as emotional instances in the streets that then guided the creation of the artistic maps.

As I walked in a dérive through Lake Merritt in Oakland, one of the cities of the Bay Area of San Francisco and where I found clusters of dreamers' narrations of nightmares and night terrors, I encountered a man who was standing in front of a memorial shrine and mourning the death of a gang member who had been recently killed at the lake. Witnessing this expression of suffering made me reflect on the large number of homicides that Oakland had suffered in the last decade. A few days later, I noticed that the city employees had removed the death memorial, breaking the votive candles and leaving behind a few pieces of glass, which I gathered. Using the surrealist technique of frottage, I placed these pieces of glass under paper and traced their shapes as a way of bringing out the hidden emotions of the city and the emotional traces of the dream narratives.

After several dérive walks, my capacity for absorbing emotions from the streets became more acute and I entered a state of sensibility akin to the paranoiac-critical method of Salvador Dali, in which the artist soaks up what she sees and enters a state dominated by a flow of images and sensations. Memories and feelings associated with the dreams I had collected tinted my encounters in the streets, dissolving the boundaries of my internal world with the surroundings. I incorporated these experiences into the creation of the maps, injecting the center of the maps with the emotions I felt. In this manner, I replicated and experienced bodily a process of dream creation, from the use of emotions to the creation of dream images.

Exhibits as public anthropology

Art exhibits socially, relationally, and experientially transmit knowledge to audiences; they can be powerful forms of public anthropology. These exhibits can produce spaces for altering understandings of the world and potentially generating social change (see Bennett 2005, Bourriaud 2006).

I have these forms of transmission during the opening reception for Geographies of the Imagination at the Oliver Art Center Gallery of the California College of the Arts (October 24, 2008-November 28, 2008), which I designed to evoke the experience of long-term exile and migration. The installation took up two rooms in the gallery. In the main room nine video monitors stood on stands aligned in the shape of a V. Each monitor played the personal stories of one of the exiles and their reflections on exile and nostalgia. Above the monitors hung 32 monoprints depicting the exiles' memories of forced migration. In a separate room furnished with chairs and tables, visitors could trace their own journeys and migrations on the outlines of geographical maps.

Audience members reflected on their own experiences and were also affected by the ways others engaged with the installation. People sat with friends and family and shared their journeys. For example, a man used four maps to trace his journeys around the world during his 30 years working as a merchant marine and through doing so showed his wife all the places he had visited. He also reflected on his new life as a sedentary retiree and his recent heart attack. The act of seeing others engaged in this activity created a different awareness for the audience about their own migration, identity, and sense of belonging. A woman commented that seeing parents showing their children their places of origin and tracing their journeys made her feel that the stigma of being an immigrant had been lifted from her.

As audiences at the installation, the exile participants expressed a feeling of unity with one another as they recognized commonalities in their experiences and feelings. This awareness led them to organize future meetings to talk about their experiences of exile. Although most of them were familiar with the general set of events and circumstances of some of the other exiles, this was the first time that they heard the stories of many other exiles.

The production of the artworks for public display also affected the exiles during the creation process. It made them aware of audiences within and outside of their communities. They imagined audiences as they worked on the art, to address those who had caused their situation of exile: the government of Augusto Pinochet. They addressed Pinochet directly or indirectly by creating counterimages or counternarratives to oppose those they perceived were created about them by the government.

The hybrid work of combining visual art and ethnographic research gives me the opportunity to observe and participate in the creation of ethnographic knowledge through the making of art objects. Through the use of different art techniques, I have also been able to experience knowledge through my senses. And exhibiting these works in galleries has given me a new form of transmitting knowledge, which produces immersive and sensorial forms of understanding in social settings that differ from the intellectual and solitary reading of texts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Anthropologist as Artist - Anthropology News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A deeply interdisciplinary visual artist creates objects that are both art and ethnography. Her installations produce space for immersive, social forms of understanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Powerful, Though Silent: Frederick Douglass’ Portraits

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Portraits of Frederick Douglass, the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, illuminate his life and career as an abolitionist. By tracing the evolution of his self-presentation, this article highlights the power of photography for countering racist stereotypes of Black Americans during the nineteenth century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It looks a long way down from the window of Faith Ringgold's attic studio to her snow-covered garden in Englewood, New Jersey. Her friend and longtime gallerist Dorian Bergen is holding the phone aloft, giving me a video tour of an impressively ordered room. There is a long work table in the middle, with paints of every kind and colour at one end, and canvasses piled high, ready for use, at the other. Hung on one wall are two framed quilt editions from Ringgold's Coming to Jones Road series, inspired by her move to this very house 28 years ago, when the neighbours' hostile reception ended in a court case. Ringgold herself - now aged 90, and regal with it - sits by that window with its vertiginous view, as if on a throne backlit by the sun.

In a 70-year career spanning the US's 20th-century social revolutions, the artist, activist and children's author has infused the US art establishment with traditions that had previously been systematically excluded: west African; African American; the work of women; and the perspectives of children. But while her famous fans include Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton, it is only in the past five years that the art world has come to appreciate the full scope of her legacy.

The celebrated story-quilts showcased many of Ringgold's artistic preoccupations - African American history, vivid colour palettes, the elevation of oft-dismissed domestic crafts to high-art status - but their prominence has also overshadowed just how much else there is. Ringgold's subjects have varied from prettified landscapes to highly charged political portraits, and her medium has encompassed painting, sculpture, mask-making, performance art, mosaics on the NYC subway and a large-scale mural at the Rikers Island women's prison. As she explained in a 1972 interview, she chose the site after receiving a grant to create a public work and being rejected by a number of academic institutions, including her alma mater, City College. "When I spoke to the deans I would get a lot of 'Who are you?' ... I asked myself, do you want your work to be somewhere where nobody wants it, or do you want it to be somewhere it is needed?"

For a long while the American art world didn't seem to know what to make of Ringgold's determination to depict the nation - racism, violent upheaval and all. In December 1967, her striking, 12ft by 6ft American People Series #20: Die was first shown at Spectrum, a cooperative gallery in midtown Manhattan. The painting draws on the influence of Picasso's Guernica to depict a dramatic scene of civil unrest on the streets of an unnamed American city. Injured or dying bodies of men, women and children - black and white - are dramatically splayed on the pavement, amid splashes of blood. One visitor to the gallery apparently emerged from the lift, saw the painting, and immediately let loose a wild scream of terror.

"People weren't used to seeing blood," says Bergen now. "I wasn't used to painting blood either, by the way," adds Ringgold. "But I found it very easy and very interesting. Because I saw it all the time, you see. People were having these riots, but nobody was painting them." In 1964, Harlem had seen six nights of what Ringgold described in her 1995 memoir as "tumultuous thrusts for freedom", after a 15-year-old African American, James Powell, was shot dead by a white police officer. By summer 1967, uprisings were taking place all over the country. "I said: 'I'm not gonna see all these riots and not paint them. I can do what I want,'" says Ringgold.

Faith Ringgold with her mother, Willi Posey Jones. Photograph: Courtesy of Faith Ringgold

Making art that elicits screams would doubtless attract notice today, but despite the political tumult of the late 60s, white men dominated the New York art scene, just as they did other spheres of public life. And the attention she did get was not always favourable. In 1970 she was arrested for what the NYPD termed "desecration of the flag". She had designed the flyer for the People's Flag Show exhibition in Greenwich Village, a red and black lithograph that reimagined the US flag to include text such as: "A flag which does not belong to the people to do with as they see fit should be burned." Ringgold insists it was far from desecration. "It was just people, y'know, trying to control creativity." The authorities soon realised their mistake and she was released that same night.

Things were slowly changing, though, with Ringgold seemingly involved in every major liberation movement of the 70s and 80s. As a founding member of the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee, in 1970 she protested against the almost exclusively male lineup of the Whitney annual exhibition by depositing raw eggs and sanitary towels around the gallery. In 1971, she co-founded the black women artists' collective Where We At, to foster community art, and in 1974 she and her elder daughter, Michele Wallace, were founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization. Her Anyone Can Fly Foundation remains dedicated to "expanding the art establishment's canon to include artists of the African diaspora".

Ringgold's childhood took place amid the creative buzz of the Harlem Renaissance, when Langston Hughes was writing poetry and Bessie Smith was singing the blues. Her father, a truck driver and a minister, "would always make sure that I had enough paint and crayons". He brought home her first easel when she was 10. Her mother was a fashion designer, offering a role model as someone who made a living through art. "We all had lots of beautiful, unique clothes made and designed by my mother. People were very careful about being dressed in those days. Nobody went out in the street looking raggedy, unless they were."

This was particularly important, because you never knew who you might bump into. Ringgold says, of the black artists of the 1930s: "No matter how famous or important they were, they lived in Harlem." There was a lot of racism elsewhere in New York City, but her neighbourhood was the exception, "because Harlem was for us". Duke Ellington lived around the corner, so Ringgold and her friends would make a diner coffee last for hours, in hopes of crossing paths with him. The jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins also lived nearby, and remains a life-long friend. "If he played at home then the neighbours would complain, y'know - they didn't want all this music, all hours of the night. So his parents told him no, and he'd go on George Washington Bridge and play."

Ringgold and her mother in the 1930s. Photograph: Courtesy of Faith Ringgold

Her memories of growing up in Harlem fed into the semi-autobiographical Tar Beach (1988) and Tar Beach 2 (1990) story-quilts, which depict an eight-year-old girl soaring above her neighbourhood and claiming its landmarks as her own. The inspiration was the sun-heated asphalt roof of her childhood apartment building. "We'd go up there and my mother would make up lunch and put it all on a table, and everything. It was perfect." In 1991, Ringgold adapted Tar Beach into her first illustrated book for children. She has now published 17 such titles.

Chronic asthma meant Ringgold was mostly home-schooled until the age of eight, but after several years teaching in Harlem's public schools, she now looks back at that early period as fundamental to her artistic development. "I noticed there's a point in the life of children when they kind of give up on art," she says. "They don't like the idea that some people won't like what they do, and I just didn't have that problem. Because I was home a lot, I didn't have to deal with people who liked or didn't like. I liked - and that was the end of that."

In 1950, her application to study art at the City College of New York was rejected, owing to her gender and race. She refused to take no for an answer and a compromise was eventually reached: instead of majoring in art, she would study "art education", considered a more acceptable subject for a woman. In retrospect, this diversion was a happy one. "Children are extremely inspiring when it comes to art," says Ringgold. "I'm very glad I did it." But back then, wasn't she outraged? "Absolutely! I was determined that I didn't want to be limited."

Ringgold's formal education focused on the European masters and her early work reflected that. "A lot of boats and trees and whatever they taught you in school. Not political at all." This period coincided with Ringgold's first marriage, to the jazz and classical pianist Robert Earl Wallace. The two married in 1950, separating four years and two daughters later. It wasn't until 2004, however, with her Jazz Stories series of quilts and acrylic paintings, that Ringgold explicitly incorporated the soundtrack of her youth into her art. "I'm definitely not a musician of any kind," she says with a laugh. "But the music was rampant - it was all over the place."

In the early 1960s a fateful meeting with the New York gallery owner Ruth White changed everything. "She said: 'You can't paint any of this kind of stuff.' And I said: 'I wonder why she's telling me what I can do? I can do what I want.' But then I realised what she was saying - 'With all the racist things that are going on in the world, you're painting landscapes?' So I said: 'OK, here it comes ...'"

Ringgold married her second husband, Burdette "Birdie" Ringgold, in 1962, and with his financial support and encouragement was able to devote more time to art. Influenced by the writing of James Baldwin, as well as White's challenge, she began work on her American People series of oil paintings (1963-67), now among her most celebrated works. These paintings, usually of figures chosen to reflect the interracial tensions of the times, were rendered in a bold style that combined influences from pop art, post-cubist Picasso and African sculpture.She eventually gave up teaching in 1973, though she continued to hold prestigious positions at various US universities until the early 00s.

Her mother, Willi Posey Jones, was a key supporter, providing both childcare and collaboration. "She taught me how to make these quilts," says Ringgold, pointing to the framed editions hanging on her studio wall. "She knew how it should be composed." Mother's Quilt (1983) was the first quilt work that Ringgold completed without her, and the physically demanding work became a kind of grief therapy. "Finishing that quilt, after my mother died, was very helpful," she says.

Groovin' High, 1996. Photograph: © 2021 Faith Ringgold / ARS and DACS member/Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York

Sometimes Ringgold's work has been able to combine the politically incendiary and the personally cathartic. In the early 90s, some of her New Jersey neighbours were apparently unhappy about a black family moving to the area. The ensuing legal battle inspired Coming to Jones Road, which depicts runaway slaves migrating north. Ringgold saw parallels in "the slaves coming to America, people deciding where we should be. Of course, I didn't know anything about that, being born in Harlem; who tells anybody where to live?"

As an enthusiastic traveller, she did her own version of the European Grand Tour in 1961, taking in the galleries of Paris, Florence and Rome, and in the mid-70s there were trips around west Africa, where she studied mask-making and other traditional fabric techniques. Since her international reputation began growing in the 1980s, she has shown her work in galleries from Cairo to Tokyo and collected honorary doctorates (she has 23) from institutions around the world. Her only regret is that she can't currently represent her work in person. "We can't even get out of the house now because of this corona thing," she says.

In 1989, Oprah Winfrey commissioned a quilt as a birthday gift for Maya Angelou, and in 1994 Ringgold was seated next to Hillary Clinton at a White House dinner, but it wasn't until 2016 that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York purchasedthe bloody, scream-provoking culmination of her American People series, Die. In 2017, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern in London included some of her most confrontational work, alongside that of other African American artists. This was followed two years later by her first solo show in a European institution, at the Serpentine Gallery in London. A version of the same show will open at Glenstone Museum in Maryland next month.

Ringgold's wedding to Birdie, 1962. Photograph: Courtesy of Faith Ringgold

In the era of global Black Lives Matter protests and a white supremacist-led storming of Capitol Hill, Ringgold's work has found new resonance. Today, though, she doesn't seem interested in talking about her activism. "We've made some progress, yes, but I don't pay much attention to it any more." At 90, Ringgold has been there, done that, and got the MoMA x Vans T-shirt, based on one of her collages. Since the loss of Birdie in February last year, grief has challenged even her prodigious productivity. "Most of my life, I used to get up at six o'clock in the morning, every morning and do my work. Now, I don't quite do that, because my husband died ... That has set me back."

Even so, the work continues, and in conversation the right topic can light a fire behind Ringgold's eyes. Take a series that she has been painting in semi-secrecy since the 2016 presidential election but has been in no rush to exhibit: "I'm like, what else is [Trump] gonna show me about himself? I wanted to see more ..."

If Ringgold has slowed down, it's only because so much is already accomplished that she can afford to take her time. She has lived her life, and created her art, without regrets. "Make your art what you want it to be. And I did that. So all my work is there - I don't have anything waiting in the corner that I'd like to show." She pauses for a moment to skim the vast exhibition catalogue in her brain. "No, I think I've got it all out there."

This article was amended on 20 March 2021 to remove some details.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Faith Ringgold: 'I'm not going to see riots and not paint them'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a 70-year career, Ringgold has shown the US its bloody, brutal side. And yet the artist started out wanting to paint landscapes ... She talks about growing up during the Harlem Renaissance and her battles with the establishment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An emaciated figure looks out at us, his teeth bared and his eyes wide open. A large bowl rests atop his head. This figure, known as a zemí (or cemí), shows someone who has likely fasted for days in preparation for a ritual, which involved snuffing cohoba (a type of hallucinogen). Ingesting such substances would allow the participants, typically spiritual healers or caciques (rulers), to travel to the world of the spirits and communicate with them, bringing power and healing knowledge back to their people. The bowl atop the zemí would have been used for this very ritual, while his alert facial expression would have echoed that of its practitioner.

The side view of the zemí shows his lean state, with his ribs emphasized in low relief. He wears a woven cap, ear ornaments, and around his biceps and ankles are bands referred to as ligatures-tightly-bound ornaments that often pinched the flesh and modified the shape of the arm or leg they adorned. While now appearing nude, the figure may once have worn a loincloth.[1] Although only the teeth remain of its shell inlay, the zemí would originally have had inlaid eyes as well. The grimacing mouth and open, staring eyes are characteristic of cohoba users, and so may be meant to show the zemí in a trance state.

While many zemís, were used as cohoba stands, the word "zemí" in the Taíno language refers to "a spiritual and vital force pertaining to deities and ancestors;"[2] meaning that zemís were also imbued with spiritual, ancestral, and supernatural forces. Art historian James Doyle explains this process further:

Sculptures began with a call from the medium itself; for example, a tree would frighten a person walking through the forest by moving its roots. The person would ask the tree spirit ( zemí ) who it was, and the spirit would demand that a ritual specialist reveal its identity. When the ritual specialist arrived, the spirit's specific bodily form would be revealed during a hallucinatory trance. Once the identity became known, an artist would sculpt the tree (or stone) invested with divine power into a figure. James A. Doyle, "Arte del Mar," 23.

As objects used for both ritual and veneration, zemís could impact many aspects of Taíno life, influencing the health, social standing, political power, or the fertility of an individual.

The ritual of sniffing cohoba

The ritual of sniffing cohoba began with a cleansing process, through which the cacique would induce vomiting. Afterwards, the cacique would use a spoon to place the cohoba on top of the zemí. With the aid of tubes, the cacique would sniff the cohoba, which was sometimes mixed with tobacco or crushed seashell to enhance the hallucinogenic effects. Taíno artists made objects specifically for this ceremony, such as spatulas to capture the snuff and sticks to induce vomiting.

The experience of sniffing cohoba was an all-body experience through which caciques interacted with the supernatural world and interpreted these induced apparitions as communications with either gods or ancestors. The knowledge acquired from interactions with the spirits was fateful for the sick since the cause of illness, and its cure, could be ascertained.

Materials

The material from which the zemís were made significantly affected the style of the finished product. In the case of a zemí made of sandstone, one can see how the smooth edges and round features of the cohoba stand echo the circular eyes and oval mouth of the figure. Depicting a crouched figure, which is typical of cohoba stands, the body's features seem to blend in and at times disappear altogether with the cylindrical shape of the stand, perhaps a consequence of its material fragility.

By contrast, the wooden zemí is more detailed, as seen through his descriptive face and emaciated body. The detailed face, which depicts a crying figure, allows us to identify the zemí as a depiction of Boinayel, the Rain Giver. The white teeth, made of shell, add a strong decorative element to this already intricate figure. Together, the use of low relief carving and inlaid material give this zemí a heightened sense of realism, not seen in the stone zemí.

The Pigorini Museum in Rome, Italy, display a zemí that has baffled visitors and art historians alike. Lavishly decorated with seashells, glass beads, and mirrors, this zemí features the depiction of a cacique on the front and a zoomorphic mask on the back. The dualism of this zemí and the use of these particular materials and style are rarely found in Taíno art.

Because the human face is carved from West African rhinoceros horn and the beaded designs seem to mimic the complex geometric arrangements found in Angolan art, viewers may wonder whether the artist of this unique zemí was West African or Caribbean. Making the matter more complex is the use of Venetian mirrors to create the eyes and ears of the zoomorphic mask and Venetian glass beads to decorate the exterior. How did Taíno artists have access to these materials, designs, and iconography? Or was the artist even Taíno?

The Beaded Zemí looks similar in many ways to other Taíno zemís including the typical gaping eyes, wide-open mouth, and squatting position. There are more differences though. The variety of materials, many of which are rare, and use of geometric design dramatically depart from the simplicity encountered in traditional zemís. Art historians have explained the dualism of this zemí as the transformation of a ritual specialist, with the human face being a reference to human life, and the mask, which many believe to be skeletal, a reference to death. Nevertheless, even if the zemí does not depict a ritual specialist, it may still relate to cohoba rituals through its associations with the spiritual world of the dead. And at least in that regard, it is a clear example of Taíno art.

The confluence of European and African influences have led scholars to think that the Beaded Zemí was made sometime between the initial Spanish colonization of the Caribbean and the Taíno demographic decline during the mid-sixteenth century. It is a unique artwork. The Beaded Zemí reveals the high-level cultural complexity that resulted from the colonization of Latin America.

Duhos

Duhos are ceremonial seats fashioned out of stone or wood. They symbolized prestige and power since only caciques or ritual specialists used them. While duhos ranged in design, consisting of high-back or flat seats, they were most commonly low seats supported by four legs. Despite being seats of power, much like what we would today call a throne, duhos were low to the ground, featured no arm rest, and their reclining position resembled that of hammocks.

Duhos from the Dominican Republic were usually highly ornate, featuring decorative patterns and exotic materials, such as manatee bone and gold. The backrest was an essential part of the seat since it provided lumbar support to the cacique or ritual specialist during rituals. The head, featured prominently in the front, and stylistically in keeping with zemi sculptures, depicted either a god or ancestor. The smooth wooden surface would have made the experience all the more comfortable, allowing the cacique or ritual specialist to relax as he mentally entered the spiritual world.

Ranging in color and graining pattern, wooden duhos reveal the diversity of Caribbean timber and might for instance be made of the tropical hardwood Guayacan, which the Taíno valued for its dark color and glossy finish. Further contributing to its shimmering effects, the artist decorated this duho with gold sheets that have been inserted into the eyes, mouth, earspools, and joints of the figure. Despite the perishable nature of wooden duhos, they have survived in large part because the Taíno stored them in caves to protect them from humidity and fire, as well as from invading Spaniards. It is extraordinary that any of these fragile ceremonial seats have remained almost intact. Used not only in cohoba sniffing rituals, duhos were also placed inside tombs, where they rested alongside the interred cacique.
Notes:

1. James A. Doyle, "Arte del Mar: Art of the Early Caribbean," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin vol. 77, no. 3 (Winter, 2020), 23.

2. Ibid., 24.

Additional Resources:
Doyle, James. " Indigenous Arts of the Caribbean." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. (June 2021)

James A. Doyle, " Arte del Mar: Art of the Early Caribbean," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin vol. 77, no. 3 (Winter, 2020)

Lawrence Waldron, Pre-Columbian Art of the Caribbean (University of Florida Press, 2019)

Taino: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean, ed. Fatima Brecht, Brooklyn Museum, NY, 1997

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An emaciated figure looks out at us, his teeth bared and his eyes wide open. A large bowl rests atop his head. This figure, known as a zemí (or cemí), shows someone who has likely fasted for days in preparation for a ritual, which involved snuffing cohoba (a type of hallucinogen).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Founded by Charles Blockson, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple is one of the most prestigious collections of African American artifacts in the U.S. The collection houses over 500,000 items relating to the global Black experience. Located in Sullivan Hall, the extensive catalog dates from 1581 to the present. African American studies students are provided with an excellent opportunity to enhance their academic research by making use of the collection. Blockson donated his collection to Temple in 1984 because of our diverse student body and our location in the heart of the African American community in North Philadelphia.

The Blockson Collection includes, but is not limited to

assorted correspondence of Haitian revolutionaries;

first-edition works of Phyllis Wheatley and W.E.B. DuBois;

narratives by Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass;

Paul Robeson's sheet music; and

the John W. Mosley Collection, which documents African American life in and around Philadelphia.

Charles L. Blockson

From his early childhood in nearby Norristown, Pennsylvania, Charles L. Blockson accumulated a stellar collection of rare materials documenting the story of African Americans. The historian and scholar is the author of 13 books, including two on the Underground Railroad, on which he is an expert. One of Blockson's proudest achievements is getting a state historical marker placed at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia. Unveiled in August 2016, the marker recognizes Pennsylvania's role in the slave trade.

Learn More about the Blockson Collection.

"My main goal in life is to build a good library of Black history- knowledge is a form of Black power and this is my part in it." - Charles L. Blockson

Location and Hours

Sullivan Hall, 1st Floor
1330 Polett Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19122
Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Phone: 215-204-6632
Fax: 215-204-5197

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection Special Collections-African American Studies at Temple University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1969, five University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) students independently founded Gidra in response to what they perceived as anti-Asian sentiment on the schools campus and Los Angeles area. Initially they sought recognition from the university but after they were denied they decided to publish independently. The newspaper was named after the three headed monster King Ghidorah of the Godzilla franchise.

The paper was in publication for 5 years from 1969 to 1974 with a special anniversary edition in 1990 and five issues in 2000-2001 bringing the total to 66 issues. In its first phase, Gidra focused on the Asian American Movement and identity; its voice became the premier platform for describing the Movement and its goals, especially within the context of the campus and higher education. Gidra's second phase coincided with increasing national crises, during which time the paper's scope grew from the personal to encompass the antiwar movement, counterculture, and international perspectives. Gidra's new focus spurred some of the staff to form a political study group and collective household in order to better analyze and accomplish the Movement's goals. But ultimately their studies brought Gidra to the conclusion that the paper had finally outlived its usefulness. While Gidra only ran for five years, it critically shaped the Asian American Movement and inspired the creation of other similar publications and organizations.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1969, five University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) students independently founded Gidra in response to what they perceived as anti-Asian sentiment on the schools campus and Los Angeles area. Initially they sought recognition from the university but after they were denied they decided to publish independently.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania is fighting for governmental recognition - despite pushback from other Lenape tribes - raising big questions about who gets to call themselves Native and how the state views its history.

It's a muggy mid-September Sunday, and kayakers and vacationing families are taking in the calm waters of Mauch Chunk Lake, a small reservoir in the southern Poconos. While beachgoers lounge on the sand and watch eagles cruise above the trees, another group is gathered a few hundred yards up the shore for an even more traditional lakeside activity: a Native American powwow. The reverberation of drumbeats, along with the smell of burning sage and barbecue, hangs in the humid air, floating across the parking lot between the powwow and the beach.

Many of the people dancing, chatting and celebrating at the powwow claim ancestral connections to the Lenape (leh-NAH-pay), the Indigenous people of the Delaware Valley. Some are dressed in full regalia, wearing head-to-toe beads and painted feathers, attracting stares from those who came to Mauch Chunk Lake for swimming or a hike. They gawk, open-mouthed. Some take pictures. It's as if the last thing they expected to see on their weekend trip to the Poconos was the people who lived here first.

It's a common belief that there are no longer any Lenape (sometimes called Delaware Indians, the name given to them by European colonists) in Pennsylvania. It is widely presumed that every single Lenape person was forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, Ontario and Wisconsin. But those affiliated with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania ( LNPA) - the nonprofit group hosting the powwow - maintain that some Lenape never left.

Now, LNPA members are making a push for government recognition of their status as a tribe, something they say will help correct years of erasure and ensure that both the history of the Lenape and the fact of their continued existence gain more prominence across the state. It's a complex endeavor that raises questions about who gets to call themselves Native - made even more complicated by vigorous objections from other Lenape tribes who question the legitimacy of the LNPA.

A few feet away from shore, Ken Macaulay reflects on the path that brought him to the powwow, which is called "Return to Mauch Chunk." Tanned from a summer of working outdoors, dressed in all black with his thin gray hair in a ponytail, Ken sits on a wooden bench, polishing off an elk burger and thinking about his childhood in 1950s Central Jersey. He and his sister knew they had Indigenous lineage through their mother, and they were taught to respect the land around their childhood farm. But their grandmother, who grew up when it was even more dangerous to be Native, was always quick to remind the rest of the family to keep that heritage a secret. She would often say to Ken, his sister and his cousins: "Tell no one you're Native."

That grandmother, Bessie Lattig, was born at the turn of the last century, when Pennsylvania still had an Indian residential school in Carlisle tasked with forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families in an effort to replace Lenape traditions with Western values. When he was a kid, Ken says, he wasn't taught much about Lenape culture, though his parents emphasized spirituality and connection to the land. In 1970, at 20, he was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam. As a scout for Project Delta, doing recon in the jungles of Cambodia and Laos, he thought about his ancestors, who would have used similar tracking skills.

When he returned from the war, he was determined to reconnect to his Native roots and eventually found his way to the LNPA.

Founded in 1998 by Chief Bill Whippoorwill Thompsan as the Eastern Lenape Nation, the LNPA is a nonprofit comprised mainly of people who descend from marriages between Lenape women and white men. It's currently the only group claiming Native heritage in Pennsylvania - the remnant of what was once a 20,000-strong society here. There are officially recognized ancestral tribes in New Jersey and Delaware: the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape in Bridgeton, the Ramapough in Mahwah, the Powhatan Renape in Pennsauken, the Lenape Tribe of Indians in Dover. But in part because Pennsylvania's settlers and state institutions dispersed Indigenous people more effectively than in New Jersey and Delaware, its Lenape didn't form a cohesive community in the 200 years that followed the mass forced removals.

"If you stayed, you disowned every aspect of your Lenape heritage publicly," says Adam Waterbear DePaul, a member of the LNPA's tribal council and the organization's story keeper. "We couldn't speak the language, hold ceremonies. We couldn't dress traditionally. We dressed like colonists; we spoke like colonists." As the nation grew, Lenape in the Delaware Valley, like so many other Indigenous people across the county, were often mistakenly or intentionally miscategorized as other races and encouraged to culturally assimilate into white society. And while there are established Lenape tribes in New Jersey, Delaware and the Midwest, there has never been a state or federally recognized tribe - Lenape or otherwise - in Pennsylvania.

It wasn't until the 1950s that descendants in Pennsylvania organized and appointed an informal chief, and almost another 50 years before the LNPA officially formed. Now, there are 397 people on the membership rolls who have sufficiently proven their Lenape lineage, using whatever documentation they had - birth records, newspaper clippings, photos, diaries. There are members scattered across the country, but most are concentrated in Eastern Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

The organization is working to revitalize the Lenape language, called Unami, on the East Coast, hosting classes led by Adam DePaul's mother, Shelley. Leaders collaborate with Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore and Haverford colleges to offer classes and speak on their culture and other Indigenous issues. Members view themselves as stewards of the Lenape homeland and organize environmentally focused events, consulting with nonprofit groups like the Friends of the Wissahickon. The organization's most public endeavor is the Rising Nation River Journey, a once-every-four-years trek down the Delaware River that culminates in the signing of a "treaty of renewed brotherhood" between the LNPA and such organizations as the Friends of the Wissahickon, the Northeast Pennsylvania Audubon Society, the City of Easton and the Penn Museum. In the time between river journeys, the tribe hosts festivals and annual powwows like September's Return to Mauch Chunk.

Recognition, says Morgan Ridgway, could "act as a political and legal tool to combat the pervasive idea that there are no Indians left in Pennsylvania."

Despite its self-proclaimed heritage and nationhood, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania has no official tribal recognition. In 2019, the LNPA's tribal council began working to change that. Currently, 574 tribes have been acknowledged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as sovereign nations, a designation the federal government gave to some tribes as early as the 18th century. These nations can create their own laws and set taxes and are eligible for funding and grants, which then support social and economic development, medical care, educational opportunities, and cultural and historic preservation. The government can also put reservation lands in a trust to protect them from development.

The standards for federal acknowledgment are stringent. Groups must be able to prove their continued existence as tribal entities since at least 1900 and demonstrate that they've had political influence over their members for that long. Even those that might meet these criteria - the rigidity and fairness of which are currently being debated among Indigenous activists nationwide - face the steep financial cost of years of lawyer fees and documentation efforts. When they don't fit the criteria or lack the resources to engage in a lengthy federal recognition battle, tribes generally work to become recognized by a state instead.

State-recognized tribes aren't considered sovereign nations but do enjoy some resources and privileges. In New Jersey, recognized tribes have formed a relationship with the state government, are permitted to sell traditional arts and crafts labeled "American Indian-made," and are eligible for some federal and state funding.

This is the path the LNPA hopes to follow. Its members insist they don't want a massive federal payout, just some official recognition from Pennsylvania. They say such recognition will make it easier for them to continue their outreach and education (some colleges, for instance, opt to work instead with the federally recognized Lenape in Oklahoma), continue the stewardship of the land that they see as their duty, safeguard a sense of identity for their children, and gain a little more public recognition for the Lenape people across the country.

"If we get state recognition, it's going to bring more attention to what we do," says Ken Macaulay, now 71 and the organization's cultural chief. "We don't want casinos or anything like that," he says. "We just want people to realize there are people here who are Native American descendants who do their best to try to take care of the homelands."

Advocates for state recognition say the designation would be a small step toward resolving centuries of abuse and exploitation. Morgan Ridgway, a PhD candidate studying the Indigenous people in our region - and a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe - suggests that for the LNPA, recognition could "act as a political and legal tool to combat the pervasive idea that there are no Indians left in Pennsylvania."

In the years before European colonists arrived, various bands of Lenape (it means "original person" in Unami) lived in an area they called Lenapehoking, which was composed of present-day Manhattan and southern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and northern Delaware. At the time Europeans surveyed the area, the Lenape formed a loose confederation of towns stretching from present-day Trenton and eastern Pennsylvania to southern New Jersey and Wilmington. They traded amongst themselves, grew corn and other crops, hunted, fished, crafted stone tools and baskets, and worshipped a single deity, the Great Spirit. Egalitarian and democratic, Lenape society had a matrilineal structure in which women held equal status with men.

When Dutch and Swedish settlers arrived in southern New Jersey in the early part of the 17th century, the mixed society they formed was cooperative and cordial, Lehigh University historian Jean R. Soderlund writes in her book Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. After William Penn arrived in 1682, he engaged in treaty agreements and land sales with the Lenape; the result was that the Lenape left land that today makes up Philadelphia - the towns of Shackamaxon and Passyunk. At the beginning of the 18th century, the last Lenape land holding in what had by then been dubbed "Pennsylvania" stretched from central Bucks County to the Poconos.

After Penn died in 1718, colonists continued to flood into the region, often settling illegally on Lenape land. Penn's sons claimed they'd found a drafted deed between their father and the Lenape from 1686 that hadn't yet been executed - a deed the Lenape insisted they had never seen.

It indicated that the Penns would receive land that stretched from Wrightstown to "as far as a Man could walk in a day and half" - a common unit of measurement. The Penn brothers employed trained speed walkers who made it 64 miles to present-day Jim Thorpe - double what the Lenape likely imagined when they agreed to the deal now known as the Walking Purchase. In 1741, the Iroquois, working on behalf of the English, drove them out, pushing the Lenape west to land along the Susquehanna River and in the Ohio River basin.

Eventually the Lenape would join the French to take up arms against the English in the French and Indian War, but it would be too late. Divided geographically and politically, Lenape factions in central and western Pennsylvania fought on both sides in some of the bloodiest conflicts of the Revolutionary War, while the violence pushed them west into Indiana and north into Canada. About 1,000 Lenape arrived in Oklahoma in the 1860s, and today, the state is home to two federally recognized Lenape nations, the Delaware Nation in Anadarko and the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville. Wisconsin is host to the Stockbridge-Munsee, and two more federally recognized Lenape nations reside in Ontario.

Lenape who lived east of the Delaware River retained a degree of autonomy compared to those in Pennsylvania. Eventually most were pushed west, but some assimilated with the New Jersey colonists and purchased land and other holdings. Many converted to Christianity. Though the majority would eventually move to distant regions, the remainder sought each other out and merged with other tribal communities. By the early 1700s, Lenape had gathered near present-day Cheswold, Delaware, and formed communities throughout southern New Jersey in combination with the Nanticoke people of Maryland.

The LNPA hopes official recognition will be a way to address the fractured and fraught history of the Lenape in Pennsylvania and reestablish a Native presence in our state. But that same history is why other already-recognized tribes - tribes with a clear through line to the original Lenape population - are so wary about any plans to elevate the status of the LNPA.

Indigenous groups put significant emphasis on the history of tribal identity. As part of its mission to preserve the "inherent tribal sovereignty" of its affiliated members, the Alliance of Colonial Era Tribes - of which two state-recognized Lenape tribes, in New Jersey and Delaware, are a part - released guidance in 2013 for state governments on establishing recognition criteria. Among the list of requirements is that a tribe has "maintained tribal identity in some manner that can be documented to have continued from at least the 19th century or earlier." But 200 years passed between the departure of the main body of the Lenape people to the west in the late 18th century and the founding of the LNPA in 1998. Whether or not Lenape people continued to live covertly in Pennsylvania, it's undisputed that there was no continuous tribal entity in the region. In the eyes of some other Indigenous people - and according to the established criteria - this makes the LNPA a fabricated tribe.

Though scant, there is some evidence that Lenape were living in the state after removal efforts. A 1901 article in the Inquirer, for example, describes a petition to the U.S. Indian Affairs Commission claiming that the Walking Purchase was fraudulent. The petitioners said they were descendants of members of a smaller tribe of Lenape that was never transported west.

But the Delaware Tribe of Indians holds that no Lenape people exist outside its membership and that of the four other federally recognized nations. In 2015, their tribal council passed a resolution opposing "fabricated Delaware 'tribes,' 'groups,' and 'Indians.'"

Jeremy Johnson is a member of the nation's tribal council. He says the tribe "truly believes that because of the way our societies were set up, we left no relatives behind. Anyone who was 'left behind' of Lenape descent was absorbed and adopted into other legitimate tribes."

By that logic, the Delaware Tribe considers both state-recognized tribes and organizations like the LNPA to be inauthentic and denounces their existence on the grounds that they jeopardize the "sovereignty and reputation of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and the general public." These groups, they claim, are being allocated public and private funds in "epidemic proportions," yet are unqualified to represent the Lenape people or speak publicly about Lenape heritage.

The Delaware say they are the true keepers of the Lenape identity, and it's they who should be consulted if local Pennsylvanians want to learn more about the state's original inhabitants. Even though they are now located in Oklahoma, the tribe's members feel as connected as ever to Lenapehoking. "We're still dealing with the vestiges of colonialism," says Curtis Zunigha, the Delaware Tribe of Indians ' cultural director. "I'm sitting out here in Oklahoma when I should be sitting at the same table as you and the mayor and the governor." If Pennsylvania's state government is going to renew a connection with a Lenape group, he says, it should be with the federally recognized nations, not an organization like the LNPA.

The Delaware Nation in Anadarko holds a similar opinion. In February, it appointed a representative to combat what it refers to as "Corporations Posing as Indigenous Nations." Hereditary chief Daniel StrongWalker Thomas said in a press release that "the forced removal of the Lenape people from Lenapehoking, combined with continued exclusion from contemporary events and happenings," has resulted in an increasing number of "pretendians." Those claiming membership in tribes or organizations other than the five federally recognized nations are masking their theft "within a robe of cultural preservation and unproven Indigenous lineage."

At the heart of this dispute is the fact that there are limited resources available to help Native communities, and that means tribes have to be fiercely protective of their status. With a history of occupation, theft and murder by the U.S. government and its citizens, and with so many people today hoping to cash in on their lore and legacy, tribal gatekeeping is one of the few mechanisms of control left for the recognized tribes.

There's also a stark paradox built into the American Indian recognition process. In effect, the U.S. government, a colonial power, retains the authority to grant authenticity to the very people who lived on this soil first. This isn't lost on Indigenous people, which is why they emphasize that though federal and state governments have the ability to acknowledge a tribal nation's government, Indigenous people retain what they call "inherent sovereignty." Native people predate the existence of the United States and thus possess unalienable powers such as the ability to create their own membership requirements, laws and customs.

Donna Fann-Boyle, a Pennsylvania-based activist of Cherokee descent, accepts the LNPA's claim that there are people in the state descended from the Lenape who stayed in the region. But because the organization didn't retain a tribal identity or act as a continuous political entity in the years following the displacement of the rest of the Lenape, it shouldn't get the same recognition as the tribes that have endured for centuries, she says.

The fact that the LNPA, acting as a tribal group, has written treaties with local universities and organizations is "disrespectful, and it's not the way that Native people behave," says Fann-Boyle, who leads the Coalition of Natives & Allies (CNA), a Pennsylvania-based organization devoted to eliminating racist Native mascots and imagery across the state. She says that only recognized tribes who have gone through the arduous process of proving their history have the right to make treaties (and do so sparingly and as needed, not every four years, like the LNPA), the authority to speak about their culture at schools and universities, and the ability to present themselves as a tribal nation. Of the LNPA, Fann-Boyle says: "They're breaking traditions."

"It shouldn't be just a feel-good moment," says Donna Fann-Boyle. "Like all of a sudden, we're going to do something right to make up for the wrong. Because if they do that, then they're just making the wrong worse."

But when it comes to Pennsylvania, tribal tradition is hard to define. Because there are no established tribes in the state, and because the state government doesn't have an office or department dedicated to Indigenous affairs, there is no real process for Pennsylvania's Native groups to become recognized.

And that may give the LNPA an opening. The state's General Assembly could compose and pass a bill outlining such a process, a list of requirements that tribal groups must meet, and what resources and privileges a tribe would receive. The LNPA has received some positive feedback from state legislators, and it's backed by some local colleges and municipalities.

This new push for state recognition - a similar effort failed in 2004 - is taking place against a political landscape that has cast new attention on issues of racial and economic injustice. The current focus on racial equity has given the LNPA some hope that politicians will be more receptive to its efforts. And indeed, state leaders have now begun to show some interest in recognizing the Lenape living in Pennsylvania. In July, a spokesperson for Governor Tom Wolf told WHYY that should a bill creating a process for state recognition reach his desk, he would give it "serious consideration."

The federal Lenape tribes and Indigenous activists who see the LNPA as trying to force its way into state recognition worry that the good headlines politicians could grab with a recognition bill will hold more weight than centuries of established ideas as to what constitutes tribal authenticity. Recognizing the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania would create, critics say, a new, modern tribe - one that would make a mockery of the long-standing persecution of tribal groups across the country and the centuries of work they've put into establishing their authority and identities. "It shouldn't be just a feel-good moment," says Fann-Boyle. "Like all of a sudden, we're going to do something right to make up for the wrong. Because if they do that, then they're just making the wrong worse."

Leaders of the Delaware Tribe of Indians plan to bring their concerns to Pennsylvania state officials should the LNPA's recognition efforts move forward. "The legislature, as we've discovered firsthand through a visit, is naive and very uneducated," says Arla Patch, a non-Native activist with CNA. The CNA wants lawmakers to consider the criteria other state tribes in the U.S. have had to meet before they start thinking about any legislation - criteria that would effectively bar the LNPA from recognition.

To the LNPA and its supporters, those criteria ignore how difficult it was for Natives living in Pennsylvania to assert any identity. "Of course we're a tribe," says the LNPA's Adam DePaul. "If you take a dish and you smash it on the floor and then you glue it back together, you can't say it's never been a dish. You can try to say it's not a dish anymore, but if you do that, you have to admit you're the catalyst for that."

For DePaul, recognition means that families like Macaulay's will no longer be caught between cultures. "A large part of that can be feeling that they're not legitimate and feeling that because the state or the federal government hasn't told them that they're Lenape, they're not," says DePaul, who says that was his attitude when he was growing up in the Poconos. "State government approval does go far in helping the youth in our community feel confident and feel less hesitant about celebrating our heritage."

But at some level, the LNPA has already done that. Ken Macaulay's son Cory joined him at the Mauch Chunk powwow, as he has for most of his life. Thanks to his father's involvement with the LNPA, Cory was born into a family and culture that celebrated, rather than shamed, his Native heritage; even his baby shower incorporated Native elements. He considers the LNPA his extended family.

The eldest of Ken's two sons, Cory is so much like his father that people often call him a clone. Like Ken, he's a veteran; he was in the military police in Iraq. Now 42, he worked for a time in the National Park Service, teaching visitors about Indigenous history at southeastern Pennsylvania's Fort Necessity National Battlefield - the site of the opening act of the French and Indian War. He's a construction worker now, too: "Like my father, but union."

Of all that's been passed from father to son, passion for their heritage seems to be the most salient. Cory, who also favors all black and ties his thin hair - brown, not gray - in a ponytail, is raising his three teenage daughters to have pride in their Native roots, roots he feels are as legitimate as any others. "For the people to say, 'We marched every Native American out of the state' is pompous and preposterous," he says. "I want recognition for my daughters and someday my grandchildren."

What neither Cory nor Ken mentions is the fact that regardless of whether some Lenape have remained in the region, out in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario, there are approximately 15,000 Lenape people whose ancestors were forced westward. They, too, have passed down history, traditions and language in an unbroken line, despite all obstacles, for centuries - but haven't been able to return to their ancestral land since the 1700s.

Despite the contested status of its host, the powwow attracted attendees of a variety of Indigenous nationalities. People of Lenape, Cherokee, Apache, Muscogee and Lakota descent joined in intertribal dances, exhibited solo performances, and sold handmade jewelry and crafts. Even non-Native guests were invited to dance and to partake in children's games and gift giveaways.

Before any of this could happen, though, Ken and Cory, other members of the LNPA, and representatives of various tribes took part in an opening flag ceremony. Some wore historic regalia from their respective tribes, and others donned regalia in brighter, more modern colors. Many wore t-shirts and jeans. They all marched solemnly in a circle to the beat of the drums, each holding a flag aloft - for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, for the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, for the armed forces, for the United States. There was none, though, for the Delaware Nation.

Published as "The First Philadelphians" in the November 2021 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Years, People Said There Were No Lenape Left in Pennsylvania. This Group Begs to Differ.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania is fighting for governmental recognition - despite pushback from other Lenape tribes - raising big questions about who gets to call themselves Native and how the state views its history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cannupa Hanska Luger Credit... Cara Romero for The New York Times

His work playfully critiques what white audiences want - and upends long-held ideas about what Native American art should look like.

Cannupa Hanska Luger Credit... Cara Romero for The New York Times

Listen to This Article

Audio Recording by Audm

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
Early in his career, the artist Cannupa Hanska Luger realized that his Indigenous ancestors would not have had words to describe his work - that the objects they made, however beautifully embellished, were always created with some purpose in mind. Before white anthropologists recast them as aesthetic treasures and displayed them in museums and private collections, beaded bison-hide sacks were meant for carrying things, and Pueblo pots for storing or cooking food. My own Tlingit ancestors used decorative cedar chests, like one in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to store regalia used in religious ceremonies. Luger, who is 43, spent years of his artistic life grappling with the fetishizing of Native objects. Then something similar happened to his own work.

Luger lives in Glorieta, N.M., near Santa Fe, and in the summer of 2016, he was doing well as an artist, having just sold an eight-foot-tall ceramic-and-steel figure he called "Nature" to a private collector for $30,000. His father is among the Sioux residents of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which straddles the border separating North and South Dakota; Luger spent his early childhood there and still visits regularly. When community members faced violent resistance for opposing the construction of an oil pipeline near the reservation that could threaten their water supply, Luger decided to take a break from making art to create something that people could use to defend themselves against police batons and projectiles.

He emerged from his workshop with a shield that had a reflective outer surface, a way of forcing law enforcement to confront their own aggression. It became the basis of an open-source experiment called "The Mirror Shield Project," for which he filmed a video tutorial that he posted online. Luger, wearing a yellow beanie and safety goggles, explains over down-tempo instrumental hip-hop how others can replicate his work in locations as inhospitable as parking lots or campsites, using cheap materials available at any hardware store. The video's aesthetics are coolly understated, but Luger's tone is earnest, even urgent. "Please," he says at the end, "if you are willing, and you believe that water is important, create these shields to protect the water protectors."

Word spread on social media, and soon people were making their own mirror shields to send to protesters on the reservation. Luger worried that the authorities might confiscate the shields, calling them weapons. So, being intimately familiar with the back roads into the reservation, he got in a van and drove 500 of them there with a partner, the Native artist Rory Wakemup. When they arrived just before Thanksgiving, Luger distributed the shields and directed people to hold them above their heads in something deliberately resembling a performance - to reflect images of state violence back to those perpetrating it, while also making clear they weren't weapons.

Image

"It wasn't, like, art," Luger said. "I'd seen too many people getting shot with percussion grenades, being shot directly with tear-gas canisters." One person could make enough shields to protect several frontline protesters, he figured, and if those protesters shielded everyone behind them, then thousands at the camp might be safer because of his efforts. Yet Luger is an artist, even at his most practical, and by disguising his activism as performance art he inadvertently attracted attention from journalists, gallerists and art collectors - more attention, it turned out, than any of the pieces he previously made for sale.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, an influential curator and the artistic director at the Serpentine gallery in London, discovered Luger through "The Mirror Shield Project" and said the video guidance reminded him of Marcel Duchamp's "Unhappy Readymade," which was constructed by the artist's sister in Paris based on instructions he had sent her from Argentina. Obrist was also impressed with how Luger's do-it-yourself approach "focused on community." Others took notice as well: In the year before the Standing Rock protests, Luger participated in shows at five galleries; in the year after, he did 19 of them. In 2018, he won the inaugural Burke Prize for contemporary craft from the Museum of Arts and Design, which exhibited "The Mirror Shield Project" alongside some of Luger's newer work. "He shows us a contemporary moment in which craft enables indigeneity and modernity to occupy the same space," wrote Namita Gupta Wiggers, one of the jurors.

By 2020, Luger had made a leap even some of the most prominent Native American artists never manage, from selling his pieces through a gallery in Santa Fe to working with one based in Manhattan, the Garth Greenan Gallery, where buyers outside the silo of American Indian art collecting might see it. This past April, Luger was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship; in May, he led a workshop on making mirror shields at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, on June 23, "The Mirror Shield Project" will be part of a water-themed group exhibition conceived by the first Native American curator in the museum's 150-year history, Patricia Marroquin Norby.

I first met Luger last December over video chat. He has the inner glow of a neighborhood barista everyone wants to be friends with, and large brown eyes that seem to be smiling even when the rest of his face is not. In conversation, his patience and intellect hint at a lifetime spent dealing with people who have preconceptions about his art or his identity. Dressed in a red pullover fleece and a wool cap, he rolled a cigarette while we talked about whether it's possible for American Indians to produce art that doesn't trap us, creatively, between the white settlers who engineered our pain and the white audiences eager to see what we've made from it. Years after the Standing Rock protests brought attention to "The Mirror Shield Project," increasingly prestigious institutions have approached Luger about displaying something he still insists is not a work of art. Participating in the Met exhibit, he told me, has been a matter of making peace with the fact that whether he considers it art or not, presenting the project in public can be another way of reminding people what happened at Standing Rock.

Luger's Native predecessors, like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Allan Houser and T.C. Cannon, spent their careers fighting long-held stereotypes that had confined Native artists to the world of crafts and kept them out of the mainstream art market; Luger and peers like Nicholas Galanin, as part of a generation of Native artists embraced by the fine-arts community, must instead reckon with what that market wants from them and what it is they want to be selling. One path is to trade on familiar symbols of Indigenous culture, but Luger and many of his contemporaries are also bending a wide range of forms to their own cultural perspective, creating a visual language independent of the archaeologist's gaze. Being embraced by the fine-arts community, however, doesn't mean being understood by it. "A generation later, or two generations later, we're having that same conversation," Luger said, reflecting on his elders' legacy. "They broke through into the larger market, but it didn't create the world that they imagined."

When I encountered Luger's work for the first time late last year - an installation called "Every One" - I was transfixed. Conceived as a response to a June 2019 report from the Canadian government on missing and murdered Indigenous women, which critics considered an incomplete accounting of more than 4,000 cases of disappearance or murder suspected by Indigenous groups, "Every One" is a monumental work. It consists of more than 4,000 fist-size ceramic beads hung to form what looks like a pixelated black-and-white portrait of an Indigenous woman; each bead represents one of the missing or murdered women, while the portrait, based on the tintype photograph "Sister," by Kali Spitzer, represents the loved ones left to suffer in their absence.

Several weeks later, on a bright, frigid January afternoon, I met the artist at his home in the snow-flecked hills above Santa Fe. Luger wore bluejeans, a hooded sweatshirt and a beanie. While playing with his dogs outside, we talked about various ceramic pieces he'd been working on: a head with a sword plunged into its mouth; an oversize bison skull; a stoic Indigenous face mask. "They're not art; they are what's left over from art," he told me. Luger's art is process-oriented, not object-oriented, and what drives him is not the thing he's making but the thrill of making it. "All of these things are just byproducts of something incredibly special. Ceramic chips and paint fades, but creation is perfect."

Luger calls clay a "generous" material. Recently, he created 72 ceramic bullets, each cast from one of several molds, then fired in his kiln and painted in motifs that reimagined them as purely aesthetic objects. One design featured cobalt-colored flowers that brought to mind Russian teacups, while others drew inspiration from Crayola crayons and military camouflage patterns. Another was given a gold-leaf-and-porcelain treatment. The installation, called "Rounds," grew out of Luger's continuing fascination with symbols of colonial violence and his interest in imagining them as aesthetic trophies - like an Indigenous anthropologist of white-settler culture, he unbinds the object from its function and finds a strange beauty.

When Luger was 4, his parents divorced, and the reservation eventually became a place he only visited. He and his four siblings went to live with their mother, the artist Kathy Whitman-Elk Woman, who moved with them to the Black Hills for a time before settling in Santa Fe in order to make a better living. ("There's no economy for Native art in North Dakota," Luger said.) It was a transient childhood, with stints in New Mexico and Arizona, but always tethered to the Santa Fe Indian Market, where his mother sold her beadwork, paintings and sculptures at a booth each August.

Santa Fe has been the center of the Native art world since Sept. 4, 1922, when the Museum of New Mexico's director, Edgar Lee Hewett, inaugurated what was then called the Southwest Indian Fair and Industrial Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In a welcome speech, Hewett, a white archaeologist and anthropologist from Illinois, professed his hopes that the market would help preserve what he sometimes called the "ancestral purity" of Native arts and crafts. Appointing himself an arbiter of Native authenticity, Hewett encouraged Pueblo Indians to abandon any pottery traditions arising from contact with the Spanish - believing they had tainted the "racial purity" of the art - while failing to recognize his own corrupting influence. One draw in the market's first year was a style of black-on-black pottery developed by people of the San Ildefonso Pueblo solely for sale to white buyers; Hewitt also offered free admission to Indians who came dressed in traditional clothing.

A century later, Santa Fe's more than 200 art galleries, which tend to specialize in Native art, mostly sell what Luger calls "Santa Fe romanticism," an aesthetic descendant of Hewett's ideal: silver and turquoise jewelry, Zuni dolls, dusty Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets. Hewett's creation has morphed into the Santa Fe Indian Market, where, for an extended weekend each summer, 1,000 artists representing 160 different tribes, nations and villages showcase and sell their work to more than 100,000 visitors.

Raising Luger around the market, Elk Woman correctly sensed that her son resented its trappings. Being successful there meant endless haggling, networking and the kind of salesmanship that bordered on theatricality. When white customers made insulting offers on Elk Woman's work, told off-color jokes or put unreasonable demands on her time, she had no choice but to indulge them with good humor. She was a single mom with five kids to care for, and with no source of income besides her art, she relied on the Indian Market. Playing that game well could be stifling, though, and she's sure her son saw that. "I think it left a bad taste in his mouth," she told me. Luger said observing his mother from the periphery of that economy also sharpened his instincts for recognizing who was looking to support Native artists and who was looking to rob them.

Inspired by his mother's creativity and surrounded by her materials, Luger turned to art as a teenager. When he was 16, he tagged along to one of his mother's shows, at a gallery in Chicago, where he occupied himself by bending some thin strips of steel he'd found into crow-shaped sculptures. The gallery owner suggested he display them. Luger asked him how much he should charge, doubled it, then swiftly sold all the crows, using the proceeds to buy a silver bracelet made by a Zuni artist. "I actually had very little self-worth at the time," Luger said of his ambitious pricing scheme. "It's just that we had traveled all the way up there."

At the time, Luger was into hip-hop and slam poetry, which briefly exploded into mainstream popularity in the mid-1990s. Each offered him an opportunity to create in a space where he wasn't constantly aware of rules and expectations. "There was no white anthropologist, in those corners, looking for Native art," he said. "In that space, I was allowed to do whatever I was thinking." For the first time, he learned to see art as nothing more than "the medicine of making things." After high school, Luger moved to Seattle for several years and began experimenting with painting in front of an audience while rappers performed. "All of my kids are creative, but Cannupa is the only one who is like me," his mother said. "He needs to create."

In his late 20s, Luger returned to Santa Fe and enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the world's only fine-arts college dedicated to contemporary Indigenous art, which has its campus on 140 acres of high desert just south of Santa Fe and has been a training ground for generations of Native American artists. When Luger arrived at I.A.I.A., it was best known for having nurtured painters like T.C. Cannon, Kevin Red Star and Gina Gray, who in the 1960s and '70s sought to blow apart the stereotype that Indians were all craftspeople rather than fine artists. Cannon used irony and kitsch to subvert stereotypes in paintings that captured off-kilter Indigenous lives in vivid shades of orange, purple and blue, while Gray created heavily stylized, abstract representations of Native bodies. This generation broke through the "buckskin ceiling," Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a contemporary of those artists, told me; young baby boomers like the Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary took it further by using novel materials and modernist techniques to create traditional Native objects, like canoes and seal clubs crafted from colored glass.

By the time Luger was in college, he'd gravitated toward crafts like ceramics and textiles, even as he eschewed Santa Fe romanticism. His work with clay was largely outside any formal custom, because the ceramic traditions of his Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara ancestors did not survive the flooding of the Missouri River basin and the smallpox epidemics that followed contact with European settlers. Instead of being based in pure apprenticeship, Luger's techniques emerged from study mingled with self-directed experimentation. Even then, he had "a fearless approach to his practice," according to Smith, who was a visiting artist at I.A.I.A. at the time.

From this base in Glorieta, with his wife as his manager, Luger finally began pursuing art as his full-time job. In August 2013, the I.A.I.A. Museum of Contemporary Native Arts hosted his first major solo exhibition, called "Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American," which explored how media representations flatten Indigenous identity. In one piece for the exhibition, "The Drunk," Luger built a ceramic transistor radio with a liquor bottle embedded in a hollow on its backside - then destroyed it as part of a filmed performance.

In 2014, Dunnill gave birth to their second son, and Luger focused on studio work that would keep him at home. Luger sold many of these pieces through Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, where he learned to engage playfully with "the white gaze." "Primarily white collectors go into Blue Rain to get Native art, and in that space, that's when I was like, 'Oh, this is kind of funny,' because it's a market, it's a product," he said. "And I'm like: I don't want to sell you my culture. I think what I want to do is sell you your idea of my culture." He made anthropomorphic bear, elk and coyote figurines from clay, then draped them in beads and feathers from Hobby Lobby to "make objects that were 'Indian art,' you know, in major quotes." It was, he said, a way of selling white collectors "a tongue-in-cheek regurgitation of their expectations."

Luger's work, at its most lacerating, activated my own inner turmoil as a Tlingit writer who has wrestled with what it means to represent Indigenous culture to white audiences. But instead of struggling with this dissonance, Luger appeared to revel in it, artistically and economically. It thrilled me to hear that collectors acquired his figurines as fast as he could make them, that they seemed willing to buy absolution in the form of a clay doll that served as a wry critique of the transaction itself.

When Luger invited me over for dinner one evening, his two sons were riding push scooters over the concrete floors of their home, weaving around the couch and dinner table. High on the prospect of North African takeout and a two-liter root beer, they told me about a trip they took to Detroit and showed me figurines they made using scrap felt from their father's workshop: one an "O.C., original creation," and the other a video-game character.

Luger sometimes jokes about the artistic freedom that "the weed house" has afforded him. There is a saying in the Santa Fe art world, the critic and gallerist Garth Clark told me, that you should "be careful never to buy a rent bowl" - meaning one that has been made in haste when the potter's rent is due. But the insidiousness of the rent bowl goes deeper still, Clark added, because it suggests a market in which Indigenous artists have too little elastic income to take creative risks. "Because they live too close to the bone, they couldn't be making work that wasn't selling," he said. "They just sell every piece as they made it, and that imposes a real ceiling on what they could do creatively."

I realized I'd misread some of Luger's most important work, which was rooted not in righteous anger toward our colonizers but in a deep well of empathy for them.

On the first floor, a large, light-filled room held a washing-machine-size kiln in one corner and a workbench running the length of the opposite wall. I saw what appeared to be six ceremonial objects on the floor, fashioned from the remnants of a gas station. Luger was calling them "Dance Clubs"; he had created them by joining flat hardwood blades to ceramic reproductions of gas-pump handles that he painted bright orange; each slab of wood was secured to its ceramic handle using a synthetic animal sinew.

These pieces, like the ceramic bullets, reflected Luger's interest in recasting harmful objects of colonization as purely aesthetic ones - a reference to how white collectors have done the same to Indigenous crafts. But they weren't yet finished; he had to solve one last puzzle. He'd bought cheap hair extensions to attach to the spout of each ceramic pump handle, so that it looked like blond gasoline was pouring out of them, but he hadn't yet figured out the best way to affix them. "I don't do sketches," Luger told me, "so I'm constantly just problem solving."

He surveyed the workshop for remnants of past projects that might offer a solution. Despite a lack of sleep and a looming deadline to get "Dance Clubs" and "Rounds" to Colgate University for a show, Luger seemed to be having fun. When he found a length of hose that he thought might help, he was briefly elated, then got immediately down to the business of experimenting with it. The hose was just wide enough to fit securely over the spout of each gas-pump handle; he cut it into short lengths, glued a fistful of synthetic hair inside each one, then secured a piece of tube over each spout. As soon as "Dance Clubs" was finished, we rushed to get all the pieces crated for shipping, then drove around Santa Fe listening to the singer-songwriter Bill Callahan and the outlaw country artists Blaze Foley and Johnny Paycheck.

In the van, we talked about what white Americans get from Native American art. Luger's theory is that it has to do with their trauma of becoming American, which meant severing all ties to their own ancestral lands - a trauma that has left them with a longing for what Luger calls a "deep time connection" to the land they now inhabit, which is, of course, someone else's ancestral land. The "narrative of bootstrapping and rugged individualism" celebrated in white American culture, he feels, arises from that displacement; so does capitalism's exploitation of land and natural resources. "It's a byproduct of removing yourself from the land, from the people, from the culture, so that you are an individual. You are alone."

It was only then that I realized I'd misread some of Luger's most important work, which was rooted not in righteous anger toward our colonizers but in a deep well of empathy for them. "Rounds" and "Dance Clubs" address not only what colonialism has cost us but what it has cost them as well, as the instruments of our oppression take the lives of schoolchildren and the spoils of our land contribute to the climate crisis. He has maintained this empathy amid a continued disregard for Indigenous lives: At the Ent Center for the Arts in Colorado Springs, where "Every One" was first displayed, Luger grew melancholy at the sight of the white-gloved gallery staff handling each ceramic ball with the utmost care while assembling the piece. His artist friend Jesse Hazelip pointed out that in life, the people represented by each ceramic ball had never been treated so well by white society. For Luger, there was something devastating about seeing institutions find value in these human beings only after they were dead and gone.

When Luger told me this, I wanted to tell him that I'd seen my own little sister in each of those ceramic balls - that she is among the thousands of Indigenous women who have gone missing in America; that I have not heard from her since she stopped returning our family's calls over a decade ago; that my best efforts to find her pointed to a stint in rehab and time living on the streets of Los Angeles; and above all, that I've never felt her absence more strongly than when I gaze at photographs of "Every One." I wanted to tell him how I feel her presence, too, in these moments, and that the experience is like visiting my sister's grave without conceding that she might be dead. But I couldn't find the right words for any of this.

In a video from the multimedia series "Future Ancestral Technologies," Luger and Dunnill model the science-fiction-inspired regalia: gauntlets made from sports equipment and industrial felt; giant cloth headdresses that evoke futuristic college-football mascots; secondhand afghans fashioned into full-body outfits. In the background, a robotic voice intones: How to heal a wound that is still being cut? By traveling into the future, we survive you.

More than once, Luger told me our survival is a threat to the "myth of America," because our existence is a reminder of the illegitimate land claims this country was built on. Several months ago, he and the Seneca Nation artist Marie Watt were invited by one of Yale's residential colleges to build a monument on campus, in acknowledgment of the fact that it was once Indigenous land. Luger was tormented by the thought of participating in an empty gesture. He and Watt suggested a machine that would flatten ordinary coins into badges reading: "I ACKNOWLEDGED INDIGENOUS LAND TODAY." That, by itself, would seem to read as provocation - an ironic acknowledgment of the meaninglessness of the whole project. But the idea went beyond that. Luger and Watt proposed that, once minted, the metal badges could be connected like a tapestry or chain mail and turned into an artwork by Yale. Whatever patch of land it covered would then belong to the descendants of those Indigenous tribes it was stolen from. "The more people use it, the more Indigenous land the university will have to return," Luger told me.

While a formal commission hadn't yet been made, Charles Bailyn, who is the faculty head of the residential college, told me in an email he was "thrilled by Cannupa's vision." But there seemed to be a disconnect between the vision as Luger described it to me and Bailyn's understanding of it: While Luger told me he sought a legal handover of land, Bailyn said, "I'm guessing it won't be legally binding in the Anglo-American sense, but rather a moral/cultural land return."

Dwelling on Luger's intentions with the piece, I was reminded of something I heard him mention while delivering a large ceramic bison skull for crating. In the next year or two, Luger said, he hoped to construct a war memorial honoring the millions of bison murdered by white settlers as a means of starving American Indians. Texas would be the ideal location, he added, because he'd heard of a barbed-wire salesman there who amassed a fortune in a fencing boom that followed the slaughter of the bison; his plan was to ask the salesman's descendants to help fund the project.

Near sunset on the last day of my visit, Luger and I walked the grounds of I.A.I.A.'s desert campus, which seems to exist on its own planet. Luger was wearing oversize sunglasses and a yellow beanie with a patch that read "YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND." In a wide-open courtyard, we passed a sculpture of a bison, which prompted me to ask him about the war memorial - in particular, about whether it was anger or mischief that motivated him to provoke white institutions: this family that got rich off barbed wire; Yale. As we walked back to his pickup truck, Luger told me it was about something else entirely - an attempt at healing their trauma with the land and our trauma with them. "I don't see them as provocations. I see them as opportunities," Luger said. "I'm giving them a gift. I'm giving them the opportunity to make themselves whole again."

Joshua Hunt is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Previously a Tokyo-based correspondent for Reuters, he is currently working on a book about the global trade in counterfeit fashion and luxury goods. Cara Romero is a photographer and an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. Her artwork is in more than 40 museum collections in the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cannupa Hanska Luger Is Turning the Tables on the Art World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
His work playfully critiques what white audiences want - and upends long-held ideas about what Native American art should look like. Cannupa Hanska Luger Credit... Cara Romero for The New York Times To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We asked our readers what they would ask at tonight's debate. These were some of our favorite questions they posed to the candidates.

Maddy Pontz

Get the Ms. Weekly News Digest:

Feminist Daily Newswire

Highlights from the Current Issue:

We know from the many stories shared within our community that those who are remembered today suffered not only a truncated, and frequently grisly, end to their lives, but that they experienced violence and exclusion on a daily basis, for years or even decades. That pervasive ostracization forms the backdrop-as well as the enabler-of so many incidents of acute, debilitating, tragic violence directed at the transgender community, also referred to as trans-directed gender-based violence.

Chloe Schwenke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We asked our readers what they would ask at tonight's debate. These were some of our favorite questions they posed to the candidates.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dripping paint and newspaper clippings obscure a map of North America in State Names. The only names left visible are those that stem from indigenous sources. The collaged layers act as sequences of time, partially eclipsing the past while highlighting the injustices endured by Native

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth'. (Mendieta 1981: 10)

Ephemeral, corporeal and fragmentary, The Silueta Series has been described as both 'life and death-in-life as something like a mystical force' (Esteban Muñoz 2011: 193) and a 'deconstruction or subversion of identity.' (Best 2007: 72) Ana Mendieta's experimentation with the self, through absence and presence, subversion and temporality, questions the philosophical undertaking of the 'trace' and its relationship to performance and art. This essay conceptualises Mendieta's Silueta Series in relation to Derrida's notion of cinders, to question how temporality and erasure is bound to the works' inherent performativity, as a feminist inscription into the earth. Derrida's short book Cinders (2014)-a text centred on the very erasure of the self-is, like The Siluetas, a profound experimentation with embodiment, presence and absence. In Cinders, Derrida reckons with cinders by announcing 'cinders are there' (2014: iv) a phrase which re-traces itself, through repetition, as a philosophical treatise on presence and remains. The signification of presence and recognition found in Cinders is employed in this essay to unravel the feminist duration and temporality inherent to Mendieta's Siluetas. As Susan Best commented, Mendieta's Silueta Series signifies a 'feminist space [of] dwelling', where the 'female body [is] at once present in outline and yet absent in actuality.' (2007: 81-82) This absence and presence situates The Siluetas in conjunction with critical questions of performativity, fragmentation and repetition. Moreover, Best's comment also generates the following question: can The Siluetas ' performativity bear witness to the exclusions of Mendieta's name, from the past as a trace? Or, as Jose Muñoz asks, '[w]hat is attempted when one looks for Ana Mendieta? What does her loss signify in the here and now?' (2011: 191)

Mendieta's practice broadly explored the materiality and conceptualisation of traces through the body, land and time, particularly in her Silueta Series (1973-1980). Initially constructed in Iowa and Mexico, Mendieta's Silueta (Silhouette) Series began in 1973, and created abstracted female figurations by physically inscribing her body into the land, as an expression of belonging. As Mendieta noted 'I have no motherland, I feel a need to join with the earth.' (1988: 76) Mendieta was re-tracing herself, partly, in relation to her exile from Cuba, and her relationship to the US. Mendieta and her sister were among many of the children within Communist Cuba who were exiled to the United States in the 1960s as a part of Project Peter Pan. Her mother joined them in Iowa three years later. Perhaps as a result of this, The Siluetas have an intimate quality, a universal, performative expression of the self-enmeshed within them. They often consisted of a variety of materials: tree branches, moss, sand, fire, and gunpowder-even on occasion animal hearts. Five years later, in 1978, The Siluetas began to reference goddesses (from Taíno and Ciboney cultures), gods, and other spiritual beings, where Mendieta carved formations into limestone grottos and mud. In 1981, she travelled to Cuba and created the Rupestrian Sculptures (1982) [Fig. 1] in Jaruco Park outside of Havana, which have slowly, but not completely, eroded over time. Over two hundred Siluetas were made between 1973-1980, and in form, location and concept they are all bound by universal omnipotence of energy and female figuration, mark-making, and perishability. [1] They all leave, as the title suggests, a Silueta of the body. They are traces of the body, a double displacement.

Much like The Siluetas, Jacques Derrida's Cinders is a performative text, one which explores liminality, presence and absence philosophically, both in form and content. Derrida defines a cinder as a formation which 'comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present' (2014: xiv) through the presence of 'there [as a] mourning that can never achieve completion and for that reason still clings, interminably, to something still 'there.' (2014: 25) This location of 'there,' much like the outline of Mendieta's body in The Siluetas, is precisely Cinders' temporality as a 'becoming-space of time' of which life and death are only traces.' (2014: 25) A cinder, much like ash, is the process of cross-referential tracing which 'erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself' (2014: 53), as a sense of dwelling, of Mendieta's not quite present. This presence of the body found throughout The Silueta Series is not just a dwelling, but also a self-induced mourning through nature's elemental forces.

In response to the hegemonic, historic tradition of reducing The Siluetas simply to Mendieta's identity as a woman exiled from Cuba to the US, the work cannot be considered solely through the prism of personal displacement, but also as an expression of the universal need for belonging. Thus, the mourning found in Mendieta's Siluetas is considered here in line with Rebecca Schneider's explanation of absence and performativity. As she writes, 'loss is not an anxious flirtation, not riddled with desire, displacement or dislocation. Loss is present-literal, exigent, palpable.' (1977: 119) Indeed, the series does more than present a linear sense of loss, instead provoking profound questions of liminality, of nationality, belonging, and feminism. Jane Blocker references the problems with reducing The Siluetas to a singular act of disappearance, when she writes:

her feelings of loss and uprooting were the sources of her series Silhouettes in progress. [Mendieta] uses her work as a means to establish a 'sense of being', of healing the 'wound' of separation. ... Perceiving herself as an exile, Mendieta used her art to heal herself thus by provoking and perhaps healing others. (Blocker 2021: 77)

Therefore, throughout the Silueta Series, the incision of the body into the land generates a mark-making that is undone by the earth's materiality and temporal transformations. When The Siluetas appear on the beach, their trace is removed by the ocean; when sculptures of the body are set on fire, they turn to ash, symbolising cremation and cinders. When a figure is made of ice, it slowly dissipates and absolves through its temporal erasure. Therefore, in The Siluetas, there seems to be a double bind (be alive, but stay dead) at play; both in the inscription of her subjectivity as a trace, and as a dwelling, a temporary inscription of the body into the land; 'an identity anywhere.' (Blocker 2012: 78)

***

When viewing Mendieta's work, I encounter a dwelling that falls between absence and presence, memories folded into one another, fragments scattered across time and history. For instance, when I experience a sensation of a trace in the margins of a book on Mendieta someone has read before me- a note the reader has written to themselves-Mendieta's trace is felt in the psyche of another, a trace I re-trace linguistically in the present. When I trace this, I am responding to what Derrida called a 'cinder' (remains, or ash), and these remains of traces allow me to imagine differently. Cinders are prefigured in Mendieta's work, because the book itself is a performance of selfhood, a pursuit of giving elliptical, poetic language to the living dead. Indeed, the word 'trace' has a multidimensional relationship to Mendieta, both due to the metaphysical, figurative traces of life and death found within her work, and the tracing following her afterlife, linguistically and visually.

The exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces (24 September-15 December 2013), was the first UK retrospective of Mendieta's work solely dedicated to her art. It displayed notebooks, films, photographs, and drawings of works created by Mendieta across her twenty-seven-year career. The curator, Stephanie Rosenthal told Art in America (2013) that 'her tragic death was always present in my mind ... but it had no place within my curatorial concept.' (Donnelly 2013) The accompanying exhibition book Traces (2013) also has an uncanny relationship with the notion of a cinder, the presence and absence of traces, and what an ethical tracing of a woman who is dead might mean for an exhibition. [2] The Silueta Series (1973-1980) particularly binds the temporal, ephemeral, and self-subject trace explicitly, where Mendieta's body is both marked and always in a state of disappearance, self-effacement. Through the application of natural materiality-fire, water, sand, and ice, Mendieta's figure is a presence tied to a specific time, place, and witnessing. Sediments are left, ashes dwell and move (into embers, cinders), figures are erased by lunar movements, bodies erode, diminish. The subjectivity of Mendieta, or indeed Mendieta's subjectivity, is remade and undone, and cannot be archived, recorded, or experienced. Yet is burning the most charged form of dematerialisation?

These are complicated issues, not just of origin but also of how we witness The Siluetas in the present, as photographs of formations that were purposefully destroyed at the moment of their conception. Thus, one might also question how The Siluetas-sculptures that rely on and are constructed by the passing of time and transformation of materiality-were initially captured as photographs, static objects transfixed tangibly. In The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta (2007), Susan Best quotes Roland Barthes, noting that The Siluetas bind photography's temporality to a universal sense of 'here.' Photography's fixed temporality references the moment of capturing but also what cannot be seen outside the frame: as Barthes writes, '[photography creates] the illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly.' (2007: 74) Thus Mendieta's Siluetas, like the actual present, are always bound to a sense of disappearance, ungraspability, loss. In this vein, to view photographs of The Siluetas is only to experience them as a cemented moment, a fragment of the very conceptual grounds in which they were conceived. Thus their ephemerality, always dispersing and changing, becomes an object of revisitation, restlessness. Making sense of the performativity in these images is dependent upon preconceived imagery-of utilising photographs to imagine what existed outside the frame (before, after) and the linguistic descriptions of their demise. [3] Regarding the witnessing of The Siluetas, Mendieta wrote in a notebook that, 'in galleries and museums the earth-body sculptures come to the viewers by way of photos, because the work necessarily always stays in situ. Because of this and due to the impermanence of the sculptures the photographs become a very vital part of my work.' (Mendieta 1996: 186) Similarly, Dr. Joan Marter, claims the photographs of The Siluetas are both 'body earthwork and photo,' (O. Viso 2004: 70) presenting the notion that the physical Siluetas and the photographs of them are not solely documentation, but separate artworks in their own right.

Many believe Mendieta was already citing her body as an absence before her death, and the trace of her death is present in her life, in her mark-making in the land. As Blocker eloquently describes it, 'the use of her/the body almost always approached erasure or negotiation: her 'body' consistently disappeared'. (2012: 33) The trace of the body is also an announcement of the self, and the absence of the body, a form of self-definition. Kaira. M Cabañas describes this as a 'corporeal presence [which] demanded recognition with the female subject'.(1999: 14) This referring back to her work creates an uncanny temporal loop when investigating what is lost and re-found, and what remains in the present.
***
Part of The Siluetas' enduring appeal is how they question the aestheticisation of the body and its omnipotence, which speaks to a larger reclaiming of the self; effacement, for Mendieta, was always a pursuit of earnest subjectivity. A profound expression of effacement is apparent in the untitled 1977 Silueta created in Iowa [Fig. 2]. Executed from ice, a limbless figure-unidentifiable as 'female'- lies corpse-like in a lake. Acutely bound and constituted by the ice, the figure fails to offer the viewer plenitude or a sense of absence or presence. It is evocative, in terms of both death-in-life and life-in-death. Thus the dwelling (ethos) of the figure resides only in its material precariousness; it will perish as the ice melts. The figure's malleability is its most compelling quality; it is inherently performative due to its changing state, despite being photographed as a static object. The amorphous state that dissolves back into the land is The Siluetas' redeeming quality, as it both dislocates control of ever being retained as solid, and is subject to a perishing, a vanishing. In The Ethics of Earth Art (2010) Amanda Boetzkes comments that '[for Mendieta] the earth is not just the material of the artwork, or even its catalyst but the unfathomable presence engaged in a kind of quasi-intersubjective exchange'. (2010: 160) In this quasi-intersubjective exchange, the phenomenological, performative encounter of the figure and the earth is both dependent upon and intertwined with the substance and soil in which they are rendered. The very temporality of these works uncouple one another in their liminal temporality-both body and earth undo each other through The Silueta's disintegration, as a universalism. Or, as Blocker comments, 'it's a map of Cuba made in the Iowa mud and as a result it's neither here nor there; is a body in exile ... they produce the condition, however fleeting, of the exilic.' (2012: 82) This is not to mobilise a rhetoric where Mendieta re-performs her exile through The Silueta Series, but instead to note that the condition of their erasure (through natural forces) creates a liminal sense of exile, through their physical movement and change. They can be considered, then, as both an ephemeral expression of exile and an act of disrupting this unearthing.

Obsessive repetition of Mendieta's silhouettes both resists and points to absence and death, because the material/maternal presence they invoke is always a substitute for the imagined state of originary plenitude, and is always already lost before it can be repeated in representation. (1990: 316)

Therefore repeatability contains what has passed away and is no longer present and what is about to come, and has not yet arrived. The present is always complicated by non-presence. The trace, Derrida claims, 'must carry the repetition within itself' of the trace to which it responds. (2014: xi) The trace constitutes the cinder whilst rendering as other, yet 'the cinder is exact' Derrida writes, 'because without a trace it precisely traces more than another, and as the other trace(s).' (2014: 39) The cinder's exactness and preciseness derive from its constitution being bound to a dwelling (ethos) of the living present or present non-living. It is instead a life/death relationality beyond the limits of spoken language. The cinder, following the trace, is the self-presence of the living present. The cinder- although of a similar ontological tautology as the trace-differs from the trace in that it has specific materiality, contingency, or remains; 'a cinder is what burns in language in lieu of the gift or the promise of the secret of that 'first' burning, which may itself be a repetition' Derrida writes. (2014: 9) The cinder both remains and reconfigures; it is the ember, the reminiscence of a trace.

But when you arrive 'there' you will not find 'him' or 'them' or even 'it'; you will find only cinders, the traces that remain, a 'becoming-space of time' of which life and death are only traces. (2014: 25)

If applied to Mendieta, this mourning puts forward the possibility to imagine the body anew, instead of re-imposing a failure to recognise her as an exiled, and indeed marginalised, woman. Mendieta's Siluetas do not simply remain materially as an expression of being exiled; they do something further, where absence and presence meditate on both states as fluctuating, ever-changing. Perhaps their 'light envelopes itself in darkness even before becoming subject.' (Derrida 2014: 26) Yet to declare The Siluetas as constituted by darkening or dampening does not account for tracing others who might be found within them. The failure to apprehend the ever-changing voice in The Siluetas undoes the veracity of performing/becoming, an 'I' that might be dependent upon another. As Derrida writes, 'the words 'another voice' recalls not only the complex multiplicity of people, they 'call,' they 'ask for' another voice.' (2014: 9)

***

Returning to the question of performativity in the Silueta Series, the existing photographs of their creation render the female figure as ghostlike, neither present, absent, dead nor alive, where ontology is preserved by a dwelling, an otherness (see Levinas, Altérité et transcendance, 1995). The Siluetas portray an elusive identity which cannot be grasped temporally, where Mendieta's refiguring of the body is a letting go of preservation. Not only does Mendieta prompt the viewer to question the presence and absence of witnessing, but she also destroys the witnessing of herself to herself. Mendieta traces her past through a delayed afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit) of how The Siluetas are both created and experienced. Natural forces and elements slowly erode the sculptures and performances, which was part of Mendieta's artistic intention. In the sand, they perished through the sea's tide, or if set on fire, became ash. Therefore, most of The Siluetas were never uncovered, or located: they were private performances. Their elusiveness is both an unformulated experience, which clears the path for a voice that might, if even fleetingly, bear witness to what Susan Best has termed a 'future anterior' embodied presence of the future. She writes, 'we can say with absolute certainty when looking at The Siluetas: [that] this one will have melted, that one will have been washed away, that one will have been eroded. In short, we know, as Mendieta puts it, that the sites are eventually reclaimed by the earth.' (2007: 74) Thus the pursuit of recognition is overturned and replaced with a not-quite conceivable trace, a cinder of what might have been. There is no origin, no telos-only a palpable cinder remains. In Bleeding Borders: Abjection in the works of Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane (2011) Alexandra Gonzenbach discusses how within The Siluetas Mendieta questions the stability of the self through permeability. Gozenbach considers Mendieta's physical body and the trace of it to be all and one of the same temporalities. She writes,

[in] the Silueta series, the body is essential for the creation of the silhouettes, yet once the body disappears, the work destabilizes the notion of a permanent, consumable art object. The ephemeral trace of the artist's body achieves a 'stable' existence through a series of photographs. Again, this stability is tenuous, as the viewer is left with the task of decoding and interpreting the documentary fragments. (2011: 44)

In Alma, Silueta en Fuego (Silueta de Cenizas) (1975) [Fig. 3] for instance, the living presence of the figure is subject to its own demise; it is set on fire. Amongst the quivering flames, traces are flickers of temporality, endurance. As Gonzenbach notes, the photographs of The Siluetas create a stable temporality-and indeed ontology-which is transfixed by the action of capturing and archiving. [2.5] In a similar vein, Derrida writes, with regards to what remains after the act of tracing; 'at present, here and now, there is something material-visible but scarcely readable-that, referring only to itself, no longer makes a trace, unless it traces only by losing the trace it scarcely leaves.' (2014: 25) Moreover, the materiality of fire is inherent to the conception of Derrida's cinder. Fire symbolically alludes to celestial light, an aggravation or ignition. It is a transformational element, symbolic of deconstruction, where something is always left; it can be denoted that fire also creates regeneration, renewed energy. Writer Julia P. Herzberg coins Mendieta's application of fire to that of Mexican religious imagery, when she writes that Mendieta's 'use of fire in tandem with the uplifted arms motif was intended to suggest the well- known subject of the soul burning in purgatory, seen in many examples including those familiar to Mendieta such as Mexican folk art and popular religious imagery.' (Herzberg 2004: 159) Simek Shropshire also extends the question of Mendieta's relationship to Mexican ritual and Santería practices in her essay 'Self Inflamed': Ephemerality and Essentialist Feminism in Ana Mendieta's Alma, Silueta en Fuego' (2017) when she writes that Alma, Silueta en Fuego evoked 'ritual practices of lighting candles around graves for Day of the Dead vigils and burning paper-mâché figures of Judas on Holy Saturday.' (2018: 5) One might question that what remains once burnt is ash, which renders Mendieta's body as ash is also a signal to the ethnic, appropriated other (woman). As Shropshire further writes, The Siluetas and their relationship to Santería practices 'constitutes a correlation between the individual sculpture and Mendieta's social identities as a woman and a fetishized ethnic 'Other.'' (2018: 5) Therefore, Mendieta's name and self-recognition are symbolically erased to regain agency, where fire is a compounded energy which quite literally ignites the self, a fleeting orifice of female energy; s elf-inflamed; a cinder.

Through burning, the destruction of the self occurs in The Siluetas. Yet I believe, just as Blocker does that 'the disappearance of the work is a serious limitation to writing about it, yet that sense of loss is central to its meaning.' (2012: 23) Yet fire, Derrida writes, creates the cinder. The cinder is both a consequence of the fire and a demonstration of their presence, dwelling. Its lucidity is both qua fire and predicated on an ontological différence. Consider, for instance, the transformation of fire into a cinder in the following passage:

The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder. Memory or oblivion, as you wish, but of the fire, trait that still relates to the burning. No doubt the fire has withdrawn, the conflagration has been subdued, but if cinder there is, it is because the fire remains in retreat. By its retreat it still feigns having abandoned the terrain. It still camouflages, it disguises itself, beneath the multiplicity, the dust, the makeup powder, the insistent pharmakon of a plural body that no longer belongs to itself-not to remain nearby itself, not to belong to itself, there is the essence of the cinder, its cinder itself. (Derrida 2014: 43)

I re-print this long section to demonstrate the complexity of fire's elementality, and its relationship to cinders. Of note here is the attention given to Derrida's formation of the cinder, as gaining its singular ontology after the fire. The cinder is in part the after-effect of the fire's demise, yet its ashes, its embers, linger on as their own forms. The Silueta, like the cinder, would not be an ember without Mendieta's body; 'no cinder without fire [feu]' Derrida writes. (2014: 9) The cinders différance (and the The Siluetas) is a process of recognising both loss and what remains. As Derrida eloquently writes,

the all-burning must pass into its contrary, guard itself, guard its own monument of loss, appear as what it is in its very disappearance. As soon as it appears, as soon as the fire shows itself, it remains, it keeps hold of itself, it loses itself as fire. Pure différance, different from (it)self, ceases to be what it is in order to remain what it is. (2014: 26)

Taken in relation to a sense of decay and haunting, différance, where no origin is immediately apparent, and thus cannot be comprehended by a sense of one. Instead, it alludes to what cannot be seen or heard.

***

The connection of Derrida's cinders did not elude art historian Jane Blocker, either. In the first chapter of Where Is Ana Mendieta? called 'Fire,' Blocker explores the essentialist/anti-essentialist binary by deploying Derrida's use of the cinder to reconfigure that Mendieta's identity-which is always implicated by dislocation both physically and politically-is predicated on a loss expressed in the Silueta Series. Loss of one's name-of rebirthing oneself in the earth-with the awareness that such formations will always disappear, is a form of incongruity, enigma. Blocker writes, 'the paradox of essence is the paradox of identity; it is formed only through loss. There is no essence, only the search for essence; there is no identity; only the name; there is no origin, only the cinder.' (2012: 34-35) One might conclude that to be named is a recognition that something remained, came before; a cinder. Similarly, the Butlerian notion of identity, one which marks naming as a form of accounting for the self and also a historical tension to dispute, opens on to a questioning of agency, ownership. [4] Employing Butler, as Blocker notes, means that we must work 'against the history of names ...although identity is not a matter of will or free choice, neither are we solely at its mercy'. (2012: 41) [5]

The very first Silueta, Imagen de Yagul (1973) [Fig. 4] was composed by Mendieta in Yagul, Mexico. Mendieta lay naked in a Zapotec tomb with white flowers strewn over her body, obscuring her face and features. Yet, in the photograph at least, her full body is present. In contrast to The Siluetas in which her physical body is absent, Imagen de Yagul is neither a trace, nor a cinder, but Mendieta in unison with the origins of mark-making. Yet mark-making in The Siluetas-the act of inscribing oneself in the land-differs from naming as the pursuit of acknowledgment of recognition. Instead, Mendieta gives recognition to her body situated in Imagen De Yagul. Yet absence is also a state of othering, displacement articulated through the tangible materiality of Mendieta's physical outline in the earth. The question of essentialism and universalism occurs frequently in questions of Mendieta's metaphysical presence and application of locality. Particularly in Imagen de Yagul, time feels like a form of corporal-permeability. The earth was a canvas for Mendieta to make an incision of recognition-or societal lack of it-as a disappearance that seems to be the only intersubjective relationality ripe for her agency.

Indeed, Imagen de Yagul is invoked as a possessive action, not of the artwork itself but its inherent quality of demise through the rhythms of the land. It is not necessarily a marking but instead an un-marking, a baptism of origin. The body here could be perceived as a form of (re)birth, a body which produces a dense, indeed flourishing inflorescence. The ritualistic nature of the body in the land is a trans-corporeal act that comes after the event (Nachträglichkeit). It is deferred action, a re-emergence of origin. It encases but also mutes Mendieta's living self through the immersion of bodily outline. As Jane Blocker writes,

To baptise the earth is to unmark it, that is, to make it disappear from the binary structures that normally mark it as feminine, primitive, or undeveloped in a pejorative sense. It is a deconstructionist move that undoes the very hierarchies by which name is organised. To be unbaptised is to reveal the name as a cinder. (2012: 35)

Of note here is Blocker's attention to naming as an inversion of agency, and that in (un)baptising the application of one's identity, what remains is a cinder, a dwelling. Thus to look at The Siluetas' figuration is to encounter a gendered, indeed feminine object, at least for Blocker. She writes that Mendieta's Siluetas 'deals with themes of death and rebirth staged in an earthen, womb-like cavity.' (2012: 37) Mendieta's body in these works is not wombed, however, but instead buried, given a sense of the underworld where flowers flourish from her (supposed) corpse, much like a burial ground. The symbolism of a womb, for its materiality at least, is to be encased within a cave; to be bound by possibility, beginnings, abundance, and potentialities.

Within a Derridean notion of the trace there is not solely an undoing of presence, but also a reckoning with such processes of fragmentation and remains. The text Cinders is an enactment of the cinders' conception, which derives from the register of the trace. [6] As Derrida writes, the cinder is 'the best paradigm for the trace ... the trail of the hunt, the fraying, the furrow in the sand, the wake in the sea, the love of the step for its imprint.' (2014: 25) If the register of a fragment exposes a cinder, for whom does Mendieta's Siluetas presently remain? For whom does she remain, die, and rebirth, and what does this mean for mourning, if what remains is a mere ember, cinder? Derrida's contention of a cinder as it 'constitutes the self-presence of living present' (2014: 25) is read back through the trace to resituate that which presence cannot: 'the cinder is exact,' Derrida writes, 'because without a trace it precisely traces more than another and as the other trace(s).' (2014: 21) The cinder, unlike the trace, is there but not there; 'the cinder is not here, but there is the Cinder there.' (2014: 15) The figuration of the cinders constitution is formed through a disjunctive remaining, or better yet a dwelling with the living present formed by traces of the past. The cinder, like The Siluetas, is in and of itself performative, bound to the incineration of traces, of a temporal burning and remaining; 'cinders remain, cinder there is, which we can translate: the cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall at the delicate, charred bottom of itself only nonbeing or nonpresence.' (2014: 21)

Thus the cinder, like the trace but even more than the trace, unsettles the 'like me' and 'life' of the 'living present' because it is 'extended to the entire field of the living ... or rather to the life/ death relation, beyond the anthropological limits of 'spoken' language. (Derrida 2014: xiv)

Much like The Siluetas' material formation, cinders both erase and elicit their existence, but also offer something else. They bear witness to a more fluid, in between, state of haunting, of restlessness, of unattainability. Their performativity is a freedom from fitting into a binary of life or death while also being an instability, and a refusal. As Herman Rapaport beautifully articulates in Performativity as Ek-Scription: Adonis After Derrida (2013), 'the cinder is the trace that comes unbidden and, upon first hearing (as 'la cendre') carries the erasure of its place ('là'), as if it were merely some ash falling out of the sky, free and unmotivated.' (2013: 215) Instead, the very act of erasure generates a sense of ontology and embodiment itself. I would like to claim, then, that The Siluetas present neither an 'empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on [survive] ...of which life and death would themselves be but traces.' (Derrida 2014: xiii - xiv) The cultivation of ontology, or indeed what might create a sense of living or survival (to use Derrida's language), opens onto a consideration not of an absence as a signifier of demise, but instead their (arguable) feminist durability. Mendieta's Siluetas allude to a decolonised desire for belonging, of earthly survival. They beckon towards alternate modes of reliving and giving life within death. The ephemerality of The Siluetas demonstrates that such a state is an irreducible, structural condition of existence. The contention of non-presence is woven by threads of not just linear temporality (chronos), but similar theories of disfiguration. [7] To be disfigured is to lack a personalised sense of someone: their characteristics, their unique qualities, their agency. The Siluetas harbour this quality, despite the knowledge that Mendieta's body is the origin of mark-making; they propose a wider meditation on the displacement of females in a broader sense. The ambivalence of absence and presence demonstrates that The Siluetas are 'a figure, although no face lets itself be seen. The name 'cinder' figures, and because there is no cinder here, not here (nothing to touch, no color, no body, only words), but above all because these words, which through the name are supposed to name not the word but the thing.' (Derrida 2014: 53)

When considering The Siluetas as fragments, however, they communicate quite the opposite: they demonstrate that tracing is an effacement, an erasure of presence. They are dually an attainable recognition of a universal need to be bound to the land and location, and a restlessness which haunts the viewer. Yet through the act of linguistic re-tracing what emerges is a re-orientation to Mendieta's trace as always already a cinder. This trajectory is one Mendieta summoned in her naming, mark-making, trace making. To obtain a sense of the complexity of the word trace at work in regards to Mendieta, we must register The Siluetas as a perishable living absence which renders as a cinder (presence) to be re-traced beyond conceivable liveability. It is 'extended to the entire field of the living' as Derrida puts it, and moves 'us beyond present life ... its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on [surviving].' (Derrida 2014: 25) The Silueta speaks, not vocally but aesthetically. It says 'there are cinders there ... cinders there are.' (Derrida 2014: 5)

Mendieta's Siluetas demonstrate that erasure and loss which materialises in land reveals a potential for a renewed way of recognising the self, or gaining agency; a dwelling (ethos) of a cinder, a fragility, 'a ghost, a flame, ashes.' (Derrida 2014: vii) In this spirit, Mendieta's Siluetas are not then or now but instead a series of ghosts which sought to find a locality, a burning through ontological dislocation, a capturing of this demise. Therefore, a sense of Mendieta, as a trace in the Silueta Series and the written form, prevails as embers, cinders. Derrida attributes the delicacy of languages' temporality (via an urn/fire) as ephemera which can be eroded and translated into sediments: 'the urn of language is so fragile' Derrida notes, 'it crumbles and immediately you blow into the dust of words that are the cinder itself.' (2014: 35) For it is the register of the cinder which is responsible for not just a proto-linguistic signifier in The Silueta Series, but also a physical mark-making that remains once the trace has been dispersed. If the cinder of Mendieta is constituted by a tracing of the cinder-and cannot be registered without such recognition-then one must see her 'I' as an effacement, a dwelling, an 'I' which yearns for an answerability. Because The Siluetas, if only conceived for their singularity, are much like cinders: strange even to themselves.
Notes
[1] It is important to note that the official date of The Siluetas conception has been widely debated. According to the director of Galerie Long Mary Sabbatino, there are thousands of more images at the Estate of Ana Mendieta archive. This also poses a complicated question as to the life/death binary of The Siluetas, and if such images should all be included under the 'Silueta rubric'. Indeed, as Charles Mereweather argues the first Silueta was Silueta de Yemaya (1975) or Untitled (Flower Person), a piece often overlooked by the majority of critics. For further information about the historicization of The Siluetas, see Charles Merewether, 'Ana Mendieta' Grand Street 17 (Winter 1999) 40:50.

[2] For further reading see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Adrian Heathfield and Stephanie Rosenthal, Ana Mendieta. Traces (Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz, 2013).

[3] The Siluetas were captured on Super-8 film and 35mm slides, the majority of which are housed at the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, at Galerie Lelong, New York. The slides and negatives show that Mendieta captured The Siluetas at the moment of their demise and disintegration. The photographs capture a singular temporal moment, which is opposite to the conception of The Siluetas, as forms predicated on a sense of loss. Whether the photographs are artefacts that capture a momentary event of The Siluetas, or function as an extension of the artworks, is difficult to differentiate. Yet they do provide the viewer with further temporal elaboration. What is clear, however, is that Mendieta intended The Siluetas to transcend their decay, to be archived, and remembered. Photographs bear witness to the event, but do not show The Siluetas for their decay and changing state: a gesture in wanting to be remembered.

[4] The question of film in Mendieta's work and this medium's difference from photography is discussed in Chapter Seven.

[5] See the section 'Against Ethical Violence' (pp. 41-83) in Giving an account of Oneself (2005) by Judith Butler for a further exploration of accountability, morality and recognition.

[6] The role of the trace can be found in the evolution of the text Cinders, too. It was initially performed by Derrida and Carole Bouquet in 1987 for journal Éditions des femmes. They both read the text in its entirety aloud, and recorded on old fashioned tapes. The experimental performativity of the text is not just in its linguistic formality but also its conception - as a tracing of traces. Notice the [elle-là] 'she' in the text, which perhaps gives reference to a female voice, or trace of another. For further notes on the performance, and the role of performativity after deconstruction see, Mauro Senatore, Performatives After Deconstruction, (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 197-236.

[7] For further experiments and interpretations of the word 'threads' and performative lyricism see 'Metaphors of Weaving' by Nisha Ramayya in Threads, Clinic Publishing Ltd, 3rd edition. (2018) pp. 29-46.

REFERENCES

Alvarado, Leticia (2018), Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies In Latino Cultural Production, Durham: Duke University Press.

Barthes, Roland (1977), 'Rhetoric of the Image' in Image/ Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill & Wang.

Best, Susan (2007), 'The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta', Art History, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 57-82.

Blocker, Jane (2012), Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity Performativity And Exile, Durham: Duke University Press.

Boetzkes, Amanda (2010), The Ethics Of Earth Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia, Adrian Heathfield & Stephanie Rosenthal (2013), Ana Mendieta. Traces, Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz.

Cabañas, Kaira M. (1999), 'Ana Mendieta: 'Pain of Cuba, Body I Am'.' Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 12-17.

Derrida, Jacques (2014), Cinders, 2nd edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters Of Marx, New York: Routledge.

Ryan Donnelly (2013) The Untold: Ana Mendieta, Available at: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/the-untold-ana-mendieta-56344/ (last accessed 11 March 2021).

Gonzenbach, Alexandra (2011), 'Bleeding Borders: Abjection in the Works of Ana Mendieta and Gina Pane', Letras Femeninas, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 31-46.

Herzberg, Julia (2004), 'Ana Mendieta's Iowa Years: 1970-1980', n Olga M. Viso (ed.). Ana Mendieta: Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, pp.136-179.

Mendieta, Ana (1998), A Retrospective, Exhibition Catalogue, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mendieta, Ana (1979), 'Introduction.' In Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States. Exhibition Catalogue, New York: A.I.R. Gallery.

Mendieta, Ana (1988), quoted in Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perrault, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, Exhibition Catalogue, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mendieta, Ana (1996), 'Personal Writings', in G. Moure (ed.), Ana Mendieta, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, pp. 167-222.

Raine, Anne (1990), 'Embodied Geographies: Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana Mendieta.' In Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the V Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, New York: Routledge, pp. 228-249.

Schneider, Rebecca (1977), The Explicit Body in Performance, New York, London: Routledge.

Shropshire, Simek (2017), "Self Inflamed': Ephemerality And Essentialist Feminism In Ana Mendieta's Alma, Silueta En Fuego', Bowdoin Journal of Art, Vol. 4, pp. 2-20, https://www.academia.edu/32427689/_Self_Inflamed_Ephemerality_and_Essentialist_Feminism_in_Ana_Mendieta_s_Alma_Silueta_en_Fuego (last accessed 11 May 2021).

Senatore, Mauro (2013), Performatives After Deconstruction, London, New York: Bloomsbury.

Sontag, Susan (2005), On Photography, 3rd edition, New York: Rosetta Books.

Spero, Nancy (1992), 'Tracing Ana Mendieta', Artforum, Vol. 30, No. 8, pp. 75-77.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tracing Mendieta, Mendieta's Trace: The Silueta Series (1973-1980)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States.

The Black Panther Party maintained a commitment to community service including various "survival programs" developed by individual chapters that, by 1969, became part of the national party's "serve the people program" to connect their commitments to basic social services with community organizing and consciousness raising. The Black Panther Party's Intercommunal News Service published The Black Panther Party Newspaper as a critical part of its consciousness raising program.

The Black Panther Party Newspaper is also known as The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Black Panther Black Community News Service, and Black Community News Service, was published by the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1980. The newspaper was most popular from 1968-1972, and during this time sold a hundred thousand copies a week.

An undergraduate student at San Francisco State, Judy Juanita, served as editor at The Black Panther Party Newspaper during the later 1960s. In 1969, two-thirds of Black Panther Party members were women.

In its later years it was used to rally support for members of the party who became political prisoners.

"The BPP newspaper grew from a four-page newsletter to a full newspaper in about a year and [537] issues were printed".

Circulation was national and international. From 1968 to 1971, The Black Panther Party Newspaper was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, with a weekly circulation of more than 300,000. It sold for 25 cents. Every Panther was required to read and study the newspaper before they could sell it. As it became nationally circulated, The Black Panther Party Newspaper national distribution center was located in San Francisco, with a distribution team led by Andrew Austin, Sam Napier, and Ellis White. Other distribution centers were in Chicago, Kansas, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.

The copies of The Black Panther collected here were made publically available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/4m7axa/a_complete_archive_of_the_black_panther_partys/ In 1968 a copyright symbol started to appear on the masthead of The Black Panther. In investigating this copyright it appears to gone into irrelevancy asnpapers were subsequently filed with regards to the ownership of the copyright with the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. The Marxists Internet Archive will assume it has fallen into the Public Domain. We welcome any discussion of the legality of this. Please contact us.

For text file of the missing issues, please click here

Black Panther: Volume 1, 1967
Vol. 1, No. 1, April 25, 1967 Vol. 1, No. 2, May 25, 1967 Vol. 1, No. 3, June 20, 1967 Vol. 1, No. 4, July 3, 1967 Vol. 1, No. 5, July 20, 1967 Vol. 1, No. 6, November 23, 1967
Black Panther: Volume 2, 1968-1969
Vol. 2, No. 2, May 4, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 3, May 18, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 5, September 7, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 6, September 14, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 7, September 28, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 8, October 5, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 9, October 12, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 9, October 19, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 10, October 26, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 11, November 2, 1968 Vol. 2, Nos. 12-14, November 16, 1968 Vol. 2, Nos. 15-17, December 7, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 18, December 21, 1968 Vol. 2, No. 19, January 4, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 20, January 15, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 21, January 25, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 22, February 2, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 23, February 17, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 24, March 3, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 25, March 9, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 26, March 16, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 27, March 23, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 28, March 31, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 29, April 6, 1969 Vol. 2, No. 30, April 20, 1969
Black Panther: Volume 3, 1969
Vol. 3, No. 1, April 27, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 2, May 4, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 3, May 11, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 4, May 19, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 5, May 25, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 6, May 31, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 7, June 7, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 8, June 14, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 9, June 21, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 10, June 28, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 11, July 5, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 12, July 12, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 13, July 19, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 14, , 1969 Vol. 3, No. 15, August 2, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 16, August 9, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 17, August 16, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 19, August 30, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 20, September 6, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 21, September 13, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 22, September 20, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 23, September 27, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 24, October 4, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 25, October 11, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 26, October 18, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 27, October 25, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 28, November 1, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 29, November 8, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 30, November 15, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 31, November 22, 1969 Vol. 3, No. 33, November 29, 1969
Black Panther: Volume 4, 1969-1970
Vol. 4, no o. 1, December 6, 1969 Vol. 4, no o. 2, December 13, 1969
Vol. 4, no o. 3, July 25, 1970
Vol. 4, no o. 4, December 27, 1970 Vol. 4, no o. 5, January 3, 1970 Vol. 4, no o. 6, January 10, 1970 Vol. 4, no o. 7, January 17, 1970 Vol. 4, no o. 8, January 24, 1970
Vol. 4, no o. 8, January 31, 1970
Vol. 4, No. 9, February 9, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 10, February 17, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 12, February 21, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 13, February 28, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 14, March 7, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 15, March 15, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 16, March 21, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 17, March 28, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 19, April 11, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 20, April 18, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 22, April 25, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 23, May 9, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 24, May 19, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 25, May 31, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 27, June 6, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 28, June 13, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 29, June 20, 1970 Vol. 4, No. 30, June 27, 1970
Black Panther: Volume 5, 1970-1971

Vol. 5, No. 1, July 4, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 2, July 11, 1970
Vol. 5, No. 2, July 18, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 4, August 1, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 6, August 8, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 7, August 15, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 8, August 21, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 9, August 29, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 1, September 5, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 11, September 12, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 13, September 26, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 14, October 3, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 15, October 10, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 16, October 17, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 17, October 24, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 18, October 31, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 19, November 7, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 20, November 14, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 21, November 21, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 22, November 28, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 23, December 5, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 24, December 14, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 25, December 19, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 26, December 26, 1970 Vol. 5, No. 27, January 2, 1971 Vol. 5, No. 28, January 9, 1971 Vol. 5, No. 29, January 16, 1971 Vol. 5, No. 30, January 23, 1971
Black Panther: Volume 6, 1971
Vol. 6, No. 1, January 30, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 2, February 6, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 3, February 13, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 4, February 20, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 5, February 27, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 6, March , 1971 Vol. 6, 7, March , 1971 Vol. 6, 8, March , 1971 Vol. 6, 9, March , 1971 Vol. 6, No. 11, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 12, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 13, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 15, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 16, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 17, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 18, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 20, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 21, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 22, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 23, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 24, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 25, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 26, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 27, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 28, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 29, 1971 Vol. 6, No. 30, 1971
Black Panther: Volume 7, 1971-1972
Vol. 7, No. 1, August 28, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 2, September 4, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 3, September 11, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 4, September 18, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 5, September 25, 1971
Vol. 7, No. 5, October 4, 1971
Vol. 7, No. 6, October 9, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 8, October 16, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 9, October 23, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 10, October 30, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 11, November 6, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 12, November 13, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 13, November 20, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 14, November 29, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 15, December 4, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 16, December 11, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 17, December 18, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 18, December 25, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 19, January 1, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 20, January 8, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 22, January 22, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 23, January 29, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 24, February 5, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 25, February 12, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 26, February 19, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 27, February 26, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 28, March 4, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 29, March 11, 1971 Vol. 7, No. 30, March 18, 1971
Black Panther: Volume 8, 1972
Vol. 8, No. 1, March 25, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 2, April 1, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 3, April 8, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 4, April 15, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 5, April 22, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 6, April 29, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 7, May 6, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 8, May 13, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 9, May 20, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 10, May 27, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 11, June 3, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 12, June 10, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 13, June 17, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 14, June 24, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 15, July 1, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 16, July 8, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 17, July 15, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 18, July 22, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 19, July 29, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 20, August 5, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 21, August 12, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 22, August 19, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 23, August 23, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 24, September 2, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 25, September 9, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 26, September 16, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 27, September 23, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 28, September 30, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 29, October 7, 1972 Vol. 8, No. 30, October 14, 1972
Black Panther: Volume 9, 1972
Vol. 9, No. 1,October 21, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 2, October 28, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 3, November 4, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 4, November 9, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 5, November 16, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 6, November 23, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 7, November 30, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 8, December 7, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 9, December 16, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 10, December 23, 1972 Vol. 9, No. 11, December 30, 1972
Black Panther: Volume 10, 1973
Vol. 10, No. 1, May 19, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 2, May 26, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 3, June 2, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 4, June 9, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 5, June 16, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 6, June 23, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 7, June 30, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 8, July 7, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 9, July 14, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 10, July 21, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 11, July 28, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 12, August 4, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 13, August 11, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 14, August 18, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 15, August 25, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 16, September 1, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 17, September 8, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 18, September 15, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 19, September 22, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 20, September 29, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 22, October 13, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 23, October 20, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 24, October 27, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 25, November 3, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 26, November 10, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 27, November 17, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 28, November 24, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 30, December 8, 1973
Black Panther: Volume 11, 1974
Vol. 11, No. 2, January 5, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 3, January 12, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 4, January 19, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 5, January 26, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 6, February 2, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 7, February 9, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 8, February 16, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 9, February 23, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 10, March 2, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 11, March 9, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 12, March 16, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 13, March 23, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 14, March 30, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 15, April 6, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 16, April 13, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 17, April 20, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 18, April 27, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 19, May 4, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 20, May 11, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 21, May 18, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 22, May 25, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 23, June 8, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 24, June 15, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 25, June 29, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 27, July 6, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 28, July 13, 1974 Vol. 11, No. 29, July 20, 1974
Black Panther: Volume 12, 1974
Vol. 12, No. 2, August 3, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 3, August 10, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 4, August 17, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 5, August 24, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 6, August 31, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 7, September 7, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 8, September 14, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 9, September 21, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 10, September 28, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 11, October 5, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 12, October 12, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 13, October 19, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 14, October 26, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 15, November 2, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 16, November 9, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 17, November 16, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 18, November 23, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 19, November 30, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 20, December 7, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 21, December 14, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 22, December 21, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 23, December 28, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 24, January 4, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 25, January 11, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 26, January 18, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 27, January 25, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 28, February 1, 1974 Vol. 12, No. 30, February 15, 1974
Black Panther: Volume 13, 1975
Vol. 13, No. 1, February, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 2, March 1, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 3, March 8, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 4, March 15, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 5, March 22, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 6, March 29, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 7, April 5, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 8, April 12, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 9, April 10, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 10, April 28, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 11, May 5, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 12, May 12, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 13, May 19, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 14, May 26, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 15, June 2, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 16, June 9, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 17, June 16, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 18, June 23, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 19, June 30, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 20, July 7, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 21, July 14, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 22, July 21, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 23, July 28, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 24, August 4, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 25, August 11, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 26, August 18, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 27, August 25, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 28, September 1, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 29, September 8, 1975 Vol. 13, No. 30, September 15, 1975
Black Panther: Volume 14, 1975
Vol. 14, No. 1, September 22, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 2, September 29, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 3, October 6, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 4, October 14, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 5, October 18, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 6, October 25, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 7, November 1, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 9, November 15, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 10, November 22, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 12, December 6, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 13, December 13, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 14, December 20, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 15, December 27, 1975 Vol. 14, No. 16, January 3, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 17, January 10, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 18, January 17, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 19, January 24, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 20, January 31, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 21, February 7, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 22, February 14, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 23, February 21, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 24, February 28, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 25, March 6, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 26, March 13, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 27, March 20, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 28, March 27, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 29, April 3, 1976 Vol. 14, No. 30, April 10, 1976
Black Panther: Volume 15, 1976
Vol. 15, No. 1, April 17, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 2, April 24, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 3, May 1, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 4, May 8, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 5, May 15, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 6, May 22, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 7, May 29, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 8, June 5, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 9, June 12, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 10, June 19, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 11, June 26, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 12, July 3, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 13, July 10, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 14, July 17, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 15, July 24, 1976 Vol. 15, No. 17, August , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 18, August , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 19, August , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 20, August , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 21, September , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 22, September , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 23, September , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 24, September , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 25, October , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 26, October , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 27, October , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 28, October , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 29, October , 1976 Vol. 15, No. 30, November , 1976

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The official organ of the Black Panther Party

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President Biden became the first president to officially recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day in 2021, and did so again this year. It falls on the same day as Columbus Day, which was established by Italian American groups to celebrate their heritage and to acknowledge the mistreatment of the immigrant group in the U.S.

Indigenous Peoples' Day is a time of reflection, recognition and celebration of the role Native people have played in U.S. history, as NPR has reported. One way to mark the day - and to learn about Indigenous history year-round - is to learn which Native lands you live on.

Acknowledging an area's original inhabitants and stewards is a valuable process, albeit a complex one, as the National Museum of the American Indian explains. The museum suggests reaching out to local Indigenous communities for guidance involving formal land acknowledgements, which can be offered at the start of public and private gatherings.

"Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties," the museum says. "Even so, Native Nations, communities, families, and individuals today sustain their sense of belonging to ancestral homelands and protect these connections through Indigenous languages, oral traditions, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural expression."

This map's creators want it to convey more than borders

Native Land Digital, an Indigenous-led nonprofit based in Canada, is working to facilitate such conversations and document this history including by putting together a searchable map of Native territories, languages and treaties.

Users can click on labels across the Americas and around other parts of the globe - or type a specific city, state or zip code into the search box - to see which Indigenous tribes lived where. You can zoom in or out, as well as choose to apply "settler labels" to see how the map corresponds with contemporary state lines. Clicking on the name of each nation brings up links for related reading.

The map is available on the organization's website and on iOS and Android mobile apps. Native Land Digital also publishes resources to go with the map, including a teacher's guide and a territory acknowledgement generator.

The nonprofit says it aims to improve the relationship of people - both Indigenous and non-Indigenous - with the history and sacredness of the land around them. That involves "acknowledging and righting the wrongs of history."

"We hope to inspire people to gain a better understanding of themselves, their ancestors, and the world they live in, so that we can all move forward into a better future," it says.

The map itself is "more than a flat picture," as the nonprofit explains, pointing out that land is sacred to everyone regardless of how consciously they appreciate it.

"In reality, we know that the land is not something to be exploited and 'owned,' but something to be honoured and treasured," it says. "However, because of the complexities of history, the kind of mapping we undertake is an important exercise, insofar as it brings an awareness of the real lived history of Indigenous peoples and nations in a long era of colonialism."

Mapping tribal lands comes with challenges

The nonprofit acknowledges the many logistical and ethical questions that come with mapping Indigenous territories. Those range from defining "Indigenous" across time and space to engaging with those communities so they can "represent themselves and their histories on their own terms."

Native Land Digital aims to use at least two valid sources (including oral history, written documents or "maps sketched by people deemed to be reasonable authorities") when updating the map, and says in cases of conflicting maps it generally errs on the side of being "more expansive."

It cautions that the map does not represent definitive or legal boundaries of any Indigenous nations, and is a work in progress with many community contributions.

"We ... encourage people to treat these maps as a starting point and to do their own research in engaging with communities and history themselves," the group says.

The map has already made an impact

Native-Land.ca was created in 2015, and the organization was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2018. The group says it's found over the years that its maps have made a direct impact on peoples' lives.

That's been true of Indigenous people, who have been glad to see their nation mapped or surprised to see how large their traditional territories look on a standard Western map, as well as non-Indigenous people who may be "for the first time, encountering the depth, breadth and complexity of Indigenous history on the land."

"Some people may be made uncomfortable by the new information and history the map brings forth," the nonprofit adds. "But we are secure in knowing that truth is the best teacher, and we hope to provide the best information we can to help people come to their own conclusions about themselves and their place in the modern world."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Which Indigenous lands are you on? This map will show you

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Native Land Digital, a Canadian nonprofit, offers resources for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to learn more about the land and its history. It hopes its map will be just a part of that journey.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). The dialect poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar's canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems. In its entirety, Dunbar's literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.

Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed mother. The only African American in his class, he became president of the school literary society, editor-in-chief of the school paper, and class poet. By 1889, two years before he graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton Herald and worked as an editor of the short-lived Dayton Tattler, a Black newspaper. Although their names are not listed in the publication, Dunbar's classmate, Orville Wright, and Wright's brother Wilbur, printed the newspaper.

Dunbar aspired to a career in law, but his mother's financial situation precluded a university education. He consequently sought employment with various Dayton businesses, only to be rejected because of his race. He finally found work as an elevator operator, a job that allowed him time to continue writing. At this time, Dunbar produced articles, short stories, and poems, including several in the dialect style that later earned him fame.

In 1892, one of his former teachers invited Dunbar to address the Western Association of Writers convening in Dayton. At the meeting, Dunbar befriended James Newton Matthews, who subsequently praised Dunbar's work in a letter to an Illinois newspaper. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted the letter, bringing Dunbar recognition outside Dayton. Among the readers of this letter was a lover of Matthews, poet James Whitcomb Riley, who then familiarized himself with Dunbar's work and wrote him a commendatory letter.

Bolstered by the support of both Matthews and Riley, Dunbar decided to publish a collection of his poems. He obtained additional assistance from Orville Wright and then self-published with United Brethren Publishing, a Dayton firm that eventually printed Oak and Ivy (1893) for 125 dollars. The publishers loaned the sum to Dunbar, who was earning four dollars a week at the time. In Oak and Ivy, Dunbar included his earliest dialect poems as well as many other pieces. Among the latter is one of his most popular poems, " Sympathy," in which he expresses, in a somber tone, the plight of Black people in American society.

Shortly after the publication of Oak and Ivy, attorney Charles A. Thatcher approached Dunbar and offered to fund his college education. Dunbar, however, rejected Thatcher to pursue a literary career because of the promising sales of Oak and Ivy. Thatcher then applied himself to promoting Dunbar in nearby Toledo, Ohio, and helped him obtain work there reading his poetry at libraries and literary gatherings. Dunbar also found unexpected support from psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, who helped distribute Oak and Ivy in Toledo and occasionally sent Dunbar much-needed financial aid.

Tobey teamed with Thatcher to publish Dunbar's second verse collection, Majors and Minors. For this book, Dunbar produced poems on a variety of themes and in several styles. The dialect verse found greater favor with his predominantly white readership and Dunbar gained increasing fame. Instrumental to Dunbar's growing popularity was a highly positive though extremely patronizing review by eminent realist writer and literary critic William Dean Howells. In Harper's Weekly, Howells praised Dunbar as "the first man of his color to study his race objectively" and commended the dialect poems as faithful representations of Black speech. Critics believe Howell's applause also had a chilling effect on Dunbar's legacy, as the fervent discussion around Dunbar's dialect poems precluded a comprehensive study of his oeuvre.

Through Thatcher and Tobey, Dunbar met an agent and secured more public readings and a publishing contract. He then published Lyrics of Lowly Life, a poetry collection derived primarily from verse already featured in Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors. This new volume sold impressively across the country. On the strength of his recent acclaim, Dunbar commenced a six-month reading tour of England. There he found publishers for a British edition of Lyrics of Lowly Life and befriended musician Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with Samuel Taylor Coleridge), with whom he collaborated on the operetta Dream Lovers.

When Dunbar returned to the United States in 1897, he obtained a clerkship at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Although his health suffered during the two years he lived there, the period nonetheless proved fruitful for Dunbar. In 1898, he published his first short story collection, Folks From Dixie (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), in which he delineated the situation of African Americans in both the pre-and post-emancipation United States. Although these tales, unlike some of his dialect verse, were often harsh examinations of racial prejudice, Folks From Dixie was well received upon publication.

At the end of 1898, his health degenerating still further, Dunbar left the Library of Congress and commenced another reading tour. In 1899, he published another verse collection, Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dodd, Mead and Company), which was well-received by critics. However, in the spring of that year, his health lapsed. Ill with pneumonia, the already tubercular Dunbar was advised to rest in the mountains. He moved to the Catskills in New York State but continued to write while recovering.

After a brief stay in Colorado in 1900, Dunbar returned to Washington, D.C. Shortly before his return, he published another collection of tales, The Strength of Gideon (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1900), in which he continued to recount Black life both before and after slavery. Reviewers at the time favored his pre-emancipation stories, which were seen as humorous and sentimental, and ignored work that detailed volatile accounts of abuse and injustice.

Dunbar followed The Strength of Gideon with his second novel, The Love of Landry (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1900), about an ailing woman who arrives in Colorado for convalescence and finds true happiness with a cowboy. Like his first novel, The Uncalled (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898),The Love of Landry was dismissed by critics. Dunbar suffered a further critical setback with his next novel, The Fanatics (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1901), about the United States at the beginning of the Civil War. The novel's central characters are from white families who differ in their North-South sympathies and spark a dispute in their Ohio community. The Fanatics was a commercial failure upon publication. The Sport of the Gods (1902), Dunbar's final novel, which featured racist violence perpetrated by police officers and other white characters, presented a far more critical and disturbing portrait of Black America.

Although its acclaim was hardly unanimous, The Sport of the Gods earned substantial praise as a powerful novel of protest. By this time, however, Dunbar was experiencing considerable turmoil in his own life. Prior to writing The Sport of the Gods, he suffered another lapse of poor health, compounded by alcoholism. The same year The Sport of the Gods was published, he separated from his wife of four years, writer Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. The next year, following a nervous breakdown and another bout of pneumonia, Dunbar assembled another verse collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead, 1903), and another short story collection, In Old Plantation Days (Dodd Mead & Company,1903).In Old Plantation Days includes 25 stories set on a southern plantation during the days of slavery. Dunbar's stories drew the ire of many critics for their stereotyped characters, and some of his detractors went so far as to allege that he contributed to racist concepts while appearing to disdain such thinking.

Though he continued to write and publish, Dunbar's health declined further. Relying on alcohol to temper his chronic coughing only exacerbated his illness. During the last three years of his life, he lived with his mother in Dayton, Ohio. He died February 9, 1906, at age 33.

In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's standing as the foremost Black American poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in African American literature. In the ensuing decades, however, scholars questioning the validity of his often stereotypic characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain an anti-racist stance damaged his reputation. More recently, Dunbar's stature has risen, and poems that did not receive much attention during his lifetime are now prized as some of his greatest achievements in verse.

Modern champions include Addison Gayle Jr., whose Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Doubleday, 1971), is considered a key contribution to Dunbar studies, and Nikki Giovanni, whose contribution to A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1975) hails Dunbar as "a natural resource of our people." For Giovanni, as for other Dunbar scholars, Dunbar's work constitutes both a history and a celebration of Black life. "There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his achievement," she declares. "Even today. He wanted to be a writer and he wrote."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Holding History:  The Collections of Charles L. Blockson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Paul Laurence Dunbar | Smithsonian Institution