Indigenous Kinship Materialism in the Works of Marie Watt and Rose Simpson

For Indigenous art, traditional and new materialist frameworks are often insufficient paradigms that omit the spiritual and non-human animacy of objects. In this paper, I analyze recent installations by two Indigenous women artists—Skywalker/Skyscraper by Marie Watt (Seneca), and Ground by Rose Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo)—toward an Indigenization of materialism. The two installations are brought together to demonstrate the expansive nature of Indigenous kinships to include the non-human, as material and object become index for ancestral presence, labor, and love. Both installations are meditations on material as index for inherited meaning from the unique cultural background of each artist, reflecting stories of cultural origination, heritage, and family from above and from below. My analysis unifies the disparate, unique cultural traditions through an analysis of their use of materials, honoring their meaningful evocations of culture.

Framing materialist art history with a kinship lens allows for the possibility of an Indigenous methodology in which inanimate matter and human families, individuals, and other beings are connected in relation to each other. The exhibitions in this analysis demonstrate that paradigm, while also engaging themes of generational heritage, maternity and paternity, and the function of family across time. While such a framework is not unique to Native American art, these artists’ materials specifically and explicitly reference ancestral forms and the bodies of kin, as materials form compendia of familial significance through materiality.