b'Wendy Red StarRedeeming ImagesNicole Smythe-JohnsonWhen Wendy Red Star moved off the Apsalooke Reservation in Montana where she grew up to attend college at Montana State University in Bozeman, she began to encounter images of the Apsalooke (Crow is a mistranslation of this term, which the Crow use to refer to themselves) in advertising and media. In particular, a portrait documenting an important nineteenth-century Apsalooke delegation to Washington, DC, reproduced on Honest Tea labels, caught her eye. Initially, Red Star found the images comforting reminders of home. But she soon began to wonder how the non-indigenous people around her received them. Did the corporations mobilizing these images, or their audiences, understand the images significance? Or was it just another representation of a static, exotic, homogenous Native American culture?Much of Red Stars work emerges from those questions. She works primarily in photography and other image-based media, interrogating the ways in which North American indige-nous peoples have been and continue to be imaged by others. Her practice offers a pointed critique of a long history of misrepresentation. In earlier works like Four Seasons (2006), Red Star highlights the constructed nature of representations of Native American culture through self-portraits that reproduce stereotypical scenes featuring overtly false backdrops and props, including fake foliage and inflatable deer. Within her practice, Red Star also offers a correc-tive to images of this kind. She creates new images and icons that attempt to communicate the specificity of Apsalooke culture and begin to index their lost histories, as well as what those losses mean for contemporary (Apsalooke or not) American life.Red Stars Medicine Crow and the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014) is an intervention into a series of photographs of a delegation of Apsalooke chiefs that traveled from Montana to Washington, DC, in 1880 to negotiate with the United States government for land rights. At the time, the U.S. government was preparing to build a railroad through Apsalooke hunting territory, and hoped to relocate the Apsalooke to North Dakota. But the negotia-tion was an important success for the tribe, ensuring that despite massive territorial losses to 62'