By Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds is a Cheyenne artist who earned his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and his BFA from the University of Kansas. His work blends European and Native North American artistic forms, practices, and mediums in order to offer a counter-narrative to many non-Native myths and stereotypes surrounding the history of indigenous American Indians.
As both the artist Heap of Birds himself and Hertha D. Sweet Wong assert, “Whether living on reservations or in cities or traveling between them, contemporary Native writers and artists must formulate and articulate themselves as correctives to the long history of misrepresentation of Natives by colonizers, thus placing themselves as historical and contemporary subjects.” In her writing, Wong immediately disrupts the widely believed, non-Native, ahistorical idea that Native American artists and people have disappeared. She begins her examination of two contemporary artists saying, “Neither pictography nor indigenous artists have disappeared…today both writers and visual artists continue to reconfigure pictographic (and other graphic) traditions and Native subjectivities.”
This assertion helps to establish the slanted historical playing field from which Heap of Birds works when countering stereotypes and mis-histories. His work also echoes performance artist James Luna’s sentiments, in that one of the first barriers for many contemporary Native artists is the simple and emphatic notion that they are in fact still here, alive, and making art…