The lives of things: Native objects, human rights and ndn-indian relationality

Abstract

Vital non-human things are too easily severed from their human “owners” due, in part, to particular human rights logics that enact market logics of equivalence, multicultural investments in recognition, settler-colonial categories of life and death, and Westphalian notions of racial identity. Using the controversial sale of Native artifacts as our primary example, and borrowing from recent thought on temporality and liveliness in feminist physics, we consider how a rethinking (not just expansion) of the subject of human rights opens up possibilities beyond the rights to development, enshrined in the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and towards something like rights of relationality. We turn to the contemporary photoart of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew to explore sovereignty and solidarity across NDN/Indian divides.

Keywords:

• Juridical humanity
• UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples
• native material cultures
• Indian photo art
• Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Annu Palakunnathu Matthew for her work and generosity in allowing the reproduction of her images.

Notes

1. Opposing the vote were the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, four nation-states that have settler colonial histories and continue to have contentious relations around entitlement with Native and indigenous peoples.

2. Amongst other things, Vicky Kirby illuminates the conundrum of the problem of binary oppositions, specifically as they manifest “nature” against “culture” where “every maneuver to escape binary logic effectively reinstates it in a disavowed and subtle way” (69).

3. In a similar sale hosted by another Paris auction house, Neret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou in April 2013, Hopi kachinas became the focal point of controversy when The Heard Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona publically denounced the sale. The Neret-Minet Tessier & Sarrou sale proceeded as scheduled and the Annenberg Foundation reported purchasing 24 sacred Native artifacts for the sole purpose of returning them to the Hopi and Apache.

4. Kēhaulani Kauanui has written poignantly about the possibilities as well as exclusionary conditions of custodianship in her work on queer diasporic Hawaiian belonging. See Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, Duke UP, 2008.

5. NDN is a term that reconciles the older generation’s practice of retaining the familiar if problematic nomenclature of “Indian” with the younger generation’s embrace of the sometimes abstracting “Native” or “Indigenous.” NDN serves to mark both continuity and difference, thus allowing for self-identification without losing historicity. For our purposes here, the play of NDN/Indian identifies singularity within colonial histories of equivalence. (However, the preferred practice today is to identify by specific tribal membership.).

6. As Matthew explains, the “lenticular prints in this series are derived from two photographs that have been spliced and reassembled and mounted against a lenticular lens so that from one angle you view a portrait of the call center work in his/her ‘work’ clothes, usually perceived as more Western. From the other angle the Virtual Immigrant appears dressed in clothes that he/she may wear for a more formal occasion, which is invariably Indian. …Because of the size of the images (approx 50x70 inches) the viewer has to move back and forth to see the two portraits (a metaphor for the Virtual Immigrant’s experience) while simultaneously listening to the audio of the call center workers. …There is a fascination with the technique, which makes the viewer spend time examining the portraits and listening more intently to the audio” (Cohen 1).

7. In the accompanying catalogue, Matthew writes: “As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I am ‘really from.’ When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. It seems strange that all this confusion started because Christopher Columbus thought he had found the Indies and called the native people of America collectively as Indians. In this portfolio, I look at the other ‘Indian.’ I play on my own ‘otherness,’ using photographs of Native Americans from the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century that perpetuated and reinforced stereotypes. I find similarities in how Nineteenth and early Twentieth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, similar to the colonial gaze of the Nineteenth century British photographers working in India.” See Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, An Indian from India, annumatthew.com, n.d. Web. 19 December 2015. [http://www.annumatthew.com/gallery/an-indian-from-india/].

8. The author (Ray) viewed An Indian from India at the Smithsonian in October 2014; and at the San Jose Museum of Art in March 2015.

9. Nancy describes this phenomenon in detail in Being Singular Plural. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2000.

10. In the global context of rising identitarian electoral politics and neo-liberal conformity, India’s violent turn to Hindutva has only strengthened this legitimacy. See Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, Monthly Review P, 2011.