Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 looks back to a period when Native artists and activists were challenging who had the authority to represent Indigenous peoples, cultures, and experiences. Emerging alongside the Red Power movement and a growing assertion of Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, artists of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were not simply seeking inclusion within existing institutions. They were creating on their own terms, questioning inherited forms and expectations, and making space for ways of seeing and knowing that had never required permission.

That spirit reverberates through the work of MacArthur Fellows Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota), Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation and descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee descendant). Across visual art, moving image, television, language, humor, and collaborative practice, their work resists easy categories and challenges assumptions about time, authorship, community, and whose ways of knowing shape contemporary culture.

Moderated by Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota), Executive Director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, this closing conversation considers what today's artists carry forward from the self-determination era, what they have chosen to disrupt or leave behind, and what becomes possible when Indigenous artists no longer measure their work against someone else's expectations.

This program is part of Defying Boundaries: MacArthur Fellows at 45 and is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

SITE SANTA FE members, please contact Madison Hagey, Development & Membership Manager to receive free admission to this event.
hagey@sitesantafe.org | 505-989-1199 ex. 121