Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital video surveillance cameras in the twenty-first century. All of these carry legacies of intense racial coding, ones which Native scholars and visual artists have critiqued with counter discourse and works of “visual sovereignty.” Intervening into film studies, Native American studies, and critical theories of visual culture, the research offers new insights into the complex relationship between settler colonialism and visual sovereignty. I use visual sovereignty as a framework to confront the often-absurd assumptions that circulate around visual representations of Native Americans, while also disempowering structures of cinematic dominance and stereotype.