Indian/Not Indian

Paul Chaat Smith

A major retrospective this fall at the National Museum of the American Indian celebrates the revolutionary and complex life and career of Fritz Scholder

On November 1, the exhibit Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian opens at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City. A companion book with the same title is co-published by the museum and Prestel. The book is edited by scholar Lowery Stokes Sims and exhibit co-curators Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Truman T. Lowe (Ho-Chunk). The following is an excerpt from the essay “Monster Love” by Smith, which appears in the book. It is available at the museum, online, and at bookstores everywhere.

In the summer of 1994, news that Fritz Scholder was returning to Santa Fe with a show of new work, specifically a show of new work featuring Indians, produced a frisson of shock, delight, and nostalgia in the small city he had left two decades earlier. “Red Alert,” the headlines read. “The man is back.”

AMERICAN INDIAN, OIL, 40 X 30

His absence all those years had only clarified his standing as the region’s most celebrated artist, second only to Georgia O’Keeffe. The local newspaper described it this way: “The years Scholder lived in Santa Fe are referred to by many as the most notable period of the city’s fabled art scene, a time roughly bounded by the Nixon years on one end and the rise of the Reagan presidency on the other. It was the final years of Santa Fe as an inexpensive haven for artists. In many ways, the most enduring art legacy of those years was the emergence of Scholder’s haunting, energetic paintings of American Indians. His creative genius laid a cornerstone in the foundation that made today’s flourishing Santa Fe arts scene possible.” The article ended with a quote from the artist about why he was returning to the subject that made him famous. Acknowledging that he had once declared he would never paint Indians again, he found that after thirteen years he had more to say after all. He allowed that he discovered something else, too: “I’ve learned that you should never hem yourself in by making pronouncements.”

We should be grateful this was a lesson he only learned in his sixth decade. The extravagant, baffling, and still-consequential career of Fritz Scholder is framed by bold pronouncements, dichotomy, and contradiction. It is irresistible—and I surrender willingly—to treat them as one way of mapping the artist and making sense of his life and work.

Here’s the short list: the son of a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school administrator, who vowed he would never work for the BIA, who later teaches at a BIA art school. The abstractionist who turns to figuration. The artist who (twice) broke his promise to never paint Indians and was rewarded with fame, wealth, and endless controversy. The public intellectual who gave speeches about the New Indian Art Movement, who also said he didn’t believe in making statements.

And, above all, this one: the man who revolutionized Indian painting, who also consistently, insistently, told everyone who would listen over five decades that he was not Indian. Except that he was proud of being one-quarter Luiseño. Except that perhaps he was a non-Indian Indian. As if trying to be helpful, Scholder also told us, over and over, that his favorite word was paradox. To which we can only say, no kidding.

In Fritz’s early years the Scholders lived in North Dakota border towns. During the brutal, unforgiving winters, they clung to ropes tied from house to barn to keep from blowing away into the night. “We lived on the Indian school campus, because my father (who is half-Luiseño) worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But we went to public schools. There were no Indian objects in the house. We never thought of ourselves as Indians. My father was a product of the old Indian schools—he was ashamed of being an Indian.”