Reading Settler Archives Relationally

To write Native North American art history is to dance with difficult archives. Most of our primary sources were authored by white artists, patrons, collectors, curators, instructors, anthropologists, and government agents. Accordingly, we arrive in the archive determined to root out the damaging ideologies of even the most well-intentioned authors. While this preoccupation sheds light on colonialism and its attendant power structures, it does not necessarily bring us closer to the archive's obfuscated Indigenous subjects. An exclusively critical orientation can lead us to overlook subtler clues—affective, sensorial—that register the impacts of Native art and artists on their social and ecological milieus. This essay offers an alternative approach, proposing that we read settler archives relationally. By this I mean studying white authors' recorded responses to Native art and artists as potential indices of Indigenous worldmaking under conditions of colonial duress. Here I attempt to learn from Native approaches to agency and ethics that assess human accomplishments according to their effects on others. Has one behaved as a good relative? Has one furthered the chain of reciprocity linking humans to one another, to other beings, and to the entire universe? Has one contributed to beauty, harmony, health, and balance in the world? This approach prioritizes Native artists' rights and responsibilities to nurture an orderly cosmos. I test this relational method using the papers of Olive Rush (1873–1966) at the Archives of American Art.