Exoticization, or the Facade of Representation

Among the fluent speakers and written dictionaries of our Mikasuki language, I have never found a perfect translation for what Eurocentric knowledge systems have institutionalized as “art” or “craft.” For many Seminoles and Miccosukees, our so-called traditional visual cultures, songs, dances, and stories formed through deeply complex historical contexts. Our practices exist on a spectrum spanning secular personal expression, inherited knowledge, and specific actions of cultural patrimony. Because of the contextual importance of our creative practices, working within mainstream collecting institutions is historically disorienting and demotivating, with interest in Seminole art often relegated to ethnographic displays. In recent years, collecting institutions in Florida have initiated collaborations with contemporary Seminole artists and creators to take steps toward fostering authentic and meaningful representation. Yet the sinking feelings of disorientation within those same institutions persist despite centuries of material and cultural exchange. 

Indigenous people and contemporary artists find ourselves combating the constant need to translate our creations, arts, and knowledge into something contained by collecting methodologies. As a Seminole artist and academic working with and within collecting institutions on my ancestral homelands in Florida, I want to expose the systems and methodologies of collecting institutions as Othering through the historic process of exoticization. Exoticization imagines the unfamiliar within the context of the familiar, ultimately creating a new understanding that is constantly subject to reinvention. I’ve witnessed this continued process of exoticization in contemporary collecting institutions as covert. By recognizing this evolving issue, we can support paths for Indigenous consent, agency, and rebellion as we navigate, or even usurp, collecting institutions.  

Since the earliest instances of European contact, the Indigenous peoples and cultures of Turtle Island existed within a distinct paradigm of understanding that explicitly challenged many of the foundational beliefs in European knowledge. To both calm fears of the unknown and legitimize the colonial possession of the “New World,” Early Modern Europeans sought to produce, standardize, and even commodify knowledge about the so-called Americas. This approach ignored Indigenous contexts, favoring the construction of a recognizable and easily replicable exotic icon. The process of exoticization informed the initial dissemination of the New World throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, with symbols such as the savage cannibal wearing a feathered skirt shaping colonial attitudes towards Indigenous peoples for centuries to come. 

For Indigenous cultures and peoples, this phenomenon of exoticization removes us from the context of home and redefines us as a foreign Other, even within our ancestral homelands. An overt exoticization is clear in many collecting methodologies: Indigenous belongings described in standardized categories such as art and craft, Indigenous histories explained from the perspective of a colonial timeline, Indigenous knowledge documented using only Eurocentric record-keeping practices. Through documentation and display, collecting institutions create their own representations that assimilate the unknown aspects of the Indigenous cultures into familiar frames of reference for safe consumption.

In the contemporary art scene, exoticization still deeply impacts the way collecting institutions engage with living Indigenous communities and peoples. In exhibits of Seminole art across Florida, I have noticed covert exoticization executed in primarily two forms: the ethnographic entrapment of contemporary Indigenous peoples and the tokenization of a person or communities’ acts of engagement. I refer to this neocolonial process of exoticization as “covert” exoticization as it recontextualizes Indigenous agency itself to create a new exotic commodity. 

The categorization of Seminole art objects often positions them as tools for ethnographic consumption regardless of the artists’ intention. For example, some institutions only featuring Seminole artists in Indigenous-specific exhibitions or on Indigenous specific “holidays,” as well as promoting exhibitions of Seminole art by focusing solely on how their creations relate to some greater concept of Indigeneity. In my capacity as assistant director of my tribe’s museum, I was asked to write a label for a Seminole work featured in a prominent fine arts museum. The piece was a modern Seminole patchwork jacket that was on display in an exhibit focused on Indigenous cultures as they relate to nature. The jacket was a bright, ostentatious satin piece, roughly from around the 1960s, and its provenance beyond being Seminole-made was largely unknown, yet it was the singular Seminole piece the fine arts institution could source for the exhibit. From the garment's structure, you could tell it had been adapted from a man’s traditional long-shirt into a trendy and cropped mid-century styled top. 

To me, the piece spoke greatly to innovation, resourcefulness, and cultural hybridity in a fun and relatable way that reflected the mainstream fashion climate of the Sixties. Yet I was specifically instructed to describe how the jacket symbolized the Seminole peoples’ connection to nature; to force this secular and contemporary fashion piece to become a mirror of the exhibit’s narrative regardless of the designer's intent or my own interpretation as a Seminole scholar. While anything from a Seminole origin can be stretched and twisted into relating to nature due to our underlying cultural values, to make this jacket a symbol of that relationship completely robbed it of its ability to exist merely as an extension of the original designer and/or wearer’s own self-determined identity. 

Something as personal as a hand-me-down shirt-turned-jacket was showcased to an audience of thousands as some sort of ethnographic piece representing the entirety of our people’s cultural connection to the land. Dynamics such as this detach the Indigenous artist’s agency for self-determination, and recontextualizes their works as autoethnographic icons. The museum often feeds into the colonial bias of rendering Indigenous artists as token authorities of cultural authenticity instead of as contemporary peoples capable of multifaceted ways to navigate self-determination independent of their ethnicity. 

Institutions seem eager to legitimize the authority of their museums as sites of social discourse and cultural hybridity with Seminole artists. However, in an exhibition of our art the outcome is almost always just the performance of the Seminole Other within the colonial institution. What Seminole engagement is present beyond our art pieces on the wall? Rarely does the institution become a place where Seminoles at large feel welcome to hold continued dialogues with museum audiences, critics, and peers. So then, what is the point of exhibiting Seminole art? 

The goal of inclusion and representation asymmetrically serves the museum. Despite intentions of collaboration and equity, the museum still sets the terms of engagement and legitimizes its own colonial methodologies of documentation, categorization, standardization, and presentation. Not only does the art of the contemporary Indigenous people become a commodity for the museum, but the very action of Indigenous engagement itself becomes an icon of the institution’s civic duty, social network, and legitimacy. 

Through recontextualizing the agency of Indigenous peoples, the museum is able to morally and politically legitimize its role as a collector and sanitize its continued participation in the extraction and exploitation of Native communities. Exhibits that feature Seminole art disproportionately serve as sites of discourse for non-Seminole communities, as their locations in cities like Miami, Winter Garden, and Tallahassee are inaccessible to our communities both through physical distance and cultural dissonance. I often find no attempts at creating a true sense of access or belonging for Seminole people, leaving the dream of mutually engaging and relevant institutions to fade as soon as Seminole artists leave the exhibition space. 

For a collecting institution to truly showcase Indigenous art, creations, and belongings, it must understand that Indigenous knowledge exists not as an extension of settler-colonial knowledge systems, but as a separate site that operates outside of the colonial society’s familiar frames of reference. Indigenous artists and communities should define the terms they engage with collecting institutions. Indigenous peoples should decide methods of communication, frequency of communication, and what will be transmitted in these “collaborative” exchanges, as well as the sites of exchange. 

Indigenous peoples must have the authority to determine the legitimacy of collaborative practices if collecting institutions cannot provide us the freedom to define the terms ourselves. Some artists or communities may refuse to engage within systems that invalidate agency and knowledge. Along with refusal, there are strategies of legal literacy, contracts, and usage rights that can help to protect Indigenous peoples against exploitation and extraction. However, we must still recognize that Indigenous peoples choosing to engage with collecting institutions does not always mean they are conceding to the authority of the institution. 

This essay started as a lecture presented to the University of Miami’s Libraries Indigenous Studies Group in 2022. Watch the entire presentation online.