thenation--2020-10-20--Fraudulent Indigenous Art Is Flooding Museums

It ’ s a modest museum on the edge of a modest town .
The Lander Pioneer Museum is dimly lit , a nod to its log cabin beginnings , and its mismatched display cases house everything from antique saddles to applesauce mills—artifacts of early settlers in what is now Lander , Wyo .
In the main gallery , a placard announces the institution ’ s major show , “ Tribal Warrior Art.
” The exhibition , which debuted in fall of 2018 , contains about 100 ledger art drawings—narrative illustrations created by Indigenous artists from the Plains on discarded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 19th century .
The show is a windfall for the museum ; authentic ledger art often carries a price tag that far exceeds the institution ’ s annual curatorial budget and is typically housed in much larger , more prominent museums .
For example , Kiowa Chiefs on a Visit to the Agent , which depicts a Kiowa delegation on its way to meet US officials , is archived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City .
And therein lies the problem .
The centerpiece of the Pioneer Museum ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one at the Met ; what ’ s different is the number of delegates , the reversal of a lead figure , and the drawing style .
Then there ’ s a battle scene drawing in the show—which looks much like a piece in the Blanton Museum in Austin , Tex .
And the artist credited to that piece ?
Several experts say they have no knowledge that he ever existed .
At least 20 of the pieces that have been on display at the Lander Pioneer Museum for the past two years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suspected counterfeit art speaks to a serious problem with authentication in the art world—one in which an eBay auctioneer in East Texas used online markets to sell unauthenticated , and perhaps forged art to a Wyoming buyer with no formal expertise , who then transferred that art to a museum where it was presented to the public as real .
Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 , a truth-in-advertising law that prohibits the misrepresentation of Indigenous art products , only the seller of forged work , and possibly the platform @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criminal penalties .
However , that law applies only to Native American artwork produced after 1935 .
While the pieces on display at the Pioneer Museum supposedly predate that year , experts we spoke with suggest that more than a few of them may have been created in the last decade or so .
But the potential forgeries also speak to the ongoing exploitation of Indigenous peoples : communities that already fit uneasily into the world of fine art and often remain marginalized by inaccurate representations , persistent cultural appropriation , and sellers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ January and August of this year , the Indian Arts and Crafts Board has received approximately 500 complaints about fake Indigenous art ranging from counterfeit jewelry to paintings .
Generally , the agency receives around 200 complaints a year , and only 39 complaints have led to an indictment since 2000 .
That means it ’ s not clear if justice , whatever that means here , is even possible in Wyoming .
“ Most of the people who buy this stuff have big bucks , ” says Jim Stewart .
“ Retired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this ballgame.
” Stewart is a short , sturdy man in his 80s .
His white hair is often covered by a baseball cap that boasts his service in the US Navy .
A Lander local , he serves on the board of directors at the Lander Pioneer Museum , where his personal , 150-piece ledger art collection has been rotated through the “ Tribal Warrior Art ” show for nearly two years .
When he ’ s not fixing broken display cases at the museum , he ’ s enjoying the exhibit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how the details of the ledger pieces—the style of a horse ’ s bridle , or the cut of a person ’ s hair—offer clues about an artist ’ s tribal affiliation .
He ’ s got a sharp eye for the stuff , he says , sometimes sharper than the online dealers who supplied the entire collection .
“ I know more about what they sell , I think , than they do , ” he says .
Prior to forced relocation , war , and genocide , Indigenous people created narrative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rocks , wood , and buffalo hide .
That is , until the late 1860s , when bands of white hunters , sanctioned by the United States , enacted a scorched-earth policy , mass-killing swaths of buffalo herds in an effort to decimate Indigenous populations on the plains .
With the loss of the buffalo , tribal artists and record keepers shifted from hide to paper , and in many cases , lined pages pulled from ledger books—hence the name “ ledger art.
” Because ledger art is fragile and much of it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pieces are relatively rare—except in Texas .
Here , Stewart has managed to purchase at least two dozen drawings over the last 10 years or so from an online seller by the name of Keith Lack .
“ He ’ s a middle man between whoever has a collection [ and potential buyers ] .
He doesn ’ t collect , he rolls over collections , ” Stewart says .
“ And who does he buy from ?
He doesn ’ t disclose that.
” Originally from California , Keith Lack calls Jefferson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ On social media profiles , he lists himself as a visual effects artist , an accomplished stage and screen actor , and a magician who performed his act on MTV in the 1990s .
In addition to his work in film and magic , he performed in a series of radio plays produced by the Jefferson Opera House Theatre Players this spring .
According to Lack , ledger art post-1900 is “ quite common ” and can be obtained relatively cheap , despite expert assertions to the contrary .
Since at least 2014 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sell around 100 pieces of ledger art on eBay .
Worthpoint , a website that aggregates online auctions , has captured these listings , which do not name Lack directly , but use language that is identical to his eBay listings .
Lack has sold some of these pieces for as low as $ 55 .
By comparison , ledger drawings in good condition might fetch upwards of $ 3,500 , while exceptional pieces , like the one sold by Heritage Auctions earlier this year , went for $ 106,250 at auction , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ low prices raise major red flags for serious curators and experts , but they fit comfortably within the budgets of hobbyists like Stewart , who says buying from Lack and other online sellers is a way to indulge a lifelong interest in the form without breaking the bank .
“ I go on the Internet and I just call up ‘ Indian ledger art.
’ I Google it , ” he says .
“ You get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of results.
” Stewart sticks with sellers like Lack who not only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reach out before listing a batch of drawings on eBay to offer private , discounted prices .
Stewart likens the experience to hitting up a pawn shop or a used car lot .
Two artists featured in “ Tribal Warrior Art ” go by the names of Sam Lomo and Nadya Loomis .
According to Lack , the pieces associated with these two artists came from Colorado .
Originally interested in finding and buying vintage tobacco advertising ads , Lack says he came across framed ledger art pieces at the home of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a tobacco salesman , befriended the artist Lomo at a Wild West show in the 1920s .
Lomo claimed to be a former scout for the US Army and worked in the show , but in his off-time , he made ledger art drawings to sell to tourists .
The tobacco salesman bought a multitude , then Lack bought them from his grandchild .
“ I am not at liberty to give out names and contact information as I still buy items from them and will not give out that information for obvious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ e-mail after declining to be interviewed by phone for this story .
“ Not to mention it would be an invasion of trust and privacy.
” In most of his eBay listings , Lack doesn ’ t provide specifics about Lomo ’ s tribal affiliation , but a few list him as Sioux .
Listings on some secondary auction sites identify Lomo ’ s works as “ Kiowa Native American Ledger Drawing ( s ) .
” Lack says that “ no one knew specifically what tribe ” Lomo came from .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ likely , ” Lack wrote in an e-mail .
“ Was he a Native American ?
It is unclear either way.
” That question of authenticity and provenance is a major problem .
Kiowa Museum curator and artist Tahnee Growingthunder says it ’ s highly unlikely that a ledger artist as prolific as Lomo would fly under the radar of any Indigenous community , including her own .
Growingthunder says the name “ Lomo ” is unknown to elders and others in the community .
As well , the Kiowa Tribe had no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ official enrollment records .
When contacted for more information on Lomo , scholars and curators at the Denver Art Museum , the University of New Mexico , the University of Oklahoma , Texas Tech University , and others had never heard of him .
Lomo isn ’ t listed on the Plains Indian Ledger Art database , a project led by the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California San Diego .
In the Navajo Nation , Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots The same goes for Loomis , the artist credited on about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Museum .
If Loomis existed , she would be one of the first women to ever create Ledger art in the early 20th century .
An online search , however , only finds her name attached to Lack ’ s eBay listings—and now , on the walls of the Pioneer Museum .
Take the battlefield scene in the Pioneer Museum ’ s show .
Purchased from Lack and credited to Lomo , it ’ s similar to another piece housed at the Blanton that is believed to depict the 1874 Battle of Buffalo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ borrow , ” insists Stewart .
Lomo , Stewart reasons , must have seen the original drawing and created a “ flashier ” version to sell to tourists at the Wild West show .
How this is possible is unclear , as the original drawing was held in a private collection in Germany from the late 19th century until 1964 .
In 1915 , when Lomo allegedly borrowed its subject matter , the drawing had not yet emerged from obscurity , raising the question of just when the Lomo piece was created .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ drawings , which he purchased from Lack and credits to Loomis , that bear an uncanny resemblance to works by the Sans Arc Lakota artist Black Hawk .
Drawn in 1880 or 1881 , Black Hawk ’ s original drawings were purchased by a white trader and passed down through his family for most of the 20th century .
The drawings were briefly lent to a museum in Los Angeles in 1933 , leaving open an incredibly slim possibility that a Lakota woman might have come across them , committed them to memory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1940 .
But Stewart has also considered the possibility that his “ Loomis ” pieces are actually reproductions made by Black Hawk himself : Since the artist was paid 50 cents a piece for his original drawings , it ’ s only logical he would replicate them , he argues .
“ If Ford makes one car and he can sell it , he ’ s going to start making more cars .
Right ?
Same with these guys , ” he says .
“ Which one ’ s the chicken and which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can not tell you.
” How Visual Culture Is Implicated in Mass Incarceration One of those questionable drawings , labeled Thunder Destroyer in the exhibit and sold to Stewart by another eBay seller , is drawn on a ledger dated 1896 , some 16 years after Black Hawk drew the original and seven years after he is believed to have died .
Then there ’ s Arapaho Dog Soldier , a splurge for Stewart , who picked it up for $ 250 in 2018 .
It ’ s a nearly identical copy of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Henderson .
According to Stewart , the two versions of the drawing have identical origin stories : They were created by the same artist using the same medium during the same window in time .
The only difference is one was acquired by the Met and the other ended up on eBay .
Still , Stewart maintains that he knows how to spot a fake and would never buy one .
In fact , he says his expertise is so strong that he could produce his own convincing fakes if he ever wanted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” says Stewart , who holds a studio art degree and worked 18 years as a public school art teacher .
“ If I was dishonest , I could fool people.
” “ I would say I am 99 percent certain they ’ re not what they say they are , ” Growingthunder says .
“ And if I ’ m proven wrong , then that ’ s just my own mistake .
But I am brave enough to put it out there to say that this is not accurate .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Capture , curator and vice president of Native Collections at the Autry Museum of the West , agrees .
After reviewing images of seven drawings on display at the Lander Pioneer museum that are credited to Lomo and Loomis , Horse Capture says they “ do not seem like historic works at all.
” So many elements in the pieces are anachronistic that he doesn ’ t know where to begin .
“ I think it ’ d be better to ask , ‘ What in here is quite right ?
’ ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a shorter list.
” Without physically handling the works , Horse Capture can ’ t say outright that they are fakes .
That said , he has seen hundreds of pieces of Plains narrative art and maintains that he ’ s never seen this style of narrative drawing before .
“ It makes me wonder when these were actually produced , ” Horse Capture says .
“ It seems likely that these were done within the past decade , maybe .
They ’ re certainly not historic.
” When Stewart offered to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the site manager of the Pioneer Museum , jumped at the opportunity .
And while Wise says he had questions about some of the drawings , he took Stewart ’ s word that they were authentic .
When presented with the findings of this investigation , Wise conceded that he was “ not surprised ” many of the drawings may be fake .
“ I wouldn ’ t be surprised if we have some fake beadwork , too , ” he said with a chuckle , adding that the museum is likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small museums with few resources .
Scott Goetz , director of the museum network that includes the Lander Pioneer Museum , declined an interview and instead e-mailed a statement calling the situation “ unfortunate ” but says the blame lies with the sellers .
“ It is sad that there are individuals who would take advantage of such an important cultural aspect of Native American history , ” Goetz wrote .
But Lack denies any wrongdoing and says he is not responsible for the pieces he sold to Stewart .
“ If he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a museum , that would be solely on him , ” Lack wrote when presented with the reporting in this story .
“ Museums have curators .
Their job is to authenticate any items they display in their galleries and to take responsibility for the collections.
” This may seem like small potatoes in the landscape of art forgery cases .
A bunch of possibly fake Native American pieces that sold for a couple hundred bucks each and hung in a small-town museum don ’ t carry the same weight as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Knoedler Gallery or the national art forgery ring the FBI busted in Michigan this summer .
But regardless of the size of these operations , marginalization is the point .
Native American art has been taken seriously by non-Native collectors and curators only in the last 50 or so years , and never to the same degree as American or European art .
If a forged George Ault is cause for an FBI raid , does a forged Black Hawk warrant the same resources and attention ?
Indigenous artists , curators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ space for Indigenous artists is small enough , and to have those slivers of space filled with modern knockoffs by fictitious artists is an additional indignity .
Growingthunder says all of this could have been avoided if Stewart or the museum had simply reached out to the tribes in question and asked for authentication .
But collectors and institutions sometimes skip this crucial step , she says , because they fear that a tribe will try to repatriate an item .
Meanwhile , Keith Lack continues to list artwork for sale on eBay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ caveat : “ I am not a Native American Expert .
I find items that are unique and make wonderful additions to collections or decor and list them with the information I get at the time I acquire ( or agree to take on consignment ) the item.
” His recent sales include a work clearly based on an 1890 drawing titled Short Bull Falls From Wounded Horse , which is housed at the Met .
“ This is a well-known drawing and well published , ” says Horse Capture , after comparing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Clearly , whoever made this contemporary version of it used Short Bull ’ s drawing as a base.
” In his listing , titled “ Original Indian School Ledger Drawing .
1919 , ” Lack included the phrase “ Carlisle Nidian [ sic ] Industrial School ” and the year , 1919 implying the time and place the piece was produced .
Yet the notorious boarding school was shuttered the year prior and formally turned over to the US Army on September 1 , 1918 .
A representative from the Carlisle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ College told us that the piece could not have been created at the school in 1919 because the school did not exist then , and that its “ association with Carlisle is immediately suspect.
” It sold for $ 270 in mid-August .
This is the kind of piece that , with another careless chain of custody , could end up on the walls of a museum where elementary school children will huddle around the drawing as a docent describes the scene from a Native artist who never existed .
“ Tribal Warrior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Lander Pioneer Museum .
It ’ s unclear where the pieces will go next , if anywhere .
Disclosure : Kiowa Museum curator Tahnee Growingthunder is a cousin of Tristan Ahtone , the Texas Observer ’ s editor in chief .
This played no role in the reporting of this story .

Chris O’Connell, Savannah Maher, The Texas Observer

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was reported in collaboration with Wyoming Public Media and published in partnership with the Texas Observer and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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It’s a modest museum on the edge of a modest town. The Lander Pioneer Museum is dimly lit, a nod to its log cabin beginnings, and its mismatched display cases house everything from antique saddles to applesauce mills—artifacts of early settlers in what is now Lander, Wyo. In the main gallery, a placard announces the institution’s major show, “Tribal Warrior Art.” The exhibition, which debuted in fall of 2018, contains about 100 ledger art drawings—narrative illustrations created by Indigenous artists from the Plains on discarded account books, mostly during the late 19th century.
The show is a windfall for the museum; authentic ledger art often carries a price tag that far exceeds the institution’s annual curatorial budget and is typically housed in much larger, more prominent museums. For example, Kiowa Chiefs on a Visit to the Agent, which depicts a Kiowa delegation on its way to meet US officials, is archived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
And therein lies the problem. The centerpiece of the Pioneer Museum’s show is suspiciously similar to the one at the Met; what’s different is the number of delegates, the reversal of a lead figure, and the drawing style. Then there’s a battle scene drawing in the show—which looks much like a piece in the Blanton Museum in Austin, Tex. And the artist credited to that piece? Several experts say they have no knowledge that he ever existed.
At least 20 of the pieces that have been on display at the Lander Pioneer Museum for the past two years are possible forgeries or frauds. The suspected counterfeit art speaks to a serious problem with authentication in the art world—one in which an eBay auctioneer in East Texas used online markets to sell unauthenticated, and perhaps forged art to a Wyoming buyer with no formal expertise, who then transferred that art to a museum where it was presented to the public as real.
Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, a truth-in-advertising law that prohibits the misrepresentation of Indigenous art products, only the seller of forged work, and possibly the platform, eBay, can face civil or criminal penalties. However, that law applies only to Native American artwork produced after 1935. While the pieces on display at the Pioneer Museum supposedly predate that year, experts we spoke with suggest that more than a few of them may have been created in the last decade or so.
But the potential forgeries also speak to the ongoing exploitation of Indigenous peoples: communities that already fit uneasily into the world of fine art and often remain marginalized by inaccurate representations, persistent cultural appropriation, and sellers peddling fake Native American art. Between January and August of this year, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board has received approximately 500 complaints about fake Indigenous art ranging from counterfeit jewelry to paintings. Generally, the agency receives around 200 complaints a year, and only 39 complaints have led to an indictment since 2000. That means it’s not clear if justice, whatever that means here, is even possible in Wyoming. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
“Most of the people who buy this stuff have big bucks,” says Jim Stewart. “Retired school teachers aren’t typically in this ballgame.” Current Issue View our current issue
Stewart is a short, sturdy man in his 80s. His white hair is often covered by a baseball cap that boasts his service in the US Navy. A Lander local, he serves on the board of directors at the Lander Pioneer Museum, where his personal, 150-piece ledger art collection has been rotated through the “Tribal Warrior Art” show for nearly two years.
When he’s not fixing broken display cases at the museum, he’s enjoying the exhibit, and can explain with gruff authority how the details of the ledger pieces—the style of a horse’s bridle, or the cut of a person’s hair—offer clues about an artist’s tribal affiliation. He’s got a sharp eye for the stuff, he says, sometimes sharper than the online dealers who supplied the entire collection. “I know more about what they sell, I think, than they do,” he says.
Prior to forced relocation, war, and genocide, Indigenous people created narrative art on a multitude of canvases like rocks, wood, and buffalo hide. That is, until the late 1860s, when bands of white hunters, sanctioned by the United States, enacted a scorched-earth policy, mass-killing swaths of buffalo herds in an effort to decimate Indigenous populations on the plains. With the loss of the buffalo, tribal artists and record keepers shifted from hide to paper, and in many cases, lined pages pulled from ledger books—hence the name “ledger art.”
Because ledger art is fragile and much of it has not been professionally preserved, authentic pieces are relatively rare—except in Texas. Here, Stewart has managed to purchase at least two dozen drawings over the last 10 years or so from an online seller by the name of Keith Lack.
“He’s a middle man between whoever has a collection [and potential buyers]. He doesn’t collect, he rolls over collections,” Stewart says. “And who does he buy from? He doesn’t disclose that.”
Originally from California, Keith Lack calls Jefferson, in East Texas, home. On social media profiles, he lists himself as a visual effects artist, an accomplished stage and screen actor, and a magician who performed his act on MTV in the 1990s. In addition to his work in film and magic, he performed in a series of radio plays produced by the Jefferson Opera House Theatre Players this spring.
According to Lack, ledger art post-1900 is “quite common” and can be obtained relatively cheap, despite expert assertions to the contrary. Since at least 2014, he’s been able to sell around 100 pieces of ledger art on eBay. Worthpoint, a website that aggregates online auctions, has captured these listings, which do not name Lack directly, but use language that is identical to his eBay listings.
Lack has sold some of these pieces for as low as $55. By comparison, ledger drawings in good condition might fetch upwards of $3,500, while exceptional pieces, like the one sold by Heritage Auctions earlier this year, went for $106,250 at auction, a record high. Lack’s low prices raise major red flags for serious curators and experts, but they fit comfortably within the budgets of hobbyists like Stewart, who says buying from Lack and other online sellers is a way to indulge a lifelong interest in the form without breaking the bank. “I go on the Internet and I just call up ‘Indian ledger art.’ I Google it,” he says. “You get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of results.”
Stewart sticks with sellers like Lack who not only offer much lower prices but will occasionally reach out before listing a batch of drawings on eBay to offer private, discounted prices. Stewart likens the experience to hitting up a pawn shop or a used car lot.
Two artists featured in “Tribal Warrior Art” go by the names of Sam Lomo and Nadya Loomis. According to Lack, the pieces associated with these two artists came from Colorado. Originally interested in finding and buying vintage tobacco advertising ads, Lack says he came across framed ledger art pieces at the home of a seller who claimed that their grandfather, a tobacco salesman, befriended the artist Lomo at a Wild West show in the 1920s. Lomo claimed to be a former scout for the US Army and worked in the show, but in his off-time, he made ledger art drawings to sell to tourists. The tobacco salesman bought a multitude, then Lack bought them from his grandchild.
“I am not at liberty to give out names and contact information as I still buy items from them and will not give out that information for obvious reasons,” Lack wrote in an e-mail after declining to be interviewed by phone for this story. “Not to mention it would be an invasion of trust and privacy.”
In most of his eBay listings, Lack doesn’t provide specifics about Lomo’s tribal affiliation, but a few list him as Sioux. Listings on some secondary auction sites identify Lomo’s works as “Kiowa Native American Ledger Drawing(s).” Lack says that “no one knew specifically what tribe” Lomo came from. “Was he a real person? Most likely,” Lack wrote in an e-mail. “Was he a Native American? It is unclear either way.”
That question of authenticity and provenance is a major problem.
Kiowa Museum curator and artist Tahnee Growingthunder says it’s highly unlikely that a ledger artist as prolific as Lomo would fly under the radar of any Indigenous community, including her own. Growingthunder says the name “Lomo” is unknown to elders and others in the community. As well, the Kiowa Tribe had no record of anyone by that name on official enrollment records.
When contacted for more information on Lomo, scholars and curators at the Denver Art Museum, the University of New Mexico, the University of Oklahoma, Texas Tech University, and others had never heard of him. Lomo isn’t listed on the Plains Indian Ledger Art database, a project led by the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California San Diego. Related Article In the Navajo Nation, Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots Cecilia Nowell
The same goes for Loomis, the artist credited on about a dozen drawings at the Lander Pioneer Museum. If Loomis existed, she would be one of the first women to ever create Ledger art in the early 20th century. An online search, however, only finds her name attached to Lack’s eBay listings—and now, on the walls of the Pioneer Museum.
Take the battlefield scene in the Pioneer Museum’s show. Purchased from Lack and credited to Lomo, it’s similar to another piece housed at the Blanton that is believed to depict the 1874 Battle of Buffalo Wallow. “It’s a borrow,” insists Stewart. Lomo, Stewart reasons, must have seen the original drawing and created a “flashier” version to sell to tourists at the Wild West show. How this is possible is unclear, as the original drawing was held in a private collection in Germany from the late 19th century until 1964. In 1915, when Lomo allegedly borrowed its subject matter, the drawing had not yet emerged from obscurity, raising the question of just when the Lomo piece was created.
Stewart applies the same logic to four drawings, which he purchased from Lack and credits to Loomis, that bear an uncanny resemblance to works by the Sans Arc Lakota artist Black Hawk. Drawn in 1880 or 1881, Black Hawk’s original drawings were purchased by a white trader and passed down through his family for most of the 20th century. The drawings were briefly lent to a museum in Los Angeles in 1933, leaving open an incredibly slim possibility that a Lakota woman might have come across them, committed them to memory, and produced copies some time before 1940.
But Stewart has also considered the possibility that his “Loomis” pieces are actually reproductions made by Black Hawk himself: Since the artist was paid 50 cents a piece for his original drawings, it’s only logical he would replicate them, he argues. “If Ford makes one car and he can sell it, he’s going to start making more cars. Right? Same with these guys,” he says. “Which one’s the chicken and which one’s the egg, I cannot tell you.” Related Article How Visual Culture Is Implicated in Mass Incarceration Jessica Lynne
One of those questionable drawings, labeled Thunder Destroyer in the exhibit and sold to Stewart by another eBay seller, is drawn on a ledger dated 1896, some 16 years after Black Hawk drew the original and seven years after he is believed to have died.
Then there’s Arapaho Dog Soldier, a splurge for Stewart, who picked it up for $250 in 2018. It’s a nearly identical copy of a self-portrait by Southern Arapaho artist Frank Henderson. According to Stewart, the two versions of the drawing have identical origin stories: They were created by the same artist using the same medium during the same window in time. The only difference is one was acquired by the Met and the other ended up on eBay.
Still, Stewart maintains that he knows how to spot a fake and would never buy one. In fact, he says his expertise is so strong that he could produce his own convincing fakes if he ever wanted to. “I’m proficient,” says Stewart, who holds a studio art degree and worked 18 years as a public school art teacher. “If I was dishonest, I could fool people.”
“I would say I am 99 percent certain they’re not what they say they are,” Growingthunder says. “And if I’m proven wrong, then that’s just my own mistake. But I am brave enough to put it out there to say that this is not accurate. This is not authentic art.”
Joe Horse Capture, curator and vice president of Native Collections at the Autry Museum of the West, agrees. After reviewing images of seven drawings on display at the Lander Pioneer museum that are credited to Lomo and Loomis, Horse Capture says they “do not seem like historic works at all.” So many elements in the pieces are anachronistic that he doesn’t know where to begin. “I think it’d be better to ask, ‘What in here is quite right?’” he says. “It’ll be a shorter list.”
Without physically handling the works, Horse Capture can’t say outright that they are fakes. That said, he has seen hundreds of pieces of Plains narrative art and maintains that he’s never seen this style of narrative drawing before.
“It makes me wonder when these were actually produced,” Horse Capture says. “It seems likely that these were done within the past decade, maybe. They’re certainly not historic.”
When Stewart offered to loan out his collection, Randy Wise, the site manager of the Pioneer Museum, jumped at the opportunity. And while Wise says he had questions about some of the drawings, he took Stewart’s word that they were authentic. When presented with the findings of this investigation, Wise conceded that he was “not surprised” many of the drawings may be fake. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some fake beadwork, too,” he said with a chuckle, adding that the museum is likely “in good company” among other small museums with few resources.
Scott Goetz, director of the museum network that includes the Lander Pioneer Museum, declined an interview and instead e-mailed a statement calling the situation “unfortunate” but says the blame lies with the sellers. “It is sad that there are individuals who would take advantage of such an important cultural aspect of Native American history,” Goetz wrote.
But Lack denies any wrongdoing and says he is not responsible for the pieces he sold to Stewart. “If he authenticated these items himself and gifted/sold them to a museum, that would be solely on him,” Lack wrote when presented with the reporting in this story. “Museums have curators. Their job is to authenticate any items they display in their galleries and to take responsibility for the collections.”
This may seem like small potatoes in the landscape of art forgery cases. A bunch of possibly fake Native American pieces that sold for a couple hundred bucks each and hung in a small-town museum don’t carry the same weight as the fake Mark Rothkos and Jackson Pollocks sold by the Knoedler Gallery or the national art forgery ring the FBI busted in Michigan this summer.
But regardless of the size of these operations, marginalization is the point. Native American art has been taken seriously by non-Native collectors and curators only in the last 50 or so years, and never to the same degree as American or European art. If a forged George Ault is cause for an FBI raid, does a forged Black Hawk warrant the same resources and attention? Related Article Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty Are Interconnected Josué Rivas, The Nation and Magnum Foundation
Indigenous artists, curators, and historians say yes. The space for Indigenous artists is small enough, and to have those slivers of space filled with modern knockoffs by fictitious artists is an additional indignity.
Growingthunder says all of this could have been avoided if Stewart or the museum had simply reached out to the tribes in question and asked for authentication. But collectors and institutions sometimes skip this crucial step, she says, because they fear that a tribe will try to repatriate an item.
Meanwhile, Keith Lack continues to list artwork for sale on eBay. His item descriptions all have a caveat: “I am not a Native American Expert. I find items that are unique and make wonderful additions to collections or decor and list them with the information I get at the time I acquire (or agree to take on consignment) the item.” His recent sales include a work clearly based on an 1890 drawing titled Short Bull Falls From Wounded Horse, which is housed at the Met. “This is a well-known drawing and well published,” says Horse Capture, after comparing Lack’s version to the original. “Clearly, whoever made this contemporary version of it used Short Bull’s drawing as a base.”
In his listing, titled “Original Indian School Ledger Drawing. 1919,” Lack included the phrase “Carlisle Nidian [sic] Industrial School” and the year, 1919 implying the time and place the piece was produced. Yet the notorious boarding school was shuttered the year prior and formally turned over to the US Army on September 1, 1918. A representative from the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center at Dickinson College told us that the piece could not have been created at the school in 1919 because the school did not exist then, and that its “association with Carlisle is immediately suspect.” It sold for $270 in mid-August.
This is the kind of piece that, with another careless chain of custody, could end up on the walls of a museum where elementary school children will huddle around the drawing as a docent describes the scene from a Native artist who never existed.
“Tribal Warrior Art” is now coming down at the Lander Pioneer Museum. It’s unclear where the pieces will go next, if anywhere.
Disclosure: Kiowa Museum curator Tahnee Growingthunder is a cousin of Tristan Ahtone, the Texas Observer’s editor in chief. This played no role in the reporting of this story.


thenation--2020-10-21--A Dilemma of Intimacy

A Dilemma of Intimacy

When I shaved my head in anticipation of chemotherapy , two things happened .
First , just like that , I stopped looking like a woman .
Second , I turned into a monk .
My husband , peering in the mirror , said , “ Hey , you look like a cute monk !
” I am pretty sure the “ cute ” part came out of love , but the “ monk ” part , echoing my thoughts , struck me as a notable coincidence .
In the spirit of camaraderie , he , too , shaved his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less male , nor did he look like a monk .
Being tall and white , he looked… well , military .
So there we were : the monk and the soldier .
Given how complex gender and race are as embodied experiences , it is remarkable how simplistic and crude their visual expressions are .
Could hair , a minor loss in the violence of cancer , make such a great difference ?
I knew , at least intellectually , that “ woman ” has always been reducible to her body parts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so viscerally and mundanely demonstrated in the bathroom mirror stunned me .
And what ’ s with the monk ?
Would my husband have thought I looked like a monk had he not grown up watching kung fu movies ?
Would I , had I not immigrated to the United States ?
Have I come to see my own Chineseness through Western tropes ?
In the 1990s , when I lived in Northern California , the San Francisco Bay Guardian ran an article about relationships between Asian women and white men .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of California at Berkeley who , asked why she preferred dating white men over Asians , said , “ Well , it kind of feels incestuous to me…like dating my brother.
” A friend who read the article poked fun at this admission , saying , “ Good thing people in Asia don ’ t think so !
” But there ’ s something behind what that young woman said—a thin line of grief or maybe of querulousness , an expression of familial allergy—that has stayed with me .
Scholars have long pointed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the demasculinization of Asian men in American popular media as a leading cause for the high rate of Asian American women marrying outside their race .
But it is also common wisdom among Asian American women that if you discover that your white boyfriend has been exclusively dating Asian women , you should run for the hills .
The fetishization of white masculinity is thus not necessarily the obvious other half to the fetishization of Asian femininity , and racialized gender is not simply a problem about the politics of representation .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interview seems to me to speak more to a dilemma of intimacy for the diasporic subject , a wound in the experience of kinship itself .
Kinship , after all , is all about determining who is a stranger and who is not .
It is generally agreed , certainly in Western cultures , that the social norm of marrying outside one ’ s community , clan , or tribe creates biological , economic , and cultural advantages .
The injunction to marry outside one ’ s bloodline to ensure genetic diversity and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on different and confusing meanings when your clan or community has been truncated or displaced , at once insulated and under assault .
For many immigrant communities , marriage within one ’ s ethnic group ensures cultural and familial continuity in the face of fragmenting , geographic dispersal .
Here , then , is the double bind for the racialized minority : Marrying out means selling out , while marrying in can feel like giving in to conservative familial demands on the one hand and xenophobic prohibition on the other .
Only within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traditional , racist white anxiety about miscegenation find a ready ally with traditional Asian family values .
Both sides apply patriarchal and racial restrictions within which the Asian American woman must navigate .
Love can be challenging .
Add being Asian and a woman in America , and you get a vexing picture .
As Cathy Park Hong sums it up in her recent book Minor Feelings , “ In the popular imagination , Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial space…distrusted by African Americans , ignored by whites , unless we are being used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down.
” Used as pawns in the game of racial divisiveness , Asian Americans are often despised for their reputed adjacency to whiteness and economic privileges .
In a 2012 study , psychologist Susan Fiske showed that most Americans rate Asians and Asian Americans as highly “ competent ” or “ intelligent , ” but almost all found the latter to be “ cold ” or “ not warm ” —that is , unloved and unlovable .
The result is not surprising , especially since the very terms of the survey ( competence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grounds on which Asianness gets judged .
The Asian American woman would seem to fare better than her male counterpart on the likability scale .
She at least can claim access to erotic or exotic appeal .
But this privilege also spells her downfall .
At once the lotus blossom and the dragon lady , the celestial being and the pestilential prostitute ( according to 19th century immigration laws ) , Asian beauty in America is , historically and now , an ugly business .
To this day , the Asian American woman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racial imaginary : She has absorbed centuries of the most blatant racist and sexist projections , yet she hardly registers in the public consciousness as a minority , much less a figure who has suffered discrimination .
The writer David Xu Borgonjon once wryly observed , “ You can only be Asian outside of Asia.
” For the Asian American woman , I would add , she can be neither wholly Asian nor wholly American , seen as both a prize and a liability .
She is caught between sets of double elimination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stranger versus family distinction—confounding , even perilous .
Years ago , when my husband was shopping with our newborn girl , a woman in the store approached him to ask eagerly , “ I got my daughter from China .
Where did you get yours ?
” My husband was amused by the encounter , but I recall being pained by the story .
Did my husband , even for a second , feel our daughter to be foreign to him ?
Did the incident jar him out of the cocoon of our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being able to bring myself to ask these questions out loud .
My husband and I had taken on so many challenges beyond becoming an interracial couple : getting married as older adults ; learning to meld two full , separate , and idiosyncratic lives ; buying a house we could barely afford ; confronting parenthood for the first time .
So why was I unsettled by a stranger ’ s perception ?
That ’ s the power of the third gaze .
I can dismiss the woman ’ s clumsy assumption , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for community , but her misrecognition is not unlike what haunts my extended family .
Members of my side of the family invariably remark how white my children look , while my husband ’ s side observes how Chinese they look .
There ’ s what the world out there sees , and then there ’ s our lived , affective reality .
The two are not the same , but they are also not wholly disconnected from each other , either .
How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , complex , and fragile conditions of being—at once magically capable of being forged and terribly easy to rupture .
Sometimes the dance of strangeness and familiarity in my marriage ( those tiny shifts of reality ) baffles me , the ways in which quotidian intimacy can energize or hinder our togetherness .
We come in and out of focus in everyday living .
The more familiar we are with each other , the more intimacy becomes both a lifeline and an obstacle , something we rely on but also something that foils @ @ @ @ @ @ @ each other afresh .
In minor , daily acts , like chatting over washing dishes , we swell in the luxury of shared rhythm and private language , but a particular turn of phrase or a tone that the other recognizes all too well can abruptly open up a jagged breach .
This , too , is difference at work .
In 1920 , W.E.B .
Du Bois wrote a haunting story called “ The Comet , ” a dystopian vision of the end of the world in which , at long last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white woman and the last Black man ) could be redeemed .
Only with the apparent end of the world and the breakdown of all societal rules , according to Du Bois , can love between the races be imaginable .
But in the story , it turns out that only their city was destroyed , her family returns in the end , and all that was between the lovers is dashed , erased as if it had never been .
But do we need to face death or disaster to own interracial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ husband and I are such opposites .
There are times when I feel the insurmountable wall of our differences—his stubbornness , his maleness , his whiteness .
Yet I have also grown from his determination , his unshakable faith in our ability and right to thrive in this world .
When cancer and chemo stripped me down to the core , there was no one else on earth on whom the bare skeleton of me could lean other than him .
My husband ’ s ease in the world is both who he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moves in the world .
His presence in most spaces is rarely questioned .
I enter a room and immediately scan it for Asians or other people of color , their number ( whether none or too many ) calling for different social arsenal .
Over the years , I have developed enough of a mask of composure to be highly functional .
Few people know how much mental energy it takes for me to enter a room full of people or to talk to a stranger .
A very old friend once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ party was like watching a duck on a pond : above the water , smooth gliding ; under the water , the frantic flutter of feet .
Family lore tells of a different child in Taiwan , one who talked back whenever she was told girls are disposable , one who wore a glaring yellow and orange bell-bottom suit to a uniformed school on picture day .
That cocky girl disappeared around the time of our move to America .
I think I lost her to immigration and puberty .
Her departure was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much a loss as a forgetting .
She disappeared behind little punctuating moments : Adrianne—pink , blond , green-eyed , and one of my first American friends—pinching my skin and exclaiming , “ You are not yellow at all , ” my father telling me not to call him “ Pop-pi ” anymore because in America it sounded as if I were calling a puppy , the only other Asian American girl in my high school snubbing me because people assumed we would be friends .
It took years for me to acknowledge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Such admission would feel like a great failure .
It would mean I have fallen into the petty trap of the disgruntled other , like the child who , in demanding to know why she was not invited to a party , exposes her longing .
Or it would mean that I have not worked hard enough or have not been good enough to master my limitations .
To this day , I fluctuate between trying to own categories I occupy and trying to resist categories that own me .
Recently , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a group of colleagues , I overheard one of them say , “ And we even had a Chinese woman on the committee with us.
” What feels so terrible about social alienation is that it can divide you from yourself .
Even as I grow older and kinder to myself , my body seems intent on repeating the habit of dis-ease .
First came the entire day that I lost ; they call it transient global amnesia .
( Wasn ’ t I , an immigrant , already a globally transient subject @ @ @ @ @ @ @ refused to dump itself into long-term memory for 18 hours , I was stuck in a loop , restarting every few minutes .
My brain hiccuped like a broken toy .
I would have preferred to be out cold over that unreliable consciousness .
For months afterward , I could not trust myself to drive or stray too far from home .
Then came a series of auto-immune issues .
“ It ’ s as if your body thinks it is under constant threat , so it attacks itself , ” the doctors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that your body is working against you—that is , until you are told there is actual malignancy in your body .
After my cancer surgery , I woke up in the operating room .
I could not speak but could hear loud noises , metal clanking , and people murmuring .
Someone pulled something hard out of my throat , and my body told me hands were pulling and pushing parts of me that I could not really feel .
In a moment of panic , I wondered if they knew I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being made a stranger to yourself .
When the chemo began to leach my interiority , empty me out like a used bag , I took on a transparency , a ghost behind glass , unreachable even to myself .
In those nondays , the only anchor against my vanishing was my effort to approximate being a parent and a person .
All the words we have around cancer—militarized ones like “ fighting ” or euphemistic ones like “ treatment ” —really end up sealing an experience that is nearly impossible to describe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eradication at the very cellular level of your being , not pain as we know it but an awful erasure of your mind , your being , you .
The truth was I felt indifferent , unmoored from everything and everyone , even from the life I was laboring to save .
My body sat on me like an armor even as it refused sanctuary .
When I could read again , I found these lines from the poet Jacqui Germain : The tail end of my treatment coincided with the outbreak of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into the world ’ s quarantine .
It was heart-sinking enough to confront my mortality ; now , almost every week I have to process news of the death of family members , friends , former teachers .
We all know we are going to die one day , but the force of that knowledge can be felt only when death breaks into your path and sits on your chest .
Covid-19 has made it clear how interconnected we all are .
It has shown that the question of life itself is not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ethical one : Whose life counts ?
How do you take care of yourself and others ?
What is your responsibility to those most vulnerable ?
Constraint and responsibility have always been conditions of and not exceptions to freedom .
Yet this shared proximity to disaster and the huge losses incurred because of the pandemic have not been able to protect us from old enmities—the fact that we in 2020 still have to argue for the value of Black lives , the eruption of attacks on people of Asian descent since the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a shared global health crisis would save us from racial antagonism .
It ’ s the opposite : The viral crisis has become a vector for the racism that has always spoken in and circulated through the language of contamination .
Anti-Black and anti-Asian sentiments are born from at least three centuries of American racial strife , the enduring , knotted legacy of systemic and cultural racism .
They become only more vivified in the presence of other disasters .
More and more , I fear Du Bois ’ s vision remains prophetic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not enough to warrant love between the races or to make claims for a fundamental regard for life .
My husband and I did not come to be the monk and the soldier in this world accidentally .
As I write , it occurs to me that , aside from the exotic Asian woman , the monk and the soldier may be two of the most iconic and loaded figures to emerge out of East-West entanglements .
US militarized presence in Asia for the better part of the 20th century has made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many people outside the United States , while the monk has become for the West the very symbol of Asian passivity and outdatedness , whose extinction has been safeguarded against only by its occasional usefulness as an appropriable source of Eastern mysticism .
Given the contemporary rhetoric of contagion ( surrounding both disease and the immigrant ) and the anti-Chinese xenophobia revived by Covid-19 , the monk is hardly quarantined from the stigma that is as old as the Yellow Peril and as recent as the “ China virus ” or “ kung @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our sitting president .
That my husband and I , in the darkest moment of our private reckoning , in the face of a threat to our very future , should end up reproducing the flat outlines of these mirror images has everything to do with the racial and gender formulations that inevitably shape and fall terribly short of who we are .
It tells us how powerful and yet also how impoverished cultural images are .
How they move us and how we move through them can be at once coercive and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ husband is my most cherished interlocutor , and there are days when I feel keenly that he will forever remain a stranger to the immigrant in me .
Both are true and are the conditions of our intimacy and our separateness .
The shadow of disaster ( cancer , a global pandemic , racial violence ) makes and unmakes the monk and the soldier , both figures of endurance in their own way , just as my husband and I have had to readjust , moment to moment , our ideas of what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is needed to let go and what to hang on .
( Write it ! )
I may live for several more years or a few more months .
For the time I have , I want to live honestly .
I want to stop proving my worth to a world that treats the diligent but tiresome Asian American woman with expediency and contempt .
It is crushing to be reduced to a cancer patient or the Asian wife of a white man or yet another woman of color .
I feel like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live the reality of all of those things .
I want to shore up my energy and concentrate on things and relationships that give me meaning and joy .
( I would say I am going to Marie Kondo my life , except this lifestyle guru and her enormous popularity draw from so much of what haunts me about being Asian in our culture today—the lingering myth of Eastern simplicity and restraint , the fantasized beauty of self-reduction . )
It takes too much psychic effort to be always good and disciplined , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the minefield of multiple consciousnesses .
I want to own a life to which I am directly connected .
Two months after my last treatment , my hair started to grow back .
The dream is pixie chic , but the reality more resembles a lapsed monk .
When the unruly fuzz started to appear , my husband and this time my son , too , shaved their hair so we could have a hair-growing contest .
Every evening after dinner , at the same time and in the same spot in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of our naked heads to document what grows .
We know we are tracking the imperceptible .
We know we are running an unseen race .
Death now forever moves through the center of our days .
The little bubble of our family , so clearly drawn by the quarantine , holds its own slow time .

When I shaved my head in anticipation of chemotherapy, two things happened. First, just like that, I stopped looking like a woman. Second, I turned into a monk. My husband, peering in the mirror, said, “Hey, you look like a cute monk!” I am pretty sure the “cute” part came out of love, but the “monk” part, echoing my thoughts, struck me as a notable coincidence. In the spirit of camaraderie, he, too, shaved his head. But he did not look less male, nor did he look like a monk. Being tall and white, he looked… well, military. So there we were: the monk and the soldier.
Given how complex gender and race are as embodied experiences, it is remarkable how simplistic and crude their visual expressions are. Could hair, a minor loss in the violence of cancer, make such a great difference? I knew, at least intellectually, that “woman” has always been reducible to her body parts, but to see such an insight so viscerally and mundanely demonstrated in the bathroom mirror stunned me. And what’s with the monk? Would my husband have thought I looked like a monk had he not grown up watching kung fu movies? Would I, had I not immigrated to the United States? Have I come to see my own Chineseness through Western tropes?
In the 1990s, when I lived in Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Guardian ran an article about relationships between Asian women and white men. The article quoted an undergraduate from the University of California at Berkeley who, asked why she preferred dating white men over Asians, said, “Well, it kind of feels incestuous to me…like dating my brother.” A friend who read the article poked fun at this admission, saying, “Good thing people in Asia don’t think so!” But there’s something behind what that young woman said—a thin line of grief or maybe of querulousness, an expression of familial allergy—that has stayed with me.
Scholars have long pointed to the hypersexualization of Asian women and the demasculinization of Asian men in American popular media as a leading cause for the high rate of Asian American women marrying outside their race. But it is also common wisdom among Asian American women that if you discover that your white boyfriend has been exclusively dating Asian women, you should run for the hills. The fetishization of white masculinity is thus not necessarily the obvious other half to the fetishization of Asian femininity, and racialized gender is not simply a problem about the politics of representation.
The young woman’s confession in that interview seems to me to speak more to a dilemma of intimacy for the diasporic subject, a wound in the experience of kinship itself. Kinship, after all, is all about determining who is a stranger and who is not. It is generally agreed, certainly in Western cultures, that the social norm of marrying outside one’s community, clan, or tribe creates biological, economic, and cultural advantages. The injunction to marry outside one’s bloodline to ensure genetic diversity and create social alliance, however, takes on different and confusing meanings when your clan or community has been truncated or displaced, at once insulated and under assault. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
For many immigrant communities, marriage within one’s ethnic group ensures cultural and familial continuity in the face of fragmenting, geographic dispersal. Here, then, is the double bind for the racialized minority: Marrying out means selling out, while marrying in can feel like giving in to conservative familial demands on the one hand and xenophobic prohibition on the other. Only within the peculiarities of American racial dynamics can traditional, racist white anxiety about miscegenation find a ready ally with traditional Asian family values. Both sides apply patriarchal and racial restrictions within which the Asian American woman must navigate.
Love can be challenging. Add being Asian and a woman in America, and you get a vexing picture. As Cathy Park Hong sums it up in her recent book Minor Feelings, “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial space…distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we are being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Used as pawns in the game of racial divisiveness, Asian Americans are often despised for their reputed adjacency to whiteness and economic privileges. In a 2012 study, psychologist Susan Fiske showed that most Americans rate Asians and Asian Americans as highly “competent” or “intelligent,” but almost all found the latter to be “cold” or “not warm”—that is, unloved and unlovable. The result is not surprising, especially since the very terms of the survey (competence and likability) already scripted the limited grounds on which Asianness gets judged.
The Asian American woman would seem to fare better than her male counterpart on the likability scale. She at least can claim access to erotic or exotic appeal. But this privilege also spells her downfall. At once the lotus blossom and the dragon lady, the celestial being and the pestilential prostitute (according to 19th century immigration laws), Asian beauty in America is, historically and now, an ugly business. To this day, the Asian American woman occupies a weird place in the American racial imaginary: She has absorbed centuries of the most blatant racist and sexist projections, yet she hardly registers in the public consciousness as a minority, much less a figure who has suffered discrimination.
The writer David Xu Borgonjon once wryly observed, “You can only be Asian outside of Asia.” For the Asian American woman, I would add, she can be neither wholly Asian nor wholly American, seen as both a prize and a liability. She is caught between sets of double elimination that make the question of love—and the stranger versus family distinction—confounding, even perilous.
Years ago, when my husband was shopping with our newborn girl, a woman in the store approached him to ask eagerly, “I got my daughter from China. Where did you get yours?” My husband was amused by the encounter, but I recall being pained by the story. Did my husband, even for a second, feel our daughter to be foreign to him? Did the incident jar him out of the cocoon of our new family? I also remember not being able to bring myself to ask these questions out loud.
My husband and I had taken on so many challenges beyond becoming an interracial couple: getting married as older adults; learning to meld two full, separate, and idiosyncratic lives; buying a house we could barely afford; confronting parenthood for the first time. So why was I unsettled by a stranger’s perception?
That’s the power of the third gaze. I can dismiss the woman’s clumsy assumption, itself most likely driven by a longing for community, but her misrecognition is not unlike what haunts my extended family. Members of my side of the family invariably remark how white my children look, while my husband’s side observes how Chinese they look. There’s what the world out there sees, and then there’s our lived, affective reality. The two are not the same, but they are also not wholly disconnected from each other, either. Related Article How Does One Tell the Story of Asian America? Jane Hu
Familiarity and intimacy are in fact strange, complex, and fragile conditions of being—at once magically capable of being forged and terribly easy to rupture. Sometimes the dance of strangeness and familiarity in my marriage (those tiny shifts of reality) baffles me, the ways in which quotidian intimacy can energize or hinder our togetherness. We come in and out of focus in everyday living. The more familiar we are with each other, the more intimacy becomes both a lifeline and an obstacle, something we rely on but also something that foils us when we most need to see each other afresh. In minor, daily acts, like chatting over washing dishes, we swell in the luxury of shared rhythm and private language, but a particular turn of phrase or a tone that the other recognizes all too well can abruptly open up a jagged breach. This, too, is difference at work.
In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a haunting story called “The Comet,” a dystopian vision of the end of the world in which, at long last, interracial love (between the last white woman and the last Black man) could be redeemed. Only with the apparent end of the world and the breakdown of all societal rules, according to Du Bois, can love between the races be imaginable. But in the story, it turns out that only their city was destroyed, her family returns in the end, and all that was between the lovers is dashed, erased as if it had never been. But do we need to face death or disaster to own interracial love or risk its ruptures?
My husband and I are such opposites. There are times when I feel the insurmountable wall of our differences—his stubbornness, his maleness, his whiteness. Yet I have also grown from his determination, his unshakable faith in our ability and right to thrive in this world. When cancer and chemo stripped me down to the core, there was no one else on earth on whom the bare skeleton of me could lean other than him.
My husband’s ease in the world is both who he is and the result of how he moves in the world. His presence in most spaces is rarely questioned. I enter a room and immediately scan it for Asians or other people of color, their number (whether none or too many) calling for different social arsenal. Over the years, I have developed enough of a mask of composure to be highly functional. Few people know how much mental energy it takes for me to enter a room full of people or to talk to a stranger. A very old friend once observed that watching me at a dinner party was like watching a duck on a pond: above the water, smooth gliding; under the water, the frantic flutter of feet.
Family lore tells of a different child in Taiwan, one who talked back whenever she was told girls are disposable, one who wore a glaring yellow and orange bell-bottom suit to a uniformed school on picture day. That cocky girl disappeared around the time of our move to America. I think I lost her to immigration and puberty. Her departure was so gradual that it was not so much a loss as a forgetting. She disappeared behind little punctuating moments: Adrianne—pink, blond, green-eyed, and one of my first American friends—pinching my skin and exclaiming, “You are not yellow at all,” my father telling me not to call him “Pop-pi” anymore because in America it sounded as if I were calling a puppy, the only other Asian American girl in my high school snubbing me because people assumed we would be friends.
It took years for me to acknowledge my deep sense of unbelonging in America. Such admission would feel like a great failure. It would mean I have fallen into the petty trap of the disgruntled other, like the child who, in demanding to know why she was not invited to a party, exposes her longing. Or it would mean that I have not worked hard enough or have not been good enough to master my limitations. To this day, I fluctuate between trying to own categories I occupy and trying to resist categories that own me. Recently, after working on a yearlong committee with a group of colleagues, I overheard one of them say, “And we even had a Chinese woman on the committee with us.” What feels so terrible about social alienation is that it can divide you from yourself.
Even as I grow older and kinder to myself, my body seems intent on repeating the habit of dis-ease. First came the entire day that I lost; they call it transient global amnesia. (Wasn’t I, an immigrant, already a globally transient subject?) When my short-term memory suddenly refused to dump itself into long-term memory for 18 hours, I was stuck in a loop, restarting every few minutes. My brain hiccuped like a broken toy. I would have preferred to be out cold over that unreliable consciousness. For months afterward, I could not trust myself to drive or stray too far from home.
Then came a series of auto-immune issues. “It’s as if your body thinks it is under constant threat, so it attacks itself,” the doctors explained. Nothing quite like being told that your body is working against you—that is, until you are told there is actual malignancy in your body. After my cancer surgery, I woke up in the operating room. I could not speak but could hear loud noises, metal clanking, and people murmuring. Someone pulled something hard out of my throat, and my body told me hands were pulling and pushing parts of me that I could not really feel. In a moment of panic, I wondered if they knew I was awake.
There are many ways of being made a stranger to yourself. When the chemo began to leach my interiority, empty me out like a used bag, I took on a transparency, a ghost behind glass, unreachable even to myself. In those nondays, the only anchor against my vanishing was my effort to approximate being a parent and a person.
All the words we have around cancer—militarized ones like “fighting” or euphemistic ones like “treatment”—really end up sealing an experience that is nearly impossible to describe, because it is all about merciless eradication at the very cellular level of your being, not pain as we know it but an awful erasure of your mind, your being, you. The truth was I felt indifferent, unmoored from everything and everyone, even from the life I was laboring to save. My body sat on me like an armor even as it refused sanctuary. When I could read again, I found these lines from the poet Jacqui Germain:
My body is a haunted
house that I am lost in.
There are no doors but there are knives
and a hundred windows.
The tail end of my treatment coincided with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. My self-isolation blended into the world’s quarantine. It was heart-sinking enough to confront my mortality; now, almost every week I have to process news of the death of family members, friends, former teachers. We all know we are going to die one day, but the force of that knowledge can be felt only when death breaks into your path and sits on your chest.
Covid-19 has made it clear how interconnected we all are. It has shown that the question of life itself is not only a biological one but also an ethical one: Whose life counts? How do you take care of yourself and others? What is your responsibility to those most vulnerable? Constraint and responsibility have always been conditions of and not exceptions to freedom. Yet this shared proximity to disaster and the huge losses incurred because of the pandemic have not been able to protect us from old enmities—the fact that we in 2020 still have to argue for the value of Black lives, the eruption of attacks on people of Asian descent since the pandemic began.
I was wrong to think a shared global health crisis would save us from racial antagonism. It’s the opposite: The viral crisis has become a vector for the racism that has always spoken in and circulated through the language of contamination. Anti-Black and anti-Asian sentiments are born from at least three centuries of American racial strife, the enduring, knotted legacy of systemic and cultural racism. They become only more vivified in the presence of other disasters.
More and more, I fear Du Bois’s vision remains prophetic; even the end of the world is not enough to warrant love between the races or to make claims for a fundamental regard for life.
My husband and I did not come to be the monk and the soldier in this world accidentally. As I write, it occurs to me that, aside from the exotic Asian woman, the monk and the soldier may be two of the most iconic and loaded figures to emerge out of East-West entanglements. US militarized presence in Asia for the better part of the 20th century has made the soldier the representative American figure for many people outside the United States, while the monk has become for the West the very symbol of Asian passivity and outdatedness, whose extinction has been safeguarded against only by its occasional usefulness as an appropriable source of Eastern mysticism. Given the contemporary rhetoric of contagion (surrounding both disease and the immigrant) and the anti-Chinese xenophobia revived by Covid-19, the monk is hardly quarantined from the stigma that is as old as the Yellow Peril and as recent as the “China virus” or “kung flu,” in the words of our sitting president.
That my husband and I, in the darkest moment of our private reckoning, in the face of a threat to our very future, should end up reproducing the flat outlines of these mirror images has everything to do with the racial and gender formulations that inevitably shape and fall terribly short of who we are. It tells us how powerful and yet also how impoverished cultural images are. How they move us and how we move through them can be at once coercive and unpredictable. There are days when my husband is my most cherished interlocutor, and there are days when I feel keenly that he will forever remain a stranger to the immigrant in me. Both are true and are the conditions of our intimacy and our separateness.
The shadow of disaster (cancer, a global pandemic, racial violence) makes and unmakes the monk and the soldier, both figures of endurance in their own way, just as my husband and I have had to readjust, moment to moment, our ideas of what constitutes survival, what kind of strength is needed to let go and what to hang on. (Write it!) I may live for several more years or a few more months. For the time I have, I want to live honestly. I want to stop proving my worth to a world that treats the diligent but tiresome Asian American woman with expediency and contempt.
It is crushing to be reduced to a cancer patient or the Asian wife of a white man or yet another woman of color. I feel like none of those things, yet I live the reality of all of those things. I want to shore up my energy and concentrate on things and relationships that give me meaning and joy. (I would say I am going to Marie Kondo my life, except this lifestyle guru and her enormous popularity draw from so much of what haunts me about being Asian in our culture today—the lingering myth of Eastern simplicity and restraint, the fantasized beauty of self-reduction.) It takes too much psychic effort to be always good and disciplined, constantly self-curating, and vigilantly tuned in to the minefield of multiple consciousnesses. I want to own a life to which I am directly connected.
Two months after my last treatment, my hair started to grow back. The dream is pixie chic, but the reality more resembles a lapsed monk. When the unruly fuzz started to appear, my husband and this time my son, too, shaved their hair so we could have a hair-growing contest. Every evening after dinner, at the same time and in the same spot in the house, we take a picture of our naked heads to document what grows. We know we are tracking the imperceptible. We know we are running an unseen race. Death now forever moves through the center of our days. The little bubble of our family, so clearly drawn by the quarantine, holds its own slow time.


thenation--2020-10-21--Amy Coney Barrett Gets That Covid Is Infectious—but Not That Climate Change Is Real

Imagine any serious adult saying they don ’ t know whether gravity is real .
That , in effect , is what judge Amy Coney Barrett testified to the US Senate during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week .
After denying that she had any “ firm views ” about climate change , Barrett told California Democrat and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris that she would not comment further because climate science is “ a very contentious matter of public debate.
” It ’ s not , of course .
“ There is as much scientific consensus about human-caused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Michael Mann , one the world ’ s leading climate scientists , recently told 60 Minutes .
And Barrett ’ s views about climate science matter enormously .
The Supreme Court plays a decisive , if often overlooked , role in shaping US environmental policy .
The Obama administration was able to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because the Supreme Court ruled , in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency , that greenhouse gases qualify as a “ pollutant ” under the Clean Air Act of 1970 .
Next year , the court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and local governments are suing fossil fuel companies for the climate damages knowingly caused by the companies ’ activities .
Much has been said in the press about the potential consequences of Barrett ’ s nomination for Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act , and rightly so .
But the press also needs to make clear the implications of a Barrett appointment for the climate crisis and , specifically , the US government ’ s legal authority to address that crisis .
Given Republicans ’ determination to rush this process—the final @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , October 26—newsrooms will have to work fast .
Journalists Must Demystify the Green New Deal More in this series A handful of good early stories on this subject can bring journalists up to speed and inform further reporting .
The New York Times explained how putting Barrett on the court could imperil not only Massachusetts v. EPA but also the EPA ’ s subsequent “ endangerment finding ” that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare—the finding that provided the legal authority for the Obama administration ’ s 2015 Clean Power Plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rylander , an attorney with the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife , who suggested that Barrett ’ s inability to “ admit climate change is real ” casts doubt on how she could “ fairly assess the validity of law and regulations enacted to address it.
” InsideClimate News published the most instructive piece to date—a detailed examination of how Barrett ’ s legal views , especially with respect to government regulation , clash with the very notion of government action against climate change .
The author , Marianne Levell , interviewed environmental law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Federalist Society , a conservative legal organization that abhors government regulation as an infringement on economic liberty and has propelled scores of alumni onto federal courts .
A close reading of Barrett ’ s writings , the scholars said , reveals an originalist view of the Constitution that would likely make her “ inclined to chip away at or overturn Massachusetts v. EPA.
” The scholars were especially concerned that the Supreme Court could , with Barrett ’ s help , limit the right of individual states to sue under the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lavelle reported , “ 115 multi-state lawsuits [ have been ] filed to block or reverse Trump administration actions like repeal of the Clean Power Plan , the weakening of fuel economy standards and the elimination of requirements to control methane emissions at oil and gas industry facilities.
” She added that “ more than a third of the cases are still pending , and most will be headed for the Supreme Court.
” The so-called # ExxonKnew lawsuits , which seek to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the damages their products @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the companies ’ decades of knowing and lying about those damages , could be at particular risk .
The Supreme Court has already put on next year ’ s docket a case in which BP and other companies are appealing lower-court rulings in suits filed by five cities—Baltimore , Md .
; Boulder , Col. ; and Imperial Beach , Richmond , and Santa Cruz , Calif.—as well as three California counties .
The oil companies argue that the cases should be heard in federal court , a contention that the local governments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Covering Amy Coney Barrett ’ s Supreme Court nomination illustrates a core principle of good climate journalism : Every beat in the newsroom—from weather and the economy to , in this case , politics and the law—is part of the climate beat .
Granted , unpacking the climate implications of this story is no simple task , especially given Republicans ’ haste to vote on Barrett ’ s nomination before Election Day .
Given the stakes , however , newsrooms must somehow rise to the challenge .

This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Imagine any serious adult saying they don’t know whether gravity is real. That, in effect, is what judge Amy Coney Barrett testified to the US Senate during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week. After denying that she had any “firm views” about climate change, Barrett told California Democrat and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris that she would not comment further because climate science is “a very contentious matter of public debate.”
It’s not, of course. “There is as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity,” Michael Mann, one the world’s leading climate scientists, recently told 60 Minutes. And Barrett’s views about climate science matter enormously.
The Supreme Court plays a decisive, if often overlooked, role in shaping US environmental policy. The Obama administration was able to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, that greenhouse gases qualify as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act of 1970. Next year, the court will hear a case in which state and local governments are suing fossil fuel companies for the climate damages knowingly caused by the companies’ activities. Covering Climate Now How to Stop the Spread of Climate Disinformation Erika Seiber and Michael Khoo A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency Mark Hertsgaard Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats? Mark Hertsgaard
Much has been said in the press about the potential consequences of Barrett’s nomination for Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act, and rightly so. But the press also needs to make clear the implications of a Barrett appointment for the climate crisis and, specifically, the US government’s legal authority to address that crisis. Given Republicans’ determination to rush this process—the final Senate vote is reportedly scheduled for Monday, October 26—newsrooms will have to work fast.
A handful of good early stories on this subject can bring journalists up to speed and inform further reporting. The New York Times explained how putting Barrett on the court could imperil not only Massachusetts v. EPA but also the EPA’s subsequent “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare—the finding that provided the legal authority for the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan. E&E News quoted Jason Rylander, an attorney with the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, who suggested that Barrett’s inability to “admit climate change is real” casts doubt on how she could “fairly assess the validity of law and regulations enacted to address it.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
InsideClimate News published the most instructive piece to date—a detailed examination of how Barrett’s legal views, especially with respect to government regulation, clash with the very notion of government action against climate change. The author, Marianne Levell, interviewed environmental law scholars who described Barrett’s grooming by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that abhors government regulation as an infringement on economic liberty and has propelled scores of alumni onto federal courts. A close reading of Barrett’s writings, the scholars said, reveals an originalist view of the Constitution that would likely make her “inclined to chip away at or overturn Massachusetts v. EPA.” Current Issue View our current issue
The scholars were especially concerned that the Supreme Court could, with Barrett’s help, limit the right of individual states to sue under the Clean Air Act. To date, Lavelle reported, “115 multi-state lawsuits [have been] filed to block or reverse Trump administration actions like repeal of the Clean Power Plan, the weakening of fuel economy standards and the elimination of requirements to control methane emissions at oil and gas industry facilities.” She added that “more than a third of the cases are still pending, and most will be headed for the Supreme Court.”
The so-called #ExxonKnew lawsuits, which seek to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the damages their products have caused, as well as for the companies’ decades of knowing and lying about those damages, could be at particular risk. The Supreme Court has already put on next year’s docket a case in which BP and other companies are appealing lower-court rulings in suits filed by five cities—Baltimore, Md.; Boulder, Col.; and Imperial Beach, Richmond, and Santa Cruz, Calif.—as well as three California counties. The oil companies argue that the cases should be heard in federal court, a contention that the local governments dismiss as a legally baseless delaying tactic. The Nominee Amy Coney Barrett Displays Her Twisted Views on Voting Rights Joan Walsh
Covering Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination illustrates a core principle of good climate journalism: Every beat in the newsroom—from weather and the economy to, in this case, politics and the law—is part of the climate beat. Granted, unpacking the climate implications of this story is no simple task, especially given Republicans’ haste to vote on Barrett’s nomination before Election Day. Given the stakes, however, newsrooms must somehow rise to the challenge.