{"id":30401,"date":"2013-04-15T02:01:15","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T02:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30401"},"modified":"2013-04-16T01:52:23","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T01:52:23","slug":"black-indian-with-a-camera-the-work-of-valena-broussard-dismukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30401","title":{"rendered":"Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Southeastern Oklahoma University
\nNative American Symposium<\/a>
\n2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium<\/a>
\npages 40-46<\/p>\n

Sarita Cannon<\/strong>
\nUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign<\/em><\/p>\n

In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes<\/a>. I am especially fascinated by the way in which Dismukes takes the camera, an object that had previously been used as a weapon of oppression against Native Americans and people of African descent, and uses it to capture the spirit of twenty-first-century Black Indians on their own terms. In her series of portrait photographs entitled \u201cRed-Black Connection: The Cultural Heritage of Black Native Americans,\u201d Dismukes highlights the varied experience of Black Indians in the United States and forces her viewers to reevaluate their notions of what a \u201creal\u201d Indian and what a \u201creal\u201d Black person look like….<\/p>\n

…The verbal narratives that accompany many of the portraits highlight many issues that contemporary Black Indians face, including the difficulty of tracing their lineage and the responses they receive from others about their authenticity or lack thereof. However, generally the narratives celebrate Black Indian Identity. A few of Dismukes\u2019 subjects discuss how their own family members obscured their \u201ctrue\u201d ancestry. For instance, Elnora Tena Webb Mitchell (of Cherokee\/Blackfeet descent) writes, \u201cMy grandparents and other members of my family were identified as Native American. However, there is much information about our ancestry that is kept secret. Being Native American is not revered nor honored by many family members.\u201d It is interesting to note here that it is not the Black blood that is repressed, but rat her it is the Indian ancestry. It was not always advantageous to be identified as Black rather than Native. This choice depended upon historical and geographical context. Still others note how they are viewed as \u201cwannabes\u201d who are trying to distance themselves from Blackness. Gene \u201cQuietwalker\u201d Holmes of Comanche descent says, \u201cThere have been people from both communities who react to my heritage on a negative basis and ask, \u2018Who or what are you trying to be?\u2019\u201d But Carol Munday Lawrence of Cherokee descent responds to these attacks simply by saying that she is merely discovering her multiple selves: \u201cI fully understand why some fear that to claim Native American, or any other heritage, is to reject one\u2019s Blackness, but this is not about \u2018going Native.\u2019 Knowing who your people are, and embracing them all unconditionally, can only enrich your life.\u201d And Stella Vaugh playfully embraces this historical moment in which she can identify as a multiracial person: \u201cIn fact, I\u2019m having fun boasting about my mixed-race. I jokingly say I\u2019m 57 Heinz Variety. My mother\u2019s mother is Cherokee and Irish. My father\u2019s mother is Bohemian and his father is Choctaw. I am told that one of my ancestors is black and I\u2019m still searching for that beautiful person.\u201d Vaugh proudly embraces her multiple heritage and openly acknowledges the mystery that still surrounds her ancestry. She symbolizes the twenty-first century Black Indian who is coming out\u201d after living much of her life in a space where she felt the need to repress parts of her identity. If Dismukes\u2019 project can give at least one person the opportunity to feel a sense of dignity about who she is and introduce her to a community of people who also live at the crossroads of Native and African American cultures, then it is, without a doubt, a meaningful political and artistic endeavor…<\/p>\n

Read the entire paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes Southeastern Oklahoma University Native American Symposium 2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium pages 40-46 Sarita Cannon University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes. I am especially fascinated by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1196,8,3015,14,25],"tags":[147,1986,14408,3797,14419,3799],"class_list":["post-30401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-papers","category-women","tag-photography","tag-sarita-cannon","tag-sarita-n-cannon","tag-sarita-nyasha-cannon","tag-southeastern-oklahoma-university","tag-valena-broussard-dismukes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}