Seeing and Being Seen in Media Culture: Shelley Niro's Honey Moccasin

In the work of Mohawk visual artist Shelley Niro native stereotypes are deconstructed while at the same time racial identity is not taken as historically fixed and timeless. Rather, identity is understood as an ongoing formative process whereby the vitality of culture is measured in the creative energy of adaptation and appropriation (among other traits) in the expression of tradition and in the face of the consequences of contemporary history. As a reviewer of her photography series Mohawks in Beehives notes: [Niro's] work is situated in a contemporary reality of what it means to be a First Nations woman. Her references to soap operas, the Canadian national anthem, Hollywood and fifties' lifestyle complete with hairdryers, articulate an identity that has to do with lived experience rather than some essentialist or nostalgic cultural identity. (1) At the same time her artwork provides a vital critical engagement with western hegemony, humorously sketching the kitsch of consumerist media culture as marker of the more oppressive and assimilationist political project. the above reviewer's description of the artwork suggests a postmodern appeal to the surfaces of consumer culture, what also emerges is an understanding of identity that consists of more than fashion and artifact. Indeed, it is the very subject of identity rather than difference that troubles the seductive surfaces of the postmodern. In Niro's films It Starts with a Whisper (co-directed with Anna Gronau, 1993) and Honey Moccasin (1998) the grim stereotype image of the disenfranchised native typically found on Canadian television is replaced by characters who have a sophisticated historical consciousness and desire to navigate the flux of identity formed out of tradition, everyday reality, dominant media culture, and the creative process of change. (2) In contrast, mainstream or what I call the good liberal narrative of First Nation experience, while often examining the important issues of residential schools, racism, and the economic dislocation of many reservation residents, often also articulate the native as a sad figure of traditional culture unable to adapt to contemporary reality and accordingly doomed to disappear. As Daniel Francis points out, the prediction of the vanishing native informs the historical breadth of contact with white Europeans, notwithstanding the necessity of native assistance to early settlers and participation in the fur trade. The narrative of a vanishing people becomes especially dominant as Canada shifts from a fur-trade and resource colony to an agricultural and increasingly industrialized political economy by the end of the nineteenth century. With settlement emerges the culture industry and the museumization of the native as noble figure of the past. According to Francis: While artists like Emily Carr lamented the fate of the Indian, their success was predicated on it. Having first of all destroyed many aspects of Native culture, White society now turned around and admired its own recreations of what it had destroyed. To the extent that they suffered any guilt over what had happened to the Native people, Whites relieved it by preserving evidence of the supposedly dying culture. Whites convinced themselves that they were in this way saving the Indians. (3) As a kind of antidote to the history of this bad medicine, the spirit voices who visit the main character in It Starts with a Whisper quietly urge: Shanna don't be sad we made it through another year, a short five hundred years. Next year will be better. It is this irony, subtle wit, and assertion of the complexity of identity in relation to the long road of history that characterizes Niro's films. It is an identity which is not simply a reproduction of the grim Canadian cultural cliche of survival; rather, it is shaped by a self-referential awareness of process and change emergent with the creative act of performance and perception. In a curatorial statement from 1994 Shelley Niro affirms the longstanding importance of image-making in First Nations culture, from the design of Iroquois wampum belts to record legal transactions to the importance of totem poles for west coast natives: Art was not a superfluous pastime but part of peoples' own physical reality. …

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