Countering the Fetishization of Indigenous Art How contemporary Native artists are evading recognition and visibility for a more 'speculative indigenous futurism' In 1991, James Luna invited audiences at the Whitney Museum of American Art to stand on a small riser with him – or alongside one of three life-size, cardboard cut-outs of him shirtless in a beaded necklace or ornate headdress – to ‘take a picture with a real Indian’. It was a precipitous moment for both the institution and the wider art world: two years later, the museum would host the decisive ‘identity politics’ Whitney Biennial (curated by Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt, Lisa Phillips and Elizabeth Sussman) that conventional wisdom suggests began a slow tectonic shift toward greater inclusiveness and ‘globalization’. In 1992, to mark the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña toured a performance as ‘Amerindians from Guatinau’ in which the audience could taunt them through the bars of a cage, feed them bananas or purchase pictures of Gómez-Peña’s genitals.