Rabbits and Flying Warriors: The Postindian Imagery of Jim Denomie

American Indian Studies Center at UCLA. 3220 Campbell Hall, Box 951548, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1548. Tel: 310-825-7315; Fax: 310-206-7060; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.books.aisc.ucla.edu/aicrj.html

Y

27

Artists; American Indian History; United States History; Oral Tradition; American Indian Culture; American Indians; Misconceptions; Stereotypes; Social Attitudes; Activism; Cultural Influences; Animals

0161-6463

In an art world dominated by non-Indian curators and experts, being "Indian" was confined to an ethnographic fiction of storytellers, dancers, and medicine men attired in traditional clothing and regalia, in which the colonization of indigenous lands and peoples is left to the margins like an Edward S. Curtis portrait. These are the notions about history and indigenous culture that persist, even in a post-Red Power society, which Jim Denomie critiques and satirizes in a body of work that looks at Indian stereotypes and other misconceptions from the vantage point of growing up in the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the climactic years of the Indian protest movement, when the American Indian Movement's (AIM's) 1973 confrontation with federal forces at Wounded Knee blazed across American television screens. In this article, the author talks about the postindian imagery of Jim Denomie. What Denomie adds to the visual discourse on contemporary American Indian life and society is his identification, as an urban denizen, with Rabbit, a character that he acknowledges is inspired by the Ojibwe trickster Nanabozho, who has a prominent role in the oral tradition and who appears regularly in Denomie's paintings. (Contains 11 figures and 52 notes.)

ERIC

2012

EJ960103