"INSURGENT MESSAGES": HACHIVI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS AND BUILDING MINNESOTA

ELIZABETH SLOCUM

I

Hachivi (pronounced Hock E Aye Vi) Edgar Heap of Birds is an internationally acclaimed artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent.   He received his M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art; his B.F.A. from The University of Kansas, and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art in London.   Heap of Birds returned to his reservation in 1980 to acquire a concrete experience of his culture.   He is currently on the faculty of Oklahoma University with a joint appointment in Native Studies and the Art Department.  

Heap of Birds works in a variety of mediums: large-scale drawings, acrylic paintings,   prints, monumental porcelain-enamel-on-steel outdoor sculptures, and multi-disciplinary public art messages.   According to the artist, "With regard to the development of my work I am engaged in four primary forms of art practice. These diverse forms seek to allow the full participation of one's self in varied public and private modes.   The first form involves the creation of large celebratory color-contrast paintings. The second art practice deals with presenting the complex daily memories and reactions, which we all posses, through large-scale drawings. The third artistic form involves prints and public art collaboration with communities and their inherent histories. Lastly, the fourth component of [my] artistic mission addresses issues of critical theories and curatorial interests. " 1

1. The artist's large, celebratory acrylic-on-canvas paintings are titled the Neuf Series .   (Neuf is the Cheyenne word for the number four.)   The production of these works is ongoing and originates from Heap of Birds's return to the Cheyenne and Arapho tribal reservation lands in western Oklahoma.   From the invigorating, rural landscape, Heap of Birds began to develop a painted language. This language evolved from the cedar trees, which populate the grasslands, along with arroyos within the red earth.

2. Heap of Bird confronts issues as wide-ranging as nuclear and toxic waste dumping and the sexual ambiguities of modern life.   In "What Makes a Man?", an artwork consisting of a series of phrases written in jagged colored hand-printing, he examines the personal politics of manhood within a tribal context.

3. The artist's print works and public art collaborations are carried out through archival research, community consultations, engagement with local flora and fauna, and visits to historical native sites to ascertain the political and cosmological orientations   In 1988, he placed six aluminum signs in New York City parks as a project for the Public Art Fund.   Called Native Hosts / Reclaim , these signs reminded New York's current inhabitants of whose land they occupy: Shinnecock, Seneca, Tuscarora, Mohawk, Werpoe, and Manhattan.   The words "New York" were written backwards on each sign to symbolically reverse the claims of the post-Columbian city and to force the viewer to face (back into) the past.  

4. Heap of Birds has played the roles of critic and curator.   He maintains that artists can be instrumental in presenting a clear vision of art history of the past and present. "I find it very important," he states, "to comment in written form upon art and present analysis of artistic expression through curatorial efforts."

II

Heap of Birds's critical reputation has been established most by his aggressively political and site-specific public signage projects.   One example is Building Minnesota (1990), a signage installation mounted on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota and commissioned by the Walker Art Center.   In it, Heap of Birds set forty large, metal, billboard-like signs along Minneapolis's downtown riverfront.   The signs honored the forty Dakota men who were sentenced to death by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson after the US-Dakota Conflict of 1862, in what is considered the largest mass execution in American history.   The forty who were hanged were part of a group of over three hundred men who were sentenced to death after a military tribunal.   The remaining two hundred sixty (or more) convicted had their sentences commuted by Abraham Lincoln.  

The Dakota Conflict erupted as a result of white settlements in the Minnesota River Valley, and triggered wars between the Plains Indians and the US Government that were to rage for the next thirty years.   The Native tribes were not allowed the sovereignty and dignity to provide for their own economic livelihood through hunting and gathering.   The Native land base of this region, as across the Americas, was not given the right to exist intact but was superseded by white invading immigrants and their hunger to cultivate and consume more of the earth.   The Indians were starving on reservation lands while the region was shipping grain downriver to other white settlements and fast becoming the "breadbasket" of America. 2

It was Heap of Birds' intention to not only create signs of respect, but also to underscore the fact that "it was the potential disruption of American commerce that cost the Dakota people their lives."   The signs call directly to the viewer and command him to honor the lives of those executed, including Wa-kan-o-zha-zha (Medicine Bottle), Wa-hi-na (I Came) and Na-pe-sni (Fearless).   But the "billboards" also served an educative function.   According to the artist, "The oppression and slaughter of human beings by white American society does not only come from hatred; greed and potential impediment to economic growth also feed the frenzy to kiss and destroy people of color and spirits that grow from the soil or move to the surface that is our earth.   It is therefore proper that we inform the Minnesota public to honor the dead Dakota citizens who were executed by the direct order of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson and with the support of the citizens of Minnesota."

When the work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, it was conceived of not as a solid, permanent structure but as a site-specific reconceptualization of a historic space. 3   The US-Dakota Conflict was fought along the banks of the Mississippi River, on the very banks where Heap of Birds chose to locate his artwork--which form part of what was called the Grain Belt.   In this area, which Minneapolis proudly proclaims as its own, grain and flour mills, canals, and facilities were housed--places for processing and sending out the fruits of "American Process."   Even today, large grain storage tanks across the river from the site evoke the tragic irony of the historical episode that Building Minnesota memorialized.   The land and its economy both became part of the memorial.  

Walker Art Center curator Joan Rothfuss wrote, "[Heap of Birds's] choice of the site relate[d] the events of 1862 to the complex economic and cultural history of this country.   The execution of forty men 128 years ago [was] linked to Native peoples' ongoing struggle for land rights, and thus to a respect for the earth that is traditional in Native culture.   [Heap of Birds] implies that unless our society develops an attitude of respect for the earth, his sculpture may be read as an obituary not only for forty Dakota men, but also for the land that nourishes us all."   Engaging this "nourishing" land, Heap of Birds also engaged water and its many connotations, natural and spiritual.   According to the artist, "the water called the Mississippi, which remains a highway for American business, we seek not only to extract profit from our surroundings.   We also wish to honor the life-giving force of the waters that have truly preserved all of us from the beginning, and to offer respect to the tortured spirits of 1862 that may have sought refuge and renewal through the original purity that is water." 4 

Unlike the recent sanitized designs of the World Trade Center memorials, Building Minnesota forces the viewer to confront the atrocity of the event in question. The signs specifically command the viewer to "HONOR" the dead.   According to Eric Fischl in a recent editorial, "A memorial should be more than a marker at a grave site. It should be a narrative.... Narratives help keep the meaning and significance of great historical events vital" 5  In Building Minnesota , Heap of Birds constructed precisely this, a narrative. Within his larger body of work, the piece continued to dispel the fantasy of Native American art held by non-Indian mainstream.   It took into account the dynamism of relationships to the land which cannot be pinned down into the romantic stereotypes of Indian art and life so popular in white culture.

According to Heap of Birds, "Over all I would say that the work was very successful and timely in it's first installation. It caused a negative uproar from the White community yet brought respect to the Native people and created an enhanced awareness of truer history. The difficult part was and is that no institution will support the return of the artwork to the public. The Walker refuses to re install the piece. Even the MPLS American Indian Center will not handle the work on their grounds. It seems that a clear point of history in the living arts has trouble surviving when it is critical (of a national hero) and very near the location of the memorialized event." 6

Although the injustices of history can never be fully corrected, Heap of Birds tries to reduce their bearing on the present by effecting change. Many choose to forget the dishonored treaties and intolerable pressuring of the [Native] population upon which Minnesota was built.   Heap of Birds instead calls on his viewers to remember, delivering "insurgent messages for America." 7

NOTES

1 www.heapofbirds.com

2 Berlo, Janet C. and Phillips, Ruth B., Native North American Art , Oxford University Press, London, 1998. 236

3 Rushing, W. Jackson. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century : London, New York, 1999. 75

4Absence/Presence exhibition catalog, 1999

5 Fischl, Eric, "A Memorial that's True to 9/11." New York Times December 19, 2003. A35

6 www.heapofbirds.com

7 Rushing125