“How come you’re kicking us out?”

“This is private property, sir. I could run down a whole list of rules for you. Also, I’m beginning to wonder what he’s got in the bag there.” The chief of security at the Potomac Mills mall in Woodbridge, Virginia was escorting artist Gregg Deal outside. On this day, December 7th, 2013, Gregg was in the midst of a performance art piece he calls “The Last American Indian On Earth,” in which he wears an elaborate outfit, a conglomeration of American Indian knock-off regalia, mostly ordered from the online website crazycrow.com. Because none of what he wears during his performances is authentic, his outfit is more akin to a costume than it is to a traditional vestige. Deal’s intention is to evoke the stereotype of the “pan-Indian,” replete with turkey-feather headdress and a large black handprint over his mouth. Standing almost seven feet tall with the headdress on, he is hard to miss.

“Lotion I bought at Bed, Bath and Beyond, I’m here shopping, just like everybody else,” Gregg snaps back at the officer. “Okay, alright,” replies security. “Yeah, I had a curiosity, that’s all. I actually didn’t ask to look in your bag, but thank you. All I said was I was wondering… and you’re probably recording that too.”

“Yep, recording you right now,” his companion offers. To which the officer replies, “Okay. Alright, now I’m going to tell you that you are banned from the mall.” Laughter ensues, but the officer is serious, insisting Deal is now banned from the Potomac Mills mall, forever.

On the way back to the car, a man in the parking lot verbally accosts Deal. The man is slapping his mouth and imitating a war-cry popular culture has indelibly acquainted us all with. “Why would you think that’s an appropriate thing to say to an Indian?” Gregg shouts across the parking lot—he’s fired up. Deal isn’t usually this confrontational, but perhaps the mall expulsion has triggered something. The mouth-slapper quickly slips into his car and zips away without answering Gregg’s question.

Gregg Deal, 38, lives in Culpeper, Virginia, about 80 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. He, his pregnant wife and three children recently relocated from Dumfries, Virginia in March of 2014. On the new 1.5-acre property he has a sprawling studio space for creating artwork and the family has more bedrooms for their third baby boy, expected mid-June.

Gregg met his wife Megan in 1998 in Provo, Utah where Megan was in her last year of college at Brigham Young University. Gregg had recently relocated from his hometown of Park City with the intent of enrolling at BYU himself. Megan, however, had plans of returning to Virginia to be close to her hometown and her family, and so Gregg made the decision to put off college in Utah in favor of pursuing a 4-year degree on the east coast. Upon Megan’s graduation from BYU, she and Gregg drove across the country, and married in Virginia on May 1, 1999. Gregg enrolled at George Mason University in that fall and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in spring of 2004.

Gregg Deal is a member of the federally recognized Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, whose reservation is located near Carson City, Nevada. Gregg says he has been there once, when he was 19 he and two friends traveled there and to the nearby Walker River reservation. Both the Walker River and Pyramid Lake reservations are affiliated with the Northern Paiute nation of Oregon, California, Idaho and Nevada. At the time, he knew his mother Tonya was born on the Walker River reservation, but neither he nor his mother had the paperwork to prove it, and so they remained unaffiliated. It wasn’t until 2006, after the birth of his daughter Sage, that Gregg was able to obtain documents from his mother’s adoption agency proving that Tonya was the birth-daughter of Floyd Phoenix of Pyramid Lake and Donna Ridley of Walker River.

Because Gregg’s maternal grandparents were both deceased by 2006, getting their account of events was not possible. However, according to Gregg, Tonya’s parents met at the Stewart Indian School in Carson, Nevada. The school was a federally funded Indian boarding school, where children of the Northern Paiute tribe were placed throughout much of the twentieth century under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Dating all the way back to the 1870’s, Indian boarding schools have a long and controversial history in the United States. Created with the intent of assimilating native children, American Indians were systematically stripped of their cultural heritage through forced adherence to the English language, non-native customs, and Christianity. Under such circumstances, Gregg’s mother is thought to have been conceived.

Born Gail Ridley on December 1st, 1952, Gregg’s grandmother Donna put her up for adoption one week later. After floundering in the Nevada foster care system for the first 4 years of her life, a Salt Lake City couple named Thomas and Norma May adopted young Gail in 1956. Gail’s name was changed to Tonya, and as she grew up in the May’s Caucasian-Mormon home her cultural identity was obscured and her heritage forgotten.