American Quarterly

What We Inherit

In 2011 I created an exhibition titled What You Left Me, at the Clark County Cultural Center. I showcased photographs, artifacts, and documents that told the story of my dad. Or rather the exhibit told the story of my research on my father and my understanding of where he fit into the history of the United States of America. I exhibited his private documents, his letters, photos of him posing with his prison baseball team, and family portraits shot in a Nevada prison visiting area. One of the most important artifacts was a printout of an email I received from the Nevada Department of Corrections that described the crime my father committed that landed him in prison. Yet the exhibit’s aim was beyond the life of my father: it was a gesture or an attempt to tell a story of contemporary indigenousness. I wanted people to consider that the mistreatment of American Indians is not something that happened in the distant past. And I wanted to ask, why was I left with this resounding emptiness?

When I planned this exhibition, I was uncomfortable. Was it okay to tell my dad’s story? As many love tragedy, I knew What You Left Me would get attention. Yet if he were alive, he would have been mortified. I was airing his, and our family’s, dirty laundry. During his life he never told me why he was in prison. If he didn’t want his daughter to know, I doubt he would want strangers to know. I was also concerned that one of my family members might hear of the show and reprimand me.

I thought about my discomfort surrounding this project for a while. Legally, perhaps, I do “own” the rights to my father’s story. I inherited this painful story from him. I was born with a broken heart. Perhaps it was not only my right to tell this story, but it was my responsibility to tell this story in the context of a history that tries to disappear Native Americans. I wanted the viewer to consider why being Native American had anything to do with my father being in prison. I wanted the viewer to see the image of my father as a young boy in an Indian boarding school and ask how that trauma may have affected his future alcoholism and rage. In creating this exhibition, I asserted some power in a narrative where I was previously erased.

My work asks audiences to recognize that how the US government treated my father shaped his predisposition to depression, substance abuse, and violence. Yet will audiences make a connection between my father’s histories of violence and, for example, the images of the children in US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) camps? How will the young children forcibly taken away from their families develop into adulthood? Would a stronger collective [End Page 406] recollection of past forms of structural violence perpetrated by the state in any way create a stronger tool kit to intervene in contemporary, and parallel, atrocities?

Who Owns Your Stories?

In 2014 I had an artist residency at ACRE Projects in a rural community in Steuben, Wisconsin. Many other artists in residence and staff members loved going tubing down the river. Although I was invited a few times, I said no. I was scared of water babies. Water babies are spirits in Paiute communities that pull people into the water. Why should Paiute folklore scare me? I’m not religious or spiritual. When I was little, the other Paiute kids would tell frightening stories about water babies. I never went water tubing.

A few years later one of the white ACRE staff members drowned while tubing. Something in me whispered, “water babies.” I learned about water babies in Nevada. Do they exist also in Wisconsin? I met the ACRE staff member [End...