The practice of looking at things to remember is our way. It seems important to me that we as native people remember what it is to survive the genocide of five centuries of this conquest and exploitation of people and earth. Both artists recognize and articulate the importance of remembering and use their ability in art-making as a means of continuing and protecting this remembering. Memory is one of the most significant sites of survival, as everything within the power of American hegemony has been institutionally intended to supplant and deny indigenous memory of survival. Their works provide a visual remembering of the impact of Native women historically as well as the presentation of diverse and multiple representations of Native women.
Western society views power as male and immediate.
Women, especially Native women, have not been considered to be powerful or represented as such by Western society. Because they are not seen as committing impulsive acts of power. Impulsive acts are not the way one survives. Yet Native women have contributed to strategies of Native survival. Outside of Native women writers and artists, women have not been recognized to the degree that they have, in reality, contributed to strategies of survival.