The Untitled Native Project

by Brutis Baez, Amber Kay Ball, Trevino Brings Plenty, Leland Butler, Olivia Camfield, Robert Franklin, David Harrelson, Anthony Hudson, Woodrow Hunt, LaRonn Katchia, Steph Littlebird, Kanani Miyamoto 

Time-Based Art Festival by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art 
Sunday, September 6th
[reflections provided by Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney]

Unlike so many of the other performances featuring one or a couple artists performing solo, and/or in partnership, this evening was a compendium of creative projects and performances, each one involving many moving parts and, often, entire teams of people. Therefore, I don’t think the reflection style I’ve used while covering TBA:25 up to this point is quite right here. Additionally, it was quite dark, so my preferred method of note-taking wasn’t available to me. But even without notes, I find myself returning to so many moments throughout the evening—moments of joy, of grief, of heartbreak, embodiment, and community—and I think the best way to honor the energy put forth is to simply present the list of artists with links to their projects along with concise, affectual reflections which might help direct you to your own areas of interest. 

[ Photo, Robert Franklin ]

Brutis Baez (Warm Springs/Wasco/Paiute)

Film director; Musician; Writer; Producer; Actor; Mentor; Operations Manager, KWSO Radio in Warm Springs

Brutis’ Films  |  Brutis’ Video & Music (Bigg B) Projects  |  Brutis’ Instagram  |  KWSO

Accessible, gregarious, kind, my first thought when Brutis took the stage was, I bet everybody who spends time with him leaves feeling good. A film-maker, music-maker, community-maker, language-maker, who seems as passionate about making work as he is about making work with other people, about mentoring and sharing and passing knowledge freely. 

He talks about film production, past and current projects, and shows us a joyful satire(?), a  two-minute film he directed, SPAM is Life— “A short film produced by the youth of the Warm Springs Community Action Team about the gathering of every Native’s first food—SPAM.”

Amber Kay Ball (Dakubetede, Shasta, Modoc, Klamath)

Artist; Advocate; Theatre Maker

Amber’s Theatre Work  |  Amber’s Visual Art  |  Amber’s Instagram  |  KWSO

Self-described as a “theatre maker, visual artist, and community-based advocate. As a contemporary Native multi-practice artist, Amber uses theatre, multimedia, and beadwork as mediums for sharing stories, truths, laughter and joy. These mediums allow them to critically explore, honor, and weave Native pasts, presents, and futures in a just and liberated format. Amber studied theater arts and Native American Studies at the University of Oregon where they were able to study theatrical arts abroad in London, England.”

Another artist for whom mentorship and community intersect squarely at the center of their arts practice.

Trevino Brings Plenty (Lakota)

Poet; Musician; Archivist; Meme Maker

Trevino’s Books  |  Trevino’s Memes  |  Trevino’s Instagram  |  Trevino’s X Account  | Trevino’s Pretendian Article Archive

From his website: “Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject.”

Before highlighting the next artist, I want to talk about memes for a minute. And also about the collective pressure to categorize every mundane thing ever since (seemingly) social media shifted to being all about algorithms. Algorithms rely on categorization, and categorizing/naming one’s content results in more eyeballs (read surveillance). We have been trained to prize commodification and reach over privacy and safety.

I mention this naming/categorizing thing because, in the same way that calling a thing what it is doesn’t make that thing special, meme-ifying something doesn’t make it clever. You have to actually be clever to make words on a photo funny. 

I continue to be baffled by the see-say nature of media these days. It manufactures the compulsion to perpetuate hashtag-ified nomenclatures to describe and therefore commodify even the most ordinary things — #GirlBoss, the name for a woman in a leadership role; #MomLife, to indicate that the content is made my a mom who is alive and doing things; #dogsofinstagram, pictures of dogs posted on Instagram, etc. — and I struggled to understand the purpose of the word ‘meme’ for, well, a very long time.

Look at this meme—we should do something like this for our client—colleagues would say in the social media ‘fishbowl’ of the big Tennessee ad-agency I worked at, and then show me a photo with a try-hard caption overlay. It’s a good thing I have botox now. I should have then. My face’s responses were real loud, even though what came out of my mouth was, simply, “Hmm, something to consider.”

I was so frustrated by what I considered the unnecessary naming and categorization of a thing humans have been doing since time immemorial—making clever ha-ha’s out of everyday things (hello, New Yorker cartoons)—that, for a long time, I refused to even call a meme by its name. Instead, I would called it a captioned photo. Yes, I was stubborn. And it wasn’t until I began noticing trends of captioned photos being created for specifically activist storytelling narratives that my perspective began shifting. I started separating what I considered dumb and pointless memes into the ‘captioned photo’ or ‘infographic’ (I hate this word as much as I hate ‘listicle’) categories, and captioned photos which seemed to act as accessible modes of storytelling whose composition intersected at the center of art, pop culture, language, and criticism, into the ‘meme’ category. Trevino Brings Plenty’s memes about Pretendians falls into the latter. Not that it’s up to me to gatekeep the word ‘meme,’ but I feel like a name is something to rise to and too many captioned photos just don’t.

One of my favorite Trevino memes is of a white man in a corporate blue oxford shirt? jacket? with a big smile on his face, looking very ‘wholesome,’ surrounded by forest animals. The caption overlay reads, HOW THE PRETENDIAN SEES THEMSELVES AND EXPECTS YOU TO SEE THEM, and gives very hunter-as-Bambi’s bestie vibes. 

The meme format allows for the communication of big, often critical, ideas, quickly and easily and in a lighthearted way, and I think the ‘lighthearted’ part is key here because self-reflection is almost never the result when the vehicle of a message is ill-humored judgment or overt disdain. Disdain but make it fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For the record, Wikipedia states that a meme is: 

“… an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.” [emphasis mine]

What of Trevino’s meme work, which is utilizing this unit for carrying cultural ideas…with a mimicked theme to interrogate the idea of mimicry? Picture a picture of somebody standing in front of a mirror, with a mirror behind them, reflections reflecting into eternity. Picture the GIF (another thing I find strange is naming an entire category of short, looping videos, by, simply, their file type—in that case, why not call all static images ‘jpegs’ or whatever, instead of ‘photos’?) of the science-y looking guy floating in space making the “brain blown” motion with the galaxy expanding behind him. 

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I feel like leveraging this ‘unit’ of mimicry as the vehicle for interrogating mimicry is, like, total genius. Much smarter than the photos my colleagues used to send me which pictured anybody doing anything with a me/also me caption overlay in an attempt to cleverly communicate that people can be two things at the same time. Classic tropes in the me/also me category include diet culture (me: on a diet / also me: shoving cake in my mouth); relationship styles (me: not codependent / also me: thinking you don’t love me when you leave me on read); and consumerism (me: I’m broke! / also me: swiping a credit card); among other things like racism, sexism, all matter of phobias, politics, etc., etc., etc., etc etc etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetceetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetce

Point being, mimicry done with intention/interrogation = art

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Leland Butler (Grand Ronde, Siletz, and Yurok)

Photographer; Artist

About Leland Butler  |  Leland’s Instagram

I’m always thrilled when somebody who seems easygoing and polite comes out of the gate with challenging and provocative art. The video performance piece that Leland shared—a combination of self-portraiture, contextual imagery, and title cards displaying messages like “free Palestine”—felt determined, unrelenting, hungry. It was disquieting in the most thrilling way. 

“Leland Butler (Grand Ronde/Siletz/Yurok) is a photographer and artist. Curiosity about self, land, and people led Butler to photography a decade ago. His sophisticated and often mysterious compositions explore the duality of light and shadow. Butler is the recipient of the 2024 Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship.” – Bio via PICA’s website

David Harrelson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde)

Storyeller; THPO Program Manager

David’s Professional contact

“David Harrelson is the Cultural Resources Department Manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. He is a Grand Ronde tribal member from the Bean-Menard-Sengretta family. He was raised by a mountaineer and grandparents who worked in education and health care. Among his lineal Oregon ancestors of recent memory he counts the owner of a logging company, a mobile butcher, chief of police, and Kalapuya headman. David is active in his community and currently serves on the Oregon State Advisory Committee for Historic Preservation (SACHP) as well as the Oregon Arts Commission. He is a former board member of the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, OR, and has previously been a conversation leader for Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, where he led sessions on the topics of monuments and place. Working for over ten years in the field of cultural resources, David continues to champion the protection of archaeology sites, maintenance of ancestral lifeways, and proliferation of indigenous art forms throughout his Tribe’s homelands centered in Western Oregon.” – Bio via PICA’s website

David’s talk began with the reading of a historical timeline, but quickly transformed into a more conversational interaction with the audience. To conclude his portion of the evening, David performs a song—a chant—which began a capella, eventually building momentum with the sound of accompanying drums and other instruments in the background. At the end, what I originally mistook for a backing track, was revealed as a group of live musicians who entered the main space from behind the closed door of the annex.

I think the ‘backing track’ as a theme of cultural appropriation is critical. (Thinking about Indiginaeity as a ‘backing track’ for Disney, etc.)

Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz)

Performance Artist; Writer

Anthony’s Website  |  Anthony’s Writing  |  Anthony’s Video Work

Anthony Hudson MC’d the evening as the beloved Carla Rossi. She was in full fashion, sporting a selection of precious bowl cut wigs in a variety of colors, and multiple hip-length jackets which, combined with the bowl cuts, had me yearning for a fashion moment that either never existed or, which I tragically missed while trying to hairspray my bangs upright in the rural American South. Back then, my hair was straight as a pin if you can believe it. And a little bit blonde.

What is that feeling? The feeling of nostalgia for something that hasn’t yet happened—nostalgia for a future beyond a horizon you can’t quite make out … is this the stuff of magical thinking? Of world-building? I typed nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened into Duck Duck Go (because FUCK Google!) and this is what I found: 

The comment about a desire to connect with “a past that you never could have experienced” gestures a little too pointedly, for me, toward appropriation and fetishization. Enter, Trevino’s Pretendian memes. 

“One thing’s for sure: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” – Hugo

LaRonn Katchia (Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute)

Director; Cinematographer; Editor; Associate Programmer/Advisor/Juror for the Indigenous Films Program at the Oscar-qualifying Bend Film Festival

LaRonn’s Website  |  LaRonn’s Video Work  |  LaRonn’s Instagram

“LaRonn Katchia is a director, cinematographer, and editor. Some of LaRonn’s achievements include: Shooting and editing PBS’s Roadtrip Nation: Native Way Forward, a behind the scenes segment for FX’s hit show Reservation Dogs, both projects in collaboration with Ryan Redcorn and Buffalo Nickel Creative. 

LaRonn is also the Associate Programmer/Advisor/Jury for the Indigenous Films Program at the Oscar-qualifying Bend Film Festival. Recently, LaRonn and Bendfilm director Todd Looby hosted acting legends Gary Farmer & Tatanka Means, showcasing their work alongside the Warm Springs tribal membership. 

Today, in collaboration with the Warm Springs Community Action Team, LaRonn is working on his first feature documentary about the transformation of a 125 year old, historic Commissary Building as it is moved and restored into a small business incubator to serve tribal entrepreneurs on the Warm Springs Reservation.” – Bio from PICA’s website

Steph Littlebird (Kalapuya, Chinook)

Artist; Curator; Writer; Illustrator

Steph’s Website  |  Steph’s Gallery  |  Book, My Powerful Hair  |  Steph’s Instagram

Like Brutis, Steph’s energy was warm, welcoming, and she had a great sense of humor. A prolific art maker, Steph is working on a children’s book, maintains a fine art practice, and also creates digital illustration work which “often examines issues related to Native identity, cultural resilience, and responsible land ownership.” The part of her talk that stuck with me most was when she shared a sampling of her activist artwork—bright illustrations featuring figures based on Disney characters, based on actual Indigenous people, which subvert the sunny stories Disney would have us believe about our country, telling stories instead of appropriation, exploitation, and colonialism. 

There’s something of the meme here, in the activist approach to using mimicry and visual storytelling to communicate complex ideas, lightly. If you go to Steph’s Instagram page, you’ll see a few of my favorites—a bastardized “Land O Fakes” (took me a few glances to realize it didn’t say Land O Lakes) package; several comic-like short conversation clips between Steph’s version of Disney’s Pocahontas and John Smith, Pocahontas sussing John whose cluelessness is almost pitiable; and even a figurative graph which corrects Disney’s incorrect (and incredible inappropriate) characterization of Pocahontas as an adult woman with sexual agency at the time that she met John Smith. In fact, the very period of her life that Disney’s film claims to represent would only be accurately portraying Pocahontas if she were illustrated as a 10-12 year old child. This is less about the problematics of Disney, though—the Disney story is just a vehicle for delivering the painful message that the over-sexualization of Native Women leads to catastrophically high instances of sexual violence and murder. 

Kanana Miyamoto (Hawaiian)

Artist; Primtmaker; Teacher; Curator; p:ear Arts Coordinator

Kanani’s Instagram  |  p:ear  

“Important to Miyamoto’s work as an artist is sharing and honoring her mixed cultural background to represent her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. She also explores topics such as institutional critique and hopes to create critical conversations around cultural authenticity in the arts. Miyamoto is a printmaker and uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large scale print installations and murals. In addition to being a practicing artist, she is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker.” – Bio via PICA’s website

Kanani’s talk centered around the commodification of symbols, highlighting the appropriation of Tiki culture by two iconic Portland bars—The Alibi and Hale Pele. She read from drink menus she had created based on real menus, and riffed on the absurdity of cultural symbols so white-washed. 

***

Themes of iteration and mimicry as activist modalities ran through several of these artists’ work and the sharpness of the criticality left an impression. I left wanting more—more from our politicians, more from our institutions, and more than land acknowledgements, the performativity of which leave a taste like tin in my mouth every time I hear them. 

But no use in spending energy on the wailings of a white sympathizer who isn’t doing much herself to change the status quo. Because, how embarrassing of me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I did manage to capture a few notes on the left despite the dark, here. The page on the right is filled with notes from a meeting the following day about my thesis project but, at first, I couldn’t tell that it was from a different occasion. I love when that happens—when I can’t tell where one thing stops and another begins. 

Learn more about all the artists involved in The Untitled Native Project here.