Given the problematic depictions of Native Americans and the pervasive cultural biases that exist, we sought to understand how contemporary educational practices in museums might encourage viewers to consider the context of their preconceptions rather than passively absorb conventional representations. In this two-part study, we tested whether and how viewers (mis)perceptions and interpretations of Native peoples might be influenced by encouraging empathy-specifically by taking the perspective of a Native individual depicted in a photograph they are visually analyzing. We randomly assigned participants in a lab setting (N = 120) and in a museum setting (N = 75) to one of three conditions (perspectivetaking, stereotype-suppression, or control), and examined eye movements, self-reports, and verbal and written responses while participants viewed portrait photographs of American Indians. Notably, perspective-taking led viewers to interpret American Indians in a more emotional, empathetic, and human-centered manner than in control and suppression conditions. This was reflected in eye movements such that control and suppression participants attended to decorative features (e.g. jewelry) more than to the eyes of the depicted individual, whereas perspective-takers' attention was more balanced. Similarly, perspective-takers used more empathetic and emotion-related language, whereas participants in control and suppression groups used more "objective" visually-descriptive language. Crucially, regardless of condition, cultural biases were stubbornly resistant to change and, in some cases, appeared even more frequently for participants adopting others' perspectives. We argue that despite the positive outcomes associated with perspective-taking, the continued presence of cultural biases across conditions demonstrates that cultural competency-based interventions must be more complex and culturally-specific.
Literary theory may provide the discourse to compare and construe the apparent evolution of literature, but the traces, tricky turns and visionary reach of Native narratives forever haunt interpreters and translators.-Gerald Vizenor, "American Indian Art and Literature Today"F or generations (and as some might argue, since contact), American Indian artists have grappled with the varied responses of a consumerist Western audience unversed in the interior logic of indigenous aesthetic impulses. 1 The public exchange of Native arts as goods for cash, trade, or opportunity has resulted in a largely object-based academic inquiry in the service of ethnography, voyeurism, and consumer class aspirations. The marked history of these objects and their circulation has to date effectively stood in for serious arts scholarship, obscuring and at times obstructing a more accurate reading of aesthetic expressions informed by the rich legacies of oral history, traditional exchange processes, religious uses, and even metaphysical interventions with the divine that are enacted in the private and often-interior settings of indigenous lifeways. Like Native literary theory, Native arts scholarship is "haunted" by the visionary complexity of indigenous arts practices. The inherent intellectualism of indigenous visual arts, design, performance, and media exceeds the means by which we have to describe them, even in our own contexts of Native arts teaching, learning, and enacting in national and global settings.
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