K. Afro-Indigenous Reconstructions

“An act of chance or disaster produced a divergence or an aberration from the expected and usual course of invisibility and catapulted her from the underground to the surface of discourse. We stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face might demand. We only know what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her. Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the enslaved in general.”

• Hartman, Saidaiya, “Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2), June 2008, pp. 1-14 (Article)

The 3 CORE REASONS for this exhibit include:  

1. Complicate, and contextualize the intentions of settling to recognize the intention of the American state to nationalize, and socialize disadvantaged groups into a practice of settler colonialism and the rapid modernization of the American West 
2. Create a spectrum of the different attitudes, beliefs, and political motivations of Black actors in the American West, to better understand their self-identity in a more authentic way of understanding the myriad of ways of being Black at the time 
3. Disturb flat and determined narratives of the American West:
   1. Identify its cosmopolitan and multicultural context 
   2. Showcase the dichotomy of the West as a place of possibility for some and annihilation for others 
   3. Center the resistance, and survivance of indigenous + black communities through this time 

I came to this project with a personal desire to clarify why and if Oregon was rightful in taking claim to “the only state to legally outlaw Black people from living there.” This phrase had been a widely accepted truth, with immense local coverage and even a few articles in the Washington Post and the Atlantic examining the racially exclusive history of the state. The effectiveness of this exclusionary provision in the state constitution had been successful in maintaining a less than 2% Black population so many decades later. Yet, I knew this precedent must have derived from some specific instance, and that it was not particularly original enough in the grand scheme of land development practices in the American West to arrive first in this landscape in the mid 1840s. I wanted to consult the historical record to understand the material cultures and biographies that might unfold an answer to the primacy of exclusion in the state, and more interestingly, to place the narrative in the perspective of the subjects, not the outcome of the objectified racism.

Arranged as a series of speculative histories, and perspective fables, I have assembled a series of narratives from the history of the settlement of the Northwests (first the NW that is the archipelago of the Midwest; and then the second, and final NW that is the Pacific), to showcase the macro-level logics of producing and settling space that created the American West, and the precise experiences of individual Black and indigenous subjects in shaping their own reality despite the erasure and exploitation unique to their status at the time. The speculative histories came as a product of the wide range of historical evidence that key events in Oregon history had been largely fabricated by actor’s with their own agendas. With fabrication becoming truth and therefore the record of history, it felt most compelling to continue this tradition and to take lead from other Black scholars who have found humanity, and non-humanity in the archive with a care of designing a narrative to meet the scale of truth that forged the lie that we had come to accept as our norm. The work of Kara Walker was most tangible in setting the foundation for the work composed below. In Figa, a companion book to her severed Figa hand from her Sugar Sphinx first unveiled at the Domino Sugar Factory, in which the artist personifies the historical and social context of sugar for both the world and the slave, across time, to elicit a broader, if not more real account of what had already been known. I have now taken to speculation as the corrective annotation to a historio-structural method of white supremacy. Where the primacy of whiteness has supposed itself, it can be dislodged by a scale of fabulation that grounds that which has been made invisible, a real material. I sought to evoke these stories and names to understand the interplay between political ideologies, the erection of laws in an ever contested and stolen landscape, and the embodied realities of those who existed within, and through it. I see the centricity of those who lived in the time as our record of what was. That is, we can undo our attention to the injustice, and instead understand how the perseverance of those most vulnerable in these places at these times created a greater public participation for all those within the landscape in perpetuity. As the frontier is still being settled as both an epoch of time to describe a place that has always been, the landscape remains contested in how it is discussed and treated. The archive of what has occurred at ever point west of the Mississippi exists still, and is waiting to unearth itself. With this perspective, nothing has been written, but instead it must be rewritten, speculated, and visibilized.