CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/17/2024

‘Indigenous Histories’ is Back in Stock!

Spanning four centuries of art and scholarship thoughtfully interwoven by guest curators from various territories and Indigenous groups in Australia, North America, South America and Scandinavia, Indigenous Histories is a staff favorite not only because of its enlightening content but also its stellar design—which includes alternating papers, black edges, a lovely ribbon and sharp interpretations of traditional patterns throughout. Nuestros dioses antiguos (Our Ancient Gods, 1916)—by Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán—is from Abraham Cruzvillegas chapter on the Zapatistas and “The Construction of the ‘Self’” in Mexican Indigenous art. He writes of a collective self that is “many at once, ubiquitous, unstable, standing on belonging and will, subjective and arbitrary, opposed to any paradigm, to race and class statutory determinisms, that includes all possible worlds, is essential for a shift in the comprehension and construction of community, art, nature, and finally the universe, in parallel to the hegemonic Western world.” On the other hand, he writes, one single body—like his own—“can also stand for a plethora of diversity and contradictory simultaneous identities and values, including gender, genealogies, and cultures, as an act of resistance, against any kind of essentialism, nationalism or indigenism.” He concludes with the Zapatista phrase: “Para todos, todo. Para nosostros, nada (For everyone, everything. For us, nothing.)”