Edgar Heap of Birds
American Indian Community House Gallery/Museum
Male identity in Western culture has tended to be defined in terms of relations of power that circulate around gender and cultural difference––an identity in support of which an abundance of anthropological and zoological data has been assembled to “prove” that the inferiority of women and others is the “natural” order of things. Edgar Heap of Bird's work has always recognized this situation as a problem of rhetoric, of a measure of the untranslatability between disparate entities, but one that nevertheless has had serious effects upon the psychic and social well-being of his people in Oklahoma