I wanted to do a piece on the hundreds of years of death the average indigenous person carries. Something subtle.
I know more about indigenous people than the average American, which is horrifying as I know so little. The majority she’s a face, a race, an controlled image. Not a person or a people or a culture. Indians, to use the name most still use, are different from indigenous people. Indians are a carefully crafted fiction that takes the place of the people. It is malleable. It is deceptive. It absorbs guilt and allows one to imagine Indians as anything you want without confronting reality.
I crafted a generic Indian face, an elderly indigenous man who typically is what is used. Harmless in his age. Foreign in his look. Non threatening.
He is ghostly. Vaguely there in front of you. Behind him is death. Acres and decades of death. You aren’t supposed to see it. You aren’t meant to. That would make him real.
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