Interview with the curator of Boundless, Heid E. Erdrich

Q: Thank you so much for meeting with us.

Heid: Oh, happy to be here. 

Q: It’s such a privilege. So I guess to get started, um, we’re wondering how did you get involved with “Boundless?” What interests you about the exhibit? How did this come to be?

Heid: Uh, I was interviewed by Lisa Crossman and Mike Kelly, after being suggested by, I don’t know for sure whom, as somebody who might possibly curate the exhibition. And, you know, it was a long project, but I committed to it. I didn’t have another huge project in front of me, or regular teaching that I had been doing. Uh, so, I was happy to do it! And it fit in with most of the things I needed it to do in the time period. I was excited to come back to New England because I had spent some time there when I was younger, and I have friends in New England. Uh, so it fit also with some of the long term curiosities and experiences I had.

Q: So our next question is, was there anything that acted as inspiration in your thought process for choosing the art and deciding the organization of “Boundless?”

Heid: Yes, there were a lot of things that I’ve written a little bit about in the show. Uh, the main thing was that I love text and image together, and I particularly love how we, as Indigenous people, share our history, presence, and future by combining words and images. So, looking at literature is important to me as a Native author. Looking at where our literature started in English, as well as where our first books and our Indigenous languages came from. Our first recorded translations, and so forth. So, having a quick look at what was in the library, I could see that there would be works in the library that would, you know, further that mission and passion of mine.

Q: I love that. This is a question we had planned to ask later but is sort of related to what you’re talking about. So, you’re a poet as well as a curator – you’re an author. How do you think your poetry and your work as a curator relate to each other?

Heid: That’s a really great question. Uh, they both come from a lot of research, and they both assert an Indigenous perspective. So I think that’s part of it. Um, a lot of my work is ekphrastic, meaning I’m looking at visual art or the poems are triggered by a conversation with visual art. And I also spend a lot of time with visual artists, so sometimes the poems are literally a conversation with a visual artist. So, I think that follows – it seems like very similar work to me. Putting a collection of poems together is a lot like putting an exhibition together. You select things, you put them in a particular order. You hope for context, you look for themes and connections, and a general flow of the work.

Q: Wonderful, thank you. As a followup question to that, we were looking into your poetry book Little Big Bully, and we noticed that the painting that you used as the cover for the book, “Exit” by Andrea Carlson, is also featured in the exhibit. So we were wondering, what about that piece is particularly inspiring to you or, um, has prompted you to use it in more than one aspect of your work?

Heid: That’s a great question. But I want to say that the fact that it was in the Mead collection is utterly coincidental. I looked at their collection and was surprised to find this work. It’s an extraordinary work, and it does have that combination of text and image in it. Andrea’s a very important artist, so I wanted it in the exhibition, regardless of, you know, the fact that I had just used it for the cover of a book in 2020. Um, it’s a beautiful image, and it really speaks to me culturally because I’m from the area. And I can see a lot going on in it about, um, what we see in landscape, and what is often overlooked. There’s images from earth formations in that work. There’s images of trail trees, there’s sign language. There’s so much about, you know, communication that we overlook. And also the artist’s explanation of the work, I feel very close to, as well. Um, it has a lot to do with some of the same things I was writing about, which is mostly fear and how to be brave against bullying influences. So I think there’s a lot, um, in common with the work. And, literally, when I was working on my book, I had a conversation with Andrea, who was working on that piece. So – I mean like a day and a half of talking. *Laughs* So I think that, you know, that will always be kind of the face of my work. And Andrea – this is the third cover Andrea, or fourth even, that Andrea has loaned me for my exhibitions. Or, I mean for books! My books. There’s so much the same. *Laughs* Yeah, so I’m really glad it was already there, because there wasn’t a lot of Native art in the collection. There was very very little.

Q: So, in our class we’ve talked frequently about work being done to decolonize museums – such as work with repatriation, giving proper credit to artists, commemoration, and collaboration of Indigenous artists being directly involved in the process. And also emphasizing the present existence of Indigenous people and Indigenous futurity, not as historical relics to be studied. We’ve talked a lot about also using cultural institutions as sites of healing Indigenous trauma. So, I just said a lot *laughs*, but what does decolonization in the museum industry mean to you and how do you think that relates to “Boundless?”

Heid: Well, I think there’s many levels of decolonization that have to happen. And I think often we imagine some policy or some, you know, deaccession of problematic works, or some huge intervention, but small interventions are really important too. And one of the main ones for me is that Indigenous people who are closest to where the institution is are included, and it’s not just one and done; it begins a relationship, and people at institutions begin to act in relational ways, which is more of an Indigenizing thing than a decolonizing. I’m a little more interested in Indigenizing than decolonizing. I think it’s hard to say, you know, the concept of the museum has any equivalent for most Indigenous cultures. But, so how to make it, you know, “decolonial” would be for it never to have existed. *Laughs* I don’t think that’s very valuable because I find museums as teaching points, and points of recovery and reclamation, and one of the few spaces that can be made to allow Native peoples who’ve been cut off from their histories a moment to really spend time with historical materials. And I want that to be intimate and inviting, and I want it to continue. So that’s some of the ways that the ideas of decolonizing influenced what I did in my practices in “Boundless.” But the other thing was just being organic. Letting themes come to me, waiting for them to surface, not determining a theme and then going and looking for it. Um, listening, a lot of deep listening to Native people from the area, getting them to talk to me, getting a relationship built so that there would be inclusion of a sort that wasn’t simply transactional. Um, I was also really interested in the little things like, how do we do the labels? Do we say “Unknown artist” or “Artist whose name is not known”, or “Artist whose name was not recorded?” How do we do that? We ended up just sticking with “Unknown artist” because there were very few of them. But if we knew the tribal grouping we included that, whereas in the past it would just be “Unknown Native artist” – and I mean, that would be like a huge territory, right? So this way we would know, and I would put notes in to the objects so we’d have a little more to go on about who maybe made that. What family, what village. So that’s a little bit of a decolonial act within the curatorial process. And there’s other things like quoting the artists on the labels, rather than just being the expert. Asking them what they wanted to say, quoting other Native people from the texts that I found in the library, having a poem perhaps stand as context rather than, you know, an analysis. Also just not being completely standard through the whole thing, shifting it up here and there, for what seemed appropriate to the relationship of the art and image and text.

Q: Our next question is how do you think intertribal representation and relationships are important to the exhibit, and how do you think these artistic intertribal relationships form?

Heid: Oh, that’s great! Um, that’s a great question. I think it’s important because we begin with relation between people, and across history. Um, family members related across history, a 19th century writer and a 21st century artist from the same group, you know, sharing ancestry, all the way to people who went to college together, or who collaborate sometimes together, or who illustrated an author’s work, or are inspired by some tribal member they never got to meet. So those sort of things I was trying to play out in the intertribal section of the exhibition. I don’t think people, perhaps, think of us as having strong intellectual connections between tribal groups, but we do! So I really wanted to make that apparent. And they’re long standing; they’re not from, you know, just recently when people started going to college in more numbers. They’re all the way from, you know, the 18th century to now.

Q: Speaking of tribal heritage, you are Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. How does your heritage, and personal and family history, factor into your curation or your thoughts about Boundless?

Heid: Yeah, you know, it’s like any identity – It completely factors into it. And at the same time, it’s not the only lens I use. I have educational training and my own aesthetics and art that might not be traditionally Ojibwe. So those things are part of how being Ojibwe comes into the work. But in general, it’s that I want to work with and be around other Indigenous people. We’ve been separated by a lot of artificial barriers, so I think that part of who I am comes into play because I wouldn’t do the work if I weren’t Native. I wouldn’t think it would be appropriate for somebody to do this kind of work if they weren’t Native. And because I’m Native, I get a chance to talk about things that really matter to us, like land, and the law, and representation, and asserting our own survivance.

Q: You are speaking before about how you were in the Northeast in your youth. You went to Dartmouth and then later Johns Hopkins. So we were wondering, did attending a predominantly white institution in the Northeast affect how you approached this as a college exhibit?

How has working with Amherst as an educational institution been?

Heid: Yeah, no doubt that influences it. I kind of know my audience, and I know some of the past structures of especially really well-established colleges like Amherst and small colleges. Small private colleges. So I understand that world quite well and understand how great a teaching tool a museum collection can be, as well as a library special collection. Those are two things that are at Dartmouth that as an undergraduate, as an alumnus, and last year as a visiting professor, I was able to really access there and then Amherst. So I see the value of those two things for learning, and for the community too, inviting community and having something that draws community in. So I knew the possibilities that were involved for how successful or relevant the show could be because I’d been around these things. But I also had a little bit of an understanding of New England Native history and some friends within the area, so I was able to work through getting to know people because of that.

Q: Similarly to your poetry, Boundless examines generational trauma, but also generational healing. How do you think Indigenous futurity and healing is spotlighted in the exhibit?

Heid: Oh, that’s a great question. One way I think is through the inclusion of emerging contemporary artists, artists who are reclaiming traditions, making them their own in visual means, as well as writing. So those things, I think, are part of the exhibition bringing in works that have futurity at their heart. Like the work that Eric Gansworth did, looking at a book from the 19th century and painting toward it with imagery from Star Wars. You know, showing that sort of sense of we will go on, we’ve been here before; we’re past, present and future. I think that that’s an important part of looking at the work. There were a lot of other texts that dealt very specifically with futurity that I wanted to include in the exhibition, and I did, but they’re more in the reading room section of the exhibition. People could sit down and find those books and read those books. So, I just wanted that to be part of it. And, you know, just looking at new materials people use, ways that conversations expand into video, and audio, and composition, and music. All of those things, I think, suggest how innovation is our past, present, and future as Indigenous artists.

Q: So, you include the work of many different mediums in the exhibit, which you talked a little bit about. How do you think multimedia exhibits can add dynamic and depth to exhibits? For example, you included recipes, which stood out to us as a sort of unconventional inclusion for an exhibit. How do you think the “bounds” of art are pushed by the exhibit, and if you think that’s unique to “Boundless” or other work you’ve done?

Heid: I don’t think it’s unique to work I’ve done in terms of including multiple pieces. I’m an interdisciplinary artist; I’ve created video and film, as well as an animation through a collaborative team. So I’ve, you know, it’s always been part of what I do. But one of the reasons I think I do it is that art reaches the senses, and when I think about an exhibition or a book project, I think about how we learn with our senses. Some people are visual learners, some people are auditory learners. Some are great with the verbal part of it, or they need to process through the verbal part of it. I was looking for those cues, and because I wasn’t actually present  I had to count on the exhibition designer and the installers to deal with some of the nonverbal cues of the way the work is set up. You know, I could guide that somewhat from a distance, but you really have to walk through to feel the physicality of experiencing the exhibition. I thought of how I wanted people to smell old books and have books to look at in the library space that I made, the reading room space in Rutherford. I thought of how I wanted folks to be able to take some time in the dark and see a moving, time-based artwork like Sky Hopinka’s work…There’s music in the audio of [“Last of James Fenimore Cooper”] by Brent Michael Davids. All of those things I just wanted to touch on and make sure people had something physical and sensory to attach to. And I couldn’t feed people, but I could give them a recipe so they could think about food and maybe go make some food. Or even just if they made them want to eat something else, that there would be that taste, that you know, missing aspects of an exhibition. Then, of course, there was an amazing opening night, or not opening night, but an amazing reception where their Indigenous foods were made. So, many people did also get to taste along with, you know, hear, touch, feel. And usually if I’m around where an exhibition is, I’ll spend time doing some sort of physical engagement with audience members. And I was able to do that that night of the reception, but I was only able to do it once, unfortunately. I like to do it several times and have visitors sit down and talk to me and handle something and make something together. We rolled up the recipes and tied them with the corn twine that we made by stripping tamales into pieces of corn twine. And I don’t remember if either of you saw that but it was um, you know, usually if I were guiding on a daily basis, I would have engaged something like that a few more times. But, yeah, so it was all about the senses and making sure that there was something for different types of learners.

Q: Yeah. So, what was your favorite part about your experience curating Boundless?

Heid: Oh that’s a really good question. Of course, seeing everybody there. And seeing the happiness of – particularly of the Native community, both from the area surrounding Amherst and from the students who came from different five colleges and really enjoyed themselves, and felt included and felt celebrated. That was the best possible thing to see. There was a lot of great times in the research, but it was just me alone and *laughs*, you know, it was fun for me of finding, you know, small things, but it was much more fun when one of the interns found something and showed it to me, you know, I might given them the list of 25 things to take pictures of and look at and then they’re like, “You gotta see this one thing!” And then they would, you know, show it to me in detail and I would be so thrilled that we’d found something that would be great – like a tiny little book [Random Thoughts and Memories] by Fritz Scholder. Yeah, there were great moments like that. It was great to work with all of the scholars who helped me on the advisory; they wrote essays for the exhibition and the book, that’s to follow the publication…. And I learned a lot from them. But also just the community members who wrote for the exhibition, and supplied poetry and, you know. That was just an experience – I was hoping it would work, but the possibility it might not have worked, that was always there. And it did work. 

Q: That’s wonderful. Final question, what are you working on next? Or what are your goals for your work in the future? We’d love to see what you do next.

Heid: We are still finishing the publication, so that will be the rest of the year.  “Boundless” for 2024 is a much smaller iteration and it will be different from what it is now. It’ll be just in the Kunian gallery, in the first gall–-the little gallery with the reliefs in it. And then, it’ll be the first gallery you come into, um, Fairchild and Rotherwas reading room, so it’ll be much smaller. It’ll be focused both on Northeast, the way it is now, and a few pieces will stay to be the exhibition, but most of it will be new work and some of them will be cross-borders to show Indigenous works from other parts of the world including Australia, further into South America and the Amazon, Mexican American Indigenous makers, and some of the Southwest tribes that we hadn’t quite touched on in the past, but there is a lot of connections to the library collections for the Dine people, so I wanted to make sure there is a room for that.

Q: We’re so excited to see what you do next. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Heid: You’re welcome!