On an unseasonably cold November day in Washington, Gregg and his mother were outside the Department of the Interior protesting before the Tribal Nations Conference. They were there in coordination with the Lakota People’s Law Project, a non-profit that provides free legal services to the Oglala Sioux nation of South Dakota. Gregg and his mother held posters Gregg had designed in conjunction with Honor the Treaties, “an organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of Indigenous communities through art and advocacy.” The poster features a stencil of the back of a young girls braided hair, and reads “our children are not yours to take, respect the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.” The stencil is taken from a photograph Gregg took of his daughter Sage.

When prompted as to what she was doing that day, Tonya acknowledged that she and her son were there due to the circumstances of her adoption. They were there because Indian children are still being removed from their tribes and put into foster care at rates above the national average. And more often than not, the homes that American Indian children are placed in are non-native. In states like South Dakota the problem is exacerbated by poverty on the reservations, and poverty in the state at large. In the nation’s capital, Tonya Deal held a sign that read, “tribe is family, state is not,” and though she is not from the Dakota’s, you could sense the cause was personal.

A week and a half later, Gregg’s sister Bobby paid the family a visit in Dumfries, Virginia. It was Bobby’s first time visiting Gregg on the east coast since he had relocated, which meant they had not seen each other in person in over 13 years. Gregg’s mother Tonya was also at the house to be there when Bobby arrived. After spending eight years on the east coast living in Virginia near her son and grandchildren, Tonya was moving back to Utah, and her daughter had arrived to make the cross-country drive with her. You could tell Tonya was very pleased to see her children reunited.

The following day, Gregg boarded a plane to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was headed to a symposium at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe. It was also the first opportunity for all of the Honor the Treaties artists to get together under one roof and share ideas, strategies and art. Jaque Fragua, Nani Chacon, Ernesto Yerena, Cheyenne Randall, Thomas Greyeyes and Gregg Deal participated in a panel discussion about Honor the Treaties along with Aaron Huey, the photojournalist who co-founded the organization.

Coming on the heels of a performance of the “Last American Indian on Earth” in Cathedral Park across the street from the museum, Gregg was taking in the difference between performing on the east coast versus performing in “Indian country.” Speaking to the audience gathered, he correlated the Washington Redskins football team name with the way people react to his performance in D.C., stating that donning the costume on the east coast he felt “sub-human, like I’m in a Mickey Mouse costume.” Being in Santa Fe, where many of the people in the audience that night were indigenous themselves, it seemed there was an implicit understanding, perhaps even relationship between the performer and his viewers. In the park earlier that night, no one had approached him, everyone just maintained a respectful distance, observing.

Defending his work that night Gregg said, “there’s an ineptitude in the relationship between indigenous people and America as a whole, and I’ve often been told that I am just oversensitive. I maintain that I’m not, and I’ve been documenting it.” He went on to acknowledge that there are some people both indigenous and non-indigenous who had been offended by his project, that he was somehow making fun of indigenous culture. “I’m not making fun of indigenous culture, I’m making fun of the stereotype,” Gregg stated authoritatively. He pointed out that his character was representative of a “pan-Indian,” referencing not any specific tribe or nation, but rather the imagined mystical mascot Indian, from a noble, yet extinct culture.

Insisting that indigenous cultures were not extinct, that they were in fact a “modern, living, breathing people,” he added, “I do it because it’s funny, because it’s provocative. Indigenous people if nothing else, have a sense of humor, through the worst of it, we keep our sense of humor.”