Perhaps no mark is so universal as that of the hand print, the history and utilization of which as an index of human presence stretches across all continents and tens of thousands of years. Rendering this symbol in a monumental size and cloaking it in the language of modernist painting and collage, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Indian Hand acts as a powerful statement of Native endurance and agency in the late twentieth century.

      Overlaid on top of the work, dozens of collaged pieces of text and images are embedded within layers of expressively applied brushstrokes. These clippings juxtapose headlines about ecological struggles facing Native communities throughout North America with commercial advertisements, cartoons, and excerpts from the Char-Koosta News, the local paper for the Flathead Indian Reservation where Smith was born. Of the latter, Smith included prosaic, hyper-local announcements for—among others events—youth and women’s clubs, cribbage meetings, school bus safety protocols, and a shawl making class. The emphasis on community, daily life, family, and children in these clippings presents an incisive strategy which cuts through romanticized tropes of Native Americans. Of her use of the Char-Koosta News as a source of material, Smith has said that “the newspaper was the most direct way to present an up-to-date view of Indian people today.”¹ These everyday events are contrasted with clippings from nationally distributed publications such as Buzzworm Magazine and Time—many from a July 1991 issue—which cite ecological threats such as the James Bay hydroelectric dam and the use of reservation land as toxic waste dumping grounds. Throughout the work, names of food items—avocados, “Campbell’s Pork and Beans,” Green Chili, Salmon, Ketchup—appear. An initial reading of these foodstuffs as native to the Americas is complicated by the inclusion of watermelon, which originated on the African continent. Smith’s wry addition of the phrase “Birth of the Global Nation'' next to this clipping and the one for “pineapple” instead situates these items within the larger continuum of contributions to the global exchange by non-European peoples [fig. 1]. In what is perhaps the most biting moment of the work, “Who Wants a Nice Cabin in the Woods,” the advertisement slogan for Jeep Cherokee, is pasted over the hand’s middle finger, an unmistakable message about Smith’s thoughts on the commercial use of a subjugated community’s name to sell cars.

      Smith painted Indian Hand in 1992, the year that the US government organized the Quincentenial Jubilee, which marked the 500th anniversary year of Christopher Columbus landing in North America. The same year, the artist curated the widely touring Submuloc Show, which included contemporary work by Native American artists whose work offered a counter-narrative to the celebrations of Columbus’s arrival and brought attention to the subsequent genocide of millions of Indigenous people. Her work from this period, which frequently cites the centuries of discontents that resulted from the contact between European and Native peoples, is marked by the use of collage and the color red, as well as by Smith’s continued experimentation in mark-making. In Smith’s paintings, these stalwartly modernist techniques, “absorbed through education and travel,” are used to express what she describes as an “inner view” of the American landscape, “a closeup, pressed on, laying-down-against-the-land view.”² Smith notes she and other contemporary Native women artists “apply, scrape, build, scrape, and paint our way to a surface which is layered, physical, and viscous.”³ The synthesis of modernist technique and Native philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities becomes, then, a source of resistance. In Indian Hand, it is perhaps best encapsulated in the calm face of George Catlin’s portrait of Arikara tribe member Kah-beck-a, which Smith coupled a the de-contextualized DuPont advertising slogan: “Never has common sense been expressed with such elegance”

¹ Carolyn Kastner, Juane Quick-to-See Smith: An American Modernist, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 19.

² Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage,” in Harmony Hammond and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage, (New York: Gallery of the American Indian Community House, 1985).

³ Ibid.

Image courtesy Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith and Garth Greenan Gallery.