Playing Indian in the Works of Rebecca Belmore, Marilyn Dumont, and Ray Young Bear

Playing Indian in the Works of Rebecca Belmore, Marilyn Dumont, and Ray Young Bear Laura Beard (bio) In Playing Indian, Philip J. Deloria discusses the ways in which non-Natives have performed their own ideas and notions of Indian identities to their own purposes. He traces Indian play from colonial times through to contemporary ones and reminds readers that while the Indianness being claimed in this Indian play “was critical to American identities, it necessarily went hand in hand with the dispossession and conquest of actual Indian people.”1 Cynthia L. Landrum echoes Deloria’s observation, noting that “the presence of actual Indians, persistently struggling to maintain land and sovereignty in the face of these constructs, necessitates the continued reconstruction of the savage over time and geography.”2 Non-Native peoples play Indian—in Hollywood movies, in dime-store novels, on television, as mascots for sports teams, in Halloween costumes—but Indians can play Indian as well. Indeed, playing with the “flattened-out pastiche” of Native stereotypes characterizes the work of many twentieth-century Native artists.3 This essay explores the cultural productions of Indigenous artists who sometimes “play Indian” in creating their own images of themselves and their communities. While Deloria’s discussion focused on the ways in which non-Natives perform notions of Native identity, many Native authors, artists, and performers have explored the discomforts of being expected to “play Indian” for members of a dominant society. Highlighted here are self-reflective works of three artists who are particularly pertinent to a discussion of the topic of playing Indian. Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore uses a variety of art forms—including sculpture, installation, video, and performance—to address such issues as the stereotyping of Native people, the commoditization of Native bodies for souvenir items, [End Page 492] and the violence against Native women. Marilyn Dumont is a Métis poet from northeastern Alberta who uses her poetry in part to expose the injustices imposed upon Indigenous peoples in Canada. Mesquakie artist Ray Young Bear is a poet, novelist, drummer, and singer whose autobiographical metafiction explores the cross-cultural conflicts created by living within a tribal community with a strong sense of place and being a writer published by what he calls The Outside World. Although these artists come from different Native communities and traditions, looking at them together allows us to see how contemporary Native artists “play Indian” in order to critique the cultural performances of others who would seek to appropriate, absorb, and transform that social, cultural, political, and ethical space at the expense of real live Indian people. Their examples of playing Indian are thus critical in both senses of the word: crucial examples of the genre but also ones that raise objections to many components of the long-standing North American tradition of playing Indian. Rebecca Belmore (member of the Lac Seul First Nation, born in Upsala, Ontario) has been called one of “the most consistently productive and provocative Native North American artists over the past twenty years,” one who has “consistently nailed moments of crisis in public debates in Canada.”4 Social and political engagement is key to Belmore’s work, work that is often site specific and time specific. Belmore’s art is both powerful and powerfully integrated into the physical, social, and political landscapes in which she enacts her performances. Belmore’s self-portrait, True Grit, a Souvenir, is a six-foot-tall souvenir cushion on which she portrays herself posed in a football jersey, jeans, and cowboy boots. The portrait has been placed on a giant pillow with a floral background and a fringed edge. With both halves of the title engaging and resisting elements of popular and commercial culture, the artwork challenges any easy expectations about what Native art or Native identity should be.5 Belmore here refuses to play Indian to meet the desires or expectations of the non-Native society, yet she reminds her viewers that Natives are constantly being used as potentially profitable merchandise.6 As she notes in her artist’s statement, “I used myself as the central figure, the northern motif, the native Indian as marketable commodity, the artist as product. The souvenir is: ‘Rebecca Belmore...

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