Ruth

Ruth is an installation of Ruth Buffalo, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation and North Dakota elected Representative, dancing a pow-wow alone in a canyon in California. I worked with Ruth to represent an aspect of her identity, focusing on her cultural background, sense of belonging, and heritage. Her life stories made me realize that community is important to her, but her work often takes her far from the community and family she is working to support. Learning about these facts, I asked her to perform the pow-wow dance, a social meeting held by many indigenous communities, alone in a canyon below the USD campus, a place inflected both by the native presence and missionary past in Southern California. The dance serves as a metaphorical bridge to connect the land of Southern California to the land of North Dakota, fostering a sense of belonging and a sense of community for Ruth while she is away from home. In the video, Ruth wears everyday clothing rather than traditional Native American clothing as a way to deconstruct the stereotype of Native Americans. The installation consists of documentation of Ruth’s dancing performance and the collected canyon dirt scattered over the floor. The audience is invited to stepping onto the dirt to leave footprints on the ground: a similar action that Ruth performs.