Hudson named Lewis & Clark College’s Native Artist-Scholar in Residence

By Nicole Montesano   

Smoke Signals staff writer

PORTLAND -- Being named Lewis & Clark College’s Native Artist-Scholar in Residence is an honor for Tribal member Anthony Hudson, but it’s also funny and ironic.

“I’m smart,” Hudson said. “But I’m not a scholar.”

As for Carla Rossi, Hudson’s alternate personality and “Portland’s premiere drag clown,” who is sharing the honor, “Carla herself is far from a scholar, as she chooses to live in a dumpster,” Hudson said. “But I’m sure she’s looking forward to the green room treats and the honorary scholarship it affords her.”

She may also be looking forward to raising the issue of the school’s name.

“It’s just so juicy to be doing it all at this little school called Lewis & Clark, because Carla is going to want to bring that up and make it very uncomfortable for people and get them thinking about which histories are the ones that we uplift and why,” Hudson said. 

For the college, those juxtapositions are exactly why Hudson was chosen.

“Lewis & Clark's students are passionate about embracing all of the arts to change the world, and we know Anthony's multidisciplinary approach — which balances deep vulnerability with absurdity and charm — will resonate with them,” Professor Katherine FitzGibbon said in an e-mail.

 “We always want students to think deeply about the connections between place and community identities, and engage with the demands and responsibilities engendered by complex legacies of colonialism,” FitzGibbon said. “Anthony's combination of love, humor, courage, and advocacy for one's community makes him an exceptionally great fit as Native Artist-Scholar in Residence. It’s such an honor to have him and we’re so excited to see what comes of his work with our students.”

Hudson said he is looking forward to working with the students. “I’m excited for this because it offers the potential to share some of my work and recontextualize some of my work with these new students coming into Lewis & Clark,” he said.

A press release from the college said that Hudson “will lead a series of creative, provocative, hilarious and historically resonant events for students and for faculty, staff, and the public.”

Lewis & Clark President Robin Holmes-Sullivan, the first person of color to lead the institution, created the Native Artist-Scholar in Residence initiative as part of an institutional commitment to build relationships with Indigenous communities grounded in honesty, respect and reparative action, according to the press release.

Hudson said he planned to start off with new student orientation in late August, in which the students were invited to a version of Hudson’s show “Ask Dr. Carla.”

In the press release, Hudson said, “Every new college student has anxieties about fitting in. If only they all had an over-the-top Indigiqueer drag clown to advise them.”

In an interview, he described the show as “Like a talk show meets bad therapy by an unqualified clown,” and jokingly said it might be considered a form of immersion therapy. “Because first, people are scared of a couple of things: Therapy, clowns, taxes, bills. This show is all of these things,” Hudson said.

Like most of Hudson’s work as a performer, there’s both silliness and purpose.

“Carla is how I honor who I am as a Two-Spirit person, but also how I have the most fun,” he said. “I hope to create a space where we forget the world for a while, while also pointing out its failings … a safer place to play and have fun. I think students coming into this have some expectations about what happens when a Native scholar shows up, and I want to blow all those expectations out of the water as soon as possible and that’s why I’m going to show up as a clown con artist offering them therapy,” Hudson said.

He continued, “There’s a common misunderstanding, like a common misplaced idea that we exist in the past, that we’re very stoic — just a lot of clichés and stereotypes about us, you know, and I really want to make people understand that, no, we’re really funny and we’re really smart, and some of us like to do clown improvs. … I hope that that helps people understand a little bit about Nativeness in the process. That it opens their eyes to the fact that we are living, breathing people here, that we aren’t part of some tiresome, antiquated Native past that they can forget about and move on from. We’re still here and they’re still accountable to us.”

Having first shown the students the silliest and most playful part of his expansive repertoire, Hudson will follow with other experiences.

“After that, in about a month, I’m going to go back over and share something completely different: A reading from my memoir of my show ‘Looking for Tiger Lily,’ Hudson said. “I’ll get to share some of the work with the students, read it with them, get some feedback and just have conversations on it.”

“Looking for Tiger Lily,” a cabaret show featuring both Hudson and Carla Rossi, uses a mix of song, dance, monologue, drag and video that the press release said explores, “Native identity and redface in pop culture.”

In it, Hudson discusses growing up watching the 1960s production of Peter Pan, which featured a blond, blue-eyed “Indian princess,” Tiger Lily.

Hudson also plans to take students and faculty on a field trip to Grand Ronde, where he will host “a special exhibition tour.”

“So they’ll see the drag, they’ll see the writing, or hear it, then after winter break, we’re going to take the students out to Chachalu to show them a queer indigenous art exhibition,” Hudson said.

Hudson is co-curating the exhibit with Tribal member Felix Furby. According to the press release, it will be “a new exhibition of art from 10 queer Indigenous regional and international artists including Steph Littlebird (Grand Ronde), Lehuauakea (Hawai’ian), and Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw and Cherokee), which will open at Chachalu Tribal Museum and Cultural Center in December.”

Hudson said the exhibit provides “space to share what does being Indigenous and queer mean to you, how do you honor yourself and your community.”

He said it serves as a kind of sequel to the 2023 Chachalu exhibit, “My Father’s Father’s sister: Our Ancestor Shimkhin,” also curated by Hudson and Furby.

Shimkhin (Atfalati Kalapuya) was a healer and transgender woman in the Grand Ronde community in the 1800s.

“We have historic information that proves at least in the Grand Ronde Tribe, and on the reservation, we had queer people that lived their lives openly and were loved,” Hudson said.

The story of Shimkhin portrayed that evidence and included a written account from Hudson’s great, great uncle.

“That story was rooted in the past; this next show is taking that idea and running with it all the way into the future,” Hudson said.

Hudson said “gender enforcement” was a tool of colonization that has persisted into modern times. He said that he and Furby have been unable to find a traditional word for transgender people, indicating that “we were just taken for granted and accepted as part of the community.”

  After five months on exhibit at Chachalu, Hudson said the new exhibit will then tour throughout Tribal homelands for two years.