Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka
By Doak Dean
Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka
By Doak Dean
Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka
By Doak Dean
Still from Endless Acknowledgement (2021).
Conversation with Adam Khalil & Jackson Polys
Led by EDDIE DAI
Adam Khalil (Ojibway) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) are both multidisciplinary artists who — along with Zack Khalil (Ojibway) — compose the core contributors of the public secret society New Red Order (NRO). With a network of non-Indigenous informants and accomplices, NRO produces exhibitions, videos, and performances towards the imagining of Indigenous futures and the expansion of Indigenous agency (New Red Order).
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The following is an excerpt from a discussion during Khalil and Polys’s class visit on April 3, 2025, as well as from a discussion following a screening of their films the night before.
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AILY NASH: One of the primary tools you work with is humor and satire. In an installation context, it is made evident in the space and through the aesthetics. Whereas in the cinema, your work is decontextualized and it is less clear how to read it. Could you speak about getting audiences to question what they're looking at and what they're being told, and the power of employing humor and satire?
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ADAM KHALIL: We were always talking about — jokingly talking about — how to “unsettle the settler,” and thinking about humor as this kind of unstable ground. Also, us all collectively being in on the joke but then us all being joked on, and the weird tension of not being sure where that is. And sometimes I feel like there's a critique even of ourselves within that that's hopefully manifested or felt somewhat as we're trying to figure that out. There's something about how — especially with film — once you know where it's going, you can kind of tune out in some sense. So it's also trying to keep people on their toes or keep ourselves on our toes, too, to be continually engaged or questioning or never passively consuming it as something that's, “Is it real? Is it not real?” I don't know. It's pretty real. You can sign up.
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JACKSON POLYS: I think that's a good question in terms of, what are the relative degrees of familiarity or unfamiliarity when it's shown in an installation context versus a cinema context. Maybe just for myself to digest the question, I’ll take a step back to humor in general as a tactic. I feel like for us — as Adam mentioned, the joke is maybe on ourselves — the self-seriousness of promoting anti-colonial discourse is something we're attentive to in terms of the possibilities that it could be seen or taken as something that could be easily dismissed. So when we introduce an element of satire, that acts as a form of acknowledgement that this is an extremely ridiculous situation we've inherited as Indigenous people, with the ultimate joke being the stealing of the land and the continual discourse that aims to dismantle, attempts to oppose colonization. As an outside force, that can seem insurmountable. So what does it mean for us to try to negotiate or wrestle with colonialism in general? It demands — at least for us, I think — some aim to encapsulate or acknowledge all the contradictions inherent in confronting any gaze upon us as Indigenous people. For example, the notion that Natives have no idea or practice of property, which has historically been used to justify the dispossession of land for Native people. What does it mean for us to introduce or counter that? Sometimes the best way to counter it is to present modes of attraction to Indigeneity and the excessiveness that that can have, and the excessive reflexivity when one wants a kind of movement that might demand accompliceship, and the predicament that introduces. We see there are traps we all face when trying to figure out what to do to collectively dismantle colonialism, and the contradictory elements are something hard to confront and figure out what to do. So, humor is a way of acknowledging that in general.
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ADAM KHALIL: It's also the absurdity of the position we've all inherited and the public secret that we're all living through but don't really discuss. I feel like trying to find some humor in something that's tragic is a classic move. There’s a great essay by Vine Deloria called “On Indian Humor,”[12] which is all about this weird push and pull of the necessity to undercut seriousness to make something hopefully be heard. And that’s why we have Jim Fletcher as our proxy or spokesperson, 'cause this rhetoric coming from someone that looks like him resonates differently with an audience than it would if it were Native people advocating for this. Seeing some of this stuff back to back, I’m thinking of this genuine appropriation of a kind of neoliberal universalist approach, which is also maybe how the work is transitioning in a weird way towards something earnest and ironic at the same time. 'Cause it's very effective, but we're critical of it. But it's super seductive 'cause it works, you know what I mean?
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JACKSON POLYS: It's this embrace of unfolding the dynamics that one experiences when experiencing neoliberalism. The fact that it can seem extractive, and for us to promote this kind of extractive impulse, is a warning to not do that. But at the same time, using any means necessary, whether it takes activism or an acceptance of neoliberalism as looking for the billionaire donor and finding that as a site of potential liberation, is kind of dangerous. But what else are we going to do at this point? As Native people, the numbers are tricky.
Still from Never Settle: The Program (2020).
EDDIE DAI: Jackson, you’ve mentioned the word “parafiction,” and Adam, you brought up using film to do something rather than to make a film about something. Where in the evolution of your work did you guys land on this process of making films as a political intervention more so than visual art?
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JACKSON POLYS: It was always the impetus — finding the right forms that could break through obstructions or the feeling of being contained as an informant. Through INAATE/SE/,[3] I feel like you [Adam] were working on amplifying the sovereignty and problematics and conditions of that community, the difficulty of being able to access it. It’s an educational act, too. Natives are often put in the position of using excessive didacticism in order to explain, because nobody knows about the plight of Native people. It felt like something we were always having to do, and so to fold it into the art as a way of continuing to amplify sovereignty and agency was something that felt almost necessary. And the parafictive container was often — was always, at least in my view — a way to introduce some kind of uncertainty or unsettling device where you didn't really know what was happening necessarily. But the goal was never for it to become a simple comment or criticism or something that felt like it contributed to the feeling of hopelessness. It was always towards something. And so I feel like we gradually recognized the obstructions along with being called upon as consultants for land acknowledgements and finding the ways that the order or syntax of the language can often unintentionally contribute to the erasing and replacing of culture. Like: here they were, and now here we are, and thank you. So that kind of dynamic was something we wanted to counter, and the one way that we did that through multiple venues and experiences was being called upon to ghost write sometimes or to get something going and identify where the traps might be. Or, identifying that it is necessary for institutions — if they want to do that — to make a commitment to something. And that commitment can then act as a promissory note that then has to be actualized.
I think at those points we recognized that material change is necessary and that signaling is gonna be detrimental to not only Indigenous people but also that institution itself. So we found ways to articulate that. In terms of formalizing it then, giving it back was the next step. If you're going to acknowledge something and then just stay there — what does that do versus moving towards some way of decolonizing or rematriating or returning what can be returned? Also figuring out things that may seem like they might not be able to be returned and how to still return them and act toward that. So I think this activation was always a goal.
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ADAM KHALIL: But even with Violence,[2] we were shooting guerilla style in the American Museum of Natural History. We didn't get permission to shoot there. It was actually funny when we were shooting 'cause Jackson's partner and kid were there. We were running around hiding from security guards, and after eight hours the security guard caught us. He was like, “You guys making a movie?” We were like “Yeah.” He was like, “Cool.”​
Still from The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017).
JACKSON POLYS: The Northwest Coast hall is right next to where the processional was filmed, and it’s directly contiguous to another hall housing ancient humans. And so within that institution, there's some ten thousand Tlingit items, let alone Northwest Coast items, in the basement. There still remain all those items that are subject to repatriation laws under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
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ADAM KHALIL: Just 'cause we're on the subject here, maybe just 'cause it's weird to be here, the Peabody has 6,500 ancestors or human remains still held hostage there. They're trying to do their best, but there was a federal law passed over 30 years ago, and there's still more dead Indians here than living ones. And that's a pretty fucked up reality of this place. Just to ground it a bit, too.
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AILY NASH: Can you say more about what the law was?
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ADAM KHALIL: So the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA, said any institution that receives federal funding had to create an inventory of all human remains that they had and then start consultation processes with tribes to return the remains — 35 years ago. 1990.
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JACKSON POLYS: Institutions are like, “Oh, this law exists,” and they've been dragging their heels and often didn't have a NAGPRA officer dedicated to that kind of activity. Those belongings and ancestors are still housed.
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ADAM KHALIL: My tribe got a repatriation of 40 ancestors from the Peabody maybe ten years ago, and the Peabody refused to return the burial items — they just returned the remains. So it's also just blatant grave robbing. They eventually got publicly shamed by my tribe, and they returned the funerary objects, but it was only after our community remade each of those funerary objects to rebury those ancestors with what they were intended to be buried with. And then they had to go back, unearth them, and rebury them with the things that were taken from them four years later. So it was this bureaucratic clusterfuck getting in the way of what actually needed to happen. I guess maybe to tie it into this event we did at the Whitney in 2018 very early on called The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgement,[13] it was a moment of acknowledging our value as cultural laborers within institutions. A lot of the time there's this dynamic that a museum or a biennial or an art gallery is doing you a favor, showing you, without really realizing that without you, they don't have artists to show — they don't exist. So it's trying to leverage that position.
Still from Never Settle: Calling In (2020).
XINRAN LI: It's strange to think about how once you break through an institution, you also need to position yourself in relation to the institution, as you said. You’ve mentioned how we should create words without the “de-” prefix, but on the other hand, it's necessary to show our position to make what we are doing understandable to others. Our class found that the position you’ve referred to as “anti-ethnography” speaks to what Sky [Hopinka] referred to as the ethnopoetic. Do you have any language to describe what's happening? How would you feel most comfortable to describe your position?
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ADAM KHALIL: It's interesting because I feel like we almost grew out of anti-ethnography because of the kind of iconoclasm embedded within it. Which is a fun stance to take, but also kind of turns a lot of people off or even away, you know? That maybe is this kind of neoliberal turn in our practice and politics — not fully in the politics — but in terms of the veneer or what we're putting forth. Maybe denying ourselves some of the iconoclastic catharsis for something that could be more legible or more actually heard and have longer reverberations rather than like a shorter, quicker hit. I'm still thinking about it.
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JACKSON POLYS: 'Cause the “anti” can produce a backlash against something. And then in terms of longer reverberation, if you have an “anti,” then it also becomes collapsed into the same thing. In the same way that capitalism works. If you have some criticism or Marxist critique or whatever, you criticize the thing and then it gets reincorporated and reified and all part of the same thing. And then that's the larger structure that has to be attacked, and then it incorporates this own attack. And so I think in some ways what we're doing is trying to present that reality but also infiltrate into that system of more accelerated and intermediate and sequential and overlapping critiques. Even within Give it Back Crimes Against Realty,[6] the way I see it, we introduce this bubbling up of uncertainty, realty.​​​​
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REFERENCES
[1] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys, dir. Never Settle: Calling In (2020)
[2] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys, dir. The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2017)
[3] Khalil, Adam, Zack Khalil, dir. INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. To a certain place/it flies. falls/] (2016)
[4] New Red Order, dir. Endless Acknowledgement (2021)
[5] New Red Order, dir. Never Settle: The Program (2020)
[6] New Red Order, dir. Give it Back: Crimes Against Reality (2024)
[7] Khalil, Adam, and Zack Khalil. “The Violence Inherent,” The Offing, 2016. https://theoffingmag.com/enumerate/the-violence-inherent/
[8] Smith, Paul Chaat. “A Place Called Irony.” Paul Chaat Smith, 2009. https://www.paulchaatsmith.com/text-irony.html
[9] Smith, Paul Chaat, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. “New Red Order Wants You.” 2020.
[10] Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40. https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf
[11] Rudy, “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto.” Indigenous Action, March 19, 2020. https://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apocalypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/
[12] Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Indian Humor.” In Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 146-152. New York: Macmillan, 1969. https://www.vdrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/DeLoria_-_Indian_humor.pdf
[13] New Red Order. The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgement. Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 13, 2018. Accessed April 15, 2025. https://whitney.org/events/endless-acknowledgement