In a breathtaking two-minute video called “River (The Water Serpent)” in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, we see a drone shot of a snowy landscape where a crowd has gathered. Each of its members has a vertically mirrored panel. Together, at the right moment, they place the panels horizontally above their heads, reflecting side to the sky, and begin a procession. In the beginning it is loose and tidal pools and swirls. Then it tightens into a stream of light, gains speed and spins like a vortex.
The landscape is a stretch of prairie on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that spans the border between North and South Dakota. The time of shooting was December 2016. The procession, conceived by two Native American artists, Cannupa Hanska Luger and Rory Wakemup, was a combined act of protest and conservation.
It was carried out by some of the many hundreds of protesters who had come as “water protectors” intent on halting the US government’s plan to install a major oil pipeline near Black Rock, an action which could poison the reserve’s water supply, and would certainly desecrate its ancestral burial grounds. The mirrored panels were shields designed to protect the protectors from resistance they would encounter and to make their attackers look hard on themselves.
The video is one of 40 works that make up ‘Water Memories’, a poetically faceted pocket-sized show about the material and symbolic role of water in Native American life. Hosted by Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American Art at the Met, it combines traditional objects from the permanent collection with modern and contemporary loans, including some from non-Native artists.
A fleet of toy-like 19th-century canoe models with origins from the northwest coast to the northeast forests make up the show’s bicoastal range, suggesting the role of water as a medium for commercial and cultural networks. The equivalent of long-haul trucks, Native American boats transported commodities and handicraft commodities — baskets, ceramics, luxury beadwork — across rivers on highways up and down and through what is now called North America.
Ideas were also conveyed about values and governance, about past and future, about life in this world and others. Wisconsin-born Ho-Chunk artist Truman T. Lowe (1944-2019) paid tribute to the cosmopolitan nature of water travel in his 1993 “Feather Canoe,” an openwork boat made of willow branches and filled with white feathers. Suspended from the ceiling and lit from within, it projects shadows and spots of light onto the gallery floor.
Bought by the Met last year, it’s a beautiful thing and appears to have held personal significance for Lowe, a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “If I have a religion,” he said, “it must be canoeing. I canoe wherever there is water. It puts me in a completely different state of mind and provides everything I need to exist.”
A swath of ocean is visible in the background of a large, haunting triptych painting from 1989 called “Possession on the Beach” by Fritz Scholder (1937-2005), an artist of a quarter of Luiseño descent who has been both admired and reviled for his popular ” Indian” portraits. (He claimed both critical reactions were equally cool to him. He just wanted people to keep watching.)
The watery element, on the other hand, is all-encompassing in “Water Memory” by Cara Romero (Southwest Chemehuevi), a 2015 large-format photograph of ceremonially costumed corn dancers from Santa Clara Pueblo performing underwater, as if immersed in a mystical realm where beauty and danger, rising and falling are inseparable.
Jones’ photo has been installed with several photographs by German-born American cartographer Henry P. Bosse (1844-1893). Bosse was hired by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to photograph portions of the Mississippi River, including (although he may not have known this) areas from which Native Americans had been forcibly removed. He essentially approached his task as an art project, producing hundreds of carefully composed azure vistas over a decade. (Eight can be seen). The military’s interest in the project was, of course, very different. His job was to turn the river into a government-operated transportation route, and for that he needed photographic data.
Jones’ marker tree image honors an instrument of accompaniment. Bosse’s air-and-water images, whatever his intentions, were tools of top-down control, now valuable as records of vanishing tribal territory.
A display of a dozen beautiful glass whale oil lamps also has a story to tell. For Native Americans in coastal areas, whaling has long been a form of subsistence hunting (or harvesting in the case of washed up whales). Among American white settlers, whaling in the early 1800s was a huge affair, a thriving, violent enterprise. There was a frenzied demand for whale oil as a fuel and lubricant, and ambergris, a byproduct of the animal’s digestive process, as a fixative for perfumes.
A 2021 ceramic sculpture by Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard speaks of this history. The Shinnecock, with tribal land on the eastern side of what is now Long Island, was historically a community of ocean harvesters. Leonard’s sculpture, a ghostly mound of hollow clay shapes resembling sperm whales’ teeth, pays tribute to that history. But it’s also a memorial to the horrific and ongoing environmental impacts that 19th-century industrial-scale whaling introduced.
Near this elegiac work, Norby hovers one of her exhibition’s historic ornamental notes in the form of a small 1929 painting called “Reaching Waves” by American modernist Arthur Dove (1880-1946). Dove spent the last two decades of his life on Long Island with his wife, the painter Helen Torr. And they were devoted water people, living much of that time on a boat. Dove’s thunderously delicate photo dates from those years.
There are other highlights to linger on too: a pre-1850 miniature birch-bark canoe replete with bird oars, silk sails and a small carved fish, the catch of the day; a 1970s denim jean jacket embroidered with a bright red thunderbird, a long-standing emblem of Indigenous activism; and a ceramic bowl made by the great San Ildefonso Pueblo potter Maria Martinez (1887-1980), and painted with a swirling image of the Tewa Pueblo serpent god Avanyu, the guardian of water.
Avanyu brings us back to the Standing Rock video, which anchors a time-traveling show in the present. Last May, Norby invited members of local Native American communities to participate in a Mirror Shield workshop at the Met. It was led by Luger, who also posted a short how-to video online and whose idea for the shields was originally inspired by news photos of Ukrainian women holding mirrors to riot police during pro-democracy demonstrations in 2013, “hoping to protect humanity and make them less violent,” writes Nick Estates (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule Sioux Tribe), one of the many Indigenous community members who wrote personal responses to the art in the show in the form of wall labels.
All shields produced by the workshop will be sent to water conservationists after the show. Until then, several flank the entrance to the Met gallery, framing the art and history beyond and reflecting us as we approach the show in a fragmented, multi-angled way, like moving water or memory might.
Water Memories
Through April 2, 2023, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue, (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.