Artist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: My name is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. “Quick-to-See” is an old family name. It’s about one of the grandmothers, who had insight into things. I come from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana.
The Great Invasion—my term—when Europeans hit our shores was meant to take this rich land from the people who occupied it. My family has lived it—my father, my aunties, my uncles. Everybody in my family were taken by the military to go to a boarding school. The idea was re-educating people with propaganda—propaganda that changes their worldview, that denies who they are, that tells them that they have to become somebody else.
In that process of re-educating, they forbid them from practicing their own religion. This was a land of freedom. But we weren’t given permission to drum, dance, and sing until 1978. Instead, we were given a Bible using words that have no meaning for us. And we were taught that this is the true religion that we had to follow.
One of the other facets is, if you remove people off their homeland and their natural food source, what's going to take the place of that?
When I was a little kid, we lived on smoked salmon. Here in America, because we have so many corporations who make processed foods, often what happened is that instead of getting their salmon, they’re getting white bread and peanut butter and mayonnaise and bologna or something. It’s processed food. So now you’ve got a population of people who suffer with all kinds of diseases.
Textbooks in school talk about the meetings between Native people and the Europeans in a friendly way. It’s not truthful in any means. Our tribes are scrambling right now to put things back together that are familiar, but many of our stories are lost. That’s why, always in my work, I’m constantly telling my stories. I want to get the word out that we’re still here, we’re alive, and we have something to say too.