The Legacy of Mary Sully

Early Indigenous Feminism
and the “American Indian Abstract”

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract by Philip Deloria is often explicitly a tribute to his family, particularly the women who influenced, created, and protected the ad hoc Mary Sully archive. Deloria closely reads the formal and contextual threads of Sully’s work. What emerges is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature recognizing the roles of women in creating an Indigenous futurity rooted in self-representation and self-determination. The cultural work of women like Mary Sully challenges narratives that place Indigenous people outside of, and in opposition to, the modern world.

Published in Momus.