The Entrapment of the American Indian?

These photographs were shot on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Cranston, RI. I’ve passed the house with a tipi in its backyard a thousand times, each passing allowing me to form a more cynical conclusion about its presence there. I assumed it was some American whose hobby was the natives of our country. He obviously knew nothing about any of their vastly different cultures (New England natives didn’t even live in tipis, it was the Great Plains people…) and just thought of all these people as a novelty, clumped together as one indistinguishable mass, considered exotic even though they inhabited this land way before we did. Though I’m not Native American myself, or an expert on all that stuff, I just got a bad vibe about the tipi from all my assumptions.

So this led up to my decision to photograph the tipi from the street, and bash on all the horrible shit that Americans have done to the native people of our land; (torture, rape, forced assimilation into whiteness, into ghettos called reservations, the decimation of families, and the genocide of so many people and their distinct cultures, now with nowhere left to go etc. etc. the list goes on, and on, and on). At least that’s what I thought till the owner of the house drove up while I was taking pictures =O. I assumed he’d grab a shot gun and tell me (in a southern accent) to get off his property. But alas, my assumptions failed me.. again.

He was actually really nice, and invited my boyfriend and I to go into his backyard and see it up close. As he led us to the huge, Sioux style structure, he told us about his decision to construct it. “Well, I thought ‘where did guys meet and share with each other since the beginning?’” The answer was some sort of hut, simple and natural; a tipi. He showed us inside, which had designs that illustrated the phases of the moon, there was a fire pit in the middle and dream catchers near the entrance. He knew a lot about the history of the design. He said that the tipi was an ongoing project, and he invited to have dinner there sometime. He seemed so genuinely interested in what he had created, as well as the heritage of the people from whom it had originated, and it was really admirable. On our way out, he gave us a copy of “The Indian Tipi”, just one of the sources he had used to research his project.

When I got home and flipped through the pages, I found the dedication: “Dedicated to the Plains Indians in the hope that their young people will recapture a pride of race, a love of color and beauty, and the appreciation of the good things in their own great heritage-today the heritage of all Americans.” I thought this was a beautiful passage…so simple and hopeful. I’m starting to see that it’s not all so bad. Not everyone’s terribly blind. There’s still some realness out there, some real hope. Will this hope fix all of the past mistakes? I don’t think so. Will it fix things now? I don’t know. All I know is that it doesn’t hurt.