Kent Monkman (1965–) is an artist of Cree, and English-, and Irish-Canadian ancestry. His paintings, videos/films, installations, and performances have appeared in solo exhibitions in Canada and the United States, as well as numerous group exhibitions worldwide.
In addition to private collections, his work is held by such major public collections as the National Gallery of Canada, the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Monkman is best known for his depictions of 19th-century landscape paintings set in North America, in which he plays on — or appropriates — the work of celebrated painters such as George Catlin (1796–1872) and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), while asserting Indigenous sovereignty.
Rather than highlight the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage by global capital, for this Appropriation (?) of the Month, my focus is instead on an Indigenous counter-appropriation that expresses an Indigenous conception of sovereignty.
The North American landscape genre has been criticized for promoting an “imaginative geography” (Gregory 2009) of America as either uninhabited or populated by a “dying race” of “Indians.” It has also been connected to the religious doctrine of Manifest Destiny, or the notion that the American West was promised by a Christian god to European settlers. In many North American landscape paintings, the formal structure, and even the topography, imitate European precedents. Both the means of representation and the content of landscape painting complement one another to produce images of “homeland, comfort and legitimate European occupation” (Elston 2012: 182). Landscape painting imagery was popularized in the 19th-century as it became featured in mass-produced catalogues and inexpensive reproductions made their way into the homes of the emerging middle and lower classes (Zalesch 1996, cited in Elston 2012: 183). By representing North America as a promised land for European settlement and consumption, high and low art versions of the landscape genre acted as tools of colonization.
In Monkman’s landscape painting Trappers of Men (2006, Montréal Museum of Fine Arts), he questions Manifest Destiny, settler sovereignty over North America, and the nature of gender and sexuality. M. Melissa Elston suggests that Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains (1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC) is the likely precedent for Trappers of Men. Elston (2012) convincingly illuminates important rhetorical moves connected to displacing Manifest Destiny and “re-messaging” the landscape with Indigenous sovereignty. Where Bierstadt paints a landscape devoid of human inhabitation, Monkman swaps out deer and re-populates the landscape with Indigenous people; where the original painting was cast at sunset, Monkman challenges the “vanishing race” subtext through the use of midday lighting.
Monkman’s statements about sovereignty and territory are intertwined with commentary about the categories of gender and sexuality within the colonial state. In pre-Contact times, many Indigenous nations enjoyed a more equal distribution of power between men and women, and often more fluid gender norms. With the arrival of Europeans, there was a re-scripting of gender roles and sexuality by the Church, which focused on monogamy and hetero-normativity. There was also a re-ordering of gender power by the government through its schemes for male-led households and Indian bands. Monkman works to undo these binaries. In the centre of the foreground, he is personified in the drag figure of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a motif common in many of his works. S/he appears as Botticelli’s Venus (The Birth of Venus, 1485, Uffizi Gallery, Florence), the goddess of love, in fuchsia high heel shoes with matching silk billow. Miss Chief suggests the diversity of pre- and post-Contact Indigenous sexuality—beardache, two-spirited and Nadleehi individuals (Epplen 1998)—and thus challenges their erasure by the European “regime of sexuality” (Foucault 1990).
The blurring of boundaries by this “flamboyant” gender (Monkman, cited by Furnish 2006: 137) is further complemented by another depiction that involves the scrambling of gender identities. To the right of Miss Chief, buff, shirtless and gender-normative male settlers are depicted as entrapped by her beauty as she emerges from the lake. Rather than the queerness of Miss Chief being a target of ridicule, she appears to be the subject of desire. To the extent that these men desire such a figure, their gender normativity is also problematized.
Although this piece is infused with an atmosphere of gaiety, a more profound meaning can be read in Monkman’s appropriation of mainstream forms of representation and the re-coding of its categories, which proposes a re-visioning of Indigenous sovereignty. Meaningful sovereignty in Trappers of Men challenges the sort of dualistic thinking that undermines the role of women and two-spirited persons. Instead of simply retaking the landscape, power must also be “remade” (Smith, 2007) by, for example, a redistribution of power across genders and sexualities both within and, arguably, without Indigenous nations.
References Cited
Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, New York.
Elston, M. M. 2012. Subverting Visual Discourses of Gender and Geography: Kent Monkman’s Revised Iconography of the American West. The Journal of American Culture, 35(2): 181-190.
Epplen, C. 1998. Coming to Terms with Navajo ‘Nadleehi’: A Critique of ‘Berdache,’ ‘Gay,’ ‘Alternate-Gender,’ and ‘Two-Spirit.’ American Ethnologist 25: 267-290.
Foucault, M. 1990. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Vintage, New York.
Furnish, D. 2006. Kent Monkman: The Canadian artist who is exploding the mythology of the West—One brushstroke at a time. Interview Magazine, March.
Gregory, D. 2009. Imaginative Geographies. In The Dictionary of Human Geography, edited by D. Gregory, R. Johnson, G. Pratt, M. Watts , and S. Whatmore, pp. 369-371.Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.
Sargent’s Daughters (n.d.).
Smith, A. 2007. Native American Feminism, Sovereignty and Social Change. In Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, edited by J. Green, pp. 93-107. Fernwood, Halifax.
Zalesch, S. E. 1996. What Four Million Bought: Cheap Oil Paintings of the 1880s. American Quarterly 48(1): 77-109.
Sean Robertson is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, and an IPinCH Associate.
Our Appropriation (?) of the Month features, written by IPinCH team members, highlight the complexity of 'cultural appropriation' and 'cultural appreciation'.
