Buffalo jumps and handmade lingerie: the Native American artists ‘reversing colonialism’
Slaughter grounds thick with buffalo remains and a savaging of Thanksgiving myths are two of the highlights in the new wave of indigenous art heading for Britain
A woman stands alone in an empty landscape, poised before a precipice. Her face is daubed with thick white paint, and she is looking back over her shoulder. On her head is a beaver-skin hat, tangled with feathers and blood-red ribbon. In front of her, the Canadian prairie stretches off into the distance.
This photograph, shot at the evocatively named Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, is the work of Meryl McMaster, one of a new generation of indigenous North American artists. Edge of a Moment, as the work is called, shows McMaster at the site where, for thousands of years, the indigenous inhabitants of the prairies drove entire herds of buffalo over the cliffs, producing meat and material at a scale unequalled anywhere else on the continent. Here, the remains of tens of millions of animals lie closely packed under the soil, a tangled vein of broken bones stretching 12 metres down.
As Immense As the Sky is at Ikon, Birmingham, from 4 December to 23 February.
