Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
1940–

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Yes it is like that—fall down the stairs and land on my feet. That is how it is. I think I am a pretty lucky person, a lucky duck.

My name is an old family name. It doesn't have anything to do with art. It is not about seeing art it is about insight. I've been making art as far back as I can remember. When I was in the first grade I didn't know the word artist, I had never heard that word. I didn't know anything about it. I just knew that it was my zone—I wanted to be where I could use those materials.

The maps that I've been doing, I see them as landscapes and they all tell stories. My art practice has grown over the years. I always see my works as inhabited landscapes. From early pastel abstract swaths of color to where we are now, even figures, to me it is still landscape. 

We are in Corrales, New Mexico which is north of Albuquerque. Corrales is a small farm community of about 15,000 people. This land was given to Spanish people who grew vineyards here. It was given to them by the King of Spain they like to say but, of course, it is unceded land. And of course it once belonged to Pueblo people. Anytime people dig in their backyard here they dig up doubloons and tin cups and underneath that they dig up pottery shards and house foundations. So this has been a farm community probably for eons of time.

Native peoples have always studied the flora, fauna, and land here. It is a culmination of figuring out where we came from. All of the origin stories are about that. These stories go back 15,000 years and they match what the scientists are saying about the movement of glaciers. And that is extraordinary, it blows my mind to think that our oral history goes back that far. 

Our Indian elders studied it so well. Their knowledge of it is so complete. They are always looking back and asking what would the ancestors do? What would they say? We have to think about our future generations and if these resources will be here to serve them.  Will our tribe be able to support them? And so how can we get some of these messages out there? Part of it is in the work that I do.

Being Indigenous and making art means that you are looking at the world through lenses that are curved or changed by your upbringing and by your worldview as an Indigenous person. We get together and talk amongst ourselves about how we can change things or make things better—how we can put messages out there that have a relationship to the Indigenous world. Indigenous peoples believe that we live in harmony with all of the plants, animals, fishes, and cosmos. We really do believe that. So that's the first thing that is really distinct in our work and in what we present to the public.

Who has a better reason to paint a map? Me, a Native person who is all about the land and the history that's taken place here. How can I tell it all in a way that is different from what you learned in school? I'm showing you an American map; I'm putting my heritage in there. I take newspaper clippings and put them in every single state just to prove that there are Indians doing things there. Yes, there is Indian life there. Yes, they live everywhere all over the United States. When I started using text it seemed like a way to say something directly instead of just alluding to it—whether it be text from old Indian speeches or headlines from the New York Times or Albuquerque Journal.

What I am doing is putting messages inside the Museum, inside the corporate world where they are not supposed to be. It is where you are supposed to make nice and entertain people with money. That is kind of a given. And I am going to the source. They will find things about the environment, racism, and the treatment of animals. 

People walk through a museum and they are drawn to what they are drawn to whether it is color or figures. Some people stop and take the time to read things but not everyone wants to do that. The messages in my paintings are placed where they are not totally expected. 

Most people will never have heard of me and that is not off-putting. Maybe it will start to crack this issue of Native Americans being invisible. Most people say, "I've never met an Indian, I've never seen one before." That is pretty prominent. There are a bunch of Indians living in New York who encounter this. That is how it goes in this society. This is high society and it is white. And this is BIPOC here; we are just little grains of sand trying to make a little change.

I just move forward and do what I know how to do and what I am teaching myself to do because I am constantly learning new things. It is about growing no matter my age. Am I engaged with my practice? I would say I am right now and I take advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate that. But time is fleeting and we don't know where things will be ten years from now. So I don't concentrate on that; I just concentrate on making work that I think counts for something.

Narrator: War is Heck is a lithograph and photolithograph collage. The dimensions are nearly a square, about 58 inches high by 57 inches wide. The background is predominantly light beige and the most prominent image is a side profile view of a horse facing the left. It takes up most of the canvas, reaching close to the edges. It is drawn with a thick sketchy and painterly black outline. Shading and details are minimal except for straight angular lines across the horse’s body and neck. Behind and surrounding the horse is a “collage of converging cultures”, drawing on imagery from Indigenous, Mexican, and Colonial American visual cultures. A wash of blue drips from the top to bottom of the canvas layering beneath the horse’s body and above several faded details like bison printed postage stamps, a horizontal drawing of a pipe with a long handle, and bingo sheets. 

Right below the tip of the horse’s back right hoof is a small image of a Mexican lotería card, El Soldado, depicting a soldier standing up straight holding a gun. The same lotería card is printed larger on the top left of the canvas by the horse’s head. Printed small beneath the horse’s snout is the text “The Stone Age, Up Close and Personal”. To the right is the newspaper headline “WAR IS HECK” printed large in all caps, overlapped by the horse’s chest. On the left edge of the canvas is a wash of red dripping down to the bottom of the canvas. Its streaks overlap a silhouette of cow imagery, which repeats in other parts of the painting, and a small lotería card, La Mano, which depicts a hand, palm facing towards us. The top right of the canvas has a small grid of four American flags directly above the lotería card, El Pajaro, depicting a bird perched on a branch. 

The artist has long spoken out against the violence of war, but in 2002, when she made this work, she was responding to the imminent invasion of Iraq by the United States. She said in a later interview: “You know I always think this work is going to be obsolete. And then next year comes and things get worse, or another war starts, so this work stays ever present.”

Narrator: The Vanishing American is a vertical mixed media painting on canvas measuring about 60 inches high by 50 inches wide. In the middle and slightly towards the bottom of the painting is a cluster of head-like shapes interspersed with marks and newspaper clippings. The cluster is primarily red, orange, brown, black, and is surrounded by beige, pale pink, tan and white colored painterly marks, which peek through the cluster and drip down the canvas surrounding the cluster. The top one quarter section of the painting contains what appears to be a row of four faces painted loosely in white with ambiguous paired down features. The bold colored cluster underneath contains many square shapes with rounded corners. Some are painted with a black or white thin outline or thicker red outline, and some are filled in with dots or horizontal lines. Long and short, horizontal, vertical and zigzag strokes fill and surround the rounded shapes and their darker colors drip down the bottom of the canvas. Emerging from the edges of the cluster is the outline of three figures. Coming from the top right edge appears to be the side profile of a brown bear. Coming from the top left edge is a black outline of a bird with a long neck and long legs, obscured by vertical strokes of beige paint and a white oval and coming from the bottom left is a black outline of a person with their arms and legs outstretched as if running or in motion. 

The newspaper clippings that are placed throughout the cluster are various sizes; some are a few words while others are longer text. Four clippings of longer text peek out from underneath washes and drips of paint by the edges of the cluster. Visible text on the top right clipping by the bird reads “Tribes: FERC modifications are “misfocused”. A clipping by the bear reads “Advisory Deadline” next to a crossword puzzle. Paragraphs of small text peek out through the bottom right corner. Coming out from underneath the running figure are thicker paint drips and brush strokes that read “Notes from Indian Country,” which, along with the crossword puzzle clipping, have a newspaper header featuring several tipis. The visible text from the clippings scattered across the black, brown and warm colored cluster from top to bottom reads “What Americans”, “Treaty? What Treaty?”, “If you’re not afraid of fire, you’ll love my mother’s cooking”, “Open Stick games & card games all weekend”, “built-in upgradability”, “Literacy group hosts Scrabble fundraiser”, “SUPPORT THE TRIBAL DOLLAR”, and “best if used by 2000”. The small square clipping reading “The making of a comeback” in particular sticks out with its contrasting blue-purple gradient background. 

The title of the work, The Vanishing American, is a pointed critique of the notion that Native American people and culture have been dispersed and diminished. Quick-to-See Smith takes the idea and turns it on its head: instead imagining the disappearance of white America. About this work, she has said: “the culture's changing…this is what’s happening, the Browning of America.”

Narrator: Kalispell #1 is a vertical pastel and charcoal drawing on paper, 41 3/4 inches high by 29 5/8 inches wide. The paper is a beige color with both abstract and abstract and colorful marks often related to animal, human or natural themes. Several thick and thin lines of gray, brown, black and green create a vertical rectangle by the edges of the paper outlining the image. This composition appears like frames within frames. In the upper left corner of this rectangle, black lines create another vertical rectangle that takes up a bit more than one quarter of the space. There are a few large, washy rectangular shapes throughout the composition that the artist would have drawn first before layering the thinner pictorial drawings on top. In the middle of the work, slightly off-center to the left, is a green horizontal rectangle shape made from at least two green pastel houses. Hanging down vertically off that green rectangle’s lower right edge is a light pink rectangle about the same size. In the lower left quadrant, there is a whisper of yellow in the shape of another horizontal rectangle. And in the upper right quadrant there is a very faint green vertical patch. The greens, pinks, and yellows echo and repeat in other lines and marks throughout the work, creating a visual cohesion. There are only two marks whose colors do not repeat: one is a dotted purple line that travels in an L-shape from the upper right quadrant to the mid-lower left part of the page. The other is a slim blue arc shape in the middle/bottom area. The hue of the blue is vivid and brilliant, in contrast to the mellow, earthy tones of most of the shapes and lines. 

The colors, taken together with the composition, suggest a kind of cartography or charting of the natural environment. The thinnest lines in this drawing are the least abstract ones, and if we inspect them, they reveal triangular tipis and animal shapes. Centered at the bottom of the image is an abstracted animal with a thin black outline, a boxy spotted body, and rounded tail. The animal leaps over a thick stroke of green and above it is a curved stroke of blue with thin brown and blue lines intersecting the blue curve. To the right of this animal, there are thick vertical yellow lines on either side of a tipi outline, with a charcoal-drawn entrance. In the upper left frame mentioned before, there are two, four-legged animals drawn with loose and very thin simple lines. The left animal is drawn with black lines and appears similar to a horse with a long neck and a boxy body and face. There is a faint wash of light pink behind it. It has a sketchy tail, and its body has several circular spots. Three yellow diagonal lines overlap its body. The animal on the right is drawn with green lines and has a long round body and tail. It has thin pointy legs and a small pointed face with an open mouth, and across its body are rows of orange dots reminiscent of falling rain. The animals leap over a cluster of brown scribble-like loops smudged with yellow above a thick horizontal patch of green with a row of four small orange dots, and behind them is a long vertical stroke of pink. 

Above the animals are triangular shapes, a swipe of green, two short horizontal lines, and a circle with a line coming down from inside the middle of the circle. The artist signs her name small and in cursive at the bottom of the image in between the leaping animal, triangle and a gray horizontal line that frames the image. 

Kalispell, the title of the work, is the name of a city just north of the reservation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai, where Quick-to-See Smith grew up.

Narrator: When you exit the elevators, you will be confronted by two walls offset from the center. To the right is a darker painted wall with the Josh Kline exhibition information, and to the left is a soft white wall with a large painting by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, as well as the introductory information for the exhibition. This retrospective exhibition’s full title is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, and the large artwork featured alongside the information is Trade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights, 2015. This piece spans three separate canvases which have all been connected; the two on the left and right are oriented horizontally, and the one in the middle is oriented vertically. The work measures sixty inches tall by one hundred inches long, and through various mediums, depicts a scene of a canoe filled up with many items and creatures, including flying skeletons with feathery wings, a buck head, a snake, a rabbit, a crying eye, and most notably, a tall, dark coyote figure oriented just right of center. This painting will have caution strips on the floor in front of it.

This first gallery space revolves around a large sculpture entitled Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, which is situated on a eight inch tall platform in the middle of the space. This sculpture depicts a human figure sitting sideways on a wooden chair: an American flag lies across her lap, a picture frame encases her face, and an ear of corn sits in the place of her heart. In one of her hands is a book titled God Is Red. The cradleboard on her back supports her baby, whose body is made out of sheepskin and whose face is also encased in a picture frame. This sculpture measures 52 inches by 34 inches by 20 inches. On either side of this sculpture against the wall are two works, Ronan Robe #2, 1977 and Ronan Robe #4, 1977. The Ronan Robe works include lodgepoles, or poles of pine, leaning against canvas hangings on the walls of the gallery. A strip of friction tape precedes them, but they are not secured to the wall, so please navigate around the perimeter of the room with care.

The exhibition was designed in collaboration with the artist to prioritize collectivity and a connection to outdoor spaces, informed by the artist’s own Native American ideology and values. With that in mind, the exhibition was designed not as a series of discrete galleries, but as one diffuse space where the placement of works on view are not predetermined by strict chronology or thematic elements, but a mix of both strategies. Open corners, offset walls, and large entryways between galleries encourage a cyclical and cross-pollinated approach to viewing and interacting with the work. 

The center of the exhibition is a sort of segmented hallway created between the north and south sides of the whole exhibition space by the offset entrances to the galleries. Each section of wall is accented by a monumental painting, ferrying the visitor toward the wall of windows on the south side of the fifth floor. Throughout this exhibition, visitors are encouraged to reflect on their own position and the connective relationship to nature and the outdoors.

Throughout the galleries, you will find opportunities to commune with other visitors: large openings to each space and custom furniture designed to encourage conversation allow for a variety of ways to enjoy and be present in the galleries.

The first gallery space with Indian Madonna Enthroned is oriented around the earliest works of Smith’s career. The gallery opens at a forty-five degree angle into the larger exhibition space. It is not necessary, but if you would like to follow the narrative curatorial thread, you should proceed to the right after encountering Tongass Trade Canoe and work down the south side of the galleries first.

If this is the route you choose to take, you will find yourself first in the gallery containing some of Smith’s earliest maps and activism. You are invited to sit on the benches situated in the middle of this room. Moving east, the next space is focused on the early environmentalism of Smith’s Chief Seattle series, a slightly smaller gallery space. This opens into the large fourth room, featuring works made around the Columbian quincentenary. The large space has generous communal seating in the middle. The next space is oriented around the themes of imperialism and colonialism, and includes a number of works that the artist made in critique of war. If you continue east, you will find a large wall of windows, a few couches where you are invited to sit and view a cast bronze sculpture of a coyote head tilted Urban Trickster, 2021. If you loop around back toward the northside of the galleries, you’ll find yourself in a room focused on the theme of American capitalism and consumerism. In the center of this gallery, a pinewood lath and synthetic sinew canoe sculpture, titled Trade Canoe: Making Medicine, 2018, hangs suspended from the ceiling. A five inch tall platform sits below it on the ground. Continuing through the rest of the northwest galleries, you will experience two galleries subdivided by a floating wall. These spaces address the importance of Indigenous traditions and the leadership of Native American women. On the west side of the floating wall, a motorized, animatronic sculpture, titled Warrior for the 21st Century, periodically dances, moving up and down  from the floor. You can find a full audio description for this piece on our mobile guide. The final gallery in this route returns to the idea of mapping with a focus on depictions of the U.S. map, and also has a view of the first gallery space with the earliest maps that were encountered in the beginning of this path. This vantage articulates the cyclical and overarching ideas that guide this exhibition. 

The final gallery with work by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith on this floor is the Kaufman Gallery that can be accessed through the hallway that leads north. In the corridors as you approach the final gallery are drawings on paper, as well as a documentary video and some ephemera related to Smith’s curatorial organizing. There is a bench in this space to make watching the twenty-five minute video more comfortable. The final gallery in Kaufman is centered around the future and the environment.

It is important to note that moving south and looping around to the north is not a prescription for how you should navigate through the space. You are welcome to meander in and around through the offset entryways and exits to each gallery space. It is also important to note that while the primary exhibition is on the fifth and third floors, work by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is also sprinkled throughout the Museum: including coyote drawings and paintings on the lower level floor with coat check, to the hallways on the sixth and seventh floor, and a coyote sculpture on the outdoor terrace on the eighth floor.

Narrator: Survival Suite: Nature/Medicine is a vertical lithograph made with chine-collé, about 36 inches tall by 25 inches wide. This is one of a suite of prints in which Smith identifies and depicts the four main elements that she believes Indigenous people need for survival: tribe/community, nature/medicine, wisdom/knowledge, and humor. Smith has said: “I am telling stories about hope with humor. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have hope.”

On a beige background are large painterly black and bright red marks and smaller more tightly drawn gray drawings. Drawn with thick black painterly lines is a gestural tree that fills the center of the image. The trunk begins at the bottom edge and its branches fill the top third of the image. The branches are loose, expressive as if done with a quick drag of a paintbrush with thick rounded splotches like a cluster of leaves. Scattered red marks between the limbs emphasize the bursting branches. There is a face in the top of the tree trunk that is drawn simply with wavy lines, circular eyes and a mouth and a long curved line as a nose. Starting by the left edge of the image, overlapping the tree and running up next to the face, is a red figure about half the size of the image and centered in the middle. The figure faces the right and is on one knee, with both of their long arms raised in the air. The figure is drawn without hands, feet or facial features, however its energy can be felt by short red marks built up around the outline of the figure and by the figure’s pose, almost as if they’re mid-leap, arms outstretched. Just to the right of the tree’s trunk is another figure of a brown silhouette outlined by thin red marks. The Kokopelli figure is sitting with their knees bent holding a flute. Small smears, drops, and quick short lines are scattered throughout the image.

Underneath the bold black and red colors of the tree are two figures and very faint, pale bluish gray drawings and text. The figures appear as if they might have been the first layer of printed color, with the black and red layers coming afterwards, printed on top of the quiet underlayer. Interspersed between the top of the tree’s branches are energetic twisting and curving gray lines. In the middle to the left of the tree is a small turkey, a long sock, and another bird with a small beak which are all rendered representationally. Underneath is the loose outline of a person’s side profile with short marks for hair, an outstretched arm and hand and leg, and a large red dot like a rosy cheek. To the left of the face by the edge of the image the word “NATURE” is printed sideways in a stencil-like font, which is mirrored on the far right with the word “MEDICINE”. To the right of the tree under its branches are two very small gray figures, a cartoon-like outlined figure on the left, overlapping the tree trunk with three circles for eyes and mouth, and to the right is a person holding plants and wearing a draped outfit with long hair. There are other shapes in this same gray color such as a flower plant with heart shaped leaves and a large butterfly with squiggly wings. Spanning across the entire bottom of the image is a scene in gray of five or six Indigenous people riding horses in the style of ledger drawings, a narrative painting style predominantly practiced by Indigenous peoples of the American Great Plains in the early 1900s.

Narrator: Celebrate 40,000 Years of American Art is a large vertical collagraph etching, 76 1/2 inches high by 53 inches wide. The work consists of several central dark figures with text at the top and bottom of the work. The figures are silhouettes in the shape of rabbits, drawn in a similar style as the Peterborough petroglyphs and they recede in size from largest at the right and smallest at the left, five total. Each rabbit is anthropomorphized, standing upright with long arms, legs and torso like a person. They have long faces, long rabbit ears pointed upwards, and a short pointed tail sticking out from the left side of their hips. They do not have distinguished features on their paws. Peeking out from behind the two largest rabbits and underneath text at the top of the image is a hazy and loosely drawn outline of a large rabbit with prominent ears in a more dynamic pose than the other rabbits with its arms and legs apart and whose body that blends into the dark hazy background. 

Above the rabbits at the top of the image blocky text in a rounded font and in all caps reads “CELEBRATE 40,000 YEARS”, and text at the bottom of the image reads “OF AMERICAN ART”. The background has a smokey gritty gray texture, and the text along with the rabbit shapes are a deep, warm black. The image is speckled with water droplets with a sand-like texture. Throughout the grittiness, there are thin twisting trails of drips, and a cloudy haze of black and gray. The two largest rabbits also contain texture as they are speckled with light streaks against their black silhouettes. Quick-to-See Smith chose a rabbit here because of its popularity and recognition worldwide, and to pay homage to ancient rabbit petroglyphs. 

Narrator: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith made these drawings with the idea of publishing them as a children’s book. Together, they form a kind of memoir of her early life. In the first one, we see a traditional cut-wing dress topped by a blank face. Six different women’s faces orbit around it. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: My mother ran off when I was two. And, I had to make up faces for her, when I did her portrait, because I didn't know what she looked like. I didn't have a picture of her. So these are all the faces I made up for maybe what my mother looked like.

Narrator: On each page, Smith recalled a story or moment from childhood. In the third drawing, she’s pictured her father and sister. In the fifth, she shows her home in the Nisqually Indian Community in a log cabin underneath the grandfather trees. The sixth image shows her in a field of red. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Here I'm in a field of fireweed. I would love nothing more than to go out and lay down in a field of bracken fern and watch the clouds go by and identify them by the animal shapes. So that was one of my favorite things to do was to find a field like that of color. And so each one of these has a story, a real story about my young life. 

I always had flying dreams. Like I was taking care of my sister, which I had to do a lot. And to escape from unknown, horrific things that were chasing us, I would be flying and I would be carrying her. I still have flying dreams. Not as much as I did, but they say that's for people who have stress or something. But flying dreams, for me, was escape.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: I'm Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and I'm from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana. 

Narrator: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith made this work after the fifth centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: We had been celebrating 500 years of American art, so I decided to do a little spoof on that and go back 40,000 years. And of course I know that it wasn't called America at that time, but my purpose was to do a little teaching moment with that. And so I was looking for an icon. I wanted something that they would have a relationship to Jeff Koons, Barry Flanagan, Watership Down, Easter Bunny, Harvey, Playboy Rabbit, March Hare, White Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Thumper, Bugs Bunny, Velveteen Rabbit, Roger Rabbit, Miffy, Peter Cottontail. And so then I decided, that's a good icon.

I had to figure out where I was going to find the rabbit, and it’s in the Peterborough petroglyphs site, there are standing rabbits. But then I began doing some research on standing rabbits and they occur all over the world. To bring more children, or to bring in a better crop. Or tricksterism in Native American culture, a rabbit is part of the creation story. I usually go forward, and then I look back. And I think that's what I did here.

Narrator: In Trade Canoe for the North Pole, Smith revisits the questions raised in the trade canoe that was the very first work we talked about on this guide. In a crisis, what do you want to save? Here Smith isn’t responding to biblical stories, but the growing reality of climate change. What should we bring to the North Pole in order to navigate a warming world? There’s an air of humorous futility to the way she’s packed the canoe. She’s included things that are important to her—the silhouette of a horse, for example. But there are also palm trees, which would seem out of place even in a warmed North Pole. And near the right, there’s a line drawing of one of Snow White’s seven dwarves, as if to suggest that there’s no escaping our cultural baggage. Presiding over the whole, there’s a drawing of Coyote, hands raised in what might be a shrug. For Smith, Native trickster symbols such as Coyote and the Rabbit often appear in moments like this one, where we are at a crossroads. 

Narrator: Looking at Survival Map, the artist Jeffrey Gibson reflected on the effect of turning the map on its side.

Jeffrey Gibson: The map of the United States really becomes a figure. And when I first saw it, it took me a minute to place the map and still want to continue seeing it as a figure draped in some sort of blanket or something. In many ways that we've seen Native figures shown before in painting. 

The other thing I really like is the words, “NDN humor causes people to survive.” And it's just something that I personally have been thinking about lately is Indian humor. I don't know if many people have experienced it if you're not from those communities, but it's humor which is really based in...addiction, abuse, traumatic situations, but also love and attractive people and stories about Indians.

The term NDN, which is like EN-DEE-EN, is something which has totally emerged out of Native communities relative to Indian humor. I oftentimes distinguish for myself when I use the word Indian versus Native American versus American Indian versus Indigenous versus Native. And NDN is a very specific Indian-to-Indian kind of term of endearment. But also I think of empowerment. And I would say the humor is one of the superpowers of Indians for sure.

Narrator: In 1999, Smith was commissioned to make a work that could be packed into a small box–a time capsule. Working on the project with her son, Neal Ambrose-Smith, she set out to make the work take up as much space as possible when it was removed from its container. 

Neal Ambrose-Smith: And so this, the idea was born of maybe a figure and then it could dance or move. And it could be animatronic. 

Narrator: Neal Ambrose-Smith. 

Neal Ambrose-Smith: So we got these guys down the street to make a motor for us to mount this thing on. And then we decided to use chains instead of ropes to hold it together because they make sound and they collapse. 

And it was a lot of fun because Jaune went into this super creative mode of like, oh, we're going to do some sound. It needs sound. And so we went to this guy's recording studio and we brought coffee cans full of coffee beans and, you know, to make a rattle sound. And then we got somebody up on the reservation to do a recording from Sophie May, she's one of our Salish speakers, counting one to ten for “Ten Little Indians.”

The figure itself is a combination of all the things that you might need as a warrior for the 21st century. And when I say warrior, it doesn't necessarily mean male or female.

So the stomach is frybread and then a T-shirt from the reservation. It says Salish Kootenai on it and it's red, which is good. And then at each of the joints, we put these little clear boxes like jewelry boxes or something to stuff things in. So there's sage and there's some tobacco and the feet are cassettes, you know with like powwow songs. And then there's a snag bag connected to one of the hands, you know which are gloves. And a snag bag, for those who aren't in the know is—at a powwow, sometimes you go in there for a snag, which is to get a date. And so a snag bag has lubricants, maybe a condom. Things for safe practice of snagging.

Narrator: Throughout her career, Smith has used traditional Native dresses as stand-ins for the power of Native women.

Jeffrey Gibson: One of the things I think that people don't understand maybe about regalia and the clothing that Indigenous people wear is that it's oftentimes completely unique to the owner. 

Narrator: Artist Jeffrey Gibson.

Jeffrey Gibson: It's something that oftentimes has either been made by the person or made by their family or their community for them. 

Narrator: Smith has collaged the dress with language and images, which together point to the complexity of modern Native communities. 

Jeffrey Gibson: I noticed in some of the paintings from this time period, headlines from news from Indian Country, which is always interesting to me, that there is an alternative media that has existed for a long time within Native communities, and the perspective of those articles is different.

She also includes twentieth century, I guess I would call them racist imagery, propaganda being made of characters of what it means to be American Indian from that century. I think what Jaune really did that she didn't protect the image of being Native. She kind of reflected these conflicting layers of what the identity of being Native had become by the 1990s.

So we were no longer just living in Indian land, living traditionally in any way. Many people talked about living in between worlds. What she presents is that as one world. It's one world full of conflicting images. There's no rest you know in Jaune's world. There are, of course, other paintings where I feel like through cultural practice and traditional practice, you are able to exist spiritually in another world. But there's also the very material grounded world which is difficult and filled with pain and trauma and racism, and I feel like Jaune's work just sort of flattens that into one space.

Narrator: Smith called this painting Going Forward/Looking Back. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: It's that we always have to look back before we go forward. So there's a horse in here that's turned left and it says “looking back, looking forward.” Because the three parts of our life is: looking behind us to see where we've come from, seeing where we are presently, and then what do we have to do to move forward? Not just as an individual, but as a community, as part of a community. What can I do to help people at home? Do I have more than people at home do? A lot of people. I have more than a lot of people. So there's always  need for me to do more. And I take that very seriously. And that's called giving back. So when you grasp tight the old ways, that sense of giving back is one of the most important things you can do.

Narrator: Smith has always seen her work as an artist as being inseparable from her roles as an educator, a curator, and a community organizer. For example, she is currently expanding her studios so that she can host a number of residencies for Native artists and children’s book writers. She’ll provide them with a place to live while they do their work, and offer visual artists use of a printing press. 

Narrator: In Target: The Wild West, Smith responded to the work of Jasper Johns, who centered simple, iconic forms like maps and targets.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: And so I was inclined to, over the years, say, well, these guys are really successful in the art world, but what can I do to not copy their work, but mimic something in their work, and then I can tell an Indian story.

Narrator: Unlike Johns’ targets, Smith’s makes significant use of text.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: It's talking about how Indian people have been targets of consumerism, of commodification. Look at the books and the movies of made up mythological Indians that don't exist, of cultures that we ourselves don't recognize at all, of them having Indians speak gobbledygook on the screen. In the 1950s, when I was watching these programs, I would root for the cowboys because the Indians were stupid. They were drunk and they weren't nice people. And often they were the bad guys so I would root for the cowboys. I've heard that over and over from other people my age. 

There's no way to overcome the kind of racism that comes out of that even if it's happening today. But we can use it in our art. 

Narrator: Smith titled this work McFlag and gave the canvas “ears” made of speakers that resemble Mickey Mouse’s ears. She layers brand identities like McDonald's and Disney over the American flag, and suggests that American commercialism and American nationalism have become inseparable. 

Marie Watt: I am Marie Watt, and I am an artist and member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. 

I think that one of the things that Jaune Quick-to-See Smith does in this painting is she really does call upon us to think about these different constructs of empire, whether it's nationhood or the entertainment industry. I am very much aware is when you zoom into this image and you start looking at the collage elements that have washes of paint over them, how there's phrases like “the last frontier,” and “spirits are rich,” and “prices are low” and “big business,” and it's interesting to reflect on the relationship between consumerism and stereotypes, between consumerism and colonization, and even consumerism and environmental degradation. And so this piece on one hand, I think is playful and funny, and yet, it also sort of looks at this darker side of empires.

Narrator: Rain I is part of Smith’s “Custer Series”. In all of these prints, she riffs on a photograph of General George Armstrong Custer standing with his arms crossed. During the 1860s and 70s, Custer was a leader in the U.S. invasion of Native American lands. He is perhaps best known for his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn, a major U.S. loss known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” The photo became well known when his wife circulated it in an effort to promote him as a great patriotic hero. 

Andrea Carlson: The thing that strikes me right away about this is that it's General Custer laid out flat horizontally on the ground. 

Narrator: Artist Andrea Carlson.

Andrea Carlson: He, in this state, is in maybe a post-murdered state, but he maintains the pose, the kind of widespread stance and the folded arms of a petulant child or someone with authority. We're very familiar with that, you know, if you see any portraiture of kings or nobles or military people, you'll see this stance. And so seeing it on its side, seeing Custer on his side in that stance is wonderfully hysterical. It is just absolutely brilliant to have it toppled like a statue or a monument.

There's all these figures that are almost raining down on him, taking him over. Clearly you think of things like the dripping of the blood. But there's also humor in her work even when it's talking about things like violence and genocide against Native people. And in this particular case, he didn't get to write the end of the story. He didn't survive. So that also belongs to Indigenous people, belongs to our forms of imagery. So this is, I think, just an absolutely interesting and also humorous and also just a gutting work of art.

Narrator: In War is Heck, Smith used a printmaking technique called chine-collé to collage bits of paper onto the background. Throughout this work, the artist inserts references to war. In the upper left hand corner, you can find a card from the Mexican game of chance, lotería. It reads “El Soldado,” the soldier.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: It’s like the common people going to war, being led to slaughter. Because the dictators or the men in power, you know they always stay safe and the people wind up on the battlefield, or in their villages. And often it's the women and children.

Most of the time in the 2000s I was reacting to the issue of the Iraq War, or, you know, things that were going on in the Middle East, Afghanistan. You know I always think this work is going to be obsolete. “Oh, I'm making this now but, you know, next year this could be ended and we won't be dealing with this.” And then next year comes and things get worse, or another war starts, so this work stays ever present.

Narrator: Smith called this painting The Vanishing American. It mixes brushy abstraction with headlines clipped from newspapers. In the upper right, one reads “What Americans,” pointing loosely to the painting’s ironic explorations of identity. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: See there's always this thing about "the vanishing Native American." The vanishing American Indian. And we've been hit with that all of our lives. That, "oh you guys are so watered down." "Oh you guys are so mixed blood, you don't know who you are." "Oh you're so bastardized, you have no culture left."

Narrator: Smith said she was inspired to make the painting after a community meal during medicine lodge ceremonies on the lands of the Blackfeet Nation, near her childhood home. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: And then when everybody would gather to eat, people would start talking about, “And, you know, the white people are just going to do themselves in with all their poisons and all the pesticides and everything that they're using on our food. And so they're just going to be the vanishing white men.” And then everybody would laugh.

So I came back into the studio, and here I found this sign called built-in upgradability out of some New York Times or some ad or something. And I said, yeah, that really fits what the elders are saying, that we're going to make it through this. Built-in upgradability, that's what we have. We've been here for thousands and thousands of years. They just got here yesterday. They keep pretending like, oh, we just got here before them. Well, that's not true. We've been here since the creation time. So the making of a comeback.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: I made some paper dolls based on Barbie and Ken. Their name is Barbie Plenty Horses, which is an old family name at home for people in my tribe, Barbie Plenty Horses and Ken and Bruce, the little boy. And how they got a good education by the Catholic priests, learning how to polish door knobs and clean floors. 

Narrator: The drawings recount the many traumas that Native Americans have experienced at the hands of the U.S. government. The first one shows a Jesuit Priest—an educator, and a leader in the policy of forcibly divorcing Native American children and youth from their languages and cultures. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: That is the story of genocide right there. Part of it. Genocide isn't just slicing our throats and putting a bullet in our heads, that is back in our families. We all know that. But it is what the government and the churches have done to us. When they took our language away–like bam! Everything that we had in life, my father and all my aunties and uncles that we knew, all the knowledge that we had, our language had given us names of all the mountains at home, all the rivers, all everything, our language gave us all this, told us who we were and, and how we got here. It’s like, they gave us a lobotomy. That's what they did to us when they take away your language and parts of your culture and it's not there and they do it in one generation, your head has a big hole in it. 

Narrator: This is one of Smith’s earliest “Trade Canoes”. From the beginning, she drew on the importance of canoes to Native peoples in order to make complex statements about their experience of American history. 

Jeffrey Gibson: I think for Indigenous people, it is mobility. It is the ability to be able to travel. 

My name is Jeffrey Gibson. I'm an artist. I live in the Hudson Valley, and I'm a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee.

What's interesting about this painting is we don't know the direction. All the directions are removed. There is no front end of the canoe versus the back end of the canoe. It's empty and it's in a chaotic world that that version of the canoe doesn't really make sense.

All of the kind of text and imagery that she's put here are the things that have robbed us of knowing the Indigenous definition of a canoe. And I think putting the trash on the string above the painting, those are also just those images and those texts brought into object form, mass-produced all over the world, cheap and plentiful.

This painting of the canoe down below and all of the text and imagery that surrounds it speaks in the same way of this kind of difficult, challenging world for Indigenous people to find and navigate who they are as contemporary people, who they are as traditional people, who they are in relationship to their communities and their families. And then you hang this…I'm going to use the word trash, and I don't mean that, but I mean it sort of like this very much throwaway culture…this kitsch and camp racist memorabilia hanging above it on the string. I think it's sort of the audacity of this painting that makes it really successful. 

Narrator: Smith called this work Rain (C.S., 1854). G. Peter Jemison is a member of the Seneca Nation heron clan.

G. Peter Jemison: As you move around the painting, you would be struck by this light being reflected from the spoons. And I like that idea, because it's difficult to capture, really, what rain looks like if you try to paint it. 

Narrator: The “C.S.” of the painting’s subtitle stands for Chief Seattle, who was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief during the middle of the nineteenth century. 

G. Peter Jemison: Chief Seattle, of course, is famous for making an early statement about the necessity to live in harmony with the natural world, and not to be in the process of destroying it. Perhaps Jaune's commentary here is related to what is it, that is, now not only in the soil, but what is coming from the atmosphere. Because of the kind of air pollution that we now live with.

Narrator: Smith made this painting after traveling around the northeastern United States with Jemison, and encountering the effects of acid rain on forests in upstate New York.  

Narrator: Smith made Escarpment and a number of other works nearby during a battle to save a sacred site near Albuquerque, New Mexico, not far from her home and studio. Developers wanted to build a highway through the area, destroying access to the ancient petroglyphs there. In this work—and many others in the exhibition—Smith’s activism became a driving force behind the content and her compositional choices. Josie Lopez is the Head Curator at the Albuquerque Museum.

Josie Lopez: You can feel this frenetic energy that's coming from the work, and that's really about the entrenched struggle that was happening. And then of course to the left you see these line drawings that are echoing the glyphs that are carved into the rocks in this particular park that are what makes them sacred land, but also is what draws many Indigenous people to those lands in order to practice different beliefs and rituals.

Narrator: Thanks to the work of Smith and other activists, Petroglyph National Monument was created in 1990, though the site remains vulnerable to development. 

Narrator: In Blackwater Draw II, Smith layered fabric, painted abstraction, and images of horses. It’s from a series of paintings she made reimagining ancient Native sites. She named them after the sites, many of which she had researched but hadn’t seen firsthand. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: So I have to imagine what I might think a Blackwater Draw might be.

And that means a sort of canyon-like place, a narrow place between the rocks. And so that's what I'm forming here. You can see these narrow channels of water, and they’re dark. And so my imagination has to make it up if I can't find a picture. Remember, in the days when I did this, 1983, there were no computers. There were no cell phones. There was only the library. 

And I'm interested in what information is available. It's very hard to find. There's not a lot written on our history. So threaded all the way through this show are little soundbites in some way about this history in the United States that's not told and not known.

Narrator: In the late 1970s, Smith began making landscapes of Montana, where she’d grown up. With their abstract forms, her works stand outside of the U.S. landscape tradition that began in the nineteenth century. Those painters had a white East Coast audience in mind, and painted canvases of the western landscape suggesting that the land there was as empty as it was beautiful—ready to be claimed. In the works on view here, Smith made modest gestures to show that, in fact, the landscape had always been inhabited. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: You know, when I go home, I would see fields of mustard, fields of fireweed, or plowed fields. And also, because there was so much talk about the wilderness being empty space, I put bird tracks in, and sometimes little animals, horses. And in some cases here, I've got pictographs that you would see on the plateau. So they're kind of made up landscapes, but they're all based on what I would see at home.

Narrator: Take a moment to look at the materials Smith used in this early sculpture, which she called Indian Madonna Enthroned. She has corn at her heart, and pheasant wings for hands. She holds a book by the Standing Rock Sioux writer Vine Deloria, which contrasts Christianity to Native religions, with their focus on the interconnectedness of all living things. While these elements suggest the figure’s connection to nature, other aspects of the work point to the ways she’s constrained by colonial forces. Her face is literally framed. If you walk around to the back of the sculpture, you’ll see that her child also appears in a frame. Look closely at the hide behind the figure’s head on the frame of the chair, and you’ll see that Smith has stenciled on the words “Property of the BIA”—or Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

Smith often collaborates with her son, the artist Neal Ambrose-Smith, who restored parts of this sculpture after many years in storage. He’s talked about the flag on the Madonna’s lap, and its symbolic complexities for Native Americans.

Neal Ambrose-Smith: Many people have different identities regarding flag and flag etiquette and things that are connected to that, like war, for instance, which traditionally is the most documented way of documenting history. When we talk about history, it's always like every 200 years because there's a war connected to it or something. In Native identity, we talk about history through the land, and so it goes back 10,000 years, it goes back 40,000 years. We talk about the glaciers, we talk about the winds and the trees and how we're connected to all that, and so I think for me, that aspect of that flag really brings a lot of those things together. 

Narrator: This painting is one of Smith’s “Trade Canoes”. It’s from 2015, but she began making them in 1992—around the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America. 

Andrea Carlson: The idea around the “Columbian Exchange” is that the “new” world and the “old” world exchanged goods and things and ideas, but what did the Natives really get out of that exchange?

Narrator: Artist Andrea Carlson belongs to Grand Portage Ojibwe.

Andrea Carlson: We got disease, we got colonization, we got land loss, we lost species. And what did Europe get out of it? Lots of resources. 

Narrator: Smith subtitled this trade canoe Forty Days and Forty Nights, evoking the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark.

Andrea Carlson: The title is so incredibly interesting to me because, as we know, Christianity has been a colonial force throughout the Americas and colonized world, but I feel like this isn't a title in support of Christianity. But it can be about general ideas around this story of forty days and forty nights, of this flooding of the earth. 

A number of us have access to Christian stories and storytelling through colonization where we wouldn't have access to a Salish creation story. In this vessel, the things that are being saved are beings, they are spirits, they are stories. 

I love how at the center of this piece, Coyote emerges, Coyote as a central character with these bright beams behind him. 

Narrator: Coyote is an important figure in the creation myths of tribes rooted in the Great Plains, like Smith’s Salish ancestors. Coyote is also a trickster and a productive troublemaker. As you’ll see as you explore the exhibition, he shows up a lot in Smith’s work.

Narrator: Welcome to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map. Together we’ll explore five decades of Smith’s career, looking at paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Most people will never have heard of me. And that’s not off-putting.

Narrator: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: It’s that maybe it will start to crack this whole issue of Native Americans being invisible. Being Indigenous in making art means that you’re looking at the world through lenses that are curved or changed by your upbringing and by your worldview. 

Narrator: For Smith, who is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, that worldview first began to form in the Pacific Northwest and western Montana. Today, Smith lives and works in New Mexico. Throughout her life and work, she has underscored the importance of the land and of Indigenous communities. As we move through the exhibition, we’ll look at the ways in which Smith addresses the traumas of Native American people with rigor, inventiveness, and critical humor. 

You can use this guide to explore the works in any order you wish. As you go, you’ll be hearing not only from Smith but from writers and other artists including Neil Ambrose-Smith, Andrea Carlson, Jeffrey Gibson, G. Peter Jemison, Josie Lopez, and Marie Watt. 

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: Soy Jaune "Mente Rápida" Smith, de la Nación Confederada de Salish y Kootenai en Montana.

Narrator: Jaune "Mente Rápida" Smith realizó este trabajo después del quinto centenario de la llegada de Colón al continente americano. 

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: Habíamos celebrado los 500 años del arte americano, por eso decidí hacer una pequeña parodia y retroceder 40,000 años. Es obvio que sé que no se llamaba América en aquel entonces, pero mi intención era lograr con eso un pequeño momento de enseñanza. Buscaba algo icónico. Quería algo con lo que la gente pudiera relacionarse. Jeff Koons, Barry Flanagan, La colina de Watership, el conejo de Pascua, Harvey, el conejo de Playboy, la Liebre de Marzo, el Conejo Blanco, Pedrito Conejo, Tambor, Bugs Bunny, el Conejo de Terciopelo, Roger Rabbit, Miffy, Peter Cottontail. Por eso decidí que el conejo era el icono adecuado. 

Solo quedaba por resolver de dónde iba a tomarlo. En el sitio web de petroglifos de Peterborough hay conejos de pie. Pero cuando comencé a investigar,descubrí que los conejos en posición vertical están presentes en todo el mundo y por distintas razones: a veces, para que nazcan más niños, o para tener una buena cosecha, o bien representan la figura del embaucador en las culturas indígenas de Norteamérica, o son parte de la historia de la creación. Por lo general yo avanzo, y luego miro hacia atrás. Creo que eso fue lo que hice en este caso.

Narrator: Los grabados no suelen ser así de grandes. Para oír a “Mente Rápida” Smith contar cómo lo hizo, haz clic para continuar.

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: Es un grabado, pero está hecho con la técnica de colagrafía, que viene a ser una especie de modo ludita de hacer grabados. Cuando iba a la Universidad de Washington el profesor tenía una gran prensa, y cuando fui a hacer un grabado me dijo: "Quiero que hagas algo grande". Y yo pregunté, "¿Qué tan grande?" Y él dijo, "Hmm... como de seis pies". Y yo le dije, "Oh, nunca hice nada de ese tamaño". Así que me dije a mí misma, "haré conejos de seis pies, eso es lo que haré". Tuve que hacerlo en una especie de placa de aglomerado, y después con acrílico en aerosol, estopilla, áridos muy finos como para pulir joyas y otras cosas por el estilo. Así fue que, al mezclar todo eso, dimos con la textura. Tiene hasta pequeñísimas gotas de agua que quedaron allí.

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: It's an etching, but it's a collagraph etching, which is kind of the Luddite way of doing etching. When I went to Washington University the professor there had made a larger press, and so when I went there to do a print he said, "I want you to make something big." So I said, "Like how big?" And he said, "Hmm, like six feet." So I was like "Ohh, I haven't worked on that size before." I decided, okay I'll make six foot rabbits, that's what I'll do. I had to do it on some kind of a beaver board and then using acrylic spray, cheesecloth, aggregate to polish stones and things like that. So mixing that all together, that's how we got the texture. It's got water droplets that stay there.

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: I'm Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and I'm from the Confederate of Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana. 

Narrator: Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith made this work after the fifth centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. 

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith: We had been celebrating 500 years of American art, so I decided to do a little spoof on that and go back 40,000 years. And of course I know that it wasn't called America at that time, but my purpose was to do a little teaching moment with that. I was looking for an icon. I wanted something that they would have a relationship to. Jeff Koons, Barry Flanagan, Watership Down, Easter Bunny, Harvey, Playboy Rabbit, March Hare, White Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Thumper, Bugs Bunny, Velveteen Rabbit, Roger Rabbit, Miffy, Peter Cottontail. And so then I decided that's a good icon.

I had to figure out where I was going to find the rabbit. In the Peterborough petroglyphs site, there are standing rabbits. But then I began doing some research on standing rabbits and they occur all over the world. To bring more children, or to bring in a better crop. Or tricksterism in Native American culture, part of the creation story. I usually go forward, and then I look back. And I think that's what I did here. 

Narrator: Prints aren’t often this large. To hear Quick-to-See-Smith talk about how she made it, please tap to continue.