Example of a Native Perspectives label recently added to the Met Museum’s American Wing. This label talks about gallery 765 called “The West: 1860-1920”. Artist Jason Lujan writes, “Some kind of sun seems to have set.
An exercise in illustrating the concept of the “terminal narrative,” the works in this gallery occupy the absence of Native North American self-representation during the expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. Bronze and oil paint; Frederic Remington and Albert Bierstadt; the pre-reservation Indian. While Indigenous figures in works such as these were often modeled after real people, I have found myself wondering if the artists also viewed their subjects as actual human beings.
People often awake from dreams and nightmares and find them unreal, but this has never been the case for me: these powerful and proselytizing images of the West continue to have a profound influence on the inherited realities of contemporary Americans who happen to be born Native.”