Indigenous In Plain Sight | Gregg Deal | TEDxBoulder

before I get started I want to take the opportunity to recognize that we are in the traditional homelands of the Arapaho and the Cheyenne and the ute and even though there they may not be here this is still their land this is still Indian land and everywhere on this continent [Applause] hum Oh new Gregg deal me gnarnia new COO utakata new kuma na new - buddha new pneumo goober - yada wanna my name is greg deal I am a husband I am a father I am an artist and sometimes I'm an activist and I am also a member of the pyramid lake paiute tribe often times when I do this I always introduce my family because my family is my center they're the center everything I do they inform the work I do and the way in which I do it that I have to do the things that I do in the good way so I am going to introduce my family very quickly from what I normally do because I have so much to tell you guys this is my wife we've been married for 19 years we have five kids they oldest to the youngest is sage Phoenix Maddox Grayson and Holland is our little terror there's a number of funny things and interactions that we have in our homes and I usually love sharing those but I'm only gonna share one my wife has been documenting for the last four years my youngest son Grayson in what she calls the sideways pose and what that means that he's a professional leaner now now this seems like a simple thing but it's actually [Applause] and now listen it's not a one-off he's been doing it since he was a baby and this is the latest one it's hard to get him to do it now so it's a little bit of my family and like I said they are the center to everything that I do and I am an artist which means that I create things for a living I'm I would say I'm primarily a painter I work in mixed-media and paint and creating work that's very much about indigenous identity historical consideration decolonization but I'm also creating murals this is actually cu-boulder I just finished it and you'll notice it's in the school colors [Applause] but I'm also mostly known for performance art I create work that is about being in spaces that are not normally spaces that people think we occupy i tackles things like stereotype and and conceptions and misconceptions it's everything from concepts of standing rock to even things like blood-quantum the way in which we are quantified through an American process that decides how much Indian we are and whether or not we're Indian enough to matter a lot of there there's two main tools of everything that I do and it has brought me to this stage I do a lot with history and historical consideration and I also do a lot of critical thinking and within those things I've discovered something and that is is that the value of indigenous people is really low in the eyes of America and in the eyes of American culture that there's a hierarchy that is set within those spaces that immediately tells every child and ultimately every adult that's in that is having education here in the United States what our value is so for example we know who Christopher Columbus is but we don't know the name of the people that he came into contact with I mean I know you guys might not know but but that's important because it already tells you he's important and we are not in fact it goes so deep that he came here and he thought he was in India and so he called the people he came into contact with which was actually the modern-day Dominican Republic he called them Indians and 500 plus years later we all know that he was lost at sea but we still call indigenous people Indians Abraham Lincoln has this incredible legacy in history he signed the Emancipation Proclamation but what you don't know is he also the week before the Emancipation Proclamation was to be enacted he signed off on the largest mass hanging in American history 38 Dakota men who were being hung for a little more than just to make an example of them it happened on the 26 it was the day after Christmas I'm not saying this to make a divisive statement about Abraham Lincoln I'm telling you this because when we omit things from history then we immediately give value to those things and what this does is this sets us up with something that is really damaging when we think of Indians we think of things like this when I was a kid there was these looney-tune cartoons that were pretty popular and and you know people could look at this and they think it's no big deal it's just a cartoon it's you know it's satire it's funny but here's what happens young children see this native children see this and it immediately tells them what the world thinks of them that they are a character they're not to be taken seriously but further than that it tells your children what our value is and it informs your children what we look like what we talk like what we act like and all of it is pigeon-holed into one single thing which is this and so we see things like this Pocahontas she was actually 10 years old when she went through the things that she went through and these images are burned into the American psyche they're burned into American culture they're burned into Western culture and so they manifest themselves at things like Coachella and Burning Man and next thing you know we have sports mascots that are somehow representing every native person in the land there's over 567 tribes that are fairly recognized in the United States are several hundred more that are not recognized that are usually recognized by the state there's over 300 different languages this is just in the United States this doesn't count Canada or Central America or South America and yet we're supposed to accept these things as an honor in fact these people have no context to what we are and who we are so much so that they believe that they're not just honoring us but that they are carrying our legacy so this brings me to my work as an artist I've found that the only way to function as an artist is that you have to work within the bounds of what Western culture expects you to do they expect us to be painting cowboys and Indians people are heading down to Santa Fe and they want to buy a nice Indian painting buy a nice Indian to put in their home because it's Indian and as a result of that we're one of the few subcultures in the art world that is actually being controlled by a Western buyers market that decides whether or not there's value with our stories and it's a risk I mean if I do anything different than that is it is an inherently professional risk so I've decided to take a professional risk I'm working under the premise of what does contemporary indigenous art look like when it is not informed by a Western buyers market so the first piece I created for that is this piece it is a self-portrait I was in kindergarten and it's it's a seemingly innocent image but it's titled prairie because that's what the kids called me when I was a kid I went to an all-white school I was the brownest kid that was in school and that is what they called me and I don't say that to be decisive or blase about a word but to illustrate the intersectionality that exists within the language of racism and intolerance and this is how I experienced it at the age of 5 or 6 years old and this is not a unique story for indigenous children this is happening all over the country and the reason for that is because nobody has any context to who or what a native person is there is no value to our stories in fact this piece has been rejected from two shows one of which they asked me to bring the piece and two days later said we can't hang this because of the word that's there for a native voice group show so you can see there's not even space for our stories the stories that don't make sense the stories that don't fall in line with that cowboy and Indian narrative I just finished this piece I don't have a title for it yet I was talking to a good friend he's from neighboring tried the team or western shoshone and his people went to the same boarding school as my people did my grandparents went to Stuart Indian school it's in Nevada and they told he told me this story they're heard from his elders and I wanted to share it with you guys the story goes there was his young boys about five or six years old and he shows up at the boarding school if you don't know what a boarding school is please look it up it is a for simulation school where culture was literally beaten out of indigenous children they started in 1879 and they went clear up into the 2000s and what this happened is his boy shows up they cut his hair they scrub him clean they put this burning talc on him right to get rid of the lice because they think Indians are dirty and then the woman who's bathing him realizes that his elbows and his knees are darker than the rest of him which is common for people who have a little melanin in their skin and so she assumes he's dirty and she scrubs his elbows and she scrubs his knees and he takes she takes the skin off until they're bleeding and he goes to bed and he's crying and he's upset and he spends most of the night crying and when they come back in to find out what all the noises and they turned the lights on they see that he soiled the sheets with his blood so they grabbed him out they take him into another room and they beat him for the next hour all the kids in the boarding school can hear what's happening and then it goes silent and those kids never saw that child again I wanted to paint this picture because this is what I thought of a child standing naked and afraid' with bloody elbows and with bloody knees and under the the things that I've told you under the requirements that we have in order to be the best Indian we can for you these stories don't matter I maintain that they do matter and I'm standing here as a result of the I stand here as a protest of the policies that were put upon indigenous people I stand here in spite of those things I am my grandparents greatest dreams that were never supposed to come true and now [Applause] and now I hope I've told you something new and I think I hope I think I have I hope that I've told you something maybe even shocking and now you're all responsible for that information stories are to be carried stories are to be held stories are to be revered what are you going to do with that information if you leave here and you decide to do nothing you are complicit in the actions of those who came before you who helped you get to this place your ancestors whoever they may be but maybe ask yourself this are you making spaces for indigenous people in your home and in your workplace are you creating inclusion in those places are you realizing that as you walk these lands that there are people who walk these lands before you that these are sacred and important things and that indigenous people are still here and that we matter and we will always matter because this is the land of our inheritance this is the land that the Creator gave us so what are you going to do with that information thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 121,891

Rating: 4.9198918 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Activism, America, Anthropology, Art, Behavior, Childhood, Children, Compassion, Culture, Debate, Dreams, Empathy, History, Inequality, Invention, Literature, Love, Movement, Nature, Painting, Peace, Purpose, Race, Revolution, Schools, Social Justice, Tolerance, Truth

Id: s3FL9uhTH_s

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018