2024 Great Plains conference: Paul Chaat Smith

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

04/10/2024 Added

10 Plays

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Paul Chaat Smith speaks at the 2024 Great Plains conference titled "Out of the Blue and into the Black: Are the Great Plains still Great?" Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. He joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2001.

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[00:00:01.320]So welcome again
[00:00:02.970]to the Confronting the Legendary Great Plains Conference.
[00:00:06.270]This is the 49th conference
[00:00:08.670]the Center for Great Plains Studies has organized.
[00:00:11.010]We've been around since 1976.
[00:00:12.800](audience clapping)
[00:00:16.890]We try to make our conferences be about something broad
[00:00:22.680]and that allows people from many different backgrounds
[00:00:26.280]and perspectives to bring their insights to bear on it.
[00:00:30.540]And this conference is no different.
[00:00:33.060]So if you look at our program,
[00:00:34.560]you'll find panels ranging from things like the persistence
[00:00:38.250]of pioneers in museums and historic sites
[00:00:42.810]to conflicting landscapes,
[00:00:45.060]the place of trees and seas of grass.
[00:00:48.600]And so we hope
[00:00:49.590]that this conference will get you thinking
[00:00:52.200]about the mythologies that persist in our region
[00:00:57.090]and the ways that everyone
[00:00:58.680]from historians to landscape architects
[00:01:01.950]to soil scientists are working creatively
[00:01:05.130]to challenge and update these mythologies.
[00:01:09.720]I wanna thank lots of folks.
[00:01:12.270]First, we have a program committee
[00:01:14.760]that put together this program.
[00:01:17.340]They're drawn from three different Nebraska campuses,
[00:01:22.680]University of Nebraska Kearney,
[00:01:24.240]University of Nebraska Omaha, and here at UNL.
[00:01:28.651]And we also have people from the community here in Lincoln
[00:01:33.540]who are part of our program committee.
[00:01:35.520]And I am so grateful to them for putting together
[00:01:38.430]such an eclectic and stimulating lineup
[00:01:41.490]of keynote speakers, workshops, tours,
[00:01:45.060]panels, lunches and dinners.
[00:01:47.430]So I wanna recognize our program committee,
[00:01:49.853]Gwendwr Meredith, I saw,
[00:01:53.421](laughs) Todd Richardson, Alana Stone?
[00:02:01.650]There she is, right back there.
[00:02:03.729]Will Stoutamire, I don't know if he made it.
[00:02:06.810]And Sandra Williams. There's Sandra.
[00:02:10.020]Yeah. Thank you so much to all of you.
[00:02:12.120]We really appreciate your work on the program.
[00:02:14.869](audience clapping)
[00:02:20.034]And I wanna shout out in particular two
[00:02:22.920]of our staff members, Katie Nieland and Alison Cloet,
[00:02:27.870]who do all the invisible labor
[00:02:30.960]that you don't see that goes on behind the scenes
[00:02:34.800]to make a conference like this happen.
[00:02:38.340]You, probably many of you know what that entails.
[00:02:41.850]So I also wanna give a huge round of applause to them.
[00:02:44.788](audience clapping)
[00:02:51.390]We have a number of partners
[00:02:53.907]for this conference I wanna thank,
[00:02:56.040]the College of Architecture, UNL Libraries
[00:02:59.640]and UNL's Willa Cather Archive.
[00:03:02.550]And I also wanna thank our primary sponsor,
[00:03:05.490]which is the Mellon Foundation.
[00:03:08.010]So the Mellon,
[00:03:09.780]this conference is part of our Mellon funded initiative,
[00:03:12.900]which is called Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors,
[00:03:16.470]Re-Indigenizing Southeast Nebraska.
[00:03:19.627]And this project's a joint effort
[00:03:23.760]of the Center for Great Plains Studies
[00:03:25.470]and the Otto-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma.
[00:03:29.040]And we, through this project, we aim to promote healing
[00:03:32.700]and reconciliation in Southeast Nebraska
[00:03:35.460]by reconnecting the Otto-Missouria to their homelands here
[00:03:40.230]and educating non-Native people about the history
[00:03:43.980]and ongoing presence of the tribe
[00:03:45.750]and other Indigenous peoples in our region.
[00:03:48.900]And as part of that project,
[00:03:50.970]we are thinking deeply about the stories
[00:03:53.430]that Southeast Nebraska commemorations tell.
[00:03:57.330]Who and what do they glorify?
[00:03:58.463]And who and what do they leave out?
[00:04:01.650]We are asking too, how might we work together as a city,
[00:04:05.940]university and tribe
[00:04:07.350]to properly honor the Otto-Missouria people
[00:04:10.590]who ceded the land that became Lincoln
[00:04:12.690]and the University of Nebraska?
[00:04:15.810]So before I introduce our speaker,
[00:04:17.580]in fact, I want to acknowledge
[00:04:19.140]that the Center for Great Plain Studies is part
[00:04:21.540]of the University of Nebraska,
[00:04:23.280]which is a land grant institution
[00:04:25.560]with campuses and programs on the past, present,
[00:04:28.230]and future homelands of the Otoe-Missouria, Pawnee, Ponca,
[00:04:32.550]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples,
[00:04:37.980]as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk,
[00:04:40.530]Sac and Fox and Iowa peoples.
[00:04:43.470]So the land we currently call Nebraska has always been
[00:04:47.130]and will continue to be an Indigenous homeland.
[00:04:50.831]And we ask you to take a moment to consider the legacies
[00:04:54.390]of more than 150 years of displacement, violence,
[00:04:58.710]settlement and survival that bring us here today.
[00:05:06.360]This acknowledgement and the centering
[00:05:08.100]of Indigenous people is a start as we move forward.
[00:05:14.070]I would like to thank Margaret Huettl,
[00:05:16.717]one of our keynote speakers who you'll hear tomorrow,
[00:05:20.190]for researching and writing this land acknowledgement
[00:05:22.620]when she was a professor of history here at UNL.
[00:05:26.850]So now then, real reason you're here is Paul Chaat Smith.
[00:05:31.680]When we were thinking of people to invite
[00:05:33.510]to be keynote speakers for our conference,
[00:05:36.060]I immediately thought of Paul Chaat Smith,
[00:05:38.460]a citizen of the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma.
[00:05:42.570]His official biography is impressive.
[00:05:45.780]He's a curator and author
[00:05:47.820]who joined the Smithsonian's National Museum
[00:05:49.920]of the American Indian in 2001.
[00:05:52.860]He's curated many exhibitions
[00:05:55.020]including Americans, James Luna's Emendatio,
[00:05:59.040]Fritz Scholder, Indian, Not Indian,
[00:06:01.530]and Brian Jungen, Strange Comfort.
[00:06:05.370]I know him, as a historian,
[00:06:07.920]for his incredible book with Robert Warrior,
[00:06:11.707]"Like a Hurricane,
[00:06:12.870]the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee."
[00:06:18.330]But impressive as all these achievements are,
[00:06:20.970]this was not why I thought of asking Paul Chaat Smith
[00:06:24.510]to headline our conference.
[00:06:26.370]It was because I heard Paul speak many years ago
[00:06:29.520]at a conference,
[00:06:30.930]and he made me laugh a lot.
[00:06:34.410]And it was because his 2009 book,
[00:06:36.697]"Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong,"
[00:06:40.170]not only taught me so much, but also made me laugh.
[00:06:43.680]You see, Paul comes from a long line
[00:06:45.450]of irreverent Indigenous intellectuals,
[00:06:48.840]including Vine Deloria Jr,
[00:06:51.000]who use their wit and humor to discuss hard histories
[00:06:54.900]and challenge longstanding misrepresentations
[00:06:57.210]of Indigenous people.
[00:06:59.460]Paul is also one of the best myth busters I know,
[00:07:03.180]and we are delighted to have him here with us to open
[00:07:06.360]our Confronting the Legendary Great Plains Conference.
[00:07:09.360]Welcome, Paul.
[00:07:10.374](audience clapping)
[00:07:21.280]I didn't think there'd be this many people.
[00:07:23.059](audience laughing)
[00:07:26.268](audience member coughing)
[00:07:31.557]So it really is an honor to be with you this evening.
[00:07:35.250]I look forward to listening and learning
[00:07:38.850]with you over these next two days.
[00:07:40.740]And I wanna commend the Center for Great Plains Studies
[00:07:44.340]for its smart journal, robust initiatives
[00:07:46.800]and programs over the years and decades.
[00:07:51.330]The conferences the center's organized ask big questions.
[00:07:54.780]We are encouraged to think hard and deep,
[00:07:58.230]to engage critically and creatively
[00:08:00.240]about the Great Plains.
[00:08:03.000]It's okay to be a little bit scared.
[00:08:05.501]I know I am.
[00:08:06.900]I mean, the word great is in the very name,
[00:08:09.030]which hardly seems fair.
[00:08:11.520]Understanding a thing so beautiful and dark,
[00:08:14.280]tragic and inspiring,
[00:08:16.530]it seems as immense as the Milky Way,
[00:08:18.930]always changing, forever confounding,
[00:08:21.840]Margaret for telling us
[00:08:23.040]that we're supposed to confront that.
[00:08:26.070]So we can only try. So let's try.
[00:08:30.870]It's great to be back in Lincoln.
[00:08:33.060]It's been a while,
[00:08:34.320]50 years as a matter of fact,
[00:08:37.037]half a century.
[00:08:39.510]I was a pretentious and lost teenager,
[00:08:41.880]a suburban Comanche racked with doubt and certainty,
[00:08:45.780]a college student who was really bad at college
[00:08:48.840]on a work study assignment with the revolution.
[00:08:52.500]We'll get to all that in a minute.
[00:08:55.110]How should I put this?
[00:08:56.700]I think it's most accurate to say
[00:08:58.340]that I'm of the Great Plains,
[00:09:00.330]though not from the Great Plains.
[00:09:03.690]My sisters and I were born in Nowhere Texas,
[00:09:06.600]because my parents, Mom, Comanche, dad, white,
[00:09:11.040]from Lawton and Dibble respectively,
[00:09:13.770]couldn't wait to get the hell out of Oklahoma.
[00:09:17.610]Was the panhandle an upgrade?
[00:09:19.980]Obviously not.
[00:09:20.992](audience laughing)
[00:09:22.653]Soon we moved to Ithaca, New York.
[00:09:24.750]I'm guessing because it was even further from Oklahoma
[00:09:27.767]and so my father could get a degree from Cornell.
[00:09:31.290]Don't remember much of that.
[00:09:32.610]I grew up in the DC suburbs.
[00:09:35.190]I spent summers in Oklahoma but never actually lived there.
[00:09:39.810]If you added up all those days
[00:09:41.580]in my life I was on the ground in this region,
[00:09:44.820]it would add up to maybe three or four years, five maybe.
[00:09:49.260]And yet, Oklahoma was deeply familiar,
[00:09:51.990]months in the Dakotas,
[00:09:54.660]connected yet distant.
[00:09:57.660]I'm the only one in my family
[00:09:59.340]who actually never took up residence in Oklahoma.
[00:10:04.680]I live on the East Coast, have a coastal elite job,
[00:10:07.740]watch coastal elite TV,
[00:10:09.691](audience laughing)
[00:10:10.710]coastal elite movies
[00:10:12.540]and read coastal elite newspapers.
[00:10:15.570]And yet I always seem to be coming back here,
[00:10:18.270]never for very long.
[00:10:21.270]It's a strange reversal
[00:10:22.590]as if these red states are the center
[00:10:24.930]and the East Coast is fly over country.
[00:10:27.930]For one reason or another,
[00:10:29.580]I always seem to be leaving here.
[00:10:33.090]So Lincoln, the revolution.
[00:10:36.120]The revolution was called the American Indian Movement,
[00:10:38.880]organizers of a takeover
[00:10:41.310]at the Village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge
[00:10:44.610]in February, 1973.
[00:10:48.360]The siege held off for two months against federal marshals
[00:10:51.150]and helicopters and armored personnel carriers
[00:10:54.630]and the occasional F-4 Phantom jet.
[00:10:58.350]This electrified Indian Country,
[00:11:00.390]and thousands rallied to defend the occupation.
[00:11:04.740]Some traveled to the tiny village,
[00:11:06.720]crossing barricades at night.
[00:11:08.790]Others staged demonstrations and sent food and supplies
[00:11:11.970]to Pine Ridge.
[00:11:13.950]I wasn't there.
[00:11:15.510]I was busy trying to get passing grades
[00:11:17.490]so I could graduate from high school in Maryland.
[00:11:20.700]And yes, I was most definitely electrified,
[00:11:24.150]had a Red Power bumper sticker on my bedroom window,
[00:11:27.630]glaring out onto the mean streets of College Park Woods.
[00:11:30.752](audience laughing)
[00:11:32.550]A year later I was in Yellow Springs, Ohio,
[00:11:34.770]the college I applied to
[00:11:36.780]because it was said to be unconventional
[00:11:39.270]and because they didn't give grades,
[00:11:41.040]only pass or fail.
[00:11:43.020]Grades were not my friend.
[00:11:45.810]Antioch's other claim to fame
[00:11:47.430]is a mandatory work study program.
[00:11:51.690]One such opportunity was in Sioux Falls,
[00:11:54.480]working for something called
[00:11:56.640]the Wounded Knee Legal Defense-slash-Offense Committee.
[00:12:01.440]I was in. I was so in.
[00:12:04.887]The Wounded Knee occupation itself ended in May, 1973.
[00:12:09.300]It was messy.
[00:12:11.280]Buddy Lamont died. Frank Clearwater died.
[00:12:14.730]A federal marshal was paralyzed.
[00:12:17.280]The signed agreement was made.
[00:12:20.490]There was no victory for AIM and the Lakota patriots.
[00:12:24.630]The hated tribal chairman was still running Pine Ridge.
[00:12:28.710]However, the story was far from over.
[00:12:31.620]The federal government brought nearly 400 indictments.
[00:12:34.950]South Dakota added some of their own.
[00:12:38.250]The Man wasn't playing around.
[00:12:39.930]Pretty much everybody that could be indicted was.
[00:12:43.020]I remember one charge was cattle rustling.
[00:12:47.550]There were so many people on trial
[00:12:49.560]that the trials had to take place across the Great Plains.
[00:12:53.850]I reported for my assignment in Sioux Falls
[00:12:56.130]in August, 1974.
[00:12:58.710]That was just one venue.
[00:13:01.140]Over the next few years, there were trials
[00:13:03.030]in courthouses in St. Paul, Rapid City,
[00:13:06.240]Cedar Rapids and Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:13:10.470]Often the trials took place simultaneously.
[00:13:14.830]There was a system in place
[00:13:16.770]at the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee,
[00:13:19.650]which we called WKLDOC.
[00:13:22.491]I signed up for food stamps on the first day,
[00:13:26.850]learned about organized shoplifting expeditions downtown.
[00:13:31.200]There were lots of stories
[00:13:32.280]about stealing rental cars from Hertz.
[00:13:35.100]Apparently that was quite easy back in 1974.
[00:13:38.910]Seasoned vets, leftist attorneys
[00:13:41.490]from the National Lawyers Guild,
[00:13:44.070]defendants, legal workers and spies.
[00:13:48.510]In Sioux Falls,
[00:13:49.380]we lived in a building called the Van Brunt,
[00:13:51.840]which was empty, being prepared for demolition.
[00:13:56.220]A few weeks after I arrived,
[00:13:57.510]I attended a Sun Dance at Crowdog's Paradise in Rosebud.
[00:14:03.210]What was I doing?
[00:14:05.550]Not much.
[00:14:09.330]I wasn't interested in legal issues,
[00:14:11.280]kind of a problem if you were interning at legal committee.
[00:14:15.060]Mainly I soaked it all in.
[00:14:17.430]Later I would compare myself to Robert Stone,
[00:14:21.270]the least merry of the fabled 1960s Merry Pranksters,
[00:14:26.790]Robert Stone who watched and took notes
[00:14:28.980]while everyone else was tripping on acid.
[00:14:33.420]In the early 1970s,
[00:14:35.040]we had cars and airplanes, electricity,
[00:14:40.080]not much in the way of information technology.
[00:14:43.650]People in different houses
[00:14:45.090]would share the same phone number sometimes.
[00:14:47.550]This was called a party line.
[00:14:50.250]Phoning somebody in another state
[00:14:51.810]was thoughtfully considered and carefully planned.
[00:14:55.740]Rumor had it that it was possible
[00:14:57.390]to telephone people in other countries.
[00:15:00.210]Nobody knew anyone who ever had.
[00:15:03.060]In Sioux Falls, we had something incredible,
[00:15:05.910]a WATS line.
[00:15:08.198]And you could call anybody in the country
[00:15:09.960]and talk for as long as we wanted.
[00:15:12.420]WATS stood for wide area telephone service.
[00:15:16.800]Legal stuff all day,
[00:15:18.424]at night, we would call numbers
[00:15:19.650]on a list of pledged supporters
[00:15:22.560]and ask them for money.
[00:15:25.620]It was very cool.
[00:15:27.460]In 1974, it was like having a Starship in your garage.
[00:15:31.933]The Attica Legal Defense/Offense Committee in New York
[00:15:35.190]also had a WATS line.
[00:15:37.200]And sometimes we'd commiserate for hours about the struggle.
[00:15:41.040]Not so much me, I didn't talk much.
[00:15:44.190]Everyone assumed the FBI was listening,
[00:15:47.550]because, you know, they were.
[00:15:49.482](audience laughing)
[00:15:51.941]The trials to us were an obvious attempt
[00:15:54.360]to destroy the movement.
[00:15:56.760]We believed this because,
[00:15:57.900]while there were lots of rebellions during these years,
[00:16:01.080]it was rare to prosecute anyone but the leaders.
[00:16:05.130]Charging 400 people, as the Feds did,
[00:16:08.610]would have been like indicting thousands
[00:16:11.250]in Chicago's Grant Park
[00:16:13.050]for the riots of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
[00:16:17.910]Instead of the famous Chicago Seven trial,
[00:16:20.220]it would've been the Chicago 7,000 trial.
[00:16:24.270]We thought the government's goal was
[00:16:25.860]to keep us tied up for years
[00:16:27.750]and actually getting convictions was secondary.
[00:16:33.540]A few months after Sioux Falls, I was sent to Lincoln.
[00:16:37.650]This time, we lived in abandoned Air Force barracks
[00:16:41.280]over in Arnold Heights.
[00:16:44.250]There was a hearing before a federal judge named Urbom
[00:16:47.430]on a motion to dismiss the Wounded Knee charges
[00:16:50.550]based on the Fort Laramie Treaty.
[00:16:54.120]Not a criminal proceeding,
[00:16:56.790]a parade of extraordinary Lakota men and women
[00:16:59.370]who schooled Urbom on the history
[00:17:02.160]of how the dispossession of the Sioux took place,
[00:17:05.070]how it might be rectified.
[00:17:08.070]Elders were permitted to swear on a pipe
[00:17:10.830]instead of the Bible.
[00:17:15.083]Urbom listened carefully,
[00:17:18.210]and in the end, he said,
[00:17:19.237]"Your arguments are probably correct,
[00:17:21.750]but one federal judge can't undo history."
[00:17:27.420]It was the only time we were able,
[00:17:29.970]the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee,
[00:17:32.460]to actually be on offense.
[00:17:35.370]It failed, and it was a beautiful thing nonetheless.
[00:17:39.600]My part of AIM, published a book about it
[00:17:41.700]with a subtitle "Sitting in Judgment on America,"
[00:17:45.570]inspired by a stunning photograph
[00:17:47.520]of the Sioux elders sitting the jury box.
[00:17:52.800]AIM was brilliant and stupid,
[00:17:54.510]a streaking comet that, for a couple of years,
[00:17:57.390]was the most popular and powerful force
[00:18:00.270]among America's Indians.
[00:18:02.580]It stood up for those brutalized by big city police forces
[00:18:06.060]and by goons working for corrupt tribal bosses.
[00:18:09.960]Nobody else did,
[00:18:11.910]including the big Native organizations.
[00:18:15.840]It was a movement, not really an organization,
[00:18:20.730]whose greatest strength was that anyone could join.
[00:18:24.450]That was also its greatest weakness.
[00:18:28.380]Indian Country, like anywhere else,
[00:18:31.020]has its share of psychos and swindlers.
[00:18:34.140]And with no one to say who is or isn't AIM,
[00:18:36.900]they took full advantage.
[00:18:39.480]Soon, AIM's reputation was in free fall,
[00:18:42.390]and across Turtle Island, people were starting
[00:18:44.730]to call the tattered outfit "Assholes in moccasins."
[00:18:50.730]My little faction lost the power struggle in the late '70s
[00:18:54.063]when I moved to New York,
[00:18:56.070]as is standard practice
[00:18:57.300]for political exiles in (indistinct).
[00:18:59.598](audience laughing)
[00:19:01.230]I mostly had crummy jobs until I eventually got better ones.
[00:19:05.400]Kept thinking of myself as a writer,
[00:19:07.890]though, technically, I never wrote anything.
[00:19:12.900]This was the 1980s, one of the century's dumber decades.
[00:19:16.293](audience laughing)
[00:19:18.060]It was a book called "Great Plains"
[00:19:19.770]by a New Yorker staff writer named Ian Frazier that I loved.
[00:19:23.910]I imagine it's out of style now.
[00:19:25.950]Another example of a white guy on safari assignment
[00:19:29.130]touring an exotic region where humans never go.
[00:19:33.180]I didn't care.
[00:19:34.860]Frazier wrote about Crazy Horse
[00:19:37.290]and farmers and nuclear weapons
[00:19:39.090]and dinosaurs and Woody Guthrie.
[00:19:42.480]There was a paragraph in "Great Plains"
[00:19:44.520]that became a gold star for me.
[00:19:46.920]Here it is.
[00:19:49.957]"This, finally, is the punchline
[00:19:51.930]of our 200 years on the Great Plains.
[00:19:54.540]We trap out the beaver,
[00:19:56.100]subtract the Mandan,
[00:19:57.930]infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa,
[00:20:00.537]and overdose the Arikara,
[00:20:02.700]call the land a desert
[00:20:04.080]and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon,
[00:20:07.950]suck up the buffalo bones and all,
[00:20:10.053]kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes
[00:20:13.380]and prairie chickens and prairie dogs,
[00:20:16.170]dig up the gold and rebury it in a vault somewhere else,
[00:20:20.640]ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow
[00:20:24.540]and Kiowa and Comanche,
[00:20:26.970]kill Sitting Bull,
[00:20:28.770]harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams
[00:20:31.650]and send the wised-up dreamers on their way,
[00:20:34.800]plow the top soil until it flows to the ocean,
[00:20:38.130]ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle,
[00:20:42.330]dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants
[00:20:45.870]and send the power down the line,
[00:20:47.850]dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns,
[00:20:52.380]drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away,
[00:20:55.770]dry up the rivers and springs,
[00:20:58.170]deep drill for irrigation water
[00:21:00.030]as the aquifer retreats.
[00:21:02.550]And in return, we condense unimaginable amounts
[00:21:05.250]of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land
[00:21:09.540]which so much treasure came from,
[00:21:12.240]weapons for which our best hope might be
[00:21:16.290]that we will someday take them apart and throw them away
[00:21:19.613]and for which our next best hope certainly is
[00:21:21.933]that they remain humming away under the prairie,
[00:21:25.440]absorbing fear and maintenance, unused forever."
[00:21:30.240]That's some badass writing there.
[00:21:33.900]So back to our conference, which asks,
[00:21:36.720]who's left out?
[00:21:39.420]Let me amend that. Who's left out now?
[00:21:44.430]I've been thinking about this a lot.
[00:21:46.800]This September will mark 20 years
[00:21:49.200]since the National Museum of the American Indian opened
[00:21:52.800]on the National Mall.
[00:21:55.590]We're all about stories,
[00:21:57.420]narratives, commemoration, monuments.
[00:22:02.640]We had great energy in those early days.
[00:22:05.910]History, as in the right side of history,
[00:22:08.880]was the wind in our back,
[00:22:11.310]a righteous army fighting for the stories
[00:22:13.770]and people who were left out.
[00:22:17.490]There's lots to say about how well
[00:22:19.620]or poorly we rose to the occasion.
[00:22:22.140]Too much to cover here.
[00:22:26.550]What I think is relevant, for me,
[00:22:28.680]is how one responds when dreams come true
[00:22:33.570]and your trusted playbook
[00:22:35.430]of always being excluded becomes obsolete,
[00:22:39.480]because we're no longer always excluded.
[00:22:44.010]Lots has changed in these 20 years.
[00:22:47.670]I remember, at a AIM and treaty council conference
[00:22:50.700]in Standing Rock in 1974,
[00:22:54.240]where we called for the killing of Columbus Day
[00:22:56.730]and replacing it with an Indigenous holiday.
[00:23:00.270]Did I think such a thing would ever happen?
[00:23:02.820]No, I did not.
[00:23:04.890]Later, I wrote essays trashing the racist branding practices
[00:23:08.550]of sports teams.
[00:23:11.010]Did I think I would live to see hundreds
[00:23:12.840]of those names changed?
[00:23:14.760]No.
[00:23:17.340]Museums overhauling their lame,
[00:23:19.260]permitted displays of Indians,
[00:23:22.680]land acknowledgements, "Reservation Dogs."
[00:23:26.700]Freaking "Reservation Dogs."
[00:23:28.379](audience laughing)
[00:23:30.750]So much winning.
[00:23:32.940]It turned out I didn't want to win.
[00:23:36.166]It felt, it felt wrong somehow, confusing.
[00:23:40.140]Remember 2020?
[00:23:42.030]Columbus statues thrown into rivers,
[00:23:44.670]sometimes not even by Indians.
[00:23:47.790]The never say never owner of the Washington NFL team
[00:23:52.050]bowing to its corporate overlords
[00:23:54.210]and overnight the R word ceased to exist.
[00:23:58.710]In New York, the capital of the world,
[00:24:00.690]legendary museums wage
[00:24:02.490]a furious land acknowledgement arms race,
[00:24:06.270]rounding up local Indians
[00:24:07.620]who could tell them what to say
[00:24:10.050]and do it before the other museums,
[00:24:12.317](audience laughing) first.
[00:24:16.140]It was amusing and wonderful
[00:24:18.000]and depressing and kind of lame all at once.
[00:24:22.800]You know what they say, be careful what you wish for.
[00:24:27.750]Back in the late 1980s
[00:24:29.768]when the NMAI was lowering into existence,
[00:24:33.480]my gang found it hilarious
[00:24:35.730]that the I in NMAI was singular.
[00:24:39.330]We speculated on which American Indian
[00:24:41.727]they would choose
[00:24:42.768](audience laughing)
[00:24:44.416]and how cool it was the entire museum would be
[00:24:46.380]about one person.
[00:24:47.408](audience laughing)
[00:24:48.720]There were self nominations.
[00:24:50.396](audience laughing)
[00:24:53.010]It was all a goof,
[00:24:55.080]though the name has always been problematic, NMAI,
[00:24:58.230]not so much for me because the I is for Indian singular
[00:25:03.360]or the word Indian, which kids today think is derogatory.
[00:25:07.800]It's because the scope implied it was never a real thing.
[00:25:12.270]NMAI is charged with being hemispheric
[00:25:15.390]because the election we inherited this hemisphere
[00:25:19.740]about history and culture and music
[00:25:21.930]and the ancient past and present day, about everything.
[00:25:28.344]But NMAI was never much interested in all those things.
[00:25:32.760]It never could be all those things.
[00:25:36.720]The NMAI is more usefully understood
[00:25:39.150]as related to overwhelmingly about federal tribes
[00:25:42.090]in the United States
[00:25:43.770]focused on culture and cultural milieu.
[00:25:47.280]We do history now and then,
[00:25:49.050]Latin America and Canada once in a while.
[00:25:52.470]But our expertise and collections
[00:25:54.240]of interests are about traditional culture
[00:25:58.200]and the reclamation of the practice of traditional beliefs,
[00:26:02.490]north of Mexico, south of Canada.
[00:26:07.977]You could visit our museum in DC several times a year
[00:26:12.270]ever since we opened in 2004,
[00:26:16.350]and if you're a non-Native person
[00:26:18.960]who doesn't live near Indian communities,
[00:26:23.670]you would have no idea that a large percentage
[00:26:26.040]of US Indians are Christians,
[00:26:28.740]maybe even enjoy it.
[00:26:31.200]That's a left out story, for sure.
[00:26:34.380]And this is not intentional. There's no conspiracy.
[00:26:38.520]Most Christian Indians have no real problem with this.
[00:26:41.190]They understand what visitors want to see,
[00:26:44.280]and many Christian Indians also are
[00:26:47.970]fully behind traditional religious views.
[00:26:51.630]But it's also weird.
[00:26:53.610]Indians as part of the 21st century
[00:26:56.070]and part of America is a constant message from my museum.
[00:27:03.120]If our name is closer,
[00:27:05.280]more closely aligned with our actual practices,
[00:27:08.940]and we were called
[00:27:09.773]the National Museum of the American Indian,
[00:27:12.240]Mainly Those Indians Into Cultural Renewal,
[00:27:14.640]and Also We Mean Federally Recognized Tribes,
[00:27:16.920]Just to Be Clear, that would be a hell of an acronym.
[00:27:20.533](audience laughing)
[00:27:22.980]But you would let people know going in,
[00:27:24.300]you can't be encyclopedic, you can't be everything.
[00:27:28.535]But we can't really do that. I'm not sure why.
[00:27:33.360]So we missed out
[00:27:34.230]on really interesting developments in Indian Country.
[00:27:37.410]Indian Mormons for example,
[00:27:39.210]including prominent and respected leaders
[00:27:42.540]of national organizations.
[00:27:44.640]Devout Mormons, totally fighting for Native people.
[00:27:50.550]The rise of Pentecostals among the Crow and the Navajo,
[00:27:54.810]I see on social media younger Indian folks even identifying
[00:27:58.110]as atheists, which would've been unheard of
[00:28:00.660]when I was coming up.
[00:28:05.610]White folks are startled
[00:28:06.960]when I talk about Comanche relatives who were hardcore MAGA
[00:28:11.220]or how the Lumbee,
[00:28:12.720]a key swing demographic in North Carolina,
[00:28:16.290]voted for Donald Trump in 2016
[00:28:18.540]by an even higher margin in 2020.
[00:28:22.740]Some say they might have shifted the whole state.
[00:28:27.180]It started as well with the notion
[00:28:30.090]of Indians as deeply patriotic Americans.
[00:28:34.170]They can't understand how Indians could feel that way
[00:28:37.020]and look for explanations
[00:28:38.340]about how we're just all about being warriors all the time.
[00:28:41.580]We can't get it out of our system,
[00:28:44.160]how we're just defending land, not the United States.
[00:28:48.090]And sure, of course,
[00:28:48.990]there's some rare people that feel that way.
[00:28:51.600]But come on, this is deeply stupid.
[00:28:54.210]We're patriotic as all get out.
[00:28:57.330]And here's another news flash.
[00:28:58.890]Most Indians don't spend their days thinking
[00:29:01.260]of themselves as victims
[00:29:02.550]or obsessing about the 19th century.
[00:29:07.260]Especially the liberal left, who I tried to be clear,
[00:29:10.800]need to see Indians as politically aligned with their views.
[00:29:14.970]But which? It's really not that complicated.
[00:29:18.450]Lots of Indians live in red states
[00:29:20.370]and lots of them have terrible red state politics.
[00:29:25.110]I am not arguing for balance for the sake of balance.
[00:29:29.370]I don't believe there are objective truths.
[00:29:32.040]Narratives, histories are inherently subjective.
[00:29:37.290]But include these stories 'cause they're interesting
[00:29:39.570]'cause they reveal things about us,
[00:29:42.210]because I want the American public
[00:29:43.890]to have a more realistic understanding
[00:29:46.590]and not trade one set of stereotypes
[00:29:49.290]for another, more flattering set of stereotypes.
[00:29:54.360]We are not above politics and money
[00:29:57.120]and the need to give our public what they want.
[00:30:01.770]That's okay.
[00:30:02.603]We shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge,
[00:30:04.470]we meaning our museums, our practices,
[00:30:07.770]our centers like this one,
[00:30:10.950]have our own limitations, own political realities.
[00:30:15.150]Just kind of acknowledge it once in a while.
[00:30:17.820]It's the adult thing to do.
[00:30:21.630]You know what else is an interesting story?
[00:30:24.840]That a formidable number of plains men
[00:30:26.730]and plains women, including here in Nebraska,
[00:30:29.730]have moved to the far right.
[00:30:32.370]Lots of them seem awfully curious about fascist ideas.
[00:30:35.910]They're pretty open
[00:30:36.743]to supporting insurrection or insurrectionists.
[00:30:40.080]They hate the FBI more than anyone ever did.
[00:30:43.530]Never saw that one coming.
[00:30:45.005](audience laughing)
[00:30:46.170]They also have a lot of unusual ideas
[00:30:47.910]about science and elections.
[00:30:50.250]I mean, that's really interesting.
[00:30:52.800]I would love to learn more about this.
[00:30:55.740]A worthy topic, it would seem,
[00:30:57.210]perhaps for a scholarly conference
[00:30:59.827]in one of the fine research universities in this region.
[00:31:04.230]But it's unlikely to happen.
[00:31:07.260]Here's what I want,
[00:31:08.093]to remember the things we left out
[00:31:10.020]and why we leave them out,
[00:31:11.790]that all of what we do is imperfect.
[00:31:13.680]We don't know everything.
[00:31:15.900]Level with our public as best we can.
[00:31:19.410]Lose the omniscient voice.
[00:31:22.350]And let's remember the teachings
[00:31:23.730]of the American philosopher Ted Lasso.
[00:31:26.377]"All people are different people."
[00:31:28.723](audience laughing)
[00:31:34.170]20 years after those months in Lincoln
[00:31:36.900]and Sioux Falls and Rapid City,
[00:31:39.600]I wrote a book with Robert Warrior about the movement.
[00:31:43.050]It ended with the movement and occupation
[00:31:45.120]a year before I showed up,
[00:31:46.620]which is to say, I wrote about things I never experienced,
[00:31:50.400]easier that way.
[00:31:51.300]Any writer will tell you that.
[00:31:54.240]Robert and I never wondered whose story it was
[00:31:56.460]or who had the right to tell it.
[00:31:59.160]It was obviously our story,
[00:32:00.660]and we would tell it our way.
[00:32:03.420]People told us this was crazy,
[00:32:04.950]writing a book critical about AIM.
[00:32:07.650]I knew those guys. I wasn't worried.
[00:32:10.680]What I knew wasn't just that AIM was imperfect.
[00:32:13.650]I knew the politics of Indian Country
[00:32:15.480]in the 1970s was fascinating and complicated
[00:32:18.690]and nothing like the binaries of cowboys and FBI agents
[00:32:23.460]and perfect Indians.
[00:32:25.770]We wanted that full range of perspectives in our account
[00:32:29.790]'cause it made for a better book, a more readable book,
[00:32:32.490]and most importantly, a more useful book.
[00:32:36.660]It's fashionable to talk about history
[00:32:38.520]as a thing to be known.
[00:32:40.560]I don't get it.
[00:32:42.090]Some of my friends critique "Killers of the Flower Moon"
[00:32:44.970]as being an Osage story.
[00:32:47.190]And it was sad
[00:32:48.030]the greatest living American film director made that movie
[00:32:51.270]instead of an Osage director.
[00:32:55.290]To me, the story of those murders are an American story,
[00:32:58.530]an Osage story, an American Indian story,
[00:33:02.130]a story of American capitalism.
[00:33:04.830]No one version could ever do it justice. It's too big.
[00:33:11.070]There should be many Osage narratives
[00:33:12.780]about the murders in the 1920s,
[00:33:15.060]because guess what?
[00:33:17.130]The Osage people have more than one view.
[00:33:20.310]Osage people are different people.
[00:33:24.150]I worry the constant uplift scholarship always conducted
[00:33:27.930]with a social justice messaging has a way
[00:33:31.950]of centralizing human experience,
[00:33:35.760]because there's almost nothing (indistinct).
[00:33:39.060]We're defined more by our differences than our agreements.
[00:33:45.420]Finally, I want to leave you with this.
[00:33:48.540]We don't get to choose our ancestors.
[00:33:50.820]We only get to choose how to think about them.
[00:33:55.050]My father died in August, 2021.
[00:33:58.530]Don't feel bad. He lived large and suffered little.
[00:34:01.980]When the obituary ran,
[00:34:03.330]it listed my white father as Choctaw.
[00:34:06.780]Why?
[00:34:07.613]Because, a few decades ago,
[00:34:09.090]he enrolled in the Choctaw Nation,
[00:34:11.940]because my paternal grandmother was related Choctaw.
[00:34:15.480]The farm we grew up in was allotment land.
[00:34:19.680]My sisters and I sort of knew all this
[00:34:22.020]but never thought about it growing up.
[00:34:24.789]He and his, he, Clovis,
[00:34:27.030]my dad and his siblings rarely talked about it either.
[00:34:30.870]They were white farmers in Dibble, Oklahoma.
[00:34:36.600]But in the '90s,
[00:34:40.590]my dad and his siblings started, became enrolled.
[00:34:44.820]He didn't suddenly become Mr. Choctaw or anything.
[00:34:47.340]It was just like a thing.
[00:34:48.420]And he has some Choctaw ancestry.
[00:34:52.140]He wanted to claim it.
[00:34:56.790]Still, when his death certificate said he was Choctaw
[00:35:02.160]and then later my Wikipedia entry changed
[00:35:04.650]and listed me as Comanche and Choctaw,
[00:35:07.113]that was really annoying.
[00:35:08.738](audience laughing)
[00:35:10.410]None of this was incorrect.
[00:35:11.820]It was technically true,
[00:35:14.217]but it wasn't right either.
[00:35:18.330]Then I started thinking, well,
[00:35:20.640]there's opportunity here.
[00:35:23.280]You know that famous Clash lyric?
[00:35:24.937]"Ha, you think it's funny, turning rebellion into money."
[00:35:30.510]For me, it was angst and discontent
[00:35:32.610]about my own identity,
[00:35:34.860]doubts about my own authenticity as a Comanche person.
[00:35:39.300]Even as I came to understand authenticity,
[00:35:42.600]in the words of Skip Gates,
[00:35:43.767]"As one of the founding lies of the 20th century."
[00:35:48.450]This was my great theme.
[00:35:50.490]My second book was almost titled,
[00:35:52.357]"The Suburban Comanche Way of Knowledge."
[00:35:54.690](audience laughing)
[00:35:55.770]And a much quoted line was something like,
[00:35:58.087]"Compared to us, the Sioux were a bunch of Girl Scouts."
[00:36:01.349](audience laughing)
[00:36:04.458]My jam is leaning into the reputation of the Comanche
[00:36:07.127]as the most notorious of all North American tribes.
[00:36:11.760]We really did kill more settlers than any other tribe.
[00:36:14.790]We really did roll back the Texas frontier for a while.
[00:36:20.069]And I love the fact
[00:36:21.180]that present day Comanches rarely dispute any
[00:36:24.870]of these things.
[00:36:31.050]And it was such a relief,
[00:36:33.090]as opposed to a lot
[00:36:34.110]of other Indians I won't name that pretend none
[00:36:37.260]of their ancestors ever did anything wrong.
[00:36:41.580]The other thing I was doing was writing a lot
[00:36:43.260]about being half white,
[00:36:44.460]even for a while trying to bring back the term half breed,
[00:36:48.840]another failed PCS project.
[00:36:50.720](audience laughing)
[00:36:53.160]So that was my brand,
[00:36:54.390]citizen of the most terrifying Indian tribe of all,
[00:36:57.660]from the suburbs with a white parent
[00:36:59.940]who writes essay questioning if he's even Indian.
[00:37:03.540]I was intrigued at the ways I might monetize
[00:37:06.330]this new fake Choctaw situation.
[00:37:08.498](audience laughing)
[00:37:10.650]Lots of recent scholarship argues
[00:37:12.780]that the five civilized tribes,
[00:37:15.180]now helpfully renamed on Twitter by Black Choctaws
[00:37:18.990]as the five slaveholding tribes,
[00:37:22.080]it was the Choctaw who were the cruelest
[00:37:24.000]and most enthusiastic slaveholders of all.
[00:37:28.050]So on some level,
[00:37:30.030]I'm now connected to the very worst Indian tribes ever.
[00:37:33.530](audience laughing)
[00:37:34.860]That's gotta be worth something, right?
[00:37:38.070]Well, monetizing, I don't know about that,
[00:37:40.440]but possibilities for intervention.
[00:37:44.310]Having given up on the big idea
[00:37:46.140]about social justice or revolution,
[00:37:49.590]I landed on a message
[00:37:52.650]that American Indians are fully human.
[00:37:55.950]It sounds corny,
[00:37:58.980]but it's also deceptively radical,
[00:38:01.620]because a people or a person
[00:38:03.360]who's only good isn't fully human.
[00:38:07.943]For 200,000 years,
[00:38:11.130]humans have always done spectacularly wonderful,
[00:38:14.100]generous and kind things
[00:38:16.500]and spectacularly evil and cruel things.
[00:38:19.380]That's who we are.
[00:38:22.877]And in this complicated political moment,
[00:38:26.400]people of color are expected
[00:38:27.870]to always be proud of their ancestors.
[00:38:31.260]Not so the white guys.
[00:38:33.840]I thought about
[00:38:34.673]a present day 20 something white American progressive,
[00:38:37.740]who, in my fictional example,
[00:38:39.930]has one side of her family, wealthy planters in the South
[00:38:44.687]before the Civil War
[00:38:47.040]and another side of her family
[00:38:48.810]who were industrialists in New York
[00:38:50.280]who owned Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
[00:38:53.760]And let's further stipulate, she's not,
[00:38:58.050]this person isn't responsible
[00:38:59.760]for the actions of her ancestors
[00:39:02.370]and that her family has awareness and regret,
[00:39:04.500]perhaps has even attempted
[00:39:05.880]to make reparations with some of them.
[00:39:08.640]Here's what I find interesting.
[00:39:10.620]It would feel completely unacceptable for this person,
[00:39:14.280]in our crowd,
[00:39:16.320]let's call her Chloe.
[00:39:19.628]It would be completely acceptable for Chloe
[00:39:22.350]to feel ashamed of her family background.
[00:39:25.680]In fact, it would be startling if Chloe said, "Yeah,
[00:39:28.770]I know my family's full of people who did bad things,
[00:39:31.170]but they do good things too.
[00:39:32.638]And I choose to celebrate that.
[00:39:33.971]I'm proud of my family,
[00:39:36.000]despite the slave owning
[00:39:37.290]and burning garment workers thing."
[00:39:40.050]Can you imagine?
[00:39:40.883](audience laughing)
[00:39:41.868]She'd be so much trouble for that.
[00:39:45.256]Why?
[00:39:46.089]And why is it that I would be expected
[00:39:47.910]to unambiguously celebrate being Comanche
[00:39:52.380]if my ancestors were stone cold killers
[00:39:55.350]who incidentally murdered more Indian and Mexicans
[00:39:57.990]than they did Americans,
[00:40:00.210]who built their empire on rape, murder and kidnapping?
[00:40:03.840]Of course, my ancestors did nice things too.
[00:40:06.150]Good people.
[00:40:07.980]Nobody's bad all the time.
[00:40:10.380]But how strange it would be
[00:40:12.420]if I said I was even a little ashamed of being Comanche.
[00:40:16.830]I'd be getting in so much trouble.
[00:40:19.853]I began to think I discovered
[00:40:22.140]another, higher level of white supremacy,
[00:40:24.870]that feeling shame for your ancestors was only available
[00:40:28.830]to white people.
[00:40:32.040]You remember a T-shirt
[00:40:33.270]that was popular right after 9/11
[00:40:35.880]that showed a photograph of a line
[00:40:37.280]of 19th century warriors on horseback,
[00:40:40.080]wearing the feathers and Winchesters.
[00:40:42.680]It read, "Homeland Security."
[00:40:45.990]It was funny,
[00:40:46.823]and it was also funny
[00:40:47.760]to see how many different kinds of people wore it,
[00:40:51.390]but even better and much less famous was another
[00:40:54.510]by the same creatives.
[00:40:56.280]It had a stark outline of a generic Indian
[00:40:58.620]in feathers and a choker.
[00:41:01.230]And it read, "I'm part white, but I can't prove it."
[00:41:04.519](audience laughing)
[00:41:05.610]I love that so much.
[00:41:07.260]You saw tons of white people
[00:41:08.610]wearing the Homeland Security T-shirt,
[00:41:10.590]but only Indians who wore this T-shirt.
[00:41:13.338]I'm part white but I can't.
[00:41:16.098]Brilliant.
[00:41:17.247]But I never thought
[00:41:19.020]I would ever have trouble proving I'm part white.
[00:41:23.026]So we should be skeptical of these frames and definitions
[00:41:25.980]that change with the wind
[00:41:27.117]but pretend they're more than they ever can,
[00:41:30.120]introduce human complexity to categories
[00:41:33.810]that will be renamed a few years down the line.
[00:41:37.110]Remember our blinders.
[00:41:38.670]Remember we always decided
[00:41:41.370]which lost stories we want to find
[00:41:44.340]and which we hope will stay buried forever.
[00:41:47.610]It's okay. Just do the best you can.
[00:41:51.210]Identity, yours, mine and America's defy taxonomy.
[00:41:55.530]They change, they lie.
[00:41:57.270]None of us are ever just one thing.
[00:41:59.850]Thank you for listening.
[00:42:01.218](audience clapping)
[00:42:14.311]I'll take three questions.
[00:42:15.650]Okay.
[00:42:16.483](audience laughing)
[00:42:18.035]Only three questions,
[00:42:18.868]so they have be really good questions, so.
[00:42:21.697]Comments, comments.
[00:42:24.311]Oh, that's unusual.
[00:42:27.270]Usually we discourage that but,
[00:42:29.050](audience laughing)
[00:42:30.802]so any questions or comments?
[00:42:38.470]Yeah, Shirley.
[00:42:39.620]So Leonard Peltier's still in prison,
[00:42:43.260]and every so often, there's another push to get him out.
[00:42:47.430]And now there's another push to get him out
[00:42:49.200]and not a pardon,
[00:42:52.200]but because of his health and his age.
[00:42:55.470]What do you think's gonna happen?
[00:42:59.460]Yeah, about Leonard Peltier,
[00:43:02.880]I know people have been working on his behalf.
[00:43:07.860]You know, as you said, first for a pardon.
[00:43:14.700]You know, the documented errors
[00:43:19.290]in his prosecution are extremely well established.
[00:43:23.220]He's old and infirm,
[00:43:25.543]and clearly, you know,
[00:43:30.720]one would hope his sentence could end,
[00:43:33.540]you know, be out of prison.
[00:43:37.560]The FBI lobby is very powerful.
[00:43:39.870]So every time it comes out, there's great pressure
[00:43:44.240]in not reversing that direction.
[00:43:48.270]I can't really predict,
[00:43:49.830]but I will tell you, in the summer of 2020,
[00:43:52.157]it's a very different situation.
[00:43:54.420]But the issue of the Washington NFL team was a dead letter
[00:43:58.770]because every avenue had come to an end,
[00:44:02.040]copyright, different things that we explored,
[00:44:06.000]and there was just no way forward.
[00:44:08.700]And then 2020 happened.
[00:44:10.400]Then we changed.
[00:44:11.348]So, one hopes that something like that could happen.
[00:44:20.220]Any questions, comments?
[00:44:27.714]You need to think?
[00:44:30.797]Yeah?
[00:44:31.687]Since you work at a museum,
[00:44:33.930]I'm curious if you could give an example,
[00:44:38.250]I used to work in a museum until recently as well.
[00:44:40.530]And it's so difficult, I feel like, to tell stories
[00:44:45.030]that are complex and compelling
[00:44:47.730]but also to tell them in the context where, you know,
[00:44:50.250]an average viewer is gonna spend 30 seconds
[00:44:53.160]with a work of art or an object.
[00:44:55.410]Can you give an example
[00:44:56.460]or some ideas of like, when have you seen that done well,
[00:45:00.000]a museum that tackles historical complexity in a way
[00:45:04.020]that felt satisfying and be revelatory?
[00:45:09.270]Yeah, you're right. It is hard.
[00:45:10.887]And I think with big museums like Smithsonian Museums,
[00:45:15.480]we're all kind of scrambling,
[00:45:17.838]because audiences have changed so much.
[00:45:21.750]Audience have so much more information.
[00:45:25.290]Museums, supposedly, are still respected
[00:45:27.390]more than other institutions.
[00:45:29.580]But you know, that's not a given either.
[00:45:31.680]So I think in my work, I'm always trying to,
[00:45:37.276]you know, this is why writing is so important for me
[00:45:39.347]'cause I would write these essays
[00:45:42.150]in like obscure Canadian art journals or art catalogs,
[00:45:46.950]and you know, it's really thinking out loud partly.
[00:45:50.250]And you find other people are looking at it,
[00:45:53.940]asking the same questions.
[00:45:56.310]And so I think what some museums do is
[00:46:01.230]they have their idea of what they wanna say
[00:46:02.577]and it's all about how to say it,
[00:46:04.560]but there's not enough space for the public
[00:46:07.560]to question it or think about it differently
[00:46:10.350]or see that it's not all settled,
[00:46:13.080]that as you say, it's complex and nuances.
[00:46:16.260]So you know, for me, it's about trying to trust
[00:46:20.850]who you're writing to
[00:46:21.900]or when I'm making an exhibition who that public is.
[00:46:25.230]And you know, people come into DC
[00:46:29.730]who don't spend all their time thinking about museums,
[00:46:34.290]they think the Smithsonian is like one museum, right?
[00:46:37.020]But it's actually a dozen on the National Mall,
[00:46:38.780]all of them like vast and high quality and all that.
[00:46:43.440]So instead of making an exhibition
[00:46:46.050]where I'm thinking most visitors will have two hours,
[00:46:49.830]you know, to take in just one show in the big museum
[00:46:54.295]with other things,
[00:46:55.680]see it as a gift if they have 20 minutes,
[00:46:58.950]10 minutes even,
[00:46:59.783]and see what you can do in 10 minutes and respect that.
[00:47:04.740]So I think that's what, you know, I try to do
[00:47:07.500]in my work is to just think,
[00:47:12.480]there are people out there who know a lot more than you
[00:47:14.820]and if you somehow are aligned with visitors
[00:47:18.870]who are curious and wanna know more,
[00:47:21.510]it's different than, you know,
[00:47:23.070]a lecture to a captive audience.
[00:47:25.230]So that's how I try to approach it.
[00:47:34.553]Other questions, comments?
[00:47:41.058]Last comment or a question.
[00:47:42.720]It could be either, Gabe.
[00:47:44.310]That was the last comment.
[00:47:45.750]Oh.
[00:47:47.888](audience laughing)
[00:47:49.020]Would you like to ask a question, Gabe?
[00:47:51.286](audience laughing)
[00:47:54.176]That was a question.
[00:47:55.838]So, wow, just burned through a question, Gabe.
[00:47:58.478](audience laughing)
[00:48:00.030]I think we may have one more,
[00:48:01.470]if anybody has anything?
[00:48:05.070]If not, let's give Paul Chaat Smith,
[00:48:08.623](audience clapping)

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2024 Great Plains conference: Paul Chaat Smith

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