Running the "Medicine Line": Images of the Border in Contemporary Native American Art

Running the "Medicine Line":Images of the Border in Contemporary Native American Art Kate Morris (bio) On a typical morning the Three Nations International Crossing bridge over the Saint Lawrence River is a busy thoroughfare; the border crossing here averages four thousand cars per day. On the morning that I crossed over it in August 2009, however, the bridge was deserted. It was eerily quiet as my passenger and I left the United States and drove north onto Cornwall Island, Ontario. Coming off the south span of the bridge into the Akwesasne Mohawk community of Kawehno:ke, ours was the only car approaching the abandoned Canadian Border Services station that had until recently been an official entry point into Canada. Now it was shuttered: a bedsheet painted with the image of a handgun canceled out by a red circle-and-slash symbol obscured the lettering on the Welcome to Canada sign, and on the flagpoles over the station flew only the flags of the Haudenosaunee and Akwesasne Nations. The vehicle lanes were all open, and hand-lettered signs taped over the official directives advised all traffic to keep moving through Mohawk territory and over the north span of the bridge into mainland Ontario (fig. 1). We weren't interested in proceeding into Canada, however; the border itself was what we had come to see. As a scholar of contemporary Native American art, I have become increasingly interested in issues of transnationalism. The contemporary art world as a whole has become increasingly defined as a global culture; we now write routinely of the experiences of itinerant, globe-trotting artists, of Biennale cultures, of diasporas, thresholds, and liminality.1 Yet in curious ways we find the borders themselves—those places where the local and the global truly intersect—slipping from our view. It was, in fact, a work of art that brought me to the New York-Ontario border [End Page 549] in the summer of 2009: Alan Michelson's Third Bank of the River had been installed in the US port of entry at Massena, New York, in April of that year (fig. 2). The six-by-forty-foot image is composed of digitally joined photographs of the banks of the Saint Lawrence River as it forms the border between the United States and Canada. Michelson is Mohawk; thus, the locating of his monumental artwork in the lobby of a US border crossing station would have been a notable occurrence in any year. The fact that the work takes the overall form of a forty-foot-long Haudenosaunee treaty belt and is thus an obvious statement of indigenous sovereignty makes the commission all the more remarkable. Lending further critical weight to the project is the uncanny timing of the installation of Third Bank of the River at Massena just weeks before the eruption of a serious diplomatic incident between the Mohawk Nation and the Canadian government on the other side of the bridge. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. View of Canadian Border Services Station at Cornwall Island, Ontario, August 2009. Photo by the author. In this article I am concerned with the intersection of two congruent phenomena: an increasing number of references to borders in contemporary Native American art and an increasing occurrence of border-rights [End Page 550] conflicts between Native nations and the governments of the United States and Canada. Focusing on the period roughly 1990 to the present, I acknowledge the shifts in both art and politics after September 11, 2001; however, I do not suggest that tension or even outright conflict around borders is new to Indian Country—indeed, the right to free passage is a basic tenet of American Indian and First Nations sovereignty.2 I argue that as border-zone frictions intensified post-9/11, the visual and philosophical complexity of artworks situated within these zones also increased. The evolving situation at Kawehno:ke and the installation of Alan Michelson's artwork at Massena provide an ideal entry point into this discourse. As the northernmost territory of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Kawehno:ke, or Cornwall Island, is located entirely within Canada—it is in the main channel of the Saint Lawrence...

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