Nathan Young
 ÒWe Are Making A New World: Time, Territory and the Poetics of Forced NomadismÓ
 (transcript)



Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents






hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures March 26, 2018
Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) 
video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#mcmahon info@abtec.org

 




Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents

Nathan Young

Artist
Member, Tribal Council of the Delaware Tribe of Indians (Lenape)
Concordia University
26 March 2018

Produced by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) abtec.org/iif.

[pause]

0:00:14 Suzanne Kite: Hello. I want to welcome you on behalf of the Indigenous Futures Cluster. My name's Suzanne Kite and I am a research assistant for the cluster. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Concordia University is located on unceded indigenous lands. The Kanien'keh‡: Ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and the waters on which we gather today. Skawennati's not here to welcome you personally. Today I'm happy to introduce Nathan Young who will be speaking about his practice. Nathan Young is a multi-disciplinary artist and composer, working in an expanded practice, which incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art and experimental and improvised music. Nathan's work often engages both the spiritual and the political in order to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Nathan is a founding and former member of the artist collective Postcommodity, holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College and Milton Avery School of the Arts. He's an elected member of the tribal council of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, also known as the Lenape, which is a federal recognized Indian tribe located in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and also directly descends from the Pawnee Nation and the Kiowa tribe. Please welcome Nathan Young.

[applause]

0:01:39 Nathan Young: Hi, good afternoon, thank you all for being here. Yeah, thank you, Suzanne, for hosting, and the Center for Indigenous Futures. Yeah, so that's a long laundry list of my art practice. I am really trying to tell a complex story, so I feel like I need a lot of different mediums to tell that story. I try to kind of just choose what I think is the best medium for whatever it is I'm trying to engage. Also I'm just really trying to build on the work of others. But it's kind of a natural outgrowth, also, of just my training as an artist. I didn't go necessarily to art school, I was trained as an art historian, and became an artist through teaching. But as, throughout the years, being in Postcommodity, really felt that it was important to tell the story of Oklahoma and Oklahoma Indians. There are 50 tribes located in Oklahoma, it used to be called Indian Territory. Reservations were set up there for all the tribes that were removed from their homelands, and so generally, if somebody's in Oklahoma, they're not from there. And I say generally, because there are some people, like the Kiowa, where we were kind of from there.

0:03:08 NY: But I'm kind of the product of that. And as my father is an Eastern Woodlands tribe, the Delaware Tribe of Indians, or Lenape. My mother is Pawnee and Kiowa. And so, we started signing treaties with the United States hundreds and hundreds of years ago when my mother's tribe started to sign treaties in the 1830s. And so you can really see that in our cultures, in our life ways, in how we exist, in our tribal politics, and I try to express that in my art, and I think it's a really interesting story. This is my website. Just another... Kind of redundant. I'm just gonna talk over this. This is a video, a performative lecture that I recently gave at Performance Space New York. The Lenape or the Delaware are...

0:04:02 NY: Were from Manhattan. Manhattan is a Lenape word. We were the first tribe to sign a treaty with the United States, the Treaty of Pitt. And so those were our homelands, and with... Just like Canada and Australia does, now in America, people are starting to acknowledge the original keepers of the land. So Performance Space New York invited me to talk about our removal, about being a Delaware, and being from somewhere but not from somewhere, and to kinda tell our story. And what you saw before was the mountains really of the Cherokee Nation. So a lot of people have heard of the "Trail of Tears", and the Cherokee Nation, what... When they were moved from Georgia, they were moved to Oklahoma. I grew up in their capital. So there are these very complex inter-tribal legal weavings almost. I'm a member of the Cherokee Nation as well. I don't really put that on my introduction or anything, but I grew up with the Cherokees and it's a big part of my life. This is an image from the web of a Peyote meeting. So again, what's kind of, I think, interesting is that my mother was... My mother's Plains, my father is from an Eastern Tribe. And the story of the Native American Church, or the Peyote religion, is also kind of... It's... It came from Oklahoma as well. And you can really kind of understand the story of Oklahoma through looking at the story of the Native American Church.

0:05:48 NY: So this is the... My parents, I guess I'll start with... My parents were educators and attorneys. My father was an attorney, my mother was an educator. And... In the '70s, and there was this great revitalization at the time of tribal governments, and the power of sovereignty was starting to be theorized about, and... There was really kind of a rediscovery also and kind of a Native pride. And part of that was exhibited by people's participation in the Native American Church. This is a picture of me as a child. It's a part of one of my exhibitions. It's about... It's a large photograph, well, that I made large, getting my name from one of the last cultural leaders of the Lenape. She was the last person to speak Lenape, the first language from our tribe. There are different types of Lenape. There are the Munsee and their language is still very much alive. But our Unami language has been gone for a very long time, and there's a Lenape talking dictionary, but there are truly no speakers of the language. So that was something that I grew up around. Though there were concerns that I heard my entire life, but I was fortunate enough as a young person to be named by this lady, Nora Dean Thompson, and she has a quite large Wikipedia entry that talks about all her accomplishments and what she did to save her... To help save our culture. This is my naming...

[noise]

0:07:27 NY: This is my naming ceremony. And that's my name. And that's why that waterfall was there and it means, "He who appears like a waterfall." It's because I have blue eyes, so she named me that I think. So if you ever look at... If you have a Apple iPhone, if you ever look at the languages, you can pick Cherokee as a language. So the person who started that before he did that program, or before he started on that project, moved back to Tahlequah, he was a Cherokee. And his idea was to use animation to help say the Cherokee language. I'd been attending the University of Oklahoma, studying art history, but I had a great art history teacher that focused mainly on Native American art history, and not from an anthropological background but in an art historical context. Her name is Mary Jo Watson. She was there and also a very... Another, another important artist and influence Edgar Heap of Birds at that time. So we have to have Indian education at our schools. I graduated, I went and I went in and started working at a Indian education program. And so we do the special projects and one day somebody introduced me to this guy, and he said, "I have an idea, I want to use animation to help say the Cherokee language." And so I spent a summer with him learning how to animate and there was a Cherokee language speaker at my school.

0:08:46 NY: We started making really nice animations and I got a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and I left after my grant was over. After that, I was starting to get cameras, starting to meet people like Dustinn, documentary film makers like the Apache documentary film maker, Dustinn Craig. I would teach animation, they would teach documentary. I was kind of becoming part of this larger network of filmmakers, but I had written a screenplay about the murder of one of my classmates. He was Kiowa, we're also distantly related and his name was Donnie Beartrack. It was called "Heavy Metal Indians". And so I workshopped that for two, three years with Sundance and Tribeca, and it was really frustrating and I just really decided that... I kinda had a realization that they were working in entertainment more than they were working in art. And at that same time I was kind of rekindling my relationships with the Kade Twist from Postcommodity. And we were talking about forming Postcommodity. So I was having the time, I was in the space and I had the equipment, and so we started to make attempts at contemporary art.

0:10:09 NY: And this is one of the first successful attempts at contemporary art or this... Of Postcommodity. It's called "Do You Remember When"? This is the first iteration of it, it was during a sustainability conference at Arizona State University in 2009. The people that were organizing the conference did not believe that there was an indigenous presence in the programming, and they wanted to invite a number of indigenous artists in to talk about that as exemplary stewards of the land. So it felt like that they'd kinda left out some of the most important people in the conversation. And so our idea was to cut a hole in the floor of this museum and they, of course, at the museum, laughed and they were like, "This... Well, you know, it's crazy," but it's not a totally unoriginal idea. It'd been done by contemporary artists before in New York City, 20 years ago. But, one of the strengths of the Collective was all the different skill sets. And so we went through the... This slog of bureaucracy and got the hole cut out of the floor so I... We learned... Really the idea is to, once we would cut the hole out of the floor was to kinda put the voices or kind of make this, put the voices of those people back in there to emit out into the space.

0:11:37 NY: And so we worked with a Piipaash singer and learned a Piipaash song, sang it with him, transmitted it out of this hole here. And it goes up into a feedback system. And it's really, at this point, 2009, there was these really simple guitar amp and the guitar amp... What happened was a piece fell out, fell... You know we were trying to get it out perfectly square, and a piece came out of the side of it and so we embedded a microphone in there and started to shake the plinth with this guitar amp and this... But it's a system where you can hear the... You can hear yourself walking through there, you hear the voice of this Piipaash song coming through and you're also hearing the hum of this, so it's kind of like a three-channel sound piece. What was great about it, and really what's great about art, is that you do something crazy like that, and then people invite you to start doing it. And so we were invited to do it in 2012 in the Venice Biennale and it was... I'll just let it play...

[noise]

0:12:39 NY: As I speak. It was a much more, I guess you'd say refined and advanced version of the original idea. But every time we would travel to other countries, we would learn more about colonialism and time and how people's understanding of government, bureaucracy and things were affected by, when they had really encountered western civilization. So we get there and we were like, "We wanna do this piece with the people who are the original stewards of this land," and they were like, "Well, they were moved a long time ago, and they live hundreds of miles away or something, and somebody else lives here." We found out that it was a contested space. Really wanted to stay out of those politics, ended up working with somebody, another artist, like a local artist, really stayed away from that. But it... That's a didgeridoo you hear there, instead of say like a Piipaash... Well, it was a Peyote song actually. So I had been meeting curators and talking to... I'd been kind of... I had my own production company, and I was making a living working for the Department of Justice and doing grants, making videos for conferences and things and... Really nothing anybody ever saw, and they were... But they were... It was about issues in Indian country mainly, health, social justice, violence against women, things like that.

0:14:16 NY: But I had been meeting curators and they were like, "You should look at this school called Bard if you like to use sound, if you are into sound and music and all of your work does this." And I was always a... I was a... Again, at the same time when I... About when we started making those animations, I started making noise music, and I had a tape label called Peyote Tapes and... Which is really kind of a part of the Peyote story too, tapes are. And so it was just a really kind of a natural thing, but I was pretty busy, and so eventually I had time to attend. I got into Bard and decided to attend, but it was hard for me to be there. It's in Upstate New York, about an hour north of New York City. And it was hard for me to be there and be so close and know that I was right next to the homelands of my father's tribe, the Delaware Tribe of Indians that were the main body. And so I had to do... I felt almost compelled to engage with that, and so I started visiting sacred sites, I started to visit other Lenape communities in the area. And part of, also, I guess, my training in Postcommodity was... And one reason why I went to Bard was to do large scale landscape installation, and that was something that, you know, I learned.

0:15:47 NY: This piece is called "We are Making a New World", and "We are Making a New World" is really a... It's a 13 channel piece that uses the Lenape language archive to tell a story about the Lenape migration west, our slow migration west. And so, it's... Like I said, it's 13 channels, so there's quite an array of microphones all over, and I'm going to play a... Oops.

[noise]

0:16:40 NY: So you enter this space, which is the Bard MFA exhibition area, and it's also the home of US Scaffolding. And US Scaffolding is this huge metal yard where they ship all of the scaffolding down to New York City to constantly transform the landscape of New York City. And so, I had seen an artist there in my first year named Sterlen Morrison... Not Sterlen Morrison. Sterlen. I forgot his last name. And so he had asked those guys to bring in something. They got a big pitchfork, brought it in, and I was like, "Oh man, that's so cool." And so I walked over, asked them for some of their equipment, asked them if I could use their scaffolding. They gave me everything, you know, I... They gave it to me, and so to me it was really important to kind of engage in and use these these tools that are constantly made to transform our old homelands, and to use those to transmit our voices or the voices of my ancestors, and out, you know, back there. And to me, it's like an act of sovereignty, or it's... I don't... It's something I'm, again, compelled to do. I feel like it's important that even though I'm not an Unami and Lenape speaker, that it's important that I do that. And I do that also with the Pawnee language and with my other tribes too. Like I said, it's also probably has something with studying Cherokee, working to help revitalize the Cherokee language, and just growing up around many tribes.

0:18:23 NY: I don't know if I'm repeating myself, but there are 50 tribes located in Oklahoma. And what they were doing, I was just saying, was, to [0:18:32] ____, we were having a conversation, they tried to put us all in places geographically that matched where we were from. So Oklahoma actually has quite a large geographic... A lot of differences, it's diverse geographically. It's very flat in the west and it's very hilly and green in the east.

0:18:53 NY: So they stuck us up in the northeast with the Cherokees and all the other people. There were... Southeast would be here, but where you were from, you would go. If you were Southeast, Southwest, you went there. A part of this piece was, though, I'm not... A language I don't speak, again, Lenape. I was not trying to be... I was not trying to... I wanted people to know the story, I wasn't trying to be dense, I wasn't trying to be privileged, I wanted those voices to be be spoken and... Or to be heard. Transmitted there, I guess you would say. So it was really important for me to also have a translation there of it.

0:19:35 NY: But it really is the story. It's randomized in the fields, in the sound field that you see. It's just truly a random looping generator that just plays all day and turns off at five o'clock and come back on at eight o'clock. But as you saw, there was somebody sitting there reading that poem, and this is the poem, and it's accessible through my website as well, but it really tells the story of... It starts with a cat is licking its face, and when a cat is washing its face, you will have somebody come visit you from way off. And that's how I felt all the time. I just always felt like I was that visitor.

0:20:13 NY: But then I used this as this kind of, this is how I start to... It's kind of an open unit of using this folk knowledge to tell the story of us when we were living in the east around these three rivers. They call us the Delaware 'cause we lived on the Delaware River, but we lived around the the Susquehanna and the Hudson as well. And then we go through food, through the story. We talk about changes in lifestyle, changes in our food. I wish... They make fun of... A lady in the Delaware-Lenape archives makes fun of them, calling them "Irish potatoes" because they already had them, and what made them Irish.

0:20:56 NY: But also a lot about sound and kind of the end of our religion as well, then the end of Christianity, and into capitalism and then back. Listening, for me growing up, was a very important part of being a Native American. One was, it's just there was a high premium on listening to your elders, just being quiet and out of respect for people. And I don't think it was like they were trying to silence the children's voice or anything, but there was just... We were just taught that there was... You could learn a lot. But there are other things too. They go back to these even gendered roles, like warriordom. If you were really loud, my father would make fun of you and say you would be a horrible hunter and things like that, or a horrible warrior or whatever. But it goes down, again, talking about more of contemporary concerns, like how ceremony returned, what we do in ceremony now, today.

0:22:09 NY: I just... This is another iteration of that piece. So I wanted to, or found myself really wanting to tell the story of Oklahoma Indians, and I didn't know how to do it except by telling my own story or telling the stories of my community. It's not something that I think you can paint in abstract art, or something like that. I think that it takes a lived experience, that you have to... It's a long story and it's difficult to tell.

0:22:44 NY: About 200 years ago, a group of Delawares... Delawares, we were breaking off from each other all the time. There are Delaware... There are Lenape here in Canada today, multiple groups. Moraviantown are the ones that I know of, or have had the most interaction with, but there is a group called the Delaware Nation. I'm a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians across the state, in the flatter part of the state, in Anadarko where the Kiowa live, or the Delaware Nation. They broke up. They broke off from us over 200 years ago with the promise of a reservation in Texas.

0:23:19 NY: So I was in Texas doing a residency and wanted to tell their story. But it was very, very mysterious, their whole existence in Texas. And they'd never received their reservation in Texas. There are no Indians in Texas at all now, really. Well, there are some. So this piece is really, and there's no more work samples than this image, but it's really more about starting to think about being forced, abjection. It's called "Bracelets", and it's like, "Maybe I stink. Maybe... Maybe I... Maybe I... Maybe I... Maybe... It's maybe all these things." So it really has made me think more and more about being a Delaware and what it meant. When I was born, there were only 800 of us. And so my mother is mostly Pawnee, and so I'm by blood mostly Pawnee. And I was around them and they were very fun, very interesting. They were the ones in "Dances with Wolves", the bad guys. And so I was always like, "Why am I not... Why am I not a Pawnee?" but I am. And my mother was like, "Well, there's only 800 of you guys." And so I knew it was important that I always stayed a Delaware because we were... It was just taught to me.

0:24:53 NY: This is a map of New York City, Manhattan and Wall Street. Wall Street was literally built for us. My tribe today is still a very, very poor tribe, so we had this very, very powerful wall and we've never been able to penetrate it. We're not a part, really, of the economic system at this point. We don't have gaming, we're not a rich tribe. We cannot game because of a very complex agreement related to land and things that happened in 1866, but we were the first treaty tribe that has been memorialized in multiple paintings. This is the signing of the Treaty of Fort Pitt by William... It's William Penn. I'm blanking on the artist right now, and I don't have my notes so... But it presents this idyllic people, this exchange, and how we can live together, and it was really not what happened. But it's been memorialized in multiple paintings throughout the years, these early treaties with the Lenape or the Delaware.

0:26:04 NY: And I just had to tell people, recently, when I did my performance in New York, that Delaware is just the white way to say Lenape. It's what white people called Lenape, and now we call ourselves Delaware. So it's just ironic. And that's how we refer to ourselves. It's really strange. I can't really call myself Lenape, it's something that's hard for me to say. I call myself Delaware 'cause I'm a member of the Delaware Tribe. But what was really kind of... These maps, while this one's pretty fair, I... What eventually I was... When it becomes frustrating as a Lenape is they're also very misleading, because we never lived anywhere for more than 30 years. So if you think about it, nobody ever... I'm sure people lived and died in the same place, but people could... Almost everybody lived through a forced migration. Almost all of my ancestors lived, after a certain point, lived through a forced migration.

0:27:09 NY: And this is really the map that really set it off, in my mind, kinda made me [0:27:13] ____. I thought it was the most misleading, 'cause it just gives this impression of just this landing, even though you might think that these... I mean these are well-meaning colors, I guess, 'cause we stopped, but it really truly doesn't represent it. This is really what it was more... Was like. And so if you look at these numbers, that was the first treaty, 1682, that was those paintings. And then there's really never more than 30 years, and it's just a roundabout way through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the who people headed north to Canada, the Moraviantown Lenape, the Stockbridge-Munsee, and these are the Delaware Nation here that dipped down into Texas.

0:28:04 NY: This is my great-great grandfather, John Young. He was the Chief of the Delawares when we came from Lawrence, Kansas to Bartlesville, or Oklahoma, what was then called Indian Country. Indian Country was, they had originally what was called the "Indian problem," and they had to do something, and they removed all these tribes there at one time, and they established it after the Civil War. So most of the tribes that arrived after 1864, 1865, we arrived in '66, and so did the Pawnees.

0:28:41 NY: But I have lived with this. I've given this now to my brother, but I had this. This is a real daguerreo... Not a daguerreotype, but is a real hand-tinted picture, pretty large-scale. It's of a family heirloom. But my family had been involved in Delaware leadership, or "servant leadership" is what we would call it, or "politics" as in the more derogatory term since John. And he signed the agreement that brought us into the Cherokee Nation. Our problem was, back here in all of this mess of movements, we lost our land somewhere. And so we were living on land of the Mingo, the Wyandotte, the Ottawa. We were living in the land of all these other different tribes until we finally had a reservation in Kansas. We lost that. We're guaranteed a reservation in the Cherokee Nation, but never materialized. A lot of political things happens. It's a huge mystery. I mean, it's not a mystery, it's bad luck.

0:29:51 NY: So I decided to, the last year, to run for Tribal Council. So while I'm the fifth generation to serve on my Tribal Council, I've... My aunt has served on the Tribal Council, my aunt has served on the Cherokee Tribal Council, because we are legal members of the Cherokee Nation as well. When we bought our right... When John Young paid for us to come into the Cherokee Nation, basically the United States government was ignoring us, and were not giving us our payments, well, what we were owed for our land. And so, the Cherokees had a very, very robust relationship with the United States, but they were ignoring us. We became... We asked them to administrate our affairs for us. We still kept our business, or we still kept our tribe together, our Council together, but then the Cherokee started to ignore us too, so... And it just became this long and complicated thing, that... That's another talk entirely. But one of the things about being on the Delaware Tribal Council is, is that it's not all battles and politics and politicizing things. What is really the best part about it, and my greatest experience, was being able to repatriate human remains of my ancestors from a natural history museum.

0:31:23 NY: This is a Schoenbrunn, Ohio and my first... Actually it was just before my first year on the Tribal Council. We still do this, we're about to do one at Abbott Farm in New Jersey. We repatriated 83 remains, and so it's really hard to do something like that without having some feelings. It's gonna touch you. And so, it's taking these bones of our ancestors out of these boxes, wrapping them in muslin and then going and making this system and re-doing our burial, the best we can, to re-bury these people, but we have to work with the Stockbridge-Munsee and the Delaware Nation by law, because we all were together then, at that point. This and projects like right now we are... We're really... We do things like focus on economic development, which has to do with business and we provide housing. We provide other types of community support, but this and building... Like right now we're building a Cultural Center, Cultural Center and Museum. And the problem is, is that now, being members of the Cherokee Nation, now there's 11,000 of us, but thousands and thousands of the Delaware don't know that they're Delaware. They have a card that says Cherokee, and it says AD right after it, and then nobody knows, not nobody, thousands of people do not know what AD means, so these people don't know their own story.

0:33:00 NY: Right now, we're working to tell our own story. We're building a... We're re-purposing a building into a museum and cultural center, so people can start to understand who we are and start to think about being a Delaware or a Lenape, in a different sense of time, to think about the legacy of being one of the first treaty tribes, where we really came from. You're not a Cherokee actually, you're a Delaware. We want... That's really important. It's a goal of mine. It's something that I know it'll be done while I'm still on the Tribal Council. But how do I reconcile that with being an artist is... This is a place right down the road from Schoenbrunn, it's called Gnadenhutten, and after the Revolutionary War, there was a lot of retribution. There was a Moravian missionary site, where many Delawares... Where a hundred women and children, I'm sure there were men too, that were massacred and they were given a kangaroo trial and they were brutally murdered. And, on that site, you can stick your head through one of these wooden things and take a picture there. And I think it's really profane, it's gross, just the whole idea of having those.

0:34:27 NY: So, taking these things down is really important, and so we have to deal with re-enactments, people re-enacting the lynching of a Delaware, things like that. We have to write them letters and say, "You know, you probably shouldn't do that, because they're... The lynching of this person, his ancestors are still alive and live in Washington County." But this face, here, is called the Mesingw, and we actually didn't have a monotheistic God until we met Western Europeans. Before that, we all did our own thing 'cause we all lived in such small groups up and down the Delaware river, but this is part of the Big House ceremony, this face. But I just wanted to... It's just a photo, it's a very large scale photo. I've done a couple of different iterations of it, but in a way it's a political thing too, but... So I wanna put God there. We lost our... And when John Young came to Oklahoma, the last Big House, which was that... That religion was built on the Young allotment and it's gone today.

0:35:39 NY: Those corner posts and those faces are in a museum that I live in about 200, 300, I don't know, two blocks from, 200, 300 feet probably, and I see them, I walk inside and I see our cultural heritage sitting there and so I feel really compelled to try to build a place where we can house them, because the argument is, "Well, we can't... We don't know how to take care of them, we don't have a place to take care of them, we need to build capacity." So I'm an artist. I've worked in museums almost for 20 years now, I worked in the National Museum of the American Indian in college. So that's one of our projects. And those were the good things that... One of the good... How I... You get to these really nasty situations, and then there's these things that you know, you're sure something good is gonna come of it.

0:36:34 NY: So again, just kind of change gears a little bit. These are prophets of the Native American Church. And again, I mentioned in my introduction that I use improvised music and experimental music. Something that I was always drawn to, I have no idea how it happened, anything. Next thing you know, I have a tape label called Peyote Tapes, I'm trading tapes, putting out weird, experimental music from people in Denmark and France and... So I am really interested in that aesthetic, in that noise aesthetic, and kind of the history of industrial and noise music and kind of its same type of existential dread and things like that, and kind of these feelings that are... I don't really see natives or... Well, I feel drawn to using those for my work.

0:37:36 NY: But on your left here, we have a Delaware Caddo, who started the Full Moon Ceremony, and it's popular among the Osage in Oklahoma. They use a cement altar. And he used to lay down on the ground and they would make these altars and they would... The moon, at the end of the night, the moon would... Or all of the ashes from the ceremony would make a face, these two round cheeks and this head. This is Quanah Parker. He is the originator of the larger Native American Church. What I am a part of is called the Half Moon Ceremony. His story is the story of "The Searchers". If you've ever watched... It's a very unpopular movie among a lot of Native Studies people, but it's about his mother. His mother was kidnapped from this really prominent Texas family. He went on to become a very successful and important Comanche leader.

0:38:40 NY: But, at the same time, these two men were developing a religion out of Peyote. And they were getting it from the Huichol Indians in Mexico, and it was from raiding. And this is Sun Boy, and I'm a direct descendant of Sun Boy. He was the father of [0:38:57] ____, who was a grandmother to my grandmother, directly. He was... They're all what you would call prophets of the Native American Church. And he was the Kiowa prophet. So the Kiowa and the Comanche were like this. They raided together. So if you've ever read Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian", that was the Kiowas and the Comanches going down to those brutal raids. And the myth about the Native American Church is that Quanah Parker got hurt in a raid, ran south through the Huichol, the Huichol cured him with Peyote, which has a very powerful antibiotic in it. Scientifically, it does, it has a very powerful antibiotic in it.

0:39:39 NY: And what was genius about what Quanah did was, one, he started to... Once they put the Comanches on a reservation, we were in between the cattle yards between Texas and Kansas. So all this cattle would come through Oklahoma, go to Kansas, and ruin all their land. I don't know, it was going east and west, or really east. He started to charge them, and he said, "Just pay me in cows." And so he became wealthy, very, very, very wealthy and very, very powerful. But at the same time, he was still... He was developing a religion with this sacred herb. And what's interesting is the Kiowas had a highly, highly developed cosmology and religion. The Comanches were kind of like the Delaware before. We just kind of all did our own thing. We were all in these small bands. But he is the... Quanah Parker is kind of the... He's the prophet of the Native American Church and I'm a member of inter-tribal chapter in Dewey, Oklahoma, which is near Bartlesville. And we practice the variation of Native American Church that he started.

0:40:51 NY: What really was happening, though, at that time, it was the same time as the Ghost Dance. And Christianity really had decimated our Native religions. The Cherokees around that time, the Trail of Tears, had lost the Stomp Dance, their fire had gone out. They had to go to the Creeks to get it. The Pawnees, we readily accepted Christianity, because it was so close to our Native religion anyway. But it spread kind of... I don't wanna say like wildfire, but it spread pretty quickly throughout Oklahoma, because it was a way to hide your religion. So every time you will go to a different tribe... I go with Shawnees. The Shawnee and the Delaware, we're like the Comanches and the Kiowas, we're like this. They have their own way. And the Pawnee have their own way. And it can be charted out like an Excel chart, and it actually is in books. So you can say, "These guys will do this there, these guys do this here, these guys don't do this, these guys... Or this tribe does that."

0:42:00 NY: The reason why the Native American Church was able to exist was because it was so good at helping to cure some of the ills that were prevalent on the reservation at that time, including alcoholism and still today, I sit in Peyote meetings with people who have just literally taken a bus from prison, or they've went back to prison. And so this is a found photo, my version of this is about six feet tall now. I've many versions of it that is just trying to make it bigger and bigger, but to show that it's full of all these kind of paradoxes. It's not a... I don't feel like it's like a pious religion. It's a very, it's a very... Not malleable, you can't really... There are certain things that still make it very ritualized. And very much static or we would not recognize it one day, but also there is a lot of freedom within that and that freedom is where all of our indigenous... Our own tribal aspects would make it into those ceremonies. But this is an institutional picture, I think, obviously, I don't understand this moon here, it's... I would think that it would be a half moon, maybe it was an Osage thing, but it's just part of the charm of it, but you see this guy with a tattoo of this gun on his stomach, he looks pretty cool.

0:43:42 NY: So that was kind of... I kind of was engaged by that picture and it really just spoke to me, it was like this is what it was really like. This is what it is like being in the Native American Church. Sitting next to people who, you know, might have done something really bad but you have to know what's in their heart and you know that they're going through something and it's really an empathetic feeling. I don't think... I would never suggest it as a recreational drug. It's not something that is very fun to do, I don't think. While you do see visions and things like that, it would not be my choice. What this is, is it's two things. I'm gonna have to jump ahead here. There's a museum in Tulsa, called the Gilcrease and they did a very large exhibition of all the art of the Native American Church. When I was growing up around the Native American Church, it was... This type of flat style of painting was ubiquitous, it was everywhere. I mean, probably 'cause it was my parents' house, maybe I thought it was everywhere, but literally I was taught it like in junior high, my Indian art class in junior high, I had Indian art class in junior high. And they would just have me copy paintings and they would be Peyote paintings.

0:45:00 NY: So the Shawnees that I go that I go to the Peyote... My Peyote chapter, tell a story about this little boy and he loved Peyote meetings and that's what I remember growing up. That's the picture of my father, myself and a guy of the name Perry Lee Botone, who was a really kind of well known pow wow singer and Peyote man, and my mother. And this is what you do, like... Like this picture. And so I'm really kind of engaging this whole ethnological type of way of documenting our work, but I'm trying to tell a story through it. So anyway, this little boy named Miko which is actually a Creek word for chief or king, and his uncles would set him up a little tent in the backyard, and they made him a little tool box, and in that tool box they made him a little rattle and he would lead meetings like he was a roadman. A roadman's kinda like the priest. And so his uncle went in there. And one thing about these meetings is people correct each other, and they say, "Oh that's not how we do it. That's wrong, that's not how... You guys do that, we're gonna go that way, we are gonna go along with you."

0:46:14 NY: So, his uncle was like saying to Miko... He was like, "Oh no, you're wrong." And I guess, Miko pulls a little cap gun out of his toy box and says, "Get out of here." Just kicked his uncle out of his meeting, he was like, "What kind of roadman is that?" But so yeah, we don't carry guns in our Peyote boxes but I know that Quanah and those guys, they used to hang their, whatever, belts and things before they would go into meetings, that's pretty well established that they were armed and things like that, it was the West. But there's actually another family heirloom from my European side of my family. So this is the type of work that I was really always surrounded with and this is one of my favorite artists. His name is Stephen Mopope, and this is in a post office in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where the Kiowa are.

0:47:12 NY: And he was part of the Kiowa Five and the Kiowa Five became the first studio artists in the United States and they all eventually made it out west to Santa Fe and established what was called the studio style which was this really flat work that I grew up with. So it was really kind of... I was always kind of depressed, not depressed, or always like wondering what happened to all this really cool flat work, and I like Japanese, I like all kinds of art and I see connections to their... Why their works on paper are flat and why their backgrounds are negative and things like that, and see that with Plains Indians. And I just always kind of wondered... I didn't... I don't really care to didactically do exactly what they did, but I'm pretty close.

0:48:00 NY: I started making these altars in different ways and started to kind of make my own versions of these moons, and other symbols, other items of devotion, and what... These are just drywall and plaster. And the funny thing is really, is that most of these people who are Peyote men 'cause it's a really hard religion. You arrive at five o'clock for dinner, and you're dismissed about two o'clock after dinner. 'cause they don't just let you drive off all Peyote'd up. So these are the main colors, they're the red... The red, yellow and blue of these ropes that the leaders of the church will wear in ceremonies. It's a close up of one but it's very much... I'm thinking about Stephen Mopope and trying to create these installations. In my studies of the material culture and the devotional items. They're the Shawnee and Delaware. The Shawnee and Delaware men would take these, they would build these roundhouses and they existed all around northeastern Oklahoma. And so I built this roundhouse and really didn't know what to do with it, but it's kind of a miniature roundhouse. And so it's been through many different iterations.

0:49:20 NY: This is a fourth floor in Tulsa, looking at this kind of petroleum building and all of these other kind of... It's not the entire skyscape, but it's the largest building, and that building looks exactly like the 9/11 buildings because it's the only... It's the same architect and it's the only one that was kind of made outside of those two Twin Towers. But, so I decided to perform with it, so I put all these wires and shakers and all kinds of things on it, and we started to do these concerts on top of this fourth floor. In the States, First Fridays are the big art events and so normally in Tulsa people are like... You start playing noise and they're like, "Please leave, just get out of here." On First Fridays, they see you doing something weird and they're like, "Oh our minds are open to art, we're so ready."

[laughter]

0:50:19 NY: And so I'd taken it down, but just really kind of felt compelled to put it back up and really, I'm just inspired by the stories that I hear in Peyote meetings and those are my favorite things about them is to find out, one, who is who, who's related to who. We talk about people that have passed on that my father knew who, tell stories on people, joke around.

0:50:45 NY: So this is just me experimenting with it, and kind of painting in this kind of abject style, like under the bridge type style that you saw in the Heavy Metal Indians photo, thinking about that, but also thinking about the [0:51:00] ____ hut and some of the things like we pour the water after the ceremony, over the moon to ruin the moon and Pawnee because of this serpent monster god that is the universe. And that's a symbol of how our indigenous religion made it into the Native American Church. And this is just another iteration of it. And I was really trying to do really kind of the exact opposite. And I was thinking about more social things like pow wowing, dancing. My mother makes regalia, my mother dances, takes my niece to dances, goes... I'm not... I'm around them. I'm not a big pow wow person myself, but I know how important it is to us and inter-tribal people, that's where... Where I live, very few people are one tribe. I'm three tribes, and it's the norm. My cousin at one time could not be a member of a tribe because she was so many tribes, she was five tribes, and not one of them had a low enough blood quantum, so we're these mixes. We're just... Then they used to call us Heinz 57s, that used to be the joke, it kind of went away too.

0:52:12 NY: The thing... Okay, so this... The nature of these houses, the Shawnee and Delaware men... I'm sorry, I'm at an hour now, I always talk long. I apologize. Don't... I won't feel hurt if you leave. Were these... These young men, who I go to Peyote meetings with, had started... Had built a roundhouse on what is called the Devil Promenade in Ottawa, Oklahoma and so there are Ottawa Indians, or Odawas, and they built and it's called, it's called the Devil's Promenade. So it's the Devil's Promenade chapter of the Native American Church. And that's the kind of sense of humor that we have, at least in Oklahoma. And what's the really strange thing is, is these propagation of memes, there are memes everywhere, all the time, and they become like these characters and they look like the people that we go to meetings with, like I know who that's supposed to look like. And this... The whole Pee-wee Herman, is this kind of high voiced or how somebody sings or maybe some super white-looking person in the meeting, or maybe somebody that was married to a white man, that really participates. And also your voice gets deep and everything sounds deep and you say Brother and stuff like that, and there's just a lot of humor in it, and so it's something that I really been interested in and have been stealing memes, actually, for these banners.

0:53:56 NY: These happen to be by the filmmakers that made "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Nacho Libre", that just happen to be a pair. But these are things that you do naturally after meetings. You pose, all Peyote'd up, and they're, again, making fun of our mixing and how we don't look like typical Indians anymore. And also this heroism of the singer, like a really good singer arrives late, with that privilege. But I'm also thinking about museums and the banners that hang outside of museums and large bodies of work. I don't think that it's something that's easy to understand, but the repetition, it's something I try to... You know what I mean? You start seeing these fans, you start seeing this over and over and over and over. We live in the world of didactic panels now, today, in art, and so in some ways it's like, "I don't understand," and then they'll give you a didactic panel and it's okay.

0:54:55 NY: So I started re-imagining these logos. They used to have logos on the cards of a Native American Church. If you were to be driving around with a Peyote box, you got pulled over by the cops and pulled out this card and it would have a logo on it, something like that, and it would say... And they would have to let you go 'cause you're a member of a chapter, by law.

0:55:16 NY: I'll show you this last thing. This is called "Infinite Peyote Road", but the reason why I made this video, and I know some of these people, like in the middle here, is the guy... Is "Nacho Libre". This pirate hat right here is sitting there. They're improvising an altar. That whole room is like an improvised altar. There's stuff like for Peyote, that's tobacco. They're singing. This broom right here, why would that broom be there? That's the broom that the fireman uses to clean the ceremonial space.

0:55:54 NY: And so I've been watching all these videos on YouTube and watching all these improvised altars, and I found it very interesting. The way that we used to share music was through cassette tapes, and we never really made it to CDs. Somehow nobody ever figured out a really easy way to record it, but those really flat tabletop cassette recorders were easy, accessible to use, and so they became like a currency and you would trade them. But today, everybody just puts their songs on YouTube, and then people could talk trash on you on YouTube and they'll say, "Why are you singing like an old man?" or "This guy's a home-wrecker," or something like that. And that's for real, that's like really real.

0:56:43 NY: But that's it. I'll just let this play through a little bit, but I'd be happy to answer any questions if you all... If there's time. But thank you very much for being here and listening to the story.

[applause]

0:57:02 SK: Thank you, Nathan. If there are any questions, he'll be happy to field them now, if anyone has a question, or five, or none. [chuckle] Anyone.

0:57:16 NY: What more can you say? I mean [0:57:17] ____.

0:57:17 NY: What more can you say? Any questions? Yeah.

0:57:22 Speaker 4: Would you say a little bit more about the process of working in Australia, and how you ended up kind of collaborating, if you feel like sharing more of that story.

0:57:33 NY: The purpose of working in Australia? 

0:57:34 S4: No. When you were in town for the Sydney Biennale and you said you were going... It's a contested site for sure, and how did you end up, or what song lines were you working with? 

0:57:48 NY: Oh, yeah, what song... Yeah, it's been a couple of years, but we found somebody who was, I think, a multi... A person who knew those song lines and knew enough of those song lines that he was acceptable for everybody. Because you could go through territory knowing those song lines, and he knew enough of those, and we just kind of lucked out, 'cause he was one of the better didgeridoo people there. What was the second part? 

0:58:18 S4: I was... That was it, really. I was just thinking how it was for you to come into that situation and try and negotiate those complex [0:58:28] ____.

0:58:28 NY: I just related to it. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I just related to it. I was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean." I'm from New York. This is Sydney, the New York of Australia in a sense. So yeah, I'm from there, if there are people there and they've lived there for a long time too. But there was no way... There would be no way, say we were doing it in New York, I wouldn't expect anybody to come get us. But we tried our best, and it was really starting to... It made me...

0:59:04 NY: Another project we did was in the Adelaide... Adelaide, it's a biennial too, Adelaide Biennial, and it was a four-channel piece with language, where we used Cherokee and Pitjantjatjara tribes, and we had made a lot of assumptions about how they live. And then we started to learn about their concept of time and encounters with colonialism, and they were just... There were these disconnects, and I was like, "This reminds me of my mother's people's experience and my father's people's experience," whoever's on the tip of the spear. So really, I do work in a time-based media. I do like to slow things down, I do like to think, not in some kind of lofty way or whatever, but I do wish Delaware or the members of my tribe thought about us in larger legacy when we do things like our crafting policy, when we're trying to do what's best for the future of our people, I wish that people would think about how long our existence is and not so much in the moment and do what's best and just kind of changing paradigm, and that's really an impossible task, but it's something to think about.

1:00:31 Speaker 5: I have a question about the reburial process. Was it a ceremony that was because the remains had been returned to the tribe? What can you just say a little bit more about...

1:00:41 NY: Yeah, we work really hard to repatriate our remains through the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA. I was told by our Tribal Historic Preservation Office that in my lifetime, we would never... There are so many Lenape, our trail was so long and twisted and so many of those bones had been dug up by amateur archeologists, and farmers, doctors and amateur archeologists is mostly what they were. And he said that in my lifetime, we'll never repatriate all of those. Those natural... Those bones or remains, and in the natural history collections. And to me, that is a very depressing idea because it's a really healing thing. I think that it's something that we have to do in this... Again, I mean not in a lofty sense or something. I think it's something we have to do, it's a very healing thing for everybody, everybody wants us to do it, it's something we're not gonna fight over. Somebody might say you did something wrong or whatever, but what's important is, that these remains of our ancestors are out of museums and in the ground. But there've... We still were encountering, we were getting problems with Trump and some things he's done that make that harder for us and are gonna make it harder for us.

1:02:03 NY: But we're about to start a repatriation at a place called Abbott Farm, which is somewhere that I first started kind of... Not investigating, but learning about at Bard and was making artworks about my first year there. So I'm really happy to be able to, in a sense, support them and kind of like... We need to get this done, we need to start... We need to work faster. But you can only push so hard, but that's what's next. And I'm really excited about it. It just came up the other day and I was just, it was like, "Oh good. We can stop fighting, and talk about this really important thing that we need to do."

1:02:41 Speaker 6: Can I ask you a question, I wanted to ask about how you navigate, 'cause I know you use humor and you use... You're using these videos, using memes and videos and things like that, how do you navigate with somebody from the culture, from the Peyote culture that doesn't like what you've done? Do you have skills that you have to use...

1:03:02 NY: Well, I have the confidence to do them because I go to meetings and I've literally had the most beautiful prayers said on my behalf to do... To express myself the way I want to. I'm not making these memes. Real Peyote people are making these memes. So in a sense, really what I should be getting in trouble for is stealing memes and not necessarily... And so it's kind of a funny thing, not everybody's gonna like your art, that's something I'm gonna... I'm willing to accept. Nobody has wanted to fight about it, nobody has wanted to excommunicate me about it or anything like that. Because for the most part, it is a practice. I mean, it is a... Like it's a hallucinogenic, it kind of opens your... It opens your heart, it opens your mind. And I do encounter people that are angry about seeing a gun in a Peyote box and things like that, but once I tell them the story, it's... I can... They understand. But for the most part, it's just something that I know that not everybody's gonna like and I just have to deal with it, and I don't have any kind of special way 'cause it's kind of... It depends on who it is.

1:04:28 SK: Any more questions? Great, thank you so much Nathan. Oh wait.

1:04:34 Speaker 7: I'll ask him later.

1:04:36 NY: Okay she'll ask you later. Okay, thank you Nathan.

[applause]



	Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents: Nathan Young	



		Page 17 of 17