Journal Title: Wide Screen
Vol. 9, No.1, July 2022
ISSN: 1757-3920
URL: http://widescreenjournal.org

Abstract: There is a long-overlooked history of Indigenous resistance through mediamaking in Los Angeles. Diné multimedia documentarian Pamela J. Peters is one such artist whose works foreground stories and portraits of urban Natives living in LA. In this essay, I examine her two major photography/film projects Legacy of Exiled NDNZ (2014/2016) and Real NDNz Re-Take Hollywood (2016) with a spatiohistorical approach to argue that Peters remaps key locations for Indigenous history in LA, such as Union Station and Indian Alley. I discuss the mediated relations between her works and earlier films, especially Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), and the Hollywood film industry in different time period. This essay also emphasizes Peters’ triangulating role as a media maker-curator-activist in destabilizing the temporal-spatial logic embedded in quotidian violence against Native Americans in the settler colonial LA. Via shedding lights on Peters’ practices, this essay calls for more scholarly and public engagement with contemporary Native artists and their active reworkings of Indigenous histories, criticisms of settler time-space, and maintenance of Native hubs.