In my native Hoopa language, kiwhliw means “he who paints.”  First and foremost, I am a painter.  I create complex, richly colorful compositions.  I am also Native American, raised on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California.

 

In preparation for this show, I immersed myself in the history of early American photography.  In the years following the Civil War, traveling photographers set out across the American “frontier.”  Armed with bulky land cameras, tripods, and large glass photographic plates, they aimed to document the natural beauty of the west and what they saw as the “vanishing race” of Native People for whom that land had been home for centuries.  The portraits taken by these “documentarians” were often staged to present the photographers’ view of “Indian-ness” and to suit the artistic or political interests of white Americans for whom the photographs were made.  Rarely were the subjects’ names and tribal affiliation accurately identified.