Yearly Archives: 2019

‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’

Tom Kelley/Getty Images

Jonny Auping | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,447 words)

Until very recently in its relatively young life, television was considered to have the same creative merit as any other household appliance — perhaps less, since the device itself was referred to as the “Idiot Box” and “chewing gum for the eyes.” Having a passionate debate about television would have been like having a passionate debate about the microwave.

But in her new book, I Like to Watch, Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic, makes the same argument she’s been making, consciously and unconsciously, for 20 years: Television is worth thinking and talking about.

I Like to Watch is a collection of essays that Nussbaum has written, most of them originally for New York magazine and the New Yorker, about television shows that served as cultural touchstones in their time as well as short-lived programs that had more to say than anybody but their loyal fan bases ever realized.

Taken as one, Nussbaum’s essays represent her perspectives and experiences traveling through decades of TV shows that were intentionally and unintentionally commenting on the moments they were being created in. Her writing doesn’t necessarily demand that you take her point of view as much as it brings to focus how clearly you could form your own point of view through a deeper examination of the characters, plots, and themes of the shows you love. I Like to Watch is, fundamentally, an argument for television as art. Read more…

Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible

The Manic Street Preachers at Castle roundabout, London, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

David Evans | The Holy Bible | Bloomsbury Academic | May 2019 | 17 minutes (2.781 words)

 

Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakin’ Stevens.

But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-who-do-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labor Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. “Things Can Only Get Better,” as D:Ream helpfully put it.

Read more…

“Set Up For Failure”: How Iran Captured 10 US Sailors at Farsi Island

Riverine Command Boats (RCB) 802 and 805 participate in a bi-lateral exercise with Kuwait naval forces in the Arabian Gulf. Photo by US Navy via Sipa USA

Despite the United States Navy’s insistence that “U.S. Navy Forces deployed globally are ready in all respects,” ProPublica’s ongoing investigation into the Navy’s combat readiness has revealed otherwise.

In the latest installment, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, and T. Christian Miller report on how failures up and down the Navy’s chain of command, coupled with a toxic “can’t say no” leadership culture, contributed to 10 US sailors getting captured by Iran in January, 2016, after navigational and mechanical glitches put their ill-suited vessel into Iran’s territorial waters.

In the wake of the Farsi Island incident, the outlines of the Navy’s fumbles were widely reported. But ProPublica reconstructed the failed mission, and the Navy’s response to it, using hundreds of pages of previously unreported confidential Navy documents, including the accounts of sailors and officers up and down the chain of command. Those documents reveal that the 10 captured sailors were forced out on dangerous missions they were not prepared for. Their commanders repeatedly dismissed worries about deficiencies in manpower and expertise.

Foley spotted a blue flag atop one of the boats. He pulled out a Navy reference manual. The flag belonged to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Foley shouted that the men were Iranians.

Nartker was holding up a wrench and pointing at his engine to indicate to the Iranians that his boat was in need of repair.

Inside the engine room, Escobedo made quick work of the repairs on the water pump and then started up the engines. With each movement, the more maneuverable Iranian boats blocked him and the men aboard them racked their weapons. He could see them squeezing their triggers.

“Stop boat!” they yelled. “Stop boat!”

Nartker decided to ignore the shouting men.

“Go!” he yelled at Escobedo.

Escobedo believed that if he followed the order, the Iranians would begin firing. He thought the rounds would cut clean through their boat. Someone was going to get killed. Rather than gunning the boat, Escobedo simply looked at Nartker: “Sir.”

Nartker later told Navy investigators that he had considered grabbing his M4 assault rifle and trying to shoot his way out. But he thought that if he began shooting he could start a war. He had never received a briefing on the region from the Navy, but he had been reading The Economist magazine. He knew about the looming nuclear accord.

Nartker’s superior officers had ignored protests. They had assigned him a mission beyond the capabilities of the gunboats. And they ordered him to proceed, even knowing about the shoddy equipment and the late start.

It was wrong to punish him, when so many others shared responsibility. Nartker, Fuselier wrote, “was set up for failure.”

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How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives

Amy Roh/The Hastings Tribune via AP

A PhD might help land someone a teaching job, but it does not afford them a livable wage. Rather than a respectable salary, professors at many universities and private colleges earn a small hourly wage, often less than the legal minimum wage. They have no health insurance, have to float classroom to classroom, receiving their semester schedules right before the term starts, and teach at multiple schools, often racing between campuses, to cobble together an income. Others sleep in their classrooms or cars, unable to afford rent on their adjunct wage. For Splinter, Hamilton Nolan spends time at Miami Dade College, one of the largest colleges in the US, to see how their dedicated adjunct educators have unionized, and whether their efforts can earn them and adjuncts around the country any financial and emotional stability.

…The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.

So what do adjuncts’ daily lives look like?

“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”

She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage.

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Those Limits Were Not Hindrances: An Interview with Megan Pugh

Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

During his 40-year career, Leon Redbone was a musician for whom the past was never past and the persona was as important as the music. But what about his real name? And where did he come from? “That’s a memoir question,” he told one journalist. “I don’t answer memoir questions.” For the Oxford American, poet and prose writer Megan Pugh spoke to Redbone’s family and acquaintances to paint the most robust, reliable portrait we have of this compelling musical mystery. The story, “Vessel of Antiquity,” came out in the Spring 2019 issue with tragically fitting timing. Redbone died on May 30th, just a few months later.

While “Vessel” solves certain mysteries, it deepens the more important ones. While tryiing to understand what drew this expatriated Armenian to America’s musical past, the author captures the essence of the person — hilarious, kind, driven to live as his authentic self — and captures the sound and meaning of the music as only the best writers can. With incredible narrative skill and poetic sensibility, the story seeks the truth without taking the fun out of Redbone’s painstakingly constructed identity; more proof that poets often make the best prose writers. Pugh spoke with me about writing and Redbone via email.

***

How did this story start for you? Were you a fan of Redbone’s?

I wanted to understand why Leon Redbone’s live performances were so astonishingly good, and so moving. I saw him play in San Francisco in 2008 and 2011, and after both shows, I emailed a dear friend — a historian living across the country — about how urgently we needed to discuss the wondrous things Leon Redbone was doing with time: not just playing the old tunes, but also talking about long-dead musicians as though they were alive, whistling along to recordings, noting the presence of an onstage trashcan that seemed vaguely like the dustbin of history. (In hindsight, “discuss” probably meant “listen to me be very excited while I repeat all the details I can remember.”)

Years passed, Redbone retired, and no one had published the kind of serious, career retrospective he deserved, something that did justice to his art. When I reached out to Redbone’s publicist, Jim Della Croce, in 2017, he encouraged me to write one. Over a series of phone calls, Jim also told me wonderful stories about spending time with Leon. The piece began in fandom, with plenty of solitary research, but it moved along because so many people who knew Leon Redbone — friends, band members, family — were so generous with their memories.

Some of the best music stories start with that sort of passionate fandom, the urge to understand and honor someone wondrous. But part of Redbone’s legacy is the mystery he creates about himself. Did the people you talked to put limits on what they’d say about his origins?

Yes. Redbone was a very private person, and his friends were loyal— as friends should be. When I asked the blues singer Paul Geremia if Redbone had ever talked about his family’s history, for example, Geremia simply replied: “That’s personal.” Other folks, even if they’d known Redbone for years, understood that they weren’t supposed to ask about his life before he’d become Leon Redbone — or that if they got close to asking, he’d avoid the topic. Dan Levinson, who played clarinet with Redbone, remembered asking “something like ‘Are you fluent in any other languages,'” to which Redbone would reply, “‘Yes, all languages.'” Those limits never struck me as hindrances — they were information. And I was interested in other information, too: how Redbone worked, what it was like to be out on the road with him or in the recording studio, whether my developing sense of him seemed right to people who’d know.

I should be clear that by the time I became a Redbone fan, it was pretty easy to find his birthplace and given name (Nicosia, Cyprus, and Dickran Gobalian): George Gamester had written about them in the Toronto Star back in 1986. Those details led me to others. But as I learned more about the Gobalian family’s history — Redbone’s father survived the Armenian genocide, and “Leon” was the name of the last king of Armenia — I worried about what to include. Should I follow the example of the pianist Tom Roberts, who told me that when people tried to talk with him about Redbone’s origins, he’d just plug his ears and sing? So many people had been careful not to violate Redbone’s privacy, and I wanted to be careful too. I sought advice from friends — one a professional philosopher, another a longtime journalist. They told me that this information would not harm anyone; that I was going to share it in a respectful context; that it might generate interest, knowledge, and understanding; that I’d talked about this history with Redbone’s wife, Beryl Handler, and younger daughter, Ashley; that this is how profiles work. But I ran the details by the family one more time anyway, just to be sure.

It’s interesting that you sought a philosopher’s counsel, because a project like this presents the clear ethical issues you describe, but it also begs other questions about how sharing this personal information influences listeners. If his identity and performance were, as your story says, as important as his music, does knowing Redbone’s other identity change the experience of his music?

That’s a tough one, and I wouldn’t want to presume to answer it for other people. I’m still moved by Redbone’s work for the same reasons I’ve always loved him — his sly panache, that voice, the way he breaks the rules of time — but research and writing have deepened my experience and helped me understand it. Yet there’s so much about Redbone I don’t know, including how appropriate it is to think of his life before he was publicly Leon Redbone as an “other identity.” I like that uncertainty. I like that he kept audiences focused on his art.

His death, though, and the poor health that preceded it, have changed what I hear. On some level, his records were already raising the dead, but I wish this didn’t now include him. I never met him, but it felt oddly intimate to have so many long and sometimes heartfelt conversations with people who cared about him enough to try to help some woman they’d never met write an article. I suppose that process amplified the feelings of simultaneous closeness and distance that I love in his work — the past brought back, the past you’ll never quite get. But also, I’ve just been thinking about these people — who know him not just as an artist, but as a person whom they’ve lost — a lot.

You also mention how no one had published a serious career retrospective before. Was the limited number of secondary sources a challenge?

I don’t want to imply that there was a lack of writing about Redbone. There’s quite a bit, and I found it incredibly helpful to read many, many profiles, record reviews, and interviews from the 1970s on — especially since, by the time I began working on the piece, Redbone’s health was too poor to allow for an interview. What I read didn’t do what I wanted to do, but that was okay — it meant that there was room. And though no one else was writing about Redbone’s career at length when he retired, the folks at Riddle Films premiered a wonderful documentary short, Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone, last year, with stories about Redbone’s emergence on the Toronto scene and some beautiful, more recent footage.

Some of my favorite prose writers are poets, including Hanif Abdurraqib and Denis Johnson, and after seeing the way you articulate ideas and use language — I had to read this with a pencil to mark the margins of the pages — I wasn’t surprised to learn that you are, too. How do your poetry and prose inform each other? What challenges does writing in two forms present? 

That’s nice to hear, thank you! Both genres, for me, involve a kind of obsessive attention. Both come from a desire to find a language for something at times when that language might not be immediately evident. Whatever I’m writing, I tend to enjoy thinking about the ways that — to borrow from Kenneth Koch — one train may hide another, or one experience may haunt another. I tend to feel very attached to the sentence, as a form, and the kind of wonderful fragmentary play at which many poets I admire excel never comes easily to me. But I’m mostly okay with that. I like sentences.

Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion

Illustration by Homestead

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,128 words)

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water’s edge. They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Casey Newton, William Langewiesche, Sarah Miller, Hafizah Geter, and Shannon Keating.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

‘Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way the Gorgon Stare Did.’

Mikkel William / Getty

Sam Jaffe Goldstein | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,946 words)

Drones have come to define the United States’ forever war, the so-called war on terror. The expansion of drone systems developed by the military into new territories — including the continental United States — embodies this era’s hyper-paranoid ethos: new threats are ever imminent, conflict is always without resolution. At the same time, non-militarized drones have entered civilian life in a number of ways, from breathtaking cinematography to flight control at Heathrow airport. There are many avid documenters of this new technology, but no one seems to understand its many facets quite like Arthur Holland Michel, founder and co-director of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone, which catalogs the growing use of drones around the world. Now, Holland Michel has written Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, a book of startling revelations about drone surveillance in the United States.

Holland Michel has lived and breathed drone technology for the last six years, but nothing quite shocked him like the technology of Wide Angle Motion Imagery (WAMI). WAMI greatly expands the power that a camera attached to a drone can have; it is able to watch and record a much greater area while also tracking multiple specific targets within that area. In his book Holland Michel lays out how scientists and engineers created this surveillance technology through a Manhattan-project like mission. The name — a little too on the nose — that the scientists decided to give their new invention was “Gorgon Stare,” after the terrifying mythological creature whose mere glance could turn you to stone. Even from the very beginning, Gorgon Stare’s creators knew that its power would extend beyond its original stated purpose — to help prevent IED attack and track insurgents across conflict zones. Now, proponents of WAMI are finding uses for it in civilian life, and Holland Michel argues that the public must be involved in any decision before it is deployed above us. I met up with Arthur on a beautiful Spring day (perfect for flying drones) to discuss this profoundly troubling technology, how to prevent its worst potential from being realized, and maybe — just maybe — how drones can be used for good. Read more…

Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women

Illustration by Homestead

Caroline Criado Perez | An excerpt adapted from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Harry N. Abrams | 22 minutes (5,929 words)

In the 1983 film Yentl, Barbra Streisand plays a young Jewish woman in Poland who pretends to be a man in order to receive an education. The film’s premise has made its way into medical lore as “Yentl syndrome,” which describes the phenomenon whereby women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men. Sometimes, Yentl syndrome can prove fatal.

If I were to ask you to picture someone in the throes of a heart attack, you most likely would think of a man in his late middle age, possibly overweight, clutching at his heart in agony. That’s certainly what a Google image search offers up. You’re unlikely to think of a woman: heart disease is a male thing. But this stereotype is misleading. A recent analysis of data from 22 million people from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia found that women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are 25% more likely to suffer a heart attack than men in the same income bracket.

Since 1989, cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in US women and, following a heart attack, women are more likely to die than men. This disparity in deaths has been the case since 1984, and young women appear to be particularly at risk: in 2016 the British Medical Journal reported that young women were almost twice as likely as men to die in hospital. This may be in part because doctors aren’t spotting at-risk women: in 2016, the American Heart Association also raised concerns about a number of risk-prediction models “commonly used” in patients with acute coronary syndrome, because they were developed in patient populations that were at least two-thirds male. The performance of these risk-prediction models in women “is not well established.”

Common preventative methods may also not work as well in women. Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) has been found to be effective in preventing a first heart attack in men, but a 2005 paper found that it had a “nonsignificant” effect in women aged between forty-five and sixty-five. Prior to this study, the authors noted, there had been “few similar data in women.” A more recent study from 2011 found that not only was aspirin ineffective for women, it was potentially harmful “in the majority of patients.” Similarly, a 2015 study found that taking a low dose of aspirin every other day “is ineffective or harmful in the majority of women in primary prevention” of cancer or heart disease. Read more…

‘Women Created Our Worlds:’ Native Art Reclaims Its Power

Parka, Artic and Subarctic, ca. 1890-1910. Image: John Bigelow Taylor. Collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  7 minutes ( 2,039 words)

The final report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is 1,071 pages of 2,380 people — from survivors to their family members to community Knowledge Keepers — outlining how colonialism’s resolve to split First Nations communities from their culture has led to gendered violence that continues to this day. “To put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society,” one commissioner said. “This is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders to account.” That involves voting for those (preferably Indigenous, preferably female) politicians who support this dismantling, not to mention hiring Indigenous women, especially for positions of power. Instead, Canadians quibbled over whether or not the whole thing could be categorized as a genocide. The response was a chef’s kiss, a perfect example for why the inquiry had to be conducted in the first place: Indigenous women, women who originally had as much power as men, who imbued their community’s art with this power, are universally overlooked. Except this time it’s in the public record.

A third of the people cited in the report were allowed to testify in the form of art, which ended up in the National Inquiry’s Legacy Archive, a collection of more than 340 pieces by more than 800 people that serves as a historical record of myriad Indigenous identities. “We characterize these expressions, through art, as the act of ‘calling forth,’” the report explained. “This includes calling forth the legacies of those who no longer walk among us; calling forth awareness that leads to concrete action.” Calling forth also confronts the embarrassing (and persistent) colonial tradition of ignoring Indigenous voices. Of, for instance, starting public events by acknowledging the First Nations land on which they are being held, but without actually providing the First Nations people much of a space for their work. But Indigenous artists, women in particular, are refusing to be shut out; see the recently announced Netflix partnership with three Indigenous Canadian organizations or the first major North American retrospective of Native women’s work, Hearts of Our People, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “It has to be said that none of our communities need an exhibition at a fancy art museum to tell them that their women are important and what their women do is important,” cocurator Teri Greeves tells me. “This exhibition needs to happen in an art museum for the broader audience so, hopefully — my prayer — that they understand what we’ve always known, [which] is that these women created our worlds.”

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A quick Canadian history lesson for those of us who only remember Louis Riel and that book by Tomson Highway: The white settlers, armed with Christian patriarchy and blunderbusses, entered Indigenous communities hundreds of years ago and saw matrilineal societies in which power and money were passed down through women, and they were like, wha? They saw men and women with complementary roles that were equally respected and were like, wait … ? Then they saw women as advisors and policymakers and that was it. Civilization said women were designed to pump out babies and keep house and these Natives were fucking it all up with progress. So in order to convince everyone these people were better off with him, the white man came up with some bullshit about there being two kinds of Native women, the pure Pocahontas types who had the good sense to want to be civilized (read: subservient), and the Squaw, whose off-the-chain libido had to be contained in order to protect the settlers’ fragile morality (guess the ball-busting bitch wasn’t sexy enough to get her own stereotype). As laughably reductive as all of this was, it had staying power. “The myth of the deviant Aboriginal women continues to plague us, reinforced by dominant cases that coalesce prostitution and Aboriginal women into a single entity,” Lubicon Cree scholar Robyn Bourgeois said in 2011. “Contemporary Canadian society dismisses violence against Aboriginal women and girls today on the basis of these perceived deviances.”

The Indian Act officially cut down women by shifting all of their power — political, financial, familial — to men. Until 1985, First Nations women could only really define themselves through a man. Even when women were the breadwinners, their rights and recognition remained limited. Instead they became the target of their men’s resentment, and their wider invisibility made them highly vulnerable to serial killers like Robert Pickton. Convicted of murdering six women in 2007, he admitted to killing 49 in total, having preyed predominantly on sex workers on the east side of Vancouver, a group in which Indigenous women were overrepresented — another reflection of the obstacles faced by the community. For more than a decade, activist groups like the Native Women’s Association of Canada have been unofficially tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. According to the National Inquiry, they are 12 times more likely than other Canadian women to be killed or disappeared. But it wasn’t until 2016, a year after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report advised it, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the national inquiry. (In the U.S., meanwhile, since 2017 lawmakers have been attempting to pass Savanna’s Act, which would establish a law enforcement database to track disappearances.)

“The borders between the U.S. and Canada weren’t created by indigenous people, but by outside influences,” Jill Ahlberg Yohe, cocurator of Hearts of Our People, told The Guardian earlier this month. “All this work is connected to our history, whether it was made in 1500 or 2019.” Several years ago she asked Kiowa bead artist Teri Greeves to advise on a different exhibit, and out of their conversations came the realization that Native women’s art, as a whole, had never been surveyed. “She was shocked by this,” Greeves tells me. “I was not.” Greeves’s mother had a trading post for more than 25 years where her daughter noticed that the women on their reservation made everything. It turned out the iconic Native American art — beadwork, baskets, ceramics, textiles — was a way for these women to communicate. Greeves’s mother, who her daughter refers to as a “Native fashionista,” looked for literature on these textiles but found nothing. So she conducted her own research and put on educational fashion shows everywhere from museums to the YMCA. But it was more than fashion, just like the ceramics and the baskets were more than housewares. “There are layers of meaning in all this stuff,” says Greeves, “and if that’s what you mean by art with a capital A then, yes, that’s what our ladies are doing, they’re making art.”  

Not that any gentlemen cared. At the turn of the century, concerned that the destruction of Native culture would mean the destruction of Native art, a bunch of institutions sent students to save it. (Apparently the people who made the art were less important — artists were rarely, if ever, identified.) These young men all went to the same places and gathered the same objects, which is why so many of us can only call to mind a few types of Native art — Sioux warrior shirts, for instance — while the real scope is more vast and variable. (Alongside Canada’s 600+ First Nations, there are 577 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.) The collectors also dealt primarily with men, even though the women were making most of the work being sold to the white man. “If they weren’t even seeing their own white women,” says Greeves, “how were they seeing the Native women?” Today, when you walk through Native collections in museums and galleries the (limited range of) objects are often only identified by tribes, but were largely made by women. “It’s just that no one’s said it,” says Greeves.

But over the past few years, Canada’s art institutions have started to. In 2014, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights exhibited Winnipeg-based Métis artist Jaime Black’s REDress Project, an installation made up of donated red dresses that symbolize missing and murdered Indigenous women. First created in 2010, it has since traveled to the Smithsonian and red dresses have become a recognized symbol in Canada of this exploited population. In 2017, the National Gallery of Canada established the Canadian and Indigenous Galleries, which house almost 800 works, while Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario launched a department for Canadian and Indigenous art. Retrospectives of the works of Annie Pootoogook, Rebecca Belmore, and Christi Belcourt followed, and last year a nationwide project, “Resilience,” included 167 billboards exhibiting the work of 50 female artists. Film and television have been slower to adapt — Netflix just announced the cancellation of Chambers, their only original series (and one of my favorites) starring a Native American lead, San Carlos Apache actress Sivan Alyra Rose. In Canada, however, Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) associate director Kerry Swanson says that the Truth and Reconciliation report was “a watershed that shifted the dialogue.” The ISO was formed two years after that and this month — seven days before Chambers got the axe — Netflix unveiled a partnership with the ISO, ImagineNATIVE and Wapikoni Mobile. The deal involves six initiatives for First Nations producers, directors, and screenwriters, which wasn’t necessarily out of the goodness of Netflix’s heart — it was part of their five-year $375 million agreement with the federal government, which includes $19 million to develop Canadian talent.

Twelve Canadians will also be included among the 115 artists making up the millennium-spanning Hearts of Our People retrospective. Asked around five years ago to help curate the collection, Greeves, despite being an artist (not a curator), said yes in order to continue her mother’s legacy. But because she could not speak for other Indigenous groups, and because, not being an elder, she couldn’t even speak for her own, Greeves and Yohe gathered 21 artists and academics, mostly Native, to circumvent the trap of curatorial tokenism: “Museums are colonial institutions, so we’re working within a format that is set up to not listen, and we’re all aware of it because we’ve all been silenced.” With no men present, recreating the gendered spaces they form on their own reservations, the women felt comfortable enough to freely exchange ideas. The result was a show organized into three loose themes: Legacy, Relationships, and Power. The first refers to the knowledge passed down through generations, the second to the relationships that include but also extend beyond the natural world, and the third to the power of Indigenous women, in all areas of life.

* * *

When you think about what art’s supposed to be — how much it should mean — and then you think about Native art and how its meaning transcends not only us, but also space and time, it starts to look like it belongs in galleries and museums more than anything else. Not only was each work of the past sacred, but each existed to be disseminated; Indigenous work was not generally considered the property of any one individual. What it does need, however, are women, because women are the keepers of its history. If they disappear, the art disappears and vice versa. Each work not only serves to preserve Native history, but the voice of the woman who makes it and all the women who came before her. “When I go to make something, I am praying on it,” Greeves tells me. She prays for the animals that gave up their lives for the materials she uses, for the person she is making the work for, for where it goes after that, the same way the women did before her: “When I look at the historic stuff, what I know is that all that stuff was made in prayer.” And when you look at all of that work together, when you acknowledge that you don’t know about the culture that is all around you, that the pieces the women have poured themselves into are teaching you what you thought you knew, the voices of Indigenous women become so loud they’re no longer possible to ignore.  

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.