Dressing the Truth in Irony: Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World

My name is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Quick-to-See is an old family name. It has no meaning for art. It’s about one of the grandmothers, who had insight into things. She could read people well, and I strive for that. My father gave me that name. I come from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation in Montana.

The title of this work is Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World (With Ensembles Contributed by the U.S. Government). From the title to every piece of clothing, there’s a huge story that goes with it. Information about the past is sometimes seen as, well, that happened back then, and this is now. In most cases with my work, my messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today. All this news about the boarding schools in Canada and the United States, we all have lived it. My father, my aunties, my uncles, everybody in my family were taken by the military to a boarding school. This whole suite of paper dolls, this family, Barbie Plenty Horses—that was an old family name on my reservation. Barbie and Ken showed what living a good life in America was about: they were at the beach or riding in nice cars, or doing whatever was fun and playful, things that were out of reach for those of us at the poverty line. We couldn’t possibly attain a life like that.

This story I’ve woven together is a true story. It’s about my family, but it’s also about other Native families in the US and Canada. It was from the beginning of the Great invasion—that’s my term, the Great Invasion—when Europeans hit our shores and began the genocide, that’s where it starts. I remember reading about Gail Tremblay’s background in Nova Scotia and how the Catholic Church came before the fur traders and tried to capture as many Natives as they could and put them into the Jesuit schools. That movement swept across the United States, killing, pillaging, raping, pushing people out of their homes and their homelands and away from their food sources. This was their means of hegemony, control, and imperialism from the very beginning. School textbooks talk about the meetings between Native people and the Europeans in a friendly way: sharing food, especially silly Thanksgiving. Native people totally spurn that holiday, because it’s not truthful. The Great Invasion was meant to take this rich land from the people who occupied it and control it. Here’s the thing that people don’t know. Today we look at the Middle East and South America, where militaries have moved into villages and pushed people out of their homelands. What we don’t realize is it’s not a simplistic thing to see guns and armor and machines moving into an area to take it over. Genocide has many factions to it. They’re all evil, they’re all ugly, they’re all meant to kill human beings, or turn them into robots that they can control.

Barbie and Ken

If I want people to hear my message, it’s important for me to present it in such a way that it will draw them in, so they look at the work. Probably many people move away and think, “Oh, she’s really funny, she’s making fun of Barbie.” At least they get that far. When you get acquainted with each other, it enriches your life because you see yourself reflected in them, and learn more about yourself. Using Barbie versus an impoverished tribal view of the world gives that kind of contrast. There’s a kind of push and pull when I’m working with the Barbie paper dolls. And of course, I’m also being not really sinister but facetious maybe, because I’m also poking fun and being provocative.

Educating viewers

My aim is to make a teaching moment from something that I feel we don’t hear in everyday life and don’t learn in school. From my perspective, there’s still a lot that this country has to learn about dealing with the other. We’re presented with this every day right now: Why aren’t more people standing up and speaking out? I feel that we need to do a better job with our educational system to do critical thinking, and I think my paper dolls offer a moment to do that.

I’m constantly searching for information, ideas, and whatever fits into the little track that I’m on that has to do with tribal society and our planet. When I’m working in the studio, I don’t know if the work will come to fruition, but I want to turn the research into a good story that tells something about our worldview, that communicates. The paper dolls laid around here for 25 years. I made them for 1992, when there wasn’t any interest. I think people saw them as something funny. They would show one or two pieces. They liked the name. I think that was the attraction. I don’t know that anybody ever connected that to genocide, but that’s what we’re doing—telling a really important story.