Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's Maps

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an artist who paints pieces that encourage aesthetic resistance with their message. She was born on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation in Montana in 1940. However, she now lives in New Mexico where she paints stuff that reports on a wide range of topics, not just Indian country. Some of her most famous pieces are derived from maps, pieces such as The State Names maps, Echo and Tribal maps, Where do We Come From? map, Memory map, The Browning of America series, and Indian Country Today. Smith's maps are of particular importance to the aesthetic activism movement because they "become a kind of contested space where contemporary and traditional Native issues take the foreground- not unlike the contested geographic spaces of early America” (53).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's State Names I

As Rader perfectly points outs, “her maps function particularly well as sovereign sites of engaged resistance because they force us to reconsider visual demarcations of identity. For example, when I first looked at State Names I & 2, I thought that the running color represented blood lines fusing together. However, after reading Rader’s text, I understand now that it is meant to visually represent the whitewashing of America. I also saw the blank states but immediately thought they might just be covered by paint and that was the reason for their absence. Now I come to find out that they are absent because they are the only state’s whose names are either not derived from original Indian names or are not Indian names. Knowing now that Smith pays special attention to every detail of her painting, I see the significance of her paintings. Each one holds a special meaning that can be unlocked if one only stops to consider its implications. I think the State Names paintings struck me the most because I understood the whitewashed concept. Due to assimilation and takeover (legal or not) of Native American land, the white influence has taken over the United States. Due to the overwhelmingly large and collected group of white people that entered the country, they had complete control for a while. However, minorities cannot be permanently silenced and thus, they continued to grow and have voices, a fact exhibited by Echo Map I and II. I think those maps were powerful for me just because of the large diversity of America. This is no longer just “our land” but it belongs to the large population of people that inhabit its borders. All of these people deserve equal rights and attention because they are the faces of America.

Now I am definitely not hating on white Americans with these words. I am a white American. I am just pointing out what I feel when I look at these painting. Obviously Native Americans cannot be given back their land, especially now as it has been so altered from its original state, like Smith's United States maps that were altered to create articles of aesthetic resistance. But we can reflect back on some of the mistakes made by the United States government at the time. We can reflect on these mistakes and in the future, work to make sure that they do not happen again. In the meantime, we can work to fix those mistakes. We can work with the Native Americans on the reservation to enhance their quality of life, particularly in the alcohol realm. Perhaps we could somehow work to build safe houses on the reservation for battered women and places of treatment for the abusive males and females on the reservation. I guess what really should be done is research into why these situations even occur in the first place. Can things during the present time be changed? Can our ways of thinking and knowing possibly change so that we can identify with those on the reservation. These are all questions that I think should be a main focus in the present day.