FROM-THE-FIELD

CITY OF MURALS

City of Murals sets out to investigate how Native American authenticity has been constructed historically and one of the ways this construction is being experienced today. By tracing the efforts to create the American native, through the photographs of Edward Curtis and tourist narratives, it is possible to see how the Native American has been fixed in the mythic and ‘immemorial’ past. Through the interviews and artwork of Cha’ Tullis, a Blackfoot-Cherokee artist living near an Osage Reservation in Hominy, Oklahoma, the video attempts to juxtapose the historically contained Indian with the world Tullis is constructing to represent his own dreams and experiences. The goal of the film is to move past the concept of authenticity toward an understanding of how alterity was, and still is, being (re)produced in and through our own historical imaginations and to begin to unravel some of the impacts of these imaginings. This clip depicts Tullis in the process of creating his artwork, both physically as he paints and mentally as he struggles with the bindings of authenticity. City of Murals was produced and edited by Jean Dennison for her Masters degree in anthropology at the University of Florida.

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