Smart Wars: Asserting Native Identity, Resilience, Resistance, and Coexistence

Banner image: Rory Wakemup, Rabble Rouser (detail), 2023. Quills, feathers, bullet shells, plastic. All photos by Carl Atiya Swanson.

 

There is a simple brilliance to Rory Wakemup’s Smart Wars: Many Shields exhibit at All My Relations Arts, in that if you have been anywhere near American popular culture over the past 50 years, the symbols being subverted are immediately familiar. Smart Wars is populated with Darth Vaders, Stormtroopers, Wookiees, and Yodas, all transformed with feathers, quillwork, paint, and shell casings — recast and reimagined as Native American warriors, with a biting sense of history and humor.

“I got sick of giving everyone Indian 101, I got sick of going all the way back to papal bulls. I used to go back to papal bulls and Manifest Destiny, and this is a more subversive way to teach,” said Wakemup in the opening artist talk. “It’s nice to flip the script, take pop culture and take our narratives back.” 

The power of Wakemup’s subversion, his flipping of the script, is that he has transformed entertainment through culture. And Star Wars, for all of its Campbellian myth-making roots and broad fan base, is entertainment, especially in its new, Disney-franchised maximalist iterations. Which is not to say that it cannot still be powerful on a human level — Andy Serkis’ jailbreak speech and look of pathos when he says he can’t swim from Season 1 of Andor is worth your attention — but it is still an imagined story.

 

Top: Divest or Die, 2017. Fringe, bullet shells, plastic, feathers. Bottom: Street Medic, 2023. Feathers, bullet shells, plastic. 

 

Where Star Wars is imagined, the warriors and history Wakemup is referencing is material and real. In one corner, a Darth Vader figure, resplendent in a fringed cape and feathered crown, has its foot on the papier-mâché head of the former Cleveland baseball team’s mascot, and is holding up the large red feather plucked from the mascot’s head. The piece is titled Kill the Idiot, Save the Fan, a play on the Richard Henry Pratt quote, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Pratt was the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and a proponent of the forced assimilation of Native peoples that followed generations of wars and genocide.

Beyond referencing a real history, the pieces themselves are an active part of the current moment. A trio of fringed and feathered fashion-forward figures in the main gallery are from the Divest or Die performance in 2018, protesting the Enbridge Line 3 expansion. In the center of the gallery is an evolving series — blue 55-gallon plastic drums, cut into thirds and arranged in interlocking patterns, so that the drums can be used as shields in a phalanx formation. At the opening, the drums were laid out in a petaled center circle, but more may be added and decorated over the course of the exhibit. On one wall, a medicine wheel of 3D-printed masks fill the space — yellow, red, white, and black, each with the red handprint that has become the symbol of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

 

Top: Rory Wakemup speaks about his work at the exhibition opening. Bottom: Untitled, 2025, feathers, 3D printed mask.

 

Of the Stormtroopers, Wakemup noted “[it] has its roots in ceremony, so maybe it’s always intended to be regalia, protection for the times that I hope don’t come.” A trio of figures in one corner include a white Stormtrooper with white feathers, a quillwork Thunderbird, and red quillwork circled crosses, referencing a field medic. A black stormtrooper with patterned quillwork references the biohazard symbol, a symbol of warning and cleanup. Those two flank a Stormtrooper made entirely out cast aluminum that was transported to Standing Rock as part of the pipeline protests, but was too heavy to be worn in the cold. Each of the newer Stormtrooper outfits are designed so that riot gear can be worn underneath.

“If you’re in a nonviolent direct action and wearing armor,” Wakemup added, “they attach a felony to the misdemeanor.” The rooting in regalia is a spiritual practice, a legal defense as well as a physical one.

“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum,” reads the opening line of Claes Oldenburg’s seminal 1961 Pop Art manifesto. The pieces in Smart Wars aren’t for sitting on their ass. They are taking a breath before heading back out into these times, a time when Greenpeace is threatened to be sued out of existence for their part in the Standing Rock protests, when copper nickel mining is still on the table despite threats to wetlands and water, when the current administration is actively trying to turn public forests into private logging camps. 

At the opening for Smart Wars, artist Marlena Myles noted, “You need to come and see these in action. Right now they are just sleeping. [Wakemup] isn’t creating art that is stuck in the past, he is making work to educate people without boring them to death.” ◼︎ 

 

MMIR (detail), 2025. Faux fur, bullet shells, bandana, 3D printed mask.

 

Smart Wars: Many Shields | Rory Wakemup is on view at All My Relations Arts through Saturday, April 5, with a closing reception from 6 –8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 10am – 5pm , and Saturday, 12 – 3pm.

To learn more about Rory Wakemup, visit his website.