CURA.

Quoting Philip Deloria, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang make a poignant analysis of the idea of “playing Indian”, in their essay Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor:

“Playing Indian is a powerful U.S. pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to fraternal organizations, to new age trends, to even those aforementioned Native print underwear. Deloria maintains that, ‘From the colonial period to the present, the Indian has skulked in and out of the most important stories various Americans have told about themselves’ […] The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants.”^[1]

Tuck and Yang depict how the settlers’ inability to completely eliminate indigeneity led to a feeling of inadequacy to secure absolute domination over land; and further led to a kind of perverse fascination, where cultural appropriation and romantization become further strategies of eradication.

In the currently called United States, the beneficial implications derived from the Indigenous dispossession, land theft, and generational oppression that the settlers have had over the last hundreds of years, up until the present day, is a hard pill to swallow. Conversations around decolonization have become a trend in humanistic fields and academia, including in the art world. The performative display of solidarity that often has no further consequences allows the settler to feel at ease just by acknowledging the injustice. This is something that Tuck and Yang call “the settlers move to innocence,” in which feelings of guilt are alleviated to ultimately serve the settler.

NRO, although offering a critical view of performative decolonization, also encourages “the de-metaphorization of decolonization,” providing the possibility of understanding and envisioning new ways of promoting Indigenous growth. One of their works, Give It Back (2020)—an installation with a street-facing window display that reimagines a real-estate office—enjoins visitors to restore land to Indigenous people, and reveals other examples of property that has been restored or has been promised to be restored. Often highlighted through slogans like: “TIRED OF LIVING ON STOLEN LAND? GIVE IT BACK,” repatriation is a central and practical necessity for NRO.

Matters become even more complex when it comes to the violence inflicted by institutions, monuments, and archives, set in place to directly or indirectly serve the settler-colonialist paradigm. In the series Culture Capture, NRO juxtaposes archives and monuments with new technologies, like 3D scanning, to explore Western society’s ongoing obsession with seizing, collecting, classifying, and preserving Indigenous objects, as well as to depict how colonial powers solidified their ideological domination and their national identity in newly controlled territories, through institutions and disciplines like art, ethnography, and anthropology. However, revisiting monuments and archives through Indigenous perspectives shakes the symbolic order and undermines some of the most toxic forms of American Nationalism. For instance, in multiple video works, NRO looks at the practice of James Earle Fraser—the famous American sculptor (1876-1953), who lived during the colonial expansion westwards that resulted in the subjugation of Native Americans. Fraser created the controversial sculpture Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, located since 1940 in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 2020, it was unanimously voted that the sculpture should be relocated as Roosevelt is depicted flanked by a Native American and an African man—a clear symbol of colonialism and racism that became even more intolerable after the killing of George Floyd. NRO depicts the materiality of signifiers as undeniable violence on Indigenous peoples: “The presence of Indian bodies outside made of marble, bronze, and stone, often signifies the presence of Indian bodies inside made of bone, brain, hair, heart and lung. These monuments conjure terrifying realities.”^[2]

Revealing the true face of settler-colonialism as a destructive culture, suffocated by its own accumulating burden of archives and monuments, NRO’s practice is unique due to its ability to display the obvious solutions in reconfiguring the current ideological structures. And although the concept of decolonization moves freely through different materials and mediums in NRO’s practice, it does not go unchallenged. NRO questions everything to promote Indigenous futures, and to move forward in the face of the inconsistencies, contradictions and paradoxes that have emerged from settler colonialism.