episode eight | keith secola

Published 20 feb 2019

Miranda Metcalf  Hello Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) friends, and welcome to the eighth episode of the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I release an episode every two weeks, and on the off weeks, I publish an article on the Pine Copper Lime website, which features images and maybe a bit more information about the printmaker I'm going to interview. If you want to get in touch, Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) can be found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and of course at helloprintfriend.com. Not to mention, I'm going to be at the SGCI vendor fair this year in Dallas, which as of this podcast, is only two weeks away. So make sure to come by, say hello, and get some merch. My guest this week is Keith Secola. He is a Northern Ute Anishinaabe printmaker currently based in the Bay Area. In his printmaking practice, he screenprints large scale photographs from his family's archive onto covers from publications of romanticized tales of early America, often ones which contain warped views on indigenous populations. Thus, he physically and philosophically obscures and overrides the story with a history from the voice of the subjects. In this episode, we talk about his early life growing up as the son and namesake of a well known musician, his time as a sponsored skateboarder, and the incredible research he's doing into his own family through this project. This is a really great episode. And Keith has an incredible mind for names, dates, and places. So it's a little bit of a history lesson as well. And just before I hand things over to Keith, I want to let you all know that episode nine is going to be a little bit different. My guest is Shayla Alarie, who's not a printmaker, but a brilliant gallerist who I worked with for five years and printmaking specific gallery in Seattle. We cover collecting, authentication, all the sticky wickets of the secondary print market. But I'm also going to do a series of polls for questions over on the Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) Instagram, which Shayla will answer before the episode goes out. So if you've ever had a burning question for a gallerist, now's your chance. Our handle is found @helloprintfriend. Of course, we'll put a link in the show notes. Give us a follow and be on the lookout for those polls appearing in the story. All right. Now, without further ado, here's Keith. Hi, Keith. How's it going?

Keith Secola  Good. I'm doing really well out here in the Bay Area, sitting here in Oakland, California. It's really nice out.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I hear that the West Coast has been having quite the mild winter this year.

Keith Secola  Yeah, no, it's a lot different from when I first got out here. The first winter, it rained almost every single day and it was super windy. But lately it's been a lot of sunshine, so I can't complain.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I definitely can identify with that. When I first moved to Sydney it was in July, which of course is their dead of winter. And I think the second or third day I was here, it got down below freezing. Which was really strange for here. And you know, everyone's plants were dying and all this kind of thing. So now Australia is having this incredible heatwave.

Keith Secola  Everywhere, too, has been kind of, it's been dry this last summer. You know, there's so many wildfires this fall out here in California, and even back home in my reservation in Utah, when I went back I experienced the Dollar Ridge Fire and it just was ripping up the whole western United States, and the earth is definitely drying out. You know, it's a problem. It's definitely affecting a lot of countries.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, for sure. So I think that that's a good place that I can just sort of ask you maybe to introduce yourself. I actually came across your work just on Instagram, wiling away my time on Instagram, like we all do. And maybe it was through a post that Kala did about the fellowship that you have there. And I went to your page, and I saw your work and I thought, Why doesn't everyone know about this person? This is amazing work. And so I featured you on the Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) account, which is where I just repost work that I find interesting, and it completely took off. 

Keith Secola  Yeah, I saw that. It was really awesome. 

Miranda Metcalf  Whatever we did, the algorithm liked it a lot. And we were rewarded.

Keith Secola  Yeah, it worked on my end too. I ended up getting over 1000 likes and it sort of catapulted me into like, a lot more following and then also the algorithm, or whatever trend we broke, I guess, kind of getting a little bit more awareness for my postings and things, which is good, you know, overall, for the art practice.

Miranda Metcalf  Definitely. We cracked some kind of code.

Keith Secola  it was really good. And I really appreciate that because you sort of just took the initiative and did it, and it really worked out, you know, so I really appreciate you sort of taking the time to write something up and research the work.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, definitely. It was my pleasure. So that being said, I actually don't really know too much about you or too much about your work other than what I've seen on your Instagram or on your website. So yeah, I'm going into this a little more blind than I usually am with the artists I chat with.

Keith Secola  If you want, I could kind of just give you some of the basics of who I am and where I come from. 

Miranda Metcalf  That would be great. And if you could tell us about your name as well, if, you know, people call you Keith or people call you Mino or who calls you what, and what you prefer and all of that, I'd love to hear that whole story. 

Keith Secola  Yeah. So I could just start by saying I was born in the late '80s, in 1988. I was born in the Ute Indian Reservation. And that's where I'm from, in Fort Duchesne, Utah. It's an Indian Reservation northeast of Salt Lake. And it's about 200 miles from Salt Lake City, and kind of on the borders of Wyoming and Colorado. But I was also raised in Phoenix, Arizona with my mom and dad, we grew up there. So I sort of had an urban upbringing as well, for most of my life, actually, for the better part of my life. It was sort of like this dual upbringing between, you know, reservation life with my family and learning that way, but also growing up in the urban settings of Phoenix and suburbs around there. Yeah. And then from there, I kind of just grew up all over the southwest and ended up getting my undergrad in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2012. And then I've lived around Colorado for a while, between school and graduate school and things. So I just I kind of always just kind of tell people, I'm a product of the southwest in a lot of ways, you know, I grew up there, I met a lot of my good friends from IAII, it's sort of where I developed my sense of art practice and using my identity to question things with my art and sort of find my aesthetic.

Miranda Metcalf  And then, do you want to tell us a little bit about your name? Because you've got two listed on your work, and I'm sure there's a story with that.

Keith Secola  Yeah. So my name is Keith Secola, Jr. My father is a native musician. He's pretty well known in Indian Country all across America for some of his hits, he had a hit called Indian Cars and stuff and -

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, when I was trying to do research on you, I definitely saw him.

Keith Secola  Yeah, I finally feel like I'm starting to kind of come out in my own, even though I've been doing my art for a while, it's hard to separate from the name and things too, and kind of do my own thing. But yeah, I am a junior. And I kind of have, you know, that whole legacy of my father and his work. But he's Anishinaabe, so I'm two tribes. I'm from the Northern Ute Indian tribe, which is in Fort Duchesne, on my mother's side. And then on my father's side, I'm Anishinaabe Bois Forte Ojibwe, and they're from the territories in northern Minnesota. Part of the rite of passage in a man and young woman, we're given Indian names in the language of the Anishinaabe, and when I was 17, I was taken up to northern Minnesota to a place called Grand Marais. And it's on the north shores of Lake Superior. There we had a ceremony, a naming ceremony, with a medicine woman from Rainy River. That's on the border of Minnesota and Canada. And she came down to Grand Marais on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota and she had a naming ceremony for me which is, you know, a medicine woman that has dreams for you and relays with an animal or spirit that comes and gives you your name. And she did the ceremony for me when I was 17 and she gave me the name Mino Mashkiki Wish Kang. Mino, in our language, means good, in Anishinaabe, it means "good," and Mashkiki means "medicine." So if you translate that, it means, Mino Mashkiki means "good medicine." And the Wish Kang doesn't really have any English translation, like a hard English translation, it's sort of more just a meaning like "to be around" or "to see." So my full name, Mino Mashkiki Wish Kang, kind of means "good medicine to be around" or "to see" or "to know." That's what my name is in the Anishinaabe. And, you know, I was given that name, and it changed my life a lot when I was 17. You know, there's a lot of things that, at a young age, I sort of understood. The discipline of what it might take to kind of carry a strong name and medicine like that. And yeah, you know, I still struggled with things but you know, I think it kind of helped me, kind of grounded me in a lot of ways to go to school and, you know, get right, even at, you know, 17 years old and things.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I can only imagine that being given something with that kind of weight, even, you know, for a 17 year old kid, you would take it so seriously and really understand, this is something that's important. Like, this is something that's mine.

Keith Secola  Yeah, it was. I mean, it definitely did. It felt, you know, I was given medicine from it, you know, like, something that I carry with me that's only supposed to be mine throughout life, and no one else's. And the lady who gave me the name, her name is Sandra Hunter. And she's sort of like an adopted auntie now, you know, she's like, my family now. And even though we're not blood, it's that relation through spirit and medicine. So, you know, I could always kind of rely on her to always guide me in things and, and even sometimes, when things have happened, she's just kind of known, it's like this intuition she has over me. So yeah, you know, I think it changed my life a lot. And it really, at the time, when I was 17, I was a skateboarder. You know, I used to ride for this Apache skateboard team in Arizona, and they were based out of San Carlos Indian Reservation. And I just remember thinking, that's what I want to do is like, you know, to achieve these things I want, it's going to take a sacrifice and really push hard at this. So I think, even though I wasn't so much into art practice at the time, I was around creative people and, you know, I at least learned that discipline through the ceremony that, you know, at the time, it was all about skateboarding. So I just, I devoted all my life to that at the time, and it sort of led me to meet artists, and that's what kind of led me to college, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I loved skateboarding and sort of the art around it. So I started taking art courses and taking drawing 1 and then just sort of learning through that, that's what I love to do, too. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, no, that's a really fascinating crossover, because obviously, you've got music, which is its own art, through the connection with your father. And then, you know, I always think that movement is, of course, its own art. Because we like to put hierarchies on things, we think that ballet is more art than skateboarding. But of course, that's bullshit, right?

Keith Secola  I mean, skateboarding, you know, it's technique. It's what's looks good, it's aesthetic, you know -

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. It's super athletic.

Keith Secola  Yeah. And I mean, the aesthetics of it, what you're doing with your body and the movement and things like, you know, I kind of grew up off of that more. So, you know, the artistic forms of skateboarding and the creativity, I just would meet so many creative people, like people that could draw and paint or do graffiti, or they'd write, you know, so I think just being around that whole subculture is what really influenced me. And then being, you know, American Indian in an urban landscape. It's kind of hard to find that commonality with people. And I think, you know, the subculture of skateboarding and art and music sort of breaks those boundaries a little bit for people, especially people of color and stuff. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, certainly. You know, finding your safe space and finding spaces that are for you -

Keith Secola  Accepting spaces, yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, absolutely. That's so important. Do you have an exhibition up at the moment? Is that correct?

Keith Secola  Yeah. There's a show at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. It's called Postcolonial Revenge. And I think it came, it sprouted from two curators that I've kind of had relationships, friendships with, you know, throughout my experience here in the Bay Area, Gilda Posada and Dara Katrina, so I kind of knew both the curators, and they had me in mind as far as my vision and the work that I've done with my murals and archive printing and things, so they reached out to me and kind of were hoping that I would do a large scale installation for it. They definitely had that vision and the whole idea around making a show around postcolonial studies and the kind of aftermath of, you know, colonialism and what it's had on our identity and our stories and narratives as a native people and people of color.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I'm sitting in a conference room at a local college that's basically empty right now, because it's Australia Day today. So it seems sort of apt that we're having the postcolonial conversation today. And I think generally speaking, Australia's doing better than the states, you know, in terms of acknowledging the history. In Australia, before there's any gathering, they do what they call a Welcome to Country, which is, you know, whoever is the master of ceremonies, they acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that whatever is happening is happening on.

Keith Secola  Yeah, and just, I mean, an acknowledgement, even, that's something I think so much of Native American history and North American native people's stories and acknowledgments, you know, just completely erased. And there's a lot of controversy going on right now, especially what's going on with Nathan Phillips in the Catholic High School, I believe, you know, and everything that happened on the Indigenous People's March, just a week or so ago, you know, there's a lot of movement for people to realize that we have a voice and that these stories are real, that indigenous peoples really shaped a lot of the politics.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And that it's still like a living history, I think in the general education that children get, there's no acknowledgement of the presence and the continuation and all of that. It's a problem. Yeah. 

Keith Secola  Yeah, I feel like it's one of those things where some people can think of natives and there's always sort of that dated time, your imagery, it's always kind of a past, romantic time, you know, and like a lot's changed since then. I mean, even the story of my Ute people, you know, I like to try to tell people, we were from Colorado, even though our reservation's in Utah. The Uintah Ouray Reservation was a combination of the Utah Utes and the Colorado Utes. So the Uintah part of our name, the Uintah Ouray Reservation, "Uintah" refers to all the Utah Utes, and "Ouray" was the chief of our tribe, the Uncompahgre band that I come from, and we were around the Pikes Peak area of Colorado,  that's where we originated from. And we had land, a reservation, in the late 1800s, that was in Colorado that was set aside from us by Abraham Lincoln and the Uintah Ouray Reservation in Utah. But there was a conflict in, I believe, 1872, where a lot of Northern White River Utes got in conflict with the Indian agent, Nathan Meeker, who was basically policing the tribe, policing the band up north, and eventually they plowed up a Northern Ute horse racing track, a place where we'd breed our war ponies and things, and trade them and sell them, because that was our monetary value, was our horses. When they plowed that up, it created this sense of treachery. And eventually, it just boiled over to where, you know, we had a battle, and unfortunately, Nathan Meeker was killed. And that created a political campaign in Colorado, which was like, "The Utes must go." And then eventually, all the northern bands and the central bands, like where I was from, my family, and everything, we were pushed into Utah, to that Ouray part of the reservation. So that whole, our ancestral lands in Colorado, are completely just, you know, we don't have the access to it. There's still Ute tribes in Colorado, but they've been pushed to the very southern parts of it, where they straddle New Mexico and Arizona. But there's this whole western slope that was once just Ute territory, and it's sort of you know, even that kind of story is long lost, you know, and it was like, I feel like my people have only been on that reservation for only 100 years. So before that, I mean, to us, in the great timeline, that's more new to us than ever. I mean, that is like, that was our way of life, that freedom. When we left Colorado, I mean, there's obviously a negotiation that happened. There was a lot of money involved, and we were supposed to get paid out, obviously, for Colorado, like, millions. A lot of the times, though, the federal government felt that, you know, native tribes, when we were becoming citizens, they didn't believe that we were able to suit our own money. They would regulate the amount of money we had. So my tribe didn't get the money for Colorado until maybe the late or the early '50s. And we were moved to our res in, like, 1872. So I mean, there's over 50 years of harsh poverty, maybe 70 years, where people really struggled. It creates this whole era of harsh times. And then when we do get the money, it creates all these different politics within a tribe. There's so many complications, trying to assimilate into this American culture. You know, I think there's still a lot of struggles there, just kind of understanding. Because it's even hard for me to like, keep my head up on all the policies that native people are shaped by. It's like, you know, I can see how it gets to that point where you just almost don't want to deal with it. You write in your artist statement about existing in two worlds and having to navigate that, and it seems to sort of tie into, perhaps, your current body of work where you're mixing the traditional family photos, literally over printing it on the propaganda about America. Would you talk about that a little bit? I kind of knew about some of these archives we had. My mom, she's very much like the matriarch of a big family that I come from. So that creates a big, large, extended family. My mom was always very responsible. And you know, she was very smart and did a lot of good things. So I think when my grandmother passed away, she got all the photos. Before I came out to graduate school, my mom was like, 'Hey, you know, we have these archives, you know, I see you interested in these things and the art you look at, could you ever use these in some of your work?' And I looked at them and they're just  really powerful. It was definitely a true depiction of my family and people from the period of the early 1900s to about the '50s. And then at first, that's kind of the era I was really into, so I took a couple albums to school with me from my grandmother's side. You know, I didn't really know how I wanted to use them at first, I was just sort of diving into experimenting, printing on different things and fabric and stuff. There's this place called Scrap in San Francisco. I just went there looking for stuff to print on. Found a bunch of deconstructed book covers, and I just, it was like, a lightbulb that went off, 'Oh, I can print these on the book covers.' And at first, you know, before even thinking about infusing identity onto historical books, I just needed to make the work. And I printed them, and then when I was able to finally have it and sit there and look at it, it really started to hit with me like, well, this is more of a statement and a concept that can grow. And I just kept on going from there. And then I kept trying to find more book covers that became a little bit more, you know, suggestive of colonial powers. And then it kind of became this critique of text and image and persuasion and that whole propaganda that's used. I mean, it was through a lot of studio visits, you know, a lot of trial and error, I have a lot of pieces that didn't quite, make it, but I've learned a lot from them. I started to understand the power of these portraits, and then it kind of made me want to learn more about the portraits too. The project started to evolve, not only with trying to find the right books and the right history and texts, but then learning about my family and who certain people were in my lineage and different bloodlines and how strong it was.

Miranda Metcalf  And so for the photographs themselves, seems like a lot of them are kind of formal portraits. Do you know the history behind those?

Keith Secola  I think what happened was somebody on my grandmother's side had an old Brownie camera and would shoot a lot of the photos herself. So a lot of them were developed by somebody in the family, and a lot of pictures that happened back then in that kind of formal setting with this, in our regalia, is a lot of times, to make a little extra money, a lot of tourists would come through Indian country, you know, because the 40 runs right through my res, from Denver all the way to Salt Lake and it pretty much just - I think some tourists sometimes if they, you know, people would pose in their regalia in the photos and they could get copies of them or other ways like that too, just so people could kind of have a token of Indian country, you know, when they're coming through. And so I know a few of them are the photos we have are from that, too, themselves. But what's interesting is I have that album on my grandmother's side, which is the Cesspooch family, the Utes, the Uncompahgre family that comes from that side, but then I'm using a photo album from my grandfather's side, my grandpa, his name was Francis McKinley, he was sort of everything to me as far as what I wanted to learn and think about, because he was a pretty prominent man, I found out a lot about him through researching about him. And I learned that he developed a lot of the photos himself. He kind of - the timeline of the of the photos I'm talking about kind of run from  the early 1900s to about the '40s. And that's my grandmother's album, there's a lot of mystery behind it, there's a lot of, you know, not enough information sometimes to know exactly, but then the second part with my grandpa's is more of everything he's collected, everything he shot. And so I knew that he sort of had this educated background, and he was, you know, he's like a leader in our tribe. So when I got to school, I started researching everything that I could find about him because I remember seeing Arizona State articles or just paperwork that he'd write about, you know, being a dual native and all these things that I kind of faced, you know, that he'd write about in his own college publications. And then I didn't really find anything at Arizona State where he worked, but I ended up looking at the University of Utah, and I found that he was part of this oral history project where it was pretty much just like, they interview 12 different Ute men at the time in the '80s, just to kind of learn about Ute culture, and it was sort of an archive project with the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. I found this 89-page interview that he had. It was all him, and then I even found voice recording of his interview, and it hit me when I read it, and I had to write my thesis paper, I was researching what he was writing, this sort of nonfiction-fictional story of learning about the Utes through a vision. But I realized, this is the first time I ever heard my grandfather's voice. I'm listening to it on a recording in graduate school doing art. And then he pretty much just lays everything out, from who his grandpa was, and who his family was, and then all the photos that he had of the family on my grandma's side, and his side started to make sense. You know, like that's my grandpa, that's great-grandpa Albert Cesspooch in that photo, and now I'm starting to see the tree line because of his interview. And I can kind of understand the purpose now of these archives, and how important it is to maybe finish his work. And then also, the idea of taking photos he developed and then screen printing them the book covers is just this extra layer of work. It's just become something really, it's a huge project.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, there's one photo that looks like kind of the poster for the Postcolonial Revenge exhibition. 

Keith Secola  Yeah, the boxer. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, the boxer. So I'm just breaking in here for a second to explain this image. Because if you haven't seen it already, it's definitely worth looking at. You can find it on his Instagram, on my Instagram, on his website, which I'll put a link to in the show notes. But just for reference, it's a young Ute man with two boxing gloves on in a fighter stance with his right leg back, wearing this huge, beautiful head dress. And he's staring right in the camera. And it's just an incredible image. So if you're a visual person, which likely a lot of you are, just take a quick peek on your phone, and then you can hear the story behind it.

Keith Secola  So the boxing one is really cool, because that one was taken by my grandpa Francis McKinley, and he developed it himself. Like I have the hard copy and everything. What's cool about that one is, that is a picture of my great great uncle. His name is Reuben Cesspooch. So that would have been my grandma's little brother. He was part of the Ute boxing team. So we had a boxing team on the reservation in the '60s, he would compete with other boys and probably other Indian reservations that had boxing teams, and my grandfather wanted a photo of all of them and Reuben had the headdress on. You know, they have the one where he's definitely posed as the fighter, and then there's another photo I have where all of them are laid out in the ring, and then Reuben's in the middle again, and they're with their coach and the coach's name was Chappie.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, it's such a great image. I think that's one of the layers to your work, is that the images are just gorgeous images. Like he definitely, as you said, was bringing his own artistic eye for it.

Keith Secola  It makes more sense, too, for me, as far as being a printmaker. I mean, there's so many, I don't want to say relationships, but like, certainly, you know, photography and printmaking, they can go hand in hand, you know, a lot of photo processes transferred to printmaking, and vice versa, you know. So I think it's kind of interesting to know that he had such a passion for photography, and then his youngest grandson is a printmaker, and doing these things and stuff, you know, I think about that, too, that I always used to wonder, where did this all come from? But, you know, I mean, it's within my family more than I think.

Miranda Metcalf  So you've got these photographs that you've manipulated, you've enlarged, you know, some of them look maybe like five feet, or four feet, something like that. They're big pieces. And then you hang them on the wall. And then you also paint directly on the gallery wall. Can you speak to that practice and sort of those images and how they fit in with the whole experience?

Keith Secola  Yeah, I mean, I think I always, you know, my graphic quality of drawing and just my love for graffiti and wall mural painting that I developed in undergrad, you know, just trying to find a place for it. So there's always that interest and love for the graphics that I do, but they just kind of developed over time, and how I started doing these sort of representations of Virginia Coastal Indians and these graphics was, my last year of school, I took this class called the promise of monsters. We really focused a lot of things around Frankenstein and that whole idea of monsters and why they're created and literature and art and popular culture you know, they have a deeper meaning than scary spooky Halloween monsters. I had sort of the readings about political boundaries and why certain people of color and marginalized, you know, indigenous groups are created in a way to create monsters and savages and barbaric depictions of  people being scalped and all these reports of monsters in the new found land, these people, but then also very romanticized. And so I just started looking at savage depictions, just to kind of print and do these things to create these kind of monstrous representations. And then I found a lot of these ones by this Belgian printmaker named Theodore de Bry. He's a 16th century etcher, printmaker, and he had pretty much made this whole, kind of like an encyclopedia, of the European expeditions to America. And the thing is, he never actually really went. He was just kind of reprinting this colonist named John White's watercolors, so he had gotten the watercolors and then for this encyclopedia, which was called A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, he altered them to sort of fit a European-centric sort of perspective, or sort of like a gaze, you know, like the European gaze of Roman statues and sort of very muscular and romanticized, you know, all these images of natives to fit the European look. And that was like, printed all over Europe at the time, you know, that printing press was everything. That was like our social media, you know, going viral. The whole country was starting to see these images of natives and these representations that they started to believe over time. Our identity has been shaped by a European gaze throughout the beginning, you know? And then to me, I printed all those and, you know, natives being very savage, or being very beautiful, and naked, and things, and I printed them, and then through different studio visits, and just through the class, it led me to blow one up and paint it big. Because I was really into Kara Walker, and her silhouettes and her show, you know, that showing of that sort of African Diaspora and that alternate, almost fantasy world, but also very savage. I kind of created these narratives with these images. And when I blow them up, they change by the way I do the graphics, and I sort of add tattoos and different regalia that I want to create in my own little narrative, just to kind of separate them from just being directly what they were as a printing, you know, so they become more of like a line graphic. Having the studio space and painting them, and then doing the pieces on the book covers, just sort of led me to starting to place some of the pieces over graphics, you know, and sort of like, kind of creating a dichotomy of representation, you know, like, okay, here's the real, here's the fake, and kind of comparing the representations together to create the installation and obscure certain parts with the pieces, or having parts of the mural go into the piece, you know, I think that's where I want to sort of exist, you know, kind of put people in that in-between.

Miranda Metcalf  And I feel like it's so important, because the way we're taught history is that it's objective, and it's factual. And so much of getting a broader view and a more advanced education is realizing that people were doing marketing and spins and fake news since the dawn of time.

Keith Secola  Oh, yeah, I know, right? There's a formula for a lot of this media, you know, a lot of things. Like, I'm reading this book right now, it's called Killers of the Flower Moon. And it's about the Osage murders in Oklahoma, where, you know, this tribe was the richest people per capita in the 1920s, because they were removed onto a reservation with huge mineral deposits and huge oil deposits. And they were placed there by the federal government, and then eventually, they were made rich, because so many people would tap underneath the ground, and just the way the media would spin everything on them in the 20s that I'm reading about, you know, like calling these natives rich, red millionaires, and like, 'Oh, something needs to be done about how rich these Indians are.' It's just crazy, the manipulation of the press, even 100 years ago, and I was in this chapter, they're talking about the roaring 20s. And we're one year off from that, you know, like, 100 years ago, going back into the roaring 20s. You know, these things are, you know, the media spin, like you just said, you learn that, you sort of learn and your eyes are opened a little bit more. And then most people didn't know that a lot of that money was regulated. And I learned through, you know, even that Osage tribe I referenced in that book, you know, they had the rights to this money, they wouldn't allow full blood people to manage their money, where they'd have to have an Indian agent come out and basically say, you know, 'I'm going to approve all the money you pull out of your bank account,' and they're only allowed to pull out $1,000 annually when they were millionaires, you know, and so it's keeping people poor, systematically, even though they have all the riches. Regulation, and a lot of like, policing, you know, that still happens. 

Miranda Metcalf  Listening to you talk about all the history that you're doing in the archive and the research, what's your relationship to the fact that, you know, doing this history means dealing with a lot of harsh realities and a lot of histories that have been smothered? 

Keith Secola  You know, it's heavy, for sure. And there's times where I think I struggle in the studio dealing with certain things. I mean, it's real, to the point where it affects us all differently, you know. Some of the imagery I use with the archives of the people, I don't really mention it too much, but there's a few, in some of the pieces I have in the show now, where I lost those people this year. Some of those uncles and aunties. And that's something that I can only really think about, you know, and it gets kind of more something I carry. And I don't know, I just think there's something that reminds me of how important it is and that this sort of sacrifice, both mentally and physically, to kind of get things done is what it might take, too. But I definitely try to take care of myself too, in that sense, where I have a good family that supports me and knows what I'm trying to do, and I remind myself that constantly. I have a good support system as far as, you know, my tribe and things. So that helps. But yeah, there's moments where it's hard to understand why I'm printing this or something, you know.

Miranda Metcalf  And I would guess, though, that the work that you're doing is good work, and it's important work, and that's got to be uplifting too, you know, that's gonna be helpful.

Keith Secola  I think that's what it is. It's kind of like, almost sounds super sappy, but it's like, yeah, it can be very sad and heavy, but it's almost like, this is like a beautiful thing, too, you know. These things that I create, that I know that, for me, a lot of our indigenous belief is in these spirits and these people that help us and stuff, so I've always kind of thought there's someone, these people can see that eventually, you know, or they'll know that what I'm doing is important to that. So I think that, you know, I just always kind of remind myself of that, and it helps.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Where can people find you if they want to know more about your work and see images of it that we've been talking about?

Keith Secola  I'm in the process of updating my website, keithsecolajr.com. On Instagram and things I'm @mino_mashkiki. Gallery representation, you know, I'm still kind of working on that, and just sort of doing more exhibitions and shows.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, you're doing just incredible work. I know that good things are coming to you, I'm sure, for it, because it's really great stuff. And thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me and being so open about everything in your work.

Keith Secola  Yeah, no, this was great. And, you know, it helps me kind of like, cuz these are my ideas and thoughts after the show and things, you know, it helps me sort of get that stuff out. And even referencing back to sort of how you deal with certain situations with art and maybe the concepts, these kind of talks and being able to kind of relay the story to a further, a larger audience, you know, I think that helps, you know, a lot and just being able to sort of speak about what you're trying to do, you know. So I appreciate you giving me the space to sort of tell my story.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, that's our show for this week. Tune in again in two weeks time when my guest, Shayla Alarie, will be answering your questions about the gallery world. So if you've ever wondered the best way to approach a gallery for representation, how galleries make money, or if it's a legal requirement for gallery directors to wear black, now is your chance to ask. To submit a question, head on over to the Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) Instagram and send me a direct message, or just be on the lookout for the polls in the story. However, if you prefer the old fashioned method, you can definitely drop me a line at miranda@helloprintfriend.com. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next time.