The name Amelia Winger-Bearskin sounds like the best stage name ever for a performance artist, or at least that is what I thought when I first met Amelia. Little did I know that her surname, Winger-Bearskin, is not a figment of her imagination but rather real and deadly serious in its hybridity.

Born to a Jewish father and a Native American mother, Amelia straddles the divide between two ancient and dying cultures to create a new culture, one mixed and based on love rather than logic. In her recent work, Amelia harvests from the rich story telling traditions of her parents’ cultures to investigate what it means to be mixed, the perfect blend of different races, religions, ethnicities, or world views. For her, the mixing of cultures is based on a complex set of human emotions including love, hate, not belonging, loss, death, violence, and hope. Amelia’s work reflects her activist aims by involving the viewer and forcing her into a dialog with the issues that her performances address. She attempts to find ways to use her own personal experiences and present them to her audience as metaphors through which they may understand their own lives. Amelia wants her work to provoke the viewers into questioning their own status as potentially mixed or not and to ultimately recognize the prevalence of mixed people in today’s society.

In her latest performance Johnny My Love, Amelia turns the magnifying glass away from her own mixed identity and focuses on the mixed up emotions of passion, loss, destruction, and violence in contemporary society. Performing the role of a cabaret singer, she sings the story of three loves beginning with her true love, Johnny Justice, who tragically dies and leaves her a widow. She next has an affair with Johnny Chaos who leaves her and forces her to become a whore for Johnny War, a masochistic lover of whom she is at the mercy and against whom she is powerless. As the song progresses from one love story to another, the woman’s appearance and status in life changes from a blushing virgin bride to a bedraggled whore filled with the violent passions of her master. Amelia’s performance draws upon the rich story telling of Native Indian culture to present a modern day fable about the United States’ fast decision to go to war, making war not an intellectual or rational decision but rather one based on impassioned emotion. The metaphor of loving men who she knows are bad for her is an appropriate metaphor for the complexity and difficulty of the war. The woman singing about her Johnnies ultimately becomes a whore to the war machine, emotionally violated and too ashamed to be talked about publicly. At the performance’s end when the vengeful seed of Johnny Chaos is painfully expelled from her body, every viewer is implicated in being part of a society that lets war rage on.

Although Johnny My Love is the beginning of a new direction in her work that is no longer beholden to the past, Amelia’s experiences are and will always be evident in her art, the choices she makes, and the issues that she address just by her being who she is. From her unique vantage point as a Native person, she sees the Native community in America as a living record of what happens when the US takes on the role of the aggressor. She compares American attempts to bring democracy and self-sufficiency to the Iraqis and Afghans as a contemporary successor to early settlers’ efforts to “civilize” the Indians. For her the current plight of the native people of America is the future for people in Iraq and Afghanistan, a future with very little hope. Being Jewish, Amelia also understands the threat and repercussions of America fighting and persecuting those around the world that are supposedly different from “Americans” and need to be eradicated in order to make the world a safer place. By tackling these powerful issues in her work, Amelia’s performances provide a sense of hope to a bleak present and future. Maybe we can change the world after all or at least begin talking about issues that need to be acknowledged.