Makerspaces: We Must Recognize, Celebrate and Support Indigenous Innovation
Its Indigenous People’s Day in the United States, a day when we acknowledge the histories that brought our ancestors together in North America. We recognize the first peoples who greeted us on arrival and upon whom we visited a new civilization. Surely today we experience the same love for this beautiful country that filled the hearts of Native Americans who lived on these lands, from Massachusetts to Alaska, long before we arrived.
And today is a day to reflect on the course of our history–the propulsive appetites that expanded our civilization and the deep deficits of justice that have enshrined it.
As a young person, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded by the stories of the Coast Salish peoples and Chief Seattle. More important, it was my first exposure to the traditions of creativity and ingenuity that thread indigenous cultures everywhere. I also fell in love with formline art and began to see, for the first time, how patterns of creativity spiral outward from nodes of settlement, overlapping with others and adapting over time. Today the Seattle Museum of Art is home to an incredible collection of indigenous works and, as important, fosters a contemporary dialogue across time and culture. It’s one of those places to return again and again.
Here in Massachusetts, where I now live and work, I am struck by what I sense is a relative absence of this discourse. The Museum of Fine Arts and other institutions hold collections of indigenous art, sure; visitor centers and murals ensure a limited presence in the public’s imagination. Outside of these efforts the legacy of New England first peoples is most visible by name only. Perhaps I shouldn’t be quite so surprised; the Puritan appetites that drove much of the conquest-though-trade of the 17th century had greatly dissipated by the time the far West was opened to settlement by our eastern population. And the repressive instinct that surrounds our collectively unconscious shame for a past without reparations should not be a shocker. This point was uncannily revealed to me as a younger artist back in the late 1990’s.
At the time I was an assistant to a public artist I’ll call J.S.; he had me working on a commission he’d won from the University of Connecticut. My job was to translate recorded transactions between the Puritan settlers and the Algonquin groups from English and phonetic recordings into binary code. Things like a musket and five blankets for 500 acres in one transaction; ten ax heads for 1,000 acres in another. During this time I learned that the concept of “land as private property” was foreign to these groups and I found the Puritan parsimony repugnant. A teapot, glass beads and metal pieces for ancestral lands. The lists, recorded in proud, neat handwriting, went on and on. As I translated these transactions into 1’s and 0’s for J.S.’s piece, I found myself angered and my eyes opened to a new view of our histories on others’ lands.
We cannot allow history to be written exclusively as an experience of oppression and suffering.
Years later D.B., a family relation who is a member of the Pueblo groups, helped me shift my frame from one dominated by the discourse of appropriation and conquest to a discourse of indigenous innovation. It is important to hold both aspects in our memory; we cannot allow history to be written exclusively as an experience of oppression and suffering. To honor ancestral achievements we must celebrate them.
My own journey later introduced me to numerous examples of indigenous innovations in North America that stirred my imagination. From the petroglyphs at Gila, Arizona to the mysteries of the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. Water management practices of Fremont groups in Southwestern Utah later adapted by Mormon settlers. Chocolate. Kayaks. Suspension bridges. In a macabre reminder of history’s blind spots, I was once told that while the Pilgrims starved in Plymouth during the 1620’s, Spaniards dined in Sante Fe, a city founded on Tanoan pueblos populated for at least five centuries before their arrival.
The catalogue of indigenous innovations is substantial and too often overlooked in the telling of American history. In helping to create the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, D.B. convinced me to see it as a way to honor indigenous pasts while linking them–through landscape and innovation–to a new common future.
I believe that it is at this intersection of indigenous histories and innovation and our collective efforts to shape the present where our thriving multicultural future lives. The Smithsonian’s imagiNATIONS activity center sets the pace for exploring indigenous innovation. Artists like Jeffrey Verrege, a Salish artist, link the past and present with a blend of Northwest Coast formline and pop-culture figures. University research programs are helping young people translate ancestral ideas into new cultural forms online. Books like “Sand Talk” invite inquiry and action-taking around ways indigenous thinking can realign the rules of global progress with the requirements of natural systems and human-centered values. Movements like Indigenous Futurisms help us imagine–to see with empathy and excitement–what these possible pathways hold.
As makers, “indigenous innovation” is a beautiful frame to inform our work.
Vibrant makerspaces are hybrid places where the past and the present naturally shape innovation. Hands-on processes merge with machine-controlled processes to generate new products and services that solve meaningful problems, bring joy and delight to others, and advance knowledge. Along the way we expand our networks and we build communities around our affinities. As creative people, one of the most powerful questions we ask is, “What are you making?”
Do we know what indigenous makers have contributed? And are we aware of where and how and by whom these contributions are being made today? If the answer is “no”, we have work to do.
What can we do to become spaces that actively welcome, support and promote indigenous innovation?
This Indigenous People’s Day I’d love to hear ways indigenous innovation has shaped your life and your practice. What motifs have you learned? Are there indigenous myths and legends that animate your work? Do you use materials, techniques or processes that have their roots in indigenous practice?
And as important, what can we do to become spaces that actively welcome, support and promote indigenous innovation? As members of organizations that have committed to serving as a refuge for creativity of all kinds, what can we undertake individually and collectively to ensure that indigenous voices have a safe place in our home? What can we do to be an ally in brightening the spotlight on contemporary indigenous innovation in the arts, education and entrepreneurship?
This Indigenous People’s Day let us commit–as artists, makers, hobbyists, crafters and innovators–as allies to engaging in dialogue with indigenous creative communities. As a Massachusetts-based creative community, I propose that we form ties with groups like the North American Indian Center of Boston and the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness. Let’s follow the work and writing available at resource centers like the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. Locally, let us advocate for the visibility of, and active discourse with, indigenous artists and innovators in the collections and representations of institutions like the MFA. And let’s work together to inform ourselves of the traditions that flow through our own work. Lets celebrate indigenous contributions to the world as we know it, and welcome the conversation about the world as it can be through indigenous co-creation.
