STILL WE SMILE
Humor as Correction and Joy
People often view the Native American experience through the lens of trauma and loss. While it is true that settler colonialism has continuously tried to deprive Native People of humor and joy, we have held onto these sentiments through playful teasing, storytelling, performance, and other artistic expressions. These creative outlets allow us to heal with one another, express our love for our communities, and mock the outlandish ways non-Native people attempt to understand us.
Still We Smile: Humor as Correction and Joy features the work of six Native artists who embrace wit, irony, and satire to communicate messages regarding their lived experiences and cultural worldviews. Collectively these works embody the resiliency of our communities by illuminating the many ways we have always found amusement in the everyday, thus ensuring our survival in the past, present, and future.
A Few Curatorial Notes:
To Native visitors, I hope this exhibition makes you laugh as sincerely as your aunties. Remember there is healing in our joy, something no one can take away.
To our non-Native visitors, you may experience discomfort or difficulty understanding the comedy expressed in this exhibition. We invite you to embrace these feelings and to do the work of correcting any harmful misconceptions you have about us. It is okay to be uncomfortable sometimes, I promise.
SKODEN!
- Dr. Meranda Roberts (Yerington Paiute Tribe/ Chicana), Guest Curator -
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Dr. Meranda Roberts is a citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe and Chicana. She has a Ph.D. in Native American History and an M.A. in Public History from the University of California, Riverside. Meranda has worked as a co-curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she developed brand new content for the museum’s Native American exhibition hall, Native Truths: Our Stories. Our Voices. She is the co-host for the award-winning podcast Exhibiting Kinship, a consultant for the Benton Art Museum at Pomona College, and an independent scholar.
Meranda’s passion lies in holding colonial institutions, like museums, accountable for the harmful narratives they have created about Indigenous people. She is dedicated to reconnecting Indigenous collection items with their descendants and telling these items’ stories in a way that adequately expresses their meaning to the communities they come from. Using Indigenous methodologies and anti-colonial pedagogy, Meranda’s work exemplifies ways in which we can work toward a more equitable future. -
Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Indian Nation)
Zig Jackson(Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara)
Chelazon Leroux (Buffalo River Dene Nation)
River Garza (Tongva)
James Luna (Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican)
Rachel Martin (Tlingit)
Dates
June 19-July 29, 2023
Location
Idyllwild Arts (Idyllwild, CA)
Curated by
Meranda Roberts, PhD
Exhibition Graphic Designer
Kevin Coochwytewa “Ligthning Kev” (Isleta Pueblo/Hopi)
Oversaw
Exhibition design and installation; lighting and didactics; artist communications and loan agreement, shipping; reception and artist/curator talk; photo-documentation; exhibition webpage build.
