As we reimagine the MFA’s 18th-century Art of the Americas galleries to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, I and many other colleagues have been thinking back to previous anniversaries. The Museum first opened its doors to the public on July 4, 1876, the US Centennial, so such commemorations are part of the MFA’s history. Questions like Who is American? and How do individuals of many backgrounds fit into our collective American story? remain essential as we continue to consider how art shapes national narratives.

Artist Fritz Scholder’s 1976 painting Bicentennial Indian considers these questions and others. In Scholder’s massive canvas, a Native American man painted in pink and rich browns sits before a sandy yellow background and looks forward at the viewer. His ponytails are wrapped in fabric and he wears a blue button-down shirt with an upside-down American flag draped over his shoulders. Originally a military signal of distress, the upside-down flag became a symbol of the American Indian Movement, a group founded in 1968 to highlight civil rights issues and lack of opportunity for Native Americans. Scholder was not affiliated with the American Indian Movement, but he would have been aware of the group and how it used the US flag. The portrait’s large format and abstracted features, and the relative anonymity of the sitter, represented innovations in midcentury painting by artists in portraying Native American subjects.

Scholder, an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, was a remarkable artist; a masterful painter, he also produced hundreds of prints and sculptures. He created nearly 300 portraits of Native Americans starting in 1967, when he was a teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts and witnessed his students painting Native Americans with bold modernist techniques.¹ He had a complicated relationship with his own background, often stating, “I am a non-Indian Indian.”² By his own description, he was one quarter Luiseño and three quarters European (German, French, and English). As an enrolled member of his federally recognized tribe, he is Native American by the US government’s definition. His paintings of Native Americans are not meant to represent his community; many are based on historical photographs by non-Native photographers.

Controversial in his time, Scholder was not interested in painting idealized depictions of Native Americans. Instead he painted them expressively, using bright, often unnatural colors, and giving them objects like ice cream and beer cans. His legacy is complicated—some Native American artists criticized him for resisting the “Native American” label while making a career of depicting Native Americans. Although his father worked for Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, Scholder attended public school and lived mostly in white communities, experiences that were generally “non-Indian.” As a person of majority European heritage, Scholder had what we would today call passing privilege—the ability to be seen as white, which many Native Americans did and do not have. But looking at the past with our current understanding of race and ethnicity can be limiting. Instead, we might consider how Scholder’s desire to be seen as “non-Indian” reflected the real limitations society placed on Native Americans at the time, in the art world and beyond.

As I am a person with Indigenous CHamoru and white heritage, I find Scholder’s discomfort with categorization relatable. Unlike him, I grew up in a time when we think about identity, Indigeneity, and whiteness with greater nuance. Returning to the questions that started this essay and to Bicentennial Indian, which sits at its center, I leave you with another question: What’s more American than being unsure of your place in the world?