I. The beautiful thing about being a Crow is that you really are a part of the community.

We have a matrilineal clan system. Since my mother is white, I use my father’s mother’s clan, the Ashkaámne. Growing up, all my aunts and uncles were considered my mothers and fathers, and all of their children would be my brothers and sisters.

This sense of community and kinship is hard to explain. For example, when I see historical photos of my community, I know that we are connected deeply, even if we're not biologically connected. And I know that all the other tribal members feel this same feeling: that these our ancestors. We might not be blood-related in a Western sense, but we are kin. 

When I'm doing some research on historical photographs, I’ll call my mother and father. I’ll say, ‘Hey, is this a Crow name? Do you know anybody of this name?’  It’s so fun to hear them talk because they'll whittle it down to ‘it’s so-and-so from here.’ I'll talk to other people who live on the Crow reservation, and they do the same thing. Even if it's a person who we don't know personally, we piece it together. In the end, I’m either related to them, or the person talking with me is. It’s an incredible network. 

II. When I was in graduate school, I had an experience that set me up to critique the institution in a way that I'd never done before.

Graduate school is a period when you’re questioning things all the time. I was missing home, and didn’t know any other Crows living in Los Angeles. I thought to myself, ‘I need to see home somehow.’ And then I made a bet with myself: ‘If I go to the Natural History Museum, I'll find something that's Crow there.’ Wherever I travel, and when I go to an institution that has an Indigenous collection, more often than not I see some of my community’s material culture. This first time, though, this messed up bet made for an interesting experience. 

I used to walk into institutions and take whatever commentary was provided at face value, without ever really questioning it. But what stuck with me here was very dramatic. 

I walked into the museum and there was a giant brontosaurus that you walked under -- part of a big, dark, dinosaur exhibit. This is what led you directly into the Native galleries. And I did find some Crow moccasins in there. But I was looking around at all the people, and I thought to myself: ‘All these people don’t know. They don’t know that Native people and their descendants are alive.’

I left the museum wanting to convey that feeling. Native objects and bodies are in the Natural History Museum because we were categorized as part of the natural world. But does this mean that Europeans aren’t part of the natural world? This experience led to my work, Four Seasons. I passed a great selection of dioramas in the museum, I wanted to weaponize the diorama in a way, as something everybody knows and understands is not real but still believes is real. I thought to myself, 'what better way to analyze the system than with its own structures?'

III. In my research, every one of the individuals that I study has interesting stories connected to them. But some historical gossip you just can’t write. The reality is stranger than fiction. 

It can be terrible. Like with Pretty Eagle: when he died, his body was buried in an honorable way, but then it was exhumed along with other Crow bodies by the Big Horn County Sanatorium. They sold the bones for study, for money, and he ended up at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He spent seventy-two years there before the tribe received his remains back in the 1990s. Our community built a memorial for him, a bronze teepee, reburying his remains on the reservation at a site named Pretty Eagle Point. I grew up knowing about Pretty Eagle Point, driving by it, with no idea that this ugly history was present. Had someone told me that as a young kid -- that this was something that white people did to Native bodies -- I would have been horrified.   

It can also be beautiful. There's this story about Chief Plenty Coups, one of our last chiefs who died in the 1930s. During the 1880 delegation, he visited George Washington’s estate at Mt. Vernon, and he fell in love with it. He liked the whole concept of a leader having this type of house. Later on in his life, this stuck with him, and he aspired to create something akin to Mt. Vernon on our reservation. So he gifted his land to the state of Montana to create a State Park. It has his log cabin home, and his apple orchard, which he planted, as well as his gravesite along with his wife and adopted daughter. And there’s a visitor center. I managed the park for a year. This was his vision and takeaway from Mt. Vernon, and now we have this: a place for non-Crows to come and celebrate and learn about Crow culture. 

IV. When I was a very young researcher, I had a black-and-white approach, which has since been brutally humbled by my experiences. What I’ve learned is that a lot of things -- information, connections -- are already here, waiting for me. 

There was this amazing dress that I encountered in the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. We pulled open this drawer where it was stored, it was identified as Crow but it didn’t look Crow. I went to the National Anthropological Archives, which is in the same building. I started looking at photos, and saw several of the Crow women wearing that dress. Very light, romantic images of them, gathering water or cattails. I learned they were taken by Joseph Dixon on the expedition by Rodman Wanamaker, a non-Indigenous man who documented his own fantasies of Native life. 

Two years later, I was going through these calendars produced by a Crow woman that I know, who takes historical photos from different archives. And there is this image of a woman wearing that dress from the Natural History Museum. And the caption said, these were the stars who played Hiawatha and Minnehaha in Rodman Wanamaker’s film, which was based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha.” (I knew about Hiawatha because I had studied a sculpture by Edmonia Lewis. My grandmother’s sister can also recite the poem because she had to memorize it as a child in school. That’s how research goes.) And that's when I learned what's up with the dress. He was traveling through our territory, and he brought that dress and he photographed and filmed this Crow couple playing these characters. 

I'm always finding the humor in things, thinking to myself: ‘How funny is it that you made two Crows play this fiction? You could have talked about this Crow couple, but you had them play cheesy parts written by a white poet instead.’ But the thing is, I’ve had this calendar since I was in my 20s, and it helped me put all these other pieces of information together. Now, I plan to look into this film. 

When I’d see something that was misidentified as Crow in a collection, my initial reaction used to be, “Get it out of there. They’ve put it in the wrong drawer.” I realize, now, that the fact of its presence is the story, and a part of the Crow story. It could have been something silly, like a human error, where some collections manager placed it there mistakenly. Or, in the case of the 1873 Crow Delegation photos, where Crow men are wearing Cheyenne or Lakota moccasins, it could be a case of trade that can’t be discounted.

These days, I keep bringing things that I research to my dad, to find out more information, and he’ll sometimes say,  “Man, I should’ve paid attention to that because your grandpa told me about that.” And when I'm looking at everything today, I have a feeling that I’m going to be saying something similar to myself in the future. I’m going to be interested in something that was right here all along; in something I had access to, or was staring at. A lot of these things are waiting for me. And it’s a great motivator in my work.