We're here with Jolene Rickard. An artist, a professor, a scholar, and an activist. And a wonderful person, inspirational for so many people for quite awhile, right? And Jolene, thanks so much for being with us. >> Yeah, thank you for inviting me. >> Thanks. >> Yeah. >> And perhaps we could start with you talking a little bit about guns, bibles, and treaties is a great project that you work for. >> Right, guns, bibles and treaties were installed at the National Museum of the American Indian which is part of the Smithsonian's museums. And it is located, the location is significant because it is 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. >> In fact, I think there's a window where you can get inside a teepee- >> Yes [LAUGH]. >> So you can see [LAUGH]. >> It's yeah. It's very experiential. And so this was a collaboration with Paul Chaat Smith. Paul's also an activist and curator. And we're really trying to deal with the genocide, that took place against indigenous people, in the Americas without being able to use the word genocide. Because, within the Smithsonian, because it's a federal institution every single word, in every label, is scrutinized by layers and layers of legal. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> No, very specific legal expertise protecting, of course, the interest of the Smithsonian. And so guns, bibles and treaties is the way that we experientialized, or created a sense of 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 an object form. Or I was very influenced at the time by Edward Galliano'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, it was like their 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. And so then there was of course, the most famous one was Potosi. And there was this mountain of silver that was completely extracted, and many of you know the wonderful photography. Wonderful that he did it, but not wonderful subject of Salgado, 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 the collection. And this is the collection of because the person who was one of the founders of the museum, George Gustaf Heye 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 a community had. And 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 was interesting is that a number of those pieces were then smelted down. And they became objects that Guild where part of the sort of, what would you call, the gilded age of the renaissance. And so scholars that focus on the renaissance have argued that the extracted from the America's actually fueled the revival of Europe, created the renaissance. So there's this 500 year long relationship. And 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 it self, deserves I think a book- >> Yes, yes. >> 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 the charrette. And I have a wonderful image to share with you about that. And when we were doing the charrette, which is actually an architectural term that locates where every single little piece goes. There were guards. There were guards with us the entire time, but there wasn't just guards in the room with us, but there were guards around the building because the gold vaults were open. And, so, there's just that idea. And so to move one object in that installation from the archive to the wall was approximately $600.00. And 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 super hyper, it's all so that somebody couldn't just punch through and run with the gold. So it was a pretty high security installation. There's a whole history of guns about 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 for making or spiritual power as a man. And so, 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 poverty. The acceptance of poverty. And so there's a lot of things we need to relearn about what indigenous communities were. They were not rural, they were very cosmopolitan. We liked to live in large, urban centers. >> Even to the present there's an erasure of the urban indigenous movements. >> Right, exactly. And so the Americas were organized around waterways, not around, it was an interior artery. The Mississippi all the way down through Latin America. It was the rivers. And so, I mean, that's the education we need today. We need to reconceptualize just the geography of the Americas. To rivers Versus eastern and western borders coming in. because 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 mean I think it enters into a discussion that people have been having in our communities for a long time about the preciousness of the object. And 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 skill set to actually make these things. But at the same time, they're interested in the broader cultural context that these ideas fit in. So this term culture I think is really, probably at the core of this discussion, 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. >> Yeah. >> And that had to be from me to you for generations in order to move an idea forward. And so these ideas we move forward. Critical ideas were moved forward in song, in dance, in tattooing, in 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 a social practice today. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And so how is it that we can not claim this idea that our philosophy is art. >> Yeah. >> Our culture is art. >> Right. >> We never separated the two. >> And that it was there decades if not centuries or millennia [LAUGH] before this. >> And so when we think about this sort of discourse that's going on in academia right now in rethinking modernity. In that all of a sudden people are recognizing, maybe there are multiple modernities. That there wasn't a single European modernity. 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 geopolitical space in the world. With these encounter of two very old world systems, of Europe and the Americas. And that first negotiation was germs, guns, bibles. And what's that negotiation now? How is that? And that's why museums fascinate me because in the global condition, it's like 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. And so, it's sort of like their portals. Their portals of their entry points and how different nation states make visible the indigenous entry point is really interesting.
