Art, Truth & Reconciliation

By Gerald McMaster

Chapter

Dana Claxton, Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz, 2023

Three figures—a mother and her two daughters—in elaborate, colourful regalia

Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz by Lakota filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist Dana Claxton (b.1959) presents three figures—a mother and her two daughters—in elaborate, colourful regalia. Their ribbon skirts, a resurgent garment of ceremony and everyday pride, signal continuity in Indigenous womanhood, grounding the figures in the living present of their communities. Claxton renders continuity here through the density of the adornment: each medallion, fringe, or cedar-weave reflects the work of makers and the relationships that connect generations, families, and places. Each headdress is not a singular crown but a part of a larger network of belonging.

Claxton’s decision to layer intertribal items, such as hip-hop baseball caps and Western hats perched atop beaded medallions beside pow wow and peyote fans, disrupts the rigid categories once used by ethnographic museums to define Indigenous cultures. The image insists on mobility, taste, and self-fashioning: belongings circulate through families and across territories, knowledge travels with people, and adornment is curated not frozen. As Claxton notes in her Headdress series statement, the works present people and objects as “cultural carriers,” living expressions of identity and story.

Visually, Headress – Shadae and her Girlz is as strategic as it is sumptuous. The neutral background heightens the vivid colours of cloth and glass beads; illumination renders each surface tactile, from quillwork and buckskin to sequins and nylon. This calibrated abundance counters scarcity narratives that have long shadowed Indigenous representation. At the same time, the veiled faces enact a politics of refusal: by withholding clear visibility, the sitters resist the controlling gaze of the camera and, by extension, the archive. The viewer is invited to engage through protocols of attention—attending to pattern, craftsmanship, and labour—rather than through identification or voyeurism.

With this image, Claxton extends her longstanding investigation of Indigenous representation by using the visual grammar of commodity display—the glowing light box—to stage a counter-spectacle of kinship, cultural plenitude, and survivance. The LED Firebox, a signature format in her practice, borrows the lure of advertising while rejecting its logic of consumption: rather than selling a product, the radiance amplifies the living presence of cultural belongings while the sitters remain partially anonymous.

Installed within museums and fairs, Headress – Shadae and her Girlz creates a charged relational space: an image that glows like an advertisement but functions as ceremony, where light honours relation between people, ancestors, and community. In this work, Claxton offers a luminous lesson in visual sovereignty: the right to look Indigenous, beautifully and on one’s own terms, while turning display itself into a practice of care for past and future kin.

Art, Truth & Reconciliation

Dana Claxton, Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz, 2023

Collection of A New Generation of Witness

Dana Claxton, Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz, 2023