Analysis Of Flathead Vest By Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

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Born in 1940 as a member of the Flathead Nation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith started her life on the Confederated Salish and Kootneai Reservation in Montana, with lineage from French, Shoshone, and Cree ancestors. Smith and her sister grew up primarily with their father in California and in several reservations in Washington State, after their mother abandoned them when Smith was two years of age. Smith was put to work at an early age to help out her family who struggled financially. Smith’s upbringing was not an easy one, as she was moved around between foster homes and public schools where she was ridiculed for being an American Indian. Though school and her childhood were both uncomfortable and complicated for Smith, she discovered the artistic …show more content…

By incorporating flowers and leaves such as roses and sunflowers, she references some of the beadwork that can be seen on Flathead clothing and in turn recognizes her grandmother Nellie Quick-to-See’s exceptional beadwork. Smith also incorporates an image of a turkey from a coloring book which she collages under the layers of text in order to comment on the stereotyped stories and tales of the Indians and Americans on what is now called Thanksgiving. Through the use of many other images such as an Indian man wearing an elaborate headdress, an attractive women, several newspaper clippings reading “Interior Secretary Signature Validates Gambling Compacts”, and imagery of advertisements involving Indians on horseback, Smith creates a strain between the different perceptions that people have on who Native American people …show more content…

In some of her earlier works, more notably Winds of Change (1992), Smith relies on symbols, reference to nature, patterns and colors, rather than text and recognizable imagery to tell her story. By using traditional native imagery in combination with contemporary native imagery, Smith refers to the fact that modern life does indeed exist on the reservation and it is not constrained to the past. In an interview with Smith she explains QUOTE: “My cultural heritage gives me in-depth and political content, a narrative in my work, a worldview as well as design elements that are based on nature,” Quick-to-See Smith said. “It also helps me to see the flip side of things, a particularly Native way of applying humor, which is part of

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