ABSTRACT
Wittily relying on camp aesthetics, Monkman parodies the different strategies and techniques used by dominant white culture in order to portray Native cultures by creating a singular, fictive "imaginary Indian" who is revered in popular culture. Through the queer strategies of camp, Monkman reanimates the ghosts of North America's colonial past, thereby intervening in the dominant hegemonic representative tradition in literary as well as visual culture. In paintings like Artistand Model, Charged Particles in Motion and East vs. West, Monkman creates a new order where reality and fantasy merge in campy fashion. Establishing the Native American tradition as part of a "primitive past", the emerging United States and Canada based their "concept of sexuality on top of disappeared Native American indigeneity". Stereotypical images of Native Americans and First Nations people have become so commonplace and prevalent in the European imagination that they become what Louis Owens has called "the damningly hyperreal Indian".
