The core collaborators of New Red Order (NRO) — Adam Khalil, Jackson Polys, and Zack Khalil — don't finish each other's sentences; they flesh out each other's ideas. Together, they work across media to recruit audiences into their larger aim: confront obstacles to Indigenous growth and help secure a better future for the next generation. Such work could end up feeling overly didactic, but NRO has found a way to be playful, funny even, amidst their uncompromising conceptual grit. To experience this kind of mind meld unfold over a recent Zoom conversation about their practice was a gift, and only made more apparent that NRO's work is a boon to us all.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: You've been working together for several years now. I'm curious what are the roses and thorns of working as a public secret society?

Adam Khalil: Collaboration means that things go quicker and slower simultaneously, which is both a rose and a thorn of the process, but a meeting of the minds is something that I think is always good in terms of our practices and projects. I haven't worked as an independent artist in over a decade; I’ve only worked collaboratively under the guise of the public secret society in New Red Order or in other collaborative constellations.

We're really obsessed with not being called an art collective, and I think one of the reasons for that is because it contains you in the realm of art. To define our purpose limits our potential. To not ascribe parameters on what New Red Order could or couldn't be might allow NRO a life that could even potentially exist beyond us.

Jackson Polys: I want to get to the roses, but yes, thorns emerge from imposed parameters of the label “art collective,” given that it can be thought of as something that primarily culminates in art and contributes to the idea of art for art's sake. On the other hand, many Indigenous artists historically and even currently have been pigeonholed by the thinking that for them, for Native artists in particular, the art must be for something else — it has a certain utility. 

We're interested in recapturing and renewing the possibilities of what utility might mean. The kind of flattening that's often projected or imposed on Native artists is something that we can invert or at least reinvigorate to find ways of confronting obstructions to Indigenous growth. One of the primary obstructions to Indigenous growth is people pushing Native people back into the past. We’re interested in working through this lineage of secret societies to find ways to garner support for contemporary art and Indigenous contemporary artists, and figure out ways to materially shift possibilities for Native people.

We are also continually working through the question, what kind of public secret services can we provide? Native artists are often called upon to be informants on their own culture or on other cultures problematically, so engaging with New Red Order might flip expectations of didacticism that are often imposed on Native artists to instead fold them into the formal qualities of the work to potentially change people’s minds.

Zack Khalil: To build off of how defining purpose can limit potential, being a public secret society gives us room to expand and grow even beyond our own lives and practices just like some actual secret societies we're referencing: the Improved Order of Red Men or the Freemasons. 

One of New Red Order’s foundational public secrets is that almost all of us are living on stolen land on Turtle Island, and so for me, one of the roses of the public secret society is being able to clue people into that reality in a way that actually allows them to do something about it. To feel like they have a sense of agency and it isn't just a permanent historical condition that can't be talked about, shifted, or transformed into something else. 

I think if people hear an art collective say that you can fundamentally transform the world and create a new one, they might not listen as much. But if it’s a public secret society, they have to think a little bit more critically about what that means, and learn a little bit more about the history of some of the organizations that we're talking about, and the ways they’ve transformed the world. But to answer the thorn question, being called an art collective is the biggest thorn of working as a public secret society.

Jessica: Clearly one of the major roses for you is working together. What is your process like working as collaborators? How distinct are your roles and how many folks besides the founders are typically involved with New Red Order?

Adam: Well, no shade, but we don't use the term founders. New Red Order found us is one way we like to propose it. The origins of New Red Order are complicated. I was recruited around 2017, but there's a lineage that exists before me that I can't quite speak to.

Jackson: Yeah, for us, it’s less founded than found, as a symptom of readymade settler colonial aspirations.

Jessica: Thanks for clarifying that. It’s important.

Adam: We use the term core contributors because it leaves room for other interlocutors to enter and exit in a project-specific sense. We work through things communally and collectively rather than traditional film production where it's a hierarchical structure of a director at the top and marching orders that trickle down. It’s more fluid and dynamic, which also makes it more confusing sometimes.

Zack: But it can be really liberating, too. Knowing that we have each other to bounce ideas off of makes me a little bit bolder in what I'm willing to propose or try out, which can be really helpful. In terms of people, I think we've collaborated with over a hundred people, but I'm not sure. It feels like scores of people when you include members.

Jackson: It’s an exciting opportunity to bring in other collaborators who have ideas and want to contribute to specific projects. Those meetings often bring together new combinations or juxtapositions that go beyond whatever existing authorship assumptions might allow.

Jessica: So there's a certain flexibility and expansiveness that you guys are always after in order to keep your practice interesting and open to the directions that you want to pursue. What other core influences or inheritances do you bring to your work?

Jackson: I came to sculpture through a lens of wanting to contribute to my own culture and directly confront the legacies of salvage ethnography, which has influenced how Native art is received. That confrontation led to me looking directly at primitivism, the way European artists were directly influenced by so-called older and “other” forms of art. They appropriated, incorporated, and mixed into forms received and accepted as contemporary art. Legacies of primitivism contributed to a reification of the denial of contemporaneity of Native artists, and put pressure on the question of what “newness” can be.

At the same time, I’ve been influenced by Indigenous artists who depict non-Native people, like Haida argillite pipes or Tlingit shame or ridicule poles. In my formative years, alongside finding conversations about sculpture being everything  — and other Euro notions of conceptual art — I looked at Brian Jungen and the Anonymous Drawings he did in 1997. That form of taking and encapsulating desires for indigeneity and representing them formally was instrumental to me.

Adam: The work of Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, who's from the same tribe as Zack and I. A lot of Morrisseau’s practice was about taking traditional stories and updating them into contemporary times. That's a transgressive act, but also an urgent and necessary one in order to perpetuate our cultures into the future. 

Coupled with that, there's an artistic lineage stemming from The Situationists or Guy Debord. This idea of culture jamming also came from my tutelage under filmmakers like Craig Baldwin and Peggy Ahwesh. There's a kind of unruliness to Peggy’s work, but her indelible thumbprint is all over it. Martha Rosler is another artist who's constantly refusing to be contained, and then there are groups like General Idea or Bernadette Corporation, in which it's unclear where something starts and ends or who's actually behind it.

I would be remiss not to mention Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan. I don't know if we've explicitly talked about them before, but they’re central to how we think through New Red Order: we do it for the kids. We joke about that all the time, but NRO really is this kind of forward-looking, future-hopeful operation or endeavor.

Zack: You took all of my inspirations.

Adam: Well, we have a shared upbringing.

Zack: The Norval Morrisseau reference really resonates with me, of course. In particular, his ability to share stories and aspects of Anishinaabe culture, but in a way that protected them too. His desire to call non-Indigenous people into that sort of understanding of reciprocal relationships speaks to me.

I want to double shout out Peggy Ahwesh, a mentor and friend. Her work is constantly formally shifting and incredibly sharp but accessible, in a way I aspire to be. Filmmaker Peter Mettler influences my practice in terms of a desire to follow a process more so than predetermine it. I’m also influenced by his attention to detail, and ability to reveal the transcendent in the ordinary.

Jackson: Then there are people like George Hunt, an informant to anthropologist Franz Boas and even photographer Edward Curtis, who wanted to depict Indigenous people in certain ways to capture their culture. We're constantly inspired by any acts of individuals and groups who took the opportunity to work toward developing something that couldn't be completely consumed.

Adam: We're also deeply indebted to the writing of people like Paul Chaat Smith, Philip Deloria, Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Christopher Bracken, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. A lot of our work stems from trying to be in dialogue with the ideas that they're putting forth, and figuring out ways to make those ideas more consumable or distributable.

We've talked about being in a dialectic pull where there's this constant tug between material, real decolonization and space for symbolic and speculative understandings of what it means to put something forth into the world. Those two things never really align or fall into place, but within that incongruity I think there's a lot of space to operate in, and that's central to our practice.

Jessica: The language NRO uses often feels playfully conspiratorial or mysterious. Why is it useful to describe your practice in this way?

Zack: It goes back to the writers and thinkers Adam was referencing, and how we’re trying to make some of their work consumable to a broader audience outside of academia. A lot of that language is pulled directly from those resources. Coming from a video and editing background, so much of that job is making sure that we're keeping an audience with us. Film is amazing because you can make people feel things that they might have a harder time understanding intellectually.

I think we have a lot of fun with language, too. We try to balance out that academia with deadly serious jokes, and more flippant humor and wordplay. Partially to get us through the day, but also to give the audience something that keeps them on the hook, so to speak.

Jackson: “Informant” is a kind of readymade term from anthropological practice, but it also describes conditions in which we find ourselves as Indigenous artists. In using that term, we’re able to point people to a dynamic that, once exposed, doesn’t eliminate intrigue, but instead allows for a continual reflection on this charged relationship that may be actually inexhaustible.

This exchange of information is felt as a welcome to participate, but also a warning of how to come correct and situate yourself with reflexivity, in a way that doesn’t contribute to the devaluation of Indigenous people while hunting for their epistemologies. 

Adam: We’re riffing on the structure of secret societies, which uses lingo that allows entry or access to the ideas behind them. To Jackson's point about creating and using language to foreground this dynamic, but putting forth ideas into the world is actually about their deployment. That these ideas and dynamics have the potential to become material if spoken, which has a real power to it that we’re interested in engaging.

Zack: Discourse deploys forces, so this structure of language that Adam and Jackson are talking about is about making this public secret seen and felt and understood on a day-to-day basis by creating a framework for it. 

On the other hand too, there is a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the absurdity of the situation. The absurdity of needing to create this framework to describe something that is so clearly and blatantly obvious and in front of us every day. It references some of the absurdity of secret societies, or any system claiming to have a comprehensive view of the world that can be easily explained in a few terms.

Jackson: There’s always a question: how far do we go to explain everything? How far can we go? What do we need to do? To what lengths do we need to try to convince people who don't yet understand? We aim our language toward something that can be immediately actionable, but still allowing for a staying with the project and not always immediately understood.

Jessica: Yeah, totally. The hook intrigues and gets folks to stay with you and go deeper as opposed to staying in observer mode. I appreciate you using the word absurdity. It helps contextualize the aesthetic choices you make in this sense of, "It's kind of ridiculous that this is how we have to present this information to you, but this is how we're going to do it to get you to pay attention and maybe pique your interest." I think that works really well.

I love how you’ve found ways to get your work and interests beyond gallery walls, like your hotline 1-888-NEW-RED1, which is a real number people can call to learn about NRO and join. What other strategies have you employed to encourage engagement and action?

Jackson: A most immediate way is on our website, where you can access a questionnaire that invites you to divulge information about your own desires for indigeneity. The form can then be processed by the team at New Red Order, which can allow for further discussions around one's own desire and figuring out how to contribute.

Adam: There’s a forward-facing public advertising impulse within our work, like with previous iterations of our Give It Back project, which started by making real estate display ads that highlighted instances where settlers voluntarily returned land to Indigenous people. They were designed to look like actual rental or sale listings that would be displayed at a real estate office, and there was a weird tension in Vancouver and New York when people would go into these galleries asking about real estate and then end up upset that the places weren’t for sale or rent. They felt duped because they were looking for an apartment. We slipped into the vernacular of what people would consume every day, but then created a moment to pause and really consider what was actually being communicated. 

Zack: Another way we lean towards that engagement is by not leading with ourselves or other Indigenous people. Jim Fletcher, our proxy host, tends to stand in for us. I think there's something about when people hear him, a middle-aged white man advocating for the rematriation of all Indigenous land and life, it causes people to listen a little bit more, because it’s unexpected.

And we really are doing it for the kids, too. There’s a long intergenerational outlook in The World’s UnFair with Dexter and Sinister, the talking tree and beaver that teach people of all ages about the origins of private property. It’s about trying to get that engagement early and continue it for generations.

Adam: Edutainment is another vernacular that we're obsessed with, which goes back to some of the informant stuff. We embrace (and flip on its head) this desire that people have to ask us for education or knowledge about indigeneity. Tapping into edutainment is another way we communicate with broader audiences, where an animatronic tree and beaver feels like it’d be at Chuck E. Cheese or something.

We've also talked about our work a lot in terms of front of house and back of house. The front of house is the art spectacle or the event or the installation that can be consumable, but there's also a lot of back of house work that doesn't involve public eyes. That has more to do with connecting and organizing and has a temporality that's much longer and hopefully more meaningful. Those two things are always connected and informing each other.

Jackson: That culminated in some ways with Counterpublic 2023, which allowed for us to both employ front of house advertising as a tactic of visibility for the return of Sugarloaf Mound (the last remaining mound in St. Louis City limits) and then back of house mechanisms with the curatorial team to figure out ways to divert funding to the rematriation of the remaining portions of Sugarloaf Mound. The Osage nation had purchased the top of the mound and the remaining portions were owned by Joan Heckenberg, who was in her eighties and lived there her whole life, and a fraternity for a pharmaceutical school. We met someone in Oakland who had found a novel legal mechanism that allowed for someone in California who had given back land to stay on it until it was eventually given over to the tribe or community. We were able to help do that with Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis.

Zack: Lastly, self-help is a big way we try to engage an audience. Especially for non-Indigenous people to become interested in Indigenous growth and agency, there has to be something in it for them. Jim Fletcher has this quote, “It’s not about me... but for me, it is.”

We’re talking about what people can gain from giving it back and being unabashed about the positive outcomes that could come out of giving back land. We’re engaging with how people have felt disempowered and advocating for something different, to show or at least point in the direction of people who have actually already started to create new realities, and allow them to speak about the ways it’s improved their own lives.

Jessica: To that end, throughout several of your projects there's this recurring invocation to “give it back,” which refers to land. Given how intentional you are about language, though, and the ambiguity of “it,” are there other kinds of “it” that you might be referring to, or are you centrally referring to land?

Jackson: Non-metaphorical decolonization, if that's possible, requires rematriation of all Indigenous land and life. Land is kind of obvious, and water, but I think “it” is also something that allows for an openness and expansiveness that might relate to NRO being for the children and also for us now: life. We’re really trying to identify what we can do to allow for a revaluation of reciprocity and kinship, and instantiating that in our relationships and discussions every day. “It” can open up conversations and my own obligation and responsibility.

Zack: One of the really concrete things “it” includes from my perspective is the return of Ancestors, of actual Native American human remains that are stored in museum and university archives around the country and across the world, as well as traditional objects of cultural importance, many of which, depending on the tribe, might be considered alive or to be animate beings as well. More fundamentally, land is more than just dirt, it is soil which is in part composed of the remains of our Ancestors. Land also includes all kinds of more than human beings which have been removed from that land in all sorts of ways too.

Adam: “It” is the possibility to imagine a future we would all like to inhabit, and to not have to passively inherit the present and assume that it can't change. 

Zack: In our current condition, everybody loses in a different way. Everybody gets disconnected from their own relationship to their Ancestors, and the worlds they created to pass down to future generations. There's a lack of intergenerational connection and communality that I think could also be considered as something to be given back.

Jessica: To close out, what do you feel like you've been able to achieve as a group that you perhaps wouldn't or couldn't have if you worked individually?

Zack: Speaking for myself, what couldn't I achieve individually? Any of it. Go ahead, y'all.

Adam: I was going to say the same thing. Any of it, all of it.

Jackson: I mean, if we were to take New Red Order and imagine what it might be as a project, it would easily be reduced. It could be short-circuited before it really began. But working together has allowed for a head-on approach to some of the shared concerns we're dealing with; as Native people in the so-called United States the numbers are difficult in terms of advocacy. This group formation allows for a kind of expansiveness and an ability to call in people that would not be possible in the same way by an individual. I'm incredibly thankful to be able to work with Adam and Zack and all co-conspirators thus far and excited to be doing it in the future.

Adam: When I saw that question I just was so appreciative. It's also like family, in some sense. The roses and the thorns of it!

Zack: Super true. Being able to collaborate and support each other has enabled so much more of the back of house stuff to happen, in terms of trying to facilitate material and institutional change, and being accountable to that change. I’m super grateful for being able to relay race with each other and be each other's moral backbones and reminders of why we're doing what we're doing.