Artists Invited to Disrupt Exhibition at Museum of the Cherokee Indian

By Gina Malone

Disruption, a new exhibition at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian (MCI) in Cherokee, invites 36 artists who are enrolled members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and Cherokee Nation to respond to the recent removal from public view of funerary and culturally sensitive items in MCI’s collection. The exhibition, in which artists fill cases and wall space left empty with works that address contemporary Cherokee culture as well as ancestral methods and aesthetics, opened in the Museum in September and will remain on view through September 11, 2023.

When Evan Mathis become director of collections and exhibitions at MCI in January, he led an inventory of MCI’s collections to identify funerary and sacred objects for removal from display. The EBCI Tribal Historic Preservation Office’s lead archaeologist Beau Carroll (EBCI) and numerous community members aided with the identification. “Funerary objects are objects that were looted or excavated from Native American graves,” Mathis says. “Sacred objects are objects that have been used in ceremonies or for religious practices.” These items, tribal members say, were never meant for public display.

In addition, MCI will update its entire permanent exhibition, which opened in 1998 and welcomes an estimated 83,000 visitors annually, to reflect culture and tell stories rather than follow a historical timeline. One benefit from the update, Mathis says, is that visitors will see “contemporary works from today that allow Cherokees self-representation.” New signage throughout the Museum explains repatriation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and Indigenous collections care. “The Museum plans to share more insight into the artists’ work through programming, and throughout Disruption’s installation,” Mathis says.

Disruption’s opening follows MCI’s announcement of plans to build an off-site collections and archives facility. Items removed from the permanent collection that are not being returned to gravesites will be housed in the new facility and available for viewing by tribal members. “As a tribal museum, we have even more of an obligation and responsibility to the objects, because we consider them ancestors, and not just artifacts,” says MCI director of education Dakota Brown (EBCI). “The people who made these, who put their energy and creativity into those objects, used them, wore them—we’re being respectful of them.”

Enacted in 1990, NAGPRA is a federal law providing for “the repatriation and disposition of certain Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony,” according to its website. Among other things, the law allows for criminal prosecution of those selling or profiting from Native American human remains or cultural items, and civil penalties and the withholding of grants for museums failing to comply with requirements.

Mathis has seen good come of the law since its enactment. “The Tennessee State Museum recently repatriated a pre-removal Cherokee war mask that was purchased from a Cherokee family in Oklahoma,” he says. “We accepted the mask, then repatriated it back to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who stewarded the mask until the Tennessee State Museum purchased it in the 1980s.”

New signs educating MCI visitors include one that reads, “Ethical repatriation extends beyond NAGPRA: it happens when institutions repatriate or return items to their ancestral communities not because a law is forcing them to do so, but out of ethical responsibility to Native communities.”

Artist and MCI assistant registrar Atsei Cooper’s (EBCI) contribution to Disruption draws on her background in archaeology, a strong interest in femininity and Native American cosmology, and her lived experience as a Cherokee woman on the Qualla Boundary. Her work is titled Three Worlds. “Some of the symbols on my painting are pulled directly from vandalized, excavated and looted sites,” she says. “When people see my painting, I want their takeaway to be the power of women, our sacred connection to the upper world, this world and the underworld.” During much of her research and work on the painting, she was pregnant with her son Kanati. “I am grateful I got to create such a meaningful painting on my journey into motherhood,” she says. She is glad to see her painting add to the representation of Cherokee women in the museum. “Our museum did not have much on women in the main exhibit,” she says. “Wherever you went, it was mostly male figures from times of removal. Our women were at the forefront of decisions regarding our tribe. It was nice to see how many artists created pieces surrounding motherhood, femininity and matriarchy.”

Luzene Hill (EBCI), another of Disruption’s artists, grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of a white mother and a Cherokee father from the Yellowhill community of the Qualla Boundary. She now lives and works on the Qualla Boundary. Motifs expressed in her multimedia large installations, performance collaborations, drawings, expressive paintings and sculpture include Indigenous sovereignty and female power and sexuality to challenge colonial patriarchy.

For Disruption, she created a beeswax goddess figure titled Matrilineage. Though small, this piece shares elements with her larger works in its expressiveness. Silver thread attaches, subtly, to the goddess figure, emerges from the case and moves above touching level, with more threads being added along the way, to a place in the museum where, Hill says, an older exhibit existed that did not offer a full sense of Cherokee women. Matrilineage finishes with silk pieces bearing women’s names that, like hers, are likely phonetic English versions of Cherokee sounds. Her intent, she says, is to “indicate that women had a really strong role in Indigenous societies, and most of that was quickly obliterated by colonial settlers and patriarchy.”

She is excited by the new direction MCI is taking because the exhibition represents Cherokee people expressing their culture. With her art she always aims to slow the viewer down. She hopes things are puzzling enough that they take time to observe and ponder. “I do hope that people will be interested to explore the culture that has existed for so long,” she says. “A lot of my work—almost all of it—has been about pre-contact culture and an attempt on my part to find uncorrupted Native art that hasn’t been misinterpreted or somehow destroyed or diminished. So, I hope that people will get interested and realize that Indigenous world views are very different and often misunderstood because they are so different.”

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian is located at 589 Tsali Boulevard, Cherokee. To learn more about Disruption and upcoming events at the Museum, visit mci.org. Check calendars for an Asheville Art Museum exhibition in January that will include Luzene Hill’s work.