Artwork by Steph Littlebird in the "Transgressors" exhibit at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde depicts White Cindy, a member of the Klamath Tribe who lived from approximately 1830 to 1940, was known for her white dresses adorned with colorful ribbons despite the repeated efforts of settlers to force her into men’s attire.
M. Earl Williams
The new exhibit at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde features the work of queer indigenous artists reflecting on the space of queerness in indigenous cultures. The exhibit was curated by Grand Ronde artists Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby, who created another exhibit two years ago based on the life of Shumkin, a 19th-century Two-Spirit Atfalati Kalapuya healer. That exhibit set out to explore the ways that queerness has always been a part of Indigenous history, but assimilation tried to sever the community’s connection to it. This newer exhibit discusses the present and future of queer indigeneity as well. Hudson and Furby join us to talk about the exhibit, along with Steph Littlebird, one of the featured artists.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A new exhibit at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde features the work of queer Indigenous artists reflecting on the role of queerness in Native cultures. The exhibit was co-curated by Grand Ronde artists Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby. Two years ago, the pair created an exhibit based on the life of Shimkhin, a 19th-century Two-Spirit Atfalati Kalapuya healer. That exhibit was focused really on the past, on the ways that queerness had historically been a part of Indigenous society and the ways that assimilation with Western culture severed that connection.
This newer exhibit, which is called “Transgressors,” explores the present and the future of queer Indigeneity. Hudson and Furby join us now, along with Steph Littlebird, one of the featured artists. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Anthony Hudson: Thank you.
Felix Furby: Hayu masi.
Steph Littlebird: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Thank you. Felix, I want to start with you. I mentioned that you and Anthony partnered on that earlier exhibit that focused on Shimkhin. Who was she?
Furby: Oh, Shimkhin was a transfeminine ancestor and she was Atfalati Kalapuyan. So you might recognize that as Tualatin, which is the same word as Atfalati. And she was a figure who lived before the establishment of the reservation, and then she lived through those times and lived on the reservation as well. So during her lifetime, she saw a lot of change, a lot of cultural change.
Miller: Why did you want to focus an exhibit on her?
Furby: Well, in the national conversation about Two-Spirit, this multicultural, pan-Indigenous conversation, I wanted to focus on traditions that were specific to us and hyperlocal. There was an idea that perhaps only some tribes that weren’t around here had Two-Spirit traditions, and I wanted to show, yes, we had those two – not that we need a precedent in order to exist, but we wanted to restore that connection with our own history and show that this also is rooted in our own traditions
Miller: Anthony, what kinds of responses did you get to that earlier exhibit?
Hudson: We were actually blown away by the response to the first show, to “My Father’s Father’s Sister.” I think going into that and making that work, we came with a lot of trepidation. Something that happens in Native community is anytime we talk about something like culture, tradition or history, we kind of freeze up. It can be a traumatic space. So we were nervous about introducing essentially this queer agenda into our reservation, into our culture museum.
The day of the opening, we, I think, had one of the largest openings and most attended openings that’s happened at Chachalu at the Tribal Museum on the Rez in Grand Ronde. And the feedback was just so lovely and getting to see elders experiencing it, getting to see like half of the tribal council coming out and celebrating the work. It really felt like, wow, this is the correct time. Our people are ready to really hear us, greet us and accept us.
Miller: How did that earlier exhibit lead into this new one?
Hudson: So that show kind of came out of actually a plot that Felix and I hatched in the parking lot after I gave a speech at Chachalu talking about my work, and we saw that there was interest in talking about drag, queerness and two-spiritedness. So we hatched this sort of scheme of, OK, what if we start with a show about Shimkhin and then what if after that we go with an even larger show and we bring in artists? We had some artwork in the previous show. But this time we really wanted to steer the focus from history to contemporary art, and to show what living and future ancestors look like and are doing right now.
Miller: Those words you used were a little bit tongue in cheek, but you call it a plot, you called it, a queer …
Hudson: A scheme.
Miller: But I mean it, they are very similar to the phrase you said as a real joke because it’s so loaded and in some ways ridiculous of the gay agenda, but it does seem like this was at least maybe strategic, is a fair way to put it. You said we focused in the past, that worked. So now, let’s push this forward to the present and the future.
Hudson: We felt like we needed to lead with love. We don’t want to feel like … we just don’t want to be perceived as coming in with something that is from outside of our community. We are members of our community. And this topic though is something that really can cause a schism with many communities and community members. So we just thought, let’s make this gentle, let’s start with that history, and let’s show, like Felix said, a precedent. What we learned after doing that was that we ultimately don’t need a precedent because we are here today. So the next plan was definitely to get a little bit larger and show people this is what we look like now. This is what incorporating us into our community looks like now. This is a plan and a vision for the future based on the past, but it was definitely baby steps and a nice three-year plan.
Miller: Felix, how did you go about finding artists for this new show?
Furby: Oh, well, Anthony and I and a few other people also found artists. We were asking for connections, we were asking our communities for artists who would be interested in participating in a project like this. We wanted to make an all-Indigenous queer show, and really have something that shows our current community and also our thoughts about ourselves in the present day and what we want out of the future. So it was really important to have as many artists as we could have and have them also be based here in a hyperlocal way, but also have them be from multiple different cultures across what we call Turtle Island and to show our connections with each other.
Miller: I want to talk about that as we go just because there’s a really big geographical spread here.
Steph Littlebird, what went through your mind when Anthony and Felix reached out to you to be a part of this?
Littlebird: Oh, I am just always honored whenever either of them want to work with me. They are such a pleasure to work with just generally as human beings, but all of the work that we do as individual creatives and just people within our community really is rooted in sort of honoring our community and our ancestors. So being asked to be part of something like this in its original iteration a couple of years ago, but also in its new iteration, has just been such an honor because it allows me to make work that I love to make. And that really is what I see as my purpose as a creative, making work that is sort of bringing joy and honor to our community.
Miller: Can you describe the works you made for this show?
Littlebird: Yeah, I did actually create the image for the show, which was an illustration of White Cindy, and also made the illustration of the original Shimkhin. For me, it is so amazing to try and imagine what my ancestors look like because this is before photography. And to really bring them to life is like very much Indigenous futurism, very much bringing culture forward. So that in itself is really powerful.
Then I got to submit works that I thought were really representative of Indigenous queer joy. I actually submitted my design of the Two-Spirit flag that is hanging in the exhibition, but also, I created vending machines that really harken back to the ‘90s, ‘80s culture of like coin op vending machines. These vending machines have Two-Spirit specific items in them that I designed as a creative, that’s what I do normally. So anyway, there’s stickers and fun things that people can take part in that just actually make you laugh and appreciate what queer joy really brings into the world.
Miller: You mentioned one of those works which is a large-scale painting of White Cindy. Who was she?
Littlebird: She was one of our trans ancestors. I think that Felix might be a better person to really explain who she was. So I’ll hand that off to Felix.
Furby: Yeah, so Muksamse’lapli is a Klamath ancestor and she is also a transfeminine historical figure. She was contemporary to Shimkhin. She was also a medicine person and somebody that people sought out for healing and knowledge, and had a regional renown, and somebody that also has such a spirit of strength and resistance that I feel like we really wanted to honor her for and also be inspired by today in our communities.
Hudson: Something that’s fascinating about both White Cindy and Shimkhin is that in their cultures, in their communities, in this time, over 100 years ago, they were gendered correctly by their community and by their relatives. They were born essentially, as we understand, assigned male at birth. They performed rituals and actually went through the process of “becoming woman.” We have spiritual texts that describe the act of “becoming woman.” And from that point on, like members of their family called them “she” and “her.”
Miller: The way you’re describing that reminds me of some language in the panel about Shimkhin that I wanted to read for folks. It reads, “For the Grand Ronde community in the 19th century, affirming identity was an ancestral value. In their world, we are traditional, sacred and loved.” I was really struck by the fact that “we,” which I’m not used to reading in museum or gallery font … I mean, that first person. Normally, I think things in their world queer people or Two-Spirit people were loved. This says we are loved. What was the idea behind that?
Hudson: So I’ve been working in the art world professionally for 15 years and I hate it. [Laughter] I, as a Native person, as a queer person, as a Two-Spirit person, I think we are so much more complex than a plaque on a wall, and especially coming from a history where our ancestors and their bones are kept in museums, where these stories are kept away from us, we had to go through so many hoops to even try to access some of these cultural texts that were delivered through ancestral testimony to white ethnolinguistics. All of that can be so much to deal with. So that was a huge decision in this show, that we wanted to present these artworks also in ourselves as curators, as people. Like, we’re not just artists, these are not just objects on a plinth. These are stories, and these are realities and experiences from actual human beings.
That’s even part of how “Transgressors” is designed – when you walk through the show, you’re not seeing museum plaques. You see giant people-sized banners with photos of the artists at eye level like they’re in the space with you and you read their testimony. You’re supposed to take in both the person and the artwork, and understand that this is all holistic.
Miller: Felix, I want to talk about the font and color, just the style that you all chose for this exhibit. It feels like, I don’t know, a little bit 1980s neon throwback, but also, I can see the future in it. How do you describe it?
Furby: Well, I am going to want to hand that over to Steph probably.
Miller: That’s fair because she gave one of my questions to you earlier.
Furby: If I can just briefly comment though. That does tie in a little bit to that last point, which is this framing of we. We’re always trying to reconnect this more continuous idea, this more whole and integrated idea of our identities and our past, our present and our future. As Indigenous people, our past is disconnected from us in a way. It’s always framed as something further back. We are framed as not the people that live here, but descendants of the people who lived here.
Miller: Once there were Native people in America?
Furby: Yes, exactly. So framing of us is always put back into the past, but it’s also disconnecting us as being the same people. We are those people. We’re a continuation of those people and future generations are those people.
Hudson: Yep.
Furby: So it’s very important to make sure to have that more integrated, holistic view and we really wanted to have something that wasn’t just framed through history in both shows. We wanted to pursue that more integrated view of the past, present and future. So the font and the design decisions were a lot about that. On top of incorporating joy when we have so many constant narratives of suffering, we wanted to show something more than just suffering.
Miller: Steph, do you have more to add?
Littlebird: Yeah, I think the aesthetics of the show really call to a lot of what Felix was just talking about in terms of time. It does feel very ‘80s, but it feels like futuristic ‘80s to me.
Miller: Right, so an ‘80′s idea of the future?
Littlebird: Yes, exactly.
Miller: Which still feels kind of futurey in 2025?
Littlebird: Right. I keep waiting for it to manifest. We will keep our fingers crossed [Laughter]. But also, the use of bright colors was really important and that’s something that’s important in all of my work. As a children’s book illustrator, as just like a political commentary, I use color as a way to communicate the aliveness of our community because many people don’t realize that we still exist or don’t believe that we still exist. So using color as a way to sort of represent the resilience and vitality of our community is really important in my work.
You can really see that in the design of the “Transgressors” text, and all of the colors that flow throughout the exhibition are representative also of White Cindy’s ribbons that she wore on her dresses. So it’s like tying in all of these ideas into this sort of visual metaphor for our resilience and our way of life that goes back way before the Oregon Trail or any sort of colonialism of this region. These ways of life existed prior to any of that. So we have to be reminded of those ways of life for our own benefit and our own resiliency, but also so that folks realize that the binary is a relatively new concept, and that many cultures have much more room and space in their beliefs for people that deviate from the binary.
Hudson: The binary is not traditional to here and has not been for over 16,000 years, as long, if not longer, that we’ve been here. Also, on that end, we painted the walls basically black and that’s again in response to the whiteness of the art world. Let’s paint these walls black and then let’s really let these queer colors pop.
Miller: Anthony, you were saying earlier that you were a little bit surprised by how much that that first more historical exhibit was embraced by the Grand Ronde community and other folks who went to the exhibit. Have you noticed any difference in how people are responding to this new show?
Hudson: The opening for this show was similar to the opening of the first show where it was just wild to see Chachalu turn into a queer nightclub. And actually, Steph, the queer joy of your trading post, vending machines, getting to see a 90-year-old elder in a wheelchair, like laughing as he gets the little toy out of there then look at it, it was just so beautiful to experience. And it was awesome to have this gathering of community, but also to laugh a lot in a fairly dark time. You know, this is December after the election that we were opening the show.
I think then the experience has sort of shifted a little. There’s been a little bit more clap back, not necessarily from our community, but part of the experience of going through Grand Ronde and going to the coast – which a lot of tourists do – is that tourists stop in, they want to support the Natives. They want to learn about culture. Half the time they just come to ask, “hey, is this arrowhead worth anything?” [Laughter] So there has been more negative response from a lot of outside community that we are very lucky that the folks on staff at Chachalu are able to navigate, have been willing to put themselves out there to defend this work and to speak up for it. But I think that just serves to prove why this work matters and why this work needs to be seen by Oregonians that don’t know the history of this land.
Miller: So Felix, Anthony talked a little bit about the timing there. I assume that a show like this has to be in the works for a while. But it opened at a very specific time … I don’t know, a month-and-a-half after Donald Trump won the reelection bid and just a few weeks before his second inauguration. How have you been thinking about this exhibit at this time?
Furby: Yeah, so with this exhibit, we’re honestly pushing things a little further, a little harder. When we named it “Transgressors,” part of the reason why is because we wanted to point out there is something that we are transgressing, these rules that are placed upon us, the system that is drawn with us on the outside of it.
Miller: It’s a complicated title though too, right, because you’ve just been saying that this would not have been transgressive pre-1492 in this country, pre-1850 something. But “Transgressors” is a title that works for now.
Hudson: And that’s the rub, right? There’s actually nothing transgressive about it, right?
Furby: Exactly. Yeah, the transgressiveness of it is only due to the framing of the system that is imposed upon us. And that is not a system that is traditional to here, and it is just a system. It’s an invention. It’s something that is being pushed very hard right now in the modern time.
Hudson: I mean, Felix, just looking at the news today.
Furby: Yeah, I was looking at the executive order yesterday. What was it? The Restoring Truth and Sanity Act? You know they’re talking about scrubbing the Smithsonian Institution of what they called improper ideology. And they’re framing their reality, what makes sense from their perspective as truth and everybody else’s perspective as ideology. So, which one’s truth and which one’s ideology. They’re both ideology, they’re both truth. And they are dictating from a top-down level what is allowed to be truth and what is defined as ideology, and they’re talking about race and gender.
Miller: Steph Littlebird, Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby, thank you very much for joining us.
All: Hayu masi. Thank you.
Miller: Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby are the two curators of the show that’s up right now at the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde that features the work of queer Indigenous artists, reflecting the role of queerness in Native cultures now and going into the future. Steph Littlebird was a part of this exhibit and its creation, and one of the artists whose work is featured.
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