Installing Indigenous geographies

Native-controlled public art can play a meaningful role in the reclamation of Indigenous geographies. Such pieces have a unique, although constrained, ability to move from being objects just used as symbols of multicultural incorporation toward insurgent acts sustaining and creating spatial reorganization. What kind of geographical work can be done by a stone carving on a bridge or a riverside iron/wood sculpture? These questions of spatial significance and capacity are especially well tested in urban sites, where Indigenous presence is most thoroughly “removed” or forgotten. What happens when Native homelands are reasserted within the city? Is art the most effective means of making such assertions? This provocation draws from ongoing collaborative research on urban art installations, commissioned by a Native nation, with the explicit aim of actively reshaping the landscape of Portland, Oregon, and beyond.