Imag(in)ing the Feminine: Women's Creative Portraiture as Demonstrations of Indigenous Becomingness

Abstract

I have chosen four works of art from four different women artists who have different relationships to and engagements with Indigeneity that are represented in their works: Sister (2016) by Kaska Dena/Jewish photographer Kali Spitzer, Loba (2017) by Mestiza mixed-media artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Untitled: Imagén de Yagul (1973) by Afro-Cuban performance and earth work artist Ana Mendieta, and Interrelation: Maqtukwek (2020) by L’nu mixed media and performance artist Meagan Musseau. Not only are these artists from different tribal/cultural communities, they hold different nationalities and represent multiple continents, and their art practices encompass an array of different mediums, processes, and styles. However, their work manages to interrogate the same systems of heteropatriarchal settler colonialism and its impacts on Indigenous peoples, particularly Indigenous women. Their rich and complex representation of themselves, their community members, and their land relationships establishes a creative practice that allows them to be seen and understood on their own terms, pursuing their own Becomingness in that process. Analyzing their works from both the perspective of the maker and that of the audience, it is evident that each artist upholds a contextually specific protocol of relational accountability that is reflective of Indigenous Feminisms and the infinite possibilities of how to Become an Indigenous woman. I argue that their works of portraiture, specifically, demonstrate an artistic mode through which Indigenous women are able to engage with understandings of the feminine self and inject these felt experiences into their current spatialities, disrupting colonial rhetorics of various disciplines wherein the Indigenous feminine is impacted. These women artists are able to utilize the woman’s physical image which has so long been commodified, exotified, and dehumanized to critique and resist the very systems that made it so. By engaging with the treatment of the feminine body in connection to issues of land, political and social stratification, and violence, Spitzer, Friedemann-Sánchez, Mendieta, and Musseau are subverting the image of the woman and feminine to rehumanize and decolonize the spaces they occupy, contributing to a narrative of Indigenous Becomingness through which they work towards personal healing and community futurity.