Indian, Indio, Indigenous is an important example of what Jaune Quick-to-See Smith calls her narrative landscapes: paintings in which stories are revealed only to those who know how to see life in the arid "empty" land.2 Set within a collage of striped and polka-dotted fabrics, which bears a resemblance to aerial photographs of cultivated lands, Smith includes the masthead of her reservation newspaper, Char Koosta, photocopies of George Catlin's drawings of American Indians, part of a U.S. map, pictographs of bear, deer, and a coyote, a painted bust, written declarations, and abstract blocks of paint.

In this work, Smith provides the viewer with multiple symbolic elements that require deciphering. Beginning with the red painted words "Indian Indio Indigenous"-suggestive of American Indian blood that has been spilt on the soil-pictorial images are juxtaposed with such sardonic comments as "it takes hard work to keep racism alive" and "money is green: it takes precedence over nature." Representative of both the wounded earth and the unjust treatment of native peoples, this painting strongly echoes Chief Seattle's 1854 statement, "We are part of the earth and it is part of us."3 In this context, it is possible to see the august-looking figure to the left of center in the painting as a representation of this famous Duwamish chief who was forced to sell native ancestral lands to the U.S. government under the 1855 Port Elliot Treaty.

Reading these symbols, the meaning of Smith's canvas becomes clear. It is a morality tale about the historical desecration of Indian lands and culture as well as a modern-day admonition to stop the injustices native peoples experience in the United States.

2 Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 113.

3 See Jonathan Binstock, "Jaune Quick-to-See Smith," in Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1996), 46.