This painting was created by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in 2000. It is an acrylic and oil painting on paper mounted on canvas and is part of the collection of OZ Art NWA in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Smith was a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, born on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. She devoted more than five decades to studying and understanding Indigenous history and American identity from a Native perspective, combining expressionist aesthetics and pop art with symbols characteristic of the continent’s indigenous cultures.

The outline of the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States on the map serves as the backdrop for a composition that deliberately subverts the usual function of a political map. Against the borders and colours of the various states, the artist has placed dozens of symbols derived from the petroglyphs of the continent’s indigenous peoples: schematic figures of animals and humans, spirals, crosses and all manner of symbols that refer to rock art traditions predating European colonisation.

For decades, Smith used the map of the United States as a tool to challenge colonial cartography. Her choice of petroglyphs is no coincidence, as in the 1980s she was involved in a campaign to preserve thousands of sacred rock carvings in New Mexico. The use of these symbols also seeks to give precedence to an earlier form of cartography: that of the indigenous presence which existed millennia before the arrival of European colonisers.

Sources

• Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map