This is a Stereotype
This is a Stereotype (2014) is a short film featuring audio interviews from contemporary Native American artists and scholars paired with historical footage sourced from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Native American Videotape Archive (1976). This work was created by Cannupa Hanska Luger in collaboration with Dylan McLaughlin and produced by Ginger Dunnill. Interviewees include Migizi Pensoneau, April Youpee-Roll, Douglas Miles, Adrienne Keene, Courtney Leonard, Karl Duncan, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Wendy Red Star and Bentley Spang.
This is a Stereotype film was created in 2014 to expand on concepts from Cannupa Hanska Luger’s solo exhibition Stereotype: Misconceptions of the Native American, which exhibited in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Santa Fe, NM. The exhibition addressed preconceived notions about Native people supported by popular culture that have been invented, imagined and rooted within the American public's social conscience.
The central event for the exhibition was a staged performance by Luger titled, Destroying the Stereotype (2013). This durational activation took place inside the museum where the artist methodically smashed each of the hand-built ceramic and mixed media sculptures on view and in turn the stereotypes the work embodied - the community witnessing this destruction. The remains of the destroyed sculptures were placed on view for the duration of the exhibition as a reminder of the agency and power Native people have to control their own narratives.
Long time friend and filmmaker Dylan McLaughlin was brought on by MoCNA to document and archive Luger’s Destroying the Stereotype performance. During the filming of the performance, Luger and McLaughlin conceived of This is A Stereotype, a short film presenting interviews with their contemporaries juxtaposed with archival footage by Native American students from IAIA in the 1970’s in order to share the diversity of the Native American experience and the reclamation of identity taking place in Indigenous communities for decades.
This is a Stereotype asks us to look deeper at popular culture’s characterization of Native Americans and ask why certain ideas about Native people are upheld as truths, and how that is harmful to Indigenous communities. This work creates a layered dialogue spanning decades in order for the audience to look deeper at internalized bias and to begin to dismantle the misconceptions of the Native American.
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