Description
In this image, a figure modeled after a traditional founding father—drawing on the visual language of official portraiture and referencing Cindy Sherman’s strategy of inhabiting historical archetypes—sits formally for a portrait of authority while his body is pierced by numerous arrows. The work engages directly with the mythology surrounding George Washington, particularly legends that describe his miraculous survival during the Battle of the Monongahela during the French and Indian War, where bullets reportedly passed through his uniform without striking his body. Later expanded into the so-called “Indian Prophecy,” these stories cast Washington as divinely protected and destined to lead a new nation, reinforcing a narrative of inevitability and moral righteousness at the foundation of the United States.
Here, that mythology is deliberately inverted. Where legend insists that no shot could touch him, the image imagines the moment when the projectiles finally connect. The arrows function as a metaphor for how Indigenous peoples understand this revered figure—not as untouchable or ordained, but as inseparable from a violent process of land seizure, broken treaties, and the systematic erosion of Native sovereignty. The wounds make visible what founding narratives work to suppress: that national origin stories are sustained through selective remembrance and the normalization of Indigenous dispossession.
By juxtaposing the composed calm of authoritative portraiture with embodied harm, the work transforms abstract notions of providence, destiny, and guilt into physical consequence. The image collapses the distance between myth and accountability, reframing American independence through Indigenous historical memory and insisting on the visibility of histories that have long been rendered absent within narratives of national greatness.
