Cultivating Art Inquiry Through Land-Based Thinking on Social Justice Art and Museum Praxis

Abstract

Place has long been noticed, made, developed, and narrativized in favor of settler majorities’ economies and hegemonies. Disregarding Indigenous presence and land, the terror on the land continues in the form of dislocation and dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized communities of color, along with racial segregation and alienation. Drawing on the scholarship of land-based and decolonizing education, this article provides the conceptual groundwork for a form of art education theory and practice concerned with place-based social justice and equity. Particularly, I propose land-based art inquiry as a decolonizing pedagogy that helps critically assess settler colonial ways of sharing and making place via spatial–temporal injustice and the normalization of settler colonial logics that pervade our daily lives. The art inquiry generates new and critical ways to engage with the land as a site of art and museum (educational) practice as exemplified in the three different sites—a graduate students’ collaborative art-based project, a contemporary artist’s praxis, and museum praxis. Graduate students’ site-specific installation and contemporary artist JeeYeun Lee’s mobile walking are artistic interventions to public places that critique settler narratives and re-story the place. They highlight the ways in which land-based art inquiry can help individuals (re)connect with and (un)learn the stories and politics of their relationships to the land, thus troubling the settler colonial territorial imperatives. Also, by bringing land-based art inquiry into the investigation of the museum as another settler colonial place seeks and brings understanding of contemporary Indigenous-led collaborative museum spatial design and (educational) praxis for decolonizing possibilities.

Acknowledgments

I express immense gratitude to Penn State Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance directors Tracy and Nicole Patterson, Hollie Kulago, the journal editor Kryssi Staikidis, the assistant editor Amy Barnickel, the reviewers, Bogdon Sazonov, and Olga Ivashkevich for the various ways they supported throughout the writing process.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term “nonnative” is synonymously used with “settler.”

2 This policy emerged from the U.S. government’s assimilationist approach that forced a model of individual land ownership on Native peoples by dividing Indigenous lands into separate allotments. Each Indian family received 160 acres, and the leftover lands were sold to the highest bidder. Tribal communities lost a significant portion of their reservations through this policy. One hundred and thirty-eight million acres of land that were guaranteed to tribes under federal treaties quickly became only 52 million acres in tribal hands. See:

https://www.thoughtco.com/dawes-act-4690679; https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act#:∼:text=Also%20known%20as%20the%20General,granted%20allotments%20of%20reservation%20land.

3 The policy created a permit process for archaeological excavation and established punishments for looting in the name of protecting U.S. cultural resources. This reified the authority anthropologists held over Native American material cultures, including human remains.

4 The presentational form is a collaborative creation of a sculpture by Caspar Mayer and modern anthropologist and curator Franz Boas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Étienne, 2017). It has become popular over time and has been displayed in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and the Field Museum in Chicago.

5 Lonetree (2012) used this term to refer to the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, observing the collaborative practice of the Minnesota Historical society with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in her study.