When the Department of Homeland Security was created in late 2001, Native Americans nationwide seized upon the concept as a means to communicate our own struggle with colonization in the Americas. Posters and t-shirts were distributed with the intent of creating dialogues along the lines of, "Whose homeland?" and "Who defines what Terrorism is?" My response to the current climate of fear in the United States is a work called Selections From The American Indian Activist Handbook. This project recontextualizes U.S. Military training manuals such as the U.S. Army Ranger Handbook, and other U.S. government publications, and transforms it to a training manual for Native American political activists (acting under the guise of Homeland Security.) The publication and doctrinal terms are changed so that the techniques imply that the "good guys" are American Indians, and the "enemy" or "terrorist invader" is the United States government.

The term fansub refers to Japanese animation translated by fans of the genre, rather than a professional company. Fansubs are of widely varying quality, and recently have become more popular due to distribution through the internet. Though quasi-legal, because these anime shows have not yet been licensed for distribution outside of Japan, they are available free and created and uploaded by fan groups who do it as a hobby. After becoming aware of the tradition of fansubs, and seeing subtitled anime in languages from English to Spanish to Arabic -all done by anime fans- I decided what was missing were fansubs created for an American Indian audience. I chose Native languages with their own letter systems, rather than just repurposing the Latin alphabet into phonetic Indian words. Being a visual artist, I'm interested in how these alphabets look, and how they interact with the spoken Japanese of the videos.

As an American Indian I'm naturally interested in how others perceive my own culture and history. By chance I was the American Museum of Natural History looking at the various exhibits when I noticed the use of the exact same model for all the diverse exampes of Indian peoples.This oversight (or laziness on the part of the curators) speaks volumes of the general knowledge the American public has of other cultures in general. I wonder how things might be different if Indians were allowed to represent ourselves in such situations.