“There’s a deliberate sort of deception being practiced right here that’s actually cynical and actually harmful,” a historian tells the nineteenth.
Printed by The nineteenth
Final week, the official social media accounts of the Division of Homeland Safety deviated from a sequence of motion pictures of Secretary Kristi Noem and varied legislation enforcement officers to put up a portray from the nineteenth century.
“American Progress” portrays a floating White girl main the cost for homesteaders and technological progress, herding buffalo and Native folks off Western lands.
The portray, accomplished in 1872 by John Gast, is on show on the Autry Museum of the American West, nestled within the hills of Los Angeles. Over the weekend, the museum hosted festivities for the Nationwide Day of the Cowboy and Cowgirl, throughout which Stephen Aron, the museum’s director, invited The nineteenth to go to and talk about what this portray represents about America, empire and White womanhood.
The picture of “American Progress” has been trending ever because it appeared throughout DHS’ social channels on July 23 with the caption: “A Heritage to be happy with, a Homeland value Defending.” The portray is a deviation from the current content material on the official DHS Instagram web page, which since Trump’s inauguration has change into a set of memes, vintage-inspired propaganda posters and extremely produced hype movies of legislation enforcement officers.
On the Autry, the small portray is a part of an intensive salon tableau of wilderness canvases, depicting the American West as a fertile land to be conquered. Persons are secondary or absent in most works, with few exceptions. Subsequent to “American Progress” is a massive portrait of three White kids and a canine, displaying the kind of life settlers have been striving for in pursuit of manifest future.
In real-life Los Angeles, the place the Autry is positioned, town has been floor zero for the Trump administration’s federal immigration agenda, which has targeted on a specific model of “Homeland’s Heritage” — one about defending White girls and households.
Based in 1988 by Gene and Jackie Autry to share the heritage and legacy of the American West, the museum combines artwork, historic collections and cultural occasions. Central to its mission is bringing “collectively the tales of all peoples of the American West.”
That is exemplified by the format of the gallery the place “American Progress” lives. Aron factors out three large Navajo chief blankets are displayed throughout the room as a distinct sort of panorama. In the course of the room is a gigantic sculpture, referred to as “Grounded,” by third-generation Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson.
“American Progress” was acquired after it was displayed as part of a controversial 1991 exhibit on the Smithsonian Museum of Artwork that sought to reinterpret artwork of the American West with recent context on conquest and colonization. A number of lawmakers criticized the exhibit as overtly political, and threatened to defund the Washington, D.C., cultural establishment in retaliation. Critics and patrons felt the exhibition unnecessarily villainized America’s historical past — a pointy distinction to the shining beam of progress depicted in Gast’s piece.
It’s a response that’s echoing by way of American politics right now, because the Trump administration considers eradicating books about slavery from nationwide parks, erasing factual info that “disparages” American historical past and renaming a warship honoring LGBTQ+ activist Harvey Milk. Trump’s govt orders search to rollback mentions of gender, racial and ethnic variety from the federal authorities.
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Specialists on the Autry made clear that the capital-H “Heritage” celebrated within the DHS caption is a matryoshka doll of romanticization. The portray depicts three waves of “American Progress,” with a floating White girl bearing “the star of empire” ushering Indigenous folks and animals out of the body, main the best way for miners and homesteaders. It’s wanting again on the 1840s by way of the eyes of post-Civil Conflict America, when the West represented a option to sew collectively the nation and supply a rebirth, Aron instructed The nineteenth.
To ensure that White Individuals to settle within the West, they needed to unsettle a various group of Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican folks. And the primary image — and weapon — of settlement was the White household, stated Virginia Scharff, distinguished professor emerita on the College of New Mexico and chair of Western historical past on the Autry.
“The presence of White girls is completely important to the thought of everlasting occupation of previously Indigenous lands by the USA and the cementing of a legitimacy to occupy that land,” Scharff stated. White males first headed west alone, to work on railroads or as miners, however they didn’t start to occupy the land in a significant means on their very own.
And in Gast’s portray, White womanhood looms massive — actually. Clad in classical white, the passive determine brings gentle westward; in distinction to the bare-breasted Indigenous girl, she embodies decency and civility.
As this spectre of “progress” claimed new states within the mid-1800s, the rights of girls diverged primarily based on racial and ethnic background. “There have been at all times girls who existed there previous to Individuals coming, who had totally different concepts of womanhood, totally different roles of their communities, that always turned beneath assault when a brand new authorities was established,” stated Carolyn Brucken, senior curator on the Autry, throughout a telephone name.
Mexican girls had extra rights than American girls within the East, together with the flexibility to personal property, Brucken stated. Native girls, who participated in public councils throughout myriad tribal traditions, have been faraway from ancestral lands and totally different cultural beliefs have been pressured upon them.
On the similar time, Gast’s floating, symbolic girl erases the very actual contributions of girls on the frontier. “You miss how a lot girls have been energetic brokers of change within the West,” Brucken stated. They fought for his or her rights and communities — Wyoming was the primary state to legalize girls’s suffrage in 1869. In distinction to the resurgence of conventional gender roles right now, gender roles may very well be extra fluid in frontier communities with restricted assets, and ladies slowly gained extra independence by way of expanded work and obligations.
Scharff sees the strategic deployment of the “American Progress” portray as deeply insidious. “The Division of Homeland Safety shouldn’t be sending scantily clad White girls,” she stated, “however as an alternative sending guys with weapons and truncheons and masks to seize folks off the streets.”
“There’s a deliberate sort of deception being practiced right here that’s actually cynical and actually harmful, for my part.”
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DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin instructed The nineteenth in a press release that the company “honors paintings that celebrates America’s heritage and historical past.” She added: “If the media wants a historical past lesson on the courageous women and men who blazed the paths and cast this Republic from the sweat of their forehead, we’re blissful to ship them a historical past textbook.”
However on the Autry, context is all the pieces. “We’re doing all the pieces we are able to, each within the bodily house and likewise once we’re doing interpretive work, to attempt to contextualize this type of artwork in American historical past,” Scharff stated.
She considers Simpson’s “Witness,” which is often displayed alongside “American Progress,” to be probably the most highly effective piece in the complete assortment. “It speaks to the people who find themselves made invisible, muted and chased off the sting of the canvas by this sort of artwork, however they’re nonetheless there,” she stated. “Their presence is simple when you simply look.”
When Simpson’s work was displayed in an eighteenth-century residence, the artist commented on being “misplaced.”
“There have been instances after I wished to talk solely to individuals who may perceive my work,” Simpson stated in an interview. “But if my sculptures are misplaced, they’re truly working tougher than in the event that they’re surrounded by my context. I would like my sculptures to enter tough locations; they’re supposed to infiltrate.”
“Witness” has been quickly changed by its accompanying sculpture “Grounded,” a clay determine crouched on the bottom with black wings reaching to the ceiling. “Witness” was relocated to the ground beneath as part of a brief exhibit known as “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Artwork, Style, Know-how.”
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Upstairs, Aron explains, the artwork is supposed to remind patrons of the time earlier than the start mythologized by painters like Gast. “Future Imaginaries” is supposed to indicate Indigenous historical past isn’t just prior to now, but in addition that there’s a current and a future.
In its non permanent environment, “Witness” towers over Aron. He addressed its typical placement whereas standing in entrance of the post-apocalyptic clay determine. “Bearing witness to the work of manifest future stands, I feel, if not as a rebuke, then at the very least as a reminder of whose homeland, whose heritage, who’s first and who’s nonetheless right here,” he stated.
