“Chief Jo’s Vision.” Yes, it’s not how most people spell the nickname for “Joseph,” but it’s how it’s spelled in the name the artist gave this piece — and who’s to say it’s not a more accurate rendering anyway?
The last half-century has seen Native art grow and expand in new directions, transgressing genre boundaries, overlapping style lines, appropriating imagery from the dominant culture in a reversal of how our own cultures are appropriated on a daily basis, inverted, converted, reverted, turned in on itself, turned inside out into something wholly new and yet utterly indigenous.
And so it is with “Chief Jo’s Vision”: a collage that harks back to ’60s media and psychedelia, yet incorporates new materials and non-Native imagery to tell a story in a way that is simultaneously newly recombinant and yet traditionally non-linear.
It’s a story as old as this land, as old as our peoples, older than contact — and as new as every hope for the future, even unto the seventh generation.
From the piece’s description in the Other Artists: Wall Art Gallery here on the site:
This framed collage by Preston Bellringer (Yakama/Assiniboine) melds ancient prophecies with modern media in a piece that harks back to a ’60s ethos and feel. The iconic central photograph of Chief Joseph in the upper half of the collage is surrounded by a complex synthesis of images in multiple media: photography, paint, pen and ink, even children’s stick-on decals, all telling a layered intertribal story of warriors protecting the people in their quest for a better time, a better place, one of peace. The studded wood frame is 25.25″ high by 8.5″ wide; the visible image (no glass cover) is 22.75″ high by 6″ wide (all dimensions approximate).
Mixed media; wood
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
It’s an unusual piece, and at first glance, it seems to be focused on images of war — or, at a minimum, on the warrior ethos found in so many of our cultures.
First glances are deceiving.
If you know the story of Chief Joseph — the real story, not the sanitized New Age version bandied about today — then you know that it is much more complex than surface questions of “war and peace.”
Born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat in 1840 to one of Khapkhaponimi, one of the “chiefs” of the Wallowa band of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), both he and his father had the English name “Joseph” hung on them by white “missionaries” invading the area. At this time, Manifest Destiny was playing out in its usual fashion, and the Nimíipuu were under great pressure by the colonialist federal government to enter into treaties to permit settlement of their lands. The “treaties,” of course, were not worth the paper they were written on, and the “settlement” amounted to “we’ll steal your land and pen you up over there.”
Desperate to save their sacred lands in the Wallowa Valley, lands essential to their spiritual traditions, several of the chiefs agreed to such “treaties.” Then came the “discovery” of gold by trespassers in those very same sacred lands that the treaties allegedly protected. Under intense pressure to surrender the mineralogically valuable land, the chiefs eventually decided to resist — and, if necessary, to fight to save their lands, their people, their ancestral way of life.
In 1871, Khapkhaponimi walked on. That his people fight to save their sacred lands (and their freedom to be) is recorded as his dying wish. His son, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat, who the dominant culture remembers only as “Chief Joseph,” took up that dying wish as his mantle and his mission. After three years of desperate and ultimately futile negotiations with the U.S. government, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat ordered his people to head northward to safety, taking the women, elders, and children. Battle erupted, and for several months, his warriors engaged the U.S. Army while the people retreated to the hoped-for safety of the Canadian border. Once there, they were ambushed and surrounded, and the bitter cold and lack of food in the northern winter made effective countermaneuvers impossible.
Hinmuuttu-yalatlat worked desperately to negotiate a peace that could be had with honor. It was during this period that his most famous utterances were reportedly made:
“We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man. Free to travel. Free to stop. Free to work. Free to choose my own teachers. Free to follow the religion of my Fathers. Free to think and talk and act for myself.”
“You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.”
He hoped that he was being treated as a peer, as an equal — as a man. And, of course, the invading army’s negotiators were only woo willing to foster that false hope. He was made promises of specific lands — not their most sacred, most important lands, but lands nonetheless — for the people, if only they would lay down their weapons, board the unheated cattle cars of the Iron Horse, and be transported peacefully.
They laid down their weapons. They boarded the freezing metal rail cars.
They were transported to a concentration camp.
Sent first to eastern Kansas, then to Oklahoma, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat and the Nimíipuu spent more than a decade in the wilderness of U.S. Army death camps (and death camps they were, decimating the people’s numbers with epidemics of disease, starvation, and other privation). Eventually, they were promised a safe return to their sacred valley, only to find, once transported, that they were not home but were once again interned, this time on the “reservation” of the people now known as the Coleville.
Hinmuuttu-yalatlat survived another quarter-century. Recognizing the futility of challenging the U.S. Army’s massive numbers and firepower, he nevertheless continued to fight in his own way, challenging their words. He spoke, plainly and proudly, to anyone and everyone who would listen. He insisted on the Native right to self-determination, to autonomy, to sovereignty, to existence — as men, as women, as human beings.
He did not, in his lifetime, create the world that he so devoutly wished to see. But his words have outlived his body, unto the seventh generation and beyond, and they are sound guides for our peoples today in the same ongoing fight for the same existential rights.
Warrior, leader, elder, teacher, he remains, well over a century later, a hero to our peoples and a role model for our own work. It is why Wings has his image tattooed on his upper arm: a reminder of the need for courage and conviction, of the need to adapt but continue the fight, of the need to stand on our principles and keep our traditions alive.
For our people.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
