Memory Map
Note: The publicity image sheet compiled by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the purposes of promoting Memory Map is the most comprehensive (though entirely unordered) source of the works referenced below. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s website has a much higher resolution archive, but it also is not comprehensive, works are unlabeled until opened, and unlinkable when opened. Some works I’ve linked to directly; in most instances that wasn’t possible.
My work comes right from a visceral place — deep, deep — as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take these feelings and attach them to the passerby? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try.
– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
In pheasant feather hands, the Mother holds God is Red by Native philosopher and theologian Vine Deloria Jr.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the artist who created her, nestled the book in her lap, where — in the Christian version of this scene — sits the baby Jesus. An opening over the Mother’s heart reveals an ear of blue corn. She wears moccasins on her feet and buckskin leggings over-wrapped in an American flag. Wood and turquoise beads and a shining abalone shell hang around her neck. Thick black cloth braids frame a framed face. Her baby, their face also framed, is worn in a pack on her back.
The piece’s dimensionality — both literal and figurative — forced me to examine it from every angle. I’m embarrassed to admit I had never heard of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith or seen any of her work prior to first visiting Memory Map at the Seattle Art Museum a month before it closed. Whether that is demonstrative of a failure on the part of the custodians of the canon of art, my education, or my own depleted attention span in my last semester of college when I took both Contemporary Art and Women in Art & Society, I truly don’t know. But what a gift to come across her work now, in the middle of life.
A citizen of The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith’s work has palpable presence. I felt this immediately upon entering the exhibit where sat Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974. Not a hint of posturing, the Mother’s seated position suggested a power foundationed with ease, with self-knowledge. She commanded respect.
It was the perfect opener to the exhibit — an experiential palette stimulator that invited me into a reverent mood prepared to follow her map, wherever it led. This mood, and Indian Madonna Enthroned has stayed with me since. I’ve steeped myself in Smith’s work, listened to her speak, and revisited her art, curation, and activism, listening for her to name the truths she paints so beautifully on canvas.
If the outpouring of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s five-decade career can be taken in whole as a Memory Map, as the title of the recent retrospective exhibition of her art suggests, to what memory do these maps point?
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An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is your mother’s blood…
You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.
–lines from A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo
The memories that begged expression in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work were next rendered in pastel and charcoal in her early maps. In Wallowa Waterhole Series: Spring Tracks, 1979, colorful green planes are intersected with solid, dashed, and printed lines in contrasting colors suggesting not only movement across land but the tracking, the witnessing of that movement. Two pictograph-like horses leap from one side of the map to the other.
“Smith’s belief that the ‘landscape is never static’ underlies the often subtle but ever-present resistance to colonial narratives of land use in her work,” writes Laura Phipps, curator of Memory Map, in her accompanying essay, “My Roots Extend: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and the Landscape of Memory.” The land is foundational to everything. It was never empty, far from trackless, as the fever dream of Manifest Destiny claimed. It’s difficult to tell whether Smith felt compelled to relay this message, and the style of her early maps emerged from it, or if the message was there in her, waiting for expression, the result of an immersion in process and the sense of place inherent in her being.
As Smith’s career progressed, she honed and built upon that foundational message of the land’s primacy and Native peoples' forever presence. In the Chief Seattle series, created 1989-1991, Smith used her canvases to indict American environmental atrocities and rampant resource extraction. In the triptych that is The Spotted Owl (C.S. 1854), 1990, Smith painted a wooded scene eerily void of both the work’s namesake and the old-growth trees upon which they are dependent. Embedded atop the right and left panels are a pair of shining splitting mauls by way of explanation. A bronze plaque at the bottom of the central panel reads C.S. – 1854, a reference to the year the Duwamish and Suquamish chief signed the Treaty of Point Elliott thereby ceding their homelands to the United States government.
A speech made by Chief Seattle to mark the signing of the treaty is excerpted in a number of other paintings in this series. In Sunlit (C.S. 1854), 1989, the words, “The air is precious, for all things share the same breath, the animals, the plants, the humans,” are scrawled under an illuminated light bulb that casts weak light upwards in rays that extend off the canvas onto the gallery wall. If the heavy brushwork and somber palette are indicative of the air quality the quote addresses, the whole piece echoes with the unheeded words of Chief Seattle. On the facing wall is the 1989 painting of the same series, Pictures at an Exhibition (C.S. 1854), in which the quoted lines, “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the inhabitants of the earth,” are fit between framed, crushed aluminum cans atop an oily soup of thick paint. “Smith’s work clearly links the exploitation of the land to the blatant disregard of treaties made between the U.S. government and Native nations,” reads nearby gallery signage.
But there was another level of clarity Smith’s work was building toward, catalyzed by the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in America.
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I was thinking how can I make my messages not so incommunicado? How could I make them so that people would understand more about what I am saying? Because I really felt like I had something to say, to communicate, but I wasn’t doing it right.
– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith on the impetus for her map series that began in 1992
The power of maps lies not merely in their accuracy or their correspondence with reality. It lies in their having incorporated a set of conventions that make them combinable in one central place, enabling the accumulation of both power and knowledge at that center.
– David Turnbull, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas
Where Smith’s first maps quietly depicted Native inhabitation, her 1992 painting Indian Map opted for a louder message. It was the first in her on-going series of paintings of the geo-political (and highly recognizable) American land mass, altered in one way or another. In this her first, states lines are blurred and have the appearance of receding. Collaged across the map are newspaper clippings, both of images and words, that acknowledge the first inhabitants of the American land mass and indict the colonization of Native lands and the genocide and erasure of Native peoples, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” as one clipping announces.
“There was opportunity for a more incisive reading of Native American history as the year 1992 approached,” Phipps writes. The quincentennial, “proved to be a catalyst for many artists reacting to and redirecting this long-skewed historical narrative.” Smith’s maps engaged in the work of correcting those narratives.
Six of Smith’s maps of this series were included in Memory Map, the most recent of which were completed in 2021. They hung together in a single gallery, offering the visitor view upon view of this country through Smith’s eyes. In Memory Map, 2000, pictographs overlay the map, which is obscured, as if by thin gauze. The iconography is reminiscent of some of the inclusions in Smith’s earliest maps, her signs of human habitation. Here they are given the place of priority, they are the representations of the stories of the land. The arbitrariness of state delineations fade behind their presence.
In Survival Map, 2021, Smith rotates the American landmass 90 degrees until the west coast occupies the top of the canvas. Quite suddenly, the power of the shape is stripped. “That North is traditionally ‘up’ on maps is the result of a historical process, closely connected with the global rise and economic dominance of northern Europe,” writes Maps are Territories author, David Turnbull. By rotating her canvas, Smith refuses to accede that dominance.
With this simple reorientation, Smith stepped fully into her artistic voice. The inclusion of Native Plateau inspired patterning around the American landmass further subverts the presumptive power of America, particularly when seen as replacements for the two major fields of the American flag. Smith felt the power of her own work in this instance, “embodied by Indigeneity,” and “too disorienting and subversive for viewers to initially comprehend,” in the words of curator Laura Phipps. In the center of the painting, also rotated by 90 degrees, is the punchline:
NDN humor
Causes people
To survive.
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I like to say that my DNA comes out of that land, because that’s where I was born and it comes into the mother’s bloodstream through the food. And in that food is the DNA of, you know, of weasels, and woodticks, and bluejays, and you name it, it’s all there. You figure thousands and thousands of years of our crumbling bodies merging with the earth and then coming back to feed the mother — so that’s what’s in me.
– Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
I love art. I love its challenge, its commentary on culture and what it means to be human. I found art as a lens on culture so compelling I majored in art history. And still, I can count on a single hand the number of times art has moved me to tears, touched me with truth so deeply that I felt changed by it. Those experiences — the ones in which something essential is witnessed and recognized, in which an entirely new depth of understanding is accessed — have been few.
For me, the capstone of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map was another of Smith’s 2021 maps. It hung in the final gallery, also rotated by 90 degrees, with all the destabilization of power implied. A framed portrait of an unidentified Indigenous woman hung separately above the map, recognized as such by her beautiful clothing and headdress. Below her, the reoriented American landmass is surrounded by blue, the states are delineated and painted with dripping tones of orange, turquoise, gold, and green. Layered over the states are translations for Mother Earth in sixteen different, named languages (none of them English): Mattarahkka, Saami; Ka-luahine, Hawaiian; Madre Terra, Italian; Akna, Maya; Tatei Yurianaka, Huichol, to name a few. At the bottom, Smith names the piece: Map to Heaven.
From Indian Madonna Enthroned to Map to Heaven, Smith’s message, the memory she was pointing me to all along, came through: we’ve forgotten our Mother — our origins, the land, the quality of care we are called to in our relationships with all of life, the quality of care with which we are Mothered by the Earth. But she is the way forward, it is with her guidance and her wisdom we are to proceed. We are the land, and it is us. We need to live out that memory on the land. We need to remember our Mother.
The knowledge exists. The way forward exists. The teachers are here, they’ve always been here. (Smith’s Going Forward, Looking Back, 1996, comes to mind.) It requires a reorientation though — a forgetting of the patriarchal habits of line drawing and maximum resource extraction and militarism. It requires acknowledgement and righting of wrongs. It requires a willingness to be led by the Mother, and by those whose relationship with her is intact, those who have carried this land in their bodies the longest.
“My work comes right from a visceral place — deep, deep — as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take these feelings and attach them to the passerby?” Smith named her artistic vocation. As a passerby in the third floor galleries of the Seattle Art Museum, considering the work of this visionary woman, twice, I am changed.
From my home today, on the lands ceded by Chief Seattle and the Suquamish People, on Mother’s Day, I am ready to remember, to extend roots beyond the soles of my feet into these sacred soils.
