Native American Literature of North Carolina
N C L R ONLINE
37
BY TONYA HOLY ELK
Women of the Red Earth Dedicated to our Ancestral Matriarchs
From the place where Creator started dust sprinkles gently upon Mother Earth. Matriarchs emerge with strength, resilience, wisdom named Women of the Red Earth.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Deep ancestral roots of our Grandmothers bond daughters, aunties, sisters, mothers. Like clay vessels we carry stories, medicine struggles, sorrows and triumphs. From the four corners, the four directions we are all different, yet the same we travel on the winds inside the sacred circle share, teach and listen in one voice. From the most delicate and precious bundle, to the knee of the wisest of the wise. Our roots run deep and we are many Women of the Red Earth.
Symbolic (acrylic on paste board, 30.5x41) by Alisha Locklear Monroe
Robeson County, NC native ALISHA LOCKLEAR MONROE, Poet, author, and educator TONYA HOLY ELK grew upWriter, in southeastern North author and educator, TONYA HOLY ELK grew up in a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is a visual arts educator and Carolina. She’s an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation of Pine Ridge, Southeastern North Carolina. She is an enrolled citizen of the former museum educator of ten years with the Museum of SD, and has kinship ties to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Tonya’s focusof South Oglala Lakota Nation Dakota and descendant of the Southeast American Indian. She received a BA in Art and an is Native American literature, and her poetry is themed aroundTribe land,ofkinship Lumbee North Carolina. Her poetry is themed around MA in Art Education from UNC Pembroke. Her art has shown and food while reminding readers about the importance of kinship, preserving land, andNative food, while reminding readers the importance in venues such as the Guilford Native American Art Gallery American culture and identity through oral history traditions. As a poet, sheAmerican of preserving Native culture and identity through and the Center for the American South at UNC Chapel Hill and shares her work within the community through workshops and a literary oral history traditions. She has presented her poetry in many is in the collections of UNC Greensboro and UNC Pembroke. project for youth in collaboration with North Carolina Poet and Laureate Jaki venues has published work in poetry anthologies and In 2021, she was one of three female artists commissioned by Shelton Green. Tonya has traveled and presented her poetry many venues, variousinIndigenous journals. Her new poetry collection entitled the North Carolina Museum of Art to complement the exhibit and she has published work in poetry anthologies and Soulvarious Food isIndigenous forthcoming from That Painted Horse Press in Los Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Visionary. journals. Her new poetry collection, entitled Soul Food, is forthcoming from Angeles, CA. That Painted Horse Press in Los Angeles, CA. Read another of her poems in the 2023 print issue of NCLR.