a 1986 performance by Native American artist James Luna which challenged the way contemporary American culture and museums have presented his race as essentially extinct and vanished.
In this performance piece, Luna “installed’ himself in an exhibition case in the San Diego Museum of Man in a section on the Kumeyaay Indians, who once inhabited San Diego County. In so doing, critiqued the representation of Native culture by museums and other institutions that systematically objectify and romanticize Native peoples as either living in the past or altogether vanquished.
All around were other exhibition areas with mannequins and props showing the long-lost Kumeyaay way of life. Among them, Luna posed himself, living and breathing, dressed only in a leather cloth, with labels around him pointing out his scars from wounds suffered when drunk and fighting. Various personal items were displayed in a glass case, including contemporary ritual objects used currently on the La Jolla reservation where Luna lives, recordings by the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, shoes, political buttons, college diplomas, divorce papers and other cultural artifacts. The mixture of elements revealed a living, developing culture.