As I define this concept of No One, or this person who is No One, I refer to a person that has been directly or indirectly destined to become No One through indoctrination. For me and my Aaniiih People, this process began during the late 1800s during my great grandparents’ time in Indian boarding schools of the United States. It was in those places where my grandparents and parents were embedded with the notion that they can only achieve a lower level of success in mainstream America as compared with their non-Indian contemporaries. They were defined to be no one, invisible and non-existent. Generations later, many of us may fully believe that we can only go so far and never be free to be ourselves. The power of the underestimation of oneself, as well as others’ underestimation, can have a great impact on those that are defined to be No One.

For myself, born in 1971, almost 100 years after my great grandparents’ experience in American society, a different but similar experience would await me. I would have to live within that definition or have the desire to redefine that; I have chosen both.

The expression of my work takes me and the piece to where we are supposed to go. I think of my father’s art teaching and lessons of Aaniiih Philosophy of being in control of my own destiny to be prosperous and generous. I also think of my mother’s lectures given to me as I entered kindergarten, on being an Indigenous person in the contemporary world, specifically about being a ’free’ human being. The freedom to be whatever I wanted but under someone else’s definition of myself, which technically means that I wasn’t free. With that foundation, I communicate my own little life experiences and how they relate to the surrounding world.

As much as I intend to express all of which is inside, I’ve also used my art to cover part of me layer by layer. Maybe with art I can hide among the images of men, women and creatures and keep myself behind the masks. Maybe it’s a fear of judgement or a protection of expression or simply being too self-conscious. More likely however, it’s a line formed by my own contemporary experiences in mainstream society connected to the years of ancestral experiences enduring dehumanization, indoctrination, racism and cultural genocide.