Clementine Bordeaux

This dissertation project traces the intersection of art, land, and culture to provide insight into Lakota intellectual traditions. This project analyzes everyday examples of Lakota artistic culture and creative practices such as storytelling, personal adornment, and image-making to articulate relationality in Lakota culture. The research utilizes ethnographic data to draw attention to historically dismissed art practices that are essential contributions to new sources of knowledge. The analysis draws upon Lakota concepts like kinship and ikcé (ordinary) to signal the common individual and examine information outside of the hierarchy of art and academic disciplines. The focus is on an everyday Lakota relationality, which is unapologetically Lakota-centric while providing a strategy for imaging a future understood outside the extraordinary and unsettling, decolonial acts of resistance that are often popularized in mainstream academic and art institutions.