At the historic house of Hudson River School–founder Thomas Cole, contemporary works by Indigenous artists present alternative
worldviews of landscape and place.
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, installation view. Courtesy Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo: Peter Aaron. Pictured, left: Thomas Cole, Solitary Lake in New Hampshire, 1830. Oil on canvas. Right: Teresa Baker, Forest, 2019. Willow, yarn, spray paint, and buffalo sinew on AstroTurf, 69 × 52 inches. Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck.
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, curated by Scott Manning Stevens, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill, New York, through October 27, 2024
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Stand on Thomas Cole’s porch in Catskill, New York, and you can still see the stirring views Cole painted. He was the founder of the Hudson River School, no school at all but men perpetuating a myth of America: grand vistas, cliff edges, waterfalls, and mountain majesties, etc., etc. In the mid-nineteenth century, they created the visual language for a new country and Manifest Destiny, persisting in so many car ads and van-life Instagrams that promise to deliver us to remote splendor.
Alan Michelson: Prophetstown, installation view. Courtesy Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo: Adam T. Deen. Pictured: The Ratio of Art to Nature, 2008.
Cole’s house, where he was first a boarder, then married the proprietor’s niece and came to live, is a museum that sits between reenactment and revisionism. Now, a bulging black mirror hangs by the front door. Elaborately framed, it could be a security device meant to fit in with the historic-house-site vibe, but is actually an installation by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson, The Ratio of Art to Nature (2008), part of his solo exhibition, responding to Cole’s legacy, installed throughout Cole’s home. It is on view concurrently with Native Prospects, a group show curated by Mohawk academic Scott Manning Stevens, which presents Indigenous approaches to the landscape tradition, all hanging in Cole’s studio.
Michelson’s mirror is a Claude glass, once used by artists to study the views they sought to capture. Painting nature meant you had to turn your back on it. Inside, another piece of his, Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) (2018), feels even truer to the concept of a landscape, a term that comes from the Dutch and means to shape the land but also hold power over it—surveying and subjugation, perspective and ideas of progress, as well as the violence that often accompanied the worldview of nineteenth-century landscape paintings.
Alan Michelson: Prophetstown, installation view. Courtesy Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo: Adam T. Deen. Pictured: Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), 2018.
In the sitting room, a marble bust of George Washington, the one that makes him look like an American Caesar, stands in the corner. It would be easy to assume the sculpture is some Victorian curio. Then video flashes across Washington’s placid face. Flames lick, maps scroll. The image freezes on a roadside historic marker, then another and another across upstate New York. Words distort on Washington’s forehead: “Seneca Nation Destroyed, Sept. 17, 1779.” And, “Destroyed During Sullivan Campaign Sept. 21, 1779.” “Village Dest–” curves over the face, again 1779. Voices repeat a word, “Hanödaga:yas.” The intonations hold the downbeat, the breath—grief.
Hanödaga:yas means “Town Destroyer.” That is what the Mohawk people call the “father of our country,” a man who enslaved more than three hundred people. He also instigated Sullivan’s Campaign, attacking five of the six Haudenosaunee nations: the Mohawk, Seneca, Tuscarora, Onondaga, and Cayuga. He ordered “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” The directions go on and on, the meaning: genocide. Washington’s bust sits on a surveyor’s tripod because this was also about stealing land, and Washington himself was a surveyor, who owned swaths of land from the Appalachians to Ohio and New York.
Kay WalkingStick, Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow), 2020. Oil on panel, 24 1/8 × 48 × 7/8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery.
In Cole’s studio, a wall is given to Kay WalkingStick’s Thom, Where are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow) (2020), her clapback to his painting The Oxbow in the Met’s American Wing. Both have the same river curve and view from Mt. Holyoke, his marked by plumes of smoke drifting from right to left, east to west: Progress. Across the room is his 1826 Kaaterskill Falls, the first time I’ve seen it IRL. The composition is part of American art survey courses; Google it, and you too can get a copy that looks like an oil painting for $79. I never noticed the teensy person on a ledge. Such tiny people offer cues on how to read a landscape. In the original Oxbow, the person is Cole himself, a white guy with his bracing experience of nature as storm clouds recede. (This singular white guy appears throughout landscape painting, as well as in Emerson and Thoreau, and remains a trope in nature writing today.) WalkingStick leaves Cole out and asks instead where the original people are, gesturing to their enduring presence by layering their ancestral pattern over the view.
Thomas Cole, Kaaterskill Falls, 1826. Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 × 35 1/4 inches. Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
WalkingStick uses patterns tied to her paintings’ locations to show how place holds meaning and history and people. This worldview also shapes Truman Lowe’s Waterfall VIII (2011), which hangs next to Cole’s falls. Lowe, a Ho-Chunk sculptor and educator who died in 2019, also served as a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His rapids recall the ones he saw growing up in Wisconsin. Made of thin pine strips that lick and leap from the wall, they arc like spray at my feet and feel like the essence of waterfall-ness, far more than Cole’s.
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, installation view. Courtesy Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo: Peter Aaron. Pictured, upper right, against back wall: Truman Lowe, Waterfall VIII, 2011.
In the catalog, Mandan/Hidatsa painter Teresa Baker says, “Land holds and signifies: cultures, memories, people . . . land is a part of everything.” Zoom in on her Forest (2019), and the trees are made of slim twigs at odd angles interspersed with a darting line of red yarn, like sunlight. This forest holds the sense-feeling of the hemlock forest I live near that is impossible to capture on my phone, not the crown of trees, nor the light filtering through them. Baker’s lines are abstractions but also mimetic; the painting is on AstroTurf, and the twigs a metonym for the trees.
Richard David Hamell, Two Row Wampum / Guswenta Belt, 2022. Deer leather, artificial sinew, and polymer beads, 6 1/2 × 52 inches. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Cole National Historic Site.
Stevens includes traditional works in the show, like Richard David Hamell’s 2022 version of the Two Row Wampum / Guswenta Belt—woven of beads in two parallel white and purple lines. White for the Hudson; purple representing boats’ wakes. Neither interferes with the other. It is a 1614 treaty with the Dutch at Albany, just after the colonizers arrived. The wampum belt celebrated its four-hundredth anniversary a decade ago and still holds, is still true, still being reactivated and recreated, like in Michelson’s abstracted lightbox interpretation, Third Bank of the River (Panorama) (2024), on view nearby. Stevens shows how these traditional representations are alive and present, not past, not history, but reinvigorated over and over.
Alan Michelson, Third Bank of the River (Panorama), 2024. Mounted lightbox, 12 × 87 inches. Courtesy the artist.
He writes, too, in the catalog about the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, given not on one day in November but every day and at important occasions to address all beings, the thunder, the sky, the plants and their medicines, the birds. . . . Each speaker says it differently. In his version, Mohawk elder Tom Porter pauses at the end of each stanza and says, “Now our minds are one.” It is this idea that I crave in the hemlock forest. A nation that deployed the landscape tradition has no word for this sense-feeling that holds me in these woods, not the being with other-species, not the connection I feel with the kingfisher that alights as I write, or the bear twenty feet away as I crouch in the moss looking for chanterelles, not the moss itself or the lichen or horsetails. There is no language in English for it, no word. All I have: landscape.
It is the 199th anniversary of Cole’s first trip up the Hudson, and this work matters in this place because place holds meaning, and those meanings spiral through time. I only wish Native Prospects could be larger, could be someplace like the Met, which only in 2017 started to include Indigenous American work in the American Wing. There isn’t enough space at the Cole site, and being small risks essentializing Indigenous takes on the landscape, a bit like Cole and his compatriots making Indigenous people nothing but nature. In our climate-crisis era, many have elided Indigeneity with a relationship to nature and place, as if these worldviews hold the answers. It is a seductive mistake when we—me included—are eager for ways forward. On the porch in the mirror, I see blue sky and billowing clouds—and myself. I see a white person of European ancestry longing to belong to a place.
Jennifer Kabat’s books The Eighth Moon (2024) and Nightshining (2025) are published by Milkweed Editions. Her writing has been in Best American Essays, Granta, BOMB, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s. She lives in rural upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.