Bury My Heart
Rebecca Belmore
2000
Great Falls, Montana
Performance
Bury My Heart is a performance by Rebecca Belmore based on American history. In the winter of 1890, three hundred Oglala Sioux, most of them women and children, were massacred and left exposed by the US Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. In the performance, Belmore uses her hands to dig a hole in the earth in Montana (part of the territory of the Great Sioux Nation- connection to Wounded Knee). Belmore explores the earth with flowers before covering a chair in the earth and burying it in the hole. The focus is on Indigenous histories and cultures that colonial powers continue to revise and suppress.