Quannah Parker by C.M. Bell and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew by A.P. Matthew.

November has been designated—with more than a little irony—as Native American Heritage Month. Given the bloody, genocidal history of this country's engagement with the continent's indigenous populations, I suppose the least we can do now is to set aside a month to appreciate them, giving thanks for Thanksgiving, I guess.

An exhibition of work by two photographers—Kingston's own Lauren Piperno, and Rhode Island-based Annu Palakunnathu Matthew—opens this month at Ramapo College's Berrie Center in Mahwah, New Jersey. Both bodies of work raise interesting and necessary questions about our understanding of Native Americans, both "then" and now, and larger questions about the whole issue of how culture functions to define itself and its "others." This exhibition makes driving down to Mahwah well worth the trip.

Piperno's work, exhibited locally two years ago at the Coffey Gallery in Kingston, involves an unlikely pairing of images—on the left, Revolutionary War reenactors, and on the right, contemporary Native Americans gathered at various locations throughout New York, photographed at their tribal powwows. The strength of this work lies in its troubling juxtaposition: we are presented with two groups of people, both ritualistically attempting to connect with their people's pasts, but the victory of one group (the Revolutionary-era colonists, who, by the way, lifted many of the leading democratic principles in our Constitution and elsewhere from the Iroquois Confederacy and other tribal groups) ultimately spelled the downfall of the other (the Native Americans). The contrasting political significance of their respective cultural reenactments charges both images in ways that would be unthinkable without Piperno's pairing strategy.

But this is no grim, intellectual, "politically correct" exercise. The thickly layered irony opens up more than a little humor, as well. The somewhat ludicrously overstuffed figure of Captain, Colonial Regiment, who fills the frame the way he fills out his military tunic, is paired with a Pawnee man in traditional garb seen from farther away, almost receding into the landscape behind him. The humor comes largely at the white man's expense (pun intended), but it's a way to rebalance the scales a bit, to puncture the bubble of the white worldview that was the primary source of trouble for the Native Americans in the first place.

Or, to use a more politically incorrect term, the Indians. Back in 1492, at the beginning of the European invasion, Christopher Columbus got himself a bit mixed up on the voyage across the Atlantic, and when he landed on the island of Hispaniola (today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he thought he'd landed on the eastern shore of the Asian subcontinent, and so he dubbed the natives he found there "Indians."

This bit of colonialist misapprehension has snowballed over the years into greater and greater confusion, especially now that global travel and immigration have become so frequent. Photographer Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, the daughter of Indian immigrants in the UK, has now herself migrated to the US, raising all sorts of strange and confused questions for her, as she recounts on her website (www.annumatthew.com):

"As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I am 'really from.' When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. Not an American-Indian, but rather an Indian-American, South-Asian Indian, or even an Indian-Indian. It seems strange that all this confusion started because Christopher Columbus thought he had found India and called the native people of America collectively 'Indians.'"

Burning of Kingston and Seneca Dancer from the "Living History" series by Lauren Piperno. (Photo: 2005©Lauren Piperno)

Out of this odd circumstance, Matthew has brilliantly taken on the whole enchilada—in addition to the cross-cultural stupidity, she goes after the romanticized mythology imposed on the exotic, the foreign, and indigenous people, in particular—with a photographic project that also pairs images to deeply dialectical (and often comic) effect.

In An Indian from India, Matthew started by doing archival research through the photographic collections at the Library of Congress. There she dug up a number of 19th- and early-20th-century photographs that documented American Indians of various tribes, genders, and ages. The most well-known photographer of this genre was Edward S. Curtis, whose 20-volume The North American Indian catalogued its subject in over 2,000 photogravures of more than 80 tribes. Curtis saw his project as a means to preserve photographically this "vanishing race," which, as he saw it, was about to disappear in the early 20th century, just as the Western frontier had closed in the late 19th.

Curtis's romanticized view of the eminent disappearance of the "noble savage" was not entirely accurate, of course. In case you hadn't noticed, there are still Native Americans surviving and keeping their culture alive today. (See Lauren Piperno's work for documentary evidence.) Starting with these dubious ethnographic images, Annu Matthew turns the whole distorted, Eurocentric worldview on its head by recreating the subjects, substituting her own image for the original sitter's. By the ingenious use of digital editing technology, her new self-portraits reproduce the same background, the same furniture, and often the same props that appeared in the original photograph, critically turning the conversation into one between two varieties of "other" in the process—her own Indian face stands in for, and on a certain level identifies, with the Native American, and the two images together challenge the univocal cultural calculus that would simply classify them both as "other."

Oh, and like many of Piperno's pairs, they're funny, too. In one set, a fearsome brave, seen in majestic three-quarter view, prominently displays an eagle feather dangling from his head. The pose of this Feather Indian, as the photographer has labeled him, is copied in Matthew's self-portrait version, but with one key difference—instead of the feather, a large Hindu marking decorates her head—and has been given the quite logical (and unexpectedly hilarious) title of Dot Indian.

The humor and easy, self-deprecating wit with which Matthew skewers the racial stereotypes and white cultural assumptions that have constructed this unlikely minefield of cultural meaning is the key to her project. There's something exceedingly disarming about laughter; it's got a potential for revolutionary energy and change that not nearly enough of the boring, liberal, politically correct set have ever dared to turn loose. When we turn our backs on the value of a good belly laugh at the status quo, we're ignoring one of our most valuable agents for change. It's to Piperno and Matthew's credit that we can look at their photographs to laugh—and learn—at the same time.