Môniyâw
Môniyâw is believed to have originated from the Cree term, moy nêhiýaw (moy niya) meaning not us/not cree/not me.
There were some uncanny, serendipitous circumstances surrounding this piece both while I was working on it and after….things that a younger version of myself would call coincidence, a word I have since mostly parted ways with. Sometimes I feel a longing for something we have all forgotten many many years ago; the ability to recognize these things we’ve called coincidences for what they really are.
I hadn’t noticed the handwritten text at the bottom of the portrait of the gentleman until I was halfway done cutting him out. I wasn’t intending on creating a new photo collage before our first show in Omaha next weekend but earlier this month I felt suddenly inspired which I try to indulge whenever possible, since such a thing can be fleeting and unpredictable.
And when I saw Omaha scrawled at the bottom of his portrait—twice—I smiled.
Naturally I retained that handwriting in the final piece. More about my sources below.
(Like all of our photo collage work, this is printed on beautiful luster metallic paper and we currently have a few available in our shop.)
The back of an Omaha Indian by Frank A. Rinehart
Môniyâw is a digital photo-based collage created utilizing these historical sources:
(Môniyâw is believed to have originated from the Cree term, moy nêhiýaw (moy niya) meaning not us/not cree/not me.)
The back of an Omaha Indian by Frank A. Rinehart. Platinum Photograph. 1899
Rinehart, a German American who began his photographic career in Denver, CO in the 1870s before moving west to Nebraska in 1885, was commissioned to photograph the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, NE and the Native Americans who attended. Together with his assistant Adolph Muhr, they produced what is now considered “one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders at the turn of the century”.
Monument Valley, a Navajo Nation tribal park whose red-sandstone formations on the Colorado Plateau lie mostly in Arizona but also into Utah by Carol M. Highsmith (who has photographed in all 50 states and has donated her life’s work of over 100,000 images, royalty-free to the Library of Congress). Photograph. Late 20th or early 21st century
