Description
With Our Military History, Near, Close, and Now, Jeremy Dennis provocatively revives the Indian Captivity narrative — a settler-colonial fantasy used to justify violence and expansion — but twists it with unsettling humor. A Native figure carries a smiling woman across a quiet landscape, her expression bizarrely gleeful in contrast to the trope's usual terror. In the background, across the Hudson River, looms the unmistakable silhouette of West Point, the U.S. Military Academy — a site saturated with the legacy of conquest, discipline, and American martial pride.
The image collapses temporal and geographic distances, asserting that the violence and mythology of America’s military history are not relics of the past but fixtures of the present — “near, close, and now.” By reanimating the captivity narrative with a surreal, almost cartoonish tone, Dennis exposes the absurdity of settler paranoia and the romanticization of American militarism. The woman's strange delight becomes a parody of how deeply this fantasy is internalized, while the Native figure remains unreadable — neither villain nor savior. In this collision of past and present, Dennis invites us to reconsider what is truly being captured: bodies, land, or the American imagination itself.
