Free Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit Page A

objects from the existing vocabulary of public space—billboards, bus signs, enameled metal signs like those used for traffic—which gives them a neutral, official aesthetic. In the late 1980s, he completed
Native Hosts
for a public art project at City Hall Park in New York. This work consisted of twelve signs made by the city’s Traffic Department, each of which said, “New York, today your host is ____” and named one of the tribes that had lived or still lives in the region. A few years later, in Seattle, he paid tribute to the city’s original inhabitants and the homeless Indians on the streets today with an enameled metal sign in Pioneer Square, next to and addressing the existing statue of Chief Seattle. One side of
Day Night
, decorated with crosses and dollar signs, said, “Chief Seattle the streets are our home”; the other, decorated with leafy splotches, said, “Far away brothers and sisters we still remember you.” Both these projects spoke to the presence, then and now, of displaced Native people in urban spaces. So did a third projectin San Jose, California, which used bus posters to critique the effects of the mission system—and, inevitably, offended the Catholic Church. “Who owns history?” another project asked point-blank, at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, monument already commemorating “Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States.”
    Among Heap of Birds’s more controversial projects were billboards commenting on the centennial of the 1889 Oklahoma land rush from which the “Sooner State” took its name; one had the text “Sooners run over Indian Nations, Apartheid?” with the word “Sooners” written backwards. In 1992, Heap of Birds recalled,
    All of the state of Oklahoma is Indian Territory. They changed the treaties and took the land away and gave it to the settlers and that’s why they had the land run. So every April they have an incredible reenactment which goes throughout all the school system. All the grade school kids come to school and they have a little red wagon and they dress up like pioneers and they bring their sack lunch and they run across the school yard and put a stake in the ground and take away Indian land. . . . So I made a series of billboards that just try and turn the Sooners away and run them [in] the other direction . . . and just try to remark about this kind of practice of racism really. So we had the billboards up and then I made some t-shirts and then people started wearing them and then the day was coming when the city was going to have its big celebration, and then everyone said well let’s have a protest march, so we made more t-shirts and then people marched from the Native American Center in Oklahoma City to the State Capitol and had a forum on the steps of the Capitol and followed the path of the billboards, so it was a very, very positive kind of way to bring people together and focus people on this other part of the history.
    You could call Heap of Birds’s works counter-monuments: they speak to excluded people of erased history; they revise, but they don’t reconcile or conciliate.
    The gestures of conciliation and recognition are due elsewhere. Those fighting to deny recognition of the presence of Native Americans then and now and the atrocities suffered are cultural Custers, caught up in a doomed assault on truth, justice, and even awakening government bureaucrats. But the conflicts they stirred up are not yet over.
     
The Garden of Merging Paths
[1995]
    You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    Screen text from the early computer game Adventure
    Place your right (or left) hand on the right (or left)
wall of green, and doggedly keep it there, in and out of
dead ends, and you will finally get to the middle.
    Julian Barnes, on hedge mazes
    In 1989, I went to a demonstration at United Technologies in San Jose, a company making fuel components for Trident II missiles, which carried nuclear warheads. The corporate