The Foe Manuscript
SECTION I — Introduction: The Frame and Its Weight
I did not choose the frame my work first entered through. It was waiting for me before I ever stepped into the art world— constructed by institutions, curators, and an art market eager to fit Native artists into a single, familiar storyline. The frame was already named: Contemporary Native Art. It had its own language, its own expectations, its own appetite for confrontation. And without being asked, I was placed inside it.
The role was scripted. A Native artist in the United States was expected to confront, challenge, expose, resist. The foe was already cast: colonialism, the museum, the archive, the white gaze, the state. Exhibition writing used verbs that had nothing to do with my practice: “push back,” “subvert,” “interrogate,” “critique,” “deconstruct.” I would read these descriptions and feel—quietly but unmistakably—that someone else was speaking for me, shaping my work into a position I had never claimed.
The truth is that I’ve never approached my practice through confrontation. My work has never needed an enemy to function. My relationship to history, to the archive, to Apsáalooke memory is not oppositional. It is attentive. Relational. It comes from being raised inside a lineage with its own intelligence and timeline—my father’s voice, my grandmother’s hands, the land around Pryor. These are not metaphors. They are the material foundation of my practice.
But the art world’s frame left little room for this complexity. It preferred a narrative that made Native art easily legible to non- Native institutions—a narrative in which the power of the work depended on its proximity to harm, its performance of resistance, its usefulness as critique. Within this frame, Native artists became instruments through which museums could process their own guilt. Our work became a stage for institutional self-awareness: Look—this museum is learning, listening, acknowledging.
Even when the work was not confrontational, the writing around it insisted that it was.
For years I lived inside that discomfort without having the language to name it. I felt it whenever someone described my work as “calling out the archive,” when what I was actually doing was listening to it. I felt it when my work was framed as a response to colonial violence, when I was grounding myself in Apsáalooke lives—real people, not symbols within a political narrative. I felt it every time I was grouped with other Native artists simply because we were Native, as if our motivations, methods, and histories could be collapsed into a single purpose.
The frame turned difference into sameness. Specificity into category. Lineage into spectacle.
Once I recognized this pattern, the weight of it became impossible to ignore. A foe-based model of contemporary Native art—where meaning is derived through resistance—creates an economy in which the artist becomes dependent on an antagonist. The work requires the foe to assert its power. In that setup, artists orbit the very structures they are supposed to resist.
That dynamic cannot hold my work. It cannot hold where the work comes from or where it is going. It cannot hold the way I gather knowledge or the way time operates in Apsáalooke thought. It cannot hold the people who surface in archival photographs— misnamed, unnamed, but still themselves. Still traceable. Still present.
I eventually realized that what I’d been resisting all along was not the museum itself—it was the frame. A frame that casts Native artists as representatives rather than individuals. A frame that mistakes generalized Indigeneity for Nation-specific knowledge. A frame that rewards spectacle and mistrusts quiet forms of truth.
Understanding this allowed me to articulate something essential:
Apsáalooke time is not shaped by the foe.
It is shaped by lineage.
And when lineage becomes the center, the foe loses its power.
My work does not turn toward the foe.
It turns toward ancestors.
Toward specificity.
Toward continuation.
Toward the people whose lives were never dependent on the museum’s recognition to be whole.
This is the ground I stand on.
SECTION II — A Short History of the Foe in American Art
Before I could understand the frame imposed on my own work, I had to understand the lineage of the foe itself—how it became a central organizing force in American art, how institutions learned to depend on it, and how artists were rewarded for orbiting it. The foe is not just an antagonist; it is an infrastructure. It shapes how art is interpreted, written about, exhibited, and valued.
In the twentieth century, American art developed a deep appetite for confrontation. Modernism cast the artist as a breaker of systems, a challenger of tradition, a destroyer of norms. The avant-garde spirit positioned resistance as purity: the more aggressively the artist disrupted the status quo, the more authentic the work appeared. This created a cultural environment in which opposition became synonymous with artistic relevance.
By the time the civil rights era reshaped the country, the foe structure had attached itself to race, identity, and inequality. Artists of color were positioned—often against their will—as representatives of struggle. The art world expected political clarity, resistance, and critique. Institutions learned to read artists through the lens of what they fought rather than what they built.
This was the foundation upon which Native artists were later received. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the art world had fully absorbed the idea that Indigenous artists were legible primarily through the wounds of history. Museums and critics framed Native art as a response to colonization, erasure, extraction, and representation. They needed the foe to anchor the narrative: without the antagonist, the story became harder to tell.
This created a template: Native art = confrontation. Institutions applied this template broadly and repeatedly, even as artists worked from entirely different motivations. The foe became a shortcut for interpretation, a tool that kept Native artists legible to non-Native audiences. It provided clarity, even when that clarity was reductive.
But the foe model has limits. It narrows artistic complexity into a single emotional register. It encourages artists to produce work that confirms the institution’s expectations. It traps artists inside an economy of reaction. And it mistakes visibility for understanding.
Most importantly, it obscures Nation-specific realities. The art world imagines Indigenous people as a single collective body engaged in a collective struggle. This erases the distinctions that shape our worlds: the structures of our Nations, our languages, our belief systems, our land histories, our kinship lines. Apsáalooke reality is not a stand-in for generalized Indigeneity. It is its own universe.
The foe model cannot hold that universe.
What I aim to do in this manuscript is not to dismantle the foe structure, but to make visible how it operates—and why my work cannot be contained by it. Understanding the history of the foe allows me to step outside it. And stepping outside it allows the work to breathe, move, and root itself in the relational knowledge that actually shapes it.
This shift—from foe to lineage—is not a negation. It is a realignment. A return to ground. A return to the logic that predates the museum, outlives the museum, and continues with or without institutional validation.
SECTION III — What the Foe Cannot Hold
There is a point at which the foe-based structure of interpretation begins to collapse under its own weight. It can account for anger, critique, refusal, and spectacle. It can accommodate confrontation and position the artist as a mirror to institutional guilt. But it cannot hold what is quiet, attentive, or relational. It cannot hold the texture of memory carried through families. It cannot hold the way knowledge is passed from one generation to another through conversation, proximity, and repetition rather than opposition.
The foe model is built for conflict, not continuity. It thrives on rupture. It looks for ruptures even where they do not exist. And when applied to Native artists, it assumes that the work gains meaning through its distance from, or resistance to, dominant culture. This assumption erases the internal structures that actually organize Apsáalooke life—kinship, naming systems, seasonal cycles, ceremonial responsibilities, stories that move through time without ever needing an audience.
My work does not originate from antagonism. It originates from inheritance. From the stories my father told me in the car as we drove across the reservation. From the photographs my grandmother kept in boxes, pulled out again and again until the edges softened. From the people whose names I carry, whose lives I study in archives not because I want to expose harm but because I want to understand their choices, their movements, their relationships.
The foe model cannot hold any of this because it is not designed to. It looks for harm, not wholeness. It looks for spectacle, not subtlety. It looks for a clear target, not an intricate web of relations. And when an institution insists on reading Native art through that lens, it inadvertently reveals its own limitations rather than the artist’s.
Apsáalooke thought organizes time differently. It does not rely on linear narratives of before and after, wound and repair. It moves through cycles, returns, re-encounters, accumulations. Knowledge is layered rather than staged. People live in relation rather than in reaction. When my work looks to the archive, it is not to confront the violence of misnaming, though misnaming is present. It is to follow the thread of someone’s life across time: where they stood, who they traveled with, how they carried themselves into the photograph.
This is not a confrontation. It is a form of attention.
The foe model cannot hold attention. It cannot hold a practice that grows through looking closely rather than speaking loudly. It cannot hold an aesthetic grounded in lineage rather than rupture. And it certainly cannot hold a Nation-specific worldview that existed long before the museum and will continue long after it.
Understanding what the foe cannot hold allows me to define what my practice does hold—what it protects, what it builds, what it brings forward. And that is where the work begins to take its true shape.
SECTION IV — Lineage as Structure
Lineage is not metaphor. It is architecture. It shapes how I understand time, how I recognize people in photographs, how I move through archives, and how I make decisions in the studio. Lineage is the central structure of my practice—its orientation point, its internal logic, its method.
In Apsáalooke life, lineage is not simply a list of names or a record of descent. It is a system that organizes responsibility. It determines who you listen to, who you speak for, who speaks for you, which stories you carry, and how you move through the world. Lineage is embodied knowledge, lived daily rather than stored in an institution.
This is why my work cannot be organized through the foe: the foe is an external structure, while lineage is an internal one. The foe positions the artist in reaction, while lineage positions the artist in continuation. The foe demands confrontation, but lineage asks for attention—to people, to time, to memory, to the subtle ways history persists.
When I look at archival images, I am not scanning for harm. I am searching for recognition. I am looking for gestures, relationships, environments—things that reveal how someone lived rather than how they were documented. The archive becomes a meeting place across time, not a battleground. Lineage makes that possible.
Lineage also determines the rhythm of my work. It is why certain projects unfold over years rather than months. It is why one photograph can lead me to an unexpected story buried three generations deep. It is why some details return repeatedly, not as repetition but as accumulation—each encounter adding a new layer of understanding.
To work through lineage is to acknowledge that knowledge is not linear. It does not move forward in a straight line. It circles. It resurfaces. It travels through people rather than through systems. My practice follows that movement. It grows by returning, by revisiting, by listening again.
This is not nostalgia. It is structure.
Apsáalooke lineage is an active, living framework. It clarifies relationships. It grounds decision-making. It keeps the work accountable to the people it comes from, not to the institutions that display it. It is what allows my practice to remain sovereign even when positioned inside structures that were not built for us.
Understanding lineage as structure also means recognizing its expansiveness. It is not just family; it is place. It is language. It is story. It is land. It is continuity that survives interruption. It is the intelligence that remains intact even when institutions fail to see it.
My practice is not built on confrontation. It is built on this structure—this network of relations that existed long before the art world and will exist long after. Lineage is what gives the work direction, integrity, and longevity. It is not a theme in my practice; it is the foundation.
SECTION V — The Archive as a Living Site
The archive is often described as a place of absence—a record of what was taken, misnamed, misheard, or flattened. This is true. But it is not the whole truth. For me, the archive is also a place of presence. A place where lives continue to move, even when the documents holding them fail to grasp their full complexity. A place where lineage can reassemble what institutions could not see.
When I enter an archive, I am not entering an institutional vault. I am entering a field of relationships. I look for the people whose names I know, and the ones whose names have been lost or distorted. I look for clothing, poses, environments, traveling companions—details that reveal who someone was in relation to others. The archive becomes a landscape where I can locate the lives that surface in my own family stories.
This approach changes what the archive is capable of holding. Instead of seeing only the violence of misrepresentation, I see the persistence of identity. I see the intelligence of our ancestors in the choices they made, the ways they carried themselves, the people they stood beside. These are not static images; they are traces of movement. Evidence of decisions. Clues about relationships that extended far beyond the photograph.
The foe model encourages artists to approach the archive as a site of confrontation—as a place to expose harm or critique the institution. But when I look at these images, I am not confronting an institution. I am reconnecting with people. I am restoring details that the record overlooked but that lineage remembers.
This is why my archival work is grounded in attention, not accusation. It is not about correcting the record, though correction is sometimes necessary. It is about reentering a world that the archive could not fully contain. A world of Apsáalooke relationships, responsibilities, and decisions.
The archive becomes a meeting point across time. A place where someone from 1880 can appear in my studio in 2025, not as a symbol or a victim, but as a relative. This shift is not sentimental. It is methodological. It guides the formal decisions I make in the studio—scale, color, material, framing—because these choices are informed by the lives I encounter in the documents.
Working this way also reveals the limits of institutional memory. Archives preserve fragments, but they rarely preserve meaning. Meaning is carried by lineage. Meaning travels through families, stories, and the places we return to. My work bridges these two systems of knowledge—not to reconcile them, but to allow them to coexist.
In this way, the archive becomes a living site. It breathes. It moves. It continues to unfold. And it serves as one of the many starting points for the projects that follow.
SECTION VI — Family as Orientation
Family is the first structure I knew. Before the archive, before the museum, before the language of art entered my life, there were the people who shaped my understanding of the world—my father, my grandmother, my daughter, and the extended web of relatives whose guidance continues to anchor me. Family is not a theme in my work. It is an orientation, a way of seeing and moving that informs every decision I make in the studio.
The stories I grew up with were not abstract. They were specific— rooted in Pryor, in the movements of our relatives, in the land that held our lives together. These stories taught me how to look closely, how to pay attention to what others overlook, how to recognize meaning in details that might seem small to someone outside our world. They provided a standard for truth that has nothing to do with institutional validation.
My father shaped much of the intellectual ground of my practice. His knowledge of Apsáalooke history, his ability to connect events across generations, his instinct for detail—these were my first lessons in methodology. He taught me that stories are not just accounts of what happened; they are frameworks for understanding how people carry responsibility, make choices, and navigate change. His storytelling wasn’t nostalgic. It was analytical, specific, and grounded in relational intelligence.
My grandmother shaped the emotional register of my practice. She was a maker—a person whose hands moved with intention, whether she was sewing, beading, or arranging family photographs. She understood that objects hold memory differently than words. When I work with textiles, images, or materials that feel close to the body, I am not imitating her; I am continuing the way she understood the world. Her influence is not aesthetic. It is foundational.
These relationships formed my sense of scale. They taught me that a life is not measured by its documentation, but by its interconnectedness. They shaped the way I approach projects that extend over long periods of time. They shaped the way I understand the people who appear in archival photographs—not as distant figures, but as individuals whose lives echo through the present.
Family is not static. It continues to grow, shift, and expand. My daughter is part of that expansion. Her presence shapes the pace of my work and the rhythm of my life. She is both a grounding force and a reminder that the future of our Nation does not exist in theory; it exists in the daily choices we make, the stories we keep alive, the histories we pass forward.
This orientation toward family is not sentimental. It is structural. It influences my decisions about which stories to follow, which images to pursue, which details to build from. It determines how I balance my roles as an artist, mother, researcher, and community member. It shapes the integrity of the work.
Family remains the anchor that keeps my practice aligned with the people it comes from and accountable to the future it imagines.
SECTION VII — Apsáalooke Intellectual Traditions
When I talk about Apsáalooke intellectual traditions, I’m talking about the structures of thought that shaped me long before I thought of myself as an artist. These are not academic frameworks, and they are not theories I adopted later in life. They are ways of thinking, remembering, and recognizing meaning that I inherited through family, through community, and through living inside a Nation with its own systems of knowledge.
Apsáalooke intellectual life is built on a few core principles: relationality, specificity, continuity, clarity, humor, and responsibility. These are not abstract values—they are practical tools that shape how we understand the world.
Relationality means that nothing exists on its own. People, places, names, and stories are connected. Meaning lives in those connections, not in isolated facts. Specificity matters because it honors those connections. Apsáalooke people are not interchangeable; neither are our histories or our names. The world becomes clearer the more specific you are.
Continuity shapes how time is understood. The past is not behind us—it moves with us. Stories do not close; they remain alive. Someone who lived a century ago can feel present in a photograph, a detail, or a name that resurfaces at the moment you need it. Apsáalooke time loops and accumulates; it does not sever itself from the past.
Clarity is an ethic. It means naming things accurately, paying attention to details, and refusing to flatten complexity. It means understanding that truth is care. Humor is part of that clarity. Apsáalooke humor is sharp and perceptive, and it cuts through pretense. It protects us from taking the foe too seriously and keeps us grounded in who we are.
Responsibility is what holds all of this together. Responsibility to family, to clan, to district, to the stories we inherit, and to the names we carry. It does not mean representation—it means accountability to the people who shaped you.
When I work in the archive, these intellectual traditions guide my eye. I don’t look for harm; I look for recognition. I look for beadwork patterns, body language, kinship clues, and small cues of personality—things you only notice if you grew up around Apsáalooke people. I look for the ways that time folds in on itself. I look for the living presence inside the historical record.
This is what makes Apsáalooke knowledge so distinct from the foe-based frameworks institutions rely on. The foe is obsessed with rupture, disruption, and harm. Apsáalooke intellectual traditions are oriented toward continuation, care, and precision. Where the foe collapses complexity into spectacle, our thinking expands it.
These traditions shape every part of my practice—my research, my material choices, my pace, my priorities. They remind me that the work I do is part of a much longer arc of thought and memory. They show me that I am not inventing something new; I am participating in something ongoing.
SECTION VIII — The Crisis of Authenticity: Pretendianism as Symptom
Pretendianism is often treated as a moral failure, an individual deception, or a scandal to be exposed. But the phenomenon is not individual—it is structural. It exists because institutions have built systems that reward performance over lineage, symbolism over specificity, and generic Indigeneity over Nation-based reality. Pretendianism is not the cause of a crisis in the art world. It is the symptom of one.
When institutions collapse all Native Nations into a single category, they create a vacuum where anyone can insert themselves. The category “Native artist” becomes so broad, so institutionally convenient, that it becomes nearly impossible to verify. Institutions prefer it that way because it preserves the simplicity of their narratives. They want identity to be legible, uncomplicated, and available on demand. They want Native artists who can fill a representational role, who can speak in the language the museum already understands, who can stand in for the complexities that institutions have no interest in learning.
Pretendians thrive in systems that reward performance. They learn to mimic the cues institutions look for: the trauma script, the decolonization vocabulary, the foe-based confrontational posture. They know that institutions will not question them because to question them would require the institution to question its own laziness—its dependence on categories instead of relationships, its preference for symbolism over specificity.
The presence of pretendians reveals something institutions refuse to admit: they cannot tell the difference between lived knowledge and performed identity.
This is because the institution’s frameworks are built to detect spectacle, not lineage; aesthetics, not accountability; performance, not continuity. The institution is fluent in the language of the foe but illiterate when it comes to the internal structures of real Nations—our kinship systems, our responsibilities, our naming conventions, our histories, our humor, our scars.
Pretendians are not slipping through cracks.
They are walking through doors that institutions built.
The crisis is not simply that pretendians exist. It is that institutions cannot recognize the difference between someone who grew up inside a Nation’s ways of thinking and someone who learned how to imitate its surface markers. This is not an accident—it is the direct result of institutions treating Native identity as a genre rather than as a lived, relational, Nation-specific reality.
My work cannot be read through that genre. It is not built from generic Indigeneity. It is not constructed from metaphors, symbols, or the desire to perform identity for public consumption. My practice originates from Apsáalooke lineage, Apsáalooke time, and Apsáalooke responsibility. It is grounded in specific places, specific people, specific stories, and specific intellectual traditions that cannot be imitated or approximated.
Pretendianism exposes the fragility of institutions that rely on identity as currency.
My work exposes the strength of a practice grounded in lineage.
The two cannot be confused by anyone who actually understands the difference.
SECTION IX — Escaping the Institution’s Vocabulary
One of the most pervasive forces shaping how Native artists are interpreted is institutional language. Before a viewer encounters the work, museums, academics, and critics have already framed it using terms that signal what the audience should expect: resistance, confrontation, intervention, decolonization. These words do not simply describe the work—they discipline it. They create boundaries around what Native artists are allowed to mean.
For years, I felt an unease I couldn’t name. Reviewers, curators, even well-meaning scholars spoke about my practice using vocabulary that did not come from me. It came from the institution’s script. When a museum used terms like “interrogates” or “corrects,” it didn’t matter if I had never used those words in my own descriptions. Once written, they became attached to my work, shaping how audiences understood it.
Institutional vocabulary is a kind of soft power. It appears neutral, but it directs interpretation. It encourages viewers to look for conflict where there is none, or to assume the work is making a claim it isn’t making. It reduces the complexity of Nation-specific knowledge into the generic language of accountability and critique.
This is where I had to make a choice: accept the institution’s vocabulary and let it define my practice—or refuse it. I chose refusal.
Refusing institutional vocabulary does not mean rejecting institutions altogether. It means refusing to let institutions determine the intellectual ground of my work. It means writing about my practice in my own voice, using terms shaped by Apsáalooke knowledge rather than academic frameworks. It means speaking plainly about what I do: I follow threads. I pay attention to details. I restore specificity. I bring ancestors forward in time. I work through lineage, not confrontation.
Once I removed the institution’s vocabulary from my own writing, everything became clearer. The work felt more grounded. My voice felt more exact. And I recognized something important: institutional language often exists to make the institution feel transformed without requiring real transformation. Words like “reckoning” and “dialogue” do not change structures; they soften them. They create the appearance of openness without altering anything underneath.
Escaping that vocabulary reorients the work around what actually matters: clarity, truth, continuity, Apsáalooke knowledge. It allows the work to be understood on its own terms—not as a symbolic counterpoint to institutional guilt, but as a continuation of a lived intellectual tradition.
SECTION X — Refusing the Category of “Native Artist”
The art world has long relied on categories to stabilize its understanding of artists—categories that feel tidy, manageable, and legible to institutions. Few categories have been as persistently applied, and as limiting, as the label “Native artist.” On the surface, it appears factual: I am Apsáalooke, I come from a specific district, and my work is grounded in Apsáalooke history. But within institutions, this label does not function as a description. It functions as a container.
The category “Native artist” reshapes the work before anyone even sees it. It tells viewers what they should expect: confrontation, witness, activism, instruction, correction. It suggests that the artist’s primary role is to represent a collective identity, or worse, an entire demographic. It reduces Nation- specific realities into a generic Indigeneity that obscures the differences between peoples, histories, languages, and forms of knowledge. It invites projection rather than understanding.
I do not reject the truth of who I am. I reject the institutional machinery that turns that truth into a genre.
“Native artist” is a curatorial shortcut. It flattens lineage into aesthetic. It encourages institutions to place artists side by side based not on shared intellectual commitments or artistic questions, but on their proximity to Indigeneity as a demographic category. It is how pretendians are able to slip through the cracks—because the category rewards performance over Nation-based reality. It is how artists who have nothing in common except race-as-read-by-the-institution are routinely grouped together, as though we share a unified worldview, method, or intention.
My work does not originate from Indigeneity as an abstract concept. It originates from Apsáalooke thought—from the district of Pryor, from my family’s names, from the people who shaped my understanding of the world. It originates from lineage, not category.
The label “Native artist” cannot hold lineage. It cannot hold specificity. It cannot hold the intellectual traditions that structure my practice. It relies on the assumption that identity is stable, symbolic, and available for institutional use. Identity becomes a marketing tool. A signifier. A frame placed around the work before the work has had the chance to speak.
This is why I refuse the category—not because I am distancing myself from Native communities, but because the category distances me from them. It collapses the distinctions between Nations that matter deeply to us. It replaces the granular reality of Apsáalooke life with a generalized image of “Native art” that primarily serves the institution’s desire for recognizable narratives.
Refusing the category is an act of protection. It protects the work from misinterpretation. It protects the specificity of Apsáalooke history. It protects my practice from being absorbed into a symbolic economy that has little interest in nuance. It protects the people in my work from being understood as representatives rather than individuals.
Refusing the category is also an act of sovereignty. It asserts that the intellectual ground of my practice comes from Apsáalooke lineage, not from institutional expectations. It allows me to define my work on my own terms, rather than accepting the terms imposed by curators, critics, or market systems.
My work is not an argument about Indigeneity. It is a continuation of Apsáalooke knowledge. And the category “Native artist” cannot account for that distinction.
SECTION XI — Reframing the Practice (From the Inside Out)
Once the foe is removed and the category is refused, the practice reorganizes itself. The center of gravity shifts. What remains is the structure that has always guided my work but was previously obscured by institutional language: a practice built from Apsáalooke time, Apsáalooke relationality, and the specific lives that move through my research and studio.
Reframing my practice from the inside out begins with a simple but essential truth: My work is not about what the institution wants from me. It is about what my lineage asks of me.
This does not mean the work is insular. It means it is accountable. It means the stories, images, and people I follow are not raw materials for public interpretation—they are part of a living continuum that includes me, but does not revolve around me.
Institutions tend to imagine that artists build meaning through public-facing arguments, manifestos, political positions, or aesthetic statements. But that is not where my meaning lives. My meaning lives in the decisions that feel necessary rather than strategic:
- following an archival thread for years because one unnamed person deserves recognition
- adjusting the scale of a work because the image itself asks to be held differently
- returning to the same figure, the same photo, the same family story because there is more there—more detail, more truth, more life
- choosing materials because they carry emotional or genealogical weight, not because they match an institutional theme
These are not symbolic gestures. They are methodological ones.
Reframing my practice means naming the structure that actually organizes it:
Lineage determines direction. A project starts when a person from the archive pulls me toward them, not when a concept appears from nowhere.
Attention determines method. Close looking—careful, repeated, relational—reveals the truth that spectacle obscures.
Continuity determines pace. Some works need years; some need days. Time is not a measure of discipline but of alignment.
Responsibility determines boundaries. Not every story belongs in public. Not every detail is mine to use. Not every image can be carried forward.
Specificity determines meaning. Apsáalooke knowledge is not interchangeable with generalized Indigeneity. The work must remain rooted, not flattened.
When this structure becomes visible, the work can finally be seen for what it is—not a commentary on the institution, not an artifact of the foe, not a chapter in a genre of “Native art,” but a body of research growing from a lived intellectual tradition.
This reframing also clarifies the position of the viewer. Viewers are not asked to decode the work or to arrive with preloaded political expectations. They are asked to look—slowly, with care— and to understand that they are encountering lives, not symbols; histories, not metaphors; a Nation’s continuity, not an institution’s narrative.
Reframing the practice restores independence. It restores scale. It restores the humanity of the people in the work and the integrity of the thought that shaped it.
SECTION XII — Sovereignty as Internal Coherence
Sovereignty is one of the most overused words applied to Native artists, and one of the most misunderstood. Institutions invoke it as a political gesture, imagining sovereignty as a stance directed outward—toward the state, toward museums, toward colonial structures. But the sovereignty I practice is inward-facing. It is not a reaction to external power. It is a coherence that comes from lineage, clarity, and responsibility.
For me, sovereignty is the ability to remain aligned with Apsáalooke values, methods, and timelines even while participating in spaces that were not built for us. It is not about withdrawal or refusal of visibility. It is about refusing to let institutional expectations override the internal logic that shapes my work.
Sovereignty shows up in the questions I ask, the decisions I make, the relationships I honor, and the stories I choose to follow. It shapes the ethics of my research: who I name, who I protect, what I reveal, what I do not. It informs the pace of my projects, the materials I use, and the scale of the works I build. It keeps the practice centered on what matters rather than on what institutions want.
The art world tends to understand sovereignty as an oppositional stance. But the sovereignty I practice does not rely on the foe. It is not defined through conflict or resistance. It is defined through coherence—an internal alignment that cannot be altered by external pressures.
This coherence allows me to move through institutions without absorbing their narratives. It allows the work to be in the world without being shaped by the world’s projections. It protects the integrity of the stories I follow. It protects the specificity of Apsáalooke intellectual life. It protects the work from becoming symbolic or representative.
Sovereignty is not a performance. It is an orientation—a way of walking, choosing, thinking, and creating that remains consistent regardless of context. It is what allows the work to stay rooted even when the environment around it shifts.
This kind of sovereignty is not declared; it is practiced. It is carried in the decisions that are invisible to the viewer, in the boundaries that may never be explained, in the respect for people whose names appear in my work and people whose names never will. It is what keeps the practice accountable to Apsáalooke knowledge rather than institutional validation.
In this sense, sovereignty is not the conclusion of the practice. It is its condition. It is what makes the work possible.
SECTION XIII — Conclusion: Returning to the Center
When I began writing this manuscript, I was tracing a feeling I had carried for years—a friction between my work and the language the art world used to describe it. That friction was not about misunderstanding; it was about misalignment. Institutions looked at my work and saw confrontation where I had placed attention, saw resistance where I had built continuity, saw representation where I had followed lineage. They read the work through the foe because the foe was the only framework they had.
But my work does not grow from opposition. It grows from connection—across generations, across stories, across time. It grows from the people whose names I carry and the ones I have found in the archive. It grows from the land that shaped me and from the processes of looking, listening, and returning that structure Apsáalooke intellectual life.
This manuscript has traced the difference between a practice built in reaction to institutions and a practice built in alignment with lineage. It has named the limits of the foe, the flattening of institutional categories, the crisis of pretendianism, and the soft power of curatorial language. It has articulated what the foe cannot hold, and why my work cannot be confined to the scripts that institutions use to make Native art legible to themselves.
But more importantly, it has clarified what does hold the work: Apsáalooke thought, Apsáalooke time, Apsáalooke specificity. Lineage as method. Attention as practice. Continuity as grounding force. Sovereignty as internal coherence.
These are not themes. They are the architecture of the work. They are what allow the work to move through the world without being shaped by forces that were never meant to define it.
If the art world needs the foe, that is its own limitation—not mine. If institutions need categories, that is their dependency—not mine. If others build their careers on spectacle or performance, that is their path—not mine.
My path is shaped by those who came before me and by those who will come after. It is built on the relationships that formed me, the histories I continue to learn, and the people who appear in the work because they deserve to be seen clearly and specifically— not as symbols, but as individuals.
What I know now, with clarity, is that the center of my practice has never moved. The noise around it has changed, the expectations have shifted, and the art world has developed new appetites—but the center has remained steady.
Apsáalooke lineage is my foundation.
Apsáalooke thought is my method.
Apsáalooke continuity is my horizon.
The work will continue to grow from that ground, not because it is a gesture of resistance, but because it is the truest expression of who I am and where I come from.
This manuscript is not an endpoint. It is a marker along the path— a clarification, a naming, a return to the center. The work will keep moving, keep gathering, keep deepening, and keep unfolding in ways that are accountable to the people it comes from.
I do not need the foe to make my work powerful.
I do not need institutions to determine its meaning.
I do not need to perform identity to be legible.
The work stands because the lineage stands.
And that is enough.