Wendy Red Star's 'The Soil You See' Takes Rightful Place at Tippet Rise
By Chadd Scott on
Wendy Red Star’s The Soil You See (2023) belongs here. On the traditional homeland of the Apsáalooke (Crow).
Red Star (b. 1981) grew up on the tribe’s reservation roughly 50 miles east of here. This was all Apsáalooke (Crow) before the white man came. Hundreds of square miles in every direction. Now it’s called Montana.
This particular 12,500 acres of Montana near tiny Fishtail, a 45-minute drive northwest from Red Lodge on State Route 78, hosts Tippet Rise, an outdoor sculpture park and summer classical music concert venue.
The mighty Beartooth Mountains with the highest peaks in region backdrop The Soil You See. Just beyond them to the southwest is Yellowstone National Park. On a clear day to the east, towards the reservation, the Pryor Mountains are visible. They are a deeply sacred place to the Apsáalooke.
As are the Crazy Mountains, about 100 miles as the crow flies north and west of Tippet Rise. That’s where Plenty Coups, who would become the tribe’s last traditional chief, received his vision of the landscape denuded of buffalo and trees, covered instead by cattle and white people.
This is the soil you see when admiring Red Star’s artwork.
Wendy Red Star, 'The Soil You See,' (2023) at Tippet Rise with the Beartooth Mountains barely visible in the background. Photo Credit: Chadd Scott
“The soil you see is not ordinary soil,” the red, fingerprint-shaped sculpture reads. “It is the dust of the blood, the flesh, and the bones of our ancestors. We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it, and we fought and bled and died helping the whites.”
With his tribe’s population reduced by 80% due to introduced smallpox, Plenty Coup’s vision helped convince the Apsáalooke to cooperate with the white man, the U.S. government.
For doing so, they were granted a 38-million-acre reservation. Today, after being progressively swindled, stolen, and chiseled away, it’s just over two million.
“You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth, as the upper portion is Crow,” the sculpture’s text continues. “The land as it is, is my blood and my dead; it is consecrated, and I do not want to give up any portion of it.”
The words are taken from Apsáalooke military scout Curly at a congressional meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1912 to discuss opening the reservation to settlement by non-Indians. All of Red Star’s work is deeply researched. Art combined with history. Much of her artwork has a tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic humor to it. Not The Soil You See. This is a 98-mile-per-hour fastball up and in.
The fingerprint is Red Star’s. When the federal government sought Apsáalooke “approval” for taking the land, “agreement” was granted by tribal representatives signing either an “X” mark or leaving their fingerprint.
The names of 50 Apsáalooke nation chiefs and tribal representatives who signed land treaties with the U.S. government between 1825 and 1880 fill the fingerprint’s ridges.
“BIRD IN THE NECK – HIS X MARK”
“THE ONE THAT JUMPS OVER EVERY PERSON – HIS X MARK”
“THE STANDING LANCE – HIS X MARK”
“WOLF’S PAUNCH – HIS X MARK”
Wendy Red Star, 'The Soil You See,' (2023), detail, at Tippet Rise.
Photo Credit: Chadd Scott
About 200-yards from The Soil You See in the direction of the Crazy Mountains sits Ai Weiwei’s (b. 1957) Iron Tree. About that same distance towards Tippet Rise’s main visitor buildings is Alexander Calder’s (1898–1976) Two Discs. Weiwei is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in the world. Calder is one of the most celebrated modern artists ever.
Red Star is no stranger to great acclaim. The most prestigious museums in the country own and exhibit her work. Still, citing The Soil You See with Iron Tree and Two Discs, and Red Star with Weiwei and Calder, makes a powerful statement about the mainstream stature of contemporary Native American art. This level of representation wasn’t the case even five years ago.
The Soil You See belongs here; Tippet Rise’s other sculptures – no matter how monumental and magnificent – feel like visitors. Invited guests, not locals. The Soil You See is from here; the other sculptures have been placed here. Beautifully placed, but placed none the less.
Outsiders.
Wendy Red Star, 'The Soil You See,' (2023) looking west at Tippet Rise.
Photo Credit: Chadd Scott
That’s a truth many in Montana where cattle and mining interests – lasting legacies of extractive, abusive colonialism – steer the state’s right-wing politics. A tourist brochure in the Billings airport highlighting attractions in the region lists the Little Bighorn Battlefield and National Monument 60 miles away.
The description states, “the Sioux and Cheyenne battled Custer and the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry in one of the last efforts to preserve the native way of life.”
I don’t recall ever reading a more oblivious, uninformed, white nationalist, colonial, anti-Indigenous statement on a piece of tourism promotion in my life. As an arts and travel writer, I’m on the road about twice a month and have been for years and have read thousands of official tourism department periodicals.
No Billings tourism, Little Bighorn was not “one of the last efforts to preserve the native way of life.” And before blowing that slander up, how about capitalizing the “N” in “Native,” when referring to a specific group of people. That’s a proper noun.
Native people across North America – Indigenous people around the world – “effort” every single day to preserve their way of life. They always have. They always will. This doesn’t always take on the form of armed conflict. Leave it to white people – colonizers – to believe the only way to resist is with weapons.
The Apsáalooke, the other tribal nations in Montana, and those around the continent and world, “effort” to preserve their way of life by practicing their religions, by speaking their languages, by making art, like Red Star, by writing books, by producing films, by organizing, through activism, through education, and a million other methods. Simply waking up in the morning is an “effort to preserve the Native way of life” in America, an effort of resistance in the face of America’s genocide against Indigenous people.
In 2024, it’s difficult imagining such a racist, ignorant statement could appear on an official piece of tourism marketing, even in Montana. It wasn’t the only one I saw at the Billings airport.
A wall display sharing the history of the Yellowstone River region read, “For thousands of years, early inhabitants of these lands seasonally migrated between surrounding mountain ranges and the lush river valley.”
There’s a name for “early inhabitants.” It’s Indigenous. Or Native. This text is another example of an attempted erasure.
An erasure that’s been ongoing for 200 years. Still is. An erasure that killed tens of thousands of Indigenous people in what is now called Montana alone. Millions across the continent. An erasure that took hundreds of millions of acres of land. That outlawed spiritual practices, that crushed lifeways and languages. That was ultimately not successful.
Indigenous people are still here. Everywhere. Inside Montana and out.
That is the soil you see whether or not you ever make it to Tippet Rise.
