Cultured Magazine

culturedmag.com 97 tktktktktktktktktktktktkt Jarrett Earnest's photograph Paul Chaat Smith, 17 July 2018, New York. kids there because it was much better than schools on the reservation; second, private boarding schools all over the world were fucking horrible— think about rich, upper-class English boarding schools and what goes on there. But most important to me is that the guy who ran it, who famously said, "Kill the Indian to save the man," was a radical Republican antiracist. For his time, he was the most militant Nation-reading Bernie bro you could find. Because these were radical ideas, to take Indians and educate them. Most of the Indian world at that time wanted assimilation—it was just a question of on whose terms, and how much. When Indians today say, We wanted to stay the way we were—that's against reality, which is really hard to admit. How has your conception of the audience shifted with this show? This show will get a million-plus visitors a year—all kinds of people, 90 percent of whom are non-Indian. If I'm interested in reaching that kind of mass audience, if it really works, it'll be something they think about the next day. It'll be something like, Trump says "Pocahontas," and they'll say, Oh, I learned these cool things about Pocahontas at that exhibition. Noticing the place names and the images will reinforce the idea that Indians are par t of your life, whether you're white or South Asian or whatever. That this is par t of the experience of living in this countr y. I think it's a pretty accessible thought that when we've rained down "Tomahawk" missiles on 15 countries in the last 30 years and called the South Bronx "For t Apache" in the '70s, these are not unimpor tant psychological elements of the country that are worth investigating, without instantly becoming about manifest destiny or white supremacy. How do we avoid that trap? That's what I'm trying to get to. A lot of it is helping people feel that it's just kind of cool to think about. Museums are organized around didactics and messaging and all of that—I just think humans are so complicated. I never want to be proscriptive. If I get people with the spectacle, and they're thinking about how Indian experience is part of their own individual life in a different way—that's success. I think the shift is thinking more deeply about who the audience actually is and what's the most impactful thing we can do. To do that turns out to be sailing against the zeitgeist and saying to the people wearing those red "Make America Great Again" baseball caps, Come on in. Learn about this. Be part of it— without irony, without, We're going to show you how bad you are, how wrong you are. I think that's what's radical about it. COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER BOOKS

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