We began our day at Red Cliff accompanied by Dee Gokee-Rindal to the youth center to catch the Bittersweet Winds exhibit by Richie Plass. We arrived just in time to have a look around between the curator’s presentations to busloads of kids from the Bayfield schools and talk a bit with him. Plass’s attitude, as he outlined in conversation and which can be seen in the exhibit’s juxtaposition of sports memorabilia, sacred items, kitschy souvenirs, and printed images depicting Indian people and traditions, is to simply put the things out there and let people make up their own minds about it.
What a collection. The sheer volume of pennants and food product labels featuring what was clearly supposed to be read as an Indian man’s head amounted to an experience of the absurd for me. It raised the question why such imagery was used — what is it supposed to say to a grocery shopper that this bag of potatoes or bottle of beer has a Native American on it?
Mixed in with clearly negative stereotypes were also such things as editorial cartoons “reversing” the roles in American colonization, e.g., Native figures dishing out meals to a soup-kitchen line of Pilgrims with the caption “America’s Original Welfare” or something similar. Also included were news clippings and other mementos from Indian political movements of the past several decades, photos of Plass and his family, letters the curator received from school officials while he was researching Indian mascots in school sports, and a retired ceremonial drum now under Plass’s care. The total effect I took away was an ambiguous confluence of prejudice and pride regarding Native American imagery and identity.
The ambiguity I perceived in Plass’s often surprising arrangement of artifacts is, I think, part and parcel of the kind of struggle that Warrior describes. No two people, whether they identify as Native or non-Native, will have the same reactions to the range of items in Bittersweet Winds. As I interpret it, the point of the exhibit is not to merely call out bigotry in American marketing and media (although this is certainly part of the effect) but rather to provoke a gamut of intellectual, emotional and visceral reactions in viewers in the first place — along with the conversations that may follow — to bring together and make extremely visible what we might shake off in isolation.
