"Sweet Medicine" and "Americans"

Two links surfaced the week our class started reading about Native American art and culture. Colin Edgington suggested I investigate Drex Brooks' Sweet Medicine after hearing about this class and it could not be a more appropriate contemporary investigation of the subjects we are starting to explore.

Nicole Pasulka writes in the link above that Brooks "photographed historical sites where conflict between Native Americans and white settlers occurred. Brooks’s work forces audiences to consider the massacres and exploitation Native Americans suffered at the hands of these settlers. The stillness of these overgrown or repopulated sites reminds us of what’s been forgotten and what’s missing."

Drex Brooks, Bad Axe Massacre Site, Vernon County, Wisconsin, 1991

Drex Brooks, Site of the Bascom Affair, Apache Pass, Cochise County, Arizona, 1988

Drex Brooks, Pyramid Lake Battlefield, Pyramid Lake Reservation, Nevada, 1988

Drex Brooks, Children's Graves, Carlisle Indian School, now U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1988

Drex Brooks, Medicine Lodge Treaty Site, Barber County, Kansas, 1988

[All images are from the Blue Sky Gallery website]

After reading Peter Schjeldahl's review "America as Indian Country" in The New Yorker, I looked up the exhibition on the National Museum of the American Indian website and promptly started clicking on nearly every single object. 

Schjeldahl writes: "As an old white man, I can’t propose my pleasure in “Americans” as a model response to it, given the plurality of brains that burn with variants of rage or anguish in this time of identity politics. But I’ll dare to endorse an approach ... that lets identity and politics float a little free of each other, allowing wisdom to seep in. The show attempts it by parading crudely exaggerated understandings of Native Americans, ossified in kitsch, to awaken reactive senses of complicated, deep, living truths."

While immersed in this world of kitsch, Lara informed me that the Cleveland Indians decided to phase out their logo this week (after how many decades of discussion?).