Hill compiling electronic library of Indian culture, thought

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

One of those paths opens into the realm of Native-American peoples. There, the shift in identity that they and other indigenous and aboriginal groups have experienced is both the subject and object of ongoing self-examination.

The Native American Studies Program of the American Studies Department at the University at Buffalo was one of the first academic programs in North America to explore this shift in terms of its meaning and its consequences.

Now, Richard Hill, a graduate of the program who is an assistant professor in the department and teaches an undergraduate course on Iroquois cultural history, is compiling an electronic library on Indian culture and thought based on materials by faculty of the Native American Studies Program. It includes a vast amount of artistic and written material, including speeches, essays and published documents on a wide range of research subjects.

"I hope it will be a resource that will offer practical assistance to future UB students and faculty in different fields," says Hill, a Tuscaroran.

"Native-American subject matter has been taught in many departments in the university-English, art, architecture, media study, social work, medicine-but only in American Studies has it ever been presented and critiqued by Indians themselves," he notes.

"Since its inception, the UB American Studies Department has made an important contribution to the development of Indian intellectual history. Those of us who have taught here actually revolutionized even our own thinking about ourselves.

"We wanted to document the process whereby the old Indian intellectual tradition spawned a new thinking by Indians about Indians-concepts that then spread and, we hope, continue to spread into the general culture."

In addition to sorting through and cataloging a quarter century of cultural analysis and teaching, he is a nationally regarded curator and explicator of Native American visual arts of the past and present who has four exhibits on display or in preparation.

Hill received his undergraduate and graduate education at UB and has gone on to make significant contributions to the reclamation and restoration of Indian art treasures in the U.S. and Canada. His publications include "Treasures of the National Museum of the American Indian" (1986); "Creation's Journey: Native American Identity and Belief" (1994); "Beyond History" (1989) and "Creativity is Our Tradition: Three Decades of Contemporary Indian Art" (1992).

"He's brilliant," said Ruth Meyerowitz, professor and chair of the UB Department of American Studies, "and an enormous credit to our department and to its Native American Studies Program." Meyerowitz cites not only his teaching, research and archival work, but his growing reputation as a major curator of First Nation art, including some of its more ironic contemporary manifestations.

Hill was the architect of the original Smithsonian exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York City several years ago. That exhibit, as Meyerowitz points out, in its conception and the design of its exhibits, speaks to the thought processes and aesthetic sensibilities of Native American peoples.

"It was very non-western, non-linear in its approach," she said, "It was designed instead around the idea of natural cycles-cycles of birth, growth, life and death-and their inter-relatedness. This caused some controversy, of course, because it wasn't what museum critics were used to. There were also many interactive features to the exhibitions, too. It was wonderful."

Hill was one of seven curators whose sensibilities represent the aesthetics and ethos of several different tribal traditions reflected in "Stories of the People," the first exhibit to be presented by NMAI on the national mall in Washington, D.C. The exhibition opened last August in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building as part of the institution's 150th anniversary commemoration and will be on view until August.

A second exhibition continues at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass., through May 1998. Two more will open this year-one at the Indian Art Centre of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in Hull, Quebec, and the other at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hill considers it important to examine the evolving native tradition and the ways in which it's expressed. For the current Smithsonian exhibit, he selected and interpreted works produced during the last 150 years, a period of rapid social and cultural change for American Indians. The show features 200 artifacts, most never before exhibited, from the Smithsonian's collection of one million Indian objects.

To represent tribes from New York state, Hill chose, among other items, a 19th-century beaded Tuscarora blanket and an intricately-beaded Tuscaroran cloth purse.

The exhibition also features the architectural model and plans for a National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian, to be built on the last available site on the national mall. Hill has been involved in the development of the museum from the beginning.

Hill is one of seven curators working on Canada's Indian Art Centre exhibition, which opens this fall. That show has the working title "Contested Identities: Towards a New Reality in Art" and its principal goal is intriguing but quite different from that of Hill's other current exhibitions.

He said that in this case the show is a critical interrogation of the concepts and terms by which contemporary native art is defined. It demonstrates, he said, just how First Nation artists and curators locate their artistic practice in their experience of postmodern Canada.

The exhibition is driven by ideologies born in contemporary Canada's ur-ban and rural Indian communities, he said. These ideologies, according to Hill, have been expanded during the last 30 years to accommodate new audiences and new and diverse intellectual concerns.

The work to be exhibited in this show is visually arresting and often very funny. Hill curates the aspect of the exhibit that focuses on art as an expression of the changing Woodland Indian cultural history from 1960-90, a period that embraces the beginnings of postmodernist artistic forms among these artists. It will be illustrated by work produced by 20 Ojibwa, Odawa, Micmac and Iroquois artists.

The works include play on such subjects as the American Indian tradition of naming juxtaposed with contemporary native political demonstrations. It offers commentary on Native spirituality by Norval Morrisseau, a native artist who revolutionized painting not just among Indians, but among Canadian artists in general. Self-reflexively, he uses the ancient pictographic style, with its vivid colors, heavy black outlines and animal imagery to express his conception of what Christ would look like if he were Indian.

In a larger culture that has taken up a romance with its aboriginal past and is busy reinventing its own spirituality in terms of Indian sweat lodges and the shamanic tradition, Hill pointed out that Morrisseau's painting reminds us quite vividly that regardless of our illusions about native spiritual traditions, the vast majority of Indians on the North American continent are now and have long been, Christians.

"The public conception of Indian art," he says, "tends to collections of ancient artifacts. These are very important, of course, because they represent the visual tradition of the Native American, a tradition central to the articulation of our economies and belief systems."

Hill does not eschew exhibitions that honor and reveal tradition; in fact, his own paintings and photography frequently meld the "idea" of the American Indian with the concrete terms of his existence in 20th century America-Disney's Pocahontas at Wounded Knee.

He stresses, however, that contemporary Indian artists, like true artists everywhere, work in a continually evolving tradition influenced by changes in the larger culture of which they are a part. Some of their work carries painful insights and projects not only humor, joy and hope but terror, disappointment and rage -the varied experiences of the First Peoples at the end of the 20th century.

Hill emphasizes that there is no uniform style used by contemporary Indian artists. They are not working out of a single stylistic tradition. "What they have in common," he says, "is that they're Indians-Indians who live different lives from those their ancestors lived; Indians who live differently from one another. The commonalities are conceptual-a focus on family, community, relationships and issues related to the environment-but approached in an entirely new way."