In her essay, “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory: Printup Hope, Rickard, Gansworth,” literary scholar Susan Bernardin writes that she is learning to “see what has been invisible for too long in discussions of Native American literary studies: the informing, vital lens of indigenous visual arts” (162). With this statement, Bernardin underscores the purpose and the voice of the collection of essays entitled Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, edited by Denise K. Cummings, in which “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory” appears. The book originates in the fields of literary and cultural studies, and all of the contributors deftly negotiate the spaces of congruence between literary texts and visual forms of communication. In so doing, they illuminate many specific historical and cultural contexts—not to mention “tribal epistemologies,” as Penelope Myrtle Kelsey terms it in “Condolence Tropes and Haudenosaunee Visuality” (119)—that inform contemporary indigenous art practices. Visualities makes an important contribution to Native American studies, and it will likely also find an appreciative audience among indigenous filmmakers and artists. The purpose of this review is to consider in what ways it might be of best use to art historians—to scholars and teachers of contemporary Native American art in particular—and to offer a brief reflection on the state of interdisciplinarity in Native art scholarship.

For Cummings, the art practices under consideration in this volume—primarily film and photography, as well as some painting—are forms of “visuality,” i.e., they are all “practices of seeing the world and the seeing of other people” (xiii). Her understanding of the term “visualities” is indebted to Nicholas Mirzoeff, whom she credits for linking visual representation to identity construction and forms of resistance to power, yet it is W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition that evidently inspires this collection: “Visuality [is] not just the ‘social construction of vision,’ but the visual construction of the social” (Mitchell quoted on p. xv). The “social” that Cummings is concerned with is an explicitly indigenous one.

Though Cummings makes a convincing argument for the unifying term “visualities” in the introduction to a volume that “aims to highlight the hybridity of visual communication within contemporary Native America” (xiii), she has chosen to group the essays into two discrete units. The first, titled “Indigenous Film Practices,” encompasses six essays, and the second, “Contemporary American Indian Art,” is comprised of four essays, with one of those also serving as an introduction to the section. The splitting off of the latter group of essays on contemporary art mitigates Cummings’s unifying thesis to some extent, as it tacitly acknowledges that the study of painting and photography might employ discipline- or medium-specific methodologies that are radically different from those of film studies.

Essays in the first portion of the book focus on several film genres, from Shelley Niro’s and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s “art” films, to Chris Eyre’s more commercially successful films such as Smoke Signals (1998), to Sherman Alexie’s challenging hybrid The Business of Fancydancing (2002). In these essays, authors consider issues of spectatorship and reception (e.g., the portrayal and acknowledgement of Native and non-Native audiences, both on and off the screen [see especially, Joanne Hearne, “Indians Watching Indians on TV: Native Spectatorship and the Politics of Recognition in Skins and Smoke Signals,” and Theo Van Alst, “Sherman Shoots Alexie: Working With and Without Reservation(s) in The Business of Fancydancing”]); they introduce or refine important conceptual frameworks such as the exercise of “visual sovereignty,” and viewing the medium of film as a “virtual reservation” (Michelle H. Raheja, “Visual Prophecies: Imprint and It Starts with a Whisper”); and they establish links between the lived realities and filmic practices of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world (Rocio Quispe-Agnoli, “Elusive Identities: Representations of Native Latin America in the Contemporary Film Industry,” and Joseph Bauerkemper, “Videographic Sovereignty: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s Aboriginal World View”). Kelsey, for example, makes excellent use of Niro’s films to illustrate “Haudenosaunee tropes and foundational cosmology”; specifically, she reads the film It Starts With a Whisper (1993) as a narrative of traditional condolence rituals. In a separate essay, Raheja regards the same film as illustrative of a wider discourse of indigenous prophecy, which she also locates in the work of Eyre. Quispe-Agnoli, on the other hand, is more interested in the ways that contemporary Latin American filmmakers have engaged in “fictocriticism” to counter the racist narratives of films such as Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006).

Taken as a whole, the essays in the first section are well suited to Cummings’s goal of providing a text that will be useful in the college classroom. As she states, these writings “can enable students to . . . see the ways other worlds are visually constructed” (xix). The strength of these essays lies in the close and nuanced readings of films and their associated texts (such as scripts, reviews, and author/director interviews). Much of the discussion revolves around plot and character development, and cultural content and context. While students are likely to respond well to these forms of analysis and will gain much from the insights offered herein, what is less evident is a distinct methodology for studying or writing about film as medium. Rarely do the collection’s authors address the formal or technical aspects of the visual field, and to my mind, this will limit the efficacy of the text in art history courses that strive to consider the actual construction of images.

The essays in the second half of Visualities focus specifically on contemporary painting, photography, and digital imagery; and though they likewise stress issues of context and content over form, they also contribute much to an understanding of individual works. Bernardin’s essay, for example, journeys through the collages, paintings, and poems of Haudenosaunee artists Niro, Melanie Printup Hope, Jolene Rickard, and Eric Gansworth to delineate tropes of loss, continuity, and memory that are integral to Haudenosaunee history and aesthetics. Cynthia Fowler’s essay, “Beauty and Self-Determination,” draws on the work of a single artist to demonstrate artistic strategies of engagement and resistance, in this case documenting the reappropriation of Edward Curtis images by Diné photographer Tsinhnahjinnie.

The fact that these two disparate essays manage to work together in this volume is due in part to the contribution of Dean Rader, whom Cummings enlisted to craft an introduction to the section. Rader, who is the author of Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), provides an impressive and comprehensive overview, despite lamenting in the first paragraph of his essay that “the sheer scope of [American Indian art] work, over both time and geography, boggles the mind” (143). His essay, “Indigenous Semiotics and Shared Modernity,” identifies many of the critical issues and key practitioners in the field. One of the themes that Rader highlights, notably, concerns the use of written text in the work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Edgar Heap of Birds, and Carl Beam. Rader notes that text frequently appears in overtly political works, ensuring that the viewer will “take nothing for granted.” “As fascinating as the images are,” Rader states, “they would be lost without the text” (149).

This latter statement is echoed in the essays that then follow. Bernardin, for instance, relies on Niro’s “pairing of title and painting [to remind] us that the relationship between the textual and the visual is vital” (162). Molly McGlennen’s essay, “Text-Messaging Prayers: George Longfish and His Art of Communication,” is explicitly a rumination on Longfish’s text-laden paintings and McGlennen’s own practice as a poet. Only Fowler, the sole art historian included in the collection, avoids a more strictly literary form of analysis; instead, she places Tsinhnahjinnie’s photographic projects in a larger art-historical context of “the return to beauty in 1990s art” (189). The singularity of Fowler’s essay in this volume—the degree to which it does not rely on textual analysis, and to which it does employ art-critical language—reinvites the question concerning whom Visualities intends to serve.

In her preface to the volume, Cummings remarks that her interest in the topic grew out of her experiences attending the annual meeting of the Native American Literature Symposium. Cummings noted that there is a sustained and growing interest among her colleagues in cultural and literary studies, in the production and reception of contemporary Native art. The strength of the essays in this collection, especially in the authors’ ability to “read” artworks as cultural objects and to use them to illuminate and illustrate culturally specific epistemologies, demonstrates that the methodology of literary studies has much to offer the wider field. Nevertheless, as art historians continue to embrace the contributions of scholars in other disciplines, so too might they expect to see art-historical methodologies and scholarship become more visible in return. It is troubling to read Bernardin’s lamentation of “the unsung importance of visual arts” (163; emphasis added) and to note the dearth of reference to eminent art historians such as Janet Berlo, W. Jackson Rushing, Gerald McMaster, and many others who have already contributed so much to the understanding of Native American art. If this volume, and Rader’s Engaged Resistance, herald a sustained confluence of visual theory and Native literary studies, it is essential to continue aspiring to an interdisciplinarity that proves to be mutually generative.