So you wanna be a stoic indian? - M. Earl Williams
“So you wanna be a stoic indian?” is the most recent project from M. Earl Williams, featuring classic tintypes of players’ Native American avatars from the genre western open world and online game Red Dead Redemption 2. We previously highlighted Williams’s foundational screenshot project reinterpreting Ed Ruscha’s classic photo books for the Grand Theft Auto era in a previous post, and in this new project. In his new work, Williams sharpens his investigation into the ways video games deploy highly “iconic” aspects of American history, and how games imagery’s frictive interface with analog photography can lead us to a more complex, sometimes unsetting relationship with what roles we inhabit and how those roles are portrayed. In his artist statement, Williams lists off a litany of questions that he, a Native American involved in tribal media and preservation, wonders about the motivations of players who would choose to play as a group of people during a period when they were undergoing both brutal repressions and being subject to imagistic colonization, with their physical oppressors also codifying media tropes that would be used in their oft-problematic depiction to the present. Williams’s questions feel earnest (if urgent and incisive) specifically because of his use of the tintype process. This was a primary commercial process being used during the era depicted in RDR2, and is clunky, complex, prone to errors, and just about as ill-suited to photographing an HD screen as possible. The tintype only produces a single positive image, rendering each frame as the lone, incomplete, simulacra of shimmering warm metallics and shadow, and that tactility, that made-ness counterintuitively actually makes these moments, these depictions, more tactical, insistent, and understood as the part of a long, troubling history of the way American history and media culture has tried to wrest control of the identity of Native Americans from the people it depicts. These images don’t answer Williams’s questions but in that refusal, become profound focal points for us to question the way history is often so glibly embedded into our digital imaginations.
Creator: M. Earl Williams
Link: https://www.mearlwilliams.com/rdr-tintypes#1
Connections:
Patrick Nagatani - Nuclear Enchantment
Wendy Red Star - 1880 Crow Peace Delegation
Matt Margini - Red Dead Redemption