Remembering Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

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, January 15, 1940–January 24, 2025

In pheasant feather hands, the Mother holds God is Red by Native philosopher and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. Smith nestled the book in her lap, where, in the Christian version of this scene, sits the baby Jesus. 

A citizen of The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith’s work has palpable presence. I felt this immediately upon entering Memory Map, 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 Smith’s map, wherever it led. 

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, a retrospective of her five decade career curated by the Whitney Museum of American Art and brought to the Seattle Art Museum last year. Whether that is demonstrative of a failure on the part of the custodians of the canon of art, my education in art history, or my own depleted attention span in my last semester of college when I took both Contemporary Art and Women in Art & Society, I can’t say. But what a gift to come across her work when I did, in the middle of life, in the middle of an investigation of the psychological concept of place attachment.

I saw Memory Map for the first time a month before it closed. I visited it a second time the day before it closed. I would have gone back five times more had I visited sooner. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died last week at the age of 85, and I’ve been thinking of the impact of her work–on me, on the art world, on the country–since learning of her passing. Her words are reverberating in my mind, alongside her paintings.

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, January 15, 1940–January 24, 2025

Smith’s maps, the paintings for which the retrospective of her work was named, represent her artistic vision and voice at its fullest. In 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’ arrival in North America, Smith began experimenting with more overt imagery. She had used the word and concept of maps in previous works, but she felt that the message was as yet unclear: “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,” she said of her work up to this point. 

She began using the highly recognizable geo-political map of the United States as the container for her message, riffing on Jasper Johns work of the mid-twentieth century. Six of Smith’s maps from this period were included in Memory Map, the most recent of which was completed in 2021. 

Where Smith’s first maps quietly depicted Native inhabitation, her 1992 painting Indian Map opted for a louder message. In this the first of her new maps, 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 indicated by one clipping.

The maps from this series 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 predating colonization. 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. The power of the shape of the American landmass 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.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Map to Heaven, 2021. Acrylic, ink, charcoal, and paper on canvas with framed photograph.

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. 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.

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.

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 this land. 

The knowledge exists. The way forward exists. The teachers are here, they’ve always been here. It requires a reorientation though, a forgetting of the habits of line drawing and place over-naming 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. We need to remember our Mother. 

“Native ideology insists that we are part of the sacred, from the solar dust on this planet as well as our bodies recycling with the ancestors and all other living things,” Smith wrote for the exhibition catalog that accompanied The Land Carries our Ancestors, a celebration of American Indigenous art curated by Smith in 2023 and exhibited at The National Gallery of Art. “We believe that anywhere we walk, and especially in our homelands, we have been here so long that we stir the DNA of our ancestors.”

As she joins the ancestors and is reincorporated into the land she so loved and honored throughout her career, my gratitude to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith wells up within me. May we continue to learn from her. May we uphold her vision and amplify her voice across this sacred land.