We are here with Jolene Rickard, an artist, a professor, a scholar, and an activist. And a wonderful person, inspirational for so many people for quite a while already. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> And Jolene, thanks so much for being with us. >> No, thank you for inviting me. >> And perhaps we can start with you talking a little bit about guns, bibles, and treaties, this great project that you've worked on for. >> Right, guns, bibles and treaties were installed at the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian museums. And it's located, the location is significant because it's on what they call the museum mile in Washington, DC. So, actually, from one of the balconies of the NMAI, you can actually see the Capitol, which I think is a sort of sweet irony, considering the fact that this museum was one of the last, if not the last, museum on the Museum Mall. And, of course, it's dedicated to indigenous peoples, but I think there's an irony there as well. It took an act of congress to actually have the museum funded. >> Yeah, in fact I think there's a window where you can get inside a teepee so you can see [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGH]. >> Yeah, it's very experiential. [LAUGH] And so, this was a collaboration with Paul Chetsmith, and Paul is also an activist and curator. And we're really trying ti deal with the genocide that took place against the indigenous people in the Americas without being able to use the word genocide. Because within the Smithsonian, because it's a federal insitution, every single word in every label is scrutinized by layer and layers of legal, legal, no, very specific legal expertise protecting the interests, of course, of the Smithsonian. And so Guns, Bibles, and Treaties is the way that we experientialized or created, in the sense, an overwhelming sense that you can't deny this. And what isn't really translated that well in the set of stills is the idea that the gold, most of the gold that was extracted from the Americas, and it could have been in object form, I was very influenced at the time by Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America which, of course, is a wonderful history of the extraction of gold and silver that took place at early contact, which was actually a gold rush. It was like there was a fever, that people needed to get to the Americas once they heard of these mountains of gold. So then there was, of course, the most famous one was put to sea. It was this mountain of silver that was completely extracted. Many of you know the wonderful photography. Wonderful that he did it, but not wonderful subject of Selgato, of that contemporary experience. So people still enslaved, pulling that silver from those mines. And so, it was not very difficult to go to the collection and find hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of gold in a collection. And this is the collection of NMAI because the person who was one of the founders of the museum, George Gustav Hyde, actually went through indigenous communities in the Americas and practiced the form of salvage anthropology. And so, he went through and, basically, scooped up everything the community had. So, today, we understand salvage anthropology to be a crime committed against people who have nothing left to sell but their most precious thing. And so, in a way, all of these objects that are in these collections today are really emblems of that desperation. Because people don't sell their most precious thing unless they have to. And so, that's what that wall represented. And what's interesting is that a number of those pieces were then melted down, and they became objects that were part of this, sort of, what you would call the gilded age of the Reniassance. And so, scholars that focus on the Renaissance have argued that the largess extracted from the Americas actually fuelled the revival of Europe created the Renaissance. So, there's this 500 year long relationship. So part of curating isn't about illustrating a book. It's about doing something that one cannot experience from reading, or from watching a video. And so, it needed to be immersive, you needed to feel it. And so, just the negotiation of putting all that gold in one place, in and of itself, deserves, I think, a book. That needs to be done, because, just to give you a little detail of curator inside stuff, we had to lay this stuff out in what's called a charette, and I have a wonderful image to share with you about that. When we were doing the charette, which is actually an architectural term that locates where every single little piece goes, there were guards. And so we had two, there were guards with us the entire time, but there wasn't guards just in the room with us, but there were guards around the building because the gold vaults were open. So there's just that idea. And so, to move one object in that installation from the archive to the wall was approximately $600. So you can understand the commitment the museum had to have in order to do that installation. And then, the glass on the installation was this hyper, super hyper, it's all so that somebody couldn't just punch through and run with the gold. So I mean, it was a pretty high security installation. There's a whole history of guns about the the guns that basically won the American west. And so, there's a whole series of guns in that installation that were bad technology that were sold to native communities. Most indigenous communities had either a balance or a privileging of a female or woman as having as much creative, or making, or spiritual power as a man. But with the importation of Christianity, we saw the importation of a kind of patriarchy that was a very devastating, destabilization factor for many indigenous communities. And that, coupled with this idea of obedience, this idea of the acceptance of poverty, and so there is a lot things we need to re-learn about what indigenous communities were. They were not rural, they were very cosmopolitan. We liked to live in large urban centers. >> [INAUDIBLE] there's an erasure of the urban indigenous movement. >> Right, exactly. And so, the Americas were organized around waterways, it was an interior artery, the Mississippi all the way down through Latin America, it was the rivers. I mean, that's the education we need today. We need to re-conceptualize just the geography of the Americas, to rivers versus Eastern and Western borders coming in, cuz that's how we think of it today. We think of it in terms of how invasion happened instead of what was happening in the interior. >> I think it enters into the discusssion that people have been having in our communities for a long time about the preciousness of the object. Really, what's precious is the knowledge of the object and how to enact that knowledge. And so, that's really what the object represents. It represents what was known and how it was known, and that's what communities are interested in. They're interested, yes, in the skillset to actually make these things, but at the same time, they're interested in the broader cultural context that these ideas fit in. This term culture, I think, is really, probably, at the core of this idea that whatever we did, we in some way created a mechanism of memory because we didn't have the kinds of technologies we have today, where people can kind of deposit knowledge. And so, the deposit of knowledge had to be from me to you, and it had to be from me to you for generations in order to move an idea forward. And so, these ideas were moved forward, critical ideas we move forward in song, in dance, in tatooing, in moco's, in forms, in sculptural spaces, in today, what people call ceremony or the performance of these ideas. And so, every single thing about indigenous culture, in my opinion, involves this process of contemplation, of intervention, of community interaction, all of the things that we think of as social practices. And so, how is it that we cannot claim this idea that our philosophy is art, our culture is art? We never separated the two. >> And that it was there decades, if not centuries or millenia before this. >> And so, when we think of this sort of discourse that's going on in academia right now around rethinking modernity, in that, all of a sudden, people are recognizing, maybe there were multiple modernities, that there wasn't a single European modernity. But that, in fact, cultures all over the world had this moment of understanding itself in a global state. And that's what the 500 year marker represents. That's when the world became global, because that completed the awareness of the geo-political space in the world, with this encounter of two very old real systems of Europe and the Americas. And that first negotiation was germs, guns, Bibles. And what's that negotiation now? How is that? I mean, and that's why museums fascinate me, because in the global condition, that's where we go first when we go into another person's world. We go to their museum and we try to look around and figure it out. It's sort of like they're portals, they're entry points. And how different nation's states make visible the indigenous entry point is really interesting.
