Photographer tells stories with her work

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Artist-photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muskogee/Dine) is making "art for a Native audience, with Native content." Although the Arizona-born artist has "made it" from the White perspective, with numerous and prestigious art residencies and a room to herself in the recent "Native Nations" exhibition at the Barbican in London, she's most concerned that her complex, multi-layered photography find a Native audience. To Hulleah, what matters is "if Native people look at the work and embrace it."

The daughter of Navajo painter Andrew Tsihnahjinnie, Hulleah says she has been making art all her life. She's grateful for the early influence of her dad and his colleagues, among them artists Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara), Adee Dodge (Dine), Harrison Begay (Dine), and Fred Beaver (Muskogee), for giving her "a Native art history foundation rather than a European one."

Hulleah comes form a family of artists. In his late 80s, her dad continues to paint.

"His creative energy is endless, "she says. "That's what he gets up for." Her mother Minnie keeps busy making powwow regalia, and her siblings are all involved in art in some way, from making regalia to sculpture.

Born outside Scottsdale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, Hulleah moved with her family to Rough Rock, in the Four Corners region of the Navajo Nation, when she was 12. In the late 60s, pictorial magazines like Life,, Look, and National Geographic were all visual windows to an outside world fermenting with social change. Images of the civil rights struggle, Wounded Knee, and the Native occupation of Alcatraz entered Hulleah's life through the medium of photography.

A pivotal influence in Hulleah's life and her subsequent decision to become an artist-photographer was Black South African photographer Peter Magubane's images of the apartheid system.

"Basically, what I was doing was looking at apartheid and comparing it to the reservation," which profoundly affected her worldview and her art.

At first she did "art for art's sake," but as she matured she found herself both more politicized and more complex in her expression.

"I like making art with layers, making it complicated," she says. "If you have the cultural reference you'll be able to read it." Viewers who don't will have to work harder, "to do research or ask questions." She compares her rich symbols to the complexities of European artists and photographers, which are likewise only understandable in a cultural context.

Hulleah's current work includes the "Damn!" series, in which she computer-manipulates 19th century archival images of Native people, adding text - often beginning with the work "Damn!" - and transforming the original photos to make them more complicated. In one, Shavano, wearing a European-style pinstripe suite and holding a long-barreled revolver, stands in front of a brash "weiner-mobile" (a vehicle shaped like a certain brand of hot dogs) in a desert landscape. His thoughts: "Damn! There goes the Neighborhood!"

Another image simply shows a Native man with the text, "Damn! I keep dreaming of three cherries." But the true complexity of this art is revealed when Hulleah explains that this is Little Six, one of 38 Medewakanton Sioux chosen at random to be hanged in the 1860s after the Sioux Revolt. Though this was the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, "there was no jury, no due process," says Hulleah.

The next layer of history to understand is that the tribe's first successful casino was named after Little Six. Hulleah thus draws the analogy that today Indian gaming, and by extension sovereignty, are being attacked without due process.

The London exhibition also features some of Hulleah's sharp-witted video work. The 18-minute video NTV (Native TV) includes news and sports satire and a sequence on a big Bingo winner who says she's going to by a Winnebago and a Cherokee.

Hulleah continues work on the "Damn!" series, and is also focusing on North-South exchange with other Indigenous peoles. She recently spent time in the Peruvian Amazon with a Bora family, and is busily learning Spanish for future trips while printing photos for an upcoming story in Native Peoples.

Hulleah hasn't yet spent much time in Canada, but hopes to journey to Yellowknife one of these days to visit; photojournalist Dorothy Chocolate, who she met at the Native Indian/Inuit Photography Association conference in Ottawa.

Speaking fondly of her dad, Hulleah says, "I wish I had one-sixteenth of that creative energy." With what she has already accomplished, watch out world!

Hulleah's website is: http://cougar.ucdavis.edu/nas/hulleah