First American Art Magazine No. 7, Summer 2015

ANCESTRAL, HISTORICAL & LIVING ARTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

Issue No. 7, Summer 2015

Keri Ataumbi Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez

Catawba Pottery Tribal Canoe Journeys

Nicholas Galanin

Solar Map Project in Paraguay

Inuk Silis Høegh

Walking With Our Sisters

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Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design www.iaia.edu

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First American Art Magazine, LLC Issue No. 7, Summer 2015 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Copy Editor: Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Jean Merz-Edwards Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Editorial Advisory Board: heather ahtone (Chickasaw-Choctaw) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi-Choctaw) Maggie Ohnesorgen (Mestiza) Paula Rivera (Taos Pueblo) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) Ken Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho-Seneca)

Eagle Dog, oil on canvass, 2010 ATT Grand Award by Gary Montgomery (Seminole)

FESTIVAL

JUNE 5-7, 2015 Cox Convention Center Oklahoma City, OK

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First American Art Magazine 3334 W. Main St. #442, Norman, OK 73072 www.firstamericanartmagazine.com info@firstamericanartmagazine.com ads@firstamericanartmagazine.com circulation@firstamericanartmagazine.com Copyright © 2015 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except those specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. All reasonable efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders, but in some cases these could not be traced. If you hold or administer rights for materials published here, please contact us. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

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ISSUE NO. 7, SUMMER 2015 FEATURES

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DEPARTMENTS

Opening the Water Highway: 16 Tribal Canoe Journeys as an Honor Song for American Indian People Misty Ellingburg (Shoalwater Bay Tribe)

Recent Developments

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Seven Directions Jason Asenap (Comanche-Muscogee Creek)

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The Talent and Tradition of Catawba Potters Michole Eldred (Catawba -Eastern Cherokee descent)

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Exploring Native Graphic Design Chad Earles (Caddo) Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

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From the Birthplace of the World: The Solar Map Project and the Ancestral Stone Inscriptions of Eastern Paraguay America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Art + Literature: 84 Interview with and prose by RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Image: Walter BigBee (Comanche)

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Walking With Our Sisters: 38 A Commemorative Art Installation Denise Neil-Binion (Delaware-Cherokee)

In Memoriam: Jeri Ah-Be-Hill (Kiowa-Comanche) Teri Greeves (Kiowa)

ARTIST PROFILES

Margarete Bagshaw (Santa Clara Pueblo) RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa-Comanche) Michele Cook

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Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez (Quechua) Staci Golar

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Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangax) Matthew Ryan Smith

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Inuk Silis Høegh (Kalaaleq) David Winfield Norman

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Gerónima Cruz Montoya 90 (Ohkay Owingeh) Matthew J. Martinez (Ohkay Owingeh) Editorial Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache)

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Advice: Get Your Art Online America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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REVIEWS

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Art Exhibit Reviews Book Reviews Music Review Report

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COVER: Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa-Comanche), Tlingit Bear, Intaglio Signet Ring series, 2013, 22-karat gold, sterling silver, diamonds, hand-carved intaglio in chalcedony. Photo: Stephen Lang, stephenlangphotography.com.

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Editor’s Greetings

W 215 S. Muskogee Ave., Tahlequah, Oklahoma 918-453-5728 ar tscenter.cherokee.org

Monday-Friday 9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Saturday 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. (and by appointment)

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E LOST A GOOD FRIEND and supporter of the magazine this spring: Jeri Ah-Be-Hill, a strong advocate of Native arts and cultures.

Jeri hosted our last launch party at her home and always attended our New Mexican events. There will never be another Jeri Ah-Be-Hill, but we can take inspiration from her life. She knew exactly who she was and was proud of her tribal identity. Jeri wore Kiowa clothing every day, not just for special or ceremonial occasions. She patiently educated curious people about the meanings behind tribal clothing and other art.

Santa Fe can be a sleepy town, but Jeri brought it to life. When she arrived, the party started. Her two brilliant daughters, Teri Greeves and Keri Ataumbi, helped make this issue happen. Jeri was the first to let me know what a skilled writer Teri is.

Every issue of First American Art Magazine challenges preconceived notions about Native art and who Native people are today. Featured in this issue, Walking With Our Sisters is a powerful event that is far more than an art exhibit—it’s a healing ceremony turning loss and heartbreak into action.

Although it originated in Canada, the kidnapping and murder of Indigenous women is an urgent problem in the United States and other countries. The Solar Map Project is a grassroots effort to document precontact petroglyphs and to share the insights of the Pai Tavytera people of eastern Paraguay with the world. Sometimes the scientific community needs a reminder that Indigenous people have studied our own histories and artistic expressions far longer than anyone else. Tribal Canoe Journeys is an intertribal Northwest Coast celebration that has grown so large that there will not be just one journey this year. To keep the spirit alive, several tribes will host smaller journeys this summer. The pottery of Catawba people reminds us that some southeast tribes in the United States were never removed. The Catawba still live in their ancestral homelands and continue their longstanding artistic traditions today.

While Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa) has a wide range of talents, our interview focuses on her work with ethically sourced, precious metals and gemstones. Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez (Quechua) is our first weaver and first artist from South America to be profiled. A talented artist in her own right, Nilda’s legacy is the work she has done for the Quechua weavers of Peru. Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangax) is a rapidly rising star, currently at his opening in New York as I type this. His provocative work is making waves throughout North America and he chooses to live in his home community of Sitka, Alaska. Inuk Silis-Høegh (Kalaaleq) took a risk and gave us images of his work for our pilot issue. We catch up with him two years later, after he has garnered international recognition for his films and installations.

All our departments and reviews hopefully answer some of your questions about what’s happening in the Native art world today and elicit even more. Thank you for joining us in our journey to plumb the depths of the Indigenous art world of the Americas.

—America Meredith

Letters to FAAM Dear FAAM Editor, On a recent trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, my husband and I visited a great little folk art shop (Peyote People) on Calle Juarez and bought two beaded Huichol pieces by Santo Bautista, one of their best artists. We also had a good visit with the shop owner, Kevin Simpson, who was featured in your magazine [“Wixáritari Yarn Paintings,” First American Art Magazine, No. 3, Summer 2014: 48–55]. Thanks to FAAM for hooking us up!

Well, actually, I saved the article and tracked the shop down when we got to Puerto Vallarta. We are so glad we did.

Kevin is working hard with the Huichol people to bust incorrect “knowledge” of their art being peddled on el Malecón in Puerto Vallarta. It’s hard to get through to sunburned, beer-marinated tourists, but he is giving it his all. I know something about the upstream swim of busting myths regarding Native art. Kudos to Kevin Simpson for his efforts on behalf of the Huichol and to FAAM for spreading the word.

Martha Berry Cherokee beadwork artist www.berrybeadwork.com Martha: So glad you visited Peyote People and met Kevin Simpson in person. Our mutual friends and enthusiastic art collectors, Beth and Peter Shumway, introduced Simpson to our magazine, and we’re grateful they did. We hope to feature more of his insightful writing in future issues. The Indigenous art world creates wonderful connections between individuals and communities. Let’s keep growing them!

—FAAM

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ANGELA BABBY

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Cur Camping 2014 Best of Show

BLACK HILLS, SOUTH DAKOTA WWW.NATIVEARTSGATHERING.ORG

I read various Native arts magazines and have been delighted with them. To me, First American Art Magazine takes it a step deeper, especially as it pertains to our art! I’ve always said, “We had enough time to learn a new language and to read and write it, and it is time to write our own history,” which you’re doing.

Deeper yet, to me personally, is the fact that it contains material on several people, places, and things I’ve enjoyed as an artist.

Ron Anderson Choctaw-Chickasaw artist Parker, AZ We welcome your letters to the editor! If we print your letter, we will send you a free copy of that issue of the magazine.

Please email your letters to us at: info@firstamericanartmagazine.com or­mail letters to: First American Art Magazine Attention: Editor 3334 W. Main St. #442 Norman, OK 73072

Errata Topaz Jones is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation, not the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe of the Duckwater Reservation, as erroneously printed on page 93 of Issue No. 6, Spring 2015.

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Contributing Writers HEATHER AHTONE (Chickasaw-Choctaw) is the James T.

Bialac Assistant Curator of Native American and Non-Western Art for the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma in 2006.

She independently curated numerous traveling exhibits and worked with SWAIA and Ralph Appelbaum Associates. She has published in several scholarly journals including Wícazo Ša Review and taught at OU for four years.

MICHELE COOK is a novelist, screenwriter, and former newspaper reporter living in Santa Fe. She and her husband, author John Sandford, are writing a young-adult trilogy called The Singular Menace. Random House will publish the second book, Outrage, in July.

ROSEMARY DIAZ (Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa) is a freelance

feature writer based in Santa Fe. She writes an original online series “Native Foodways: New Seasons” for Indian Country Today Media Network and is writing her study/memoir on historic trauma, entitled The Diaries of Sunshine YellowStar: Entries from Zarzamine. RoseMary studied literature and its respective arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

MICHOLE ELDRED (Catawba-Eastern Cherokee descent) is a

writer, curator, and educator. She received her bachelor’s degree in art and museum studies at University of South Florida and her master’s in education from Berry College. Much of her work is focused on curating Indigenous art and historical exhibitions. She believes that the process of art making and enjoyment of the arts should be accessible to all peoples.

Her work in writing art curriculum and teaching the arts to people with disabilities is reflected in the interpretive planning she creates when presenting exhibitions.

MISTY ELLINGBURG (Shoalwater Bay Tribe-Willapa) is an MFA candidate in fiction writing at the University of Idaho. She is a founding editor for Four Winds, an American Indian literary journal; teaches English composition and rhetoric; and has published in Yellow Medicine Review, Split Lip Magazine, Specter, and 100 Word Story.

SUZANNE NEWMAN FRICKE, PhD (Ashkenazic-

American), wrote her dissertation in art history on 20th-century Native American pottery at the University of New Mexico. She teaches art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. In 2012, she along with Beverly Morris (Aleut) and Charlie James curated the exhibit Octopus Dreams: Works on Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists, which traveled to six sites in Russia and to 516 Arts in Albuquerque. In 2014, two museums in Russia displayed another show, As We See It: Photography

by Contemporary Native American Artists, curated by Dr. Fricke and India Young, who are preparing an accompanying catalogue. She is currently organizing a third show, which will also travel to Russia.

STACI GOLAR (Cornish-Welsh-American) holds a bachelor’s

degree in art from Eastern Oregon University and a master’s degree in arts administration from the University of Oregon. She completed an arts management internship at Crow’s Shadow Institute of Art on the Umatilla Reservation, and went on to work at SWAIA/Santa Fe Indian Market and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Currently she is the associate director of the International Folk Art Market | Santa Fe. Her writing has been featured in the Santa Fean, Santa Fe New Mexican, Native Peoples, Bead and Button, and other publications. A lifelong advocate of the 8 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

arts, and an artist herself, she believes in the transformative power of art and in those who create it.

TERI GREEVES (Kiowa) is a beadwork artist who grew up on

the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Greeves graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in American studies.

Her work‚ which is in the National Museum of the American Indian, the British Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, and other major collections, combines Kiowa oral history with her personal and family experiences.

SCOTT W. HALE is an adviser and accredited art appraiser for

Native American Art Appraisals, Inc., with offices in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Tulsa, and New York City. He pursued his master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Oklahoma, where he taught in the Native American Studies program and lectured in the School of Art and Art History. Hale is a former curator of private, corporate, and nonprofit art collections and has written and lectured for several publications and museums.

BOB HAOZOUS (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache) works

in a range of media and is best known for his monumental, site-specific sculptures. He has co-curated exhibits such as the 2006 Relations: Indigenous Dialogue with Joseph Sanchez (Tewa descent), Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo), and other Native artist-activists. Haozous earned his BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and has shown his work internationally.

ZELMA LONG (Danish-American) is a PhD candidate in

performance studies at University of California, Davis, with a designated emphasis in Native American studies. She plans to attend the University of Oklahoma School of Art and Art History in fall of 2015 and then proceed with her dissertation. Long grew up in Oregon on the Columbia River, and returned to school to further her knowledge and understanding of Native American cultures and art.

MATTHEW J. MARTINEZ, PhD (Ohkay Owingeh), is the

assistant professor of Pueblo Indian studies at Northern New Mexico College. He worked for the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in the Sciences (SACNAS) and the New Mexico Higher Education Department. Martinez earned his doctoral degree in American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He was associate producer of Canes of Power, a 2012 documentary about the canes presented

by President Abraham Lincoln to leaders of the 19 New Mexican pueblos.

THOLLEM McDONAS is a peripatetic pianist, keyboardist,

vocalist, a collaborator, an activist, an educator, and an author. He has released over 40 albums of his own work and in collaboration with others on 18 different vanguard labels. As an author, he has contributed articles to Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening, Entasis, and Full Moon Magazine.

JEAN MERZ-EDWARDS has studied art history since 2000

when she attended her first art history classes at Hunter College in New York. She recently earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Oklahoma, where she was awarded a certificate in women’s and gender studies and the Alice Mary Robertson Award for her scholarship on the life and art of Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi-Choctaw).

Merz-Edwards teaches art history and English at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, Kansas.

DENISE NEIL-BINION (Delaware-Cherokee) earned her master of arts degree in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico. Her research interests center on Native American female artists in Oklahoma. She is a PhD candidate in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma and currently resides in Norman, Oklahoma.

DAVID WINFIELD NORMAN is a writer and art historian. He studied at the University of Oslo and the University of British Columbia, where he focused on contemporary art and culture in the circumpolar North. His writing on Greenlandic art and exhibition strategies has appeared in journals, exhibition catalogues, and magazines such as Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society; CONDITIONS: Independent Scandinavian Magazine on Architecture and Urbanism; and the catalogue to the DanishGreenlandic pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture.

MASON RIDDLE is a critic based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who writes about the visual arts, architecture, and design. She was the director of the former Two Rivers Gallery at the Minneapolis American Indian Center where she curated multiple exhibitions. Previously, she was the director of the Goldstein Museum of Design and the Minnesota Percent for Art in Public Places program. Riddle has written about numerous Native artists.

She holds a master’s degree in art history and museum practice from the University of Minnesota and has taught art history at the college level.

CATHY SHORT (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) is a professional photographer and textile designer. With her husband Hank and son Christopher, she owns Lizard Light Productions, specializing in fine art photography, video production, laser art, and Native-designed clothing and accessories. Short serves on the board of Wings of America. She exhibits throughout the Southwest and is based in Goodyear, Arizona.

MATTHEW RYAN SMITH, PhD, is a freelance writer, independent curator, and sessional professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. His writings have been featured in several Canadian and international publications including Canadian Art, Prefix Photo, ESSE, Briarpatch, Blackflash, C Magazine, Alternatives Journal, Magenta, FUSE, and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Criticism. He has also published in several academic journals including The Senses and Society, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (forthcoming).

NEEBINNAUKZHIK SOUTHALL (Chippewas of Rama First Nation) is a graphic designer and artist, working in a variety of media including photography, body painting, and three-dimensional art at Neebin Studios. She graduated magna cum laude in 2011 from Oregon State University and earned a minor in fine arts and an honors BFA through the University Honors College and OSU’s competitive graphic design program.

Southall works at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, where she photographs, designs, and manages media.

IFAM 2015

JOHN TORRES-NEZ, PhD (Diné), is the president of the Indigenous Fine Art Market. He earned his doctoral degree in ethnic studies from the University of California, Riverside. He has taught in the Indigenous Liberal Studies department of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Torres-Nez has served as a curator and tribal archaeologist and is a flintknapper, silversmith, and beadwork artist.

INDIA YOUNG decided, somewhere between her Alaskan home, her New York college education, and peace riots in La Paz, art best expresses activism. She returned to school to learn the practice of sharing her passions. Today, she is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of New Mexico and an independent curator. Young researches print media, contemporary Indigenous arts, and activist art. Her curatorial pursuits focus on the spaces of interconnection between Indigenous arts and the larger world.

INDIGENOUS FINE ART MARKET AUGUST 20 21 22 SANTA FE RAILYARD indigefam.org . facebook.com/indigefam artwork: joe hopkins

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Recent Developments MUSEUMS The University of Tulsa hired James Pepper Henry (Kaw-Muscogee Creek) as the new executive director of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Henry previously served as director and CEO of the Heard Museum and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, associate director of the National Museum of the American Indian, and director of the Kanza Museum, which he co-founded.

The Indian Arts and Crafts Board is refurbishing the Southern Plains Indian Museum (SPIM) in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

John Worthington, a Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist, is serving as interim curator while the previous curator Bambi Allen is on extended leave. The new museum design will feature more space to display items from SPIM’s permanent collection and a hands-on learning center for children.

The interim chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Candice Hopkins (Carcross/ Tagish First Nations), has accepted the position as chief curator. Hopkins earned her master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and has curated at the National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front, the Walter Phillips Gallery, and SITE Santa Fe. The Iroquois Indian Museum, in Howes Cave, New York, hired Stephanie Shultes as its new director. Shultes volunteered at the museum in 1985 through 1991, when she became the museum’s curator. She earned her master’s degree in anthropology from University of Albany, SUNY. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art hired Scott Shoemaker, PhD (Indiana Miami), as its new Thomas G. and Susan C. Hoback Curator of Native American Art, History, and Culture. Shoemaker earned his doctoral degree in American studies and master’s degree in landscape architecture.

His research interests include Miami language and ribbonwork.

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The Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the Arts in Santa Fe is closing its doors after the death of its founder Margarete Bagshaw (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1964–2015).

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is rotating artwork in its Art of the Americas galleries. Its new selection from the permanent collection will be on view this summer.

GALLERIES Scholars and Indigenous artists partnered to create Tucum, an artist network with a gallery in Santa Teresa, Rio Janeiro, Brazil. Tucum also hosts an online store, selling locally crafted items to benefit 15 Indigenous villages from the Amazon, Cerrado, and Northeast Brazil. The founders believe artwork such as jewelry, basketry, and pottery help transmit cultural values to the younger generations.

Members of the Kayapó tribe were the first to join the project, followed by members of the Kamayurá, Karajá, Kashinawa, Krahô, Mehináku, Pataxó, Suruí, Ticuna, and Waimiri-Atroarí tribes. For more information, visit tucumbrasil.com.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery received a $500,000 gift from TD Bank Group to build its planned Inuit Art Center.

The bank, holder of one of the largest corporate collections of Inuit art, contributed the gift to fund an artist-inresidence program and printmaking studio.

ART FAIRS The Heard Museum Guild held its 57th annual Indian Fair and Market at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) won Best of Show, his second at the Heard Fair. Best of Class winners were Vernon Haskie (Navajo), jewelry and lapidary; Daryl Whitegeese (PojoaqueSanta Clara Pueblo), pottery; Orlando Allison (Gila River-Hopi), paintings, drawings, graphics, and photography; Alex Lewis (Cheyenne River Sioux),

wooden carvings; Nelson Tsosie (Navajo), sculpture; Clarissa Rizal (Tlingit), textiles; Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota), diverse art forms; and Jeremy Frey, baskets.

The 2015 Southwest Indian Art Fair (SWIAF) hosted by the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, awarded Ronald Honyouti (Hopi) Best of Show. Johnathan Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) won the Legacy Award and both Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) and Iva Honyestewa (Hopi-Navajo) won acquisition awards.

An Award of Excellence was given to one to four winners in each category: Jessica Lomatewama (Hopi) and Stephanie Lomatewama-Kayquoptewa (Hopi), basketry; Charlene Reano (San Felipe Pueblo), Fritz Casuse (Navajo), Weaver Selina (Hopi), and Allen Aragon (Navajo), jewelry; Ronald Honyouti (Hopi) and Antone Honanie (Hopi), katsina carving; Nuvadi Dawahoya (Hopi) and Carol Lujan (Navajo), sculpture; Alberta Henderson (Navajo), textiles; Kevin Horace Quannie (Hopi-Navajo), Baje Whitethorne (Navajo), and Mike Medicine Horse Zillioux (Akimel O’odham-CheyennePawnee), 2-D art; and James Garcia (TewaHopi-Laguna), Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo), and Jordan Roller (Santa Clara Pueblo), clay.

ART SHOWS The Best of Show winner of the 2015 Art Under the Oaks Competitive Art Show, sponsored by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation).

Classification winners were Vicki Coppedge (Cherokee Nation), basketry/ traditional; Kristie Vann (Cherokee Nation), basketry/commercial; Dorothy Ice (United Keetoowah Band), textiles; Sandy Fife Wilson (Muscogee Creek), jewelry; Jimmy Gerald Stone (Seminole Nation), graphics; Verna Bates (Cherokee Nation), pottery; David Chaudoin (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; Toby Hughes (Cherokee Nation), cultural items; Dylan Cavin (Choctaw Nation), 2-D miniatures; Ronda Moss (Cherokee Nation), 3-D miniatures; Carolyn Pallett (Cherokee Nation), beadwork; and Gary Allen (Cherokee Nation), painting.

ORGANIZATIONS The Aboriginal Art Research Group (AARG) has published a new journal, AboRiginaTe, of student writing about Aboriginal Canadian art with a Montreal focus. Their pilot issue came out in March and is available online at aarg.ca/ aboriginate-vol-1. AARG is a student-led organization in the Concordia University Department of Art History in Montreal.

The Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (ACC) has hired Mylène Guay (Abenaki descent) as their new national coordinator. Founded in 2006, the ACC is a Canadian nonprofit organization that supports Indigenous curators and promotes Native arts and cultures.

technological developments through a series of digital applications and educational booklets produced by Grupo Sura. Established in 2010, researcher Cecilia Duque and 20 others founded the organization and partnered with eight Indigenous Colombian tribes: the Curripaco, Emberá, Guahibo, Guambiano, Huitoto, Kogi, Kuna, and Wayuu. Three books of ancestral Indigenous knowledge, lavishly illustrated by Native artists, were created for schoolchildren. Four applications feature games and puzzles about Indigenous cultures targeted toward children from 0 to 13 years old. Grupo Sura’s publications and games will be incorporated into elementary school curriculum throughout Colombia.

PROJECTS Artists and researchers are creating a multimedia documentation of a May 2015, month-long journey through the Gran Chaco region of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The Chaco Ra’anga Project includes three representatives from each country, as well as Spain, and begins in northern Argentina and ends in Asunción, Paraguay. Through photography, video, texts, and other interpretations, the project will present the art, culture, and science of Gran Chaco, the second-largest forested region in South America. After the journey, an international symposium will be held in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to discuss sustainable development in the Gran Chaco based on Indigenous values.

The Chaco Ra’anga Project was organized by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID).

Colombia celebrates its Indigenous languages, cultures, history, and

The First Peoples Fund presented the 2015 Jennifer Easton Community Spirit Awards to David R. Boxley (Tsimshian), Mel Losh (Leech Lake Ojibwe), Wayne M. Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe), and Keone Nunes (Native Hawaiian). These artists were chosen as cultural bearers who “bring spirit back to the communities in which they live and work.” Each artist was award a $7,500 grant.

PRECONTACT SITES

COLLECTIONS Sam Schwartz, an alumnus of the University of Saskatchewan, donated his collection of Native art to the university.

Schwartz and his late wife Margaret Schwartz primarily collected early-20th century Inuit and Northwest Coast stone carvings over four decades. His collection, the largest Aboriginal collection ever given to the university, is on display at the Edwards School of Business.

(Fallon Paiute-Modoc) is the Ronald and Susan Dubin Fellow. Marlowe Katoney (Navajo) is the Rollin and Mary Ella King Native Artist Fellow. Kathleen Wall ( Jemez) is the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Artist Fellow.

View from plaza at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia. 700–950 CE. Photo: Danielle Pereira (CC BY 2.0).

AWARDS & HONORS Robert Houle (Saulteaux) was awarded one of eight 2015 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Hosted by the Canada Council for the Arts and Governor General of Canada, the awards come with a medallion and $25,000 prize. Houle is a painter, sculptor, curator, writer, and educator based in Toronto.

Lydia Whirlwind Soldier (Sicangu Lakota) was designated the 2015 South Dakota Living Indian Treasure. This award was sponsored by the South Dakota Arts Council and South Dakotans for the Arts.

Whirlwind Soldier is a poet, educator, and visual artist from the Rosebud Reservation. She founded the Oak Lake Tribal Writers Society.

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe awarded its 2015-16 Native Artists Fellowships. Melissa Melero

Archaeologists using groundpenetrating radar have discovered a buried ziggurat in Tiahuanaco in the La Paz Department in western Bolivia.

The Tiahuanaco Archaeological Research Center developed a five-year plan for excavating and researching the newly discovered structure. First settled in 1580 BCE, Tiahuanaco became the capitol of the pre-Inca Tiwanaku Empire, which flourished from 500 to 900 CE.

LEGAL ISSUES A federal judge ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Commissioner Phil Lyman of San Juan County, Utah, from facing conspiracy charges for organizing an illegal protest ATV ride through Recapture Canyon.

In May 2014, 50 protesters drove ATVs through the protected canyon, which is open to hikers and horse riders but not motorized vehicles. Lyman and three other men will stand trial for organizing the protest ride, which Bureau of Land Management says may have damaged Ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites within the canyon.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police discovered a portfolio of prints by Al Momaday (Kiowa, 1913-1981) in a condemned apartment that housed a meth lab. The stolen artwork, valued at $33,000, was returned to Momaday’s family.

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Seven Directions Jason Asenap

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ASON ASENAP is a Comanche-Muscogee Creek writer and filmmaker from Walters, Oklahoma. In 2004, he moved to Albuquerque and has called it home ever since. Jason writes about art and film, and interviews various Native luminaries in his column “Asenap in Albuquerque” for Indian Country Today. He has a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Oklahoma and is currently finishing his MFA in screenwriting at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

WEST. When my short film Rugged

Guy had its festival run, it screened at the LA Skins Fest, and I met its founder, Ian Skorodin, a Choctaw filmmaker. The film festival was fantastic and has grown by leaps and bounds since, but what impresses me most are Ian’s contributions to the Los Angeles creative Indian community. He not only organized the film festival but also a year-round festival showcasing comedy and music.

He has created a brand in LA Skins Fest

Ian Skorodin (Choctaw), director of LA Skins Fest.

(not to be confused with LA “skinfest,” which connotes something else entirely).

Year-round youth workshops, writing workshops, and directing workshops keep everyone engaged—I lose track of all the neat things they are doing out there.

The LA Indian community is tight, and it’s no wonder with people like Ian in the mix. I have fond memories of the festival and hope to return at some point soon. laskinsfest.com 1 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

EAST. I did a stint in the master’s

program in art history at the University of New Mexico and fancied myself a future art historian. That lasted one whole semester, but through my classes there, I got to know a lot of fantastic American Indian art in Joyce Szabo’s Modern Native American Art History course. That course introduced me to Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s work. He focuses on fine art rather than juxtapositions or mediations of modern vs. traditional (whatever “traditional” means—don’t get me started). His work seems authentic (another word I hate), without pandering to some sort of latter-day T. C. Cannonesque rote exercise in “one foot in the past, one foot in the present.” I love T. C.—I’m one of his biggest fans—but that was the sixties; this is now. Gibson’s work, to me, represents confidence in being a Native human being, while (in Gibson’s case) living in New York City and painting or sculpting. This is the stuff that happens from his experience. I think living in Santa Fe might stifle some of our young Native artists, sadly enough.

Gibson does not suffer from this problem. jeffreygibson.net/2014

Jason Asenap

American Cultural Center at Yale University. Migizi Pensoneau (PoncaOjibwe), of 1491s fame and fellow MFA screenwriting classmate, has relocated there with his girlfriend. Missoula shows many great independent films at

NORTH. Missoula, Montana,

intrigues me for several reasons. My friend Jon Davis is from there; he’s the director of IAIA’s low-rez MFA program.

Also from there is my screenwriting instructor Ken White, writer and coproducer of the great film adaptation of Winter in the Blood by James Welch.

Native film scholar Theo Van Alst (Sihasapa Lakota) recently moved there after a stint as director of the Native

ABOVE: Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw-Cherokee), What We Want What We Need, 2015, mixed media, 68.5 × 128.5 × 8 in. Courtesy of the artist.

BELOW: The bright lights of the Missoula, Montana. Photo: Ken Eckert (CC BY-SA 4.0).

ABOVE. I met Leonard Sumner

Micah Wesley (Kiowa-Muscogee Creek), Vex, acrylic and newspaper on Masonite. Photo: A. Meredith.

The Roxy (theroxytheater.org). The whole town reminds me of Santa Fe or Albuquerque in the way the town centers around a cultural hub. So this place I’ve never been to, never wanted to go to, and is so far away, now is on my mind.

Like Oklahoma, I am seeing a lot of connections to really cool happenings there. I need to pay a visit soon. I’m coming for you, Missoula. Watch out!

SOUTH. Poor Micah Wesley—to

be gifted, young, and red. Micah returned to Norman after living in Santa Fe for reasons outlined in my interview with him, “Young Artist Micah Wesley: ‘The Colonizers Have Done a Number on Us’” in Indian Country Today. He is surviving and creating in Oklahoma in a crucial time in the state’s history. It’s do-or-die time, and it’s up to artists like Micah to record the moment and build upon it and make some badass art. He’s already been creating some cool, thought-provoking, conceptual work to build upon the tattoo “art trash”/Jerome Tiger-inspired pieces currently in his repertoire. In the beginning, there was the Kiowa Six and The Studio. Micah has studied and has roots in both schools of art. I look to Micah to be our fine art ambassador of Oklahoma Indian art. No pressure Micah, no pressure. feedthebares.com

CENTER. I would say Blackhorse

Lowe for this direction, and also the bigger scene in Albuquerque. It’s Arizona ex-pat Daniel Hyde and Canadian expat Sally Kewayosh (Cree-Ojibwe). It’s feminist filmmaker Ramona Emerson (Navajo), and her gender-breaking, tribal sister Sydney Freeland (Navajo), and countless others spending time and

making films in the Duke City and to the north in Santa Fe. Blackhorse just finished making a feature film on the cheap, and when I say cheap—I mean cheap. Not microbudget, which is around $100,000.

More like under $500 dollars cheap. We all helped and chipped in with acting, equipment, or location. By the time you read this, Lowe’s film will have screened at NMAI in New York City and will likely screen at more festivals in the future in a theater near you. The film, Chasing the Light, is an excellent snapshot of the excitement currently happening in the Native film community here and now.

It’s a great time to be in Albuquerque as a Native making films. It’s an exciting time to be a filmmaker with access to relatively

when he screened his documentary at a festival, and we hit it off. Now when I look at his Facebook and Instagram, however, it’s all music all the time. The dude is a popular country/rap musician in his home country, with his Rez Poetry album seemingly blowing up. He is making appearances on Canadian TV and various gigs all over the North. I can’t keep up with his progress, because he’s making too much damn progress.

I caught up with him briefly during Gathering of Nations last year and he gifted me his CD (thanks, buddy). Some younger people are impressed I know him and that says something. I need to get with it. rezpoetry.com

Leonard Sumner (Anishinaabe). Photo: Nadya Kwandibens (Anishinaabe) of Redworks Studio, redworks.ca.

BELOW. Taika Waititi’s talent is

Poster for Chasing the Light, 2014, film directed by Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo).

cheap equipment if you know how to use it. I would be remiss if I neglected to mention Raven Chacon (Navajo), an American composer and artist, who also lives here, and the great shows he puts on at his soon-to-be-defunct Spirit Abuse studio (spiderwebsinthesky.com).

I’m guilty of not showing up enough to support the experimental music he brings in from out of state. Can’t be everywhere at once. This town, man.

legendary. Dude’s film Two Cars, One Night was nominated for an Oscar for live-action short film. How many people can say that? In addition, he’s made numerous films, acted in big-budget Hollywood productions, and contributed so much to Indigenous film that I can’t even . . . His current film, What We Do in the Shadows, a vampire mockumentary, is currently screening nationwide to stellar reviews. He was my advisor and mentor in the Sundance Native film program so I got to know him a bit. You do not create work as funny as his without being incredibly intelligent. The Maori people in general have a sophisticated sense of humor, and Taika happens to have it in spades. Watch anything he makes or acts in—you won’t be sorry. You know what’s great about Taika? He’s not even 40 years old, so we have so much more of his work to look forward to. curiousfilm.com/directors/taika-waititi SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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Exploring Native Graphic Design

Chad Earles

Caddo Visual Communicator

Chad Nish Earles (Caddo), Pathway of Souls, 2015, hand-drawn and painted acrylic on wooden panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

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RAPHIC DESIGN, DRAWING, painting, screen printing, spray-painting, and ancient Caddo motifs are all part of the creative efforts of Chad Earles, an accomplished designer and member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. “I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, not far from the tribal headquarters in Binger, Oklahoma,” says Chad, who traces his ancestry to the Caddo homelands of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Family was instrumental to Chad’s creative direction, beginning with the intergenerational influence of his great-aunt Doris Miller Tonemah (Caddo, 1919–2004). “She was a big supporter of our tribe’s dances and songs and even helped amend the Caddo Nation constitution,” notes Chad. She married Scott Tonemah (Kiowa, 1913–1990), a traditionalist, a member of the Black Leggings Society, and a grandson of Chief Stumbling Bear.

The couple’s house was filled with Native art, especially Kiowa and Caddo cultural items.

Chad’s father Wayne Earles stayed with Doris and Scott while attending Oklahoma University and became the first from the Caddo side of his family to graduate college. Of Doris’s preservation of Caddo culture, Chad says, “I feel very fortunate that my great-aunt was so involved in Caddo traditions, which ultimately inspired me to reconnect with my tribe.”

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By Neebinnaukzhik Southall

Camera in hand, Doris traveled with her husband to the Southwest. She would share her photographs with Wayne, introducing him to Southwest Native art and culture. “It trickled down to me and my brother,” Chad observes. His father also became a photographer. He and his wife Fran would take the family to the Southwest where they visited Ancestral Pueblo ruins. These trips made a lasting impression on Chad, and his parents were always supportive of his own artistic pursuits, which started in elementary school.

“I first became aware of the field of graphic design in 6th grade,” Chad says. “We had an assignment that involved going through this huge binder and choosing careers we might be interested in. All I really wanted to be was an artist, but of course, that wasn’t in the binder. There were very few art-related fields listed.”

So, he chose graphic design. In high school, Chad took drawing and painting classes. After an art teacher looked through one of his sketchbooks of graffiti tags, she encouraged him to enter in the design category of a high school art competition at a nearby college. He did, winning Best of Show with his nine small Sharpie renderings of road signs on a sheet of paper.

Chad’s brother Chase Kahwinhut Earles, eight years his senior, also influenced Chad through his own studies in animation and digital art at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Seeing Chad’s piqued interest, Chase encouraged him to pursue the arts, too.

Chad enrolled in the Atlanta College of Art (ACA) in Georgia to study fine art and graphic design. The intense demands of his design program pared the group of 15 students down to four or five, resulting in significant, one-on-one time with instructors. Chad’s education included a solid foundation of the principles and history of art and design. As there was little Native presence in the area, his ancestry intrigued teachers and staff. One art history professor exclaimed, “Oh, Caddos—the mound builders!” Chad responded, “Well, I haven’t built any mounds lately.”

Chad’s role models are numerous. “I have been inspired by the work of modern and contemporary designers like Armin Hofmann, Wolfgang Weingart, Paul Rand, Chermayeff and Geismar, Shigeo Fukuda, April Greiman, Milton Glaser, and Massimo Vignelli,” says Chad, who also credits the New York School of Design and Swiss typography as influences. The ACA program included visits from “rock star” designers such as Massimo Vignelli, Phillip Burton, and Chip Kidd, and field trips to top design firms around the country, such as Pentagram, Chermayeff & Geismar, and Landor Associates. Chad had the opportunity to meet Milton Glaser, creator of the I♥NY logo, at his studio.

Chad Nish Earles (Caddo), Critt Graham Group Holiday Card (interior), 2011, digital print on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

During his junior and senior years, Chad created designs for his college and fliers for local musicians and DJs. He interned with Peter Wong, the communications department head, who along with other professors (Barry Roseman, Mark Rokfalusi, Rick Lovell, Larry Jens Anderson, and Norman Wagner) were strong influences.

Chad also delved into the world of street art in Atlanta. “Graffiti was everywhere,” says Chad. “Prolific graffiti artists were doing amazing pieces, like full-scale murals.” A few legal walls were left from demolished buildings and undeveloped spaces. One was transformed into the 40 Yard Skatepark. “You could go there and hang out with friends, eat pizza, drink sodas, and be out there all day and night, just spray-painting and learning from the different artists there.” Even one of the school’s instructors spray-painted on his lunch break.

In 2006, ACA merged with Savannah College of Art and Design, Chad was the sole graduate from his program.

After graduation, Chad freelanced for Critt Graham, a respected design firm in Atlanta. He was eventually hired, quickly advancing from junior designer to senior designer. His clients included startups, nonprofits, and Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as Ann Inc., Aéropostale, Kodak, Philips, and Wendy’s. Projects included logos, websites, sustainability and annual reports, promotional packaging, publications, posters, t-shirts, signage, interactive graphics, motion graphics, photo-shoot direction, and more.

Chad’s interest in web design and motion graphics helped secure his spot at Critt Graham. During the firm’s off-season, he took online courses through lynda.com about Flash animation and ActionScript programming. With this knowledge, he earned his firm approximately $250,000 for an online annual report for a global trading company.

Some of Chad’s work at Critt Graham also received peer recognition. His branding for Ann Inc., package design for Wendy’s, holiday card for Critt Graham, and annual reports for Ann Taylor, CommScope, and Knight Capital Group all won Graphic Design USA awards. His annual report for Knight Capital Group also won an iNOVA Gold award.

The firm closed after founder Critt Graham passed away. Chad stayed in Atlanta, contracting with design firms for clients such as Coca-Cola and Georgia-Pacific, and began creating art on the side.

In September 2014, Chad moved back to Oklahoma to be with his family, to be a part of his young niece’s life, and to be more involved with his tribe. He continues to work as a freelance designer and visual artist. His current focus is Nishology®, a culmination of his creative and cultural experiences.

“Nishology is an art and apparel brand with a mission to perpetuate Caddo art and culture by creating contemporary artwork and apparel that incorporates elements of ancient Caddo pottery and shell engravings,” explains Chad. The beauty, harmony, and balance of these designs,

which include serpents, cross-hatching, and scrolls, appeal to him as a designer.

Nish, which means moon in Caddo, is the name his great-aunt Doris gave to Chad. It’s also his graffiti tag. Tsa Nish, Mr. Moon, is a key figure in the Caddo creation story.

“After college I didn’t make any artwork at all and just did graphic design for six or more years,” says Chad. “I really wanted to express myself artistically and be more creative in everything that I did.

I just started doing art again one day, and along the same time period, my brother Chase was beginning to create Caddo pottery the old way.” Chad learned more about Caddo visuals through his brother, who was conducting extensive research to help revive the Caddo pottery tradition.

The last Caddo pottery made before Jeri Redcorn (Caddo-Potawatomi) initiated its revival in the 1990s was by the Whitebead family and Madeline Hamilton’s grandmother around 1930.1 Chad has plunged feet first into the Native art world. For his first art show, he shared a booth with his brother at the 2014 Santa Fe Indian Market. He has also exhibited at the Cherokee Art Market and the Chickasaw Nation’s Southeastern Art Show and Market, and has many more markets earmarked for the future, including a return to Santa Fe Indian Market.

chadearles.com nishology.com

1. Chase Kahwinhut Earles, “4.0 Reflection: Notes from the Artist,” Caddo Pottery, March 25, 2015, web.

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Opening the Water Highway Tribal Canoe Journeys as an Honor Song for American Indian People

By Misty Ellingburg (Shoalwater Bay Tribe)

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HIS IS HOW IT IS: in the morning, the water comes.

It gentles and it fades from the beach to the shore. In waves and in gusts, in the slow silence of predawn almost-light, etching abstractions into sand, packed tight and heavy, the water comes; it always comes. Sometimes, it splashes and rolls; other times, it tumbles and falls.

Verbose or demure, violent wild and insisting, or soft, like a lover, in the heat and the cold, in the rain, in the quiet, in azures and periwinkles, and in shades of cobalt and black, foaming wild and white, insinuating and insisting, the water comes, the water comes.

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We came from that same sea, that violent blue. And beginning in 1989, we returned to the water that birthed us, as Tribal Canoe Journeys began. We reinstated old traditions, bringing us back to ourselves.

Seventy-two-year-old Gary Johnson, former chair of the Chinook Indian Nation, stands with me on the mouth of the Columbia River, the wind blowing so hard we have to nearly shout to hear each other. His hair is white, cut short around his temples, and his voice is strong and eloquent.

It’s the night before our journey begins, and excitement is in the air.

Already participants are lining up their trailers and pitching their tents at

Skamokawa Vista Park in Washington, preparing to meet several other tribes and begin the iconic two-week journey up the coast of Washington to our host tribe, Quinault.

Gary Johnson has been on Canoe Journeys many times since their inception in 1989. A prominent cultural and educational director, he was raised in Bay Center on his ancestral land, a settlement of fewer than 300. Today, he promotes culture as a way to help kids in recovery, to encourage sobriety, and to get First Nations people back in touch with their Native roots.

When asked what Tribal Canoe Journeys mean to participants, he

ABOVE: Dugout canoe at Grays Harbor, Washington, part of Paddle to Quinault 2013. Photo: Sam Beebe, Ecotrust (CC BY 2.0).

OPPOSITE: Tokeland, Washington, the headquarters of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. Photo: Sam Beebe, Ecotrust (CC BY 2.0).

answers, “My first thought is that the canoe journey is all about teaching our youth and having our entire families here. At this point it’s really something that we plan for and work at all year round, because it’s that important.

It includes teaching song and drums and dancing, and these have all been handed down.”

What is most compelling to Johnson is that the land where we stand is near to where his grandmother was born back in 1886. “She was born a couple miles from here when the salmonberries were in blossom. She also lived in Skamokawa for a while. That’s the exciting part for us. We’re right in the heart of our home territory.”

Johnson explains that his grandmother watches over him still, speaking to him and his people through the culture.

“That thought just gave me goose bumps,” he tells me, “because we know when that fog and mist come in, that our ancestors are traveling in that fog, traveling with us and all those people who have gone before us and have shown us the way.”

Events like Canoe Journeys allow Johnson to also show the way for the youth, as his ancestors did for him. He shows us a good path to walk, and we follow, pulling cedar canoes up the shores of Willapa Bay. We were born of the cedar, of the old growth. Our pure selves come about

when the cedar hits the water, art activated by motion. Patterns painted onto the sides of the canoes tell stories, like tattoos on the very body of our people.

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N THE FIFTH DAY of this journey, nine canoes pull from Bay Center to Tokeland. Some canoe families have already pulled as far as one hundred miles across the Columbia River, with perhaps another hundred miles to go to venture into the tumultuous ocean. But for today, they’ve paddled and enjoyed a warm welcome from the Shoalwater Bay Tribe, who will share a meal, song, and dance with the families that land on our docks today.

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Dancers and singers welcome canoes arriving at Grays Harbor, Washington, Paddle to Quinault 2013. Photo: Sam Beebe, Ecotrust (CC BY 2.0).

Canoe families hearken back to the old ways when they paddled across the deep waters. “We just need to keep doing what we’re doing,” says Joel Blake, Shoalwater Bay Tribal Council member at-large, who participated in the welcoming ceremony. He described today’s events as “opening up that highway between Shoalwater and Bay Center.”

“It’s not only for us, it’s showing tribute to our ancestors who used to do this,” says Blake on the importance of Tribal Canoe Journeys. “My main goal is to let our ancestors know we still care about them. That’s where we came from. Without our ancestors, we’re nobody. We need to let the children know that our ancestors are 1 8 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

the ones who fought for us to be a tribe, fought against the non-Natives who came in and took our people away and put them in Christian schools. We need to start bringing our heritage back to our kids. [To tell them] really, this is who you are; you’re Native American.”

Skipper Tony Johnson (Chinook) affirms this. “This is creating a situation where the youth and people of our communities want to participate so much, they’re willing to change their lives. We have expectations of people that the participants are going to act a certain way, respect our traditions, not drink, drug, not abuse themselves or others. That’s what it’s really about. We know of our issues in Indian Country that we’ve inherited

over the years, and I really believe that there’s nothing changing those things better than Tribal Journeys.”

“This trip from Bay Center to Georgetown was fantastic, really easy today,” Tony adds. “Everything went right because they’re our home waters.

We’re familiar with it, and we know how to do it well.”

Council vice chairman Jennifer Taylor (Shoalwater Tribe) extends warm welcomes to the canoe families who dock on our shores. A strong supporter of Tribal Journeys, Taylor expresses that it is a long-standing dream of the Shoalwater Bay people to start a canoe family of their own, and the tribal council has set aside a budget

to obtain a canoe. Taylor notes that having all the canoes here “brings us back to tradition. The tribes can join together, eat together, dance together, and sing together. It makes us stronger as nations.”

Many people ask about the significance of Canoe Journeys for Native Americans who grew up near the water. Jennifer explains, “As coastal Indians, this is what our ancestors did.

They canoed to hunt and trade and fish, to visit neighbors, relatives. It’s important that we get back to that tradition. It also teaches drug and alcohol prevention, and teaches our youth strong morals and guidance, gives them something to work toward all year long.”

If words could describe the final landing of the canoes as they hit the shore after two weeks on the open sea, I would put them here. I would describe the sound of drums, the bustle of people who crowded to watch the landing, the abalone buttons and the felt designs, the cone-shaped cedar hats with their wide bills, the songs and the celebrations. I would tell you that the sky is clear and blue overhead, that the water rushes about our ankles as we run to meet the warriors. I would tell you that this is every victory song ever sung at a powwow, that the spirit of my grandfather and his grandfather and all the chiefs of my tribe inhabit this song, that they sing along, and that it is beautiful. I would tell you that perhaps you had to be here. But you have to know, too, the stories of the past. You had to have heard all those mourning songs. You have to know the sound of white braids cut from the shoulders of Elders as they hit the cement, to taste tears that rolled back like centuries, to know of ash and violence.

And when our family lifts the canoe to their shoulders and carries it on the beach, this is not just a victory song, but a redemption song.

TOP: Ahousaht Canoe Journeys begin, Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. All three photos: Sam Beebe, Ecotrust (CC BY 2.0).

MIDDLE: Procession of leaders in regalia, Qatuwas Tribal Journeys: Paddle to Bella Bella, 2014.

BOTTOM: Canoe in Grays Harbor, Washington, Paddle to Quinault 2013.

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TOP: Mary Hunter (Makah-Klallam-Quileute-Cowichan), weaving; Greg Colfax (Makah) and Greig Arnold (Makah), painting, Orca Hat, 2006-07, plaited red cedar bark, hide, paint, glass beads, Washington, 16.9 × 18.1 in., National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, #26/6695.

BOTTOM: Unknown Makah artist, Hand Grip for a Salmon Spear, 1870–1900, Washington, incised animal bone, 7.5 × 3 × 0.6 in., National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, #4725. Collected by George Gustav Heye in 1905. Both images courtesy of NMAI.

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Raising Our Canoe Dear Dad: I wish you could’ve been here as the waves swept across the shore and the sound of warriors singing was louder than before, and the ocean was our blanket and heaven was our roof, when the waters were our mother, and our father was the moon, and the sun rose in the sky like a bright and orange globe, and the water against paddles was a sweetly lapping strobe.

Here the dolphins still are swimming as they sing the ocean’s song, we go back to the beginning, on the water we belong.

Dear Dad, if you could’ve been here then you would have seen your boy, the twinkle in your eyes, your laughing pride and joy, the dream was in your heart when you weren’t yet his age, now he rides upon the waters, and paddles o’er the waves.

Grandfather, remember the years that you were broken down and beaten?

Grandfather, all those years the locust has eaten?

And the colonizer came to steal your land and break your spirit— but now listen to the song across the water—can you hear it?

Father, Grandfather, see them riding toward the shore as your heart pounds in your chest more than it ever has before.

For this victory, we’ve been waiting, for this dream to be released, and now warriors, they are coming, they are coming to the beach.

Hear the skipper Tony Johnson announce each tribe and people, ask permission, with great honor, to ascend the holy steeple.

And Quinault’s representatives answer with dignity and grace, as they bid our people welcome, welcome, welcome to this place.

Thank you, they commend us, you responded to the call.

Now come and rest your bones, eat, sleep, and be refreshed, all.

Grandfather, now I feel you as my brother swings his feet and they land with a great splash upon the waters of this beach.

You invigorate his step and you animate his lungs.

Oh my father and grandfather, your spirits bid him come.

And he feels your strength inside him and this is your greatest gift, for there is more to this journey—the canoe they must now lift.

Dear Dad, the sound of children crying has echoed loudly in my ears, as the rolling centuries are filled with strife and filled with tears.

Now the blankets, they do smother, and the old ones gasp and wheeze, and the youth, ripped from his mother, and it gets so hard to breathe.

Grandfather, did they make you cut your hair?

Did they say your language was evil? Did they sit you in a chair?

Did they indoctrinate your soul, did they colonize your heart?

Now the rolling tides and centuries, like the Red Sea, shall part.

Because five hundred years of genocide and death, of reservations and agony and catching your breath as you marched that death march ever closer to your grave cannot stand before these warriors who ride across the waves.

Oh, they tried to break our ancestors, crush them, and make them fall, but their generations prospered after them, and on these shores, stand tall.

Father, Grandfather, the journey’s just begun.

We know that you are with us: now, behold, your son.

For the warriors now are rising and their eyes are strong as boulders as with a heavy heave and ho they lift the canoe to their shoulders.

And it’s like twenty-eight million are lifting with them, too, as ankle deep in water, they carry our canoe.

—Misty Ellingburg

TOP: Quinault royalty in regalia meeting the canoes at the landing, 2013. All three photos: Misty Shipman Ellingburg (Shoalwater Bay Tribe).

MIDDLE: Quinault Landing, Taholah, Washington, 2013.

BOTTOM: Landing in Shoalwater Bay, Washington, 2013.

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The Talent and Tradition of Catawba Potters

By Michole Eldred

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RADITIONS VARY from one Native American tribe to another. Traditions differ within tribal communities. They even change within families.

The definition of tradition is argued and disputed amongst scholars and artists. In Native American communities heavily involved with the tourist trade, citizens create objects based on historic tourist items, which they now refer to as “traditional.” Some living Indigenous artists look back through history at culturally specific art forms to inspire their own innovative works that they feel will keep their tribe’s traditions viable. Other Native artists follow precise techniques, taught from one generation to the next, so that the meaning and purpose of the tradition will remain alive.

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I do not challenge any of those varied perspectives on tradition. There is room for fluctuation in the interpretation of the word. Regardless, I am going to highlight and define the beautiful and completely traditional pottery of the Catawba Indian Nation. How do I know it is traditional?

Because I was told it is.

I sat down with Beckee Garris on a chilly afternoon at the Catawba Cultural Center in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Garris had just finished talking to a large group of kindergarten students from the tribal school next door, so she needed a little downtime. We chatted about the weather, family, and the usual pleasantries, but when it was time to get down to business and talk about pottery, she told me

with no hesitation, “Catawba make pottery because it is in our blood. This is our tradition.”1 This I believe.

She told me about the clay. She explained that this is special clay only for the Catawba people. The Catawba people have been digging the clay from the same vein sites for over 400 years. Only a few dig sites are still available. One vein site has run dry, and two other sites have been paved over and are no longer accessible.

Garris handed me a piece of clay. It is soft clay. It is pliable clay. It is moist clay. It is special clay.

ABOVE: Georgia Harris (Catawba, 1905–1997), Fanciful Pipe, clay. Image courtesy of University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

OPPOSITE: Sarah Jane Ayers Harris (Catawba, 1831–1917) and seven grandchildren, seated on porch with her pottery, Catawba Indian Reservation, ca. 1910, Thomas J. Blumer Collection. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

BELOW: Beckee Garris (Catawba Nation, b. 1947). Photo: Michole Eldred (Catawba Nation-Eastern Band Cherokee).

As Garris and I discussed the history of Catawba pottery, she showed me the traditional technique. I watched her work while we continued to talk. She told me, “The Catawba have been making pots for [thousands of ] years or more.” Garris has been making pottery for “about 40 years.” She learned by watching the elders make pottery.

The coil method is the main building technique used.

At times the pinch method is used for effigies, and the occasional pipe mold will be used as well. A Catawba potter never uses a wheel to throw a pot; every vessel is built by hand.

I asked Garris what tools she uses to make her pots. She said she uses bone, corncob for creating spouts, and burnishing rocks. Her rocks have been passed down to her from previous generations. Some living Catawba potters have burnishing rocks passed down to them from seven generations.

After the pots are burnished or rubbed to reveal a perfectly smooth finish, they dry and then are fired in an open pit. Garris said glazes or kilns are never used in the firing process. The color of the piece comes from the type of wood used and the smoke it produces. The firing reveals a black, grey, white, brown, or red color.

The fire is going to give you what the fire is going to give you.

—Chief Bill Harris2 Garris follows Catawba protocols in her pot making. She expresses creativity in the form of handles on lids or small effigies using the pinch technique. She said, “The clay has to tell me what to make out of it.” During our entire conversation, she worked a piece of clay. At the end of our conversation, she handed me a clay owl. “Today the clay told me to make it into an owl for you.” Thank you, Beckee Garris.

1. All quotes by Beckee Garris from interview with the author, November 5, 2014.

2. Bill Harris, “Episode 12: Catawba Pottery in South Carolina (Part 1),” podcast, Artisan Ancestors, MP3, accessed February 2, 2011, web.

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Artists’ Voices Georgia Harris Georgia Harris (Catawba Nation, 1905–1997) was an artist and a teacher. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized Harris for her achievements as a potter and her contributions to the arts. As a potter, she was committed to following the high standards of historical Catawba pottery making. She also expected these high standards from other Catawba potters and her students.

ABOVE: Georgia Harris demonstrating pottery-making process. Thomas J. Blumer Collection. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

OPPOSITE, TOP: Georgia Harris (Catawba Nation), Turtle Effigy Pot, clay, Thomas J. Blumer Collection. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: Georgia Harris’s firing process, Thomas J. Blumer Collection. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

BELOW: Georgia Harris (Catawba Nation), Water Jug. Photo: Brittany Taylor. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

She started rubbing pots for me. I just kind of took Nola under my wing. And, whenever I made any pottery, I just let her fool on the little pieces first. Then she learned to rub. I used to tell her how to make them. I used to straighten them for her, you know, straighten them and let her rub them. And then I’d take them off and sell them for her.

—Georgia Harris on teaching

Catawba potter Nola Campbell3

She is the one that taught me to make pottery. And I give her credit for being the best potter.

—Nola Campbell4 She just let you take your wad of clay and your board …

She’d want to know what you were trying to make and then she’d tell you a little bit about how to do it.

—Evelyn George5

She wanted to show you things. If you didn’t get that pot right, she’d show it to you. I would be over there [at Harris’s home] and she’d want me to get a piece of clay and work with her.

—Florence Wade6 The expectations of quality pottery making were instilled in Harris as a child. Harris’s grandmother, Martha Jane Harris, taught the tradition to her granddaughter.

My grandmother always believed to make, to do, the best that you could. And she always used the best clay. She wouldn’t just use any kind of clay; it had to be the best.

She said if we couldn’t make it right on the first, there wasn’t no need to give up. She said, “You just keep right 3. Georgia Harris Interviews, Thomas J. Blumer Collection, University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

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on trying.” And lots of times I’d make something and set my fist in it, and she’d say, “Don’t do that! Give it to me!” And she would take it and work it around and fix it, work it up.

She said, “You’ll not make it perfect the first time, but keep trying.”

And she said, “Do the best you can.

Always try to improve.”

—Georgia Harris on Martha Jane Harris7

During those early years, I did not work in the clay but watched my elders, and, in watching, I learned from them. During all those years, I was observing my mother and grandmother at work and absorbing their methods of constructing the pottery and shapes they commonly built.

—Georgia Harris8 Georgia Harris demonstrated or exhibited her work in a number of galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. Unfortunately, Harris passed away in 1997 before receiving the NEA award from the White House. She is remembered with honor and gratitude for her contributions.

The work of the Harris family continues today through the potterymaking skills of Chief Bill Harris (Catawba Nation), the grandson of Georgia Harris.

I realize now that I am older it is my responsibility to continue. You don’t want to be the one to let it die.

—Chief Bill Harris9 7. Georgia Harris Interviews, Thomas J. Blumer Collection, University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

8. Ibid.

9. Bill Harris, “Episode 12: Catawba Pottery in South Carolina (Part 1),” podcast, Artisan Ancestors, MP3, accessed February 2, 2011, web.

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Earl Robbins and Viola Harris Robbins Earl Robbins (1922–2010) is the most well-known male Catawba potter. He is known for his pipe making and creation of strikingly large, symmetrical pots. He was married to another well-known Catawba potter, Viola Harris Robbins (1921–2010).

ABOVE: Rachel Brown (Catawba Nation, 1874–1960), 1908, demonstrating pottery process, building a pot using clay coils, Thomas J. Blumer Collection on the Catawba Nation. Photo: M. R. Harrington.

Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

OPPOSITE: Susannah Owl (Catawba Nation, 1847–1934), Pitcher, clay, Thomas J. Blumer Collection.

Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

BELOW: John Brown, Rachel Brown, and son (all Catawba), 1908, digging clay, Thomas J. Blumer Collection. Photo: M. R. Harrington. Image courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

While some turn-of-the-century Catawba men, such as Epp Harris and Earl Robbins, were respected potters, typically a man’s role was to dig clay. Men and children also occasionally helped with the firing and polishing process. The photos on this page were taken by Dr. M. R. Harrington, who traveled from Washington, DC, to study Catawba pottery. The Brown family obliged the researcher by demonstrating all aspects of pottery-making, which Harrington wrote about in his 1909 essay The Catawba Indians.

Like so many Catawba before them, Viola and Earl sold wares to tourists.

Earlier potters sold their wares at fairs such as the 1913 National Corn Exhibition in Columbia, South Carolina, but the Robbins created pieces for the Cherokee trade, otherwise known as the Great Smoky Mountain Tourist Trade. The Cherokee, or tourist, trade began after World War I with the popularization of automobile travel. Tourists drove through the Great Smoky Mountains where they encountered the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. Of course, tourists wanted to take home souvenirs of their travels and encounters with the Eastern Cherokee. Many Cherokees made baskets and carvings to sell to tourists, but few to no Cherokees produced pottery.

During this time two Catawba potters, Nettie Owl and Susannah Owl, married into the Eastern Band Cherokee and lived in Cherokee, North Carolina. These two women filled the need of the Cherokee tourist trade by creating wares and enlisting their own Catawba family members to create pottery for a tourist shop owned by Susannah’s husband, Sampson Owl. Sampson traveled to the Catawba Nation often to purchase pottery. Before long, Catawba potters traveled to Cherokee themselves.

They often sold out of their pottery before even arriving in Cherokee.

Unfortunately, many vendors did not

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pay a fair price for the pottery. The Catawba potters did not receive the full value of their work.

Sara Lee Harris Sanders Ayers

The tourist trade for the Catawba dwindled in the 1960s. Earl and Viola stopped making pottery for a time, but returned to pottery making in the early 1980s. For the remainder of their pottery-making careers, the couple sold directly to collectors or museums, demanding and receiving fair market value. Earl Robbins is noted for his snake-head pots and Viola Robbins for her double-braid pots. Both potters have pieces in the collection of the Smithsonian and the Louvre.10

Another recognized Catawba potter was Sara Lee Harris Sanders Ayers (1919–2002), whose signed art was popular amongst collectors.

Ayers was born on the Catawba Indian Reservation near Rock Hill, South Carolina. She moved to West Columbia, South Carolina, where

she created award-winning Catawba pottery. Assisted by husband and fellow potter Foxx Ayers (Catawba Nation, 1924–1999), Sara followed family and Catawba tradition by digging for Catawba River clay and using hand-coiled building techniques to form her pieces into fine pottery, and then firing the pieces in a pit in her backyard. Sara received considerable recognition in her lifetime, including the South Carolina Folk Heritage

Beckee Garris illustrated the friendly rivalry between the husband-andwife potters with a story about how both claimed to be the better potter.

One day Earl and Viola decided to see who could build the largest, yet most technically correct pot. Both potters spent many days working the clay and rolling their coils to construct their pots. Viola built her pot larger and larger, but the coils collapsed in on themselves. One morning she woke to see her husband’s completed pot. He had stayed awake all night working on an extremely large vessel that stood strong and beautiful. As the story goes, Viola threw her arms up in the air and told Earl that he won. He was the better potter.

The legacy of this distinguished, pottery-making duo lives on through their daughter Margaret Robbins (Catawba Nation, b. 1957), a 21stcentury Catawba potter. Margaret explains what pottery means to the Catawba people: “The pottery of the Catawba, my people, is who we are.

Only the Catawba do it this way. . .

Us. The Catawba people. The pottery comes from inside us.”11 10. Thomas J. Blumer, Catawba Indian Pottery: The Survival of a Folk Tradition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004): 37, 89.

11. Andrew Dys, “Catawba Potter in Documentary on ‘Uncommon’ Artists,” The Rock Hill South Carolina Herald Online, March 9, 2011, web.

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ABOVE, LEFT: Sarah Jane Harris Ayers (Catawba, 1831–1917), grandmother of Georgia Harris, demonstrating pottery-making process. All photos on this page from the Thomas J. Blumer Collection, courtesy of the University of South Carolina, Lancaster.

ABOVE, RIGHT: Caroleen Sanders (Catawba), contemporary potter from Concord, North Carolina, with an ornate pitcher. Photo: Brittany Taylor.

BELOW: Sara Lee Ayers (Catawba, 1919–2002), Owl Effigy, clay.

Award in 1989. One of her favorite effigies was the chief ’s head, which she used to adorn a variety of pottery pieces.

Many of her bowls and pipes are in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Pottery is my life. It has helped me through some of life’s rocky times.

—Sara Ayers12

Continuing the Tradition Thanks to the Catawba elders and to the teaching potters of the past, the Catawba pottery-making tradition remains part of the living culture today. Approximately 50 adult Catawba tribal members still create and show pottery on a regular basis. Catawba children are being taught the craft in the children’s programs that are run by the Nation. The Catawba Cultural Center in Rock Hill offers pottery classes to adult tribal members with the hope of keeping the tradition alive.

12. “Catawba Indian Master Potter: Sara Ayers, 1919–2002,” Hilton Pond Center, last modified February 2, 2015, web.

13. Beckee Garris in discussion with the author, November 5, 2014.

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Due to the importance of pottery in the Catawba culture, the tribe is committed to ensuring there are always Catawba potters to teach this skill to others, so that this millenniaold-plus tradition can continue to be passed on to future generations. In this pottery we find the past, present, and the future of the Catawba people.13

ORLANDO DUGI THE RED COLLECTION Beaded Evening Gown

Hand-beaded Silk Organza and Silk Duchess Satin Hand-dyed in Cochineal Photo by Blair Clark

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From the Birthplace of the World The Solar Map Project and the Ancestral Stone Inscriptions of Eastern Paraguay

By America Meredith

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HOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, Indigenous Paraguayan artists inscribed the stone walls of the sacred hills in Amambay Department with over 1,353 petroglyphs.1 While subtropical rainforests have protected these stone inscriptions from the elements for years, deforestation and human disruption threaten to destroy the petroglyphs today. In an effort to save these rich cultural resources, the Solar Map Project and the Pai Tavytera tribe work together using innovative techniques of preservation and public education.

The Solar Map Project (SMP) is named for a particular petroglyph that, according to a Pai Tavytera leader, is an Indigenous cosmogram. The organization is dedicated to “telling an untold story that has been muted for millennia, the story of the rock art of the Amambay hills. We hope to spread the story beyond academic circles to a larger audience, and to help preserve the rock art. Give the Pai Tavytera

Indians a voice to tell us about their traditions, the struggle they currently face, and their hope for the future.”2 Through an innovative, multimedia approach, the project broadcasts information to the world about a little-known, little-researched Indigenous community and rock art tradition.

Paraguay, the home of the Pai Tavytera as well as 16 other Indigenous tribes, is a flat, landlocked country surrounded by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina. The Paraguay River divides the country into two distinct ecosystems: the savannas of the Gran Chaco to the west and subtropical rainforests to the east. Along the Brazilian border to the east, the hilly Amambay Department has the highest elevation in the country and sees 65 inches of rainfall a year. Only since the 1960s have outsiders begun to settle the sparsely populated area in large numbers. Now cattle ranchers and soybean farmers control much of the land. The only tribe living in this department, the Pai Tavytera, is a Guaraní group. The 17

1. “El Museo Altamira presenta hoy una muestra que dará a conocer un proyecto de cooperación en Amambay (Paraguay),” Europa Press, July 21, 2009, web.

2. “Our Mission,” Solar Map Project, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

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Indigenous tribes of Paraguay account for only 1.7 percent of the nation’s population. Almost 95 percent of the remaining population is mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Native heritage.3 “Paraguayan people are proud of their heritage,” acknowledges Frank Weaver, director of the Solar Map Project, “but at the same time, there’s a lot of discrimination against the Indians.”4 Frank Weaver is a young, computer-savvy, documentary filmmaker. A polyglot, he speaks English with a rich Paraguayan accent and sports a small silver chin piercing, a contemporary nod to the aboriginal South American tradition of wearing labrets. He currently lives in Florida but was born and raised in Amambay.

His family inspires his activism for Paraguayan Indigenous rights and cultural preservation. Frank’s brother James Weaver and father Joseph Weaver are members of the Solar Map Project. Joseph was born in Arizona but moved to Paraguay as a baby, when Frank’s grandparents drove from North America to Paraguay to work for a coffee plantation in 1959. Frank’s Brazilian mother used to own a shop, “one of the first shops that sold art from the Indians,” says Frank.

“That’s why our family had a lot of contact with the Indians.

If they missed their bus to go back to the reservation, then they would just stay at our house.”

“Way back in the ’80s,” he continues, “my family would go to the reservation to do things for the environment— plant trees and do that kind of stuff. My family had a good relationship with the Indians. They came to us and said, ‘Hey, by the way, there are these inscriptions here.’ So that was my first experience, being guided by the Pai Tavytera Indians to the inscriptions.”

When overseas tourists came to eastern Paraguay, Frank stepped up. He recalls that when he was about eight years old, “one of my first jobs was to guide people to the rock art sites because I spoke a little bit of English.” Perhaps this early exposure to public speaking helped cultivate Frank’s communication skills. His enthusiasm for spreading knowledge about petroglyphs is infectious and needed.

Stemming the Tide of Misinformation “Even in Paraguay, not a lot of people know about the Indians or the rock art,” Frank says. Matthias Strecker, founder of the Society of Rock Art Research Bolivia or Sociedad de Investigación del Arte Rupestre de Bolivia (SIARB) echoes this sentiment: “Rock art research TOP: Frank Weaver next to footprint-style petroglyphs in Amambay. All images in this article courtesy of the Solar Map Project.

BOTTOM: The Solar Map, ca. 3250 BCE, with interpretations from Pai Tavytera advisors showing its theological and cosmological implications.

3. “The World Factbook: Paraguay,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed April 17, 2015, web.

4. All quotes from Frank Weaver are from an interview with the author, March 31, 2015.

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in Paraguay has hardly begun.”

Astonishingly, as Strecker explains, this is partially due to the local petroglyphs being “ascribed to Vikings or Celts believed to have visited South America, and are popularly labeled as ‘runic inscriptions.’ ”5 Defying any common sense, this belief persists today and is the subject of blogs and even documentaries.

“I think Carl Sagan popularized the saying that, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,’ ” says Frank. No proof was furnished, so he questioned the Viking theory and traced its origin to the writing of Jacques de Mahieu (1915–1990), a French Nazi collaborator who fled to Argentina after the Third Reich lost World War II. There Mahieu published widely, coupling racism with fantasy.

“Why the Vikings?” asks Frank. “The Vikings are the whitest people you can find. It’s a big discredit to the Natives.”

It is shocking how few scientists have explored the rock art of Amambay.

Branislava Sušnik, an anthropologist, was active in Eastern Paraguay from the 1950s to 1970s, and José Antonio Perasso and Luciana Pallestrini studied and published about the region in the 1980s, but petroglyphs were not their focus.

Finally, in 2008, at the request of the Pai Tavytera, a team of researchers, including José Antonio Lasheras from the National Museum and Research Centre of Altamira in Spain, traveled to Amambay to study the rock art.

In 18 days, they documented 1,350 petroglyphs and over 4,000 artifacts.6 The team discovered that petroglyphs at a rock shelter called Itaguy Guasú on the hill Cerro Guazú, dated back 5,000 years. These are the oldest evidence of humans in Paraguay.7

TOP: Amambay petroglyph representing the “Protective Eye” (CC BY-SA 3.0).

BOTTOM: Amambay petroglyphs representing leaves (CC BY-SA 3.0).

“Given the density, quantity, and especially the simple fact that the [hill of ] Jasuka Venda has the most abundant rock art,” says José Antonio Lasheras, “I believe this form of expression expanded from there.”8 It became known as “el estilo pisadas,” or the footprint style, due to repeated representations of footprints of rhea, deer, jaguars, humans, and others.

This rock art tradition originated in

Paraguay, fanning outward to Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina over time.

Cerro Guazú is the most sacred place in the Pai Tavytera oral history. According to Frank, “That’s the main spot where they believe God first created the world. The rock art was what was left behind from creation time. Their stories corroborated with the scientists’ stories.”

5. Matthias Strecker, “Zona 4 - West-north-west South America (north of the Andes, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay)” in Rock art of Latin America and the Caribbean: Thematic Studies (Paris: ICOMOS, June 2006), 143.

6. “Jasuka Venda: Cerro Sagrado de los Pãi Tavyterã,” Pueblos Originarios: Sitios Arqueológicos, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

7. “Encuentran en Jasuka Venda hombre de más de 5.000 años,” Ultima Hora, February 24, 2009, web.

8. “Jasuka Venda: Cerro Sagrado de los Pãi Tavyterã,” Pueblos Originarios: Sitios Arqueológicos, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

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an ongoing issue. A travel guide to Paraguay points out that tourists can only visit the rock art with a guide because, “Sadly, unaccompanied visitors cannot be trusted not to scratch their own initials in the rock.”9 “One of the reasons the rock art gets damaged in Paraguay is people think there is hidden gold,” explains Frank. Cerro Guazú is the site of the final battle in the quixotic War of the Triple Alliance. From 1865 to 1870, the grossly outnumbered Paraguayan Army fought the combined defenses of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, which resulted in the death of 400,000 Paraguayan soldiers, approximately two-thirds of the male Paraguayan population.

“The war ended right on one of the hills in Amambay. That’s where the general of the Paraguayan Army died.

People think the army had gold. As they were being surrounded, they realized they had to bury it or it would get captured by the enemy.”

TOP: Leonido and Ña Silvia Arce (both Pai Tavytera) inspecting their shrine they made (CC BY-SA 3.0).

BOTTOM: Petroglyphs representing rhea tracks, mistaken by non-Natives as arrows (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Threats to the Rock Art Each hill is like a deity to the Pai Tavytera, but only one hill is part of the Cerro Corá National Park. All the others are on private land. The SMP and the local Indians strive to maintain good relationships with the landowners, but when new landowners arrive, they have to reach out and educate them.

“The landowners want to preserve the rock art, but sometimes they don’t know the best way,” admits Frank.

“One time a landowner burned the

whole forest around the rock art, because he thought it would be easier for people to get to it. Cutting down the forest made the sun go to the rock art and to cause fungi to grow.”

The largest threat to the rock art is deforestation due to the increase in cattle ranching and soybean farming in Amambay.

Fortunately, erosion from rain is not a problem, since the petroglyphs were carved in natural shelters protected from rain and strong winds. Human intervention, however, has been

A common petroglyph design is a footprint of a local flightless bird, Rhea Americana. “When you look at a footprint of the ñandú guazu, it looks like an arrow,” says Frank. Treasure hunters believe the arrows point to gold left from of the war. “They go and start burning and breaking the rocks to find the gold.”

Inhabitants of the True, Future Land Since time immemorial, the guardians of these ancient sites have been the Pai Tavytera people. Their name comes from pai, a title used to address “the gods who inhabit paradise,” and tavyterã, meaning “inhabitant of the people [village] of the true, future land.”10 About 12,000 Pai Tavytera

9. Margaret Hebblethwaite, Bradt Travel Guide Paraguay (Chalfont St. Peter, UK: Bradt Travel Guides, 2010), 290.

10. “Guaraní Kaiowá: Name,” Instituto Socioambiental: Povos Indígenas no Brasil, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

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live in 50 communities throughout Paraguay. They are closely related to the Guarani-Kaiowá, who live just across the border in Brazil. Both groups speak Guaraní. With almost five million speakers, Guaraní is the third most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, behind Quechua and Mayan languages.

Scholars believe that the matrilocal Pai Tavytera people descend from the Itatin Guaraní, who forcibly expelled the Jesuits from their land in the beginning of the 17th century.11 In eastern Paraguay, foreign investors gained title to the lands without compensating the Indians, but these large landholders were mostly absent, and the tribes were able to hunt and farm as they had for previous centuries. Enjoying minimal outside encroachment until the late 20th century, the Pai Tavytera maintained their language, dances, and ceremonies. But in the 1960s, new settlers flooded the region. By the 1970s, Indians of the region had to seek work as farmhands.12 Frank describes the process in the late 20th century where the Paraguayan government established reservations for certain tribes. They assigned lands to the Pai Tavytera, but not the places they wanted. He says the tribe responded, “ ‘Well, we don’t want this spot of land, we want to be closer to our hills because they are sacred.’ ” After many legal battles, the government finally passed Law 209 in 1993, which established the Cerro Guazú reservation for the Pai Retâ Jaojú community.13 While the tribe has lived in the Amambay for centuries, they did not create and do not add to the rock art.

“The Indians say that the people who did the rock art are the people that came before them,” says Frank. “They carry on the stories.”

Galeano Suarez (Pai Tavytera), a spiritual leader for his tribe. Photo: Frank Weaver (CC BY-SA 3.0).

José Antonio Lasheras from the Altamira Museum echoes this sentiment. “There is a certain overlap between their traditional oral wisdom, intangible culture, and archaeological evidence.”14 “For them it was like a double-edged sword,” explains Frank. “You get to be

closer to your spiritual connection, but that area is not very good for farming.

It was a tricky situation.”

Members of the tribe cultivate manioc and maize, while others work as hired hands at the local farms and ranches.

Some, like Leonido Arce, are wood sculptors who sell their work to visitors

11. Nancy M. Flowers, “Paï-Tavytera,” Countries and Their Cultures: South America, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

12. Dannin M. Hanratty and Sandra W. Meditz, eds., “Indians,” Paraguay: A Country Study. (Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988), accessed April 17, 2015, web.

13. “Jasuka Venda: Cerro Sagrado de los Pãi Tavyterã,” Pueblos Originarios: Sitios Arqueológicos, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

14. “El Museo Altamira presenta hoy una muestra que dará a conocer un proyecto de cooperación en Amambay (Paraguay),” Europa Press, July 21, 2009, web.

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community. It was important to us that we get their approval. It is no surprise that the Native communities are unhappy about the way they are often portrayed, and have an inherent distrust due to so many historical deceptions.”15

Young Pai Tavytera archer. Photo: David Fariña.

or museums. Leonido’s wife is Ña Silvia Arce, a spiritual leader for the community. Both have been strong supporters and collaborators of the Solar Map Project, as has medicine man Galeano Suarez.

“This is a sad note, but one of my closest friends there is a shaman named Galeano,” says Frank. “He is a very wise person and a really good person altogether. They walk because they don’t have cars or anything. They would walk miles and miles just to see me where I’m staying.”

One time the temperature was especially high when Galeano and his companions traveled to visit Frank. “I could tell they were thirsty and said, ‘Do you guys want some water?’ I brought them a jar of water, and I give to him. He pours a cup and gives to a little kid, and then to others. He was the last one to drink. That just shows that as the leader, you provide for your people. On the reservation, he is a spiritual leader, but when he goes to the city [Pedro Juan Caballero], people might think he is a homeless person because he collects aluminum cans for

recycling. When we’re in the city, we might see him at a bus station, and he’ll have a bag full of beer cans that he’s going to recycle.”

Activism and Advocacy for the 21st Century In addition to calling attention to the dangers posed to the region’s petroglyphs, Solar Map Project also seeks to advocate for the tribe with authentic representation. “They just want to be able to speak without having their message distorted,” says Frank. Politicians and others have twisted the tribes’ words to serve their own agendas. “So they were happy that we didn’t edit what they were trying to say.”

Besides photographing rock art, the project records tribal members’ speeches and songs, photographs the community, and creates short videos. While developing a longer documentary of the community and the rock art, Frank says, “We submitted a preview of the rough draft of our documentary to the Pai Tavytera

“Most of the Indians live in extreme poverty,” Frank continues. “Every time they get in touch with Paraguayans from the outside, those people promise a lot of things but they don’t fulfill their promises. I always say, ‘I don’t promise you anything. But this is what I want to do. I’ll record, but then I’ll come back later to show you what I recorded so you can see if you like it.’ I was able to go back to Paraguay and show them the footage that I had. They love it.

‘Look, Mom, it’s Grandmom talking.’ ” The approach the Solar Map Project team takes follows the criteria Chiricahua Apache curator and educator Nancy Marie Mithlo laid out for Indigenous curatorial methodologies, which can also apply to research and advocacy: “It is longterm, reciprocal, mutually meaningful, and includes mentorship.”16 The Weavers’ commitment to the Pai Tavytera has certainly been long term, as three generations of the family have worked with the tribe for four decades.

Engagement has been reciprocal and mutually meaningful since tribal leaders such as Galeano Suarez, Leonido Arce, and Ña Silvia Arce all have an active voice in the organization’s activities.

Helio “Chito” Arce, a field coordinator for the government of Amambay, and SMP member James Weaver provided solar lighting and hand-cranked flashlights to a Pai Tavytera village.17 In the interest of empowering tribal youth, SMP is raising funds to provide a laptop and appropriate clothing for law school for Osmar Valenzuela, a Pai Tavytera and first person from his village to attend college.

15. “We Are the Pai Tavytera Indians, and We Approve This Message!” Solar Map Project, February 10, 2014, web.

16. Nancy Marie Mithlo, ed., Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011), 24–25.

17. “Cheap solar power for the Guarani Indians,” Good Karma for All, December 9, 2011, web.

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Sunset over the jungles of Amambay.

Besides donating to the tribe, the SMP is also reciprocal in its practice of making its media available to the public through Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization providing standardized, legal copyright licenses that allow artists and writers to share their work but retain certain rights. For example, under the Creative Commons license chosen by Solar Map Project, anyone is welcome to use their videos and adapt them freely, but she or he must attribute the creator and must share the work under the same license, i.e. making it equally available to others, but still requiring credit to the photographer.

“I think it’s very important to share as much as you can,” says Frank. “When the people made the rock art, I believe they

made it Creative Commons. They didn’t put a copyright on the rock art. So for me, I think it was a natural thing to make it more available for everybody. I think that goes back to the conversation, too.

The more the people know, the more the people care, the more the rock art will be protected.”

David Fariña, a Solar Map Project member from Asunción, Paraguay, takes stunning photographs of the tribe and rock art. Medium-resolution versions of his photographs are made available to the public via Wikimedia Commons.

Because these are free to use, Paraguayan newspapers have started including them in articles.

The organization is not a formal nonprofit. Using the Internet and portable,

18. “Guaraní Kaiowá: Name,” Instituto Socioambiental: Povos Indígenas no Brasil, accessed April 16, 2015, web.

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accessible technology, Solar Map Project has low overhead and accomplishes much with minimal resources. To send project members from the United States to Paraguay, the group successfully sought crowdfunding through Kickstarter, raising $15,175. “I am immensely thankful for our backers, as they are the reason this project was made,” says Frank.

Later, through Kickstarter, SMP raised funds for Leonido and Ña Silvia Arce to build a traditional Guaraní altar, or mba’e marangatu,18 and send it to the United States, where the organization hopes to donate it to an Indigenous museum.

Commissioning the altar, is one way the Solar Map Project promotes Pai Tavytera arts, including their sculptural tradition of carving local woods such as palo santo (Lignum vitae), and their textile tradition

Osmar Valenzuela (Pai Tavytera), from the community of Tavytera Okenda, currently a law student at Catholic University in Paraguay.

of twining caraguata fibers into cloth,

The response in Paraguay and abroad has

diverse communities. Their multifaceted

pouches, or bracelets. They hope to help

been overwhelmingly positive. “People

approach show what is possible through

create cultural exhibits in Paraguayan

love it. People think it’s a great project,”

grassroots community activism. The

museums in the future.

says Frank. “It’s helping to correct a lot of

Solar Map Project is fluid and adaptable,

wrong information that is out there.”

just as the Pai Tavytera people have been

A host of new media tools are making technologies cheaper and accessible, and the Solar Map Project has made the most of them. One of the more surprising hacks the organization has utilized is the Microsoft Kinect 3-D imager to record rock art images in three dimensions.19 The Kinect is a motion sensor for multiple gamers to play an Xbox video game.

Its depth sensor uses an infrared laser projector with other sensors to create 3-D images in any light conditions—perfect for recording petroglyphs.

Frank, his family, and their collabo-

throughout the centuries.

rators have an any-means-necessary

“In the back of my mind I think,” Frank

approach to advocating for Indigenous

says, “that maybe a hundred years from

peoples of Eastern Paraguay. They

now, perhaps a kid descended from the

hack new technologies, embrace social

Pai Tavytera will think, ‘Oh, I want to

media and crowdfunding as a means of

go back to my roots,’ and he’ll be able to

drawing more people into the project,

listen to our recordings of their songs.”

and speak different languages to reach

solarmapproject.com Facebook @AncientRockArt Instagram @solarmapproject

19. Clay Dillow, “Kinect Will Save the Indigenous Rock Art of a Paraguayan Tribe,” Popular Science, January 10, 2013, web.

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Walking With Our Sisters A Commemorative Art Installation

By Denise Neil-Binion

T

HE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES have made and worn moccasins for centuries. Artists have adorned them with porcupine quills, embroidered them with dyed moose hair, and embellished them with glass beads. But in the commemorative, traveling installation, Walking With Our Sisters, the artistic expression associated with moccasins serves a new purpose. Walking With Our Sisters uses vamps, the upper part of the moccasin— intentionally left unfinished—as a metaphor for the incomplete lives of hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women from Canada and the United States.

According to the website, the installation is meant to honor the lives of these women, “to acknowledge the grief and torment families of these women continue to suffer; and to raise awareness of this issue and create opportunity for broad community-based dialogue on the issue.”1 Although the project has been collaborative from its inception, it was Christi Belcourt (Métis) who first envisioned Walking with Our Sisters. Born in 1966, the Ontario artist comes from a family dedicated to fighting for Métis rights. While she has enjoyed a successful art career and has won awards for her beadwork-inspired paintings, Belcourt wanted to do more to address the tragedy of missing and murdered women in her country.

Moving from idea to action, the project developed through crowdsourcing and social media. In June 2012, when the call for contributions of moccasin vamps went out across the Internet, concerned artists in Canada, the United States, and abroad sprang into action. Organizers initially requested 600 pairs of vamps to be donated to the project, but to date, over 1,810 pairs of these moccasin tops and an additional 118 pairs of children’s vamps.

The violence against Indigenous women is a crisis.

“Throughout Canada’s history, Aboriginal people, particularly women, have been socially marginalized and undervalued, which continues to this day,” writes

ABOVE: Installation view of Walking With Our Sisters, 2014, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon. Photo: Alberto Cortes, acomultimedia. All images in this article courtesy of Walking With Our Sisters.

OPPOSITE: Walking With Our Sisters publicity poster

Maryanne Pearce, PhD, federal civil servant and scholar, who compiled a database of 824 missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. “Vulnerability and societal disinterest has placed Aboriginal women at higher risk for violence in all forms.”2 For decades, First Nations people

1. “The Project,” Walking With Our Sisters, accessed February 12, 2015, web.

2. Maryanne Pearce, “An Awkward Silence: Missing and Murdered Vulnerable Women and the Canadian Justice System” (PhD Thesis, University of Ottawa, 2013), 1.

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Chellie Goodleaf (Kahnawake Mohawk), raised-bead vamps.

in Canada have made a grassroots effort to find justice for the tragedy that has all too often been a low priority for the Canadian government at both the national and local levels.

The lives of these women have frequently been discounted by linking them to high-risk factors such as working in the sex trade or illicit drug use. Yet, studies have shown that the majority of missing and murdered women were in no way involved in these high-risk activities.3 By associating the women with these behaviors, Canadian authorities have painted an inaccurate picture of the tragedy and devalued the lives of these women. These women do matter, and their families deserve full cooperation of local and national authorities to solve these cases and bring some sense of closure. While Walking With Our Sisters remains dedicated to honoring the lives of Indigenous women as its primary objective, bringing awareness to the issue will hopefully bring forth an acknowledgment of the problem, open dialogue, and serve as an impetus to change the way these cases are handled in the future.

It is difficult to describe Walking With Our Sisters as an “exhibit.” Instead, it is a memorial, a commemoration.

“The whole thing is ceremony,” says Belcourt, “and that’s what is required in order to properly acknowledge and honor the women’s lives. We can’t do it by gawking; we can’t do it by seeing pictures; we can’t do it by staring from an outsider perspective. We must do it by bringing their lives and the acknowledgment of their lives within us and within our hearts.”4 Each space is smudged before the vamps are installed, and, as the project has progressed, it has strengthened through guidance and consultation with tribal elders. For Belcourt, the process of bringing the installation to the public has sharpened her awareness of the incredible resilience of Indigenous women and how they have endured centuries of abuse. “I think what this [project] is doing,” Belcourt explains, “is acknowledging the last two, three, four hundred years of our colonial history and the abuse of indigenous women on a grand scale.”5

3. Maryanne Pearce, “An Awkward Silence: Missing and Murdered Vulnerable Women and the Canadian Justice System,” PhD Thesis, University of Ottawa, 2013).

4. Rebeka Tabobondung, “Interview with Métis Artist Christi Belcourt on Walking with Our Sisters,” video, 6:54, March 14, 2014, Muskrat Magazine, accessed December 6, 2014, web.

5. Ibid.

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Installation view of Walking With Our Sisters, 2014, Shingwauk Auditorium, Algoma University, Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario.

The inaugural installation of Walking With Our Sisters took place at the University of Alberta in October 2013. It has since traveled to seven communities across Canada, and the installation schedule indicates the commemoration is booked through 2019. Organizers have noted that visitor reception has been emotionally charged with responses ranging from “shock, joy, beauty, grief, amazement, wonder, and a profound sense of utter disbelief. Woven into all those conflicting feelings, however, is an undeniable sense of honor and love for the lost women and girls.”6 Walking With Our Sisters is not a passive exercise. Visitors remove their shoes and walk along paths lined with the moccasin vamps, “enacting a ritual journey of solidarity with the women and girls who are being remembered.”7 The experience is powerful. The display of the vamps has had a “stunning impact on those who attend and see for the first time the magnitude of loss that has happened and continues to happen—unabated and unaddressed by this country [Canada],” says Tanya Kappo (Sturgeon Lake Cree),8 organizer of Walking With Our Sisters and the Idle No More movement.

The vamps are as varied as moccasins made by Native people throughout the United States and Canada. Contributing artists use glass beads, porcupine quills, paint, moose hair, silk embroidery floss, mother-of-pearl buttons, felted wool, fish scales, and even birch bark, and every design is unique—like the lives of each woman they represent. Some artists address marginalization of crimes against Indigenous women, as seen in a pair of vamps beaded by Teresa Burrows (Anglo-Canadian). Her beadwork alludes to the name tags worn by conference attendees, but the message is poignant. The toe of the vamp depicts a haunting pair of woman’s eyes that engage the viewer, while a generic name tag below reads, “Hello My Name Is-Who Cares.”

This is a harsh reminder of the many lives disregarded by the authorities and others. Some vamps include a personal message such as those beaded by Bridget Gloade (Mi’kmaq), whose work is done in memory of Tanya Jean Brooks.

Other vamps have designs closely associated with the artist’s tribal affiliation, including floral depictions and the natural world, geometric patterns, pictorials, and formline designs.

6. Tanya Kappo in email interview with the author, December 7, 2014.

7. Janet C. Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

8. Tanya Kappo in email interview with the author, December 7, 2014.

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Arlene Piddington, a participating artist from Idaho, conveys the power of women in her beadwork. Each vamp includes a pictorial representation of Native women and children holding hands in solidarity of their support of each other, a reminder that all lives of Indigenous women matter.

Beadworkers, Native and non-Native, are embracing in this community project. Organizers rely on volunteers to coordinate this effort. Challenges are many, since Walking With Our Sisters is “alive in that it continues to transform as it travels across the country,” says Kappo. “It is never the same, nor does it ever face the same challenges, in any community it visits or is planning to visit.”9 Beyond the challenges of transporting art and managing volunteers, organizers have to fit the installation to each location. They consider each space’s shape and size and also how they can honor the traditions and customs of the tribal communities of the area by working in close consultation with local elders at each site. They accomplish this by working in close consultation with local elders at each site.

Walking With Our Sisters strives to give voice to the women whose lives have been tragically cut short. The project also strives to provide solace to the families whose lives 9. Tanya Kappo in email interview with the author, December 7, 2014.

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ABOVE: Krista LaBoucane (Métis), beaded vamps.

BELOW: Installation view of Walking With Our Sisters, 2014, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Photo: Alberto Cortes, acomultimedia.

have been devastated by loss that is magnified by the unanswered questions of unresolved murders. In addition to memorializing the women who are honored through this installation, Belcourt hopes “it will give people a vocabulary and empower people to begin to talk about it, because it

Walking With Our Sisters is “alive in that it continues to transform as it travels across the country. It is never the same . . . ” says Tanya Kappo.

TOP: Jackie Traverse (Lake St. Martin Ojibway), beaded vamps.

BOTTOM: Theresa Burrows, beaded vamps with pigment on cloth.

is such a difficult subject to speak about. Obviously the ultimate goal would be to make it stop. Our women have to stop being murdered, period. How do we do that? I don’t know. The goal of honoring is being done here.

Who knows what the next steps will be.”10 After Walking With Our Sisters concludes its showing at Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon, the installation will make its American debut at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, from April 23 to June 2, 2015.

Walking With Our Sisters does not receive any government or industry funding and relies solely on donations.

TOP: Bridget Gloade (Mi’kmaq), beaded vamps.

BOTTOM: Simon Brascoupé (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin-Haudenosaunee), birchbark-biting vamps.

Through the efforts of thousands, the women’s lives are remembered. As the show’s organizers state, “They are sisters, mothers, aunties, daughters, cousins, grandmothers, wives, and partners. They have been cared for, they have been loved, they are missing and they are not forgotten.”11 For a full schedule and more information, visit the Walking With Our Sisters website. A final closing ceremony is scheduled to take place September 2019 in Batoche, Saskatchewan.

walkingwithoursisters.ca

10. Rebeka Tabobondung, “Interview with Métis Artist Christi Belcourt on Walking with Our Sister,” Muskrat Magazine, video, 6:54, March 14, 2014, web.

11. “About,” Walking With Our Sisters, accessed September 10, 2014, web.

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PROFILE

Kiowa-Comanche Jeweler and Painter

Keri Ataumbi

K

ERI ATAUMBI’S LIFE took a hairpin turn the night she skipped a village cockfight in Bali—the hot entertainment ticket closing out a festival—and wandered the deserted market instead.

Aeron chair in her sunlit, double-height studio, that looks out on the Cerrillos Hills. Her brown eyes are focused on setting a rough-cut, black diamond into a cast bracelet textured with feathers.

“The more you do something, the better you get. Right?”

Enticed by a melodic “clink-clinking” noise, almost like a flute, she wound her way around a building and into a small dirt courtyard, where she found a man in a sarong hammering on an anvil.

Jed Foutz, owner of Shiprock Santa Fe, has been selling Ataumbi’s work longer than anyone. From the first day his gallery opened in 2006, he put her jewelry alongside important historic Native jewelry and modern masters like Charles Loloma (Hopi) and Kenneth Begay (Navajo). Though Ataumbi was only three years into her reengineered career, Foutz was already impressed with her “courage and curiosity.”

“What are you doing?” she asked. The man was making a necklace to sell when the shops reopened, same as he did most days. “Cool,” she said, and sat down.

Back home in Santa Fe, Ataumbi was a rising painter with a recent solo show of oils—27 abstract riffs on a buffalo robe—at a respected Canyon Road gallery. Three months of island hopping was meant to make or break a stalled romance, then she’d get back to her easel and the career she’d first trained for at the Rhode Island School of Design.

As she watched the man create an intricate silver chain with his rather crude tools, something deep and powerful reached back to her childhood and blinked on.

“I want to learn to do that,” she said.

“Will you teach me?”

Two weeks later, the apprentice had made her first necklace on the man’s anvil, a herringbone chain she formed with little more than a pair of pliers and a gas torch.

How she’d managed to grow up in her Kiowa-Comanche mother’s trading post, with Native turquoise in her ears, and not connect with jewelry making until she was a bored American tourist in Bali is a mystery. But the experience 4 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

By Michele Cook

Keri Ataumbi. Photo: John Running.

was so thrilling that over the next year, she put the money she earned from her paintings—and from the landscaping job she kept to pay the bills—into jewelry courses at Santa Fe Community College.

Today, twelve years on, the 43-yearold Santa Fe resident is a full-time, award-winning designer of technically sophisticated, highly narrative metalwork she calls “wearable art.”

Working with semiprecious stones and ethically sourced diamonds, her sculptural creations are recognized

by Native and non-Native museums, publications, and collectors. This past spring, with her sister, the prodigious bead artist Teri Greeves, Keri was chosen as the 2015 Living Treasure for the Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival, an annual Santa Fe event benefiting the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

“Belief and fortitude—I think that’s the secret,” says Ataumbi. She sits in an

“The concepts were there from the start, even if technically she didn’t yet have a way to get there,” he says.

A showcase in the gallery’s main room features a series of gold and silver, archery-themed necklaces, earrings, and belt buckles that Ataumbi calls In the Woods. Last year she was doing European-inspired intaglio rings with reverse-carved Native themes on moonstone, shell, and carnelian.

“I love old Greek jewelry, Italian jewelry, Tudor jewelry,” Ataumbi says. “With the intaglios, I wanted to use Native American iconography— in-your-face Native American iconography—so lots of dancers, buffalo, Santo Domingo pots.”

Says Foutz: “A lot of artists become known for something, and that’s where they stay, but Keri’s always exploring new themes and techniques. She’s a uniquely brave artist that way.”

Ataumbi’s latest creative leap involves a collaboration of labor-intensive

Butterfly Collar, 2008, oxidized sterling silver, 24-karat keum-boo.1 Photo: David Nufer.

portraiture rings and pendants with renowned bead artist Jamie Okuma (Luiseño-Shoshone-Bannock). Calling their bold, pop-art influenced series Iconic Perceptions, the women are choosing well-known faces and images from history, media, and the arts, and reimagining these in an edgy Native style.

Their debut effort, a queenly, gemloaded homage to Pocahontas (Virginia Algonquian, ca. 1595–1617), won the Santa Fe Indian Market special award sponsored by Blue Rain Gallery in 2014.

The 18-karat gold necklace, ring, and earring set were strung with a mix of diamonds, pearls, and wampum shell by Ataumbi, and centered with meticulous, micro-beaded portraits on buckskin of

the historical Pocahontas by Okuma.

It was purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and installed in the museum’s permanent collection with a placard that reads, in part, “Yes, this is contemporary Native American art!”

“To be honest, jewelry isn’t part of our collection plan, but it was love at first sight,” says Jill Ahlberg Yohe, the assistant curator of Native American art. She lined up at five in the morning on opening day to claim the set with a funding gift from the W. Duncan and Nivin MacMillan Foundation.

Noting that two other museums have asked to take the set on loan since it went on display in February, Yohe says it really needs to be seen in person

to appreciate the “showmanship” and “over-the-top portraiture” that Ataumbi and Okuma were able to achieve.

“It blends all of the things that makes for great contemporary art: mastery of technique, mastery of creativity, and a deep reflectiveness by the artists of Native American imagery—taking someone who has a hold on us, and reclaiming her in their own way.”

Okuma, a mother of two who has won Best in Show at SWAIA’s Indian Market three times, says she’d been collecting Ataumbi’s work for years, and was thrilled when, during a trade of artwork at the 2013 market, Ataumbi blurted, “We should make something together.”

1. Keum-boo is an ancient, Korean gilding technique in which sheets of gold foil are attached to silver by applying heat and pressure.

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PROFILE

Busy lives and distant homes kept them from following up on the idea immediately. But six months later, meeting up again at another art show, they went out to dinner and were soon designing their first project on a cocktail napkin. The impetus was to find something that might reflect the duality of their lives. Both women are daughters of Native women and non-Native men, both grew up on reservations but embrace very modern lifestyles, and both share a love for Native and European fashion. Okuma is known for beading on the high-end, Christian Louboutin shoes she wears, and Ataumbi often has tied around her neck one of the vintage silk Hermès scarves she collects.

Ataumbi recalls: “Jamie said, ‘Let’s do something with Pocahontas, because Pocahontas is like you and me; she’s a woman of both worlds.’ I said, ‘That’s great, let’s do it.’ ” Ataumbi digitally searched the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for images of Pocahontas in Native dress and the European clothing she later adopted.

Okuma beaded two of the portraits Ataumbi researched on opposing sides of the grand, domed ring.

“We want people to say, ‘Hey, these Indian chicks chose to do Pocahontas, to bring up the conversation,’ ” Okuma says, “about the real life of the Native woman who married a Virginia tobacco farmer. She was a helluva lady.”

Ataumbi, who hand-carried the set on a flight to Minneapolis, feels strongly that contemporary artists have a role to play in the “cultural conversation” initiated by museums. “I think there’s a movement in museums going on right now where they’re getting contemporary artists to interact with historical pieces and installations, so there’s a bridge between us and them.”

The Pocahontas set is a means of combating stereotypes and misperceptions through beauty, Ataumbi says, adding, “I want the little girl who 4 6 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa-Comanche) and Jamie Okuma (Luiseño-Shoshone-Bannock), Iconic Perceptions: For the Love of Art, 2015, ring with 9.14-carat diamonds, 22-karat gold, sterling silver, 20° and 14° glass beads, and braintanned buckskin. Photo: Cameron Linton.

was asking for a Pocahontas Disney Halloween costume to walk through the museum and say, ‘Wait a minute, she was actually a human being? And she had an actual voice, a serious voice; she wasn’t an animated character. She was a human being like me, and I have the capacity to do something or be something or make a difference, too. Maybe that could be me in four hundred years.’ ” Ataumbi and Okuma don’t know how long they’ll continue the Icons collaboration, but they are enjoying the process of choosing the subject matter and then living with the work for several months each—first as Okuma beads a portrait, then as Ataumbi frames the portrait in metalwork and gemstones.

Okuma says they design their parts separately, with minimal input from the other, “because we completely trust each other’s judgment.”

Most recently, they’ve made a spot-on, platinum portrait ring of Marilyn Monroe and a cast silver cuff with 25 rough-cut, black diamonds built around a glitzy skull.

The cuff is inspired by the human skull that British artist Damien Hirst studded with diamonds in his 2007 piece, For The Love Of God, and sold for a reported $100 million. Either of the two women’s pieces would seem at home in the pages of Vogue, or on the person of pretty much any one-named, hip hop artist.

“Absolute gambles,” Ataumbi calls them.

There’s both an intensity and a quiet seriousness about Ataumbi, who says she always wanted to be an artist, except for a brief time around the age of nine “when I was going to become a mortician, because I wanted to understand anatomy.”

She credits her pursuit of an art career to three people: her art-selling mother Jeri

KERI ATAUMBI

Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa-Comanche) and Jamie Okuma (Luiseño-Shoshone-Bannock), Iconic Perceptions: Bombshell, 2015, platinum, sterling silver, brilliantcut diamonds, 22° and 24° glass beads, and braintanned buckskin. Photo: Cameron Linton.

Ah-be-hill (Kiowa-Comanche); her artmaking father, Italian-American bronze sculptor Richard Greeves; and her high school teacher Todd Bartel. Bartel was her art instructor when she quit her mother’s rigorous homeschooling and went off on her own to study at Cambridge School of Weston, a Bostonarea prep school. Bartel, a collage artist, still teaches there.

“Thank God for those teachers,” says Ataumbi, “the people who give you the time of day.”

While Ataumbi says she grew up as a rifle-shooting tomboy, both she and sister Teri had turquoise studs in their ears from infancy because “our mother believed her daughters were to be adorned.”

They were brought up on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming in a rambling house fronted by their

mother’s trading post, with their father’s studio out back. Ah-be-hill sold not only historic and contemporary Native arts and crafts, but also everything artists needed to make their merchandise.

Ataumbi says the sisters used the trading post “like our playground.”

“It was a really interesting, curated store,” she remembers. “At the end of the counter, my mother had this huge wall of materials stocked with anything the makers might need to buy—beads, hides, wool, thread, beeswax, studs, leather, whatever—all that stuff was there. She gave my sister and me permission to access any of it. We had this fantastic cache of materials, and we were also constantly seeing what other people were making.”

Ah-be-hill died at her Santa Fe home in March at the age of 80. She had been the longtime chairwoman of Santa Fe Indian Market’s annual Native American

Clothing Contest and a past volunteer at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

Ataumbi says her father was not so generous with his workspace, preferring solitude to children underfoot, but he kept an extensive library of art books, and Ataumbi, a class shy of an art history degree, read her way through much of it. She remembers she and her sister posing for a couple of her father’s pieces before her parents separated. While not a fan of his detailed depictions of Native Americans, often in warrior poses, she respects his discipline and achievements.

In 2006, the Autry National Center in Los Angeles exhibited 29 of his bronzes in a series entitled Lewis and Clark Among the Indians: Sculptures by Richard V. Greeves, and presented him with a lifetime achievement award.

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herself as a Native American artist has been a complex, if ultimately resolved concern. When she was 26, she legally changed her surname from Greeves to Ataumbi to honor a favorite Kiowa grandmother. When she started making jewelry, she wasn’t interested in using turquoise stones because of its longstanding associations with traditional Southwest Native jewelry.

About a year after she started classes, her sister, already an acclaimed bead worker, encouraged her to get a booth at a Native American art show, but Ataumbi feared being “pigeon-holed.”

“I’m like, I can’t do that; I’m not going to sell my Indian-ness,” Ataumbi recalls.

“And Teri basically gave me a talking-to and offered to share a booth with me, which is a big deal because you know, our booths are like little tiny card tables, and she offered to share hers with me at both Indian Market and the Heard Market. So I applied to get into both shows, and I got into both, but my first show was terrible. I sold two pieces: to my cousin and my mom.”

After that experience, she decided to worry less about where she sold and just focus on making better jewelry.

“What I’d made was fairly simple,” she acknowledges with a grin.

Her breakthrough piece came two years later: a double-sided silver belt she spent months constructing to look like an ant colony. The ambitious piece, with 68 chocolate-diamond ants, marked her first award at Santa Fe Indian Market and sold immediately.

Interior Study, 2013, watercolor on paper. Photo: Keri Ataumbi.

one of her contemporaries, such as Maria Samora (Taos Pueblo). She also collects mid-20th-century Zuni petit point for its beauty and technical proficiency.

“It was the first time I could look into the future and say, ‘Hey, I can pay my mortgage for a couple months out. I can actually get baby greens with my rice and beans,’ ” Ataumbi says. “It was a huge validation.”

“Here’s how I see it,” she says. “I’m a Kiowa woman, I’m a Kiowa-Italian woman, I’m a middle-aged wife.

I’m an American jeweler. Identity is multifaceted, right?”

Today, she is grateful for the opportunity to sell at Native markets.

She’s comfortable mixing high-grade turquoise with her beloved diamonds and gemstones. Most days she wears a piece of her own jewelry, or something from

“I feel strongly about my Native identity, but I also don’t feel like I have to wave a big red flag and say I’m a Native artist. I don’t necessarily feel I’m selling my Indian-ness, but I’m also not rejecting my Indian-ness.”

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Spending long days in the studio built for her by her contractor husband Joel Muller (the boyfriend of the once-stalled romance), Ataumbi says her design inspirations come directly from the “literalness of my world.”

“I took up archery, so recently I’ve been making a lot of arrows. I was gardening a lot, so I was making a lot of bugs. I got interested in the ocean because my husband likes to sail, so I was making turtles and hermit crabs and little octopi.

We’ve got a lot of tarantulas out here, so I made a lot of spiders.”

And so it follows that this week, after spotting a nest in a porch eave, then

KERI ATAUMBI

Ant Belt, 2007, double-sided belt made from reticulated, fine silver, 24-karat gold, chocolate diamonds, black star sapphire, onyx, and pyrope garnets.

Photo: Keri Ataumbi.

holding her iPhone overhead for a blind photo and catching the moment a chick pierced its shell, she’s begun sketching new pieces involving birds.

Ataumbi also enjoys doing custom work, especially wedding rings. She likes the act of creating with another person or a couple. In a recent collaboration with a Navajo academic in Connecticut and her “computer geek fiancé,” she cast gold bands from an oak branch found on her property.

She “remakes” her own wedding ring every couple of years and currently wears a stack of etched gold bands, one of them inspired by a Tlingit-made ring she spotted on a friend.

At her side as Ataumbi works are the couple’s three rescue dogs. Two are lanky mixed breeds she and her husband found starving near the couple’s home.

And in view outside a window is their much-used tipi. In the summer, she breaks from her jeweler’s bench to tend a large vegetable garden, and year round she runs at least 20 miles a week in the “magical hills” nearby. She sketches new jewelry designs in her head as she gets a rush passing by old turquoise mines that, like a timeline, reveal centuries of collecting.

“You can see where they were pecking away with stone tools, and then you can see where they started using iron tools,

and then you can see where they were using dynamite,” she says. “After it rains, you can actually see flecks of turquoise.”

As for her own timeline, at least as a jeweler, she’ll always look back fondly on Bali and that first necklace made with her teacher’s “archaic” tools. But what’s got her jazzed in the present is her first high-tech, laser welder.

“It’s going to open up a lot of design possibilities for me,” she says, as she sets another diamond in her latest bracelet. “The hardest piece is always the next piece.”

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Quechua Textile Artist

Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez

By Staci Golar learned to spin and weave wool while also tending to sheep.

She first practiced on small strips called jakima. The young artist learned how to create designs and patterns, some of which “come to you in dreams,” some that honor Pachamama (Mother Earth), and still others that are community-derived symbols revealing everything from identity to status.

The more Nilda worked, the more her love for the art form grew, and the more she understood how integral weaving is to individual self-expression, community identity, and personal worth in the Indigenous communities of Peru. “The amount of textiles one can produce, as well as the quality, complexity, and beauty of these textiles, create a reputation for the weavers, their family, and the community,” she says.1 However, as a teenager she noticed fewer people in the villages were learning how to weave as more and more left to take jobs in larger cities. In the 1980s and ’90s, Peru also suffered the consequences of a bloody civil war caused by conflict with communist rebels known as the Shining Path, sending tourism and textile production into a sharp decline. Nilda began to worry that the centuries-old techniques contained in this handmade work, as well as the rich, cultural wisdom passed down with it, would be lost forever.

Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez. Photo: Judith Cooper Haden. Image courtesy of the International Folk Art Alliance.

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FTER YOU HEAR HER STORY, it makes sense that master weaver Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez was born in the same place as the rainbow: the village of Chinchero, Peru. In the southeastern part of the country, with astounding views of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Chinchero is located on a pre-Columbian road leading directly to Machu Picchu. Dubbed the birthplace of the rainbow by its original inhabitants, Chinchero is a community steeped in thousand-year-old traditions, including those of the technically complex and aesthetically exquisite Cusqueño textiles.

Nilda first began weaving when she was just six years old. Like many in Chinchero and the other communities near Cusco, she

In a place where few women complete secondary school, Nilda used her passion for weaving, the love she felt for her community, and a certain sense of resolve as motivation, and she became the first person—male or female—from her village to attend college. She had been the only girl in a class of 30 boys in secondary school, and a merit-based scholarship that should have been awarded to her was instead given to a boy.

Nilda always took her spindle with her to practice making yarn, and, as she says, to meditate. “Spinning is an activity that doesn’t require physical challenges; it is very smooth, and kind of addictive.” A Native speaker of Quechua and Spanish, she studied first in Cusco, and then later in the United States to learn more about textile history and hone her English language skills. She returned to Peru to obtain a graduate degree in a tourism program, ultimately returning to Chinchero to make her lifelong dream of preserving pre-Columbian weaving traditions a reality.

In 1996, Nilda, who had long since earned the title of weaving expert, received the new title of director of the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco (Center for Traditional

1. Unless otherwise noted, quotes attributed to Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez throughout this article are from the author’s email interviews and correspondence with her in January 2015.

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Delia Sallo Huaman (Quechua), who works at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco, demonstrates weaving on a back strap loom. Photo: Judith Cooper Haden. Image courtesy of the International Folk Art Alliance.

Textiles of Cusco, or CTTC), a nonprofit organization formed to aid in the preservation and revival of Andean textiles. The official mission of the center is to recapture the history of, spread information about, and stimulate the production of traditional textiles, as well as provide support and assistance to the communities of weavers working with the center. Today, almost 20 years after its founding, the CTTC supports nearly 650 weavers in the Cusco-area communities of Accha Alta, Acopia, Chahuaytire, Chinchero, Chumbivilcas, Mahuaypampa, Patabamba, Pitumarca, Santa Cruz de Sallac, and Santo Tomas.

The CTTC uses a community-based, master-apprentice model to engage both old and new weavers. Master weavers teach their techniques and share their

knowledge with younger weavers of the village—mostly women. Each community “establishes an association and their own bylaws, and CTTC assists them with getting to this stage,” Nilda says.

The center then finds markets for the textiles, providing improved livelihood and living conditions for weavers and newfound impetus for the practices to continue.

Nilda and the CTTC encourage weavers to wear the clothing unique to their communities, like the lliklla (blanket, worn like a shawl), poncho, and chumpi (girdle belt). Of course, wearing and taking pride in one’s handwoven clothing provides yet another purpose for the textile work to continue. As with many Indigenous populations around the world, the wearing of Native

clothing started to decline due to things like school uniform requirements for children, outsider influences, and general discrimination toward those who wore culturally specific clothing. “I heard a lot of criticism for encouraging women to wear traditional clothing,” Nilda explains, “that what I was doing seemed to be going backwards in our history because traditional clothes were used by women without education, and educated people should change. Many women and girls received strong criticism, but we have already overcome that complex phase of unwarranted embarrassment.”2 As director of the center, Nilda collects exceptional examples of Cusqueño weaving to be housed in the CTTC’s small museum, where they can be researched and referenced by scholars

2. Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez, Textile Traditions of Chinchero: A Living Heritage (Lovelace, CO: Thrums, 2012), 145.

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Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez (center) and two fellow weavers from the Center for Traditional Textiles in Cusco sell their Cusqueñan weavings at the International Folk Art Market | Santa Fe. Photo: Jane Bernard Photography.

and weavers. Because of community-based research by the center, Nilda has made incredible discoveries along the way, such as an especially rare weaving technique believed to have disappeared.

Elder weavers of Pitumarca in southeastern Peru still use this technique, called ticlla. Believed to date from before 500 CE, it is rarely seen today. Using a discontinuous warp technique that involves changing the colors of the warp threads by interlocking them during the warping process, it is now being taught to a new generation of weavers in the community.

been abandoned almost completely. In the mid-1990s, the center reintroduced natural dye techniques to many weavers.

“It is healthier for us and the environment to use natural dyes, even though the work is much more time consuming and expensive compared with chemical dyes,” Nilda states. “They are colorfast, which is most important to the weavers, and they are more earthy colors.”

Another concern of Nilda’s was the weavers’ movement away from natural dyes to synthetic, or aniline, dyes. In Cusco, the practice of natural dyeing had

Achieving our current colors and methods of natural dyeing has taken many years of research, workshop participation, correspondence with natural dye experts

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Nilda writes about the challenges and experimentation involved in bringing back dyeing processes that were nearly lost, especially when they depend upon organic materials specific to a region:

outside the country, and many interviews with elders from the communities who salvaged the names and regional origin of the dyes, as well as a few secrets to obtain colors. Many times, I have practiced and experimented with techniques, sometimes to no avail due to misinformation.

The process of obtaining colors with natural dyes takes longer than it does with aniline dyes, especially for some colors made with lichens; and indigo blue takes weeks because it is dyed with a method of fermentation. The natural dyes come from the valleys and the jungle regions.

Cochineal is gathered in the valleys, while awaypili, mot’e-mot’e, k’ak’a sunqua, and k’uchu come from the jungle. In Chinchero, we find chillka, qollas, ch’ecchi and tayanka among others …

NILDA CALLAÑAUPA ALVAREZ

and more in her three books. Publishing is another tool in her arsenal to document, preserve, and share the beauty of her community’s textile traditions.

She wrote Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories (Thrums, 2013) and Textile Traditions of Chinchero: A Living Heritage (Thrums, 2012). She is the co-author of yet another book, Faces of Tradition: Weaving Elders of the Andes (Thrums, 2013). Because these are written from her perspective as a lifelong community member, they include insights on the cosmological influences on weaving, the utilitarian or ceremonial use of the woven objects, and other pieces of information that unmistakably illustrate how weaving is inseparable from daily life, and vice versa. Many of these are nuances an outsider to the villages would most certainly miss.

The books painstakingly document weaving processes, designs, and techniques, as well as the community celebrations, customs, and rituals wherein these textiles are used. Photographs illustrate the variety of woven items from various communities and highlight objects rarely being made at this time. Each book is written in both English and Spanish and includes a Quechua glossary of terms.

Ponchos hand-dyed and hand-woven by members of the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco, 2010. Image courtesy of the CTTC.

What we weavers like most about natural dyes is that the colors are permanent; they do not run or fade when washed like the colors obtained with aniline and other artificial dyes … the disadvantage is that many dye sources do not reproduce quickly, such as the lichens that grow in high altitude, and the ch’api—a dye root that could disappear if not replanted. The time and cost factor of natural dyeing are

also higher than that of aniline dyeing.

Many questions arise that require further professional research about the chemical composition of natural dyes, the toxicity factor of the dyes, the over-harvesting and extinction of natural dye plant species.

Are the methods we practice now similar to those practiced by the Inca of the past?3 Nilda explores these kinds of questions

Nilda has become a world traveler in order to disseminate all of this knowledge. Through her travels, she spreads appreciation for Andean weaving and even helps provide best practices for art cooperatives all over the globe. Always, she thanks her husband and two sons for supporting her in these endeavors, as she is often gone for weeks at a time.

Her résumé includes lectures, presentations, and workshops at Harvard University, Textile Museum, Latin American Studies Program of Cornell University, University of Vermont, Peabody Essex Museum, Museum of Textiles in Toronto, Centre for International Studies at the University College of Cape Breton, and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—to name a few. She regularly participates in the International

3. Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez, Textile Traditions of Chinchero: A Living Heritage (Lovelace, CO: Thrums, 2012), 74–75.

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Folk Art Market | Santa Fe. The Alliance for Artisan Enterprise gave her the Artisan Hero award in 2014. International scholars of Quechua textiles and culture have bestowed numerous accolades upon her as well.

“What is most striking to me about Nilda is her ability to couple a guiding vision with flexibility of process for meeting her goals,” says Mary Littrell, author of Artisans and Fair Trade: Crafting Development and professor emerita at Colorado State University. “She has never wavered in her mission to revive the highest quality Andean weaving.

Over time CTTC has evolved to engage young and old in the process of creating beautiful textiles. As founding members’ eyesight failed for weaving, she organized an elders’ group whose members could still spin high-quality yarns. As young girls became interested, she encouraged weekend gatherings to learn weaving skills. CTTC’s organizational sustainability owes much to Nilda’s creativity in meeting her goals while tending closely to the evolving needs of emerging and experienced weavers.”4 Wade Davis, an anthropologist, author, photographer, and National Geographic explorer wrote, “Simply put, Nilda is one of the most remarkable individuals I have known. She is a woman who transcends culture, who exists out of time and space, an artist and scholar of immense vision and achievement. But what makes her truly great is her integrity, the fact that despite any number of alluring temptations, she has remained utterly grounded in a spirit of place, loyal to community and landscape. More than any other, this trait links her to the distant past—to the archaic memory and currents of ritual that have fundamentally informed her life.”5 Nilda eloquently expands on that thought: During my university studies, I had an opportunity to get a grant to travel to California to study the textile history of different parts of the world and experiment with different looms and clothing

Blankets and mantas hand-dyed and hand-woven by members of the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco, 2010. Image courtesy of the CTTC.

styles. I lived in Berkeley for six months, and when I was back home, I was torn, not just between the worlds of Chinchero and Cusco, but now between the world of North America as well. They were all so different, and they all made some claim on me. I remember sitting in my family’s

courtyard in Chinchero and feeling very confused. How could I be all of these different people? What path should I choose? … In the end, it was weaving that held my life together. I realized that I could be who I was: a weaver.6

4. Mary Littrell, email message to author, February 16, 2015.

5. Wade Davis, introduction to Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories, by Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez (Lovelace, CO: Thrums, 2013), 7.

6. Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez, Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories (Lovelace, CO: Thrums, 2013), 6.

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NILDA CALLAÑAUPA ALVAREZ

Weavers at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco dye yarn using natural dyes. Because of Nilda’s important work, the natural dyeing processes that had almost disappeared entirely have returned to the region. Image courtesy of the CTTC.

When asked about her proudest accomplishment so far, Nilda replies, “Seeing the textiles produced by the weavers that show how talented they are, and also, to see how wonderfully the textiles are coming out.” She notes that the cloth embodies the spirit, skill, and personal history of each weaver and “ties together with an endless thread the emotional life of my people.”7 To an outsider looking in, her greatest accomplishment might also be her tireless work to successfully revitalize these art forms, and the snowball effect it has had on her community. She empowers women through improved livelihoods by reaching back to what sustained all of these villages in the first place.

National Geographic Today states, “The money returned to each weaver [because

of the CTTC] is changing the tapestry of family economics in some of these villages. These women are now the main economical support of their family.”

Though the center takes care of much of the administrative work involved with sales, each woman selling a piece is required to conduct the negotiation herself. “The weaving in Chinchero isn’t just a quaint tradition,” the article goes on to say. “It’s a way to survive, and a way to string together the older and younger generations of women.”8 As one might suspect, Nilda is not yet satisfied and has more goals for the weavers she helps to support and for the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco. When asked about what she hopes to still accomplish, she succinctly

replies, “To have a much bigger center for weavers that is connected with a museum.” And knowing Nilda, she will make it happen. Like a rainbow spreading its splendid colors across the horizon, she will continue to share the beauty and stories of Peruvian Quechua weaving with whomever she meets, inspiring awe in those who learn more about her personal story, and the incredible art traditions of her people.

Nilda and her fellow artists at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco will participate in the International Folk Art Market | Santa Fe, in New Mexico from July 10 to 12, 2015.

textilescusco.org folkartalliance.org

7. Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez, Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories (Lovelace, CO: Thrums, 2013), 7.

8. Simone Swink, “Inca Traditions Pay Off for Peruvian Weavers,” National Geographic Today, April 30, 2002, web.

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Tlingit-Unangax Interdisciplinary Artist

Nicholas Galanin

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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ORN IN SITKA, ALASKA, Nicholas Galanin locates new visual languages by drawing from historical Indigenous iconography. Galanin’s early experiences in the studio with his great-grandfather the Reverend George Benson, a wood sculptor, and his father Dave Galanin, a silversmith and metal sculptor, would influence Galanin’s later work. He first trained at London Guildhall University, 2000–03, where he received a BFA with honors in jewelry design and silversmithing, and later earned an MFA in Indigenous visual arts at New Zealand’s Massey University.

Following his coursework, Galanin returned to Sitka to immerse himself in an art-making practice that straddles “customary” work, as he calls it, and contemporary art. In doing so, Galanin remains free to explore the objectmaking practices of his people and its history, while also participating in the frenetic macrocosm of the art world today. Few artists have been so successful in merging the historical with the now, and video works such as Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan (2008) and Who We Are (2006) provide strong examples.

Recently, Galanin has noticeably shifted focus back to sculptural works, having made I Dreamt I Could Fly (2013), an amalgam of 60 porcelain arrows in flight, and Indian Children’s Bracelet (2014), a pair of hard-engraved, iron handcuffs. What these works show is a maturing artist taking aim at the materials that oppressed (or challenged oppression of ) Indigenous peoples by recontextualizing them.

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Nicholas Galanin. All images courtesy of the artist.

colliding the customary with the contemporary.

Music has long been a passion for Galanin, and he continues to move fluidly between songwriting and visual art with ease. Going by the pseudonym Silver Jackson, Galanin released the album Starry Skies Opened Eyes last year. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation hails the album as one of the top ten Indigenous music picks for 2014 and describes it as “confusing, alluring and addictive … a soundscape for the senses and an escape from reality.”

The following interview with Galanin was completed in March 2015. Here he discusses his key influences, recent projects, and the uses of his Indigenous identity in contemporary art practice. This, in anticipation of solo exhibitions at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver in September and

the Anchorage Art Museum in 2016, in addition to showing work in Japan, New York City, Boston, and Arizona.

To begin, I’d like to cite the Bernard Pivot’s questionnaire made famous by James Lipton: “What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?”

My Indigenous land and the relationship we have maintained with it—the movement of its seasons, our subsistence and survival on this land.

It is powerful and healing to be out on this land, out on the sea. Truth is a necessity and always motivating. When we reveal the lies that surround our nation’s history and expose the truths, we collectively progress. Sound—I am in love, even obsessed with sound; no other medium has ever provided me with this feeling of freedom to express. Light, I notice how deeply affected I am by light. The late

NICHOLAS GALANIN

Indian Children’s Bracelet, 2014, hand-engraved iron, 3 × 8 × 0.5 in.1

afternoon light that washes through the trees while on a forest run will fill a heart with gratitude and presence.

Knowledge, the conversations and knowledge shared by our elders and creative artists fuels the spirit. When given the opportunity to gather with artists, I always leave inspired, moved, and grateful to see how many wonderful creatives are out continually contributing toward progress. My children, never have I felt love like I have for them.

In a previous issue of First American Art Magazine, I had the opportunity to write about your video work Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan. In it, you combined a video of David Elsewhere popping and locking to this funky, pulsating electronic music. In the other video Dan Littlefield (Tlingit) performs a

traditional Tlingit dance in front of a massive screen. I never had the opportunity to ask you this until now, but I’ve always been curious: How did this work come about?

and by (relatively) anonymous viewers on YouTube, who charge it with being “disrespectful” of tradition in some way. How would you respond to this?

I was in New Zealand doing my master’s degree and went out to a club with some friends one evening.

It was an underground spot with a DJ doing his thing—the dancers were in a trance, almost standing in rows moving to the sound but not with each other. The idea for the work hit me here. I was probably interested in our relationship to sound throughout time.

All too often we create barriers for digestion, barriers that allow for easier consumption. Artists have the ability to move freely through these false walls, if we allow ourselves to.

Nah, my best response is to continue to create new works that push perception. I have no problem discussing my works—especially with my background in teaching customary forms. The understanding is grounded in my culture’s ancient, visual language. I would not leap from a platform if it were not truly a firm foundation to leap from. The conservative aspect of our culture is understandable. In very recent times, we had been torn from so many aspects of our being: language, ceremony, dance, land, family, song, visual language, etc., etc. This is genocide.

This is still going on today. When

Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan has been the focus of criticism both by elders

1. These are reminiscent of an historical pair of child’s handcuffs, used to restrain Native children being taken from their homes to boarding schools, in the collection of the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum, Lawrence, Kansas.

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The world will have nowhere to look but to our Indigenous leaders in restoring balance on this planet.

Get Comfortable, 2012, C-print, edition of 10, 32 × 44 in.

you steal these things, we will certainly hold tight to what we have now. Holding too tightly will also suffocate us.

Balance, movement, and growth are all necessary.

Absolutely. Why is it important to draw from Indigenous traditions/customs to produce contemporary art?

The foundation of Indigenous culture is important and relevant. In our customary knowledge, there is much to gain and learn. The world will have nowhere to look but to our Indigenous leaders in restoring balance on this planet.

My contemporary work is not separated so cleanly from the “tradition” of my cultural work. Our artists in the past provided gateways and a lens to other perspectives or worlds. The new work does the same but in new context, often with new audiences.

As a sculptor, how would you say sculpture made by Indigenous peoples is changing?

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visual aesthetic or visual language it is allowed to change.

Imagine how magnificent it is to think that something you’ve created has never ever been seen by eyes before? We also have voice and freedom. Sovereign cultural creativity is empowering. I would like to think that our sculpture will continually change; it is supposed to.

I’d like to talk about several recent works for a moment. What they have in common is they’re charged materials loaded with symbolism, and, in many respects, metaphors for suffering: I Dreamt I Could Fly, Indian Children’s Bracelet, and Haa Aaní (Our Land), a hand-engraved and carved AR-15 rifle with a handsewn, sea otter fur strap. Arguably, these works from 2013 mark a signal change in your practice in that they engage with Indigenous historical trauma. What is the impulse driving the creation of such works?

Works are created out of necessity. Too many simple conversations distract from actively overlooked historic realities. Romanticized, market-driven work is palatable and necessary for an artist to survive. So is truth, especially if the white-privilege community decides to hit the active, cultural-amnesia switch. F--- you, if this work makes you

NICHOLAS GALANIN

White Carver, 2012, black-and-white photograph of installation at Trench Gallery, Vancouver.

uncomfortable. I’ve had non-Native peers feel a need to reach out and tell me how tired they were of seeing works that confronted this history. I have had non-Native peers remind me that I am “prospering from my Indigenous culture.” F--- you. I am prospering from hard work and contributing to this culture. Colonialism is consumption.

The impulse is truth, and we need more of it.

Music is obviously a strong passion of yours. You’ve released several albums recognized for their close relationships to Indigenous life. Tell me about this music and how it figures into your art practice.

I am deeply inspired by music. It fuels my visual work. The creative birth that happens when a musician composes space is magic. It’s from another world.

What would you say is your greatest influence today?

What books are you reading? Whose work are you looking at? What music are you listening to?

I have many influences. My children and the lens through which they see the world. My wish to leave a better community for them to grow in is real. Shouts to my creative crew in the Black Constellation2—Nep Sidhu, Shabazz Palaces, Erik Blood, OCnotes and

2. Black Constellation is an arts collective of musicians, filmmakers, fashion designers, and visual artists loosely based in Seattle.

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I Think It Goes Like This?, 2012, wood, paint, dimensions variable, collection of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.

THEEsatisfaction, Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes. My father Dave Galanin, and his ability to show nothing but support for me as a young artist; also for introducing me to the wonderful world of the Delta blues. My brothers Brandon and Jerrod Galanin. Jerrod is also an artist and collaborator; together we create under the name “Leonard Getinthecar.”

I am a fan of Da-ka-xeen Mehner and his wonderful work.

Allison Warden, Ronald Senungetuk, and Susie Sillook are wonderful people and amazing artists. The list goes on, and I am grateful to be alive at the same time as you all and am sure I did not complete this list, but there are really too many to name. Gunalchéesh.

Finally, what projects do you have planned for the future?

I am creating daily. It really depends on how I feel. I am working on new work for upcoming shows—working on making leather shoes for an upcoming exhibit on Native fashion at the Peabody [Essex Museum].3 I have new music in the works. I have also been working on the live performance and translation of my new album, currently being pressed to vinyl. We are about to hit the road in June with some Indigenous musicians including

Kristi Lane Sinclair, Cris Derksen, Raven Chacon, and Laura Ortman. The Red Ride Tour. Watch for dates in a city near you.

I am throwing my tenth and final music fest in Sitka, Alaska, called HomeSkilletFest. This year’s festival will take place outdoors July 31 and August 1. It has been a good run, but I am ready to put my energy into other community projects.

I would love to see a university degree program in Sitka for Indigenous art. While I was attending university in London, England, I was told I could not pull from my Indigenous art background, simply because it was “too literal” for the curriculum. We have to have a space in these institutions where we are not required to hang our culture up at the door in order to succeed in this world. I will be working toward making this happen.

galan.in homeskilletfest.com silverjackson.bandcamp.com

3. The exhibit is Native Fashion Now in the Special Exhibit Galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, on view from November 21, 2015 through March 6, 2016.

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NICHOLAS GALANIN

There Is No “I,” 2012, C-print, edition of 10, 31.5 × 23 in.

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Kalaaleq Filmmaker and Interdisciplinary Artist

Inuk Silis Høegh

By David Winfield Norman

A

PACKED THEATER welcomed Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution to Berlinale this past February. The first Greenlandic feature to be showcased at Europe’s largest film festival was met with a five-minute standing ovation. The film and its director-producer team, Inuk Silis Høegh and Emile Hertling Péronard, received two awards at imagineNATIVE 2014, and Sumé has garnered overwhelming praise across Greenland, Europe, and Canada. The documentary, drawn together in a kaleidoscopic blend of archival footage, interviews, and rock, is about the Greenlandic band Sumé.

They exploded onto the scene in 1973 with their first album Sumut, the title of which, as one of the band’s founding members Per Berthelsen indicates, “Together with our name, Sumé presents the open question: Where do we stand in our development, and where are we going?”2 The first rock band to perform in the Greenlandic language Kalaallisut, they sparked a cultural revolution at a time when Greenlanders were challenging Danish authority and pushing toward self-governance. In 1979, this came through with the Home Rule Act, granting Greenlanders a large degree of autonomy and the latitude to make decisions at home. This autonomy expanded in 2009 with the Self-Rule legislation, acknowledging Greenland’s rights to its mineral wealth and recognizing the nation’s desire to engage in international politics. Though Sumé disbanded in 1976,3 they left their mark with a dynamic mix of sounds, styles, and lyrics that tackled issues like forced settlement closures and Denmark’s

Inuk Silis Høegh installing Taanna.1 All images courtesy of the artist.

narrative of “humane” imperialism, charging Greenlanders not only with renewed political consciousness and agency but also with a thirst for creativity and innovation.

Inuk Silis Høegh’s work as artist and filmmaker echoes this legacy. He challenges and breaks boundaries between the personal and the political and injects much-needed irony, humor, and emotion into the often-combative discourse on cultural heritage as Greenland works to define its place as a nation within an expanding global sphere. Above all, his diverse, creative projects avoid easy categorization or thematization. In the experiences and emotions they evoke, and their fluid movements across cultural, (geo)political, medium-specific, and personal reference, Inuk’s artwork likewise poses open questions within sites of exchange and possibility.

Inuk comes from somewhat of a dynasty of artists. His mother is Aka Høegh, whose work with natural motifs and sources drawn from oral narrative are internationally renowned. His father Ivars Silis’s Arctic photography fills volumes of artistic and academic works, and his younger sister Bolatta is emerging as a dynamic painter whose projects range from deeply expressive portraits and landscapes, offbeat collage-like work, and a heterotopic take on the Arctic landscape of global warming’s future. Both Inuk and Bolatta were featured in America Meredith’s article “Northern Lights: Greenlandic Art in the 21st Century” in First American Art Magazine’s pilot issue,4 where Meredith lays out some of Greenland’s post-Sumé cultural movements and the broad, innovative cohort of Greenlandic artists pushing the boundaries of creative discourse. Inuk’s work—from film to

1. Taanna translates to “that one there away hardly perceptible.” Louis-Jacques Dorais, The Language of the Inuit: Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 85.

2. Per Berthelsen, Sume: en grønlandsk rocklegende (Nuussuaq, Greenland: Milik Publishing, 2010), 25.

3. Several of the band’s original members have reunited on later occasions.

4. America Meredith, “Northern Lights: Greenlandic Art in the 21st Century,” First American Art Magazine 0 (Spring 2013), 50–52.

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INUK SILIS HØEGH

sculpture, installation, site specificity, and performance—clearly belongs to this category.

What made you want to make this documentary about Sumé now?

I have always thought that the impact of Sumé’s music on Greenland could make a good story on film. So when Emile came to me and asked if I wanted to cooperate with him in making it into a documentary, I didn’t hesitate. Here was a very talented and dedicated guy wanting to work with me on a story about a cultural awakening in my country. And it would turn out to be perfect timing for such a film. Here, around the 40th anniversary of Sumé’s first record, Greenland is again in a debate about values and identity.

In what ways are the issues dealt with in Sumé’s lyrics still relevant for Greenlanders and for Greenland today?

Among other issues, Sumé’s lyrics put feelings of alienation, loss of direction, and the reestablishment of [one’s] own self-esteem into words and questioned people’s indignation toward authority. I think all of those issues are just as much in play today as they were 40 years ago. Yes, a lot has happened since the cultural revolution of the 1970s. Power has shifted, but Greenland has only just started shaping itself as a separate, modern nation. And where Sumé’s lyrics indirectly were criticizing the Danish rule, that criticism seems just as relevant toward our own political leaders of today and toward the economic powers. And with globalization, the citizens are not as homogeneous a group as before. I think the basic discussion of values and identity as individuals and as a people . . . that Sumé’s lyrics were an important part of, is as important as ever before.

TOP: promotional poster for the film, Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution, 2014.

BOTTOM: Sumé, 2014, video still of photograph of the band Sumé.

One of the most moving elements of the film for me was how you’ve blended archival footage in almost a lyrical way, bringing together many moments to paint the political climate of the ’60s and ’70s. What was it like working with all of that archival material? Do you think you might use SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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of life in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. We tried to think of ways to incorporate silent footage of Greenlandic everyday life from the period of Sumé. I am not very structured in the way I approach my art. Even though I like to script things and ideas quite thoroughly to have a set frame, I work more intuitively with collected material. Fortunately, Emile is more indexical and has this detective gene, so he was very good at digging in archives and collecting a good pool of possibilities for us to work with.

Ajugaa (Win), 2004, digital photo collage poster, part of the Melting Barricades series.

any of that research in other projects going forward, maybe new artworks?

Quite early in the process of working with the film, we realized that footage and still images of the band from their creative period in the 1970s were extremely scarce. Back then in Greenland, there were no TV channels or filmmakers filming. Even still images turned out to be very few and mostly point-and-shoot images made by amateurs. Cameras were an expensive hobby, and it turned out that almost no young rock listeners could afford them in Greenland back then.

So, the footage we could find was from Danish archives—foreign film crews on short visits to Greenland. And there was not one single film clip of Sumé in Greenland! So we were actually working with the idea of using new footage to mirror the past, as the band, now all around 60, was playing again.

But Emile’s grandfather, who was the first Greenlandic minister of Greenland in the Danish government in the period of Sumé, had shot some 8mm footage on his trips to Greenland. It was a Greenland we hadn’t seen before. We then started to ask around for 8mm home film footage from people’s attics and basements. And even though we only found a couple of minutes of worn, silent footage of Sumé playing an outdoor concert in Greenland, we were fascinated by some of the scenes 6 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

We were lucky to get a fantastic editor on board, Per K. Kirkegaard, who saw the potential in the previously unseen footage. By trial and error, and by the help of Sumé’s music and lyrics, we found a way to use this previously unseen footage shot by amateurs as a more unfiltered, intimate look into people’s lives. It turned out to be real gold for our project.

I have worked with archival footage before in an art project, but this time, by chance, I saw my great-grandfather looking straight at me from the 1940s, and stills of me as a baby with my mom at a demonstration in the 1970s.

It all felt very powerful to work with footage of generations of people that are closely related to my own reality as a Greenlander today. Chances are I will work with this kind of material again, either in film or visual art.

You’ve been involved in a lot of different projects over the last two years, especially internationally, and at the same time Greenland has undergone some dramatic political developments and challenges. I’m thinking especially about Melting Barricades and its dual messages and questions about imperialism, and on the other hand, cultural essentialism.

It’s such a hilarious piece, but also deeply political and full of wellcrafted critiques, and I can’t help but feel this project is even more relevant now. What made you want to build a Greenlandic army to invade Denmark and then the world, back in 2004 and 2006? Do you think this project also has some renewed relevance today?

Melting Barricades was a collaboration with Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen who is a Danish artist. Greenland has never had a military as we have been part of the Danish state for many years. For me, creating a fictive Greenlandic army was at first just fun, because it was satirical about defending Greenlandic identity and traditional values. In the early 2000s, the preservation of “Greenlandicness” was used as a reason to write off foreign influence and values—but also by some politician as a way of constructing an enemy, an easy way of gaining power.

The title Melting Barricades refers to the two-sideness of creating a barrier—of closing Greenland off from foreign cultural influence. If you make a barrier you can keep something from entering, but you also create an obstacle for yourself to get out.

And all the talk about wanting to be an independent state felt hollow, as no one was discussing what values it should be built upon. A ship with no destination and no cargo.

I thought that when you go to war for your country, you do it to defend your own values as a nation. So what better way of getting to know your true values than having to risk your life for them? At the same time, the project can’t help but touch upon imperialism and colonialism.

If the micronation of Greenlanders were to defend ourselves from cultural invasion and globalization, why not do it thoroughly and take over the world? Why not make sure that all the world gets to enjoy being Greenlanders? After all, our culture and blood are the best in the world!

I think that discussion about values has gotten a new dimension today, as we have gotten the power in 2009 to exploit our nonrenewable resources: minerals, oil, etc. It seems like the world is closing in as the multinational companies take greater and greater interest in our minerals and possible oil reserves. The economic crisis of my country demands a reform. We have to decide how we want to make a living. As we gradually take over more and more control involving dealing with other countries, we have to know who we are and what we are capable of,

INUK SILIS HØEGH

Iluliaq (Iceberg), 2009, inkjet print of photos by Ivars Silis on PVC-coated, scrim mesh, 131.25 x 92 feet, being installed at the North Atlantic House, Copenhagen, during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15).

as individuals and as a people. Asmund and I have started to talk about the idea of making a sequel, a Melting Barricades anno 2016.

You created one of the most prominent and celebrated works in the landmark exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, after a similar work that was installed in 2009 for the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference at the North Atlantic House in Copenhagen.

It’s interesting to think about both settings—a major exhibition that brought many artists together from all parts of the world and challenged a lot of preconceptions about Indigeneity, and then a climate summit. Can you speak a bit about these works and how they relate to the two contexts?

Iluliaq came about from an invitation to do an iceberg for Nordatlantens Brygge

for COP15. They had seen my work using samples of ice in other artworks. I thought it was a great idea and decided to do a fantasy iceberg, balanced between being threatening and fragile—just like the demise of Greenland’s inland ice would be a threat to the water levels in the world. I didn’t want the work to have a specific message, but rather an emotional impact. Just as global warming is a problem, so could a new ice age be.

Being invited to Sakahàn, an exhibition of Indigenous art, doesn’t change my work for me. Some people might see the use of nature in my work as somewhat “Indigenous,” but I really don’t know how I feel about being categorized as Indigenous. We Greenlanders are the majority in Greenland and have a high degree of self-rule. But I am also of mixed blood, as many Greenlanders, and I look white, so I sometimes feel like a secret agent no matter what country I’m in, even at home sometimes.

I’m really intrigued by the piece you created for the project Cargo Culte, Taanna. Could you tell me about this work, and issues about material it addresses?

Taanna was inspired by the concept of cargo cults. In Greenland—in our isolation on our island at the end of the world and with our scarce resources and industry—we have an artificial relationship to all the products that we import. Almost everything is imported from abroad. We have no relation to the manufacture or material, and still we keep asking for more.

I wrote a poem or maybe some sort of prayer. I found this place out in nature where a lot of driftwood, plastic, and other material was stranded. A lot of this comes from journeys with the currents of the big seas. I built an altar, or a melting machine, from the found materials. I wrote my prayer on a piece of ice and SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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melted it on the altar and down into these bottles found in that place.

So the melting machine with the bottles just stood there, the sun putting the words into the bottles. I’m not finished with finding out what it means, but like to think of the words in the melting water brushing through the plastic and into a new form. Some form of message in a bottle asking for more or less of that which came from far away.

What was it like growing up in such a creative household? I know you collaborated with your father for Iluliaq, that his photographs became the installations. Have you collaborated on other projects with your parents or your sister?

have collected a lot of visual impressions from growing up in an artistic home with all my mom’s and dad’s pictures around me, and artists coming to visit. I am very grateful for that today.

To go back to film, you were involved with the last two Greenland Eyes Film Festivals, which took place in Berlin in 2012 and then toured the Nordic countries last year. Do you think the film scene in Greenland is growing, becoming more international?

Yes, definitely Greenland’s film scene is exploding, although the first feature

film made by Greenlanders only came about six years ago.6 Now the first feature film ever from Greenland premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Seven directors presented their work at a reception, funded by the Greenlandic government, at the Berlinale.

The smaller and cheaper cameras developed have made it possible to get going easier, but the sparse infrastructure and the wild climate still present big challenges. I don’t know how they manage to finish their films on minuscule budgets. But our hope is to find more

I’ve always wanted to be something completely opposite of my parents, [who are] a writer/photographer and a visual artist. I went to university and studied media communications, but it turned out I had only been running from my passions. So having only flirted with it for years, I took up film and art at quite a late age. I think I started when I was 24. It was quite a revelation.

Much later I have had chances to collaborate with them more than once.5 I used my father’s archive photos for Iluliaq. It is really nice to be able to cooperate with my family professionally. I have also done a little camerawork on some of his films. And also my mother and sister are such a pleasure to work with. I thought we would tear each other’s heads off, but we made an exhibition together where everything just went so easy. It turns out we have a good understanding of each other and each other’s work. And after admiring my parents’ work for so long, it was a privilege to exhibit next to them.

Luckily, both my sister and I have each found our own niche of work different from our parents. I’ve definitely tried to make something very different, to not be compared to them. I respect my sister for taking up painting and finding her own unique, strong voice, even though our mother is also a painter. All in all, I must

Taanna Box, 2012, assemblage of driftwood, bottle, poem on melted ice, red ink, and photograph.

5. One such collaboration was the 2005 exhibition Quadrofoni at the Rønnebæksholm Art and Cultural Center, where all four members of the Silis Høegh artistic family were represented in a manner highlighting their very different creative methods and themes, while evoking the “quadraphonic” harmony their distinct practices create. Sven Holm, “Quadrofonisk Familie,” in Quadrofoni, ed. John Nørbjerg (Rønnebæksholm, Denmark: Rønnebæksholm Kunst- og Kulturcenter, 2005), 7.

6. The 2009 film, Nuummioq, directed by Torben Bech and Otto Rosing, was showcased at the Sundance Film Festival and nominated for an Academy Award.

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INUK SILIS HØEGH

Taanna, 2012, installation of poem on melting ice, red ink, driftwood, and bottles, Greenland.

international cooperation in the future, to learn and get access to funding abroad.

Maybe we can use the fact that we are so far away from the rest of the world as an advantage.

Why did you decide to transition from film to working with visual art as well?

Do the two worlds intersect for you, art and film?

I worked some years with film, but also found it extremely stressful. Being on location with all the complications of time pressure, people, weather—and all the favors I felt I owed the people who worked on my films for free—made it quite traumatic to make film.

And I felt intrigued by doing something that wasn’t constricted to a flat screen.

I got attracted to visual arts, because it can have a shorter distance from idea to finish, and it is more investigative. It is very hands-on with the material. I went

to art academy with a special interest in sculpture and installation. It was like I couldn’t snap out of making cinematic stories with the camera, so it didn’t make sense to me to make art films. So the intersection between film and art never really happened. Except maybe in the way I work. I like a great deal of preparation and making myself quite a narrow frame for working. That comes from the script and production work in films where you have to have a very clear idea of what you are looking for with the camera.

Do you have any upcoming projects we should be on the lookout for?

This summer I’m making a land art project in Greenland. It will end up as a photo series about territory. Greenland is one of the last frontiers when it comes to ownership of the land. We have collective ownership of our vast and sparsely populated land, but in these years, this is starting to change increasingly as we are

giving multinational mining companies rights to throw people off their areas.

So I’m making patterns and rebuilds of the landscape to invite the viewer to question how we change nature in the name of economic growth. Basically, how we humans take possession of land and ultimately will change even the most remote spots in the world.

If you could use this article as a platform for any message or statement, what would that be? In other words, any last words?

I just hope more Indigenous people will use art as a tool for change. Often we find ourselves trying hard to regain our heritage and tradition, and that can often lead to us making quite conservative, iconic work. We need that kind of art, but we also need to take chances, to ask questions, to challenge perceptions.

Culture doesn’t survive unless it evolves.

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Davis, California

Listening to the Stone: Original Inuit Art C. N. Gorman Museum

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OR THOSE UNFAMILIAR with the C.N. Gorman Museum, its mission and focus is to exhibit contemporary Indigenous art and share the knowledge and experiences of Indigenous artists. Founded in 1973, the C. N. Gorman Museum is located in Hart Hall, which is the location of the Native American Studies Department on the campus of the University of California, Davis. Museum director, associate professor, and contemporary artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Diné-SeminoleTaskigi Muscogee) and curator Veronica Passalacqua select exhibits to fulfill this mission. While a relatively modest space, the museum is professionally fitted for ideal gallery conditions such as light, temperature, humidity, and visual calm, within which artworks are displayed and contextualized.

self-determination to the Inuit of the Arctic. She identifies the formal language used to describe Inuit knowledge as Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔭᑐᖃᖏᑦ), which includes knowledge of environment, ecology, Inuit worldview, values, life skills, and language—and working the stone:

The work of carving takes all kinds of knowledge. Knowledge of the land so that you can find your way to the quarry site.

And when you get there, knowledge of the site so that you will know where to dig in the snow. And, of course, it takes

knowledge to get the stone out of the ground. [...] These are the things that have to happen before you can even think of making art in Nunavik.1 Immediately to the left of the exhibition’s entrance is a map of the Inuit homelands, their geography, regions, and towns of the northern Arctic regions above Canada. Curator Passalacqua describes the collection of the Bieri family, who assembled these extraordinary Inuit works over 30 years: “It is rich in its representation of master artists, nine of whom are elected members of the

The Gorman casts a broad net across Indigenous arts. Its current show features sculpture, drawings, and prints by 45 artists from Inuit Nunangat, which includes four Canadian Arctic regions: Inuvialuit, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut. The artworks include the peoples, animals, environments, and beliefs of the Inuit—fishermen, walrus, owls, caribou, dancers, drummers, and Sedna (ᓴᓐᓇ), the sea goddess, who has dominion over all the creatures of the sea.

The exhibit’ions 144-page catalogue, with bibliography, is titled Listening to the Stone: Inuit Art from the Bieri Family Collection.

Edited by Passalacqua and Tsinhnahjinnie, it showcases works by the featured artists, whose birthdates span from 1893 to 1972.

The catalogue also provides an overview of Inuit culture by scholar and curator Heather Igloliorte (Inuk), who highlights some recent political changes for this region, including the establishment of governance structures that return autonomy, sovereignty, and

Judas Ullulaq (Inuk), Shaman Transforming, ca. 1997, pyroxene, antler, and bone, 20 × 11 × 12 in., Uqsuqtuuq, Nunavut. Image courtesy of the C. N. Gorman Museum.

1. Mattiusi Iyaituk, “All It Takes Is Knowledge, Money, and Time,” Inuit Art Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 3.

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Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and artists central to the establishment and continuance of Inuit art.”

with his cultural history and identity, and he reflects the perspectives, practices, and stories of his people through stone.

Sculptures are positioned in six wall encasements and in the round, under vitrines, to highlight specific topics.

One case shows eight sculptures of the Ashoona family of Cape Dorset, including family matriarch Pitseolak Ashoona, her three artist sons, Qaqaq, Kiawak, and Kumwartok, and Qaqaq’s widow, Mayoreak Ashoona. Another case houses three large works by Mattiusi Iyaituk, who pushes boundaries of Inuit art with a preference for abstraction.

Displayed in the round are works by Nick Sikkuark (1943–2013) from Kugaaruk and Judas Ullulaq (1937–1999) from Uqsuqtuuq. Ullulaq’s black pyroxene figures, inlaid with high-contrast antler and bone, convey strength in action and emotion. Nick Sikkuark’s Restless Spirit features a woman carrying hunting weapons, a caribou fur bag on her back, and a small, well-carved face with a melancholy expression sculpted from whalebone. The change from carving in stone to bone permits both lightness and detail.

The sculptures comprise a variety of media and colors, including green, gold, and black serpentines, black steatite, pyroxene, alabaster, and marble, with details of whalebone, antler, walrus ivory, and hide.

The sculpture Basking Walrus, by Osuitok Ipeelee2 (1923–2005) from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), shows a lovely simplicity and sensitivity in its representation of the walrus, elegantly carved in a mottled, green stone. An historically influential Inuk artist, Ipeelee was elected to the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts in 1978 and received the Lifetime Aboriginal Art Achievement Award in 2004.

By contrast, the sculpture by Annie Michael (1935–1999) from Kimmirut demonstrates considerable detail. Michael carved figures of women in hard stone, such as Happy Woman with Child in Amautik, an Inuk woman with a baby on her back in the traditional protective parka. The woman holds a harpoon and fish, wears finely executed garments, and displays a happy visage.

The sculpture Shaman Returns from the Moon conjures the stories of Paulatuk, home of the artist David Ruben Piqtoukun, who carved this grey-green soapstone shaman figure of solidity and power, with wings, a prominent nose, piercing eyes, and a circular, alabaster headpiece representing the moon. Piqtoukun, born in 1950, was sent to boarding school until age 17— separated from his language and native culture. Stone carving helps him reconnect

On the back wall of the gallery, well lighted and hung in salon style, are prints and drawings by eleven artists. The renowned Kenojuak Ashevak (1927– 2013), whose career spanned 40 years, is represented with an original, untitled drawing from the early 1990s that features her characteristic central owl figure. Like Osuitok Ipeelee, she received the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation’s award for lifetime achievement, and was a member of the Canada Royal Academy of Arts. In this exhibit, her graphite, pencil, and crayon work on paper, Untitled (1990/91), depicts some of her favorite subjects: birds, fish, and human faces.

Ashevak was noted for her interest in form and color rather than portraying events and stories.

In the catalogue’s foreword, Tsinhnahjinnie reminds us that art and politics are entwined in the Arctic, too, saying, “We [must] be aware of the proposed future shipping routes and development of resources within the Arctic. We must be aware of the impact upon artists and their communities.

We also must recognize the strength of communities, through continued telling of the stories in stone, on paper, or in song, dance, and digitally.”

Listening to the Stone is on view until June 11, 2015. For more information, visit gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu.

—Zelma Long

Denver

The Art of Indigenous Resistance: Inspiring the Protection of Mother Earth Knew Conscious Gallery

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HIS SHOW COMMEMORATES 20 years of poster art created for Honor the Earth and expresses the ecological issues Indigenous populations of North America face. Honor the Earth, a nonprofit organization founded by Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe) and the Indigo Girls, “address[es] the two primary needs of the Native environmental movement: to break the geographic and political isolation of Native communities and to increase financial resources for organizing and change,” according to the group’s website. In 2014, they raised $160,000 to help Indigenous communities continue important environmental work. Honor the Earth is an innovative group, and many artists have supported the organization.

Diverse in approach and technique, some of the poster art employs established methods and others are more experimental. They illustrate the myriad of ways to inspire viewers about specific issues that affect all of us, including dirty energy vs. clean/renewable energy, GMO and corporate foods vs. Native plants and good nutrition, clean water, land rights, anti-mining, and anti-pipelines.

Participating artists include Alaina Buffalo Spirit (Northern Cheyenne-Suhtai), Nani Chacon (Navajo-Chicana), Betty LaDuke, Keri Pickett, Kim Smith (Navajo), Jesus Barraza (Chicano), Jaycee Beyale (Navajo), Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute), Jaque Fragua ( Jemez), Remy Fredenberg (Navajo), Tom Greyeyes (Navajo), Michael Horse (Mestizo), Ron Toahani Jackson (Navajo), Donald Montileaux (Oglala Lakota), John Isaiah Pepion (Blackfeet), Rabbett Strickland (Red Cliff-Bad River Chippewa), Chip Thomas, Votan (Chicano), and Star Wallowing Bull (Northern Arapaho-White Earth Ojibwe).

2. His surname is also spelled Ipeelie.

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The pieces by John Isaiah Pepion are painted on ledger paper. They depict history and the future, with a medicine wheel as a windmill with feathers for propellers.

Pepion’s statement says, “Part of being sustainable and responsible is taking care of your spirit. So when you are standing up for Mother Earth, you are holding yourself accountable as well. You’re taking care of that energy so that the work is done in a good manner from spirit to out in the community. As Indigenous people, we have always been sustainable and we want to be able to continue these practices. We have to be in harmony with Mother Earth.”

Gaa-Noodin Oke: The Wind Maker, colored pencil on paper by Star Wallowing Bull, also depicts the potential of wind power.

A farming couple stands under windmills, with feathers for propellers. Wallowing Bull says, “When you are doing this work . . . people hear things they don’t want to hear. People don’t adapt so easily. So this is an image of what sustainable renewable energy would look like.”

Eritrea: Reshaping The Land by Betty LaDuke, Winona’s mother, is a vibrantly colorful reminder that Indigenous people exist all around the world with similar stories and contemporary issues. LaDuke states, “This is a depiction of Indigenous people in Africa still upholding their responsibilities to Honor the Earth. With [a child] on her back that ties in with

Nani Chacon (Navajo-Chicana) and Chip Thomas, photo collage. Image courtesy of Nani Chacon.

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the seventh generation, making sure our lineage will still be here in a hundred years, that those songs and prayers will still be there as well.”

Michael Horse depicts the Cowboy Indian Alliance’s march on Washington, DC, showing solidarity and flipping the script: This is not an issue just for Indigenous people. “All people who are affected by the Keystone XL pipeline have to stick together and support one another.”

Indian Girl Lost in a Man Camp, also by John Isaiah Pepion, is a graphic depiction of true 21st-century horrors: an unclothed young woman surrounded by industry, her face in her hands. She is another commodity in the industrialization of Mother Earth. The artist states, “Not only is the land being raped, but our women are being raped and murdered at these man camps.

There is a correlation between how we treat women and how we treat the earth.

Sex trafficking of our Native women is happening in man camps. The tribe doesn’t have jurisdiction over them so we have to hold them accountable any way we can.”

Four pieces by Gregg Deal show women and their resilience at the forefront of this movement. “It is our job to be protectors.

We are going to stand up for our communities,” he writes in his statement. Gregg explores water issues and the Keystone XL Pipeline on two stenciled works on wood. In his piece about the Washington football team mascot dispute, Deal makes it explicit that redskin is in no way respectful to Indian people. The term comes from the Indian scalps for which governments and municipalities paid for bounties. It was a way of exterminating our people, so moneyed interest could come in and strip the land.

The show ends with the original and most famous image for Honor the Earth by resident artist Keri Pickett. “It is now the logo, with a medicine wheel that represents all living things, all relations no matter who you are or where you come from. The image was created when Winona LaDuke was working to stop Uranium mining on Native lands for nuclear power. It’s a picture of unity ... and another woman!” —Thollem McDonas

St. Augustine, Florida

Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to the Matanzas Bay Crisp-Ellert Art Museum

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HIS ART EXHIBITION signals an important honor for the communities whose living memory recalls the events that took place at Fort Marion. It is, perhaps as importantly, a necessary history lesson for those unacquainted with this instance of imperialist US expansion and the impact of the federal policies that resulted. Featuring the art of 72 artists from across the country, this exhibition provides viewers with an opportunity to learn of the historic events that took place at Fort Marion, also known as the Castillo de San Marcos, in St. Augustine, Florida. These artistic responses to a seminal moment in US history remind us we are part of this historical continuum.

Epic books are yet to be written on this event, but from 1837 to 1887, Fort Marion was used to imprison Native Americans who defied the abuses of US federal policies. Imprisonment occurred in three periods. The earliest was an imprisonment of Seminole leaders, some of whom died at the fort.

In 1875, at the end of the Red River War, 72 Southern Plains warriors were arrested for hunting to feed their starving families—an act considered a violation of the terms of their treaties. The prisoners of war were taken from Fort Sill, near what is now Lawton, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion.

They were put under the control of Lieutenant Richard Pratt, who used these warriors to implement his assimilationist educational practices through 1878. From that experiment, Pratt went on to establish the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he coined the axiom, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Finally, in 1886–87, hundreds of Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache families were imprisoned and transferred to Florida by the federal government.

During this time, the Apache children were separated from their families and

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of Birds (Southern Cheyenne), are descendants of the prisoners. Others were not familiar with the story and were impelled to do their own research.

For many, like Norman Akers (Osage/ Pawnee) and Dyani White Hawk Polk (Sicangu Lakota), the legacy of Pratt survives past Fort Marion through the lives of the children who returned to their tribes transformed—and often damaged.

The curators have organized a broad representation of artists, from established to emerging, both Native and nonNative, and working in everything from watercolors to assemblage. Some images are highly evocative and charged with the politicization of the Native imprisonment. Others are built from subtle layers of personal information that inspire contemplation. The curators have built a website for which each artist was encouraged to provide an artist’s statement and a bio. It is updated with information as confirmations for exhibition sites develop. This exhibition will travel; the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum is the first of several sites scheduled to reengage this historic route.

Chris Pappan (Kaw-Osage-Cheyenne River Lakota), Through the Shadow of Cahokia, 2013, graphite, map collage, and photo transfer on US Cavalry recruitment ledger paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

sent to the Carlisle school with tens of thousands of other Native American children, taken from their tribal families under a federal program to assimilate the children as mainstream Americans.

In reference to the 72 Southern Plains warriors, co-curators Emily Arthur, John Hitchcock (Comanche), and Marwin Begaye (Navajo), asked contemporary artists to respond to the history of Fort Marion for this exhibition that will

travel from St. Augustine to Oklahoma.

The artists were provided the guidelines to use the format of a ledger book and the freedom to interpret the exhibition theme. This resulted in a show of 72 intimately sized works that are beautifully complex. A few are haunting, and several humorous, largely speaking to the survival of the people. Some of the artists, like Harry Mithlo (ComancheChiricahua Apache) and Edgar Heap

The exhibition’s opening in St. Augustine in January 2015 was an auspicious event, as it was the first of many for the city’s grand 450th commemoration. During the well-attended exhibition events, many Floridians expressed their complete lack of knowledge of the site’s important history. The art was presented in both galleries of the museum’s light, airy space within traditional Spanish architecture.

Director of the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum Julie Dickover said attendance doubled during the exhibition, which has been “incredibly moving and touching for people.” She added that viewers have expressed “how happy they are to have an exhibition that has an Indigenous voice that speaks to history.” The museum organized a symposium of speakers to provide the local college and public audiences an opportunity to hear Native artists and scholars speak to the exhibition and the history in a meaningful manner.

Dickover also worked with Flagler College faculty to engage the visiting scholars as classroom speakers. The evident need for this kind of historic engagement was overwhelming.

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The only real shortcoming was that the density of the exhibition within the space at Crisp-Ellert made it impossible to include didactic labels for the work, though a handout was available for visitors to use in the gallery and even take home. However, the artist statements were not available at all, a small misstep for bridging the images to the viewers’ full engagement. One can hope that this will be addressed in future installations.

“You look at these works,” Dickover commented, “and so often you look at these events as historical, and you realize there are all these ramifications rippling into now.” This sentiment is fully understood within the Native American community, and the curators have done an excellent job in realizing a grand vision that is both meaningful and accessible to viewers of diverse cultural backgrounds. There is definitely room for more exhibitions like this in the American landscape, to be curated by Native people and to remind us of the memories and the legacy of our Native community as part of the American experience. Bravo to the three artists/curators who stepped up for this project.

—heather ahtone

St. Paul

Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison Minnesota History Center I seek the power of the rock, the magic of the water, the religion of the tree, the color of the wind, and the enigma of the horizon.

—George Morrison, 1987

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T ITS FINAL VENUE of a two-year tour, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison looked better than ever, filling the expansive galleries at the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I first saw the exhibition in July 2013 when it premiered at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. Some 20 months later, the exhibit confirmed my belief that George Morrison (Grand Portage Chippewa, 1919–2000) is a modernist of great stature, not only to his native 7 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

George Morrison (Grand Portage Chippewa), Cumulated Landscape, 1976, bronze, wood, 48 × 120 × 3 in., collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, gift of Honeywell, Inc.

Minnesota, but also to the sweeping landscape of 20th-century art.

Modern Spirit is as scholarly as it is approachable, featuring more than 80 of Morrison’s paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture. Organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in Saint Paul and Arts Midwest, Modern Spirit clearly illuminates Morrison’s remarkable aesthetic reach. W. Jackson Rushing III, the Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art at the University of Oklahoma, deftly curated the show.

Morrison was born one of twelve children in Chippewa City, a village that no longer exists on Lake Superior’s North Shore. It is widely observed that Morrison did not think of himself as an Indian artist, saying always, “I am an artist who happens to be Indian.” As Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation) writes in the exhibit’s catalogue, “Morrison did not play the ‘Indian card’ … George was an Abstract Expressionist.”

Consequently, beyond the aesthetic pleasure of Modern Spirit, the show raises important cultural questions about racial and artistic identity and how one Native American artist navigated a complicated path to gain visibility in a 20th-century art world dominated by whites.

Modern Spirit chronicles Morrison’s 60-year artistic journey from Northern Minnesota, where he showed considerable artistic talent at an early age, to the Minneapolis School of Art, now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he graduated in 1943 with a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York City. An expansive thinker and

assiduous practitioner, he investigated abstraction in its Cubist and Surrealist manifestations, creating highly resolved works in response to the work of such innovative artists as Joan Miró, Arshile Gorky, and Adolph Gottlieb. He also learned that Picasso and other modernists were exploring ideas central to African and American Indian art.

Modern Spirit opens with early representational works, like the portrait Dirt Track Specialist (1940), and moves quickly into Morrison’s wide-ranging cache of abstract paintings and drawings from the 1940s and early 1950s. His keen awareness of the spatial relationships of abstract forms and the innate power of color is gripping. Works on paper such as Sun and River (1949) and the watercolor Abstract Composition (1950) attest to this.

New York’s Grand Central Art Gallery gave Morrison his first solo show in 1948.

After winning a Fulbright scholarship in 1952, he traveled to France where he studied at the École des Beaux-Art (now known as École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) in Paris for three months, then at the Aix-Marseille Université in Marseille. There he refined his modernist vision into resolved compositions as in the ink and watercolor drawing Paris (1952) and the oil on paper Untitled (Cap d’Antibes) (1955).

Following a brief sojourn on Minnesota’s North Shore in 1953, where he realized the power of Lake Superior’s horizon line, Morrison returned to New York in 1954. He lived in Greenwich Village and ate and drank with such Abstract Expressionist luminaries as Franz Kline, William de Kooning, and Jackson

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Pollock at the legendary Cedar Bar. And he exhibited with Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg at the Tanager Gallery on East 10th Street. The Red Painting (Franz Kline Painting) (1960), a luminous swath of red oil paint highlighted by flashes of black and yellow, demonstrates his Abstract Expressionist chops. Part of a trade with the artist, it hung in Kline’s studio and his Provincetown home. Kline died from a heart attack before Morrison received his part of the trade. Although less recognized than some of his former colleagues, George Morrison’s work is not derivative, yet his oeuvre often illuminates the works of these other artists.

While teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s, Morrison and his wife Hazel Belvo, also an artist, would summer in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he reconnected with the horizon line. He began to collect driftwood, a material that became integral to his late 1960s and 1970s work. Powerful in its simplicity is Art As Illusion (1967), a small rectangle of scavenged wood demarcated by an implied horizon line. Such modest pieces prefigured his monumental wood collages, like Cumulated Landscape (1976), the soaring Red Totem I (1977), and the elegant puzzle Cube (1988), and complemented his twodimensional work.

Morrison returned to Minnesota in 1970 to teach art and American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota. There he slowly investigated his Indian identity, a process that shaped his later work more in spirit and clarity than in imagery. The horizon line was progressively integral to his practice. He and Belvo acquired land on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation and built Red Rock (named for the jasper that lines the bluffs), their home and studios 30 feet from Lake Superior. After retiring in 1983, Morrison spent much of his time living and working there.

In the final two decades of his life, Morrison’s art expressed a mystical, even spiritual sense of place. His paintings and drawings reflected the styles he had always explored, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, and later NeoImpressionism. When assessing the breadth of this later work, mostly of modest scale due to his increasing health issues, it is clear

that the horizon line and Morrison’s acute sense of luminous color unite the work into a mature, commanding vision.

Throughout an artistic practice that led him from Lake Superior’s North Shore to the center of the 20th-century art world and back again, Morrison explored the symbiotic relationship between the natural world and the process of making art, as a contemporary artist and an Ojibwe.

Viewing six decades of Morrison’s work in Modern Spirit, one intuitively senses being on the threshold of seeing differently, of finally understanding how the vision and the hand are seamlessly, even magically matched. Ultimately, Modern Spirit lays bare a resonant body of work that—for all of its visual seduction— is a deep reservoir of ideas, spirit, and beauty.

—Mason Riddle

Scottsdale

southwestNET: Postcommodity Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

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AKE A STEP into Promoting a More Just, Verdant, and Harmonious Resolution, an exhibit by Postcommodity, and then take another. Imagine the floor as a terrain salted with unseen land mines, and know that one of your steps will hit a detonation trigger to ignite an explosion of light and noise.

It’s experiential, immersive installation at its best that puts to rest the concept of museums as static places.

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) kicked off its 2015 season with its ongoing southwestNET series, which highlights emerging artists in the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico. The museum showcased two installations by Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary art collective featuring Raven Chacon (Navajo), Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee Nation), and Nathan Young (Delaware-Kiowa-Pawnee).

Patrons can set aside their usual expectations about a museum experience when they visit SMoCA. These two

installations, Promoting a More Just, Verdant, and Harmonious Resolution and Pollination, are serious pieces—but not without humor.

They carry compelling messages about how government and business goals of power and economics negatively affect both cultural and environmental diversity on a worldwide scale.

Promoting debuted in Belgium as part of Contour 2011: 5th Biennial of Moving Image and is shown for the first time in the United States at SMoCA. The installation’s sudden loud noise, vibration, and flickering lights engage the audience. The abrupt impact of the sonic detonations on the tranquil video images is a significant reminder of the fragility of life in the face of conflicting global political and economic agendas, war, technology, and global instability. Together, the noise and flickering black-and-white videos produce a dystopian vision of the future.

The newly created Pollination uses the metaphor of a peep show to explore how consumer models can negatively impact cultures and nature. This is a “pay to play” exhibit, where each visitor is cocooned in a small, dark space until they put a special token—stamped with a butterfly (the pollinator) insignia and the words “No Cash Value”—into a slot. A blackout curtain raises and, for a short time, a lush garden complete with butterflies is on view. The effect is like a sexual fantasy with all of its associated consequences.

Projected onto the arid Southwest, the allegorical connection between consumer greed and the availability of water is not so far-fetched. The exhibit emphasizes the negative impacts of global exploitation of natural resources and cultures. Visitor participation is encouraged by this installation, with each small room providing a different perception of the lush garden at their center. Like its analogous sex peep show, Pollination provides a glimpse into a natural world that is steadily becoming more illusionary than it is real.

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building, while creating politically charged artwork. The collective questions traditional assumptions, including that of the artist as a single being. Postcommodity is big on metaphors, sensory engagement, and visitor interactivity. All four of its members are multitalented, variously combining their installation art with academics, music, public affairs, and filmmaking.

Postcommodity’s work is wryly inquisitive in its challenge of the processes and decision-making models shaping the world, both socially and economically.

Collaboration is key to the way they work, both within the group, with their shared Indigenous lens, and in outside partnerships with other individuals and institutions that embrace culture and promote diversity in the art community.

Artistic and social issues drive their work.

Consider the group’s name in terms of American Indian history and global issues.

Commodities have had a profound impact on American Indian cultures. A web of commercial relationships existed among Indians long before European contact, based on commodities such as marine shells, obsidian, turquoise, and salt that traveled hundreds and even thousands of miles from their source. The Europeans brought an increased flow of “commodity” trade goods and new diseases, both into and out of Native communities. Land occupied by Natives was considered by white man as a “commodity,” wasted if it was not “occupied” and “developed.”

Government commodity food went hand in hand with the exchange of land, with dependency on the government being a means of dispossession and assimilation.

The four Postcommodity artists address how business and government models negatively affect cultural and related systems on a global scale. Their installations emphasize the strength of shared experiences and dialogues in offsetting the processes that destabilize communities and the environment.

Postcommodity’s largest work yet, Repellent Fence, is being installed on a two-mile stretch of the Tohono O’odham 7 4 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

ABOVE: Postcommodity, Promoting a More Just, Verdant, and Harmonious Resolution, 2015, fourchannel video and sound installation. Both images: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

BELOW: Postcommodity, Pollination, 2015, detail of garden installation.

Nation on the US–Mexico border and is scheduled to be completed in October of this year. Large vinyl “scare eye” balloons, similar to but larger than those used to frighten off birds, will represent a border fence. A variety of community events will coincide with the installation and provide a humanizing stimulus for the Tohono O’odham, Mexico, and United States to build greater trans-border understanding of culture, movement, ideologies, and economics. Repellent Fence incorporates Postcommodity’s focus on how people create and understand a sense of place and how art can be used in the building of overlapping communities.

SMoCA, which has occupied a repurposed

movie theater since 1999, focuses on the crossroads between contemporary art and design. The museum mounts six to twelve exhibits a year arranged in seasonal offerings. With only a small collection of its own, SMoCA primarily showcases changing exhibitions and has become a significant base for the Phoenixarea contemporary art community. Sara Cochran, associate director, curator, and educator, curated the Postcommodity exhibits. She has followed their work since she saw them perform with instruments they had made themselves in what she describes as a wall of sound and excitement in 2008. Sara considers it a great privilege to work with them on the SMoCA exhibits.

—Cathy Short

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Tucson

Regarding Curtis Arizona State Museum

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ITH THE EXCEPTIONS of perhaps “Jackson,” “Pratt,” and “Custer,” no other surname in all United States history invokes more debate among American Indians than “Curtis.” The history of photography and Native peoples is a complex one at best. At the heart of photography is the idea of verisimilitude, a realism that photographs construct more than any other artistic medium. The advent of this science-turned-art coincides with the development of anthropology and ethnography, and cultural scientists adopted the new technology to record their Indigenous subjects. Through photography, European-Americans thought they were preserving Native culture in the face of its supposed disintegration.

Likewise, photography also played a role in the colonization of the American West. Early American Western artists like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer were not dependent upon photography for their representations, but later artists, like Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, and E. Irving Couse, relied heavily upon photographs of their subjects in the creation of their art, and such romanticized depictions fueled the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the subsequent appropriation of Native lands.

As such, photographs of Indians are double-edged instruments, as much responsible for the devastation as they are the preservation of Native cultures. And for an artist like Edward Sheriff Curtis, the reality afforded by photography creates indelible images that purportedly but infrequently render the actuality of Native identity. Recent Curtis studies by Timothy Egan (Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis) and Gerald Hausman and Bob Kapoun (The Image Taker: The Selected Stories and Photographs of Edward S. Curtis), reveal how many of Curtis’s works were staged and less suggestive of reality than

fantasy. In other words, the more Indians Curtis “shoots,” the less we really see, and the less real they become.

To combat this phenomenon, Native artists have challenged such imagery and objectification in a number of ways, in as many different media. The exhibit Regarding Curtis: Contemporary Indian Artists Respond to the Imagery of Edward S. Curtis at the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona presents 13 contemporary artists from eight different nations, each addressing the various impacts of Curtis’s photographs on Native and non-Native people.

This art show is installed adjacent to the exhibit Curtis Reframed: The Arizona Portfolios, allowing visitors to compare Curtis’s original images and their Native replies—a dialogue between artists, past and present. That conversation is most pronounced in the artworks of Diné photographer Will Wilson, which seemingly have the greatest fidelity to Curtis’s photographs. Working in antiquated photographic processes, Wilson’s Talking Tintypes are portraits reminiscent of Curtis’s in their subject, composition, and tone, but the tables are turned. Inversion of spectatorship is discernible. Wilson’s subjects examine the viewer, rather than Curtis’s audience “looking” at Indians.

Wilson undermines both Curtis and the history of photographing Indians, so that the more photographs Wilson makes, the more real they become.

While Wilson is widely known as a photographer, other artists in the exhibit

adopt Curtis’s medium. Douglas Miles (San Carlos Apache-Akimel O’odham) presents a collage of photographs (many of contemporary Native artists, some in the same exhibit) and drawings, all in black and white, flanked by floating, painted, metal construction signs in black, red, and yellow mounted to the wall. An installation work, Miles juxtaposes media and colors and fixes the work in space— while alluding to the normal dynamism and fluidity of the works for which he is best known (paintings on skateboard decks).

At the dawn of Curtis’s expansive photographic survey, The North American Indian, the aesthetic movement of Pictorialism sought to legitimize photography as an art form by emphasizing its parallels with painting and creating images with a blurred, soft focus to heighten the emotional response.

The paintings of Marla Allison (LagunaHopi) interpret their photographic subjects (Curtis’s images of Hopi maidens) with a similar, stylized treatment: a “mosaic” of square patterns of color harkening to the ceramic tiles painted by her Hopi ancestors, as well as the gridlike paintings of Agnes Martin or Sean Scully.

Similar patterns adorn the rim and wall of Cochiti artist Diego Romero’s pottery bowl in the exhibit. A frieze of checkerboard and scroll elements encircles a group of Pueblo dancers painted on the interior of the bowl. Like the Pueblo dancers of Curtis’s images, Romero’s are posed for a photographic portrait but in a contemporary and ironic twist. It’s not someone else taking their picture; instead,

Regarding Curtis, 2015, installation view. Photo: Scott W. Hale.

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they pose for a selfie. Romero underscores the irony with the title of the work, No Pictures Please, referring to a time when Natives questioned the consequences of photography while tourists asked them to pose, without recompense or regret.

Virgil Ortiz’s (Cochiti) piece in the exhibit also incorporates photography and ceramics, conflating them with poetry and narrative. Ortiz revisits the character TRANSLATOR: Head Commander of the Spirit World Army, a Pueblo warrior bearing semblance to the artist’s blackand-white figurative pottery, evoking the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 but in a sciencefiction, futuristic setting.

Perhaps the most challenging work in the exhibit is by Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo). Her work is performative and documentary, acknowledging the confluence with Curtis’s: Both artists have their subjects dressed in regalia and acting for an audience. But Simpson’s work, like Ortiz’s, doesn’t register “Indian” in the same way that Curtis’s work aimed to and, for most non-Natives, came to visually define “Indian.” As opposed to buckskin, beads, and feathers, these subjects are donned in full body paint, S&M leather, and El Caminos. In so doing, both Simpson and Ortiz move the needle for the barometer of constantly evolving discussion about Native identity.

While a larger survey with more artists, particularly outside the Southwest, would be interesting, as previous visitors to the Arizona State Museum can attest, the historic building presents contemporary exhibition limitations. The smaller gallery poses lighting problems, and some of the cast shadows cannot be avoided. But the sequence and partitions afford a visually intriguing presentation with an overall balanced feeling and effect.

While the influence of Curtis may never be erased, Regarding Curtis suggests, from a Native perspective, that it may not need to be. And just as Native art-specific museums may always sell his work in their gift shops, Curtis’s photographs, as well as photography as a medium, will be continually probed to explore what new and Native directions of artistic expression they construct.

—Scott W. Hale

Book Reviews Art History

The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex Diana Magaloni Kerpel Getty Publications, 2014

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S AN ARCHAEOLOGIST, I envy historians and their “written word.” Interpreting the archaeological record is always tricky, but the historical record can be tricky, too. Many of those written words are less than honest. Yet, one advantage the written word has is the ability to crossreference other literate cultures to assemble increasingly more accurate versions of the truth. The stelæ (carved stone monuments), ceramics, architectural inscriptions, and codices of Mesoamerica are the closest to such cross-referencing materials for the entire Western Hemisphere. Mesoamerican codices are a unique combination of illustrated encyclopedia, literature, theology, cosmological recordings, and historical documents. Combined with inscriptions on buildings, monumental sculptures, and pottery, codices are important documents helping to unfold several thousand years of Mesoamerican history.

Like historical documents everywhere, the codices of Mesoamerica chronicles famous

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leaders and their great deeds and often “forget” to record those that came before them. Documents of previous rulers were often burned and buildings reinscribed, literally rewriting history in a classic “to the victor go the spoils” pattern. Only three undisputed, precontact Maya codices are known to still exist and are named for the cities where they currently reside: Dresden, Madrid, and Paris. Other precontact Mixtec and Nahuatl texts also exist.

Given that long caveat, Kerpel does an excellent job in summarizing the complexities of the combination of writing and illustration found in the Florentine Codex. Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún commissioned this bound, three-volume book created

by Nahua scholars in the 16th century in what is now Tlatelolco, Mexico. The codex is riddled with contextual issues, inaccuracies, and propagandist implications, but, as a document reflecting the ways the Nahua written language was created and understood, it is fascinating. This is the point of Kerpel’s study. Like the unique, aesthetic tradition of the Indigenous people of the Northwest Coast, the Florentine Codex reflects a highly specialized way of communicating in visual form.

Every image contains layer upon layer of symbolic meaning, from the embedded calendrical dates, the scenes depicted, to even the colors used on the page. The researcher must keep in mind that the Spanish dictated the desired imagery in the panels to the artists, and the stories may not reflect the perception of the artists.

However, in the side-by-side Spanish language translations, many of the subtle nuances and complexities of the imagery as told back to the Spanish by the artists creating the images give the greatest insight into the mind of the Nahua artists. So, if one focuses on the beauty and the complexities of the work as both art and story, this work is well done and leaves one wondering what we could have learned had more of these documents survived.

The Colors of the New World is brief and left me wishing for more. Vivid color reproductions of choice pages from the Florentine Codex provide a taste of Mesoamerican graphic arts.

Kerpel introduces a true Indigenous American written art form.

—John Torres Nez, PhD

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Art History

Hopi Silver, Hopi Gold: 12 Contemporary Jewelers Zena Pearlstone Schiffer Publishing, 2014

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URING A SERENDIPITOUS MEETING on a flight headed out of New York City a couple years ago, a wise scholar instructed me, “Whenever you write about a Native American artist, think about how your work might impact their tribe.” Those words settled deeply into my soul, and ever since that fateful encounter I earnestly filter scholarship—what I read and what I write—through this lens.

Oftentimes the position complicates otherwise seemingly straightforward material, and Zena Pearlstone’s new publication, Hopi Gold, Hopi Silver: 12 Contemporary Jewelers, is no exception.

In this 144-page book illustrated with 194 color and black-and-white photos, Pearlstone documents the history of silver and gold jewelry production at Hopi. The focus is on the contributions of Richard and Margo Mehagian, owners of Kópavi® Gallery in Sedona, Arizona. The couple has invested in the artisans at the village of Songòopavi, Second Mesa, Hopi, since the early 1970s.

Pearlstone summarizes the main theme of her text by stating that it “records the history of a period in Hopi life and is a testimonial to the Mehagians’s endurance and generosity.” She achieves this end by including the stunning photographs and by highlighting the works of Hopi jewelers Victor Coochwytewa, Phillip Honanie, Ricky Coochwytewa, Jason Takala Sr., Sidney Sekakuku, Sharold Nutumya, Watson Honanie, Bradley Gashwazra, Norman Honie Sr., Beauford Dawahoya, John Coochyumptewa, and Michael Kabotie.

Pearlstone’s approach underscores the relationships between the author, the Mehagians, and the Hopiit, which provides the framework for this book.

Pearlstone, who has written extensively on the topic of Native American art, including her 2001 work Katsina: Commodified and Appropriated Images of Hopi Supernaturals, first visited Hopi under the “tutelage of the Mehagians” in 1985.

For husband-and-wife team Richard and Margo—who both became interested in Southwestern Indian art in childhood— their first contact at Hopi reaches farther back to 1973 when they initially visited the village of Songòopavi, Second Mesa.

Pearlstone includes various quotes and anecdotes to demonstrate the lifelong bonds between the Mehagians and the people of Songòopavi, including how Richard got his Hopi nickname, Ahöla.1 This overarching idea of a “relationship of trust” organizes Hopi Gold, Hopi Silver: 12 Contemporary Jewelers. As Pearlstone suggests, “the humanity of the relationship between the Mehagians and the jewelers is central.”

The significance of this publication points us to the lack of literature on the topic of Hopi metalsmithing. Very little has been written on the subject.

Outside of Margaret Nickelson Wright’s 1972 publication Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing and subsequent revised editions, scholarship is almost nonexistent. Therefore, by giving a broad overview of the historical practice of Hopi silversmithing, including

a discussion of the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild (now the Hopi Arts and Crafts Silvercraft Cooperative Guild) and Hopicrafts, followed by a detailed focus on 12 contemporary Hopi artisans and the jewelry they create, Pearlstone begins to fill a gaping hole in the literature.

She also fills a “visual gap” with her clear, thorough analyses that often include photographs further documenting Hopi jewelry—leaving a graphic, historical record for future generations. This record refreshingly includes the use of the Hopi language whenever possible, and a glossary of Hopi words in the appendix of the book.

Despite what is a presumably an editorial error and not the author’s, in which the chapters and endnotes are unfortunately misaligned, making it difficult to locate correct citations, Pearlstone does achieve what she set out to do: She gives the reader a view into the world of Hopi jewelry while validating the tenacity and benevolence of the Mehagians.

This achievement ultimately leaves the reader wrestling with deeper questions about how the relationship between the Mehagians and the Hopiit affects the Hopi tribe. Surely the Mehagians’s continued presence at Songòopavi—despite fluctuations in the outside economy— provides fiscal gains for the tribe, not to mention the Mehagians. Nevertheless, the extensive accolades for the Mehagians by the author, artists, and employees in the form of direct quotations attest to the goodwill of the gallery owners.

But despite these accolades, Richard’s practice of working with the artists, the materials he is credited with introducing, and the way he markets himself, all fall into grey areas when it comes to ownership. This practice also brings up other questions. Pearlstone writes: “Richard’s method of working with the Hopi jewelers is uncommon in that they collaborate on the jewelry at all stages.

He provides the materials . . . along with broad ideas about jewelry designs, some of which reflect responses from the marketplace.” Embedded within this process

1. According to Pearlstone on page 6, “One Hopi, McBride Lomayestewa, likened Ahöla’s [a Katsina spirit being] monumental headdress of eagle feathers to the Afro hair-do that Richard sported . . . Lomayestewa gave Richard the nickname . . .”

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Art History

is the underlying question, what part of the artistic process does the artist own?

According to Pearlstone, “The partnership [between the Hopiit and the Mehagians] resulted in the reconceptualization of Second Mesa jewelry and has had repercussions for all Hopi jewelry.” In other words, the ownership is shared and marketed as Hopi, but how does this help the Hopi tribe? Secondly, Pearlstone credits Richard for introducing diamonds and gold into Hopi jewelry. How do they relate to the Hopi worldview? The controversial human and environmental issues associated with mining diamonds and gold make one wonder how these materials reflect the Hopi way. Finally, Richard and Margo Mehagian have registered two items with the United States trademark office related to their enterprise: the Hopi word Kòpavi®,2 and their logo3 of a flute player that strongly resembles iconic depictions of the wellknown Kokopelli figure. Kokopelli dates back to prehistoric times and remains part of Hopi and other Southwestern Native American cultures. This leaves us with the final and perhaps most daunting question: How does “owning” a Hopi word and an image that resembles a Hopi icon help the Hopi tribe?

Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form, 50th Anniversary Edition Bill Holm University of Washington Press, 2014

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Overall, with Hopi Silver, Hopi Gold, Pearlstone provides a detailed record of Hopi jewelry by specific artists of the village of Songòopavi, Second Mesa, from the early 1970s to the present. Without a doubt, she achieves her goal to record the history of a period in Hopi life and the role the Mehagians have played in this history. In the midst of all this, however, readers are left with questions about ownership and the long-term effect of the Mehagians’s presence at Hopi.

—Jean Merz-Edwards 2. According to Pearlstone, Kópavi is the Hopi word for “door to the top of the head.”

3. According to the Kópavi® International website, this figure is an original design by Hopi Bear Clan member Delbridge Honanie. It is used on jewelry from Kópavi as a hallmark (#1,106,615) registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office on November 21, 1978. Last modified August 30, 2011, web.

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NY WRITING on the 50th anniversary edition of Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form must be as much a testament to the author as to the text.

Two years after the original release of his landmark publication, Bill Holm cocurated the seminal exhibition Arts of the Raven at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1967. He developed critical programs for the study and curatorship of Northwest Coast Native art through the University of Washington, specifically the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. With eight other tomes on Northwest Coast Native art to his name, Holm is a true legend and a bastion of knowledge in the field.

This year—coinciding with Holm’s 90th birthday—the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Arts at the Burke Museum released this anniversary edition of his most enduring contribution to a distinguished art history. The 18th print edition of Northwest Coast Indian Art, with new colorful reproductions and glossy pages, commemorates the achievements of the author as much as it reaffirms the text as a touchstone for learning the visual language of northern Northwest Coast Indigenous nations.

Beyond his academic résumé, Holm is known for creating a hands-on experience for generations of emerging Northwest Coast Native artists. Testaments more to his person than to his text are found in the new preface to An Analysis of Form.

Artists Robert Davidson (Haida), Joe David (Nuu-chah-nulth), Evelyn Vanderhoop (Haida), and Nathan Jackson (Tlingit), relay personal narratives of their experiences with Holm, and in each instance refer to the text secondarily. Davidson recounts, “I have to tell a little story here: One time when I was working with Bill Reid he was designing a gold box, and he knew a person down in Seattle by the name of Bill Holm.

Bill Holm had an encyclopedia of images in his mind. . . .”

This photographic memory, an oftrecalled trait of Holm’s, lead to a research paper written for Boasian anthropologist Dr. Erna Gunther, which would later become An Analysis of Form. Holm carefully studied 392 northern Northwest Coast objects from museum collections across North America, employing arthistorical traditions of connoisseurship and formalism. These 19th-century works offered an ideal playground for the connoisseur, and currents in mid-century anthropological and art-historical thought primed a formalist reading of these already long-studied objects.

The legacy of the text and of Holm’s influence in the field has been the coinage of a formalist language that describes Northwest Coast design principles. As explained in detail in his chapter “Elements of the Art,” northern Northwest Coast aesthetics are based on a tightly intertwined system of distinctive forms and calligraphic lines. Holm’s term formline has become the primary descriptor for this style of design, and his coinage of ovoid, u-form, and split-u remain embedded descriptors of individual design elements. In this main chapter, Holm analyzes color, proportions, and balance. He precisely describes the variations of conjoining between these elements and systematized eye, hand, claw, and feet designs that culminate in a distinctive, visual language.

The text is markedly art historical and therefore tedious to some. However, the reproductions of historic objects and the reduction of forms into graphic templates are true delights to the visual learner.

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The color reproductions of historic bracelets, bentwood boxes, masks, rattles, and other coastal objects will help ensure this text continues as a “handbook” to the newest generation of northern Northwest Coast artists.

One particular illustration leads to nagging questions. The map that begins the first chapter, “Historical Background,” is differentiated from its predecessor by an inviting aqua color and a small glossary in the right-hand corner that lists the coastal nations who have reclaimed their names: Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, and Kwakwaka’wakw.

Why not simply rename these nations on the map? It appears the publishers have chosen to keep the original text, and to not update appellations. Perhaps minutiae to earlier generations of artists and scholars, new readers stumble each time words like Indian and Kwakiutl appear. The Library of Congress has issued a new International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for this 50th-anniversary edition, so titular and textual changes were certainly possible.

Indeed, Holm himself begins the new preface by stating the title should always have included the clarifier “Northern.”

Over the years, the book faced criticism for supposedly presuming a unity of design style blanketing the entirety of the coast, even though the text itself clearly specifies that the objects under scrutiny were from specific northern Northwest communities, where design principles were most unified in 19th-century art. So the question becomes: Why not change the title? Why not amend references to certain nations?

Why, then, not replace the antiquated appellation Indian with Indigenous, or eschew a nomenclature altogether and title the book An Analysis of Form? The text, reproductions, and design templates could then speak for themselves.

A formalist might say that the designs themselves and the relation of aesthetic principles supersede the importance of renaming. Yet, in the 50 years since An Analysis of Form was first published, Indigenous communities and artists have worked hard to reclaim names, languages, and histories. Bill Holm has been instrumental in the reclamation of Northern coastal visual language. He has worked with generations of artists, freely shared his encyclopedia of mental images,

and established enduring spaces for the creation and sharing of new forms of knowledge. An Analysis of Form will always have a place in the history of Northwest Coast Native art. While the formalist framework and certain terminology may relegate it to a specific moment in time, the value of privileging this unique, visual language endures as a testament to Indigenous reclamation.

—India Young

Catalogue

Perspectives and Parallels: Expanding Interpretive Foundations with American Indian Curators and Writers Joanna Bigfeather and Amy Lonetree, eds.

University of Minnesota, Duluth, 2014

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N 2009, the Tweed Museum received a major collection of Native American art from Richard and Dorothy Nelson, which inspired a new series of exhibitions focused on Native art.

Following their educational mission, the museum invited Native curators to create a series of three shows from 2012 to 2014. These shows, featuring contemporary Native artists, were followed by a symposium and publication of the catalogue Perspectives and Parallels: Expanding Interpretive Foundations with American Indian Curators and Writers.

The Tweed Museum’s main goal is to serve as an educational resource for the community, using the exhibition space to bring dialogue about and raise interest

in new forms of art. Affiliated with the University of Minnesota, Duluth, the museum made the material from the Nelson collection available to invited artists, who selected objects to inspire their own art. The resulting shows joined historic and present-day Native life. As Joanna Bigfeather noted in the catalogue, the exhibits were able to use “Indigenous voices both as interpreters and curators” to give the exhibits “a more authentic reading” of Native culture. By engaging in more direct conversations with Native communities, the exhibition deals with many larger topics, including contemporary Native issues such as colonialism, survivance, treaty rights, and family.

The first show, Mni Sota: Reflections of Time and Place, ran from May 29 to August 26, 2012, and was curated by artist Dyani White Hawk Polk (Sicangu Lakota) and then curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Joe Horse Capture (A’aninin). In their statement, the curators questioned the dichotomy between contemporary and traditional Native arts as well as the difference between fine and folk art. The art they chose for Mni Sota, such as the quillwork of Orvilla Longfox (Assiniboine) and the birch bark of Pat Kruse (Red Cliff Chippewa) and Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), bridged these contradictions by being both current and historic, fine and folk. In their statement about the show, the curators noted the special challenges Native artists face. For example, audiences tend to see the work

by Native artists as emblematic of their culture and as unchanging, constantly repeating the same designs and images. In Perspectives and Parallels, Polk and Horse Capture describe contemporary Native art as being “in constant motion, as it dodges and weaves through different media, places, and thoughts.”

John Hitchcock (Comanche), artist and professor of printmaking at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, curated the second show, Encoded: Traditional Patterns/A Contemporary Response, in the museum from September 18, 2012 to March 18, 2013.

The works chosen for Encoded considered the artists’ multiple identities within and out of their tribal nations so their art would work “to speak about the complexity of their worldviews by transforming their subjects into symbolic depictions.” The SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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artworks were often layered, combining different images seen from multiple reference points describing the perception of Native cultures by both Native and non-Native viewers. In her mixed media assemblage Once Wetlands (2010), Emily Arthur combined elements from the natural world—trees, butterflies, and birds—into a “narrative of loss [which] holds the possibility of rebirth and transformation.”

Museum’s “compelling strategy as it allows for a final product that has the potential to create dialogue and critical conversations.”

The museum plans to continue developing programs with Native American partners.

Museums can be a decolonizing force by honoring Native culture and knowledge and challenging previously held ideas and stereotypes. By collaborating with Native curators, the Tweed Museum found an elegant solution: It became a site for change through exhibitions that connect the past to the present and will allow for new dialogues across cultures.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke

Independent curator Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika) employed portraits to discuss individuality and family identity in her show Blood Memoirs: Exploring Individuality, Memory, and Culture through Portraiture, which ran from September 13, 2013, to March 17, 2014. Using different media, the artists in this exhibit explored identity by including various viewpoints. In her curatorial statement in the catalogue, Bear Robe writes, “Blood Memoirs emphasizes the longevity and history of self-representation and selfexpression from an intimate platform.”

The title of this exhibit describes the intimate relationship between Native peoples and the land, stating, “We are the land’s blood.”

To consider the implications of these exhibitions, the museum arranged a symposium for the artists and curators with the university’s Department of American Indian Studies. Moderated

by UMD Associate Professor Jill Doerfler (White Earth Chippewa), the symposium featured the curators as well as the authors of the catalogue, Joanna Bigfeather (Cherokee Nation-Mescalero Apache) and Amy Lonetree, PhD (HoChunk), associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In her scholarship, Lonetree has led the dialogue questioning the role of museums in decolonizing representations of Native culture. She writes in Perspectives and Parallels, “My overarching argument is rooted in the belief that museums should address the legacies of historical, unresolved grief that persist in our communities.”

Survey

The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art Jeanne Morningstar Kent The History Press, 2014

begins with an excellent description of the purposes of art in the region and how it was used as a means of communication.

Whether through clothing designs or tattooing, art among the Wabanaki was a way to express who they were and where they were from—two questions Indigenous people face today that must be asked due to the widespread adoption of Western styles.

In the book, Kent describes various artistic forms and techniques used by the Wabanaki and other tribes of Northeastern Woodlands and explains their origins and function. Many exquisite images, including several color plates of beautiful bark work and quillwork, illustrate this section of the text. Although familiar with the material, I was unaware of the diversity of their uses to make a myriad of functional objects, from boxes to boats.

The realistic depictions of plants and animals are also quite wonderful.

Kent describes the Wabanaki’s transition to using European materials and how glass beads, commercial paints, and manufactured fabrics became part of the tribe’s “visual language.” Most anthropological descriptions of Indigenous art often stop there: form, medium, technique, and symbolism. Kent doesn’t stop there. She takes that next, crucial step and connects the tradition to living people today.

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S AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCHER and someone who spends a great deal of time with living Indigenous artists and their artwork, I am always delighted to be exposed to something new. Jeanne Morningstar Kent’s book The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art is this for me: exposure to something new—and delightful.

In her well written text with wonderful images of Wabanaki [and Wabankiinspired] art, Kent (Coosuk Abenaki)

The last quarter of the book is devoted to interviews with living tribal members practicing the arts of the Wabanaki people.

It is too easy to think we Native peoples are gone when books leave this important aspect out—we are here and our traditions are flourishing. This point is important, and I am pleased Kent makes it.

The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art is a great little book and a fast and fascinating read about beautiful art from a region of which not enough has been written. Kent’s survey includes detailed descriptions and unusual images of unique art forms. She makes that vital connection from the past to the present, and, as a fellow Native scholar, I appreciate her thoroughness.

Ahe’ee.

—John Torres Nez, PhD

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Music Review Native North America (Vol. 1), Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 Light in the Attic Records, 2014

I pity the country, I pity the state, and the mind of the man who thrives on hate.

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HE ANTHOLOGY STARTS and ends with Mi’kmaq singer Willie Dunn’s deep voice—wise, centered, and steadfast. His is the voice of a man who experienced profound injustices yet resolved to not adopt the hatred of his oppressors. His voice has the delivery and empathy as satisfying as Johnny Cash in his best moments. “I Pity The Country” immediately sets the stage for an incredible first volume of a two-disc anthology that chronicles folk, rock, and country songs from Native North America 1966–1985. In the liner notes, producer Kevin Howes writes, “These intensely personal accounts have shaken me to the core. That such trials and tribulations can spawn music of such meaning is a testament to the strength of Native North America’s players and their respective beliefs. It doesn’t get any more real.”

The initial experience with this anthology is the beautiful object itself: a hardcover package with graphics and color that harken back to an earlier era, appropriate for the music within. Between the two discs is an informative, 120-page

booklet with short personal and musical biographies of each artist/song that help paint the picture of the time, place, and circumstances in which this music was born. These newly remastered versions create a sonic continuity without masking the original unique quality of each recording. The sequencing of the tracks keeps the album well balanced in consistency and variety. Kevin Howes and Light in the Attic’s deep respect and sense of importance for the artists is felt throughout this anthology.

These are primarily obscure songs by obscure artists, musicians who have received very little attention by the mainstream media and culture. However, this lack of attention is not because the music is unworthy. These songs and performances deserve to be a part of the North American popular culture.

This music is written and performed by people who have personal, cultural, and political stories to tell. These songs come directly from experience; lyrics express subjects that should be considered not only significant but also necessary to understanding true North American culture and history. This anthology should be in the collection of anyone who loves great songs but who also seeks opportunities to learn about the people and circumstances behind them.

The tracks echo sounds, attitudes, and subject matter of popular music of the time. Clearly, many of these artists were inspired by more celebrated singersongwriters of their day. Hank Williams Sr. comes to mind, as do Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Richie Havens, and even the Velvet Underground. Yet, these voices stand on their own and express unique perspectives. Overall, this anthology represents a unique blend of sounds and perspectives of Native North America with the young, rebellious people’s music of the dominant culture.

The only missing element is the presence of women musicians. Few Indigenous women made popular music during the period this anthology represents (Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie being a notable exception). Fortunately there are many more now.

This anthology’s second track is a sweet lullaby, “I’ll Rock You to the Rhythm of the Ocean,” by John Angaiak (Yup’ik), accompanying himself on acoustic guitar.

It’s a personal invitation to experience the ocean—to be uplifted and embraced by the natural forces of his home.

Next is a song by a group of Inuit friends who formed a band in 1970 called Sugluk.

After getting their hands on a stack of rock-and-roll LPs, they became a regular band for dances and other events. Their harmonies are dissonant, complementing the instruments as they paint outside the lines. It feels like it’s always just about to fall apart as they sing “I’ll Fall Away”— and I like it! The next track is the first song in the anthology sung in a non-English language. Its title, “Sikumiut,” is also the name of the band and means “people of the ice” in Inuktitut. This simple song shares some resemblance to Cajun music, which also has origins in Eastern Canada.

“Spirit Child,” sung by Willie Thrasher (Inuk), who has three songs in this anthology, is a psyche-folk tune. Fans of Neil Young will naturally be attracted to his voice and lyrics. “Call of the Moose”

by Willy Mitchell (Algonquin-Mohawk) is a live recording, a refreshing addition.

This song has a delicate quality; it explores contemporary people’s relationship to our elders and the need to listen to the other life forms with whom we share this planet. “James Bay,” by Lloyd Cheechoo (Cree), conveys the feeling of a sunny, afternoon walk along the shore; however, the James Bay Project, a massive series of hydroelectric dams, diverts waterways.

The dams profoundly affect the Cree population and have lead to conflict and lawsuits against the Canadian government.

Inuk musician Alex Utatnaq’s “Maqaivvigivalauqtavut” sounds like a children’s song, but the lyrics are of a nightmare reality: At our old hunting grounds There is no more game I wonder where they could be?

At our old fishing spot, there are no more fish I wonder where they could be?

Now what have we to eat Canned food is not enough.

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In “Dreams of Ways,” Brian Davey (Nishnawbe Aski Nation), accompanied by acoustic guitar, bass, and harmonica, sings, “Don’t hang yourself for a man you don’t understand.” Good words of advice for anyone, anywhere, anytime. Morley Loon (Cree) sings “N’Doheeno,” which begins like a Scottish folk song but morphs in and out of chanting/singing in the Cree language—an admirable combination of cultures. “Little Feather,” by Peter Frank (Mi’kmaq) is a tender coming-of-age song in a world caught between Native land and the oncoming assault of Europeans.

“Tormented Souls” by Ernest Monias (Cross Lake Cree) is probably the snappiest song in this anthology in direct contrast to its tragic storyline. “Out of the Blue” by Eric Landry (Ojibwe) is a simple and direct statement to European occupiers: “You seem to think this place your home, do you treat it well?”

Arawak David Campbell’s crooning vocals on “Sky-Man and the Moon” are right in the front, tastefully supported by minimal guitar and a synthesizer. Willie Dunn’s “Son of the Sun” settles and centers the compilation once again, a great placement for this song.

“Silver River,” by Shingoose, also known as Curtis Jonnie (Ojibwe), pairs fingerpicking guitar with poetry by Duke Redbird (Saugeen Ojibwe) relaying a creation story, perhaps, or a visionary dream. “Kill’n Your Mind” by Willy Mitchell and the Desert River Band wraps up the first disc with an overt indictment against the turning away of traditional life.

The second disc of the anthology is equally as satisfying as the first. The continual unveiling of wonderful songs culminates with “Peruvian Dream,” which features chanting by Jerry Saddleback (Samson Cree), accompanied by Willie Dunn and rapid drumming, rattles, and strummed guitar.

Musically, this is perhaps my favorite track.

This anthology should serve as a reminder to all of us to look deeper into lesser-known singer/songwriters and bands, especially those of underrepresented cultures. It’s unfortunate much of the world missed out on this music and these musicians of the time. It’s an injustice to these artists, their work, and their valuable perspectives. Many thanks to Light in the Attic Records for bringing these to our attention now.

—Thollem McDonas 8 2 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Report Álamos, Sonora, Mexico

Festival Alfonso Ortiz Tirado

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ICTURE AN ENTIRE TOWN declared a national monument by the Mexican government, and then add music, art, culture, and a mood of celebration to the mix. Since 1985, that is just what happens every January during the Festival Alfonso Ortiz Tirado (FAOT). The Palacio de Gobierno and Iglesia de la Purísima Concepción, the church completed in 1820, host indoor performances. The seating policy is strict; show up late, and you must wait until intermission to be seated. Outdoor concerts around the Plaza de Armas start in the morning and last late into the night. Álamos was founded in 1684 and is known for its Spanish colonial architecture with Moorish and Indigenous influences. Facades, arches, portals, and columns line the streets, while beautiful courtyards flourish behind them. The town is famous for its silver mines, and many of the mansions built by silver barons have been restored as private residences and galleries. Tucked into the Sierra Madre foothills, Álamos is about seven hours southeast of Nogales and is the sister city of Scottsdale, Arizona. It has retained the charm and pace of an earlier time and is often referred to as “la ciudad de los portales,” a reference to the arched, covered verandas that front cobblestone streets. The town is easily walkable with many interesting barrios to explore. Don’t be surprised if you end up driving along the Arroyo la Aduana, which parallels the main street into Álamos and often serves as an alternate route during the dry season for horses, bikes, trucks, buses, and other vehicles, as well as foot traffic.

After Spanish explorers discovered nearby deposits of silver, Álamos became the capital of the surrounding region, but flooding, depletion of the silver mines, and armed Native resistance (by allied forces of Yaqui, Mayo, Opata, and Pima people) convinced the Mexican government to relocate the regional capital to Hermosillo. The population dwindled in the early 20th century. With about 25,000 current residents, Álamos avoided large-scale commercialism and become home to many artists and writers, along with expatriates from the United States and Canada. Birdwatchers have encouraged a thriving business in ecotourism in recent years. Río Cuchujaquí, a subtropical reserve,

Estudiantina troubadours, student minstrels. Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi)

REPORT

is the terminus of southern migration for hundreds of different bird species.

The nine-day Festival Alfonzo Ortiz Tirado attracts national and international performers and celebrities, and features all types of music—everything from salsa, classical, popular, and Indigenous to pick-up music on street corners. Popular art and music workshops are also part of the fun. The Ruta del Arte, a walking route through town, stops at private homes and businesses that display art of many different media. Native cultural events, including sessions on traditional Mayo and Yaqui medicine and Indigenous food, along with dances and vending of folk art, are held at the nearby Mercado de Artesanías for the duration of the festival. People from all over Mexico and around the world, many of them repeat visitors, come to enjoy the music, art, and ambiance of this cultural event.

Dr. Tirado, born in Álamos, was a physician and operatic tenor who died in 1960. He was Frida Kahlo’s personal physician and much loved for both his music and philanthropy. Recognized as “el tenor de las Américas,” Dr. Tirado’s accomplishments are celebrated in an exhibit at the Museo Costumbrista just off the plaza. It is his birthday, January 24, 1893, that was celebrated 31 years ago with a fine arts evening that included piano music, a local singer, and a literary reading. Now sponsored by the Sonoran state government, the National Institute of Fine Arts, and the governments of Álamos and nearby cities, FAOT has grown into an annual event that attracts over 80,000 people each year.

Larger-than-life cutouts of celebrities from previous festivals adorn the plaza and often serve as backdrops for family photographs. Vendors circle the plaza selling folk art, traditional Mexican candy, and the ever-present street food featuring tacos, carnitas, caldo de mariscos (seafood soup), and roasted chicken packaged with tortillas and fixings for an instant takeaway picnic. Brightly colored, embroidered clothing is for sale, as are

Sound stage erected next to the Iglesia de la Purísima Concepción. Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

baked goods, often from bicycles that have been converted into mobile “stores.” The popular Gabriel el Chino Arellano, dressed in top hat and tuxedo, plays the traditional role of el pregonero, the town crier. He wanders through the plaza with his bullhorn and announces each musical event shortly before it begins.

As much fun as the days are, at night the festival really comes alive.

The streets are crowded with people waiting for the callejoneada.

A burro carrying baskets of wine leads an ever-growing crowd as it winds through the streets, singing, dancing, and sharing the wine. The crowd it gathers along its journey often celebrates late into the night. A local group of student troubadours, known as the Estudiantina, dress in 12th-century-style Spanish clothing and lead the callejoneada each night.

Regardless of your personal feeling about opera music, a clear winner during the 2015 festival was Simone Kermes, a soprano from Leipzig, Germany. She was spotlighted in the Sunday evening performance in the Palacio. Interacting flawlessly with conductor Christian Gohmer and the Sonoran Philharmonic Orchestra, Kermes delivered a fun-filled and energetic performance that charmed the audience and left them begging for more, even after three encores.

Another outstanding star of the show, for both Mexican and American audiences, was blues singer Earl Thomas, who sang outside the church following Kermes’s concert. Dressed in traditional embroidered pants and shirt, he was widely cheered by his audience, even when he told them he spoke no Spanish!

Clearly, music transcends language.

A festival vendor and his mobile panadería on a single-speed, freight tricycle.

Photo: Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).

No matter where you are in the city center during the festival, the sounds of people enjoying themselves—and music—are heard at all times of the day and late into the night. The Festival Alfonzo Ortiz Tirado has truly become an important showcase for both Mexican and international musical talent. It is a celebration of fabulous music, food, Indigenous and mestizo culture, and, indeed, of life itself.

—Cathy Short SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa Writer

RoseMary Diaz

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IKE MANY ARTISTS, I learned about RoseMary’s work through her magazine articles covering the Santa Fe art scene. These have made her a hero among Native artists trying to get their messages, undistorted, through to the art fair audience but have also caught others’ eyes. Ojibwe cultural critic Gerald Vizenor cited one of RoseMary’s articles in his 2009 book Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. While the nonfiction pieces—including her popular “Native Foodways: New Seasons” column for Indian Country Today Media Network— are her bread and butter, RoseMary’s true love is narrative prose and poetry.

are different. If I put in line breaks and stanzas, a piece would work fine as a long poem. If I stretched the poetry out, it would work as narrative.

“RoseMary is so honest with her poetry that when she reads it to an audience, they cry,” says Osage fashion designer and educator Wendy Ponca. “She paints such a beautifully sad picture with words, I feel like I am there.”1

Did you always want to be a writer?

When you were young, did you write?

On a breezy, Santa Fe spring afternoon, I caught up with RoseMary Diaz to delve further into her writing career, education, and the treacherous territory between cultural sensitivity and self-censorship.

You were trained in poetry and prose, but you’ve been a freelance journalist for years. Would you care to discuss those different processes?

I studied poetry, narrative prose, etc., but I’ve been a feature writer for 20 years.

I write short stories, just for my own creative fulfillment, but now I’m going back into the creative writing full throttle.

It’s like my candy, my reward for working on all the difficult, intellectual stuff.

Fiction frees you, where you can get lost in the details of a story.

Is your approach to writing poetry different than prose?

When I write, everything is part of one giant narrative; it’s just the line breaks 1. Wendy Ponca, e-mail message to author, April 12, 2015.

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By America Meredith

With feature writing, you have to do the interviews and concentrate on the facts.

You’re focusing on your subjects and putting them in the best light, so you can’t get in the way. With creative writing, you abandon all that and enter a different part of the brain. It’s so sensorial. I crave that place in writing—going deeper into the self, deeper into the mind, and your own belief systems. It’s the difference between discussing painting and actually painting.

I did. I still have an award for writing a little poem in second grade at Santa Clara Day School. In high school, my creative writing teacher Mr. Rael encouraged me to go further. He saw a spark in me and encouraged me to stay with writing. After that I went to IAIA. Were you were part of the infamous Fashion Club? They should make a movie about it.

Yes, and they should, because so many lives converged all at once. Those times in the mid-’80s were the chrysalis for what’s going on in fashion today. People were taken aback. What is this? Indian designers creating gold lamé mini dresses modeled after fancy dance outfits. Marcus [Amerman]’s buckskin tuxedos. His dresses made out of Crown Royale bags. Dancing around at Club West. Ken Taylor would be out there, strutting his stuff. We were so in the moment. We didn’t think, “Someday later we’ll be talking about this.”

It’s exciting that those guys are still around creating. Wendy Ponca, Marcus Amerman, Pilar Agoyo . . .

RoseMary Diaz. Mylar dress by Wendy Ponca (Osage Nation). Photo: Kimberly Nesselhauf.

Patricia Michaels, too. They stayed with it, and look where they are now! We did some outrageous things. Maybe it was time people got shaken up. Someone used a real American flag at a fashion show in Farmington. A woman in the audience noticed it was a real flag and sent us a brochure about the rules of the flag. Of course Wendy was like, “I don’t give a damn. We’re American Indians, dammit!”

It was too much. I just thank God I had those experiences! So many creative brains in one space create an energy of their own.

From IAIA did you go to Naropa or UC Santa Cruz?

After I graduated from IA, I got the Naropa Fellowship to attend the summer program.

After Naropa, I went to Santa Cruz.

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Were these the first times you lived outside of Indian Country?

Not really. I always had a foot in each door—a traditional family at the pueblo— dancing, pottery. My Grandmother Mary Cain was a potter. My mother, my aunt, my uncles, and my cousins and others have followed in her footsteps.

Your family members have been potters, yet you chose writing.

I’ve done pottery here and there. I just had an already-in-me thing for writing. Even before I entered school.

Writing puts you in someone else’s head in a way that other art forms might not immediately. Through writing we live different lives.

Other art forms have more leeway, but people are really threatened by writing on a page. They feel more vulnerable to attack.

Artists have gone through controversial stuff around here—Bob Haozous, people we know, and the whole Guadalupe bikini.2 Did you feel you could write about anything when you went to Naropa?

Did you have more freedom?

I did at IAIA, too. In retrospect, I could have been more cautious, but the writing just needed to come out. It’s not just about the content and substance, it’s also about the craft of putting the words together.

There has to be a balance between what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.

I don’t feel right putting down some weighty, heavy story, only to leave the reader stranded there, so you have to find a way to let that person get back out, because reading can be emotional and intense.

You might stir something up in others, maybe a memory, and so it’s not just about recklessly writing everything.

Most people I know are aware of the cultural line of respect, yet we have to express ourselves. Artists would feel stifled if they were told what they could discuss and what they cannot. I have to be my own guide. I wouldn’t feel right discussing certain things, so I go right up to those lines.

The mainstream art world tends to tell artists and writers, “Just go for it, just do it, break the rules,” but in the Native art world, artists and writers have a sense of responsibility to their home community. It’s not just you as the individual; others are involved.

Yes, you represent your family, and in the Indian world, that’s everything. People might say, “Her grandmother didn’t teach her right,” so it’s a reflection on your relatives, too.

Disclosing all the kiva secrets would be a short line to notoriety, but at what cost? To what audience? To people who don’t have any fundamental understanding of it, who think it’s strange that we pray to clouds or to a cornstalk. I wouldn’t feel right about that. You have an inner gauge. If you choose to ignore it, that causes problems.

You studied with the late Louis Owens in college?

He was my professor of Native American literature at University of California of Santa Cruz. He wrote some great novels.

He was a resource and advocate for the few Native students there, but he was strict.

What a mind. He was a Steinbeck scholar.

Cherokee-Choctaw descent. It was good to have someone I could relate to culturally.

At the same time, he knew I could deliver and he pushed me.

You’re moving into more creative writing again. What projects have you been working on, and what projects are you considering for the future?

I’m writing narratives—storytelling, some dialogue, but a lot of description. I just love that. They’re vignettes, short stories . . . These little bricks are going to build something bigger; they are all starting to morph together into something longer, like a novel. Not a traditional novel, although it will have characters and dialogue.

I’m still writing feature articles. I’m still doing the food series for Indian Country Today Media Network and writing some of my own recipes now. Native Foodways Magazine is going to print my piece, “A Sacred Place: Mediations on Sacred Corn.”

I’ve started this new thing: using current news articles about atrocities in other lands. If you switch some of the names of the people and places, you can drop in the American Indian experience. It’s incredible what’s coming out of it, and it’s a document of what happened here.

People are so detached from history. Hello!

This happened here not too long ago. It’s happening overseas, but it’s happened here.

I don’t know why it’s not being discussed.

People just act like nothing ever happened.

Was it Vine Deloria Jr. who said the United States will never mature as a country until it acknowledges its history with Native Americans?

Yes, he said so many great things. I’ve always pondered that whole notion of “Native American,” because I know as American Indians—or whatever term you want to use, they’re all sort of erroneous— we identify by our individual tribes. I find it interesting that the term “Native American” gets applied to us. How could we be Natives of a place that didn’t exist?

We were here before the concept of “America” arrived. It’s adding insult to injury in this secret, sly way. “Oh, it’s a distinguished title, Native American,” but when you deconstruct it, it’s really not.

I find it fascinating, because words are powerful. They have resonance. Do you have any parting advice for young writers?

Just follow that fire, whatever that is inside.

Don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t share your ideas with everybody. Be selective about what you put out there while you’re working on it, because you will find, in some way, shape, or form, your material will be lifted. Not necessarily verbatim, but you feel it—the essence of your work when you see it stolen.

Get it published, get it copyrighted, and don’t sell your copyright! Actually, I just started a will where my copyright transfers to my daughter Atlanta—everything. I’ve been diligent about that.

Be true to yourself, follow your dream, and don’t share all your secrets. Don’t always feel like you have to ask permission. Be true to the craft of writing.

2. The “Guadalupe bikini” refers to Alma López’s Our Lady, a digital artwork that showed at the Museum of International Folk Art. The protests and controversy around this digital print inspired the publication of Our Lady of Controversy (University of Texas Press, 2011).

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ART + LITERATURE

Near the Water’s Edge

By RoseMary Diaz

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P TOWARD THE HIGH CLIFFS to the east of the canyon’s edge, where yuccas grow and eagles once flew, a gathering of serpent-shaped clouds swirled and tossed about in the cool, morning air. They pushed into and out of and over and under each other, and their shapes changed as they carried themselves across the sky.

A single beam of light escaped from within the changing shapes, brushing damp shadows onto the fine, pale sand of the canyon floor and across the smoothness of its walls.

There were shadows all around, and the air sparkled and glistened as sounds from all directions moved in and filled the silent space around us.

Saya and I came here often, to this place near our home in Kha Po’o Owingeh, Village Where Roses Grow Near Singing Water. Each time we brought a small pouch full of cornmeal that we had ground between two broad, flat pieces of stone to use when we prayed at dawn or to throw at the feet of Buffalo Dancers on Christmas Eve. The cornmeal was a bluish-grey color, similar to the color of storm clouds in early winter, or perhaps that of a young fox moving through the tall grasses growing on the cold plains that stretched away from us beyond the canyon’s edge. It was finely ground and settled in the creases of our skin as we held it in our hands and prayed together in Tewa.

We said our words aloud and offered thanks to the things that are most sacred to our people: the Sun and Moon; oceans and prairies; obsidian- and crystal-covered mountains. We offered thanks to hummingbirds and redtail hawks; to mountain lions and dragonflies; to corn and clay and shell-filled lakes; to frost-covered juniper trees and yellow stars; to hillside flowers and icy edges of quick-flowing streams; to white geese and blue rain; and to Avanyu, the great plumed serpent, who brings lightning, rain, and thunder.

We threw our cornmeal gently into the morning and watched it catch on the edges of a breeze. Some of it was pulled upward, where it spun and spiraled above our heads, illuminated by the sunlight to a sort of iridescence, then drifted far beyond our view toward distant red mesas and dried blooms of cactus. Some was pulled downward, where it settled gently into the fine dirt near our feet.

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“Throw it to the East, toward where the Sun rises; throw it to the West, toward where the Sun sets; throw it to the South, toward the Prairies; throw it to the North, toward the Mountains; throw it to the Sky, toward the Above; throw it to the Ground, toward the Below. Throw your cornmeal toward all of these things, so that the world may remain in balance.” Saya spoke these words near the water’s edge.

The soft, marshy riverbank rolled out green and mossy and familiar about us as it had a thousand times, and we walked upon it as if walking upon rose petals or rice paper or silk.

Each step was gentle and deliberate and taken with the knowing that a too-heavy or ill-timed foot could send us tearing through the softness and into the sharpness of the churning, dark-green currents below.

This was the place where I first heard the creation stories of the Tewa people, of how we got from there to here.

Saya said the katsinas brought us here. It was they who wanted us to have this life, here, now. It could not be any other way and that’s why it was so. That’s why they brought us into being.

Her voice moved through the stillness around us as she told the stories, then floated out toward the tall reeds and cedar trees that grew close to the water, toward the places where fog moves through thin, narrow passages carved into the cliffs by generations of wind and water, then into soundlessness.

Our creation stories involve lakes and long journeys and snow and places farther north than here, and were always told in a low, whisper-like voice, as if our lives depended upon them not being overheard. Some believed they did.

There was a certain power in being secretive with the telling and the hearing of the stories. And there was power in knowing that the stories were sacred, and in knowing that our secrecy and their sacredness were both part of an even bigger knowing.

Saya only told me things that were true, and I believed in the stories. I believed in the katsinas and in everything they brought into being. I believed that they made me and Saya and all of the world’s people. I believed that in the future they would want me to have a daughter, and they would make her, too. The katsinas would bring her into being.

ART + LITERATURE

Walter BigBee (Comanche [Numunuu]), Near the Water’s Edge, photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

I watched Saya move along the edge of the river’s bank, thick with cattails and grapevines and covered with a thin, sandy layer of very dark mud that softened under our steps and pushed itself over the edges of its softness.

I could hear the low, gentle trills of tiny, brown frogs and the calls of the wild turkeys that traveled through the dense collections of parsnips and watercress that grew near the water, and the faraway songs of thin, shiny magpies and loud, plump crows.

In the early ’70s, I had lived with Saya at Kha Po’o Owingeh.

She was a potter and taught me to make small pots and figurines, and we sold them to the tourists. I still remember

the strength of her hands as she taught me to shape the clay.

It would dry on my fingers, and when I peeled it off, there were small, white patches where it had bleached my skin.

After a few minutes, my darker-colored flesh returned. It was the clay that showed me who I really was.

I still wonder about those small pots and figurines, who bought them and where they are now. Sometimes I see Saya’s reflection in the pots she made that now sit on my parents’ mantel. It reminds me that, like all the women in my family, and all things at Kha Po’o Owingeh, I am made of clay, too.

WALTER BIGBEE’s Comanche name, Tutsi Wai, means “Always Searching.” His family comes from Oklahoma, but

he spent parts of his childhood living in Africa and circling the globe. These experiences shaped his “open minded view of Creation.” He studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and was a commercial photographer for 14 years. BigBee has worked on photography projects for the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Besides being a fine art photographer, BigBee also teaches, lectures, wrangles wild mustangs, and creates bows and arrows, drums, gourd rattles, fans, beadwork, braintanned hides, and regalia. He feels strongly that: “Perceptions of Native American art must continue to evolve beyond stereotypes.” He lives in Tesuque, New Mexico, and can be reached at walterbigbee@me.com.

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IN MEMORIAM

Jeri Ah-Be-Hill

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September 23, 1934—March 11, 2015 written about Native American women’s clothing, she started her own collection and used that collection to teach a larger audience about what it meant to a Kiowa woman to wear a Kiowa red sleeve dress; what it meant to a Seminole woman to wear a Seminole cape and skirt; what it meant to a Crow woman to wear a Crow elk-tooth dress. Her sources were not words written by a far-removed academic who had done some field study for a summer. They were the women themselves. Because of who she was and how she carried herself, she could ask questions. And the answers, deep and sometimes personal, oftentimes came with lifelong friendships. She carried these insights forward with her—educating and sharing with anyone who was as curious as she was to know more.

Y MOTHER WAS BORN in a small farmhouse near her mother’s original allotment in Apache, Oklahoma.

There are pictures of her, smiling that bright beautiful smile, in front of this house, with my sister Keri and I playing nearby in the red Oklahoma dirt. And it is her smile that remains with me when I think of this birthplace, when I think of her. A smile for everyone, regardless of where they came from or how much money they had in their pocket, an open-heartedness to all who crossed her path. Over the time since her passing, this is what my sister and I have heard repeatedly, from many people: She was generous of heart. She had a saying for us girls, a way of being that was taught to her by her mother: To be Kiowa, you must give—give until it hurts. Our mother lived this, not just in a material way, but also in a spiritual way, for it was her love of her people, her family, and whom she was that she shared so generously with so many people.

After a life of trading, she happily retired when her grandsons were born. She continued to give of herself and her knowledge through years of volunteer work: the long-running All Children’s Powwow at the Wheelwright Museum, 17 years as chair of the Native American Clothing Contest at Santa Fe Indian Market, many hours of docent work at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the School of Advanced Research, and her time with the Indigenous Language Institute. These and countless powwow committees, public school programs, and film productions were the ways she contributed to the people of her community and the people who visited Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Her trading post in Fort Washakie, Wyoming, still lives in the memories of many people, Native and white. That place affected people. It not only helped the local reservation economy but also gave Native people traveling from one doing to another a place to stop and sell their art. And it provided nonNative people a glimpse into the rich, contemporary, material culture that was and is Native America.

She had a story about the 1960s, in the height of AIM and Red Power. At the time, she had a young white girl from town working in her store. The girl was behind the counter, fixing the moccasin display, when one of the big-shot AIM guys came through the door. He took one look at that poor little white girl and bellowed, “Typical! Another white man making money off us Indians!”

My mother stood up, all five feet of her, looked him square in the eye, and said, “Excuse me? I own this business, and this 8 8 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

TOP: Jeri Ah-Be-Hill wearing a bracelet by her daughter Keri Ataumbi. Photo: Lisa Van Stygeren.

BOTTOM: Jeri when she reigned as Kiowa Tribal Princess in the 1952, Oklahoma.

young lady works for me.” She said he was flustered at first but eventually warmed up to her and bought a beaded headband. She didn’t just talk the talk; she walked her own path.

Curiosity drove her. Early in her working life, after exhausting what little was

It is her smile, the warmth and love found in her beautiful smile. It is her generosity, her open mindedness, her ability to grow intellectually, her boundless curiosity.

These are the gifts of how to be that she left to my sister and me. We are the artists and the human beings we are today because of what she gave to us. We are proud and humbled to be her daughters, and we consider it our profound honor to call this woman, Jeri Ah-be-hill, Kia-Mah, our mother.

—Teri Greeves

IN MEMORIAM

Margarete Bagshaw

T

November 11, 1964—March 19, 2015

O SAY MARGARETE had a way with color would be akin to saying Mozart wrote a few good tunes. Masters of their crafts were they—charters of a kind of genius whose historic and cultural significance spans far beyond shore or sea, eluding even the clutches of Chronos himself in its promise to yield not the precious to something as weightless as time.

In the five decades that defined Margarete’s life in earthly form, she not only achieved her rightful place of honor among the world’s most important artists, but she also set new standards of excellence in the painting arts. Her accolades are beyond count, each one well deserved and fruited from a foundation of unwavering work principles and determined fortitude. And though she was not one for boasting or voluminous praise, it is important to mention for posterity, and for present, at least a few of Margarete’s most notable professional achievements: a career retrospective at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, 2012–13; a onewoman show at the Smoki Museum in Prescott, Arizona, 2009–10; inclusion in the White Collection at the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois; exhibits at the Eiteljorg Museum of American and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, and exhibits at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, all within the past two decades.

Perhaps most important to Margarete with regard to professional achievements was the opening of Golden Dawn Gallery in 2009, named in honor of her grandmother Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara, 1918–2006), whose Tewa name, T’se T’san, means “golden dawn.”

The founding of the Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the Arts (PVMIWA) in 2012 was also a personal milestone, which went from idea to reality in just over a year. Both projects were conceived and brought to fruition

through Margarete’s vision to preserve the artistic legacy starting with her grandmother almost a century ago and continuing with her mother Helen Hardin (Santa Clara, 1943–1984). This vision was shared by Margarete’s husband Dan McGuinness, who really got the whole three-generation-dynastic-legacyof-strong-Pueblo-women-breaking-the rules-to-make-Abstract-Cubist-andModernist-art thing, and nurtured it as lovingly as did she.

The subject of a long list of feature articles and books, Margarete’s work illuminated many a page, including those of Southwest Art, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, NDN Art, and Pueblo Artists Portraits. Her ideas and opinions about art and making art were highly respected and brought frequent invitations for interviews and documentaries.

Rooted at once in ancient Tewa cosmologies and contemporary aesthetics, Margarete’s work is far beyond confinement to any single definition. She composed from a worldly and secular space, but also a thoroughly spiritual palette of pantheistic introspection. Fame and fortune were not her driving forces; she simply had an inherent need to paint.

For her, it was all about the art. She was motivated by generosity, and a genuine desire to see her friends and colleagues do well. She shared the gifts of her success with many, offering time, resources, and an unwavering spirit to numerous projects, including the founding of the New Mexico Women’s Foundation when she was only 24 years old. Margarete believed in the power of the positive. She turned obstacles into opportunities and pushed past hardships without looking back. She reached for things that kept her moving forward.

What Margarete cherished most were the simple, truly important things in life: the love from and for her husband and soul mate Dan and her children Helen Tindel and Forrest Tindel; the bonds of her

Margarete Bagshaw. Image courtesy of Dan McGuinness, Golden Dawn Gallery.

many close friendships; the marking of special occasions with joyous celebration; a really good laugh; the soft, gentle nudge of her beloved goldendoodle, Maggie.

Maggie was a most faithful companion who rarely left Margarete’s side and oversaw virtually every painting she made, bearing quiet witness to what was undoubtedly an exceptionally complex and exacting creative process, from blank canvas to masterpiece, from first brushstroke to last.

When I think of Margarete, I often think of the color red, which isn’t so surprising considering it is the color of happiness, passion, love, and life itself—all the things she so fully embodied and gave to the world. I thank you, dear and lovely Margarete, for helping me see in color again—indeed, a gift beyond measure.

There is a lingering silence now that Margarete has traveled beyond familiar horizons—beyond aster-covered prairies and blue mountains, beyond deep, shellfilled lakes, beyond her most-loved star.

But as the abstract of her absence takes on the dimensions of reality, there is comfort in knowing this: This is Bagshaw Country. She is here to stay.

—RoseMary Diaz SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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IN MEMORIAM

Gerónima Cruz Montoya

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September 22, 1915—January 2, 2015

ERÓNIMA CRUZ MONTOYA was a much beloved and celebrated artist from Ohkay Owingeh. Her Tewa name was P’otsúnú, which means seashell. Much like the various shells traded across the Americas, Gerónima brought forth elements of beauty and creativity and breathed into her artworks what it means to be and become a Pueblo person.

In 1927, as a young girl at age 12, she was sent to the Santa Fe Indian School like many American Indians at that time.

The early 20th-century boarding schools were intended to “civilize” Native peoples in Western values and train them to be good workers and to be part of an American fabric woven in the history of Manifest Destiny. As part of the colonizing efforts, students were not allowed to speak their own languages. It was typical for girls to be placed into domestic science courses to cook, clean, and sew. Boys were often trained in the fields and in areas of carpentry. Gerónima recalls that she was miserable to say the least. In an institution charged with wiping out Native identities, it was here Gerónima encountered the arts. She discovered her love of painting while studying under Dorothy Dunn, who heavily influenced Pueblo Indian mid-20th-century easel painting.

Some of Dunn’s students included Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache), Andrew Tsinajinnie (Navajo), Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara Pueblo), and Pop Chalee (Taos Pueblo), to name a few. Gerónima said that Dunn “did a lot for us. She made us realize how important our own Indian ways were, because we had been made to feel ashamed of them. She gave us something we could be proud of.” Since the children were prevented from speaking their Native languages and customs, painting allowed Gerónima to produce a narrative voice in storytelling. Her early paintings—primarily gouache, casein, and tempera—illustrated ceremonies, dance, and Tewa imagery. She graduated from the Santa Fe Indian School in 1935 as class valedictorian.

Gerónima returned to the Santa Fe Indian School to teach art from 1937 to 1961. Influenced by Dunn’s training, she is credited for educating many modern American Indian artists.

Having a Tewa art teacher at the Santa Fe Indian School was path breaking at the time. Gerónima encouraged students to think about and accurately depict their own village life.

Much of this artwork continues to serve as vital historical references of how village customs and celebrations have changed over time.

Gerónima dedicated her life to educating and sharing her creative passions. She was honored for her numerous contributions, including lifetime achievement awards from 9 0 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Gerónima Cruz Montoya being honored as SWAIA’s 2010 Santa Fe Indian Market poster artist. Image courtesy of SWAIA.

the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA), the Eight Northern Pueblos, and the Smithsonian Institution.

A biography of her remarkable life, The Worlds of P’otsúnú: Gerónima Cruz Montoya of San Juan Pueblo, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1996.

She founded the Oke-Oweenge Crafts Cooperative that aimed to form a collective network of painters, weavers, and potters to continue the traditions of Pueblo arts and crafts. Another little-known creation that came out of this cooperative was the Tewa Women’s Choir. Despite the tumultuous history of Roman Catholic and Pueblo relations in New Mexico, Gerónima remained steadfast to both expressions of religious and ceremonial life. This is evident in her paintings of village dances held during Christmas. The Tewa Women’s Choir continues to sing beautiful hymns in both Tewa and English.

Gerónima had great influence in how art, songs, and celebrations cut across the simple dichotomies of Pueblo artwork versus other forms. More important are her contributions of values toward honoring others and honoring community, which embody who we are as Pueblo people, as humans and all things living. Gerónima Cruz Montoya was 99 years old when she left this world. She will indeed continue to be greatly missed by her family and those she influenced through her artwork, but her legacy will continue to be alive and honored. Blessings and thank you! Ewanini Kuundawhoha.

—Matthew J. Martinez, PhD

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ADVICE

Get Your Art Online!

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Y PRIMARY ADVICE to emerging artists is—well, number one, make incredible art you are passionate about, then number two—get your art online. The Internet has revolutionized, globalized, and democratized communication in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. The important thing for artists is no matter where you may live, Skiatook to Chinle, Natasquan to Sitka, by launching a website you access a worldwide audience.

Curators and other folks regularly ask me to recommend artists.

I can name promising, emerging artists, but if those artists don’t have readily accessible websites showcasing their work and their accomplishments, they probably won’t get the gig. Having a website demonstrates a basic commitment to professionalism.

“Native Americans are among the last citizens to gain access to the Internet, with access to broadband often unavailable or overly expensive in Native communities,” states a study by Native Public Media.1 If you don’t have a computer, then schools, libraries, and FedEx Kinkos can provide access to computers and the Internet.

You can even maintain a web presence from your phone.

An online portfolio is a digitized artist packet. The artist packet is an essential tool that includes your résumé, artist statement, biography, images, and image list (titles, media, year completed, and dimensions). The barest minimum you should have on your website would be your name, general location, media in which you work, images with titles, and a means to contact you (email and optional phone number and/or mailing address).

A premium website by an experienced web designer is ideal, with no external advertising and a custom-made layout. Businesses look better with a professional website; however, if you are on a tight budget or have limited Internet access, a modest web presence is better than none. Fortunately, many free options are available to artists that don’t require extensive technical knowledge.

By America Meredith Images. The basic building blocks of a website are text and images. Ideally, you’ll have a professional photographer shoot your artwork, but if need be, you can take decent images of your work with a digital camera (or a scanner for flat art).

Photoshop is ideal for editing your images; however, free photo editors are also available, such as DarkTable (darktable.org), paint.NET (getpaint.net), or Google’s Picasa (picasa.google.com).

Your camera likely has basic editing tools, allowing you to crop and adjust photos as needed.

Computer screens display at 72 dpi (dots per inch), compared to 300 dpi for print. Larger images are slower to load, so small is preferable online. When people worry about their art being “stolen” on the Internet, keeping images low-resolution (72 dpi) is protection from illegal prints being produced.

Some artists, particularly beadworkers, worry if they post their designs online they’ll get ripped off, possibly by mass producers.

You could post extreme close-up images, showing off your precision and technique, and distant shots, such as models wearing your beadwork, that don’t reveal the fine details of the design.

Text. Search engines such as Google or Bing help people find websites, and text is their primary means of doing so. Many artists make the mistake of having images with little to no accompanying text. A brief description—a couple sentences or paragraph—about each piece or series of artwork will increase the odds of people finding your website. Additionally you’ll want a bio (a description of you written in third person), an artist statement (your motivations, inspirations, process, and/or artistic goals written in first person), and a résumé, listing your exhibitions, galleries,

While social media is a valuable communication tool, it’s important to remember, not everyone is on Facebook. The people who don’t like Facebook really don’t like Facebook. Feel free to create a Facebook page for your artwork (so people other than your friends can see it), but that isn’t enough to promote your art.

Privacy. Don’t put anything online you don’t want the entire

world to see. How much do you want to share with the public?

You might not want to share your mobile phone number or home address. By creating a website, you decide what information the public reads about your art. Don’t want people to focus on your famous relative or your schooling? Then share information about your techniques, subject matter, or inspirations. Focus the public’s attention on what you consider important about your art.

Splash page, portfolio of Michael Sheyahshe (Caddo), created with Wix, sheyahshe.wix.com. Used with permission.

1. Traci L. Morris and Sascha D. Meinrath, “New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses” (Flagstaff, AZ: Native Public Media, 2009): 4.

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ADVICE

Weebly. Weebly.com provides you with a free website with up to five pages, a large selection of streamlined templates, and a dragand-drop site creator. After signing up and choosing the free plan, Weebly asks you to choose whether you want a site, blog, or store.

To start an online portfolio, choose “site,” then select a template, which you can change later if you like. Each template has five page layouts for a coherent site design. You want a minimal, sleek template with neutrals (white, grey, or black). Weebly offers video tutorials and an interactive guide to planning out your website.

They constantly prompt you to upgrade to a paid plan. Just ignore these. At first their editor is confusing, but if you take the time to play around with it, you can have an attractive, online portfolio easily within a day. The free site will include an ad for Weebly at the footer of your website.

Image gallery, portfolio of Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi-Choctaw), created with Weebly, lomahaftewa.weebly.com. Used with permission.

awards, education, and any other relevant accomplishments. This text is what the search engines pick up.

Choose a Hosting Service. Dozens of sites offer free opportunities for artists to create an online presence. For the technically challenged, many don’t require any knowledge of HTML (the web design language) or other programming skills.

Typically the free service is limited in size and design options and includes ads for the host. Paid options usually offer more space, no ads, and the opportunity to have your own domain name. You might want to avoid signing up for free trials, since your credit card will be charged after the trial is up. Try out the free service, then if you like it, you can consider upgrading to a paid service.

ArtSlant. ArtSlant.com is a free network of individual artists, exhibits, and venues clustered around six US cities, including Santa Fe, and nine international cities, including Toronto and São Paulo.

If you don’t live near one of these cities, opt for a “Worldwide” listing. They have excellent search engine optimization (SEO), so it’s a wise to sign up with them even if you already have a website.

ArtSlant creates interlinked lists of artists based on exhibits, so your name may already be listed. If so, you’ll see the message, “Is this your profile? Click here to claim your profile.” Otherwise you start from scratch by registering your email. ArtSlant will offer three options: artists, venues, and art watchers. Under “Artists,” click “create my profile,” then click at the bottom to create a free profile and enter as much requested information as you like. You can write a complete biography and upload your artwork with title, date, media, dimensions, and even search tags. If you curate shows, definitely create profiles for them, and ArtSlant will link the artists, venues, and other curators with whom you work.

Wix. Wix.com also provides free websites from templates. You register, select two categories: photograph/design/creative arts/ etc. and “portfolio,” then select a template tailored toward your field (film editor, makeup artist, etc.). Preview the template carefully, because Wix won’t let you change it later. Wix’s dragand-drop editor allows you to construct each page, element by element, giving you more control than Weebly, but it can take longer. Wix offers a wide selection of apps, both free and paid.

Free sites carry Wix advertising, but it’s nonobtrusive.

Blogger. A blog has posts added over time. Blogger is free to anyone with a Gmail account, Google’s email service. You get so many freebies with Gmail, I recommend it for everyone. Go to mail.google.com to sign up for the Gmail account, then go to blogger.com to launch your blog. Because Google offers the service, you will automatically be optimized for Google searches.

You can create pages on your blog for content you want accessible to visitors at all times, such as your résumé or image gallery. Blogs are more structured than websites. They are also interactive; readers can comment on your posts. Readers can also subscribe to your blog, so if you regularly post news, they’ll keep coming back.

Check Yourself. Enter your own name in search engines to see what pops up. Create profiles with your real name on social media sites, such as LinkedIn or Twitter. You don’t even have to use the profiles, just make sure to link them to your newly published website. This helps reputation management, i.e., presenting yourself online as you want to be presented. If you are applying for a job or a gallery, you don’t want the potential employer or curator to find embarrassing party pics or worse. You want your online presence to show you as the talented, passionate, intriguing, reliable, and hardworking artist that you are.

Conclusion. These are just a few examples of free hosting options. You will learn as you go, so it’s okay to start out small and expand over time. Explore other artists’ sites to see what works and what doesn’t. Have trusted friends and family preview your site and share feedback. With all the effort you put into your art, it only makes sense to let the world know about it.

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VOTED TOP 3, “BEST NATIVE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE” – USA Today 10BEST Readers’ Choice 2014

THINK CHEROKEE YEAR ‘ROUND

To Preserve, Promote and Teach Cherokee History and Culture Experience the Cherokee way of life when you visit the Cherokee Heritage Center.

Immerse yourself in the living 18th century village, Diligwa, and explore cultural artifacts, art and history in the museum’s galleries and genealogy archives.

Discover the legacy that defined a nation.

DON’T MISS THIS YEAR’S ART SHOWS TRAIL OF TEARS ART SHOW & SALE – 4/18 TO 5/23 Enjoy and purchase authentic Native American art presented in one of the country’s most prestigious multi-tribal art shows.

CHEROKEE HOMECOMING ART SHOW & SALE – 8/29 TO 9/27 Don’t miss this exclusive exhibition and sale of modern and traditional art, set amidst the pageantry of the Cherokee National Homecoming Labor Day Weekend.

“5:00 Friday”

by Troy Jackson

INAUGURAL CHEROKEE NATIONAL TREASURES ART SHOW – 10/3 TO 11/8 See the best collection of artwork from Cherokee National Treasures from the artists themselves and our own collection in our newest exhibition tradition.

21192 S KEELER DR, PARK HILL, OK 74451 (888) 999-6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG SUM ME R 2 0 1 5

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Advertiser Index A Gathering of People, Wind, and Water nativeartsgathering.org

7

Antique American Indian Art Show antiqueindianartshow.com

94

Bahti Indian Arts | bahti.com

4

Cherokee Art Market | cherokeeartmarket.com

int. front cover

Cherokee Heritage Center | cherokeeheritage.org

95

Cherokee Heritage Press | cherokeeheritage.org

4

Kelly Church | woodlandarts.com

96

Orlando Dugi | orlandodugi.com

29

Exhibit C Gallery | exhibitcgallery.com

3

Benjamin Harjo Jr. | benjaminharjojr.com

int. back cover

Home & Away Gallery | homeandaway.biz

7

Indian Arts and Crafts Board | www.iacb.doi.gov

3

Indigenous Fine Art Market | indigefam.org

9

Institute of American Indian Arts | iaia.edu

1

Keshi the Zuni Connection | keshi.com

3

Native American Art Appraisals, Inc. | naaainc.com

6

Noksi Press | noksi.com

96

Objects of Art Santa Fe | objectsofartsantafe.com

94

Red Cloud Indian Art Show | redcloudschool.org/artshow

9

Red Earth Festival | redearth.org

2

Richard Opfer Auctions | opferauction.com

4

Spider Gallery | artscenter.cherokee.org

6

Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian wheelwright.org exterior back cover

Classified Ads Advertise in First American Art Magazine! Classifieds provide affordable advertising solutions for art professionals and service providers. Contact us today: (505) 473-0149 or ads@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

ORGANIZATIONS The Southeastern Indian Artists Association (SEIAA) is a Native American-run not-for-profit organization, whose mission is to promote and educate about the arts and artists of tribal peoples. SEIAA, while a network of primarily Southeastern tribal artists, is supportive of all federally recognized Native artists. Visit www.seiaa.org for more info.

Great Basin Native Artists, collective of Native American professional artists in Nevada and Eastern Sierra Nevada range providing support through our online directory, image gallery, exhibiting opportunities, art business workshops, forum for Native artists and interested community members to connect and interact, and an online presence for rural Native artists. For more info, contact Melissa Melero at (775) 424-3159 or gbnativeartists@gmail.com and visit www.greatbasinnativeartists.com.

INTERN/VOLUNTEER Internships at First American Art Magazine, LLC, available through IAIA or independently. Writing, graphics, or business focus.

Volunteers needed for tabling/events. Contact us at: info@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

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benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist

Rainbow of Life, 2015, gouache on Arches paper, 10 × 16 inches

w w w. b e n j a m i n h a r j o j r. c o m

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Wheelwright Museum OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

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704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505 • 1- 800 -607- 4636

Coming to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

Public Opening

Santa Fe, NM

The first exhibition anywhere devoted permanently to the study of Native American metalwork, lapidary, and related traditions.

Photo by Addison Doty

www.wheelwright.org

This exhibition funded in part by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts; and many private donors.