Timeline Interrupted: Racialized Imagery and the Expansion of the Native American Art Canon

A contemporary lens is essential for questioning the timeline and boundaries of a Native American art history canon, especially as traditional historical surveys underrepresent millennia of Indigenous art and cultural production. As a voting member of the Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, my work examines how types of visual representation; Object Representation (literal likeness), Abstract Representation (recognizable, culturally-contextual icons), and Abstract Non-representation (symbolic forms detached from direct likeness), shape both legacy and especially contemporary images to who represents our Native identity.

By tracing mascot imagery and other racialized visual codes from early settler iconography to present-day branding, this paper demonstrates that the canon’s definition of “art” is inseparable from histories of erasure and cultural appropriation. Such imagery often dismissed as commercial or graphic design, reveals how Native identities have been visualized, policed, and commodified across these three representational modes.

Drawing on over a decade teaching Graphic Design History, I use case studies to reveal persistent patterns of misrepresentation, exclusion, and evolving interpretive authority. This framework interrogates post-contact biases in art history, demonstrating how Indigenous object, abstract, and symbolic representations can disrupt dominant narratives and foreground Native self-definition. The paper provides strategies to affirm Indigenous innovation across time, positioning the canon as a living continuum, not a static artifact.