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REFLECTIONS

Art, Gender, and Identity

FARI NZINGA

In the United States, we often discuss Black and Native peoples as separate groups and peripheral to white people. Indeed, as scholar Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan and Lenape descent) wrote, “Seeing white people as the hub or focus has led to the serious neglect of extremely significant social phenomena, including the interactions of [Indigenous] Americans and Africans directly with each other.” This narrow framing ignores shared histories, erases blended families, keeps relatives isolated and alienated from one another, and falls into the trap of centering the white experience that Forbes warns against. By claiming a Black-Native identity, the artists in this exhibition channel and remix cultural and aesthetic traditions, opening up space for creativity, conversation, and connection.

Photograph of White Buffalo (Cheyenne) one year after his arrival at the Carlisle Indian School Photograph of White Buffalo (Cheyenne) upon his arrival at the Carlisle Indian School
Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College

Before-and-after photographs of White Buffalo (Cheyenne) upon his arrival at the Carlisle Indian School and one year later. Cutting students’ hair and forcing them to abandon their tribal clothing were two ways the federal government controlled Indigenous identity and forced young Native people to assimilate into white society.

In Ancestors Know Who We Are, we see how Native feminist art and theory engages with Black feminist art and theory. For example, as a Black-Native artist and citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi, Monica Rickert-Bolter expands the concept of Indigeneity by marrying Potawatomi and Akan (Ghanaian) textile designs, motifs, and symbols in her digital work Hair Stories. Moreover, the subject of the work—the artist’s relationship to her hair—is one that is loaded with cultural, racial, and gendered meanings for both Native Americans and African Americans. Hair plays a significant role in the cultures of both peoples. It’s not only a form of individual self-expression but also a signifier of group identity and, for some Native people, a source of spiritual connection.

Historically, schools, businesses, and state and local governments have used hair to police and control both Indigenous and Black peoples. During the 19th century, Indian boarding schools cut students’ hair short in an attempt to remove their tribal identities and assimilate them into white society. Attempts to control African Americans by restricting displays of hair began even earlier with the passing of tignon laws in Louisiana in the 1700s, which required Creole women of color to cover their hair.

Sepia-tone of a woman wearing a white wrapped head covering and a dark dress
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Sarah Ann Crowley wearing a white tignon, 1884. Crowley was born into slavery around 1820 in Maryland and then sold to other slaveowners in Louisiana and Georgia. After emancipation, she moved north to Massachusetts.

The policing of Native and Black hair continues today by schools and private businesses. At present, only eight US states have passed the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act, first introduced in 2019, which protects people of color in the workplace and at school from racial discrimination based on hairstyles. In addition, there are cases of violence centered around hair. Recently in Oklahoma, students pinned down a Cheyenne and Arapaho fifth grader and cut off his long hair.

Artist Moira Pernambuco’s series Black Boy Beautiful, Black Boy Vulnerable also envisions a joining of Native feminist theory and Black feminist theory. Black-Native feminist artists recognize that “patriarchy knows no gender,” as feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks has famously stated. In other words, issues of gender oppression are not solely limited to women, genderqueer, and nonbinary people. Pernambuco’s photographs of two Black youths offer commentary on how Black men are treated and their futures limited by the judicial and prison systems. The black-and-white images are sparse and their settings nondescript, though they seem to reference institutions such as prisons and jails—sites of extreme gendered and sexual violence, oppression, and exploitation. This series offers a visual convergence of Native feminist theory and Black feminist theory in the struggle for abolition, which demands an end to surveillance, policing, and systems of punishment and instead advocates for massive investments in the communities most harmed by these forms of violence.

Color painting of three women in long dresses and head coverings, standing together outdoors on a street ringed by buildings
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Agostino Brunias (ca. 1730–1796), A West Indian Flower Girl and Two Other Free Women of Color, ca. 1769. An 18th-century painting depicting Creole women and women of African descent with their hair wrapped in fabric coverings called tignons.

Ancestors know who we are is a meaningful affirmation of kinship and belonging for those of us whose lineages are hard to trace in the written records, for those of us who no longer speak our mother tongues or know the names of our ancestors, because ancestors know who we are.

Ancestors know.

Ancestors know who we are is a rallying cry for unity, for collective thought and action.

Ancestors know.

Ancestors know that the time is always now, and they are watching to see what we do with all that we’ve inherited.

portrait of Fari Nzinga
Photo by Aja Grant

FARI NZINGA is the teacher-scholar in residence at the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Kentucky. She graduated with a BA from Oberlin College in 2005 and went on to earn both her MA and PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University. Nzinga uses object-based learning to engage in conversations about contemporary culture and politics and to hone observation and critical analysis. Her research on Black cultural production, visual and expressive culture, and sexual politics relies on hooks’s analysis of power and forms of domination. Hooks’s emphasis on love, care, and the construction of homeplaces are values that animate Nzinga’s pedagogy, research, and curation.

The National Museum of the American Indian thanks the Frye Museum and the yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective for their research assistance.

This project received support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.

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