Faux Native American costumes and clothing reconsidered - in pictures

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Artist Selena Kearney was raised on the Chehalis reservation in Washington state and began photographing fake native regalia after a chance encounter with a young woman in a grocery store on Halloween. "She was wearing a skimpy faux-Native American costume," she says. "I couldn't begin to understand how that cheap outfit had anything to do with me, or my heritage." Curious about the power of these objects, she started to collect and consider them, sourcing sports paraphernalia, traditional headdresses and vintage and new costumes from eBay and Amazon. Over the course of five years, Kearney photographed them and the resulting series is now featured in a book, Every Object Has a Ritual (published by Minor Matters), and an exhibition at the Suquamish Museum in Washington state (Object/Ritual, 18 May-January 2025). "Collecting masks felt the hardest of all," she says. One featuring a woman with two braids was particularly unsettling. "A parody of me, looking back at me."