Aninishinaabe Academy students with bows and arrows in Rory Wakemup’s “Ledger Craft” performance.
Last fall, the courtyard between Mia and MCAD was a battlefield, at once ancient and futuristic. Kids with bows and arrows moved in a kind of martial dance, then donned cardboard costumes in the rectangular, early-digital style of Minecraft, the popular world-building computer game. They fought zombies. They were filmed by drones. They declared victory.
Rory Wakemup calls it “Ledger Craft,” a playful and theatrical hybrid of Minecraft and ledger art, the haunting drawings made by Native American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on repurposed paper. Native artists from the Great Plains had generally drawn on the hides of American bison. But after Native communities were forced onto reservations and the bison were nearly killed off, they turned to paper left behind in frontier forts and other sources, often the pages of U.S. government ledger books.
Most famously, the Plains warriors imprisoned at Fort Marion, Florida, in the 1870s, were given paper by their overseer, Richard Henry Pratt, as part of his “kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy of forced re-education. Stripped of their rank, a grave humiliation, the warriors instead recounted their past deeds and daily life at the fort in their drawings—a way of keeping their culture, and themselves, alive. Mia has several of these works in its collection. Wakemup, by capturing footage of Ledger Craft performances with his drone, is taking an evolutionary step in the recording of Native stories, from hide and paper to screen and social media.
As a multidisciplinary artist and director of All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis, Wakemup has often addressed cultural appropriation, the use—or misuse, really—of one culture’s heritage by another, more dominant culture. A few years ago, he created “Smart Wars,” a staged clash with sports mascots derived from Native American imagery. Participants wore dramatic outfits for this performance, as well. Wakemup, a proud Star Wars geek, featured a character named Darth Chief the Mascot Hunter, who also serves as his alter ego.
Words from Edgar Heap of Birds in Rory Wakemup’s “Ledger Craft” performance.
For the “Ledger Craft” staging at Mia, he incorporated the poetic words of Edgar Heap of Birds, a Cheyenne artist who has long used language, by turns playful and confrontational, to challenge America’s ongoing practice of cultural erasure. (“Minnesota, today your host is Cloud Man Village,” Heap of Birds wrote in a piece of sign art referencing the Dakota leader whose community once occupied the land that is now Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.)
Wakemup’s participants were students from Anishinaabe Academy, the city’s Native-centered school in South Minneapolis, reflecting his passion for organizing the Native community through art. He hopes to create a stash of personalized costumes—or skins, as he calls them—and not just Native and white. Available for anyone to wear in future performances. Funktivism, he calls this community engagement, blending fun and activism to answer a provocative and crucial question: “How do we work together to become indigenous in the context of the 21st century?”
In May, Wakemup will reprise this work in the Right Here Showcase at Off-Leash Art Box, in South Minneapolis. Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess, including his. “My art is like a kite in a thunderstorm,” he says. “I just hold on and hope I don’t get struck by lightning.”