Cleanliness Is Next

The Native Photography exhibit reminds me how to wash clean all the pain my ancestors endured

This past Sunday, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) closed an amazing photography exhibit curated by Jaida Grey Eagle, “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now” and not only was it an amazing show, it is part of the museum’s broader commitment to honoring Indigenous art and artists.

For full context, I Stan the Mia. I give them my money as a member, I have gladly served in a focus group about the permanent Native collection, and I’m setting intentional time aside to visit The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie. But more than what the Mia is, it’s important to know about the other art museum in Minneapolis that is still trying to shake off its anti-Indigenous reputation, seven years after its traumatizing, aborted installation, “Scaffold.”

The Walker Art Center is a shiny and gorgeous place where I’ve fallen in love with so many pieces by innovative artists. Which, is why my heart broke in 2017 when the Walker likely, blithely thought it was being provocative by bringing a replica of the scaffold that that 38 Dakota warriors were hanged from on December 26, 1862 to its permanent sculpture garden. In the following years, it’s tried to make amends by installing “Okciyapi” by Angela Two Stars and hosting at least one Indigenous artist’s show.

But art museums are tricky beasts.

As someone who studied studio arts for three years in college, they can be wondrous places where my creativity is stimulated and they can also be reminders of colonization whenever I see pieces created by Indigenous people or people of the global majority in the Asia wing or the African exhibit. There is no “right” answer that doesn’t diminish the basic humanity of artistic endeavor in this paradigm.

On one hand, we nourish our souls with the wonder of artistry and on the other, we are the beneficiaries of some distant (most likely) white person who had enough money or ammunition to take these things from their people.

Of course, there are exceptions to every assumption. Of course there should be, because what-about-ism excuses us from discomfort and art is supposed to always comfort … right?

Where I was discomforted at the Mia was one photo that could be an Indigenous Wes Anderson movie still. You can almost hear Wes Studi’s voiceover explaining the quotidian life of this Crow family as their tableau comes to life and they set about their day, rising from their kitchen table before the camera pans out of the door onto the vastness of the Crow reservation in Montana.

The piece is titled, “Interior of the Best Indian Kitchen on the Crow Reservation” by Richard Throssel, Nehiyawak, a Cree and Crow-adopted photographer.

Casey Riley wrote: “Richard Throssel worked as a professional photographer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Montana between 1902 and 1911. As an adopted member of the Crow nation and primary documentarian of life on the reservation, Throssel trained his lens upon a scene that would appeal to federal authorities’ intent upon the assimilation of Native people: that of a modern kitchen with clean-swept wooden floors and gleaming washbasins. Taken as part of a public health campaign, this photograph is a form of early propaganda emphasizing the benefits of government-sanctioned hygiene practices. Yet even in this tightly choreographed vignette, the traditional dress of the sitter on the left end of the table seems a sign of resistance-or perhaps evidence of the photographer's ambivalence about the erasure of Crow cultural heritage.”

I kept coming back to this piece every time I visited, not like a pilgrim paying homage, but more like a cemetery stroller transfixed by a unique headstone with a name on it that has a half-remembered story.  Except I remember all of it.

Indigenous memory is generational because it needs to be. It’s how we communicated vital information over decades and centuries to our descendants and how we asked our ancestors the way in uncertain times. I never stepped foot inside the Catholic boarding school where Lorraine Iron Shell-Walking Bull was held for 12 years, but I know the feel of the woolen stockings she wore in the winter and the coarseness of the canvas coats issued by Holy Mother Church to her Indian children. I know this because every time we’d be out and about, or just in the back store room of our house, she would stop what she was doing and make me feel fabric or sniff the contents of a jar with sewing notions and leather and she’d tell me, “THIS IS WHAT IT WAS LIKE.”

I also know the feel of cold water on a cold winter morning as the only means of cleaning oneself. Not just because I went through an odd phase in my twenties where I wanted to push my tolerance of uncomfortable things as a way to atone for some imagined sins that lived only in my head an nowhere else in my life, but I knew how it felt from the enamel basin they shared, chipped and dented.

“Cleanliness is next to Godliness” is what she was told. When my mother repeated it to me, she comically wagged her finger at me and tutted before giving a smile and small laugh that made me feel at ease and dispelled her trauma. We laughed at the ridiculous beliefs of these foreigners on our soil. Cleanliness is Indigenous and god is all around us.

But that magic didn’t stop our obsessions with cleaning.

In rebellion, mom became a packrat who knew where everything was but when faced with a full-time job, a working husband and two children ten-and-a-half-years apart (to say nothing of all the relatives who relied on her), she made her choices about cleaning. We were always clean, we had daily hygiene practices but we lived with holes in our floors, mice in our beds, and the occasional summer bull snake who wandered in through the hole in the floor. She made her choices and made sure we never went in public in any condition less than immaculate.

I passed every single head lice check that Melvin the Nurse made us line up for at Rosebud Elementary because once a week, my mother would go through my hair with a literal fine-tooth comb. If she ever found a bug, she’d hold it up against the pillowcase tied around my neck and gently tell me to always feel my scalp with my fingernails and if I ever felt anything, to try to comb it out. I would go one better and would dig into my scalp with my fingernails, leaving a bloody mess.

That is to say nothing of the towels.

Anyone who lives with me who is not family is usually dumbstruck by the amount of bathing towels I own. The standard number (towels I use daily, every week) is 21, seven sets of three, to say nothing of the nine additional towels that stand in if I get behind on laundry day. One towel is for my head/face/torso, one towel is for my lower half, and one is specifically for my feet.

What, you didn’t grow up with this system? You just use the one, same towel every day?  

My mother gave me this formula based on what the Catholics gave her as a child. The extra towel for my feet specifically is a fuck-you to the nuns who made her walk across cold, wooden floors with sopping wet feet. But it’s still rooted in deep shame about our bodies. I can’t really repeat the things she told me that the nuns told her right now because I don’t want to start crying.

As an Indigenous person, as a Lakota relative, and as a Queer/Two-Spirit person, the fact that I have a positive relationship with my body is the result of about two generations’ worth of deep spiritual and psychological work. Which, is funny considering that I always think of my mother as the one who officially released me from her trauma when I was 18 and asked her if she would be offended if I got confirmed as a Catholic. But there it was this whole time in plain sight. My relationship with my body is one of constant struggle. It’s never enough but it’s all I have so I have to find acceptance every morning, even when my heel aches from plantar fasciitis brought on by the extra weight its been asked to carry these past pandemic years.

And then I think there is the victory.

My body aches and I try to be generous with it, because it’s proof that the plan failed. We are still here. We are still alive and kicking. Every ache is proof of life. Every shower I massage my scalp with the fancy bamboo and plastic scalp massager and use the good conditioner is in spite of the Christian hegemony, not because of it. Every drop of water washes away the tears and fears of my ancestors and every loving pat to dry my earth-colored skin is my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother whispering, “I love you, you’re beautiful” to everyone who came after.

That is most godly.