About This Case Study

Americans, an exhibition of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian curated by Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Cécile R. Ganteaume, opens from a simple observation: American Indian images, names, and stories are everywhere in American life. The exhibition's central gallery, "Indians Everywhere," assembles hundreds of them — butter boxes and motorcycles, team mascots and state seals, advertisements, weapons systems, place-names — spanning from Paul Revere's generation to the present. The puzzle is the saturation itself. The same country that filled its shelves, stadiums, and arsenals with images of Indians was dispossessing the people the images depict and treating their political existence as finished. Flattering, comic, noble, and menacing Indians appear everywhere in the gallery; treaties, citizenship, courts, and jurisdiction appear nowhere. An image can be affectionate and still be an instrument of erasure — the gallery exists to let you test how.

The scholar Bethany Hughes (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) gives this case study its framework. Redface, she argues, is not merely costume or makeup: it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences together make a body legible as "Indian" — feathers, buckskin, a profile, a posture — and that legibility does work. It naturalizes a particular national story, in which Indians belong to the past, and it erases tribal nationhood: the treaties, governments, and jurisdiction of peoples who are, in fact, still here. The analytical move is to read each image as an instrument: to ask what work it does, whose body it makes legible as "Indian," for what audience, and what the legibility erases. You will walk four works from the gallery, describing each before interpreting it, read across them for the story they tell together, and then turn to a counter-archive — contemporary performance and art in forms Native artists control — before placing one present-day example of your own.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Americans online exhibition, National Museum of the American Indian. Visit the exhibition and find the "Indians Everywhere" gallery of images.
• The Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 exhibition materials, Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). Visit the exhibition. You will use it in Phase 4.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on the imagery: The exhibition assembles racist and stereotyped depictions, including period terminology, because they are the evidence — the point is to see how the imagery worked, not to endorse it. Read the works as historical documents of the culture that produced them, and take breaks as you need them.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Without searching, name one place you have encountered American Indian imagery in the past month — a product, a mascot, a place-name, a vehicle, a costume. What was it doing there, and did you register it at the time?
• How can a country saturate itself with images of a people while erasing their political existence? What would you look for in a single image to tell tribute from erasure?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Build Your Gallery (8–10 minutes)

Enter "Indians Everywhere" and select four works for your walk. A default set that spans the gallery's registers: the Land O'Lakes maiden, a sports mascot of your choosing, the Indian Chief motorcycle, and the Tomahawk missile. Or build your own four, so long as they span at least two registers — commercial, sporting, governmental, martial. For each, log the basics: what the object is, roughly when it circulated, and who produced it. Do not interpret yet; you are hanging the show, not reviewing it.

For groups: Build one shared gallery of four to six works, each member nominating one and saying in a sentence why it belongs.

Phase 2: At Each Station (25–30 minutes)

Take the works one at a time — five to seven minutes each — and work through the same five steps at every station:

1. Describe before interpreting. Two or three sentences of pure description: the figure, dress, posture, setting, colors, any text. If you catch yourself concluding, return to describing.
2. The legibility. What makes this figure readable as "Indian" at a glance — feathers, buckskin, a profile, a weapon? Which details belong to any actual nation, and which are generic issue?
3. The audience and the work. Who was the image made for, and what was it selling, marking, or mobilizing — butter, speed, team spirit, lethality, territory?
4. The standpoint. Who made it? Is there any trace of Native involvement or consent? Does the image assume Native people are present to see it — or that they are gone?
5. The register. Flattering, comic, noble, menacing, mournful? Note the register honestly; admiration and erasure can share a frame.

For groups: Split the stations — one or two works per member — run the five steps individually, then rotate: each member walks the group through their station in two minutes.

Phase 3: Reading Across the Gallery (12–15 minutes)

Step back from the stations and read the four works as one corpus:

• What repeats across all four — postures, dress, expressions? In what time do the figures live: are any of them contemporary, or do they all point to a past?
• Where do the works diverge — and does the divergence track the register (commercial versus martial, comic versus noble) or the era?
• Hughes's question: where, in any of the four, is tribal nationhood visible — treaties, governments, citizenship, courts, jurisdiction? If the answer is nowhere, say precisely what fills the space where the politics should be.
• If these four works were a nation's self-portrait of "the Indian," what story would they tell — about who Indians are, when they existed, and what happened to them?

For groups: Build the recurrence list together on a shared page. Then assign one member to argue, as devil's advocate, that a chosen work "honors" Indians — and answer the argument using only evidence logged at the stations.

Phase 4: The Counter-Archive (10–12 minutes)

Now turn to Indian Theater — contemporary Native performance and art since 1969, in forms Native artists control. Choose one work from the exhibition's online materials and work through:

• Run your five station steps on it. What changes when the maker is Native and the form is self-determined — the audience addressed, the register, the time the figure is allowed to live in?
• Set it against your gallery: name one thing the counter-archive work does that no station work could, and one expectation from the gallery it deliberately refuses.
• The strain test. Where does Hughes's redface framework strain? Take a hard case — an image made with Native involvement, a "respectful" rebrand, a retired mascot that fans still wear — and say what the framework catches and what it cannot settle. What does the hard case teach about the framework's edges?
• In circulation. Finally, find one use of Indian imagery circulating right now — sports, fashion, film, a product — and place it: station-style redface, counter-archive, or the contested middle. Defend the placement in two sentences, using your five steps.

For groups: Pairs take the counter-archive work and the contemporary example; reconvene to defend the placements, and let the group challenge each with the station evidence.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Across the gallery, the images shared __________. Hughes's framework let me see __________ that I would not have named before. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what repeated, exactly what the framework revealed, and exactly where the hard cases resisted it.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order, keeping the station steps disciplined — description first, always. The two artifacts to keep are your station notes and your placed contemporary example; together they are your record of how the legibility works and where you found it still working.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 builds a shared gallery; Phase 2 splits the stations with rotating briefings; Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative, including the devil's-advocate exchange. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The book behind the framework: Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. New York: NYU Press, 2024. Publisher page. The full history of the "Stage Indian" and the collaborative process this walk applied; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The counter-archive's companion volume: Hopkins, Candice, ed. Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance. Dancing Foxes Press / CCS Bard / Forge Project, 2023. Publisher page. Essays, conversations, and documents on performance as sovereign self-presentation; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The deeper vocabulary: Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999 [1994]. Publisher page. The source of "survivance" — Native presence that outruns the invented image; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.