North American Uncanny: Shelley Niro’s Activist Photography

Raymond, Claire

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28497-8_7

Claire Raymond²

331 Accesses

Abstract

In this chapter, I investigate the shape of a North American uncanny through the photography of Shelley Niro, an artist who is an enrolled member of the Mohawk (Turtle Clan), Six Nations. In interpreting Niro’s oeuvre, I draw from her work in still photography noting that her films and photographs together express Niro’s vision of the cheapness of the culture created by capitalist colonization, the damaged and damaging force it still yields. The photographic image distills the nonmaterial space between act and impact, event and narrative. Niro’s work invokes the largely disavowed trauma at the heart of America’s double-tongued history of attempting to destroy Indigenous American culture and peoples while covering up that violence in discursive modes—religious, filmic, verbal, and pictorial—that claim European settlers’ right to the North American continent. My notion of a North American Uncanny differs from previous ideas of an Indigenous Uncanny as I trace ways that North America as it has been impacted by colonization becomes an uncanny space for Indigenous North Americans. I do not posit Indigenous peoples as uncanny. On the contrary, I emphasize how Shelley Niro sees the world around her as uncanny, a reversal of perspective.

Download chapter PDF

The uncanny is a problem at home . From the nearness of what is familiar, the uncanny emerges as a discomforting distance, a place that cannot be assimilated with one’s unthought, habitual practice of self.¹ To inhabit an uncanny space is to be not at home; to see an uncanny image is to experience the unsettling shift wherein one ceases to feel at home. But the idea of being “at home” does not necessarily invoke clichés of the quotidian domestic. Rather, it means to be sure of oneself as a social entity. A raucous bar scene in a college town where American fraternity brothers get drunk may not conjure notions of domesticity, but it is not uncanny from the perspective of the frat boys. It’s not uncanny for them because white fraternity brothers in a bar in the United States are not outside their domain of social power. Fraternity life has, however, been described in decidedly gothic terms by Liz Seccuro, a survivor of sexual assault in a fraternity house.² Uncanniness has an inverse relationship to power and the sense of one’s personal safety. In this book, the uncanny I pursue through readings of photography is a political uncanny: it is about power and powerlessness, bodily integrity and its abrogation—all the ways that power and bodily integrity are projected onto and picked up by socially coded space through images. This political uncanny is reflected in photographs that reveal power dynamics that are usually suppressed into invisibility but are excavated by art.³

In this chapter, I investigate the shape of a North American uncanny through the photography of Shelley Niro , an artist who is an enrolled member of the Mohawk Six Nations Reserve, Bay of Quinte Kanien’kehaka Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan.⁴ In interpreting Niro’s oeuvre, I draw from her work in still photography but note that she is perhaps best known as a filmmaker and that there are deep links between her photography and her film works. For instance, her series of photographs The Shirt (2003) directly connects to her short movie of the same title. The film and photographs together express Niro’s vision of the cheapness of the culture created by capitalist colonization, the damaged and damaging force it still yields. The photographic image distills the non-material space between act and impact, event and narrative.⁵

In general, Niro’s work invokes the eerie, and largely unacknowledged, trauma at the heart of the United States’ double-tongued history of attempting to destroy Indigenous American culture and peoples while covering up that violence in discursive modes—religious, filmic, verbal, and pictorial—that claim the European settlers’ right to the full use of the North American continent.⁶ Theorist Mark Windsor perceptively describes the uncanny as an impossible duality, a category violation, for example a book that rains, a mirror that speaks.⁷ We can see the American uncanny is just such a case: the uncomfortable duality of a government espousing freedom and liberty while suppressing the nation’s own formative history of genocide. In using the word “genocide,” I reference the work of scholars David E. Stannard, Benjamin Madley, Karl Jacoby, Jeffrey Ostler, and others, making the argument that the catastrophic population loss of Indigenous Americans , during the “settling” of America, is best understood as genocide.⁸ This history of erasure is crucial background knowledge for my unpacking of Shelley Niro’s photography. Not all historians agree on the numbers and nomenclature, but I think we can all see that America and Canada are social and geographic spaces in which Indigenous Americans historically have been killed, silenced, and constrained to a significant extent.

In this chapter, I emphasize the way that Niro’s work dramatizes uncanny boundaries, eerie spaces of unresolved grief and loss. Her work is not only haunting but also haunted . Renée Bergland identifies the image of the Indigenous American as a ghost , the uncanny “other,” and, thus, as a constitutive, if negative, trope of Euro-American identity.⁹ My argument in this chapter, however, subverts Bergland’s, in ways that will become clear. Bergland’s The National Uncanny lays out the long history of Euro-Americans envisioning Indigenous Americans as ghostly, death-bound, and invisible, a process Bergland calls “discursive colonization.”¹⁰ Early settlers mythologized the Indigenous peoples whose land they were invading as forest-dwelling devils, which Europeans feared.¹¹ These concepts predate photography, but photographs came to play a key role in disseminating racist ideologies.¹² For example, early twentieth-century American photographers Edward Curtis and Gertrude Kasebier created images romanticizing Indigenous Americans as a “vanishing” people, already ghosts , reflecting a creepy nostalgia for the days of pre-contact North America.¹³ Even as the North American settlers deployed violence against Indigenous peoples, these Europeans saw themselves as the ones at risk, creating discursive structures that depicted Indigenous Americans as soulless waifs.¹⁴ Indigenous Americans were represented in the emerging national discourse as either already dead or deserving to be killed.¹⁵

The European invasion and colonization of North America shaped an uncanny homeland for Indigenous Americans , a social and physical “home ” in which their ancestral space and place were violently estranged.¹⁶ Developing beyond Bergland’s classic work, in this chapter, I explore the opposite side of her thesis on the uncanny. Rather than looking at ways that whites saw, or see, Indigenous Americans as ghosts , I look instead at how contemporary Indigenous North American photography represents the impact of colonization as uncanny for Indigenous Americans. Overturning Bergland’s argument that Indigenous Americans see themselves as ghosts, I trace ways that Indigenous Americans view Euro-American culture as deathly, haunting, and uncanny—the opposite of homey and life-giving. As Bronislaw Malinowski argues, some words are untranslatable across cultures, for as we move into different cultural groups—say, from Indo-European to Iroquoian—not only does the structure of language change but also the mode of thought. Some words just cannot be accurately translated.¹⁷ Yet, though the notion of the uncanny—that which estranges one’s homeplace and makes it eerie—stems from European discourse, still it suffuses the traumatic and offers a paradigm for seeing colonization from an Indigenous perspective.¹⁸ One might say that Europe infected America with uncanniness. In the Iroquian group language, Onondaga, the words for “strangely wonderful” (jachte wagelichwajenteri) and “terribly strange” (jachgatgathonochsaje) are related but distinct, suggesting a concept of the uncanny that distinguishes between the mystically inspiring and the frighteningly abnormal.¹⁹ Shelley Niro’s work pulls on both registers, bringing wonder and beauty to stories of terror and loss that are part of Iroquoian history.

I focus on the photography of Shelley Niro to illuminate the uncanny home of colonization’s aftermath, following my book’s thesis that in photography the uncanny shimmer of modernity’s double gaze catches us. Niro’s work is at times described as quietly humorous.²⁰ But her work has a force that goes beyond such soft descriptions. Niro attends particularly to geography; the place is evocatively drawn in her photography and film. In her work I trace the representation of post-colonial North America as a place that has become uncanny for Indigenous Americans . In Niro’s work, we do not see Indigenous Americans as spectral, ghostly figures. To the contrary we see ways that the United States and Canada have become haunted spaces in the Indigenous American gaze.²¹

The violence exerted against the indigenous peoples of North America during this region’s colonization created the epitome of the uncanny experience for Indigenous peoples—making what was for thousands of years their home no longer homelike for them. That this violent upheaval was pushed beneath the threshold of public statement meant that the true nature of this colonization was secret, hidden.²² In Niro’s work, the tragedy of one’s own ancestral homeland made strange through the process of forceful colonization is displayed in unsettling images that remove us from the stereotypes of “wild Indians” and dying, vanishing Indians, as well as clichés of Indigenous American spirituality.²³

For the survivors of what historian David E. Stannard calls North America’s holocaust, home becomes uncanny because America remains their ancestral space and yet inherited access to and control of this domain is lost.²⁴ Imagine that someone were to come into your house tonight and take everything out, removing also all forms of your identification so that you had no way to replace the losses. You still live in your house, but you are forced to sleep in a corner of the basement (or attic) while the thief inhabits the place at will, moving in with his family, killing your husband and taking your daughter for his wife. What I’ve just written, a parable of the Indigenous American experience, sounds like a gothic horror story. The Western roots of the concept of the uncanny are formed concurrently with aggressive colonization of the Americas.²⁵ The notion of “home ” estranged from itself—enforced secrecy, hiding the violence of one’s home’s history—emerges in Western discourse precisely as Western nations are engaged in violating Indigenous people’s lands in the Americas.²⁶

In Niro’s photographic works, we see the real national uncanny: not the imaginary figure created by whites of the Indian-as-ghost but the image of home , a geographic place inhabited by one’s ancestors for millennia, made strange, unreal, and unhomelike through the violent work of colonizers. The subject of Niro’s work is the strangeness of America after colonization, the abiding reflection of North America as an uncanny social space—uncanny not because it was once inhabited solely by Indigenous Americans but, on the contrary, because it is no longer a predominantly Indigenous American land. Her photographic and film works are driven by the uncanniness of a home that is not home, of ancestral homelands that have been perverted, turned into power plants and real estate developments, divided by abrupt national boundaries. Niro fosters a re-envisioning of Canada and the United States, allowing us to see our uncanniness as nations through the lens of this Indigenous artist who impassively contemplates the eerie social space created in North America through colonization.

Boundaries and Frontiers

Niro’s work points to the strangeness of the Euro-American social space and the long history of Euro-American geographical aggression, its constant urge to expand its own domain. Niro’s 1992 photographic series, “This Land Is Mime Land,” presents Niro , alongside some of her female family members, poking sartorial fun at the self-reflexive ideologies of domain and dominance that fomented North America’s history of colonization and that continue to shape ideas of citizenship in North America.²⁷ The series features a triptych, Final Frontier (1992) that opens with a self-portrait of the photographer dressed in mimicry of the Star Trek television series.²⁸ The triptych’s name evokes the Star Trek catchphrase, “Space, the final frontier,” as an emblem of the Euro-American celebration of conquering frontiers. Niro’s photograph unveils the ideologically fabricated notions of the nation-state domain with “frontier” being conceived as the territory not yet conquered.²⁹ In her costume, Niro makes the point that Indigenous Americans are not included in the varied racial discourse of Star Trek, except in the problematic episode, “The Paradise Syndrome,” which makes all too clear the seamless fusion between the television show’s notion of outer space as a final frontier and the foundations of Euro-American belief in conquering Indigenous people as requisite to manifest destiny. “The Paradise Syndrome” presents Indigenous Americans as aliens, entirely different from Europeans and lost in a past from which they cannot return.³⁰ In the Final Frontier (1992) triptych, Niro in the Star Trek costume is juxtaposed with a photograph of her daughter, playing with a skate-board and the family dog.³¹ This image appears to be taken in bright sunlight as the dog is overexposed and the little girl shields her eyes. The third image is, again, Niro herself this time in nondescript, late twentieth-century clothes. The three images together reveal the everydayness of Mohawk life and culture, indicating the radical inappropriateness of Euro-America’s pronounced tendency to see Indigenous Americans as “other,” as a group that lies beyond the pale and inhabits even now—in the twenty-first century—an imagined frontier.³²

On the surface, Niro’s triptych mocking Star Trek is playful, as are her photographs of herself costumed as Snow White in the triptych The Warning of Snow and her photograph of herself costumed as Marilyn Monroe in 500 Year Itch, all part of her “This Land Is Mime Land” series.³³ What appears strange in these photographs of an Indigenous North American woman dressed as Snow White, a Star Trek crew member, and Marilyn Monroe, is not the Mohawk woman herself but the photographs’ unsettling exposure of these costumes of white femininity. These ideas of femininity—Monroe’s fabrication of the dumb blonde and Snow White’s commercially produced whiteness—oppressively enforce onto the female body strictures and paraphernalia of powerlessness, lending it a kind of deathliness that is read as allure.³⁴ Marilyn Monroe and Snow White are configured as women evacuated of agency and force, manifestations of the living dead. Snow White, in the European fairytale as in Disney’s appropriation, appears to die when eating the poisoned apple, while Monroe was a Hollywood studio creation of a femme enfant without agency, wholly serving the erotic desires of men.³⁵ The emblematic tableau of both Snow White and Monroe is the dead/sleeping woman who never gains agency. These repressive feminine strictures are also part of the fabric of dominant “whiteness,” social patterns that exclude Indigenous American women, make them appear to be alterior, outside accepted social boundaries.³⁶

Femininity is structurally outside the traditional boundary of Western citizenship, but these images in “This Land Is Mime Land” are more than just a critique of male domination.³⁷ The photographs unearth an intersection of the gendered and racialized parameters of citizenship, a nexus of maleness and whiteness that constitutes social power. They point to that which is uncanny and surreal about contemporary North America: a social space dominated by pop culture icons, with those figures creating a discourse that erases Indigenous American presence in their own homeland.³⁸ Snow White is almost killed at home —unsafe there because her vengeful stepmother appears with the poisoned apple—while Marilyn Monroe dies at home, swallowing sleeping pills. Snow White lies in a coffin at home, and Marilyn is embalmed in cultural memory as the couchant, supine suicide found in the nude . Neither of these images of the white feminine can keep a home safe and happy—or keep herself safe and happy at home. Yet this very powerlessness is used as a symbolic cudgel to dispossess non-Euro women of visibility.

Niro gives visibility to Indigenous North American women in her triptych photographs The 500 Year Itch (referring to five hundred years of colonization) and Warning of Snow (referring to the encroachment of white people in North America). The photographs in “This Land Is Mime Land” are all triptychs, contrasting the mimicked photographs of white pop icons with photographs of Niro and her mother, daughter, and sisters dressed in everyday clothes and ensconced in Mohawk domesticity. These countering images of Native American women point to the strangeness and un-homeyness of the white pop icons that Niro invokes. The term “at home ” implies a specific relationship to citizenship.³⁹ To inhabit a home space or homeland that is not uncanny is to inhabit a space over which one has some degree of control. In the liberal and neoliberal discourse that shapes nation-states, this control is called “citizenship.”⁴⁰

The Euro-American notion that citizenship does not apply to those people who for millennia have inhabited North America but does apply to an amorphous and promethean smorgasbord of coded “white” qualities—for instance, being Christian and having a pale complexion, a snub nose, an Anglo name—is crucial both to the history of colonization and also to the territorial disputes that are, as I write in 2018 and 2019, fueling controversy along the southern border of the United States of America.⁴¹ Consider that, until 1924, Indigenous Americans were not considered US citizens and, unlike most people arriving from other countries, were also barred from becoming citizens.⁴² In 2018 and 2019, most of the people seeking to enter the United States across its southern border are descended wholly, or in part, from Indigenous Americans—that is, they are Latinx people—and because of their deep, historical context of being Indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent, they were refused entry.⁴³ The US government’s policy of so-called strong borders is precisely aimed at preventing peoples of Indigenous American descent from moving freely around the North American continent.⁴⁴ This form of immigration restriction emerges, then, from earlier Euro-American notions of conquest and dominion. It carries with it a trace of frontier logic, that is, the idea that terrain must be physically strictured, marked off from indigenous peoples. Overwhelmingly, it carries with it the idea that Indigenous Americans must be controlled—physically and, when necessary, by force. Hence, the current US administration’s policy of punishing prospective immigrants at its southern border by separating these children from their parents is, by another name, a policy against Indigenous Americans —a policy that has its foundation on the demagogic mobilization of the idea of a frontier.⁴⁵

Frontier space is an ideological uncanny. A frontier is a geographical representation of the ideology of dominance, achieved by describing people as “other,” people who must be conquered and whose space must be invaded in order for the invader to feel “at home .” The very word “frontier” denotes that which is not settled, an unstable or contested domain.⁴⁶ The notion’s uncanniness inheres in this idea of absence, of a vacancy in terms of social space. “Frontier” implies a place not yet made home. It is a contested space, and it, truly, is not a home —neither for the Indigenous people whose territory has been contested nor (yet) for the colonizers. Niro’s work critiques and re-envisions the concept of the frontier, the ideological premise of a boundary beyond which an unrecognizable “wild” other lives. Displacing and dislodging the notion of frontier, Niro visually instates a reconceptualization of land, one based on mutual respect and also—importantly—holding a respectful distance between cultures, as each society and realm respects the distinctness of the other. Her photographic series, “Stories of Women,” “Borders,” “Passages,” and “Battlefields of My Ancestors,” and her films Tree, It Starts with a Whisper, and Kissed by Lightning, play through tropes—geometric, political, and conceptual—of uncanny boundaries, staging re-encounters with colonization’s past through seeing anew its present impact. Niro’s work shows the uncanniness of colonization. For Indigenous Americans , staying in North America becomes a process of inhabiting an uncanny terrain, a land estranged.⁴⁷

Territory, Nation-State

If Niro’s photographic works give visual form to a different notion of social space—expressing the potential for a sociality of fairness—this is in stark contrast to the Euro-American imperialist ideology of nationality and national boundaries. From the sixteenth century onward, the model of the emergent nation-state was aggressively imposed onto the North American continent in a pattern of European colonization that did not acknowledge an ethical right of Indigenous peoples to maintain their civilizations on their traditional ancestral lands.⁴⁸ The process of taking the North American continent for the use of people of European descent was, more than anything else, a process of disregarding boundaries and borders and, later, of ignoring treaties negotiated with Indigenous Americans .⁴⁹ This habitual disregard stems from the model of the European nation-state. Rooted first in mercantilism and then in capitalism and holding a winner-take-all approach to resources, the territorial nation-state gave spatial and social form to the ideology of might is right. In other words, if you could, it was acceptable to take everything from your neighbor.⁵⁰ In this sense, the nation-state was a superficially peaceful stasis covering over an underlying philosophy of war without limits.⁵¹ In North America, over the course of five centuries of colonization, the impact of this ideology was that the land became a zone of erasure, wherein much of the physical presence (and to some extent the cultural memory) of Indigenous Americans was elided.⁵² Rather than shaping boundaries in which groups could coexist, the territorial nation-state model could not, and cannot, tolerate the forceful, fully enfranchised civic presence of North America’s Indigenous people.⁵³ This intolerance creates an uncanny world, one that from the perspective of Indigenous North Americans is a home eviscerated of homeyness, safety, fidelity.⁵⁴

It is within, and also beyond, this haunted social space that Niro navigates and negotiates in photography. Against the pressure of assimilation, Niro posits an elegant geometry of distance and, in her frequent evocation of the figure of Sky Woman, a sense of beyond-ness—looking at the sky as the last zone that has not been colonized.⁵⁵ For Niro, images of Sky Woman symbolize a refusal to assimilate to the Euro-American culture and, at the same time, an effort to come to terms with the mournful reality of history and with the present-day reality of a nation-state run according to capitalist ideology. Her series of photograph collages, “Flying Woman,” evokes Sky Woman in a contemporary idiom (Fig. 7.1).⁵⁶ Here, the social text of contemporary American culture is framed beneath the gaze of a woman who literally flies above it all. Niro’s flying woman is a liminal figure. She has no wings but is not presented as a ghost ; she exists as a reflection of the unhomey terrain of contemporary North America, flying above it and resisting the loss of home through physical distance. Physical space is uncannily evoked in Niro’s “Flying Woman” series as the domain of a woman who flies with no wings. The flying woman moves above groups of people who do not notice her or, if they do, seem to barely see her. She does not appear afraid or vindictive. Nor does she appear to have a specific goal in flying. She is simply airborne, slightly outside the earthly, though close enough to see it, a figure at the boundary who observes and refuses to come down.

Here, Niro’s activist art engages a subtle figuration of protest. Her flying woman is suspended, liminal, between zones. In that we define home by its edges, the flying woman is not at home. She traces boundaries rather than residing within them. But it seems that she has not given up looking for home: she flies low, apparently seeking a place to come home . Geographic boundaries that have been violated, with European encroachment of Indigenous American lands, are echoed by systemic violation of economic boundaries.⁵⁷

In her elegiac film Ongniaahra/Niagara, Niro deploys a slow-moving image of the falls overlaid with sparse dialogue. In conversational caption phrases, this dialogue limns a young woman’s difficult life and premature death.⁵⁸ The boundary of the Niagara Falls is, of course, a national boundary, the demarcation of the United States and Canada. In this film, the falls is also shown to be an uncanny boundary between the living and the dead as the slowly shifting camera mobilizes the force of water to reconnect the filmmaker and the film’s viewers with the dead woman, whom we learn, with painful shock, is the filmmaker’s daughter. The film vivifies a ghost not by showing the dead but by addressing her in an extended, visual apostrophe. Niro states: “There is a narrative in this video… a memory of my mother, telling me about a dream she had. She passed away two days later…the narrative is [also] about my daughter. The night she spent in jail, she was very sad and [then] suddenly a boy recognized her voice. She laughed as she told me this part.”⁵⁹ When Niro presented this film at the Boarding House Gallery in Guelph, Ontario, she also presented beadwork done by impoverished Haudenosaunee women since the nineteenth century , demonstrating that the nearby Niagara Falls is more than a boundary between nations and between the living and the spirit world—it is as well a site of economic domination.

Euro-American encroaches, expressed through the workings of capitalism such as land sales, have further shrunk the geography of Indigenous American reservations, which were already formal articulations of displacement.⁶⁰ With capitalism as the implicit law of the United States and Canada, part of what Niro protests is the negative environmental effects of unchecked capitalist-driven development. In her work is a deeply mournful engagement with the land itself. After centuries of colonization, Indigenous Americans now find themselves doubly displaced.⁶¹ The Mohawk people were pushed out of their homeland in what is now New York State after the Revolutionary War.⁶² In Niro’s series of photographs, “Battlefields of My Ancestors,” connections between the so-called Indian Wars and the contemporary capitalist selling of land are shown to work in tandem to estrange the ancestral land of the Mohawk from the living people of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tusacarora.

In “Battlefields of My Ancestors” Niro invokes the boundary of the Mohawk River as a haunted space and sacred place. In Niro’s work, rivers evoke haunted places of longing. Rivers mark boundaries impressed onto indigenous land by Europeans but they are also older, traditional borders, and suggest boundaries between the dead and the living. Expressing a longing to reintegrate with this land that is ancestral to her people—the original, pre-Revolutionary War, Mohawk territory that reached across much of the northeast, far beyond the border of Canada—Niro’s subtle photographs investigate the eerie visuality of colonization.⁶³ In her outlay of image, Niro represents the ethics of respecting not only those human beings who are ancestrally of North American land but also the ethics and morality of not violating the land itself, or, as we moderns are wont to call it, “natural resources,” a term that places the earth into a capitalist framework.⁶⁴ Niro’s work presents geography in terms of an ethic of respect for the land as opposed to a political policy with respect to a “border” and a “frontier,” with “frontier” meaning the terrain that the nation-state is striving to claim.

In these photos, Niro contends with the problems of national borders and the violence that creates and enforces them. “Battlefields of My Ancestors” is a group of clear, digital, color-photographs showing demarcation lines that have fractured the traditional Haudenosaunee world, zones of “frontiers” and the battles for their domination. The images are a kind of cinéma vérité of the geographical marks and apportioning of land left by history. In the calmness of the photographs, Niro presents the mournful aftermath of battles that stripped her ancestors of their homeland.

The series of photographs speaks in two ways at once. On the one hand, the images are calm and straightforward testimonials. Revising documentary photography to give it historical depth, they show what is happening here, in the twenty-first century , in the aftermath of centuries of colonization. The photographs take the mask off the dominant social myth of Euro-American ideology, the myth that the “settling” of North America was a triumphant march forward for human history or, as the phrase goes, a manifest destiny.⁶⁵

As a counter-memory to this myth of Euro-American settler heroism, Niro’s photographs are emblems of memory and mourning for the Haudenosaunee. Her images show an estranged landscape, a place that was turned into a no-man’s-land by imperialist-capitalist policies that raped this land, taking it by force.⁶⁶ Exposing the way that North America’s history of violence has shaped its geography, how battlefields have metamorphosed to boundary zones, Niro’s series has a quotidian rhythm and a surface look of calm—but, from underneath, these images express the pain of geographical violation.

A key photograph from the “Battlefield” series, Site of Indian Village shows a New York State plaque commemorating the destruction of a Mohawk village.⁶⁷ It is unclear from the plaque whether this fact is being celebrated, mourned, or simply stated for the record. Niro’s photograph exemplifies photography’s uncanny power: she shows the nondescript plaque, the green and mown roadside bank, the slope of the road curving into a slightly askew vanishing point. Everything in the image is quotidian: everyday America, business as usual. Then, suddenly, looking at the image, we realize there is nothing left of this Mohawk village. Niro’s photograph articulates how this plaque is profoundly insufficient recompense for the loss it records. The corner of a red barn is visible in the photograph, so we can see that what has survived on this spot of earth is Euro-American. The intense fore-fronting of the plaque skews the image’s scale. The relatively small plaque is rendered enormous while the landscape recedes.

What matters in the long perspective of the image is the lost village, signified by the plaque: all that holds this knowledge of this lost place and lost community is the plaque. Without the plaque, the village would be completely erased. And yet the plaque itself also functions as erasure, turning what was a robust village into a tiny plaque by the roadside, turning what was a battle and a slaughter into a space not especially reserved for mourning and contemplation. But the lost village is also connoted by the long view of the photograph. Niro harnesses photography’s perspectival geometry to cast a long backward glance at this landscape that bears witness to the disappearance of Indigenous peoples from the place of that village.

Her eerie photograph engages the viewer in our need to mourn and to think. It does so by dislocating our habits of seeing, deploying photography’s alternate, uncanny nature to show that the cozy tourist lane of rural upstate New York, green and lush, is a battlefield haunted by the ever-unresolved issues of boundaries, treaties, rights, and geographical ethics in this country that elides the history of its own Indigenous people.⁶⁸ This Haudenosaunee ancestral home has been displaced, in the photograph, by the plaque that Niro foregrounds, making the point that Indigenous displacement not just an event from the past; it is a contemporary reality. This is chronic and ongoing displacement is a past that shapes the geography of the present day. The crisp color of her digital image brings the view right into the second decade of the twenty-first century : we are here. The past does not recede; it uncannily remains with us.

In another image from “Battlefields of My Ancestors,” Tutela Heights, Niro captures a placid and beautiful autumnal landscape with a river running through it—a lovely scene that seems remote from the series title, though its color saturation is eerily bright.⁶⁹ The image shows Tutela Heights, near Brantford, Ontario, where the Mohawk retreated when forced out of the United States by General George Washington.⁷⁰ Niro clarifies that “People from the Six Nations Reserve know what Tutela represents. During the Indian Wars, mid 1800s, the Tutela Indians came to this territory and asked if they could stay here, away from the violence. They were given some land along the river. There are variations of this story. History books will say disease wiped them out, some say they were adopted into Iroquois life and others say they were chased out by the white population that was squatting on the borders of the Grand River.”⁷¹ The area is now being sold for development.

Niro’s photograph of the river running beneath Tutela Heights evokes a double to the Mohawk River in the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, which is the heart of Mohawk ancestral homeland and no longer in the domain of the tribe. Tutela Heights looks at an eerie space of a river, holding ancestral meaning that has been co-opted by colonization. The river is photographed from a distance, emphasizing the presence of the land itself.⁷² The photograph is placed, aesthetically, on the unnerving edge between the beautiful and the disturbing. If it were not part of a series called “Battlefields of My Ancestors,” we would not consider the violence that has been encoded by history into this landscape. Still, the image would convey to us something unsettling and sublime.

As an aesthetic category, the sublime draws from Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment era theorization of pleasure-pain in aesthetic experience.⁷³ In turn, the Enlightenment creates some of the most violent discourse with regard to race: theorists from Horkheimer and Adorno to Foucault develop the compelling argument that the Enlightenment belief in the superiority of reason and rationality feeds into the colonials’ justification for their dominion over non-European terrain and their violent subjugation of the colonized.⁷⁴ How, then, could Shelley Niro’s photograph—an image created by an activist artist as a work of de-colonization—fit the definition of “sublime” established by Kant? Niro’s photograph of this beautiful river and serene foliage is a recognition of displacements among Indigenous North Americans and of the community’s continued vulnerability to new encroachments upon their land. The image produces pleasure-pain in viewing; its sublimity inheres in the uncanny and paradoxical space it commands, showing the beautiful as evidence of the unjust. In this way, Niro’s work conveys the aesthetics of justice.

Through its stunning discomfort, the image teaches us something beyond ourselves.⁷⁵ The sublime, as I argue elsewhere, is that theoretical space wherein Kant ravels his notion of the supremacy of rationality.⁷⁶ It is the movement of the sublime that becomes active against the violence of other codes of Age of Reason philosophy. Kant’s sublime dismantles them.⁷⁷ Aligned with the sublime, Niro’s work drives aesthetic experience wherein a given viewer’s belief system of the supposedly rational course of Western history is shifted, radically altered, through the poignancy of her images. Theorists who cherry-pick Foucault’s critique of Kant (Foucault considered himself a troubled Kantian), ignore Kant’s own raveling of the code of hyper-rationality in pursuit of his aesthetics of the sublime.⁷⁸ More to the point, the assumption made by these theorists that non-European people and women are anti-rational is deeply problematic.⁷⁹ To argue otherwise is to fall (surely by accident) into racist doctrines that suggest only male Europeans are rational. Enlightenment ideology of rationality formed a perverse justification for European violence, but this does not mean that rational thought itself is perverse. The root of the concept of “rational” is dispassionate balance in thought. This is exactly what Niro’s photographs present.

The real estate development, Tutela Heights, that the artist photographs in “Battlefields of My Ancestors” is on the site of an Indigenous American village whose residents were caught up in the Battle of Beaver Dam in the War of 1812.⁸⁰ This battle from 200 years ago displaced Indigenous Americans and, in 2010, they were once again displaced as a consortium called the Walton Group developed the site for real estate and dredged up the artifacts of Indigenous people. Their village was twice displaced. Niro’s eerie photograph Tutela Heights makes the point that the land remains holy while it also emphasizes a sense of distance and longing, setting up a frame wherein the viewer can never reach the river, never reach the place that is established by the photograph as so hauntingly desirable. The image almost suggests the quintessence of home , peace, tranquility: a river that brings fish, water, and health.⁸¹ And then it takes away from the viewer access to that home with its fecundity. It is the angle from which Niro takes the digital image that conveys this slant approach. It is not a neutral image of natural beauty but a canted image that makes us aware of our distance from that desired place.

Ideological Geographies

In contrast to the ideological mapping of the nation-state, the Haudenosaunee view of social space expressed in Niro’s work resists belief in a “frontier” or a place of wilderness that must be controlled and surmounted by civilization.⁸² Instead, the natural world is seen by the Indigenous American as a part of civilization, a part of home . In the way that theorist bell hooks has described the work of photographer Carrie Mae Weems, so also Niro’s work is not post-colonial but anti-colonial, de-colonizing.⁸³ One might say that to discuss “post-colonial” Indigenous America is misprision: what colonization did to North America’s land and to the continent’s original people cannot be undone because the losses and displacements suffered by larger North American tribes, not to mention extinctions of many smaller tribes, are not only historical facts but a part of the living present.⁸⁴ Indigenous American descendants of those who survived the genocide of their people are not in a “post-colonial” social world: they continue to live the inheritance of genocidal violence. Unless the North American continent were returned to the stewardship of the continent’s original people, the term “post-colonial” has little real meaning.⁸⁵ But “anti-colonial” and “de-colonizing” are terms that apply accurately to Niro’s meditative acts of resistance in photography.⁸⁶

Niro’s photographs trace uncanny boundaries. While her subjects are sometimes photographed in front of their houses—for example, in the series “Are You My Sister?”—it is not the domestic space of the house that dominates Niro’s imagination. Rather, it is the idea of a landscape of home . Home is about control of liminality. It is a ritually defined space even if the rituals that define it are elided into everydayness. If someone enters my house when I have not asked them in, that entry is a violation, and such a violation demonstrates one principle of home. A home is a zone of negotiated space. This invaded home becomes uncanny when a pretense of home is continued, kept up, even though the social space of home is no longer intact. Whereas a public space anticipates the flow of people through it, a home space implies some restriction of this flow. Friends may come in freely because they are considered part of “home.”⁸⁷ Liminality, then, is an evocation of being at the boundary. Niro contends with visual tropes of liminality in the landscape of North America in two of her photographic series, “Stories of Women” and “Are You My Sister?” These series deal with ways of bringing a liminal daughter back into the safety of home. I discuss the works in tandem as the two series have obvious intertextual resonance, a deep commitment to understanding the cultural and ecological worlds of present-day North America by understanding the situation of its women. In this series, Niro draws from the idea of woman as cisgendered woman, but her insights regarding gender and sociality extend to transgender women.

“Stories of Women” conveys the idea of a national border, a national boundary as a dangerous place, as a site of betrayal. At the same time, by figurally representing boundaries in these works, Niro re-inscribes proper borders, respectful boundaries, imagining space in which borders and boundaries are not inscribed with the Euro-American urge to conquer and colonize. The eeriness of colonization, and the endless, uncanny afterimages of its violence, Niro brings forward in the “Stories of Women” photograph collage Bagging It (Fig. 7.2). This depicts a young Indigenous American woman holding a body bag, an image that references a severe influenza outbreak in 2009 on the Wasagamack and God’s River First Nation reserves, in response to which the Canadian government, rather than sending flu vaccine and anti-viral medication, sent body bags.⁸⁸

In Bagging It, behind the standing woman runs a line of high-tension wires and electricity towers that demarcate the boundary of the reservation. Here, Niro shows the boundary of the reservation as a space of a form of sanctuary but also of restriction and even death—a border that is penetrable to sickness inasmuch as the nation outside the reservation brings in the influenza virus and then offers no meaningful remedy.

Given the role that Western diseases have played in decimating Indigenous North American populations, Niro’s image evoking death from an influenza outbreak and a government’s callous response is both haunting and descriptive of the condition of being haunted .⁸⁹ Here, it is not Indigenous North Americans who are spectral and ghostly but rather Indigenous North Americans who are haunted by Euro-American violence. The colors of Niro’s digital image are dark, almost lurid, but within that rufescent schemata is the invocation of the power of blood , female fecundity and strength, as an answer to the deathliness of the government’s gesture. As with all of Niro’s photographs of Indigenous North American women, the young woman in Bagging It is presented as self-sufficient and strong. She faces menacing boundaries imposed by electric towers and the body bag, but she stands on her own terms. Precisely because the woman herself seems so potent and alive, the image is eerie, otherworldly, as if it carries a secret. The boundary of life and death is evoked by the young woman’s position on a riverbank with the electric towers standing over her. The landscape is surreal: it estranges home , referencing a government that sent implements of death to First Nation people rather than sending vaccines to help the people survive a flu epidemic.⁹⁰

In “Are You My Sister?”—a series of photographs of contemporary Indigenous American women—Niro juxtaposes unnerving silhouette images with warm photographs of women. Framing the photographs of women are hollow silhouettes of a woman’s body, a river, and a human shadow (Figs. 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5). The series photographs are arranged as triptychs, framed by images of a womanly silhouette, a river, and a shadow. Niro begins the series with a sepia-tinted photograph of river and lush trees. She brings the viewer home with this image that places us in the city of Brantford and the Grand River.⁹¹ In the next image, Niro presents a woman’s shadow cast across autumnal leaves, all in sepia. And then there is a series of smiling contemporary Indigenous American women, of varying ages and sartorial style. They are vivid with individuality, caught in conversation with the photographer. There is nothing strange or uncanny about these lively women. But Niro’s framing images—of shadow, silhouette, river—take the series in a different direction, into a conversation with the uncanny.

In Fig. 7.3, the initial image of a shadow appears to be the photographer’s own, as the image suggests looking down at one’s own shadow. It is somewhat frightening, conjuring a sense of someone approaching you or looking over your shoulder, their shadow thrown across yours. The final images of a woman’s skirted silhouette filled with sepia tone in Fig. 7.5 leaves also suggests burial, death. This photograph is not of a woman but rather of earth, with leaves and grass on it, in a cutout shaped like a woman. The frame of the image’s limit is a woman’s form. So that we are asked, very directly, Are you my sister? Can you step into this frame? The silhouette with leaves in it and a twin silhouette of spectral empty white space, also in the shape of a woman wearing a dress or skirt, present an uncanny opening in the text of the photograph series. We are brought to the earth, suddenly, by these images of a woman’s outline filled with leaves and then pressed into the empty mirror, or hollow sky, of the ghostly white twin silhouette at the end of the series. While the center of this work is grounded in the everyday and the living, its edges invoke the dead. “Are You My Sister?” gives formal body and makes a formal mark of the erased, the dispossessed . But it does not present these figures of the dead and the spectral as necessarily Indigenous American . The silhouette, the shadow, the river, signify mortality and eternity beyond ethnicity.

The work does not answer the question “Are You My Sister?” for us: it asks us the question. One way to approach “Are You My Sister?” is to assume that the work is for Native American women and girls since images of Indigenous American women, shown in eleven photographs, make up the bulk of the exhibit. The silhouette cut out in a woman’s form, the twelfth image, is the place to welcome all Indigenous women seeing the exhibit. In this sense, the question of the series title separates viewers. If you are not an Indigenous woman seeing the exhibit then, no, you are not the artist’s sister. If you are an Indigenous woman seeing the exhibit, then the openings of the photographs that show female outlines are for you: they bring you in like a mirror placed among portraits. You are part of the sisterhood. But the question of the work’s title is possibly also a feminist gathering call across race. It may be asking all women who see the exhibit if we, any of us, are capable of being “sisters” to the artist and to the women whose photographs make up the exhibit.

What would such a sisterhood mean? Art historian Penny Cousineau-Levine suggests in Faking Death that Niro’s cutout figure showing the earth in a woman’s form is a ghost figure, a figure of mortality.⁹² It’s not hard to see where Cousineau-Levine gleans this reading: the figure on the wall looks ghostly with no human features, only a human form. The figure resembles a shadow, and the scene of earth contained in the image of the cutout woman’s figure suggests burial. Even so, in this series I do not surmise that Niro is rehearsing what Renée Bergland sees as the tendency of Indigenous Americans to present or perceive themselves as ghosts . Instead, I would say that the eerie silhouette and shadow images perform the essential work of the photographic uncanny: they dislocate our sense of what is normal and homey. The silhouette and shadow figures are emblems of possibility and also threats.

It is fair to say, then, that Niro’s question “Are You My Sister?” isn’t meant to be comfortable to answer. If a white female viewer says yes, then this simplistic claiming of sisterhood Niro immediately complicates by visually insisting that such sisterhood entails risk and commitment. To truly be Niro’s sister is to move into the haunted terrain of the boarding school, colonization, genocide, facelessness, featurelessness, and possible erasure. The cutout figures and shadow figure would allow any of us who might wear dresses to envision ourselves in this series, provided we are willing to accept the pain and risk entailed in real sisterhood. Yet Niro’s series “Are You My Sister?” makes clear: if we are going to be sisters, we accept the terms of Indigenous history, where land is sacred but also a space of loss and, as Gerald Vizenor terms it, survivance.

Niro’s work reckons, from an Indigenous perspective, with the uncanny home that colonization enforced, and enforces, onto Indigenous peoples. The artist’s work draws on photography’s capacity to show those spaces of home that we cannot inhabit, using the camera to shape a critical distance from the discursive colonization of Euro-America. The photograph is always uncanny: it shows what is not there, even if we are still standing on the same spot at which this frame was shot. The photograph is image dislocated from time and place. But photographic images that harness this quality of the medium, its swerve in space and time, exemplify photography’s uncanniness. A photograph is a gap, a place where something is missing. For Niro , what is missing is a full acknowledgment of what has been lost in the process of colonization and a broad cultural arrival, in North America, of revivifying Indigenous presence. Consider, in closing, her photograph Hiawatha’s Belt and Other Visions (Approaching Infinity) (Fig. 7.6). Here, a sense of historical reckoning and merging of time frames carries the crepuscular image. We see a quiet river, studded with power stations and power lines, framed by traditional Iroquois beading patterns. The view is at once serene and threatening, a quiet riverbank regarding and regarded by a precipice-like higher elevation bank that carries a series of high tension towers. Industrialization has claimed the landscape, the Grand River. And yet it is still Mohawk territory, when seen by Niro’s camera. The river is also the boundary of the United States–Canada border, cutting through Mohawk reservation land on either side of a nation-state divide, a divide imposed of course by colonization. Here in the uncanny distillation of Niro’s photograph appears the home that is not one.

Notes

1.
Nicholas Royle , The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 4–7; Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 124–127; E. T. A. Hoffmann , “The Sandman,” in The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 85–118. As I’ve noted throughout this book, different theories of what paradigmatically constitutes the uncanny do not always agree with each other. Because my work in this book is about photography, the uncanny as I read it is a visual constellation of signs that reveals and critiques the distortion of home —which is ultimately the distortion of the human—in specific temporalities and violations of modernity.
2.
Liz Seccuro, Crash into Me: A Survivor’s Search for Justice (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2011), 35–38.
3.
Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 184.
4.
Shelley Niro , Ryan Rice, and Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award (Göttingen: Steidl/Scotiabank, 2018); Julia V. Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (Albany: State University of New York, 2014); Faye Ginsburg, “The Indigenous Uncanny: Accounting for Ghosts in Recent Indigenous Australian Experimental Media,” Visual Anthropology Review 34, no. 1 (May 2018): 67–76. After my initial drafting of this chapter, I discovered Emberley’s Testimonial Uncanny and Faye Ginsburg’s “Indigenous Uncanny.” As it happens, my notion of a North American Uncanny differs radically from Ginsburg’s and Emberley’s idea of an indigenous uncanny in that I am concerned with tracing ways that North America, as impacted by colonization, becomes an uncanny space for Indigenous North Americans. In other words, I do not posit in any way Indigenous American peoples as uncanny, nor do I suggest that their experience of haunting is primeval or somehow linked to their status as indigenous. Rather, and on the contrary, I emphasize how Mohawk photographer Shelley Niro sees America as uncanny. It is a reversal of perspective. My theory of the indigenous uncanny, as laid out in this chapter and at other points in this book, is about excavating how white colonizers have made the homeland of Indigenous Americans feel eerie to Indigenous Americans.
5.
Margaret Iverson , Photography, Trace, and Trauma (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 6–7.
6.
Karl Jacoby, “‘The Broad Platform of Extermination’: Nature and Violence in the Nineteenth Century North American Borderlands,” Journal of Genocide Research 10 (June 2008): 249–267; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston: South End Press, 2005).
7.
Mark Windsor, “What Is the Uncanny?” The British Journal of Analytics, August 28, 2018, https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aesthj/ayy028/5085234?searchresult=1 (accessed March 1, 2019).
8.
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 81; Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 1–3; Writes Madley, “During the era when Spaniards, Russians, and Mexicans colonized the coastal region between San Diego and Fort Ross, California’s Indian population fell from perhaps 310,000 to 150,000. Some 62,600 of these deaths occurred at or near California’s coastal region missions, and, in 1946, journalist Carey McWilliams initiated a long debate over the nature of these institutions when he compared the Franciscan missionaries, who had held large numbers of California Indians there, to ‘Nazis operating concentration camps.’” While the argument that Indigenous North Americans alive today are survivors of genocide is contentious, this contentiousness stems largely from the way that genocide studies emerged initially as Holocaust studies. The Holocaust, the government of Germany systematically murdering millions of Jewish and Romani people, became the definition of genocide in twentieth-century academia. By contrast the historical scope of the “settling” of North America makes it impossible to define any one unified governmental policy that dictated genocide of North America’s original people: the unstable and shifting definition of government, during this time, resists such resolution. The net effect of centuries of European colonization was massive and overwhelming displacement, and population depletion, of North America’s original people. For example, many of the Haudenosaunee whose ancestral home is New York state, were pushed into Canada, after General George Washington, following the US Revolutionary War, declared his aim to eradicate the Iroquois confederacy. Please also see Notes 14, 15, and 16 of this chapter.
9.
Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 5–7, 14; Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, eds., Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), vii–xl; Kathryn Troy, The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender, and Ghosts in American Séances, 1848–1890 (Albany: State University of New York), 34.
10.
Bergland, The National Uncanny, 13.
11.
Bergland, The National Uncanny, 25–26.
12.
Shawn Michelle Smith , Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 25–43.
13.
Darryl Caterine “The Haunted Grid: Nature, Electricity, and Indian Spirits in the American Metaphysical Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (June 2014): 371–397; Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).
14.
Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 13–16; Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Amy T. Hamilton, Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018), 26–94. Without question, indigenous peoples fought back in attempts to hold onto their land and those acts of violence, while understandable given the circumstances, caused pain to the specific white people attacked. But on balance, it is clear that Euro-Americans over time killed far more Indigenous Americans than vice versa.
15.
Redman, Bone Rooms, 12–13; Alan Trachtenburg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 123; Phillip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 37.
16.
Brenden Rensink, “Native American History, Comparative Genocide and the Holocaust: Historiography, Debate and Critical Analysis” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2006), 64–65; Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2009).
17.
Bronislaw Malinowski’s discussion of translation is called “The translation of untranslatable words,” and it appears in “An Ethnographic Theory of Language and Some Practical Corollaries,” in Coral Gardens and Their Magic: The Language of Magic and Gardening (London: Routledge, 2002), 4–78.
18.
Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 12.
19.
J. Wilson, Zeisberger’s Indian Dictionary: English, German, Iroquois—The Onondaga and Algonquin—The Delaware, original Manuscript in Harvard College Library (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1887), 185.
20.
Murray White, “Shelley Niro: The Way of the Subtle Warrior,” The Star, May 21, 2017.
21.
Troy, The Specter of the Indian, xiv. Kathryn Troy makes the argument that the figure of the ghostly Indian is a sign of Indian presence rather than absence. There is some validity here: ghosts are indeed signs of some residual power held by the sacrificed. But the larger reality is that Indigenous North Americans still exist and do not wish to be represented solely by ghosts of their dead. Indigenous people are alive and very capable of representing themselves as living human beings.
22.
Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). What I mean by “pushed beneath the threshold of public statement” is that ideologies such as manifest destiny created an emerging national discourse in which the killing, silencing, and displacing of Indigenous peoples was considered either benevolent or benign.
23.
Vine DeLoria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 32. Niro presents the opposite of Lévi-Strauss’ melancholy vista.
24.
David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
25.
Adrian C. Louis, Wild Indians and Other Creatures (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1997); Troy, The Specter of the Indian, xxvii.
26.
“The Sandman,” 85–118; John Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016); Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books 27, no. 6 (March 2005): 17–20; Anneeleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 144.
27.
Shelley Niro , This Land Is Mime Land, 1992. Photograph, gelatin silver print heightened with paint, gelatin silver print, toned, gelatin silver print in hand-drilled overmat, 56 × 94 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
28.
Niro , Rice, and Nanibush, Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award, 60–74. Shelley Niro, The Final Frontier, 1992. Photograph, gelatin silver print heightened with paint, gelatin silver print, toned, gelatin silver print in hand-drilled overmat, 55.9 × 94 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
29.
Pablo Petrucci, “Processes of Repression: Image, Illusion, and the Uncanny,” International Journal of the Image 4, no. 2 (June 2014): 109–118; Alexander Keller Hirsch, “‘Like So Many Antigones’: Survivance and the Afterlife of Indigenous Funerary Remains,” Law Culture and the Humanities 10, no. 3 (October 2014): 464–486; Darryl Caterine, “The Haunted Grid: Nature, Electricity, and Indian Spirits in the American Metaphysical Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (June 2014): 371–397.
30.
Rebecca Nagle, “Research Reveals Media Role in Stereotypes About Native Americans,” Women’s Media Center, July 18, 2018; Margaret Armen, “The Paradise Syndrome,” Star Trek: The Original Series, Paramount Television, October 4, 1968. The photograph also draws attention to the lack of Indigenous American representation in America’s icons of popular culture, with the original Star Trek television series, for example, presenting White, African American , and Asian characters, but no Indigenous Americans .
31.
Niro , Rice, and Nanibush, Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award, 67.
32.
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987).
33.
Shelley Niro , The Warning of Snow, 1992. Photograph, gelatin silver print heightened with paint, gelatin silver print, toned, gelatin silver print in hand-drilled overmat, 55.9 × 94 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Shelley Niro, 500 Year Itch, 1992. Silver print on paper, 58 × 96 cm. Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
34.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 99–108.
35.
“Imagine the history of fairytale as a map, like the Carte du Tendre… drawn by Parisian romantics to chart the peaks and sloughs of the heart’s affections… there is no psychology in a fairytale.” Amanda Craig, “Once upon a Time Review—Marina Warner’s Scholarly History of the Fairytale,” The Observer, October 19, 2014.
36.
James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” The New Yorker: Reflections, November 17, 1962. “Allah allowed the Devil, through his scientists, to carry on infernal experiments, which resulted, finally, in the creation of the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrously, in the creation of the white woman. And it was decreed that these monstrous creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of years—I forget how many thousand, but, in any case, their rule now is ending, and Allah, who had never approved of the creation of the white man in the first place (who knows him, in fact, to be not a man at all but a devil), is anxious to restore the rule of peace that the rise of the white man totally destroyed.”
37.
René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, & Culture), trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2014), 24.
38.
Lindsey McCarthy, “(Re)conceptualizing the Boundaries Between Home and Homelessness: The Unheimlich,” Housing Studies 33, no. 6 (2018): 960–985; Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. Adam Phillips and trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 145; Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906),” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (2008): 10. “Uncanny” means “not at home, not homey.”
39.
McCarthy, “(Re)conceptualizing the Boundaries Between Home and Homelessness,” 963.
40.
Michel Foucault , The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 346; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 401.
41.
Steven Metz, “A Border Wall Won’t Improve America’s Security—But That’s Beside the Point,” World Politics Review, January 18, 2019.
42.
“Dred Scott v. Sandford,” Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393 (accessed March 8, 2019); “Native American Citizenship: 1924 Indian Citizenship Act,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/upload/Native-American-Citizenship-2.pdf (accessed March 1, 2019). I say “most” because until 1943 emigrants from Asia were banned from becoming citizens.
43.
That is, the urgent discrimination against Latinx people extends a centuries-long pattern. See, Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, 1991).
44.
Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 129, 156–159.
45.
My concern about this policy is hardly singular. One reference point, the “Open Letter from Concerned Scientists,” addressed to former Secretary of Homeland Security Nielsen, https://sites.google.com/view/letter-to-secretary-nielsen/home?authuser=0 (accessed May 12, 2019).
46.
“Frontier: A Border Between Two Countries, or (esp. in the Past in the US) a Border Between Developed Land Where White People Live and Land Where Indians Live or Land That Is Wild,” Cambridge English Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/frontier (accessed May 12, 2019).
47.
While Bergland has written about the ways that Euro-Americans envision Indigenous Americans as “ghosts ” and uncanny, spectral people, in this chapter, I reverse the argument, pointing to all the ways that it is not Indigenous Americans who are uncanny as rather the process of colonization that creates for Indigenous Americans an uncanny homeland, a place that is their home but that has been rendered utterly strange by the forces of colonization.
48.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 127–146; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (New York: Mariner, 2017).
49.
So much so that a Red Power movement slogan was manifested into action when a group of Red Power activists, in the 1970s, traveled America following “the trail of broken treaties.” Vine DeLoria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).
50.
Todorov, The Conquest of America, 168–185. Mercantilism, precursor to capitalism, set the stage for the desolation of the colonized other in the so-called New World. The North American continent was ideologically mapped, by European settlers and their governments, as a space from which natural resources must be extracted. Indigenous Americans , whose systems of trade and exchange were not mercantilist and not pre-capitalist, resisted these systems but even so were mapped by them, in the cultural schematic of European invaders. Niro’s work mobilizes another way of conceptually mapping the land.
51.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Tuomas Forsberg, “The Ground Without Foundation: Territory as a Social Construct,” Geopolitics 8, no. 2 (September 2010): 7–24; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), 416–421.
52.
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 31.
53.
The question of whether Indigenous Americans were only accidentally displaced and killed by Euro-American settlers, during colonization, is still an item of debate amongst historians. I agree with theorists and historians who point to multiple incidents of Euro-American on Indigenous American slaughter, and multiple Euro-American directives to displace North America’s Indigenous people. Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Indigenous American Genocide (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
54.
The concept of the frontier, then, emerges from formations of nation-state, a specific conceptualization of territory: what lies beyond that conquered territory is thought of as “wild,” considered not yet inhabited, even if it is well known to be inhabited by human beings, but those not of European descent. But the “wilderness” beyond the frontier is not the uncanny part: what is uncanny is the conceptualization of the human beings who inhabit the frontier and the so-called wilderness as radically Other. As social space, the frontier is the boundary between the nation-state’s territorial conquest and that space, geographical and socio-political, not yet fully accessed and claimed by the nation state. From the perspective of Indigenous North Americans, there was never a conceptualized frontier as rather multiple zones of struggle and resistance.
55.
Shelley Niro , Flying Woman #4, Staying with the Old Ones, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 36.2 × 47 cm. Light Work Collection, Syracuse, New York. Though airspace has been claimed and apportioned in the nation-state system, nation-state claim on the sky is less substantial.
56.
Shelley Niro , Flying Woman #5, Finding Others Like Herself, I, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 36.2 × 47 cm. Light Work Collection, Syracuse, New York. See also, Shelley Niro, Flying Woman #6, Finding Others Like Herself II, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 36.2 × 47 cm. Light Work Collection, Syracuse, New York.
57.
Nancy Marie Mithlo “Reappropriating Redskins: Pellerossasogna (Red Skin Dream): Shelley Niro at the 50th La Biennale Di Venezia,” Visual Anthropology Review 20, no. 2 (January 2008): 23–35; Gilette Hall and Harry Patrinos, Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–17, 73–118.
58.
The film, Ongihaara (Niagara), is an elegy for Niro’s daughter. Shelley Niro: ONGNIAAHRA/Niagara, Boarding House Gallery, Guelph, Ontario, January 13–February 25, 2018; Shelley Niro, Niagara (2015, 5 mins., color). Pocahontas Reframed: Storytellers Film Festival, Richmond, Virginia, November 17, 2018.
59.
Shelley Niro , personal communication with the author, June 2019.
60.
Lydia Millet, “Selling Off Apache Holy Land,” The New York Times, May 29, 2015; Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Geography and Indigeneity II: Critical Geographies of Indigenous Bodily Politics,” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 3 (June 2018): 436–445.
61.
Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (First Peoples: New Directions Indigenous) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 221.
62.
Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
63.
Ryan Nagelhout, The Mohawk People (Milwaukee, WI: Gareth Stevens, 2015). Shelley Niro indicates the eerie way that Indigenous Americans are exiled within their ancestral homeland. The reservation is itself a conceptually uncanny home, set aside and apart from the United States, sovereign but also abject, to the side of the nation’s self-avowed norm.
64.
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2001).
65.
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 103–105.
66.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 23–24. As Frantz Fanon makes clear, the two-step dance of colonization begins with overwhelming violence against the colonized and then covers over that history of violence with myths of White benevolence.
67.
Shelley Niro , Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2017. Ryerson Centre, Toronto.
68.
“It is indeed a different nature that speaks to the camera from the one which addresses the eye.” Walter Benjamin , “A Short History of Photography,” Screen 13, no. 1 (March 1972): 7.
69.
Shelley Niro, Battlefields of My Ancestors, 2017, Ryerson Centre, Toronto.
70.
Nagelhout, The Mohawk People.
71.
Shelley Niro , personal communication with the author, June 2019.
72.
Shelley Niro, Honey Moccasin; Niro, Rice, and Nanibush, Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award.
73.
Immanuel Kant , Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 123.
74.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 4, 86.
75.
Christina Hendricks, “Foucault’s Kantian Critique: Philosophy and the Present,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 4 (May 2008): 357–382. Kantian ethics and how they impact readings of his aesthetics is a complicated topic. That Kant wrote racist works is a discussion I confront later in this book; whether it negates all his work or just those works in which he espouses racist ideology is an open question. For me, I see Kantian philosophy as often self contradictory. But some of its insights have been formative of my understanding of aesthetics. As Foucault argues of himself, of myself I am forced to confess that I am a Kantian who dissents from some of Kant.
76.
Claire Raymond, Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (London: Routledge, 2010), 56–57.
77.
Raymond, Kantian Sublime, 52.
78.
Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2012), 29–31.
79.
Jones, Seeing Differently, 25. There is a weird and I’m sure entirely unintended bias to assuming that women and non-Europeans are fundamentally outside the rational.
80.
Mohawk Investigations Bureau, “Tutela Heights: Walton’s Stage 3 Site-Specific Archaeological Assessment,” Rotinonshonni ónhwe – Tkanatáhere, https://rotinonshonnionhwetkanatahere.wordpress.com/mohawk-workers/tutela-heights/ (accessed March 7, 2019).
81.
Shelley Niro , Battlefields of my Ancestors, exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Ontario, April 28–August 13, 2017.
82.
Catherine Higginson, “Shelley Niro, Haudenosaunee Nationalism, and the Continued Contestation of the Brant Monument,” Essays on Canadian Writing 80 (December 2003): 141–186.
83.
bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995); Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 40.
84.
Consider here Meinig and Cresswell’s theorizations of ideologically mapped domains. Tim Cresswell, In Place/out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 9; D. W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D. W. Meinig and John Brinckerhoff Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
85.
Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock, eds., Genocide of Indigenous Peoples (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011); Karl Jacoby, “‘The Broad Platform of Extermination’: Nature and Violence in the Nineteenth Century North American Borderlands,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 2 (June 2008): 249–267. As noted, historians argue that there is sufficient evidence of a general belief, among many though of course not all European settlers, that killing Indigenous Americans was a benign or beneficial act, to establish in the main a genocidal intent, even though such was not a consolidated stably stated policy of the government.
86.
Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips, Indigenous North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 74.

The conceptual map of the land from the perspective of European settlers was shaped by the desire to use the land for farming and for European dwellings, even though Indigenous peoples already lived there, and had been inhabiting North America for at least 14,000 years.
87.
Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufournantelle, Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present), trans. Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 75; Immanuel Kant, To Perceptual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 15.
88.
“Ottawa Sends Body Bags to Manitoba Reserves,” CBC/Radio-Canada, September 16, 2009, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ottawa-sends-body-bags-to-manitoba-reserves-1.844427 (accessed March 8, 2019); Janet Berlo and Ruth Phillips, Indigenous North American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 71–73. Niro’s evocation of Sky Woman, in this same series, evokes borders and boundaries of a different kind. Sky Woman, the central figure of the Haudenosaunee myth of creation, was a heavenly woman who, while pregnant, fell through the boundary of the sky, and descended to earth. Sky Woman crossed from sky to earth, from the realm of heaven to that of earth, and this initial transposition, or translation, a border crossing, brought about the creation of turtle island, or, the North American continent.
89.
Carol Ann Lorenz, Creation: Haudenosaunee Contemporary Art and Traditional Stories (Cazenovia, NY: Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, 2004).
90.
Troy, The Specter of the Indian, 68. Kathryn Troy makes the case that whites’ creation of the idea of Indians as ghosts is not a form of Indigenous erasure, because ghosts persist, but one may see that to be ghostly is not the kind of empowered agency that living human beings need. Niro’s work is all about agency in the social space of the living.
91.
Here, the substance of life, and of being human, also serves as frame, as boundary: Sky Woman is both a real woman and also the spirit of the woman’s capacity to carry inheritance in herself, in her body, and to generate new life, evoked by Sky Woman’s pregnancy when she fell to earth. This 2011 image, however, is only one among many different evocations of Sky Woman that Niro has created. Strikingly, in her earlier “Flying Woman” series, Niro uses geometric motifs to reduplicate figures evoking Sky Woman. Lee Ann Martin, “Shelley Niro: Flying Woman,” in After the Storm (Indianapolis and Seattle: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art with University of Washington Press, 2001), 61–67.
92.
Are You My Sister? is Shelley Niro’s photo interrogation of relationship among women. See it in the exhibition, What Is the Name of the River Renew: Indigenous Art from the Collection at the Agnes. Curator Norman Vorano writes: “In this installation, the artist presents her photographic portraits of her mother, sister, a daughter, and other First Nations women artists. Her sitters’ confident yet relaxed poses exude composure and intimacy with the photographer, and celebrate the strength of women without the distancing element of humor seen in many of her other photographs. These photographs are also a challenge to stereotypical images of “Indian women,” and anonymous anthropological photographs found in museums and archives. The accompanying matt-boards, drilled with decorative arabesques based on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) beadwork designs, suggest another dimension through which women’s identities were configured.”

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Claire Raymond

Authors

Claire Raymond
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Claire Raymond .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Raymond, C. (2019). North American Uncanny: Shelley Niro’s Activist Photography. In: The Photographic Uncanny. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28497-8_7

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28497-8_7
Published: 24 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28496-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28497-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics