“My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today.”
When Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was 13 years old, she went to see a John Huston film. This was a rare outing for a child for whom schoolwork came second to laboring in canneries and on farms, like so many other Native American and migrant youth in the Pacific Northwest. On that special day in 1953, she recalled, “the Japanese farmers took a bunch of us kids into town in the back of a pickup truck on a Saturday to see the movie about the life of Toulouse-Lautrec with José Ferrer. And I was just awestruck, because that’s what I wanted to be. How could I be like this?” When she returned home, she pinned her hair under a beret and smeared axle grease on her face into the shape of a beard before posing with a paintbrush and palette for a photograph.
The year Smith decided to become an artist coincided with a tumultuous period for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. Smith had grown up on the Flathead Reservation, lands that had been established—after many brutal, federally mandated relocations—with the signing of the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855. This treaty, and the sovereignty of the nation, came under immediate threat from a Congressional bill passed on August 1, 1953, a defining moment in what became known as the Termination Era. This “era” was not a period with a beginning and end, but rather one of many inflection points in the long and continuing assault the US government has waged against Native American people. In this bill, the Flathead Reservation was targeted for liquidation, one of 60 proceedings initiated against tribes. Smith’s aspirations to become an artist took shape during this campaign of attempted erasure, and in the years since she has used art and activism to blaze a trail for generations to come.
Smith pursued her post-secondary art education for two decades across three states, with her young family in tow. She graduated in 1980 with a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. While there, she drew landscapes of the places where she grew up. These were pictures not of distant lands but of places filled with memories and life—pastel and graphite tracked across sheets to depict inhabited landscapes in constant motion. Her paintings also began to reflect her culture and heritage. Smith prepared canvases by scraping and smoking them as if they were animal hides, abandoning traditional stretcher bars and introducing lodgepoles as sculptural components. The artist developed a visual system of signs and symbols that stitched together ancient petroglyphs, Plateau Salish basketry, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism into densely animated compositions.
By the early 1990s, Smith feared the messages embedded in her stylized abstract artworks were not as legible as she needed them to be. This concern was made all the more urgent by the approaching 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The jubilee became a catalyst for triumphal media narratives of first contact, few conveying the realities of what Smith called the “Great Invasion.” “I was trying to find a way to get the word out that we’re still here, we’re alive, and we have something to say, too,” she said later. Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World (1991) is a suite of drawings that describe, through colorful images and neatly penned text, the atrocities committed by the US government against the Salish. Smith’s fictional family of Barbie, Ken, and Bruce Plenty Horses capitalizes on the mass appeal of the Barbie doll franchise to connect with a wide audience, while teaching difficult lessons about genocide.
Around this time, Smith also started to place icons in her paintings—a strategy that has become emblematic of some of her best-known works. Large, clearly contoured shapes of bison, horses, or vests appear amid richly collaged pictorial surfaces. Smith’s Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) (1992) depicts a canoe among layered media. To the canvas, Smith glued photocopies of textbooks and encyclopedic entries that chronicled Indigenous life from the perspective of outsiders. She also clipped headlines and articles from daily newspapers, dispelling the assumptions that Indigenous subjects belonged only to history. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,” Smith said. Above the nearly 15-foot-wide painting is a chain festooned with plastic tomahawks, polyester feathers, and contemporary sports paraphernalia that appropriates Indigenous figures as mascots. The clarity of the canoe is a counterpoint to the dizzying level of detail in her source material. As always in her work, there is a bigger picture to keep in focus. For Smith, that picture foregrounds the complexity, diversity, resiliency, and creativity of Indigenous life.
Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2025
