Recommendations of Recent Texts for Further Reading
Below is a concise list of texts from the twenty-first century related to Southwestern (Art) History, Native (Art) History, Indigenous Research Methodologies, Feminism and Pueblo Peoples, Nineteenth-Century French Art, Modern Art, and Academic Work by Former Couse-Sharp Historic Site Interns. Each recommendation is organized alphabetically within its attributed section and relates to the goals and/or research interests of the Lunder Research Center. This list is not, by any means, comprehensive but offers interested scholars a jumping off point for further study.
[Academic Work by Former Couse-Sharp Historic Site Interns]
- Fernald, Caroline Jean. “The Visualization of the American Southwest: Ethnography, Tourism, and American Indian Souvenir Arts.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2017.
o Abstract: “This dissertation addresses the visualization, or artistic documentation, of the American Southwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artistic images in the form of drawings, paintings, photographs, and prints shaped the way Americans conceptualized and understood the Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants, and through their circulation in popular texts, scientific reports, and marketing materials, were effective in establishing the region as a distinct cultural and geographic zone ripe for tourism. I focus on the interconnections and exchanges between ethnographic texts and images, such as the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Native American and European American artworks produced by Pueblo potters, Nampeyo, John K. Hillers, Elbridge Ayer Burbank, and E. Irving Couse, and the marketing materials of the Santa Fe Railway, the main promoter and creator of the tourist industry in the region. The visualization of the Southwest in scientific reports, artistic renderings, and promotional literature presented the region as a space that existed outside of modernity. Anthropologists, artists, and the Indigenous subjects of their ethnographic inquiry attempted to transcend the passage of time by documenting, in text and image, the memory of the art, culture, and people of the region. I suggest that this documentation was intended to give permanence to a time, place, and culture that was believed to be slipping away. By recording this information in the form of anthropological reports and artistic images and objects, the original source was given a form of permanence that allowed phenomenological resonances of the Indigenous cultures of the Southwest to extend beyond the confines of the region and the temporality of the period. Finally, through an analysis of the interconnectivity of anthropological reports and practices, ethnographic portraiture, and promotional imagery for the tourist market, I argue that American Indians were also engaging in auto-ethnography and self-preservation for the sake of future generations by replicating their culture through the acts of sharing protected knowledge and materials with anthropologists, modeling for artists, and producing traditional arts en masse for sale to tourists.”
- Harris, Alicia. “Homescapes: Indigenous Land Art and Public Memory.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2020.
o Abstract: “Indigenous North Americans make visual forms that demonstrate and provide for the practice of kinship connections with land. In art history, discourse about ‘Land Art’ has often omitted Indigenous connections with land and place. This dissertation aims to create a more holistic narrative of Land Art in North America through analysis of both ancestral and currently living artists and their work, as well as through a rigorous examination of histories of land possession and dispossession. Rooted in a kinship paradigm that intervenes in dominant public memories about place, I analyze art by Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous diaspora North Americans. In this context, I consider artworks of both living and ancestral communities who create in situ artworks, works that are representational of place, and works that consider place in abstraction. These artworks provide a counterpoint to dominant historical narratives and memories of land. Throughout my dissertation, I use the methodology, ‘Critical Place Inquiry,’ established by Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie in their 2015 book Place in Research: Theory Methodology, and Methods. This approach provides the tools through which I focus on Indigenous perspectives on land, and through which I reject the normalization of settler colonialism. Through this lens I understood place as shifting in meaning as it is experienced differently. This approach empowered me to recognize the artworks under consideration here as interjections of Indigenous kinship in the dominant narratives and memories that are constructed about land. These are claims to home on the land of North America. I first analyze in situ installations at sites of extreme historical tension and violence, battlefields and borderlands. The artists in this section include Colleen Cutschall (Lakota), Edward Poitras (Métis-Cree), Alan Michelson (Kahnawake), and the arts collective Postcommodity. Next I move to an analysis of Indigneous cartography through a series of maps painted by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish Kootenai, Métis, Shoshone). My analysis of Indigenous cartography gives way to a consideration of the connection between the Indigenous female body and the land through a series of photographs and sculptures by Cuban/ American artist Ana Mendieta and Faye Heavyshield (Kainai). All of the artists I analyze throughout this dissertation demonstrate through their art, their connections to land through a paradigm of kinship. This leaves me to conclude with a consideration of the concept of ‘home’ for Indigenous peoples as connected to land. For this, I examine a photograph from Richard Ray Whitman’s Street Chiefs series, and I conclude my study with a consideration of an installation by Serpent River First Nation sculptor Bonnie Devine, Writing Home. I end my dissertation with a brief history and context of my own kinship with land as an Assiniboine woman. Being ancestrally at home on, and in kinship with the land of this continent underscores the conceptual framework of each of the artworks in this dissertation. Through my analyses I demonstrate some ways Native artists have given thoughtful artistic form to those connections with the land.”
- Herr, Chelsea. “Future Tense: Potentiality, Portents, and Permutations in Native North American Art.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2020.
o Abstract: “This dissertation examines the ways in which living Native North American artists envision and engage possible Indigenous futures. Indigenous Futurisms (IF) investigates the many ways Indigenous peoples conceptualize, visualize, verbalize, and speculate on the future. Working within an IF visual and conceptual lexicon, the artists in this dissertation elucidate the ways in which Indigenous peoples have always employed diverse modes of future-thinking. Building upon the work of Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon, I identify four major tenets of Indigenous Futurisms examined in this dissertation: reimagining lived histories to envision potential futures; living apocalypses; navigating space/time; and privileging Indigenous knowledges, technologies, and traditions. To connect a comparatively diverse selection of artists and artworks, I consider Virgil Ortiz’s (Cochiti Pueblo) Pueblo Revolt 1680/2180 series as my primary case study, then include other artists as correlative studies in each chapter. I compare differing notions of histories and futures in order to problematize representations of time, space, existence, and apocalypse. I analyze representations of space/time travel, and relate those narratives to the artists’ personal and/or community experiences. My research culminates in an analysis of how artists devise futures that are dependent upon ancestral teachings and practices. For Indigenous peoples, science fiction and futurism are not just fiction and are not purely speculative; futurity is deeply rooted in autochthonous cultural narratives, knowledge systems, and ways of being.”
- Lanteri, Michelle. “Patterns of renewal: Native women artists and the northern New Mexico exhibitionary complex in the twenty-first century.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2021.
o Abstract: “Native North American women in the Southwest adeptly navigated a transformative moment in their economies of arts production in the early tourism era, the 1880s to 1910s. They altered their practices within a divergent time reshaped by drastic increases in commerce and travel via transcontinental railways. As arts leaders, Native women adapted their extant practices of mentorship and education, local and international reach, interdisciplinary forms, and place-specific interactions. Through this work, they established an exhibitionary complex with area partners that reached northern New Mexico by the 1910s. During the remainder of the twentieth century, Native women artists built upon this foundation in northern New Mexico. In the twenty-first century, Native women persist these legacies in wide-ranging arts practices in this locale. There exists a robust scholarship on Southwestern Native arts and exhibitions of the early tourism period. Studies have focused on particular media and associated artists and patrons, with an emphasis on potters and painters in institutional and familial contexts. My dissertation examines the tethered relationships between Native women artists of the early tourism and the post-2000 periods. In doing so, my selection of a trio of in-depth case studies allows me to focus on this topic from a broader, generational perspective. Further, I analyze the relationships, or patterns of renewal, between Native women’s arts and exhibition practices established in the early tourism era and the ways that Native women artists carry these acts of accomplishment and leadership forward in the twenty-first century. In this study, I trace a history of Native women’s leadership within the dual contexts of interdisciplinary art forms and exhibition practices in northern New Mexico between the 1880s and 2010s. Following this historical context, I focus on the arts practices of Susan Folwell (Santa Clara Tewa), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), and Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota/Ojibwe) within solo exhibition contexts in northern New Mexico.”
- von Gries, Olivia. “The Consumed Bite Back: Issues of Cultural Cannibalism and Appropriation in Andrea Carlson’s Windigo and VORE Series.” Master’s thesis, University of Oklahoma, 2021.
o Abstract: “Since contact with Indigenous peoples, Western colonizers and settlers have formed and relied upon created differences rooted in misinformation. By labeling Indigenous groups, including Native Americans, as ‘cannibals,’ Western oppressors produced the evidence that they felt was necessary to justify the colonization and settler colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies. Yet, during these processes of oppression, Western settlers and colonizers themselves acted cannibalistically; by appropriating and destroying Indigenous lands and lifeways, Western oppressors have engaged actively in ‘cultural cannibalism.’ Contemporary mixed-media artist Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe, b. 1979) identifies and challenges this ‘insatiable hunger of settlers’ in her Windigo and VORE Series. By consuming and incorporating museum objects, ‘cannibal boom’ films, and themes from Western art history in her compositions, Carlson engages in anthropophagy to flip past Western accusations of Indigenous cannibalism back onto their projectors. In both series, Carlson stresses that settlers in the United States, acting as windigos, or monsters that consume without consequence, have and continue to cannibalize Native America without hesitation or regard for Native lifeways. An examination of how Carlson addresses and consumes past culturally cannibalistic practices in her Windigo and VORE Series leads to a better understanding of how power and cultural exchange can operate in settler colonial situations.”
[Contemporary Art History]
- Campt, Tina M. A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.”
[Feminism and Arts Patronage in the Southwest]
- Jacobs, Margaret D. Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
o Abstract: “In this interdisciplinary study of gender, cross-cultural encounters, and federal Indian policy, Margaret D. Jacobs explores the changing relationship between Anglo-American women and Pueblo Indians before and after the turn of the century. During the late nineteenth century, the Pueblos were often characterized by women reformers as barbaric and needing to be ‘uplifted’ into civilization. By the 1920s, however, the Pueblos were widely admired by activist Anglo-American women, who challenged assimilation policies and worked hard to protect the Pueblos’ ‘traditional’ way of life. Deftly weaving together an analysis of changes in gender roles, attitudes toward sexuality, public conceptions of Native peoples, and federal Indian policy, Jacobs argues that the impetus for this transformation in perception rests less with a progressively tolerant view of Native peoples and more with fundamental shifts in the ways Anglo-American women saw their own sexuality and social responsibilities.”
- Jacobs, Margaret D. “Shaping a New Way: White Women and the Movement to Promote Pueblo Indian Arts and Crafts, 1900–1935.” Journal of the Southwest 40, no. 2 (1998): 187–215.
o Abstract: “In the first decades of the twentieth century, many white Americans became involved in an effort to promote Indian arts and crafts, particularly in the Southwest and among the Pueblo Indians. Some scholars have placed this effort within the context of the larger arts and craft movement in Britain and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Historians have explained this movement as a reaction again industrial production and as a related search for authenticity. Believing that industrialization had produced a mass culture of imitation, destroyed communal bonds, and divested work of its inherent worth, and crafts movement supporters sought ‘authentic’ objects and experience in preindustrial cultures and modes of production. Other scholars have argued that the white elites who patronized Indian arts consciously attempted to redefine the Southwestern identity and economy - to transform it from an area known primarily for ranching, agriculture, and tractive industries to a region known for its picturesque scenery people. For all their insights, these explanations neglect two significant aspects of the Indian arts and crafts movement among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico - its gendered nature and its heterogeneity.”
- Jacobs, Margaret D. “The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875–1935.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no 3 (2002): 29–54.
o Abstract: “Jacobs discusses the interracial marriage between white women and native American men. Sexual relationships or marriage between white women and nonwhite men violated colonial, racial, and patriarchal order where white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated people. By law, white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men, therefore, a nonwhite man who ‘possessed’ a white woman undermined the gendered and racialized dominance of white men.”
- Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.
o Abstract: “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous communities in the United States and Australia suffered a common experience at the hands of state authorities: the removal of their children to institutions in the name of assimilating American Indians and protecting Aboriginal people. Although officially characterized as benevolent, these government policies often inflicted great trauma on indigenous families and ultimately served the settler nations’ larger goals of consolidating control over indigenous peoples and their lands. White Mother to a Dark Race takes the study of indigenous education and acculturation in new directions in its examination of the key roles white women played in these policies of indigenous child-removal. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers justified the removal of indigenous children in particularly gendered ways by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of indigenous mothers, the alleged barbarity of indigenous men, and the lack of a patriarchal nuclear family. Often they deemed white women the most appropriate agents to carry out these child-removal policies. Inspired by the maternalist movement of the era, many white women were eager to serve as surrogate mothers to indigenous children and maneuvered to influence public policy affecting indigenous people. Although some white women developed caring relationships with indigenous children and others became critical of government policies, many became hopelessly ensnared in this insidious colonial policy.”
- Mullin, Molly H. Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
o Abstract: “In the early twentieth century, a group of elite East coast women turned to the American Southwest in search of an alternative to European-derived concepts of culture. In Culture in the Marketplace Molly H. Mullin provides a detailed narrative of the growing influence that this network of women had on the Native American art market—as well as the influence these activities had on them—in order to investigate the social construction of value and the history of American concepts of culture. Drawing on fiction, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and extensive interviews with artists, collectors, and dealers, Mullin shows how anthropological notions of culture were used to valorize Indian art and create a Southwest Indian art market. By turning their attention to Indian affairs and art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she argues, these women escaped the gender restrictions of their eastern communities and found ways of bridging public and private spheres of influence. Tourism, in turn, became a means of furthering this cultural colonization. Mullin traces the development of aesthetic worth as it was influenced not only by politics and profit but also by gender, class, and regional identities, revealing how notions of ‘culture’ and ‘authenticity’ are fundamentally social ones. She also shows how many of the institutions that the early patrons helped to establish continue to play an important role in the contemporary market for American Indian art.”
[Hispano/Latin American Art History]
- Avilés, Elena. “My/Mi lengua franca: ‘Language,’ Manipulation, and Cultural Heritage in Chicana Art and Literature.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2014.
o Abstract: “Chicana feminist literary and artistic cultural production since the second half of the twentieth century is characterized with a critical sensibility commissioning the arts to actively interrogate how cultural mores misconstrue female identity. By questioning the ‘miss'-representation of cultural myths and images, Chicanas expose the patriarchal language and hegemonic discourse that code and sign cultural icons. Chicana feminist interrogations of traditional representations of La Malinche illustrate how signs are a construction, and thus, indefinite and plastic, like language. By combining various methodologies such as semiotics, visual analysis, cultural and feminist studies, this study underscores the significance of the development of feminist critical, poetic and visual language to Chicana revisionist representations of the figure of La Malinche. The theme of language use in Chicana reinterpretations of La Malinche offers an innovative conceptualization to the advancement of Chicana language practices as a strategy to critically examine the gendered and cultural aesthetics of identity. This dissertation examines how Chicanas manipulate heritage through a 'thick description' of the interpretation of culture in the signification of 'language' (La Malinche) and in their own language use in order to alter interpretations of Chicana identity. The analysis of Chicana feminist representations of La Malinche is a study of how women traverse the borderlands of literary and artistic practices to gain visibility and voice. I evaluate the interrelationships between Chicana critics, artists and writers, drawing from art historians and literary critics to show how literature and art empowered women to work toward a metalinguistic awareness of self. The relationships and intersections between the textual and visual representation on La Malinche demonstrate an often-unrecognized dialectical relationship among writers and artists and literary critics and art historians. Ongoing representations of La Malinche reflect the continuance of innovative, original and imaginative forms of speaking about Chicana identity that reveals the dialogic and heteroglot nature of Chicana voices, as Chicana placas, a concept I call the development of a Chicana lengua franca.”
- Converging Streams: Art of the Hispanic and Native American Southwest. Edited by William Wroth and Robin Farwell Gavin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
o Abstract: “This lushly illustrated book examines the cross-cultural influences and unique artistic dialogue between Hispano and Native American arts in the Southwest over the past four hundred years since Spanish colonization. Insightful essays by historians, artists, and scholars including Estevan Rael-Galvez, Lane Coulter, Enrique R Lamadrid, Marc Simmons, and others explore the impact of cultural interaction on various art forms including painting, sculpture, metalwork, textiles, architecture, furniture, and performance and ceremonial arts. Over 150 art works and photographs gathered from museums across the country are testimony to the unique Southwestern aesthetic that developed from this dynamic cultural exchange.”
- Festivals and Daily Life in the Arts of Colonial Latin American, 1492–1850: Papers from the 2012 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum. Edited by Donna Pierce. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2014.
o Abstract: “The Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2012 hosted by the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art. The museum assembled an international group of scholars specializing in the arts and history of colonial Latin America to present recent research with topics ranging from ephemeral architecture, painting, and sculpture to engravings, decorative arts, costumes and clothing of the period. This volume presents revised and expanded versions of papers presented at the symposium.”
- Gibson, Christina Taylor. “Carlos Chávez in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ‘Whirling around Mexico.’” Latin American Music Review 42, no. 2 (2011): 193–225.
o Abstract: “For a brief time during the early 1930s, art patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan and composer-conductor Carlos Chávez formed a transnational alliance. They sought to foreground Native American music in modernist artistic expression, and each found in the other useful talents and resources. Chávez showed Luhan a musical equivalent to the Rivera murals she so admired and proffered a potential pathway to elevate her husband, the Pueblo musician Tony Luhan, and his practices. Luhan, meanwhile, allowed Chávez access to the network of New York modernists who congregated at her salon in Taos, New Mexico, including Paul Strand and Leopold Stokowski, as well as familiarity with the Native music in the Taos area. Using a postcolonial lens, this article embarks on a close reading of Luhan’s unpublished memoir, ‘Whirling around Mexico,’ and Chávez’s articles in El Excélsior. Through such an examination we can track the shared characteristics and divergences in their worldviews.”
- Lewthwaite, Stephanie. “Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project.” Journal of the Southwest 52, no. 1 (2010): 41–70.
o Abstract: “While the anthropological and archaeological ‘discovery’ of the Southwest, the art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, and the revival of Spanish colonial arts under Anglo patrons are well known, the Hispano artists who straddled multiple art worlds during the early twentieth century are less so. The ‘recovery’ of Hispano artists - initiated by William Wroth and Charles Briggs and continued more recently by Laurie KaIb and Tey Marianna Nunn - remains far from complete. Although we know more about the Hispano artists who achieved regional and national acclaim during this period, most often through the New Deal's WPA-funded Federal Art Project (FAP), Eurocentric aesthetic and anthropological categories of place, tradition, and authenticity have occluded the significance of their work. The state's rural, folk, and indigenous communities in particular served as bulwarks against the modern machine age and as sites for spiritual and cultural rebirth. In the midst of America's ‘crisis of modernity,’ fears about cultural loss and regional distinctiveness spawned efforts to preserve local ethnic cultures, and Native American and Hispano arts in particular. Yet, the Hispano revival derived less momentum regionally and nationally than the Native American revival, because Hispano arts were invariably viewed as utilitarian objects rather than as art.”
- Trujillo, Dennis Peter. “The Commodification of Hispano Culture in New Mexico: Tourism, Mary Austin, and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2003.
o Abstract: “This project revolves around commodification and the appropriation of culture, particularly Hispano culture in New Mexico. More specifically, I look at santos as an example of a commodified cultural tradition. Hispano art, particularly santos can be analyzed as sacred/devotional; sacred/marketed; or as commodified art. Sacred/devotional art is created specifically for use as a religious totem. Sacred/marketed art is sold for money in the market place and is created to resemble the sacred/devotional art. Commodified art is produced solely for its market value with no thought of the sacred/devotional. Commodification denotes a particular social construction of things that people value and refers to the social process of transforming and converting ideas, objects, and events into articles of trade or commerce in the capitalist marketplace or more succinctly, turning social activities into economic ones. Commodification, in other words, is a process of abstraction in which objects are removed from the physical, emotional and relational settings in which they are produced and redefined in new terms, a form of representation. “Contested commodification” refers to instances in which we experience personal and social conflict about the process and the result . The contestation in this study concerns how Hispano culture has been represented by Anglo outside change agents, and how they have used their position and power to represent Hispano culture in New Mexico in a particular way, a way that serves the purposes of their own self promotion, the tourist industry and an ideology of discrimination that I call racism. Discrimination, arrogance, condescension, paternalism, and appropriation define the racism that I refer to in this study. This project is informed by the American Studies paradigm of multi- and interdisciplinary analysis. I have used culture studies, anthropology, historical studies, and regional studies using cross- and interdisciplinary texts, archival research, interviews, and participant and participatory observation techniques particularly in the areas of the art market and tourism. Tourism and cultural representation in this study are grounded in a cultural studies approach, with particular attention given to consumer culture and its orientation to the marketing and consumption of goods and services. At issue is the social conditioning of cultural production and symbolic forms and their shaping by class and ethnic relations as well as the relationships between economic and cultural institutions.”
[Indigenous Research Methodologies]
- Applying Indigenous Research Methods: Storying with Peoples and Communities. Edited by Sweeney Windchief and Timothy San Pedro. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2019.
o Abstract: “Applying Indigenous Research Methods focuse son the question of "How" Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs)can be used and taught across Indigenous studies and education. In this collection, Indigenous scholars address the importance of IRMs in their own scholarship, while focusing conversations on the application with others. Each chapter is co-authored to model methods rooted in the sharing of stories to strengthen relationships, such as yarning, storywork, and others. The chapters offer a wealth of specific examples, as told by researchers about their research methods in conversation with other scholars, teachers, and community members. Applying Indigenous Research Methods is an interdisciplinary showcase of the ways IRMs can enhance scholarship in fields including education, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, social work, qualitative methodologies, and beyond.”
- Handbook of Critical Indigenous Methodologies. Edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 2008.
o Abstract: “The Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies is the only handbook to make connections regarding many of the perspectives of the ‘new’ critical theorists and emerging indigenous methodologies. Built on the foundation of the landmark SAGEHandbook of Qualitative Research, the Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies extends beyond the investigation of qualitative inquiry itself to explore the indigenous and nonindigenous voices that inform research, policy, politics, and social justice. Editors Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith explore in depth some of the newer formulations of critical theories and many indigenous perspectives, and seek to make transparent the linkages between the two.”
- Kovach, Margaret. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “Indigenous Methodologies is a groundbreaking text. Since its original publication in 2009, it has become the most trusted guide used in the study of Indigenous methodologies and has been adopted in university courses around the world. It provides a conceptual framework for implementing Indigenous methodologies and serves as a useful entry point for those wishing to learn more broadly about Indigenous research. The second edition incorporates new literature along with substantial updates, including a thorough discussion of Indigenous theory and analysis, new chapters on community partnership and capacity building, an added focus on oracy and other forms of knowledge dissemination, and a renewed call to decolonize the academy. The second edition also includes discussion questions to enhance classroom interaction with the text. In a field that continues to grow and evolve, and as universities and researchers strive to learn and apply Indigenous-informed research, this important new edition introduces readers to the principles and practices of Indigenous methodologies.”
- Lujan, Vince. “Ha-lem As a Pueblo Indian Pedagogical Practice.” Journal of American Indian Education 55, no. 3 (2016): 30–47.
o Abstract: “This article examines the Taos Pueblo concept of ha-lem, or respect, as a pedagogical practice to inform contemporary exercises of self-determination. Specifically, this article explores how serves as a culture-based pedagogy to prepare the People of the Place of the Red Willows to live and work to sustain the cultural and ecological integrity of the Place they have inhabited for more than 1,000 years. Rooted in social relationships, the Taos concept of comes from ontology that the individual, community, and environment are interconnected and the epistemology that the maintenance of balance among these relationships is essential to the survival of the People of the Place of the Red Willows. If these relationships are out of balance, natural and/or supernatural harm can befall one or more element. As a Taos member, this autoethnographic study presents a series of personal vignettes to demonstrate the efficacy of in the exercise of self-determination at Taos Pueblo.”
- Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40.
o Abstract: “Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of ‘the contact zone.’ She articulated, ‘I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today.’ Pratt described a site for linguistic and cultural encounters, wherein power is negotiated and struggle occurs. Although when introduced this term was in the context of literacy and literary theories, the term has been appropriated to conversations across the humanities and has been used in the context of feminist theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory and in discussions of teaching and pedagogy. The contact zone is similar to other concepts that address relationality and contiguity such as positionality, standpoint theory, perspectivism, intersectionality, and relationality.”
- Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1999.
o Abstract: “To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited third edition, this bestselling book includes a co-written introduction features contributions from indigenous scholars on the book's continued relevance to current research.”
- Wilson, Shawn. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.
o Abstract: “Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don’t just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.”
[LGBTQIA+ Arts in New Mexico]
- Biro, Jordan. “Uncommon Knowledge: A History of Queer New Mexico, 1920s–1980s.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2015.
o Abstract: “New Mexico, the heart of the American Southwest, has been home to countless gay men and lesbians throughout the twentieth century. This dissertation explores the states LGBTQ past and investigates the connections and exchanges between urban and rural gay and lesbian identities, cultures, and political organizations in the 1920s through the 1980s. Using New Mexico as case study, I provide an alternative narrative to previous scholarship that focuses either exclusively on gay urban or gay rural lives and instead present an example of a migratory queer network where lesbians and gay men crisscrossed cities and country spaces. Gay and lesbian cultures and politics flowed in- and-out of New Mexico especially during the creation of art colonies in the twenties, the construction of the security state in the forties and fifties, and the development of intentional lesbian land and gay male radical faeries communities in the seventies. These pivotal moments show how lesbians and gay men opposed institutions and practices of heteronormativity, resisted the use of sexuality as a tool of discrimination, and challenged constructed binaries: hetero/homo, public/private, and rural/urban. Lastly, New Mexican gay and lesbian experiences expose the deep and diverse trajectories of the larger struggle for gay civil rights that informs contemporary definitions of equal rights in America.”
- Burke, Flannery. “Spud Johnson and a Gay Man’s Place in the Taos Creative Arts Community.” Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 1 (2010): 86–113.
o Abstract: “This article explores the status of Willard ‘Spud’ Johnson within the modernist arts community of Taos, New Mexico, in the 1930s. By highlighting Johnson's entertaining and self-reflective journal, the article addresses how Johnson's homosexuality contributed to his position as a middling member of the Taos arts community, a position poised between white members of the colony, especially women, and the non-white local New Mexicans whom members of the colony patronized. By examining the internal hierarchy of the Taos arts community, I shed light on how creative production works. Although popular audiences tend to credit individual genius, the beauty of the landscape, or the appeal of local traditions for creative production, Johnson's experience suggests that internal social relationships, even inequitable ones, shape the creative dynamics of arts colonies.”
[Modernist Art History]
- Cottington, David. Radical Art and the Formation of the Avant-Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
o Abstract: “An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the ‘avant-garde’ in Paris and London. Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.”
- Murrell, Denise. Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
o Abstract: “This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic ‘other.’ Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet’s reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane ‘New Negro’ portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet’s and Matisse’s depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.”
[Myth and Memory in the American West]
- Auerbach, Jerold S. Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promise Land. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
o Abstract: “Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the pueblos of the Southwest frequently inspired Anglo-American visitors to express their sense of wonder and enchantment in biblical references. Frank Hamilton Cushing's first account of Zuni pueblo described a setting that looked like ‘The Pools of Palestine.’ Drawn to the Southwest, Mabel Dodge imagined ‘a garden of Eden, inhabited by an unfallen tribe of men and women.’ There she was attracted to Tony Luhan, a Taos Indian who looked ‘like a Biblical figure.’ When historian Jerold Auerbach first saw Edward S. Curtis's early twentieth-century photograph Taos Water Girls, he realized that ‘here, indeed, was the biblical Rebecca, relocated to New Mexico from ancient Haran, where Abraham's faithful servant had journeyed to find a suitable wife for Isaac. Rebecca with her water pitcher is as familiar a biblical icon as Noah and his ark or Moses with the stone tablets. Curtis had recast her as the archetypal Pueblo maiden.’”
- Jerman, Hadley. “‘Expressing the Inexpressible:’ Art Posters, Graphic Modernism, and the American West, 1890–1925.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2020.
o Abstract: “The ‘art poster’ movement swept the United States during the 1890s, generating enthusiasm and commentary for advertising posters designed by fine artists. While American art posters prompted much discussion in their time, they have rarely received focused art historical investigation. And while the movement informed advertising efforts in the American West through the early 1920s, scholars have largely ignored western centric posters. This dissertation fills that lacuna and offers a methodological framework for addressing not only western American posters but commercial art more broadly. It considers posters made between 1890 and 1925 in New York, New Mexico, and California as the tangible outcome of compromises between multiple makers. Thus, through case studies, I seek to understand how art posters of the American West visually negotiated between the needs and expectations of various stakeholders to ‘sell’ ideas about the West. As this study reveals, art posters critically comment on and interpret the ideas and objects they were designed to sell. At the turn of the twentieth century, art poster style informed the visual identity of William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Wild West even though his posters generally eschew the aesthetic. Edward Penfield’s poster promoting Frederic Remington’s book, Pony Tracks (1895), reveals the direct influence of Cody’s Wild West on New York perceptions and portrayals of the West. Rather than celebrate Remington’s vision, however, I argue that Penfield’s poster and cover design interpreted and criticized it. Likewise, while Gerald Cassidy’s 1922 Santa Fe Fiesta posters worked to advance tourism for his clients, they simultaneously promoted the artist and Pueblo land rights. While Maynard Dixon’s billboard designs manipulated public attitudes favorably toward outdoor advertising for his employer and promoted California for local advertising boosters, for the artist they served as a crucible in which to explore compositional structures that informed his fine art for decades. Such posters’ appearance of simplicity and instantaneous communication demands we afford them a longer look. Doing so equips us to more critically consume the advertising images that surround us. What might we discover if only we looked more closely, not only at the tangible images of our collective past, but at the commercial imagery that continues to pervade our visual experience today?”
- Kasson, Joy S. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
o Abstract: “A fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure. Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's ‘authenticity’ yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition. But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked ‘memories’ of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.”
- King, Brian. “Mystics, Radicals, Sinners, and Saints: Freedom, Rebirth, and the American West.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2014.
o Abstract: “This dissertation explores the lives of John Muir, the Taos Society of Artists, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Everett Ruess, Edith Warner, and the Taos hippies who journeyed to the American West in search of freedom. In the Western setting, with its diverse yet distinctive and stunning terrain, these individuals felt that their mind or soul—not just their physical body—had been liberated. They felt reborn. In the grand Sierras, John Muir discovered that physical and spiritual freedoms were intertwined. The Taos Society of Artists and Mabel Dodge Luhan found their connection with the natural world in northern New Mexico where three cultures mingled against the backdrop of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. Everett Ruess spent four years wandering the Four-Corners canyonland region writing poetry, numerous letters, and painting, intermittently returning to Los Angeles and San Francisco. His connection with the West grew as he felt free—physically, socially, and spiritually. Edith Warner fled Pennsylvania and awakened along the banks of the Rio Grande. She increasingly valued the culture of her San Ildefonso Pueblo friends and neighbors as she laid aside her civilized life a little at a time. The Taos hippies sought freedom for themselves and for America, believing that they would spearhead an awakening from northern New Mexico. Like their predecessors, the Taos Artists Society and Mabel Dodge Luhan, the communards fled from mainstream society and found in Pueblo culture a possibility for healing a spiritually ill country. Their stories are not unique. Countless radical thinkers have turned to the West for freedom and rebirth and have sought to share their discoveries. And millions more have been attracted by their tales.”
- Maddra, Sam A. Hostiles? The Lakota Ghost Dance and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.
o Abstract: “On March 30, 1891―less than four months after the military suppression of the Lakota Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee, South Dakota―twenty-three Lakota Sioux imprisoned at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, were released into the custody of William F. Cody. ‘Buffalo Bill,’ as Cody was known, then hired the prisoners as performers. Labeled ‘hostiles’ by the federal government, the Lakotas would learn to play hostiles before British audiences in 1891–92 as part of the Wild West’s second tour of Britain. In Hostiles? Sam A. Maddra relates an ironic tale of Indian accommodation―and preservation of the Ghost Dance, which the Lakotas believed was a principled, restorative religion. To the U.S. Army, their religion was a rebellion to be suppressed. To the Indians, it offered hope in a time of great transition. To Cody, it became a means to attract British audiences. With these Lakotas, the showman could offer dramatic reenactments of the army’s conquest, starring none other than the very ‘hostile Indians’ who had staged the recent ‘uprising’ in South Dakota. Cody’s narrative of conquest is generally rejected, but few people even today question whether the Lakotas had twisted the original Ghost Dance into a violent resistance movement. Drawing on sources previous historians have overlooked, Maddra shows the fallacy of this view. Appended to this volume are five of Short Bull’s narratives, including a new translation by Raymond J. DeMallie of a 1915 interview.”
- Weigle, Marta. “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45, no. 1 (1989): 115-137.
o Abstract: “Between 1882 and World War II, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and its closely associated Fred Harvey Company created and successfully marketed a compelling regional identity for ‘The Great Southwest’ of northern New Mexico and Arizona from Las Vegas Hot Springs to the Grand Canyon, displaying it as a tourist attraction of sublime natural wonders, prehistoric and colonial historic significance, and colorful, tamed, native peoples, primarily Indians. Capitalizing on the technology of the train and later the automobile, the popular world's fair performance tradition, and contemporary notions of tourism, the Santa Fe/Harvey system presented the Southwest as no longer a savage desert but variously a salutary, educational, heroic, and finally ludic region similar to Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom and EPCOT Center.”
- White, Richard and Patricia Nelson Limerick. The Frontier in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
o Abstract: “Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History;’ the other took place in William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, ‘The Wild West.’ Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians―and bloody battles―at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as ‘Custer's Last Stand.’ Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices―those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American.”
[Native American Studies (General)]
- Martinez, Kristen Le Amber. “Not All Killed by John Wayne: The Long History of Indigenous Rock, Metal, and Punk 1940s to the Present.” Master’s thesis, University of California Los Angeles, 2019.
o Abstract: “In looking at the contribution of Indigenous punk and hard rock bands, there has been a long history of punk that started in Northern Arizona, as well as a current diverse scene in the Southwest ranging from punk, ska, metal, doom, sludge, blues, and black metal. Dine, Apache, Hopi, Pueblo, Gila, Yaqui, and O'odham bands are currently creating vast punk and metal music scenes. In this thesis, I argue that Native punk is not just a cultural movement, but a form of survivance. Bands utilize punk and their stories as a conduit to counteract issues of victimhood as well as challenge imposed mechanisms of settler colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, notions of being fixed in the past, as well as bringing awareness to genocide and missing and murdered Indigenous women. Through D.I.Y. and space making, bands are writing music which resonates with them, and are utilizing their own venues, promotions, zines, unique fashion, and lyrics to tell their stories. The new wave of punk music and artists are making space for bands that are led by femme, transgender, and non-binary musicians. Moreover, Indigenous women are making spaces in historically white, male dominated scenes. I will be using the framework by Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor of survivance which is ‘an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, as well as obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.’ In this case, I will be looking at punk as a form of survivance in four themes of environmental and Indigenous rights, D.I.Y. space making, gender/queer empowerment, and positive mental health and strength for the future generations. By using punk rock, this thesis will share stories of how bands have denounced being victims or static in the past. I will be using textural analysis, discursive themes, non-institutional archives, looking at oral histories, performances, zines, flyers, video footage, lyrics, digital archival evidence, documentaries, band social medias, newspapers, as well as using interviews to substantiate my arguments. Indigenous punk bands are continuing their long legacy and movement of punk rock in the Four Corners region.”
- Rushing, III, W. Jackson. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1999.
o Abstract: “This illuminating and provocative book is the first anthology devoted to Twentieth Century Native American and First Nation art. Native American Art brings together anthropologists, art historians, curators, critics and distinguished Native artists to discuss pottery, painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography and performance art by some of the most celebrated Native American and Canadian First Nation artists of our time. The contributors use new theoretical and critical approaches to address key issues for Native American art, including symbolism and spirituality, the role of patronage and museum practices, the politics of art criticism and the aesthetic power of indigenous knowledge. The artist contributors, who represent several Native nations - including Cherokee, Lakota, Plains Cree, and those of the Plateau country - emphasize the importance of traditional stories, mythologies and ceremonies in the production of contemporary art. Within great poignancy, they write about recent art in terms of home, homeland and aboriginal sovereignty. Tracing the continued resistance of Native artists to dominant orthodoxies of the art market and art history, Native American Art in the Twentieth Century argues forcefully for Native art's place in modern art history.”
Pueblo History:
- Cogdill, Kaila. “Looking Forward Rather Than Backward: Cultural Revitalization at the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2013.
o Abstract: “This dissertation investigates how the Pueblo of Pojoaque went from near desertion to a community that in contemporary times (and with the assistance of nearby Tewa communities) has worked to retain its culture and art, in an important example of cultural revitalization. Pojoaque Pueblos Poeh Cultural Center and Museum provides a unique perspective on cultural revitalization in the 21st century. The Poeh Center has been used by Pojoaque Pueblo to strengthen its identity and its economic and social status in the area, and as a result is considered one of the most progressive Pueblos in the Southwest. I address the role the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum plays within the Pueblo of Pojoaque's attempt to recover and strengthen its identity as an indigenous or Indian Pueblo through a contemporary lens. As part of that effort, I examine 'Pueblo' culture as opposed to 'Hispano' culture in order to define 'Pojoaque Pueblo' culture and identity in contemporary times. Through participant observation, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, archival research, and visitor questionnaires, I explore and identify how exhibits, programs, and art classes contribute to the revival of the Pueblo of Pojoaque's culture and traditions. Furthermore, I look at how the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum is used and viewed by community members, tourists, museum staff, art students, and local artists. For comparative purposes I also examine regional and national museums in the United States and Mexico, including two tribal museums located within the state of New Mexico, Acoma and Zuni. I compare these two last museums to Pojoaque's cultural center and museum as well as to non-tribal museums in terms of heritage, tourism, and representation. The basic contribution of this research is to show how an indigenous identity, (more specifically a Tewa Pueblo identity) is expressed in a tribal museum in contemporary times. This research also serves as an example of a federally recognized Native American tribe that is taking advantage of technological advances to be seen as a progressive Pueblo by tribal members, other Pueblos, and outside visitors.”
[Native American Literature and Theater]
- Lujan, James. Kino and Teresa: A Full-Length Play in Two Acts. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.
o Abstract: “‘Kino and Teresa,’ a full-length play based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,’ transports the tale of star-crossed lovers to late 17th century Santa Fe. This is the era following the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, during the Spanish Reconquest of New Mexico in 1692, where tension and resentment is high and still rising among the Pueblo Indians and Spanish colonists. In the midst of this escalating conflict, Kino, a young man from Pecos Pueblo, falls in love with Teresa, a beautiful young Spaniard. But how can their love survive when there is so much hatred and distrust around them? The play was first performed by Native Voices at the Autry in May 2005. The subsequent review in the Los Angeles Times by Daryl H. Miller described the play as ‘beautifully conceived, quietly devastating.’”
- Momaday, N. Scott. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997.
o Abstract: “In The Man Made of Words Momaday chronicles his own pilgrimage as an author, retelling, through thirty-eight essays, allegorical stories, and autobiographical reminiscences, how he became one of the first recognized Native American writers of this century. By exploring such themes as land, language, and self-identity, The Man Made of Words fashions a definition of American literature as it has never been interpreted before.”
- Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
o Abstract: "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."
- Running Wolf, Myrton. “The Politics of Native American Theatrical Adaptions.” Dissertation, Stanford University, 2015.
o Abstract: “Educated at top colleges and universities, Native American theater artists now hold mastery and authority over classic western theater texts. These individuals do not necessarily embrace western theater practice as the gold standard but, instead, combine remnants of their indigenous cultures with their sophisticated learned knowledge of European performance traditions. For generations, American Indians were targeted for genocide and cultural eradication, isolated by geographical and ideological boundaries specifically constructed to make European colonists feel comfortable with, distinct from, and superior to ‘The New World's’ indigenous peoples. This dissertation is not intended to re-litigate the traumatic histories of Native America nor is it to chronicle the rise of the numerous stereotypical depictions that now dominate our current pop-culture imaginings. This project considers these to be self-evident phenomena. Instead, this dissertation offers a close investigation of the virtuosic mastery many American Indian theater artists hold over Euro-America theater making: an expertise that gives them the ability to transform narrow yet rigid ideas of Native American existence. Theatrical adaptations by New York City's Spiderwoman Theater, Los Angeles' James Lujan (Taos Pueblo), and Honolulu's Taurie Kinoshita do not align with predictable non-Native cultural imaginings of American Indian existence. In fact, each of these artists has adapted a classic western theater work not as a simple homage and recapitulation of the famous source material but as a new theater work suited to a unique worldview and set of artistic inquiries. These new theater works challenge many long held beliefs of American Indian culture, experience, and identity.”
[Native American Representation in the Popular American Culture]
- Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004.
o Abstract: “Despite the passage of time, our vision of Native Americans remains locked up within powerful stereotypes. That's why some images of Indians can be so unexpected and disorienting: What is Geronimo doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated visions, even as the latter continue to dominate relations between Native and non-Native Americans. Philip Deloria explores this cultural discordance to show how stereotypes and Indian experiences have competed for ascendancy in the wake of the military conquest of Native America and the nation's subsequent embrace of Native ‘authenticity.’ Rewriting the story of the national encounter with modernity, Deloria provides revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things-singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood-in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-a time when, according to most standard American narratives, Indian people almost dropped out of history itself-Deloria argues that a great many Indians engaged the very same forces of modernization that were leading non-Indians to reevaluate their own understandings of themselves and their society. He examines longstanding stereotypes of Indians as invariably violent, suggesting that even as such views continued in American popular culture, they were also transformed by the violence at Wounded Knee. He tells how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild West shows and Hollywood films and also examines sports, music, and even Indian people's use of the automobile-an ironic counterpoint to today's highways teeming with Dakota pick-ups and Cherokee sport utility vehicles. Throughout, Deloria shows us anomalies that resist pigeonholing and force us to rethink familiar expectations. Whether considering the Hollywood films of James Young Deer or the Hall of Fame baseball career of pitcher Charles Albert Bender, he persuasively demonstrates that a significant number of Indian people engaged in modernity-and helped shape its anxieties and its textures-at the very moment they were being defined as ‘primitive.’ These ‘secret histories,’ Deloria suggests, compel us to reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people should be, how they should act, and even what they should look like. More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if unconscious) expectations contribute to the racism and injustice that still haunt the experience of many Native American people today.”
- Kilpatrick, Neva Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
o Abstract: “Native American characters have been the most malleable of metaphors for filmmakers. The likeable Doc of Stagecoach (1939) had audiences on the edge of their seats with dire warnings about "that old butcher, Geronimo". Old Lodgeskins of Little Big Man (1970) had viewers crying out against the demise of the noble, wise chief and his kind and simple people. In 1995 Disney created a beautiful, peace-loving ecologist and called her Pocahontas. Only occasionally have Native Americans been portrayed as complex, modern characters, in films like Smoke Signals. Celluloid Indians is an accessible, insightful overview of Native American representation in film over the past century. Beginning with the birth of the movie industry, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick carefully traces changes in the cinematic depictions of Native peoples and identifies cultural and historical reasons for those changes. In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have been increasingly involved with writing and directing movies about themselves, and Kilpatrick places appropriate emphasis on the impact that Native American screenwriters and filmmakers have had on the industry. Celluloid Indians concludes with a valuable, in-depth look at influential and innovative Native Americans in today's film industry.”
[Nineteenth-Century Arts in France]
- Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914. Edited by Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2017.
o Abstract: “Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.”
- Silcock, Jane. “Genius and gender: Women artists and the female nude 1870–1920.” The British Art Journal 19, no. 3 (2018/2019): 20–30.
o Abstract: “This article considers examples of female nudes produced by women artists between 1870-1920 in the light of their artistic training, with particular reference to the life-class. It also addresses significant educational influences that affected these artists as well as factors in their personal lives that drew them to depict the female nude.”
- Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900. Edited by Laurence Madeline. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
o Abstract: “A celebration of the work and lives of women artists who shaped the art world of 19th-century Paris. In the second half of the 19th century, Paris attracted an international gathering of women artists, drawn to the French capital by its academies and museums, studios and salons. Featuring thirty-six artists from eleven different countries, this beautifully illustrated book explores the strength of these women’s creative achievements, through paintings by acclaimed Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and extraordinary lesser-known artists such as Marie Bashkirtseff, Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Hanna Pauli. It examines their work against the sociopolitical background of the period, when women were mostly barred from formal artistic education but cleverly navigated the city’s network of ateliers, salons, and galleries. Essays consider the powerfully influential work of women Impressionists, representations of the female artist in portraiture, the unique experiences of Nordic women artists, and the significant presence of women artists throughout the history of the Paris Salon. By addressing the long-undervalued contributions of women to the art of the later 19th century, Women Artists in Paris pays tribute to pioneers who not only created remarkable paintings but also generated momentum toward a more egalitarian art world.”
Académie Julian
- Andersen, Jeffery D. “Portrait of the 1890–1892 LDS Paris Art Mission: An Andragogical Perspective” by Jeffery D. Andersen.” Dissertation, University of Idaho, 2006.
o Abstract: “In July, 1890 Utah artists John Hafen, Lorus Pratt and John Fairbanks traveled to Paris, France, joining fellow artist John Clawson in studying art at the Académie Julian. These were followed by Edwin Evans and Herman Haag. The Latter-day Saint (LDS or Mormon) Church financed the art education of these artists with the expectation that they would return to Utah and paint murals in the Salt Lake Temple which was nearing completion. This venture came to be known as the Paris Art Mission. The problem addressed by this study is the paucity of literature regarding the complex circumstances surrounding the inception of the LDS Paris Art Mission, what the mission reveals about the nature of adult learning and of art education in Paris and in Utah in the late Nineteenth Century, and the lasting impact of the mission on Utah and LDS art. Utilizing a qualitative research methodology, Portraiture, this study examines from an andragogical perspective the social and artistic climate in the Utah Territory before 1890, the experience of the art missionaries and their families during their Paris experience, and their legacy to LDS and Utah art history. The study disputes the use of the term impressionist to describe the post-Paris style of these artists, showing no direct influence of French impressionism, but rather a direct stylistic link to the Barbizon School of painting. It ties the experience of the artists as adult learners to the andragogical issue of self-direction, and illuminates challenges adults face in balancing educational pursuits with professional and personal responsibilities.”
- Bartoli, Damien and Frederick C. Ross. William Bouguereau. New York: Antique Collectors Club Dist; Slp edition, 2011.
o Abstract: Includes a catalogue raisonné of his painted work and a text about his life.
- Bouguereau and America. Edited by Tanya Paul and Stanton Thomas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
o Abstract: “An in-depth exploration into the immense popularity of William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s work in America throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Seeking to bring Gallic sophistication and worldly elegance into their galleries and drawing rooms, wealthy Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries collected the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) in record numbers. This fascinating volume offers an in-depth exploration of Bouguereau’s overwhelming popularity in turn-of-the-century America and the ways that his work—widely known from reviews, exhibitions, and inexpensive reproductions—resonated with the American public. While also lauded by the French artistic establishment and a dominant presence at the Parisian Salons, Bouguereau achieved his greatest success selling his idealized and polished paintings to a voracious American market. In this book, the authors discuss how the artist’s sensual classical maidens, Raphaelesque Madonnas, and pristine peasant children embodied the tastes of American Gilded Age patrons, and how Bouguereau’s canvases persuasively functioned as freshly painted Old Masters for collectors flush with new money.”
- Robertson, Kate R. Australian Artists, 1890–1914: Paris, London, and Further Afield. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
o Abstract: “An irresistible call lured Australian artists abroad between 1890 and 1914, a transitional period immediately pre- and post-federation. Travelling enabled an extension of artistic frontiers, and Paris – the centre of art – and London – the heart of the Empire – promised wondrous opportunities. These expatriate artists formed communities based on their common bond to Australia, enacting their Australian-ness in private and public settings. Yet, they also interacted with the broader creative community, fashioning a network of social and professional relationships. They joined ateliers in Paris such as the Académie Julian, clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club in London and visited artist colonies including St Ives in England and Étaples in France. Australian artists persistently sought a sense of belonging, negotiating their identity through activities such as plays, balls, tableaux, parties, dressing-up and, of course, the creation of art. While individual biographies are integral to this study, it is through exploring the connections between them that it offers new insights. Through utilising extensive archival material, much of which has limited or no publication history, this book fills a gap in existing scholarship. It offers a vital exploration re-consideration of the fluidity of identity, place and belonging in the lives and work of Australian artists in this juncture in British-Australian history.”
- Simoni, Ana Paula Cavalcanti. “Académie Julian: the French artistic model from a Transatlantic perspective (1880–1920).” Transatlantic Cultures (2019): 1–14.
o Abstract: “Académie Julian was founded in 1867 in Montmartre, offering students studies of live models and sessions of corrections with well-reputed artists. In 1880, a course for women was created. In 1885, the school had four hundred female students. The Académie would play an important role in the formation of American artists, from North and South.”
- Simioni, Ana Paula Cavalcanti. “The Trip to Paris by Brazilian Artists of the 19th Century.” Tempo Social 17, no. 1 (2005): 343–366.
o Abstract: “This article aims to analyze the role of the Académie Julian, a private academy that received most of the Brazilian artists who arrived in Paris between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Three themes are addressed here: the training received; the importance of the institution for female artists and the way in which the aesthetic novelties that emerged in Paris were absorbed and reinterpreted by patrician artists who went there.”
- “The Art of Adolph William Bouguereau.” Brush and Pencil 16, no. 3 (1905): 82–87.
o Abstract: No abstract; short overview of Bouguereau’s life and work upon his recent (at the time) death.
- Zgórniak, Marek. “Polish students at the Académie Julian until 1919.” RIHA Journal (2012): 1–17.
o Abstract: “The subject of the article is the presence of Polish students in the most important private artistic school in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. The extant records regarding the atelier for male students made it possible to compile a list of about 165 Polish painters and sculptors studying there in the period from 1880 to 1919. The text presents the criteria used when preparing the list and the diagrams show the fluctuations in registration and the number of Polish artists in particular ateliers in successive years. The observations contained in the article have a summary nature and are illustrated only with selected examples.”
- Zimmerman, Enid. “The Mirror of Marie Bashkirtseff: Reflections about the Education of Women Art Students in the Nineteenth Century.” Studies in Art Education 30, no. 3 (1989): 164–175.
o Abstract: “‘The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff’ (1919), a diary written in the mode of self-presentation, serves as a particular instance to vivify our understanding about the way women art students were viewed, and the type of art education they received in nineteenth century France. Marie Bashkirtseff's history, the genre of Victorian women's autobiography, art schools in the French Academic tradition, the Academie Julian, and women's issues in nineteenth century France are explored. It is concluded that even privileged women suffered societal constraints in the latter half of the nineteenth century and that women generally were not best served in respect to their art education.”
[(Post-)/(De-)/(Settler-) Colonial Studies]
- Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
o Abstract: “Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities. Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.”
- Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
o Abstract: “Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our schools,’ or use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or, ‘decolonize student thinking,’ turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence,’ that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward ‘an ethic of incommensurability’ that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space- place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.”
- Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial Postcolonial Worlds. Edited by Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
o Abstract: “Tourist art production is a global phenomenon and is increasingly recognized as an important and authentic expression of indigenous visual traditions. These thoughtful, engaging essays provide a comparative perspective on the history, character, and impact of tourist art in colonized societies in three areas of the world: Africa, Oceania, and North America. Ranging broadly historically and geographically, Unpacking Culture is the first collection to bring together substantial case studies on this topic from around the world.”
[Southwest Euro-American Art History]
- Lynes, Barbara Buhler and Carolyn Kastner. Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.
o Abstract: “This book features fifteen drawings and paintings of katsina subjects and thirty-eight additional works that resulted from the artist’s deep exploration of the distinctive architecture and cultural objects of northern New Mexico’s Hispanic and Native American communities. Also included are numerous landscape paintings.”
- Lynes, Barbara Buhler, Lesley Poling-Kempes, and Frederick W. Turner. Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
o Abstract: “When Georgia O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, she was instantly drawn to the stark beauty of its unusual architectural and landscape forms. In 1929, she began spending part of almost every year painting there, first in Taos, and subsequently in and around Alcalde, Abiquiu, and Ghost Ranch, with occasional excursions to remote sites she found particularly compelling. Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico is the first book to analyze the artist's famous depictions of these Southwestern landscapes. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully written, the book accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It reproduces the exhibition's 50 paintings and includes striking photographs of the sites that inspired them as well as diagrams of the region's distinctive geology. The book examines the magnificence of O'Keeffe's work through essays by three noted authors. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and organizer of the exhibition, discusses the relationship of the artist's paintings to the places that inspired her. Frederick Turner offers an illuminating essay contrasting O'Keeffe's fabled aloofness from the well-established art colony in Santa Fe with her intense closeness to the local landscape she so fiercely loved. Lesley Poling-Kempes furnishes a fascinating chronicle of O'Keeffe's years in the region as well as a useful explanation of the geological forces that produced the intense colors and dramatic shapes of the landscapes O'Keeffe painted.”
- Rosenberger, Christina. Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
o Abstract: “Agnes Martin’s (1912–2004) celebrated grid paintings are widely acknowledged as a touchstone of postwar American art and have influenced many contemporary artists. Martin’s formative years, however, have been largely overlooked. In this revelatory study of Martin’s early artistic production, Christina Bryan Rosenberger demonstrates that the rapidly evolving creative processes and pictorial solutions Martin developed between 1940 and 1967 define all her subsequent art. Beginning with Martin’s initiation into artistic language at the University of New Mexico and concluding with the reception of her grid paintings in New York in the early 1960s, Rosenberger offers vivid descriptions of the networks of art, artists, and information that moved between New Mexico and the creative centers of New York and California in the postwar period. She also documents Martin’s exchanges with artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko, among others. Rosenberger uses original analysis of Martin’s art, as well as a rich array of archival materials, to situate Martin’s art within the context of a dynamic historical moment. With a lively, innovative approach informed by art history and conservation, this fluidly written book makes a substantial contribution to the history of postwar American art.”
- Trenton, Patricia. Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
o Abstract: “Independent Spirits brings to vivid life the West as seen through the eyes of women painters from 1890 to the end of World War II. Expert scholars and curators identify long-lost talent and reveal how these women were formidable cultural innovators as well as agitators for the rights of artists and women during a period of extraordinary development. Abundantly illustrated, with over one-hundred color plates, this book is a rich compendium of Western art by women, including those of Native American, African, Mexican, and Asian descent. The essays examine the many economic, social, and political forces that shaped this art over years of pivotal change. The West's dynamic growth altered the role of women, often allowing new avenues of opportunity within the prevailing Anglo culture. At the same time, boundaries of femininity were pushed earlier and further than in other parts of the country. Women artists in the West painted a wide range of subjects, and their work embraced a variety of styles: Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism. Some women championed modern art as gallery owners, collectors, and critics, while others were educators and curators. All played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities, and their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today.”
- Udall, Sharon Rohlfsen. Contesting Terrain: Myth and Meanings in Southwest Art. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
o Abstract: “The Southwest has long beckoned the artist. But too often, art made by Euro-Americans drawn to this region has either "basked in the sunny celebration of the picturesque, the exotic, and the sentimental" or appropriated the myths and art of Native Americans. In this collection of essays, Sharyn R. Udall explores the work of some of the painters who have found stimulus in the ideas, people, and myths of the Southwest, among them Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Page Allen, and Woody Gwyn. They saw the Southwest in new ways, drawing inspiration from the very light and topography of the region. Udall's goal is to open and enlarge the discussion by rejecting the "neat, circumscribed way of seeing" common to traditional art history. Thus, she declares, one is able to encourage a fresh look at these painters and their work, and at the larger relationships of nature and culture in the Southwest.”
- Worden, Daniel. “Landscape Culture: Ansel Adams and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo.” Criticism 55, no. 1 (2013): 69–94.
o Abstract: “Austin might come off as familiarly antimodernist in her initial exchange with Adams, very much in keeping with traditional accounts of regionalist writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, while modernism has often been thought of as ‘the antithesis of regionalism,’ they are better thought of as intertwined and mutually constitutive aesthetics. As Scott Herring has argued in his introduction to the ‘Regional Modernism’ special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, ‘regionalism and modernism have always been compeers in terms of spatiality and in terms of periodization. Doss argues that this aesthetic of social reform was downplayed, even erased, from accounts of abstract expressionism as modernist aesthetics were codified as apolitical, impersonal, and self-reflexive by the middle of the twentieth century.’ Since modernism and regionalism were so closely intertwined in the early to mid-twentieth century, it makes sense that Adams and Austin's differences in 1929 led not to rupture but instead to a collaborative book project in 1930.”
Taos Society of Artists/Taos Artist Colony:
- Bryant, Jr., Keith L. “The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway and the Development of the Taos and Santa Fe Art Colonies.” Western Historical Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1978): 437–453.
o Abstract: “During the last two decades, many corporations have engaged in significant support of the arts. Company headquarters are often decorated with important paintings and pieces of sculpture; donations have been made to symphony orchestras, museums, and public television; and several national magazines make awards annually to firms which have made major contributions to furthering the arts. Most historians, and the public, assume that this is a recently conceived effort by management to create a positive corporate ‘image,’ and, generally, that is correct. However, one of the nation's most financially successful railways, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (ATSF), helped to nurture and sustain two colonies of artists in the West - Taos and Santa Fe - for almost forty years following their founding at the turn of the century. By providing transportation in exchange for paintings; by utilizing the paintings on calendars, brochures, menus, and train folders; by displaying the paintings in stations and ticket offices; and through the purchase of several hundred paintings from artists residing in Taos and Santa Fe, the railway helped establish northern New Mexico as an internationally recognized cultural center. Although some historians have briefly noted the railway's involvement with the colonies, the extent of that support has yet to be recognized.”
- Cather Studies, Volume 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux. Edited by Ann Moseley, John J. Murphy, and Robert Thacker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
o Abstract: From Ch. 6: “Willa Cather was both enamored of and inspired by the region, people, and culture of the American Southwest. Scholars have had a lot to say about her relationship to this region, but even so, gaps remain. One unexplored aspect of Cather’s Southwest experiences is her relationship with the modernist American painter Ernest L. Blumenschein. Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Blumenschein began his career illustrating works by Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Jack London for such publications as Century, McClure’s, and Harper’s. In 1907, Blumenschein provided the illustrations for Cather’s third story in McClure’s, ‘The Namesake.’”
- Eldredge, Charles C. “Ernest Blumenschein’s ‘The Peacemaker:’ Native Americans, Greeks, and Jurisprudence circa 1913.” American Art 15, no. 1 (2001): 34–51.
o Abstract: No abstract.
- Gano, Geneva M. The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
o Abstract: “This book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Alongside a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity – the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown and Taos – the book offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence. Geneva M. Gano tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages, revealing a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects and ideas between the country and the city and producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.”
- McLafferty, Alexandra. “The American Plot Visualized: The Reinterpretation of Indian Captivity Narratives at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Master’s thesis, University of Washington, 2013.
o Abstract: “As this thesis will demonstrate in the unfolding chapters, there are several key distinctions that can be made about Native American captivity narratives. The drawings associated with captivity narratives from popular ‘dime novels,’ such as the title page for Mary Rowlandson's narrative and Opechancanough's Warriors Falling on Virginia Colonists in 1622, in the mid-nineteenth century visualized the Indian as a ‘savage,’ while also distinguishing the white population in opposition to the supposed ‘barbarity’ of the Indian. At the same time, the Fort Marion ledger drawings expressed how Native Americans viewed themselves and their incarceration, as a result of defending their communities and families from the white settlers land claims. During the late nineteenth century, the popularity of Western literature and performance rose dramatically and continued to cast the Indian as the violent attacker in shows such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West. However, the controversy that followed the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 changed the way that many white Americans felt about the indigenous population and the way that the federal government was treating them. Anglo-American artists such as Couse portrayed the Native American captor as less violent and were more mindful of the future fate of the Indian, as he did in his 1891 painting ‘The Captive.’ The turn of the century led the majority of the white American public to see the Indian as having a future within the public realm, but that future was yet undetermined. Contemporary manifestations of nineteenth-century images from captivity narratives in works by Native and non-Native artists, such as Kent Monkman, Arthur Amiotte, and the Mardi Gras Indians, reflect the enduring legacy of the Plains Indian stereotype, as well as how modern Americans are using those stereotypes in order to confront and deflate them.”
- Moore, James. “Ernest Blumenschein’s Long Journey with Star Road.” American Art 9, no. 3 (1995): 6–27.
o Abstract: No abstract; an examination of Blumenschein’s Star Road and White Sun’s creation, sale, and reception.
- Musgrave, Annette P. “The Taos Artists Response to Modernism.” Master’s thesis, University of Houston Clear Lake, 2011.
o Abstract: “This thesis fills the gap in our knowledge of the Taos Society of Artists, whose members forged exciting new directions that resulted in an authentic American art. The site of the first New Mexico art colony was in Taos. There, artists found a refuge where they could experiment and develop personal styles. The Taos Society of Artists was originally founded by Joseph Henry Sharp, Bert Geer Phillips, and Ernest L. Blumenschein. Within a few years Eanger Irving Couse, Oscar E. Berninghaus, William Herbert Dunton, Victor Higgins, and Walter Ufer joined the group. Histories of American art have largely neglected the important historical moment when American artists in the West moved away from classical artistic traditions into newer modern modes of painting. The lives and artworks of the Taos group form an essential chapter in the formation of American modernism. This thesis serves to begin the process of bridging the gap in American art history between classical and modern styles, from the art of masters such as Fredric Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O'Keeffe and Maynard Dixon. While the subject of early Taos paintings may be viewed as simply western or Indian, their styles range from idealistic to realistic. From the inception of the Taos Society of Artists, influential patrons who played a large role in America's southwestern expansion valued their paintings and frequently paid large sums of money for them. In spite of their prominence, however, there is little or no information about the group in widely used art history textbooks. Art history classes taught at the college level typically do not include works by Taos artists or mention their important role in American art history. This thesis aims to fill the lack of scholarly literature and to demonstrate the importance of the Taos Society of Artists in American art history.”
- Rodríguez, Sylvia. “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward a Sociology of the Art Colony.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45, no. 1 (1989): 77–99.
o Abstract: “This study analyzes the Taos art colony in terms of the social conditions which surrounded its development and shaped its character, and it call attention to the oblique, or unconscious, quality of this expression, an obliqueness that is part of its theoretical interest. The following discussion presents an overview of the regional setting and the general conditions under which the art colony developed, followed by a short history and then an analysis of the character of art colony society. This involves scrutiny of the face-to relations between the artists and Indians and Hispanos, or Mexicanos, during the art colony years. Several examples of cultural ‘text’ representing different viewpoints are examined for what they reveal about the nature and structure of contemporary ethnic relations in Taos, and central, interpenetrating aspects of mystification as it operates in Taos are identified. The discussion concludes by locating the case within a larger context.”
- Scott, Sascha. “Unwrapping Ernest L. Blumenschein’s The Gift.” American Art 25, no. 3 (2011): 20–47.
o Abstract: “The author analyzes Blumenchein's 1922 painting ‘The gift,’ which depicts Native American figures and seems conventional. On further inspection, more complex interpretative issues come into focus, leading to insights into the pictorial ambitions and paradoxes of the painter's dual engagement with protests against federal Native American policy and with modernism. The iconography challenges period constructions of ‘Indianness’ and creates visual ambiguity, as do the painting's unique composition and post-impressionistic style. It exemplifies an inconsistency in the preservationist platform: the paradoxical focus on Pueblo political agency and cultural isolation.”
- The American West in Art: Selections from the Denver Art Museum. Edited by Thomas Brent Smith and Jennifer R. Henneman. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2020.
o Abstract: “This volume collects a selection of works of art produced in the western United States belonging to the collection of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art housed in the Denver Art Museum. This collection is one of the richest and most substantial in the world on this subject, thanks to its outstanding bronze sculptures, early modern works, and contributions from the artistic communities of Taos and Santa Fe. The central theme of the book is the period stretching from the beginning of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. More than 200 pages of portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and depictions of a still-intact wilderness make evident the diversity of the collection. The narrative proceeds chronologically, presenting early luminaries such as Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell; Robert Henri and the artists of the TAO community; and prominent modernist painters, including Maynard Dixon, Marsden Hartley, and Raymond Jonson. Numerous illustrations and expert interpretations chronicle the artistic, cultural, and identarian climate in the western United States during this period. A prologue by historian Dan Flores and an epilogue by art historian Erika Doss describe the vaster context in which to view this rich history of American art.”
Representations/Appropriations of Native Cultures:
- Denzin, Norman K. Indians in Color: Native Art, Identity, and Performance in the New West. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015.
o Abstract: “In Indians in Color, noted cultural critic Norman K. Denzin addresses the acute differences in the treatment of artwork about Native America created by European-trained artists compared to those by Native artists. In his fourth volume exploring race and culture in the New West, Denzin zeroes in on painting movements in Taos, New Mexico over the past century. Part performance text, part art history, part cultural criticism, part autoethnography, he once again demonstrates the power of visual media to reify or resist racial and cultural stereotypes, moving us toward a more nuanced view of contemporary Native American life. In this book, Denzin contrasts the aggrandizement by collectors and museums of the art created by the early 20th century Taos Society of Artists under railroad sponsorship with that of indigenous Pueblo painters;-shows how these tensions between mainstream and Native art remains today; and-introduces a radical postmodern artistic aesthetic of contemporary Native artists that challenges notions of the ‘noble savage.’”
- Ott, John. “Reform in Redface: The Taos Society of Artists Plays Indians.” American Art 23, no. 2 (2009): 80–107.
o Abstract: “This essay builds on art historian William Truettner’s thesis that, despite what must be considered as the best intentions of Ufer and his fellow painters, the ‘myth of Pueblo life’ found in their canvases must be described as ‘a mild form of primitivism.’ First, although their romantic mode of conceptualizing Indians dramatically improved on past images of and attitudes toward Native Americans, and although it appears on its face to be more benign or, at worst, a harmless fantasy, this antimodernist primitivism is just as stereotypical and as consequential for its subjects. Second, we must recognize that these images are ultimately as much about their authors as their subjects.”
- Peck, James. “Intra-Colonial Spaces: Desire and Displacement in Images of Indian Territory, the Hawai’ian Islands, and New Mexico Territory, 1885-1920.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2016.
o Abstract: “Depending primarily on image analysis, this dissertation considers a heretofore understudied artistic construct, the American intra-colonial aesthetic. Produced as a byproduct of displaced American colonialist desires near the turn of the twentieth century, the visual practices used to achieve this aesthetic were flexible and multivalent, and included the use of visual erasure or displacement of indigenous peoples; the use of Euro-American visual surrogates, or placeholders who visually appropriate the land; the depiction of indigenous peoples as existing only in the ethnographic present; and the appropriation of natural resources into a non-indigenous epistemology. In addition, indexicality, a meta-narrative element that suggests the limits of ideology in art-making, is examined. This analysis locates the American intra-colonial aesthetic through three different cases studies of marginalized contact zones within the burgeoning American empire, circa 1885-1920 – Indian Territory, the Hawaiian Islands, and New Mexico Territory [DISCUSSES TAOS EXTENSIVELY]. While each chapter makes a different argument about the nature, scope, and characteristics of the intra-colonial aesthetic, the arguments are highly inter-related and depend upon, and strengthen, one another. Methodologically, I privilege images as primary historical documents, foregrounding my belief that art remain the first and best evidence for the art historian. Finally, I apply Edward Said’s concept of the Orient, and its inverse, the Occident, as theoretical constructions. As such, images and texts made by Euro-Americans concerned with colonial desire are counterbalanced by images and texts made by indigenous peoples concerned with native survival and sovereignty.”
- Ruud, Brandon. “Beneath the Surface: The Aesthetic and Ideological Appropriation of Native American Artwork.” Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2015.
o Abstract: “During the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the first two of the twentieth, progressive reformers concerned themselves with a variety of social issues that seemed to be altering the very fabric of American society and its spirit, among them immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. Ideologues harnessed the Arts and Crafts movement’s message of dignity in labor and a return to handcrafting to advance an agenda of reform that encompassed the fine and decorative arts and was designed to improve health, housing, and immigration. To their minds, art had the power to enact change through the social engineering of society as a whole and especially children, providing a method of redirecting attitudes during a period of seeming upheaval. Expanding on previous scholarship, this study surveys the fine and decorative arts created during this period through the lens of postcolonial theory and examines how artists and critics depicted both Anglo-American and Native American labor in images and words. More to the point, however, the project provides the first thorough analysis of how reform crusaders employed Native American art and lifeways as a guiding force to enact change and control society: Perceived as instinctual and spiritual, indigenous art and craft provided an improving antidote to the perceived degradation of American culture and society. During this period, as the middle class expanded and interior design gained traction as a professional pursuit, domestic shelter magazines rose in popularity. This study provides a careful investigation of both the images and prose in the pages of these journals, considering how they furthered the movement’s reform agenda by co-opting Native American art and culture for an Anglo-American audience. In addition, the project focuses on how artists and architects during this period—from painters such as Thomas Eakins and George de Forest Brush to architects and designers including Susan Frackelton, Gustav Stickley, and Frank Lloyd Wright—adopted the mantle of reformist theories regarding America’s indigenous population, and, as a result, wrestled with incorporating non-Western sources into their creations and justifying their presence.”
- Rowley, Kelley E. “‘I Think About This Dream Often:’ Nostalgic Visions of Native Americans During the Progressive Era 1890–1930.” Dissertation, The State University of New York at Buffalo, 2007.
o Abstract: “The dissertation provides a method for decolonizing the as-told-to autobiography Black Elk Speaks through three steps. First, I identify nostalgic imperialism as the colonizing influence during the progressive era and provide an interdisciplinary framework for which it can be used. I do so by providing a brief history of the United States' policies of physical and cultural genocide arguing that the success of these programs are what facilitated the nostalgic gaze toward Native Americans. Next, I expose America's identity crisis brought on by immigration. I make a cross disciplinary investigation of how nostalgia manifested itself in the Arts, the Social Sciences and the Humanities. With that background I expose John Neihardt's nostalgic bias. Last, I employ an Ethnopoetic method to avoid the nostalgic landmines in Black Elk Speaks. This involves using George Sword as an interpretive tool to place Black Elk's great vision and White Buffalo Woman stories in the discourse of oral performances.”
- Scott, Sascha. “Paintings of Pueblo Indians and the Politics of Preservation in the American Southwest.” Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008.
o Abstract: “This dissertation investigates paintings of Pueblo Indians produced in the 1920s. Painted at a time when the federal policy of assimilation was being vigorously contested, many of these images are imbued with a preservationist perspective. Artists, such as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, and Ernest L. Blumenschein, struggled to find a new visual language for representing the Pueblo people, one that would correspond to their protests against assimilationist policy. Through the efforts of artists in favor of the preservation of American Indian culture, a new concept of ‘Indianness’ was popularized. An anthropological perspective, or one that recorded the customs of ‘vanishing’ Indians, was displaced by a subjective vision, which attempted to evoke the abstract qualities of contemporary Indian rituals, such as their rhythms, communalism, and connection to nature. This new visual language, with its ideological complexities and paradoxes, permeates Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of Indian ceremonials. A study of the extent to which artists' preservationist stance framed their view of Pueblo Indians, and the visual manifestation of this view in their art, enriches the discourse concerning the art of the Southwest by adding a critical interpretive layer.”
[Southwest History]
- A Pre-Columbian World. Edited by Jeffery Quilter and Mary Miller. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2006.
o Abstract: “The articles in this book conceptualize the ancient New World through new and varied approaches, from iconography to the history of anthropology. The many essays in this volume explore the vast vista of the Pre-Columbian world, including representations of history, memory, and knowledge in Andean visual imagery and Pre-Columbian narrative, the ideology of rain making, and Maya beliefs about animal transformations.”
- Akins, Damon B. and William J. Bauer, Jr. We are the Land: A History of Native California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “Before there was such a thing as “California,” there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are the Land is the first and most comprehensive text of its kind, centering the long history of California around the lives and legacies of the Indigenous people who shaped it. Beginning with the ethnogenesis of California Indians, We Are the Land recounts the centrality of the Native presence from before European colonization through statehood—paying particularly close attention to the persistence and activism of California Indians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book deftly contextualizes the first encounters with Europeans, Spanish missions, Mexican secularization, the devastation of the Gold Rush and statehood, genocide, efforts to reclaim land, and the organization and activism for sovereignty that built today’s casino economy. A text designed to fill the glaring need for an accessible overview of California Indian history, We Are the Land will be a core resource in a variety of classroom settings, as well as for casual readers and policymakers interested in a history that centers the native experience.”
- Contesting the Borderlands: Interviews on the Early Southwest. Edited by Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.
o Abstract: “Conflict and cooperation have shaped the American Southwest since prehistoric times. For centuries indigenous groups and, later, Spaniards, French, and Anglo-Americans met, fought, and collaborated with one another in this border area stretching from Texas through southern California. To explore the region’s complex past from prehistory to the U.S. takeover, this book uses an unusual multidisciplinary approach. In interviews with ten experts, Deborah and Jon Lawrence discuss subjects ranging from warfare among the earliest ancestral Puebloans to intermarriage and peonage among Spanish settlers and the Indians they encountered. The scholars interviewed form a distinguished array of archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and historians: Juliana Barr, Brian DeLay, Richard and Shirley Flint, John Kessell, Steven LeBlanc, Mark Santiago, Polly Schaafsma, David J. Weber, and Michael Wilcox. All speak forthrightly about complex and controversial issues, and they do so with minimal academic jargon and temporizing, bringing the most reliable information to bear on every subject they discuss. Themes the authors address include the origin and scope of conflicts between ethnic groups and the extent of accommodation, cooperation, and cross-cultural adaptation that also ensued. Seven interviews explore how Indians forced colonizers to modify their behavior. All of the experts explain how they deal with incomplete or biased sources to achieve balanced interpretations. As the authors point out, no single discipline provides a complete, accurate historical picture. Spanish documents must be sifted for political and ideological distortion, the archaeological record is incomplete, and oral traditions erode and become corrupted over time. By assembling the most articulate practitioners of all three approaches, the authors have produced a book that will speak to general readers as well as scholars and students in a variety of fields.”
- Ebright, Malcom, Rick Hendricks, and Richard W. Hughes. Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
o Abstract: “This long-awaited book is the most detailed and up-to-date account of the complex history of Pueblo Indian land in New Mexico, beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing to the present day. The authors have scoured documents and legal decisions to trace the rise of the mysterious Pueblo League between 1700 and 1821 as the basis of Pueblo land under Spanish rule. They have also provided a detailed analysis of Pueblo lands after 1821 to determine how the Pueblos and their non-Indian neighbors reacted to the change from Spanish to Mexican and then to U.S. sovereignty. Characterized by success stories of protection of Pueblo land as well as by centuries of encroachment by non-American Indians on Pueblo lands and resources, this is a uniquely New Mexican history that also reflects issues of indigenous land tenure that vex contested territories all over the world.”
- Rodríguez, Sylvia. The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
o Abstract: “The Matachines Dance – ‘the beautiful dance of subjugation,’ as Sylvia Rodriguez calls it - derives from a genre of medieval European folk dramas symbolizing conflict between Christians and Moors. Spaniards brought it to the Americas as a vehicle for Christianizing the Indians. In this book, Rodriguez explores the colorful, complex, and often enigmatic Matachines dance as it is performed today by Pueblo Indians and Hispanos in New Mexico. Previous studies of the Matachines dance dealt mainly with its origins, distribution, and descriptive details. Rodriguez's work instead focuses on the larger cultural, ecological, historical, and political-economic setting within which each community's performance is organized. She analyzes observed behavior, incorporates native explanation, and interprets the dance's symbols in attempting to discover what the dance means to those who perform it and what its performance reveals about the people who do it. For both Indians and Hispanos in New Mexico, the dance is not merely an archaic survival but an ongoing way of coping with and commenting on the history of ethnic domination as it continues to unfold in the upper Rio Grande valley.”
- Rosenstein, Carole Elizabeth. “Forms of Belonging, Forms of Difference: Art, Ethnicity and Stratifications of Culture in Contemporary Santa Fe.” Dissertation, Bradeis University, 2000.
o Abstract: “This dissertation examines how ethnicity, culture and cultural difference are defined and negotiated within the institutions, practices and products of Santa Fe's art world. In order to uncover the ways in which Anglo, Hispano, Pueblo and other Native American art objects mediate culturally differentiated persons, the dissertation compares key contexts of display and exchange. Descriptions of this art world's institutional structure and annual events are provided for background. A chapter on museum exhibitions includes detailed descriptions and analysis of the ethnographic, domestic and aesthetic genres for picking out, organizing and displaying objects. Two chapters on festivals outline how these events systematically organize participants, formalize processes for achieving socially salient groupings, relate the values of objects to their ability to create, maintain or transcend those arrangements, and elaborate cultural content.”
- Ruiz, Vicki L. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
o Abstract: “From Out of the Shadows was the first full study of Mexican-American women in the twentieth century. Beginning with the first wave of Mexican women crossing the border early in the century, historian Vicki L. Ruiz reveals the struggles they have faced and the communities they have built. In a narrative enhanced by interviews and personal stories, she shows how from labor camps, boxcar settlements, and urban barrios, Mexican women nurtured families, worked for wages, built extended networks, and participated in community associations--efforts that helped Mexican Americans find their own place in America. She also narrates the tensions that arose between generations, as the parents tried to rein in young daughters eager to adopt American ways. Finally, the book highlights the various forms of political protest initiated by Mexican-American women, including civil rights activity and protests against the war in Vietnam. For this new edition of From Out of the Shadows, Ruiz has written an afterword that continues the story of the Mexicana experience in the United States, as well as outlines new additions to the growing field of Latina history.”
- Shorter, David Delgado. We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
o Abstract: “In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter’s interpretation of the community’s ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of “historical inscription” reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their Testamento narrative of myth and history, and their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions. Working collaboratively with Yoeme communities, Shorter has produced a scrupulous investigation that challenges received wisdom from both anthropological and New Age perspectives, demonstrates how Yoeme performances provide a counterdiscourse to earlier understandings of colonialism and conquest, and updates our knowledge of contemporary Yoeme society. Shorter’s vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses vividly show how today’s Yoeme peoples navigate the tribulations and opportunities of the twenty-first century.”
- The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy. Edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Carrie C. Heitman. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “Since the mid-1970s, government agencies, scholars, tribes, and private industries have attempted to navigate potential conflicts involving energy development, Chacoan archaeological study, and preservation across the San Juan Basin. The Greater Chaco Landscape examines both the imminent threat posed by energy extraction and new ways of understanding Chaco Canyon and Chaco-era great houses and associated communities from southeast Utah to west-central New Mexico in the context of landscape archaeology. Contributors analyze many different dimensions of the Chacoan landscape and present the most effective, innovative, and respectful means of studying them, focusing on the significance of thousand-year-old farming practices; connections between early great houses outside the canyon and the rise of power inside it; changes to Chaco’s roads over time as observed in aerial imagery; rock art throughout the greater Chaco area; respectful methods of examining shrines, crescents, herraduras, stone circles, cairns, and other landscape features in collaboration with Indigenous colleagues; sensory experiences of ancient Chacoans via study of the sightlines and soundscapes of several outlier communities; and current legal, technical, and administrative challenges and options concerning preservation of the landscape. An unusually innovative and timely volume that will be available both in print and online, with the online edition incorporating video chapters presented by Acoma, Diné, Zuni, and Hopi cultural experts filmed on location in Chaco Canyon, The Greater Chaco Landscape is a creative collaboration with Native voices that will be a case study for archaeologists and others working on heritage management issues across the globe. It will be of interest to archaeologists specializing in Chaco and the Southwest, interested in remote sensing and geophysical landscape-level investigations, and working on landscape preservation and phenomenological investigations such as viewscapes and soundscapes.”
- Wenger, Tisa. “Land, Culture, and Sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy.” Journal of the Southwest 46, no. 2 (2004): 381–412.
o Abstract: “Wenger highlights another dimension of the contretemps in New Mexico. She suggests little-noticed links between the Pueblo dance controversy and contemporary legislation to resolve conflicting claims to Pueblo lands in favor of non-Indians. Sponsors of the notorious 1922 Bursum Bill, and successive efforts at similar legislation, hoped to divest Pueblos of their lands. She explores with subtlety and nuance the material basis for attacks on Indian culture and sovereignty in the Pueblo case, which seem worth exploring further in other arenas where Indians and non-Indians collided in the Progressive era.”
[Southwest Native American Art History]
- Anderson, Duane. All That Glitters: The Emergence of Native American Micaceous Art Pottery in Northern New Mexico. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 1999.
o Abstract: “All That Glitters, the first comprehensive study of the micaceous pottery tradition in New Mexico, explores the current transition of micaceous pottery from a traditional culinary ware to an exciting contemporary art form. The illustrated catalog of the micaceous pottery collection at SAR's Indian Arts Research Center and a roster of micaceous potters practicing in northern New Mexico today further details the art form.”
- Bernstein, Bruce. Santa Fe Indian Market: A History of Native Arts and the Marketplace. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2015.
o Abstract: “Each August 100,000 people attend Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the nation's largest and most anticipated Native arts event. One thousand artists representing 160 tribes, nations, and villages from the United States and Canada proudly display and sell their works of art, ranging from pottery and basketry to contemporary paintings and sculptures. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of the artists and their work and historical photos from the market's ninety-year history.”
- Cesa, Margaret. The World of Flower Blue: Pop Chalee–An Artist Biography. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1997.
o Abstract: “Born to a Taos Pueblo Indian father and a European mother, Pop Chalee moved between the two worlds of her parents, identifying most with her father's heritage. She was one of the first Native American women artists to achieve national fame, recognition, and commercial success. Her popularity sprang from the strength and charm of her personality as well as her unique artistic style. A graduate of the famous 1937 class of the Dorothy Dunn studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, her paintings, jewelry, textile designs, and murals grace museums, private collections, and public institutions across the country.”
- Chavarria, Tony R., Ryan S. Flahive, and Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer. Lloyd Kiva New: A New Century. Santa Fe: Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 2017.
o Abstract: “This catalogue commemorates the life of Lloyd Kiva New, artist, fashion designer, and renowned arts educator. Always a trailblazer, from his early years as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lloyd New held a deep and abiding appreciation for both his Cherokee and Scots-Irish cultural heritage. This book considers his legacy and influence―as a Native pioneer in fashion design, entrepreneurship, and cultural art education―at the Santa Fe Indian School and as co-founder of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Essays provide biographical information, tracing New’s roots in Oklahoma, his time as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, as a young art teacher in the Southwest, his service in the US Navy during World War II, and New’s remarkable breakout as a handbag and clothing designer.”
- Hoving, Thomas. The Art of Dan Namingha. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.
o Abstract: “Drawing upon the landscape and culture of his native American Southwest, Dan Namingha blends abstraction and reality. Boldly colored and powerfully constructed, his works evoke the stark red sandstone desert of New Mexico and Arizona, the buttes and mesas of the Hopi land, and the emblems and symbols of Hopi ceremonies, to which he is strongly connected. His great-great-grandmother was the legendary Hopi potter Nampeyo, and numerous family members create traditional and innovative art of high distinction - pottery, kachina dolls, paintings, and graphic works. Raised in the combined tradition of two Pueblo peoples, the Hopi and the Tewa, Namingha marries the colorful, geometric imagery of his indigenous roots with the tradition of twentieth-century abstract modernism. His artistic schooling includes formal training at Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts and brief, but important, studies at the University of Kansas and the American Academy of Art in Chicago.”
- King, Charles S. Virgil Ortiz: revolution. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “With an artistic career spanning four decades, Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo) is one of the most innovative artists working today. Not one to be limited or categorized, Ortiz’s artistry extends across mediums and boundaries―challenging societal expectations and breaking taboos. Ortiz was taught traditional pueblo pottery techniques passed down from a matrilineal line of renowned Cochiti potters―grandmother Laurencita Herrera (1912–1984) and mother Seferina Ortiz (1931–2007). Virgil Ortiz: reVOlution is a midcareer retrospective that presents a view into Ortiz’s transformative pottery and art to illuminate his creative and artistic manifestations. With a vision that merges apocalyptic themes, science fiction, and storytelling, Ortiz’s ingenuity as a contemporary artist, provocateur, activist, futurist, and preservationist extends to his creativity working across media including pottery, design, fashion, film, jewelry, and décor. This beautiful book features more than 200 works of art selected by Virgil Ortiz as well as his artist statement. Curator Karen Kramer contributes a compelling portrait of the artist in the foreword to Charles S. King’s biography. In addition, this book represents a unique collaboration between book designer and artist with Ortiz leaving his imprint on each page.”
- Lidchi, Henrietta. Surviving Desires: Making and Selling Native Jewellery in the American Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.
o Abstract: “In its classic union of gleaming silver and blue turquoise, Native American jewellery of the Southwest is an iconic art form. Internationally recognized and locally significant, Native American jewellery has a compelling history—it represents the persistence of tradition while encapsulating the vitality of Native American communities and the continuously transforming nature of the jewellery makers’ art. Author Henrietta Lidchi focuses on jewellery in the cultural economy of the Southwest, exploring jewellery making as a decorative art form in constant transition. She describes the jewellery as subject to a number of desires, controlled at different times by government agencies, individual entrepreneurs, traders, curators, and Native American communities. Lidchi explores the jewellery as craft, material culture, commodity, and adornment. Considering the impact of tourism, she discusses fakes in the market and the artists’ desires to codify traditional styles, explaining how these factors can affect stylistic development and value. Surviving Desires suggests the complexity and reinvention innate to Native American jewellery as a commercial craft. Drawing on the author’s archival research and on interviews she conducted with Native American jewellers and with traders, dealers, and curators, this volume examines British collecting, exchanges between British and American institutions, and the development of the British Museum’s contemporary collection. Lavishly illustrated with 300 color photographs of jewellery in the British Museum, the National Museums Scotland, and major collections in the United States, Surviving Desires presents many previously unpublished pieces and showcases works by Native American jewellers who include the best-known names in the field today. The volume is a visually stunning exploration of the symbolic, economic, and communal value of jewellery in the American Southwest.”
- Payne, Emily. “Pablita Verlarde, Helen Hardin, and Margarete Bagshaw: Three Generations of Assertion, Expression, and Innovation.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2018.
o Abstract: “This dissertation examines the work of three generations of Santa Clara women, Pablita Velarde (1918-2006), Helen Hardin (1943-1984) and Margarete Bagshaw (1964-2015). In order to contextualize their work, I discuss the historical development of the marketplace for Native American art and note that the early modern Pueblo artists Nampeyo, Maria Martinez, and Tonita Peña each created art that was both responsive to the market demand for ethnographic authenticity and reflective of their creativity and agency. As they each passed on cultural and artistic knowledge generationally and forged new paths for female Native artists, Nampeyo, Martinez, and Peña set examples for Velarde and her family to follow. I argue that Velarde’s numerous images of female Pueblo potters catered to market demand, celebrated and preserved her culture, and subtly engaged with modernism. An analysis of Hardin’s imagery reveals that her work, while cultural in subject matter, was modernist in style. Her precise linearity and geometric abstractions diverged from Velarde’s style, yet Hardin was inspired by her mother’s depictions of culture. I compare Bagshaw’s paintings to the work of some prominent modernist artists and note formal similarities between the two, thus presenting a new way of analyzing her work. I investigate how her work addressed issues of cultural identity, including her multi-cultural heritage. I argue that Bagshaw’s work is both indebted to and divergent from Velarde’s and Hardin’s work, and analyze specific paintings from her ‘Mother Line’ series to support this claim. I conclude that Velarde, Hardin, and Bagshaw each were assertive in their careers, expressive in their art, and innovative in their style.”
- Rudnick, Lois P. and Jonathan Warm Day Coming. Eva Mirabal: Three Generations of Tradition and Modernity at Taos Pueblo. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021.
o Abstract: “Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa, Fast Growing Corn, 1920–1968) studied for six years at the Dorothy Dunn Studio art program in Santa Fe, where she was a favorite of the program’s founder and served as an assistant to Dunn’s successor, Geronima Montoya (P’Otsunu, 1915–2015, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo). By the time she was twenty years old, Mirabal was exhibiting in museums and galleries across the country. Mirabal’s first exposure to art was through her father Pedro Mirabal who was a popular model, along with Eva’s father-in-law Geronimo Gomez, for members of the Taos Art Society and for modern artists who came to Taos as part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle. Pedro sat for a bronze bust created by Maurice Sterne and for a portrait by Nicolai Fechin, Pietro, now in the collections of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. Gomez, one of the leaders of the Peyote religion at Taos Pueblo, is the non-traditional figure depicted in Ernest Blumenschein’s controversial painting Star Road and White Sun. During World War II, Eva enlisted in the Woman’s Army Corp (WACs) in 1943, the only WAC assigned as a full-time artist. She was very likely the first Native American woman to publish a comic strip, the feisty G. I. Gertie. During the same period, she worked on two significant mural commissions. After the war, Eva was a visiting professor of art at Southern Illinois Normal University. Following her return to Taos Pueblo, she studied at the Taos Valley Art School on the GI Bill. Throughout her lifetime, her paintings and murals received national acclaim. After her death in 1968, Eva’s teenage sons discovered a treasure trove of her life story. In a huge pine box that she had nailed shut, she placed scores of her drawings; family photographs; diary entries; newspaper clippings; and hundreds of letters related to her life and work that she received from curators, gallery owners, friends, and teachers over the years. Drawing on this rich and invaluable archive, as well as on interviews with family members, Rudnick tells the story of Eva’s brilliant but brief and impactful career as a Taos Pueblo artist, along with the story of the artistic legacy carried on by her son Jonathan Warm Day Coming.”
- Rushing, III, W. Jackson. Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera. Norman: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2018.
o Abstract: “Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera is the first of its kind: a large-scale, high-quality, scholarly exhibition of three generations of modern Pueblo painting. The exhibition is curated by W. Jackson Rushing III, the Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art, OU School of Visual Arts. Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting spans 1915 to the late 1980s. In addition to Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso/Cochiti) and her son, Joe Herrera (Cochiti), other artists featured include Julian Martinez and his grandson Tony Da (San Ildefonso); Pablita Velarde and her daughter Helen Hardin (Santa Clara); in addition to teachers and mentors, such as Romando Vigil (San Ildefonso) and Geronimo Montoya (San Juan); as well as younger artists inspired by Herrera, such as Michael Kabotie (Hopi); Martinez's nephew, Gilbert Atencio (San Ildefonso); and Charles Lovato (Kewa Pueblo).”
- Scott, Sascha. “Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal.” Arts 9, no. 9 (2020): 1–24.
o Abstract: “In 1918, San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Crescencio Martinez completed two commissions for the anthropologist Edgar L. Hewett: A set of paintings and a series of tiles. The paintings, called the Crescencio Set, mark a formative moment in the development of a new genre of art, modern Pueblo painting. Before Crescencio and his San Ildefonso peers began creating images of ceremonial and daily life for sale to outsiders, they were hired as day laborers at archaeological excavations. While Pueblo laborers benefited financially from working with anthropologists, they nevertheless understood anthropology as a threat to their communities, as scientists disrupted sacred sites and the dead, collected sensitive material, and pushed informants for esoteric information. In countering this new colonial threat, Pueblo communities deployed long-developed tactics of resistance. Among the most powerful of these tactics is what Audra Simpson calls ‘refusal.’ Many Pueblo laborers refused to share esoteric knowledge with anthropologists, a tactic adopted by those laborers who became artists. Early Pueblo paintings can, thus, be understood as ‘ana-ethnographic,’ a representational mode through which the artists worked both through and against ethnographic norms in order to simultaneously benefit from, manipulate, and resist scientific colonialism. Crescencio’s paintings and tiles are paradigmatically ana-ethnographic. In creating these objects, Crescencio benefited from the ethnographic desire to know and record Pueblo life, and yet he only represented aspects of his culture appropriate for outsider consumption, refusing to share protected knowledge.”
- Swentzell, Porter, Yve Chavez, and Jonathan Batkin. Lit: The Work of Rose B. Simpson. Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 2018.
o Abstract: “This catalogue accompanied Rose B. Simpson’s first solo exhibition in 2018 at the Wheelwright Museum. Simpson grew up in a permaculture environment on Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico among a family of renowned potters and artists―her mother is the famed sculptor Roxanne Swentzell. Simpson’s self-reflective work has made a big impact on the contemporary art scene. The pieces feature life-size mixed-media sculptures, faces, and monumental figures in the traditional medium of clay, combined with welded steel and leather. A range of sculptural styles and sizes reflect the trajectory of Simpson’s recent work.”
[Taos History (General)]
- Maszewski, Zbigniew. “‘An Inner Comprehension of the Pueblo Indian’s Point of View:’ Carl Gustav Jung’s 1925 Visit to Taos, New Mexico.” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory, and Culture, no. 5 (2015): 177–188.
o Abstract: “Carl Jung paid a short visit to Taos, New Mexico, in January 1925. A brief account of his stay at the Pueblo appeared in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffe in 1963. Remembering his conversations with Mountain Lake (Antonio Mirabal), Jung wrote of the confrontation between the ‘European consciousness,’ or the ‘European thought,’ with the Indian ‘unconscious.’ My article provides a reading of Jung’s text as a meeting ground of the aesthetic, emotional, visionary and of the analytical, rational, explanatory. Like many other European and Anglo-American visitors to Taos Pueblo, Jung rediscovers its capacity to mirror the inner needs of the visitor; he examines the significance of the encounter with the Southwestern landscape and with the Pueblo Indians’ religious views in terms of self-reflection and of the return to the mythical. As Carl Jung’s ‘inner comprehension’ of the Pueblo Indian’s philosophy is mediated through language, aware both of its desire and its inability to become liberated from the European perspectives, Mountain Lake’s attitude towards his visitor from Switzerland remains ultimately unknown; Mountain Lake does, however, communicate his readiness to assume the archetypal role of a teacher and a spiritual guide whose insights reach beyond the confines and mystifications of language. According to Jung’s account, during this brief encounter of the two cultures, he and his Indian host experienced a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, the sources of which, as they both understood them in their own individual ways, resided in the comprehension of universal sharing.”
- McGinnis, John H. “Taos.” Southwest Review 13, no. 1 (1927): 36–47.
o Abstract: Describing journey into town and town’s architecture.
- Norby, Patricia Marroquin. “Visual Violence in the Land of Enchantment.” Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2013.
o Abstract: “During the twentieth century three major industries: fine art production, industrial agriculture, and nuclear power production were all introduced to the Rio Grande Valley region of northern New Mexico. The advancement of Pueblo Indian participation with these enterprises and with the growing capitalist economy of this area included private and federally supported art-making, agricultural, and military programs that were initiated and managed by an encroaching Euro-American population that included Pueblo art patrons, political activists, and federal agents. The first two programs, art-making and industrial-level agriculture, which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, shared a common goal of drawing Pueblo Indians out of their agriculture-based economies and into capitalist and tourist markets. The third enterprise, nuclear power production, which began in the mid twentieth century, required the participation of this area’s indigenous populations via the appropriation of Native lands including the ancestral homelands of Pueblo Indian and Hispano peoples. Although these three enterprises have historically been treated as disparate topics, interconnections between these three industries are visually and materially present in American Indian and American art of this region and time period. Drawing upon Indigenous concepts of memory and place, this dissertation draws out the interconnections between art, land, and law, and the political and intercultural tensions that are visually and materially present in the artwork of Tonita Peña, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Helen Hardin, three artists who painted throughout the twentieth century (1900-1986) in northern New Mexico. All three artists are women, and all three women visually and verbally expressed powerful personal connections to the land and landscape of the northern Rio Grande region.”
- Ottaway, Harold Nelson. “The Penitente moradas of the Taos, New Mexico Area.” Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1975.
o Abstract: No abstract, but goal is to “obtain basic information about the Brotherhood that had heretofore been omitted in the literature” by concentrating on one particular morada (meeting place).
Architecture:
- Birdsong, Judith. “Good Architecture: The Mission Church of Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.” Crossings Between the Proximate and Remote, ACSA Fall Conference Proceedings (2017): 247–252.
o Abstract: “The church of San Francisco de Asis in Ranchos de Taos, NM, was built to provide spiritual succor to a remote outpost of New Spain in the few years prior to 1815; it has been in operation as a functioning parish church without interruption for over 200 years since. It was not designed by an architect, and by most standards used to assess the success – or value– of a work of architecture, it fails. It certainly satisfies its functional role well, but it makes no didactic declaration of intent; it doesn’t exemplify innovation, demonstrate mastery (of form or execution), or provide a scripted transformative experience. The source of its undeniable and enduring allure is elusive and seems to lie outside the realm of architecture as we ‘know’ it. Any consideration of value must take into account at least one of the nuanced definitions of ‘representation’– whether metaphorical, pictorial or archetypal. Neither value or representation are neutral; both are dependent on time, circumstance, and motive (whether consciously driven or not) and can be assigned by forces outside, and occasionally antithetical to, the control of the architect or client. This paper explores the Ranchos church as a case study in intrinstic (locally decided) and extrinsic (externally imposed) value.”
- Donaldson, Evelina Elf. “Authentic Adobe and Off-the-Grid Earthships: Investigating the potential for a green rating system and sustainability-oriented accommodation platform in Taos, New Mexico.” Master’s thesis, Uppsala University, 2021.
o Abstract: “In an age where the sharing economy has proliferated as a preferred means of travel in the tourism industry, and the accommodation sharing platform Airbnb has risen to the forefront, there is much criticism and discussion about the need for such nascent platforms to operate in alignment with sustainable development. Currently, economic benefits for the host and guest lie at the core of Airbnb’s sustainability appeal, while few concrete steps have been taken to advance environmental and social values. Many have proposed a green rating system and sustainability-oriented search filters as a means to propagate these values and catalyze a necessary paradigm shift within the sharing economy. Through the lens of green architecture and construction, this study analyzes the extent and manner in which sustainability features and amenities are promoted by hosts on Airbnb in the high-desert mountain town of Taos, New Mexico. This case study approach selects and intriguing destination that is not only characterized by a long history of earthen building traditions by the Tiwa people, but was also the birthplace of the world-renowned, off-the-grid Earthship concept. An analysis of all active Airbnb listings was compared with a more targeted analysis of off-the-grid listings to reveal that hosts more often than not frame their sustainability features and amenities in terms of visitor comfort, convenience, and enjoyment. For instance, the valorization of earthen adobe building for its authenticity and cultural appeal in lieu of its energy efficient and natural qualities. This indicated a high level of unexploited potential, wherein hosts could enhance their listing’s sustainability appeal and educational value through reframing these features to potential guests, and off-the-grid listings could benefit from implementing and promoting sustainable practices and emphasizing the local culture. Most importantly, after quantitively analyzing the features that arose, this study assembled the content basis for a theoretical green rating system and sustainability search filters that could be applied to Taos as a localized system, or merely provide insight to other destinations and the Airbnb platform as a whole.”
- Gonzales, Albert D. “The history and archaeology of the eighteenth-century community at Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Dallas, 2007.
o Abstract: “This thesis examines interethnic relations in the Spanish colonial village of Las Trampas de Taos (now Ranchos de Taos) in northeastern New Mexico. That frontier settlement developed its multiethnic character during the early eighteenth century, taking in Hispanics of multiple castes, Jicarilla Apaches, genizaros (detribalized Indians), and Taos Indians. The first chapter traces the histories of the community's constituent ethnic groups. The second chapter analyzes the nature of the relationships that developed among those groups after their arrivals. The last chapter explores the nature of everyday life at the early settlement through its material culture, building conclusions on an analysis of the findings of recent archaeological excavations. Designed as a springboard for future inquiry, this thesis raises a number of new historical and archaeological research questions in addition to providing an historical analysis of the early community at Las Trampas de Taos.”
- Narath, Albert. “Modernism in the mud: R. M. Schindler, the Taos Pueblo and a ‘Country Home in Adobe’ Construction." The Journal of Architecture 13, no. 4 (2008): 407–426.
o Abstract: “In a letter to Richard Neutra from the winter of 1920–1921, Rudolf Schindler declares with no uncertainty, ‘When I speak of American architecture I must say at once that there is none… The only buildings which testify to the deep feeling for soil on which they stand are the sun-baked adobe buildings of the first immigrants and their successors — Spanish and Mexican — in the south-western part of the country.’ Schindler wrote this statement in the first months after his move to Los Angeles and it refers back to his experience of the vernacular architecture of the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, during a break in 1915 from his work in Chicago with the office of Ottenheimer, Stern and Reichert. By focusing on Schindler's trip to New Mexico and his design for a ‘Country Home in Adobe Construction’, completed after his return to Chicago, this essay seeks to uncover the importance of pueblo architecture for Schindler's formulation of the modern house. Through a comparison with Neutra's closely related vision of the pueblo, it will also attempt to establish both architects' encounters with Taos as prime examples of the complicated and productive interactions between modern architecture and the ‘primitive.’”
- Özen, Hamiyet. “Residential adobe architecture around Santa Fe and Taos from 1900 to the present.” Master’s thesis, Texas Tech, University, 1990.
o Abstract: “The topic of this study will be Residential Adobe Architecture around Santa Fe and Taos from 1900 to present. The thesis statement is that adobe has long been an important building material and continues to be in use today. Understanding the technology and historic use of the material enables us to plan for better restoration and use the material effectively in new construction. The research for this study is divided into four main chapters with conclusions. The first chapter deals with the architectural background and historic use of adobe material from the Indian Pueblo period to the American Anglo period. The second chapter covers the historic preservation of adobe buildings. This chapter gives ideas about preservation problems and their solutions. The third chapter discusses the architectural and cultural significance of residential adobe architecture. This chapter deals with the evolution and popularity of residential adobe architecture during the 20th century. The plan of adobe houses has many influences from other cultures such as Spanish, Muslim and other Middle East and Mediterranean cultures. The production and manufacturing of adobe bricks in the Santa Fe and Taos region is the contents of the last chapter.”
- Rodríguez, Sylvia. “Over Behind Mabel’s on Indian Land: Utopia and Thirdspace in Taos.” Journal of the Southwest 53, no. ¾ (2011): 379–402.
o Abstract: “In this essay I focus on a single geographic locale to illustrate the production of space through a process of struggle between specific spatial practices and divergent interpretations or representations of space. My approach rests on the premise that rather than being a natural given, space is produced through the interaction of social and historical forces (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996). My narrative begins with two buildings, one being the morada, then moves beyond them to encompass their surrounding neighborhood, the social fields and temporal forces that shape them, and the words and deeds of individuals or groups that inhabit, traverse, control, or stake claim to them. My perspective is ethnographic, historical, textual, visual, symbolic, and mnemonic, drawing on my own and others' memories of the place I am writing about, which is where I grew up, periodically reside, and study as an anthropologist. My purpose is to describe and analyze space—and by implication place—as situated process involving interaction and struggle between subjects caught up in larger socioeconomic forces. My discussion also touches on the question of utopia, which literally means ‘no place,’ or more precisely, the paradoxical non-setting where it resides. Foucault (1980, 1986) refers to such a space as heterotopia, whereas Soja (1996) calls it Thirdspace. But rather than embark on a theoretical inquiry into the nature of Thirdspace or its relation to heterotopia, my intention is to describe an instance of its production. To accomplish this, I focus on one specific geographic and architectural zone, located in and around the colonial tourist town of Don Fernando de Taos: the Las Cruces arroyo and lower drainage.”
Taos Pueblo:
- “Taos Pueblo – Blue Lake hearings before the United States House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, Ninety-First Congress, first session, on May 15, 16, 1969.”
- Montoya, Amanda J. “Taos Pueblo Migration Theories: Indigenous Push and Pull Factors.” Dissertation, Arizona State University, 2018.
o Abstract: “This dissertation explores Brain Drain and Brain Circulation phenomena at Taos Pueblo, an Indigenous community located in northern New Mexico, USA. The study examines the push and pull factors that influence the migration of educated Taos Pueblo tribal members. The information contained in this dissertation was derived from a study that was completed from 2016–2017 in Taos Pueblo. It has become evident that Indigenous communities worldwide are currently experiencing massive migration away from reservations, rural, and communities of origin and towards urbanized centers. The research conducted in this dissertation was focused on both patterns and trends and possible distinct reasons for intellectual migration, especially in Indigenous communities. This dissertation is separated into three sections. The first part is a journal article that focused on Taos Pueblo intellectual migration patterns. The article draws from studies literature review, fieldwork methodology, methods, data and findings. The second part is a book chapter that centers on a literature review and theory development. The book chapter includes a discussion on the study findings and contains broad recommendations for addressing brain drain and promoting brain circulation in Taos Pueblo. The third and final section is a Policy Paper is aimed at two audiences, the first is Indigenous Leadership and secondly, college age students who are interested in working with Indigenous Communities. The policy brief provides solutions and recommendations that were gathered from secondary literature and from the data gathered during the various interviews that were conducted during the research period.”