First American Art Magazine No. 1, Fall 2013

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

A r t by I n d i ge n o u s Pe o p l e s o f t h e A m e r i c a s

Fall 2013

Nani Chacon Shan Goshorn Dylan Miner Ken Williams

Northern Artists in the Southwest Colorado River Geoglyphs Reviving Southeastern Beadwork Cultural Heritage, Art & Living Beings

Brent Greenwood Indian Market 2013 Booth 779LIN-W www.brentgreenwood.com gwoodstudio@yahoo.com www.kivaindianart.com

First American Art Magazine, LLC Issue No. 1, Fall 2013

Editor/Publisher: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Consulting Editor: Lisa Alvarado (Chicana) Proofreader: Meghan Cunningham Copy Editor: Amanda Mather Layout and Design: America Meredith Design Consultant: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) Contributing Writers: Gloria Bell (Métis), Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation), Corinne Cain, RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo), JoKay Dowell (Quapaw/Cherokee/Eastern Shawnee/Peoria), Lara M. Evans (Cherokee Nation), Teri Greeves (Kiowa), Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee), Lucy Hewes, Melissa Melero (Northern Paiute/Modoc), Denise Neil-Binion (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation), Suzanne Fricke Newman, Duane Niatum (Jamestown S’Klallam), Stephanie Pratt (Eastern Dakota), Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa), Yvonne N. Tiger (Cherokee Nation/Seminole/Muscogee)

Topaz Jones

Shoshone/Lummi/Kalapuya/Molalla

Daniel McCoy Jr. Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi

Editorial Advisory Board: Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Maggie Ohnesorgen (Mestiza) Jim Rivera (Pascua Yaqui) Paula Rivera (Taos Pueblo) Thanks to: Jeri Ah-be-hill (Kiowa), Jacquie Archambeau (Cherokee Nation), Samonia Byford (Cherokee Nation), Kelly Church (Odawa/ Ojibwe), Joseph Erb (Cherokee Nation), Tom Farris (OtoeMissouria/Cherokee), Susan Feller (Choctaw Nation), Jennifer Foerster (Muscogee Creek), Reid Gómez (Navajo), Barbara Harjo (Cherokee), Franci Hart, Linda Eben Jones (Northern Paiute/ Modoc), Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Stephen MacMurray, Dan McCoy Jr. (Muscogee/ Citizen Potawatomi), Jacob Meders (Mechoopda Maidu), Mary Ellen Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Todd “Trogg” Rommel, Rick Stivers, Marcia Swain, and Lyle Toledo Yazzie (Navajo).

Subscription services, changes of address, and wholesale inquiries: First American Art Magazine, 3334 W. Main St. #442, Norman, OK 73072. First American Art Magazine welcomes queries about editorial submissions. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or artwork.

First American Art Magazine, LLC, is not responsible for the content of any article or for the statements of any advertiser. The publishers reserve the right to accept or reject any advertisement at their sole discretion.

Copyright © 2013 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or in 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.

Indian Market, August 17 & 18, 2003 Booth #301 FR-S (San Francisco St.) gimmearib@hotmail.com

Letters to the Editor are welcome and may be mailed to: First American Art Magazine Attention: Editor 3334 W. Main St. #442, Norman, OK 73072 or emailed to info@firstamericanartmagazine.com.

Telephone: (405) 561-7655 First American Art Magazine is a Papyrus font-free publication.

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ISSUE NO. 1 FALL 2013 FEATURES

REVIEWS

Top of the World Bound: Seven Pacific Northwest Coast, Alaskan, and Canadian First Nations Artists Reflect on Challenge, Opportunity, and Santa Fe Indian Market RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

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Stitches in Time: The Rebirth of Southeastern Woodlands Beadwork America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Cultural Heritage, Art, and Living Beings: Justice Lost in Translation Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee)

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Colorado River Geoglyphs: Guardians of a Sacred Landscape America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Octopus Dreams Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation)

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Sarah Sense: Weaving Water Stephanie Pratt (Eastern Dakota)

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Hopituy: Kachinas from the Permanent Collections Denise Neil-Binion (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation)

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California Contemporary Native Art 34 Melissa Melero (Northern Paiute/Modoc) The Durango Collection John Torres-Nez (Diné)

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Stands with a Fist America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Air, Land, Seed Gloria Bell (Métis)

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DEPARTMENTS

ARTIST PROFILES

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Nanibah “Nani” Chacon (Diné/Xicana) Suzanne Newman Fricke (Ashkenazic American)

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Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee) JoKay Dowell (Quapaw/Cherokee/ Eastern Shawnee/Peoria)

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Dylan Miner (Métis) America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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Ken Williams (Arapaho/Seneca) Teri Greeves (Kiowa)

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Recent Developments

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Exploring Native Graphic Design Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

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Papyrus: The Power of Bad Fonts Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation)

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How Not to Write an Article 14 on Native Artists: Advice to Journalist X Melissa Melero (Northern Paiute/Modoc) 28

Everything You Wanted to Know about Art Pricing and Appraising, But Were Afraid to Ask Corrinne Cain (German-Anglo-Irish-American)

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Poetry 73 Duane Niatum (Jamestown S’Klallam)

Cover: Nani Chacon (Diné/Xicana),

Reclamation: Manifestations of Changing Woman, 2012, oil on panel, 24 × 24 in.

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Book Reviews

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In Memoriam

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Contributing Writers GLORIA BELL (Métis) is the web editor at Aboriginal Curatorial Collective and an independent researcher and blogger at Métis Ramblings. She earned her Master’s Degree in Art History from Carleton University. She has served as: an intern at the School of Advanced Research, a research assistant for the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture, gallery assistant at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, facilitator at the Royal Ontario Museum, intern at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, programs assistant for the McMichael Canadian Art Collections, and gallery assistant at the Union Gallery in Kingston. Bell has heritage ties to the Métis at Red River Settlement and Cree in James Bay. ROY BONEY JR. (Cherokee Nation) is a full-blood Cherokee and an award-winning filmmaker, artist, and writer. Boney has written, directed, and produced several short animated films. As a graphic novelist, Boney contributed to Dead Eyes Open and the Eisner Award nominated anthology Trickster: Native American Tales. He works for the Language Technology Program for the Cherokee Nation Education Services Group in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

CORINNE CAIN (German-Anglo-Irish-American) was first trained as an art appraiser in 1975, after having earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing (1974). She also earned an MBA in Finance and an MFA in Arts Administration (both 1976). Cain has been a gallery director four times, is an art critic, a marketing developer for Sotheby’s New York, an exhibiting artist, and an art appraiser. She began collecting art at the age of 16, focusing on American Indian paintings, sculpture, jewelry, pottery, and textiles; as well as contemporary photography, Fabergé, Ming pottery, pictorial American Indian baskets, artists’ books, and over 300 Japanese woodblock prints of the Meiji era.

ROSEMARY DIAZ (Santa Clara Pueblo) studied literature and its respective arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Naropa Institute, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her feature articles have appeared in Beadwork Magazine, The Collector’s Guide, Native Peoples, New Mexico Magazine, and the Santa Fean.

She is also an award-winning and anthologized poet. She often works behind the scenes, writing text for greeting card companies, commercial brochures, museum exhibits, and artists’ websites. Diaz presently lives in Santa Fe with her fiancé and their tiny black and white dog, Gemini.

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JOKAY DOWELL (Quapaw/Cherokee/Eastern Shawnee/Peoria) is a journalist, poet, writer, photographer, beadwork artist, and activist living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Journalism with a Spanish minor from Northeastern State University. Dowell has organized numerous conferences on treaty rights and other Indigenous issues. She founded the Eagle Condor Alliance Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance, a North and South American Indigenous rights organization.

LARA M. EVANS (Cherokee Nation) earned a PhD in Art History, with emphasis on contemporary Native American art, at the University of New Mexico in 2005. She is also a practicing artist, primarily working in painting and drawing. Evans is a Full Professor of Art History and Studio Art at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Evergreen State has provided a leave of absence in order to share Evans with the Institute of American Indian Arts 2012–14. She co-edited Art in Our Lives: Native Women Artists in Dialogue. Evans also wrote a chapter in Action and Agency: Advancing the Dialogue on Native Performance Art and brief essays in Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism.

TERI GREEVES (Kiowa) is a beadwork artist, who grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

Currently, she lives in Santa Fe with her husband and two sons. Greeves graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in American Studies (magna cum laude). She taught beadwork at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a sought-after public speaker. Her work combines Kiowa oral history with her personal and family experiences.

SUZAN SHOWN HARJO (Southern Cheyenne/ Muscogee) is a poet, writer, curator, lecturer, and policy advocate, helping Native peoples protect sacred places and recover more than one million acres of land.

President of the Morning Star Institute, she is also an award-winning columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network and guest curator and general editor of Treaties: Great Nations In Their Own Words, holding an honorary Doctorate of Humanities (Institute of American Indian Arts, 2011). She is a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and past news director of the American Indian Press Association.

MELISSA MELERO (Northern Paiute/Modoc) is a mixed media artist living in Hungry Valley, Nevada. She is currently a full-time artist and works part time for a non-profit arts organization in Reno, Nevada. Melero has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a Bachelor of Science from Portland State University in Oregon. She exhibits her art throughout the United States.

DENISE NEIL-BINION (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation) currently resides in Norman, Oklaoma. She has just completed her master of arts degree in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico, and 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.

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Sunday, August 18: SUZANNE FRICKE NEWMAN (Ashkenazic American) Frog by Andrew & Laura Quam 11AM—2PM Quam Family completed her PhD in Art History, with an emphasis on 20th century Native American pottery, at the University of New Mexico in 2003. For the past 20 years, she has All proceeds go directly to the artists. taught art history at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe University of since 1981 fetishes jewelry pottery Art and Design, and Central New Mexico Community College. In 2012, she served as the principal curator for Octopus Dreams: 200 Works on Paper by Contemporary ad Quam frog v3.indd 1 Native American Artists which traveled to the EkaterinburgIndian Market NEEBINNAUKZHIK SOUTHALL (Chippewas of 5/30/13 12:31 PM Museum of Fine Arts and the graphic triennial at the Rama First Nation) is a graphic designer and artist, Novosibirsk State Museum of Art; the show visited working in portrait photography and body painting. She four other museums in Russia and 516 Arts Gallery in earned a BFA with honors from Oregon State University’s Albuquerque, and will continue to Tokyo, Japan in 2014.

Graphic Design program and the University Honors College, with a minor in Fine Arts. She created the Native DUANE NIATUM ( Jamestown S’Klallam) is a poet, American Graphic Design Project to increase the visibility fiction writer, playwright, and editor living in Seattle, of North American Indigenous graphic artists.

Washington. He earned his BA from the University of Washington, MA from Johns Hopkins University, YVONNE N. TIGER (Cherokee Nation/Seminole/ and PhD in American Culture from the University of Muscogee) holds a bachelor of arts degree with honors Michigan. Niatum served in the US Navy and as an editor from Smith College and two masters degrees from the for Harper and Row’s Native American Author series, and Niatum’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies. University of Oklahoma. She is currently a research associate for the chief-of-staff at the Muscogee (Creek) He has earned the Governor’s Award from the State of Nation.

Washington and grants from the Carnegie Fund for Authors and the PEN Fund for Writers.

JOHN TORRES-NEZ (Diné) is the chief operating officer of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts STEPHANIE PRATT (Eastern Dakota) descends from the Sisseton-Wahpeton band by her paternal grandmother, (SWAIA), which hosts Santa Fe’s annual Indian Market.

He earned his PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University Rosa Daisy Fleury. Pratt taught art history at Plymouth of California, Riverside. He has taught at the Institute of University for 19 years. Her book, American Indians in American Indian Arts since 2008. Torres-Nez has served as British Art, 1700–1840 (University of Oklahoma Press, a curator and tribal archaeologist and is a flintknapper and 2005) resulted from her doctoral research on the visual beadwork artist. representation of Native Americans in European art.

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The following are the people who sponsored the magazine and helped make the printing of Issue No. 1 possible.

Shan Goshorn Studio Emily Haozous Candessa Tehee Jace Weaver Melissa D. Purcell William S. Yardley Libby Moulton Jessica Osceola George Stevenson Frank Weaver Carter J. Meyer Christopher Teuton Russell Hartman Brian K. Hudson Lucy Lippard Jennifer Mack Bobby C. Martin Abi Morgan Karen Pitcher John Torres-Nez Leslie West Holly Wilson Joshua Cheek Rev. Bryan D. Jackson Sandy Littletree Rebecca Klobucher Betsy Sobral Catherine Stephens Jerry L. Sutton Victoria Cherokee Pottery Wenonah Wilms Wool & Prince Poetic Nature Joan Quigley Nena Roberts Michael Sheyahshe Cara Cowan Watts Ivan Begley

Thank you so much for your support!

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ELLO AND WELCOME to the second the second issue of First American Art Magazine! The response to the pilot issue has been overwhelming. It is thanks to all the people who supported our fundraiser that you have Issue No. 1 in your hands. Clearly the time is right for a new platform to discuss Indigenous arts, grounded in Native communities.

People have frequently asked whether this magazine is focused on contemporary art. By profiling living artists, we are showcasing contemporary art, but our goal is to explore all aspects of Indigenous American art—old and new—since people don’t get enough exposure to Native American art history. As a discipline, Native American art history is still developing; we should all be pro-active in guiding its evolution. Our tribal oral histories encompass the past, the present, and the future, so our art histories should as well.

One of the more challenging messages to convey to the general public is that not everything made by Native peoples is “art.” Many sacred items are not meant to be seen by the public, so we explore this concern in this issue.

By presenting Native art from a Native perspective, with a couple non-Native writers to provide a wide spectrum of viewpoints, First American Art Magazine gets straight to the point. What are the artists saying? How are they saying it? And why are they saying it? This direct approach may lose some of the “mystique” and “romance” of Indigenous art, but we firmly believe that the art and writing are interesting and powerful enough to stand without outside filters.

Thanks so much for reading and for your interest in Indigenous art of the Americas!

—America Meredith America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), detail of Because, You Know, the Cherokee Language Is Coming Back, 2011, gouache, watercolor, India ink on book

Mary Ellen Meredith Noksi Press Susan Feller Beverly Morris Jacquie Archambeau Kirti Mathura Samonia Byford David Winfield Norman Claire Hummel Bob Haozous Linda Eben Jones Melissa Melero Carolyn Pallett Peter Strong Karen Abadie heather ahtone Ceilon Aspensen Michelle Baptiste Peggy Brennan Jocelyne Brown Mario A. Caro Jeannine Cuevas Suzanne Fricke Sally Rae Goble Patsy Edgar Jennifer Foerster Bruce Bernstein Martha Berry Ross Chaney Delaunay-Danizio Brent Greenwood Karma Henry Callie Chunestudy Jason Baird Jackson Brian Levy Carol and Jim Loomis Rose May Elizabeth Nesbitt Mary Bordeaux

Editor’s Greetings

Letters

Bag by Jerry Ingram

First American Art is wonderful. The writing is first rate and insightful. Your selection of art and artists to highlight is spot on. What a great start. I look forward to future editions.

Ric Danay Mohawk of Kahnawake It’s such a beautiful magazine; it has to continue. I wanted to share that a friend who is a former bureau chief of US News & World Report and who investigated starting a magazine of local interest was extremely impressed by the layout appearance of the first issue. Proud to know you and claim you as kin.

Patsy Dahlonega, GA Dear Editor, Thank you so much for this magazine! Issue 0 with Erin Shaw’s work on the cover was beautiful and the whole mag is astounding. I read it cover to cover and can’t stop talking about the articles inside to everyone I know. I keep using references, from Jessica R. Metcalfe’s article “More Than Just a Trend: Rethinking the Native in Native Fashion,” in more than a couple of conversations I have been in recently with non-Natives on the topic of stereotypes. It is a hard subject to articulate, especially without people getting very defensive.

So, thanks Jessica! Also, I loved the artist profiles and news of Native art going international. Can’t wait to read more!

MM, Middle of Nowhere, Native America

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Dear America and Friends, The first issue of First American Art Magazine, if it is indicative of anything, promises that subsequent issues will be exciting, informative, relevant, fun to look at, and better to read! I am in awe. Congratulations to you all for a product that will, I believe, stand the tests of time and reviews to become a publication that is kept and re-read. You have set some very high standards for yourselves. Keep up the good work!

Looking forward to the next issue.

Martha L. Albrecht We welcome correspondence from our readers. All letters are subject to editing for length, spelling, and grammar, and not all letters will be published. Send letters to Editor, FAAM, 1000 Cordova Place, #843, Santa Fe, NM 87505 or email: info@firstamericanartmagazine.com with “editor” in the subject line.

Errata George Flett was active on the powwow trail, not the “powwow trial.”

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Recent Developments Art Projects The Flying Buffalo Project curated an alternative art event at Buffalo Jump State Park, in which 15 Native American artists hand painted kites on July 20th. The Friends of the Madison Buffalo Jump organized the kite exhibition to raise funds for the state park in Gallatin County, Montana to help keep the park open. The Flying Buffalo Project will tour to other buffalo jump sites, cliffs used for ancient communal buffalo hunts.

Museums The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico hired Della Warrior (Otoe-Missouria) as its new Executive Director. Warrior has served as Chairwoman of her tribe and President of the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2007, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame.

The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona hired James Pepper Henry (Kaw) to serve as Director and CEO. Henry previously served as CEO of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center in Anchorage, Alaska.

Beverly Ludwig Borins donated her collection of 200 works of Inuit sculptures and other artworks to the Guelph Civic Museum in Guelph, Ontario.

Art Fairs The Best of Show winner of the 2013 Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and Festival in Indianapolis, Indiana is Summer Peters (Saginaw Chippewa).

Laketa Pratt (Cheyenne-Arapaho-Sioux-Muscogee Creek) won Best of Show at this year’s Red Earth Native American Cultural Festival in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The 56th Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market’s Best of Show winner is Marvin Oliver (Quinault).

Art Shows The 5th State Competition of Wixárika-Nahua Indian Art (V Certamen Estatal de Arte Indígena Wixárika-Nahua) will take place in Guadalajara, Mexico in August and will award 300,000 pesos to Indigenous artists from the state of Jalisco.

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42nd Trail of Tears Art Show in Park Hill, Oklahoma.

Casa de las Culturas in Asunción, Paraguay launched a new art fair in conjunction with Gran Chaco Gualamba, an art exhibit celebrating the worldview and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco. The fair and exhibit featured artists from Qom, Wichi, Moqoit, Pilaga, Vilela, Tonocoté, Chaco, Maka, Chamacoco, and Nivaclé tribes.

Division winners of the 45th Annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show in Pine Ridge, South Dakota are: Charles Her Many Horses (Lakota) for painting; Donald F. Montileaux (Lakota), drawing; Henry Payer (Winnebago), mixed media; Donovan D. Brown Sr. (Lakota), three-dimensional art; and Emil Her Many Horses (Lakota), cultural items.

Awards and Grants The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation awarded $200,000 to 12 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian artists for dance, film, literature, music, traditional, and visual arts. The 2013 Fellows are Robert Bullet (Chippewa), Brent Michael Davids (Stockbridge Munsee), Natalie Diaz (Mojave), Joan Kane (Iñupiat), Kapulani Landgraf (Native Hawaiian), Andrew Okpeaha Maclean (Iñupiat), Christopher Kaui Morgan (Native Hawaiian), Cyril Pahinui (Native Hawaiian), Ronald Paquin (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa), Teri Rofkar (Tlingit), Rosy Simas (Seneca), and Rose Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo).

Leocadia Cruz Gomez, Founder and Director of the Centro Cultural Nigan Tonogue in Cosoleacaque, Veracruz was awarded the National Prize for Science and Arts in Folk Arts. The 78-year-old community leader has taught embroidery, ceramics, and dances to countless Indigenous students.

The Tiwahe Foundation awarded ten grants to Native Americans in the greater Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota, including a grant to Moses Mahto-Strong (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota) to study traditional pipe carving in Pipestone, Minnesota.

Fashion Paul Frank Industries has announced its new line, “Paul Frank Presents,” in collaboration with Louie Gong (Nooksack), Candace Halcro (Cree-Métis), Dustin Martin (Navajo), and Autumn Dawn Gomez (Comanche-Taos

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Pueblo). Paul Frank agreed to partner with Native designers after public outrage against their racist “Dreamcatchin” party September of 2012.

ColombiaModa 2013, one of the most important fashion events in Latin America, was held in the San Agustín Archaeological Park in San Agustín, Colombia, a preColumbian site with monumental sculptures dating back to the first century CE. The fashion show donated funds to San Agustín–Más Allá, a group that protects the park.

Colombian designer Francesca Miranda showcased a new collection celebrating the aesthetics of Indigenous Colombians.

Publications Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) of Sells, Arizona recently launched Native Foodways. The magazine, available in print and digital versions, promotes Native food sovereignty, and discusses community projects, recipes, art, and literature related to Indigenous foods.

The Inuit Art Foundation is publishing the Inuit Art Quarterly this fall after its hiatus and will dedicate its entire issue to the late Kenojuak Ashevak (Inuk) of Cape Dorset.

Geoglyphs Heavy machinery for quarrying limestone destroyed part of the Nazca Lines, the Peruvian geoglyphs, dating from 500 BCE to 500 CE. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site but is on private land, so the mining company Gálveze responsible for the damage has not been charged with any crimes by the Peruvian government.

Legal The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Methodist pastor Keith Cressman can sue the State of Oklahoma over his alleged violation of religious freedom caused by the state license plate featuring an image of Sacred Rain Arrow, a sculpture by Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache). Cressman believes the image promotes “pantheism.” The design won the 2009 Best Plate Award from the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association

In Memoriam Ann Morand, Curator of Art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, passed away on July 16, 2013.

She was respected for her extensive knowledge and passion for American Indian and Western art.

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Exploring Native Graphic Design Activism & Design By Neebinnaukzhik Southall You can’t be an Aboriginal artist and not be political… The fact that we’re still here, surviving and thriving now, is already political.

— Ian Campeau aka DJ NDN (Nipissing First Nation), A Tribe Called Red

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OT COINCIDENTALLY, a fair portion of design created

by Native peoples has been of social, political, and activist natures. Pushing against the ongoing oppressive presence of colonialism and forced assimilation, many designs proudly state identity and assert Native existence, advocate for Indigenous rights and sovereignty (treaty, civil, land, fishing, religious, and so forth), highlight issues and disparities affecting Native peoples, express Native solidarity; and otherwise provide counterpoints to colonial narratives. Design has frequently been used as a vehicle to give voice to Indigenous people, often practiced in association with Native struggles. At times radical in nature, it reflects the circumstances in which work was created.

I do not necessarily agree with all of the beliefs or actions of the organizations, movements, and individuals mentioned in this article but rather am highlighting their designs for the purposes of education.

The iconic American Indian Movement logo, which features an amalgamation of a face in profile with a handheld in a V sign (the two fingers suggest feathers), was designed by Anishinaabe Steve Blake when he was just 13 years old.

Steve Blake, called Giwedin-O-Ginew (Northern Eagle) was Bear Clan of the Red Lake Nation of Minnesota. His father was from Red Lake while his mother was from White Earth. Blake was an artist and activist grounded in Ojibwe tradition.

He sketched AIM activity when he was a young person in the ’60s and ’70s, designed a pin for AIM, and later became the chairman of the Twin Cities chapter of AIM. He passed away at age 51 on September 3, 2008.

was reworked for the Mohawk Warrior Society, resulting in the Warrior Flag, featuring a Mohawk man in profile wearing a scalplock. To be more inclusive, Louis created another rendition of the Unity/Warrior Flag, featuring a Native woman’s profile alongside a man’s.

Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (1918–1993), a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Kahnawake (near Montreal, Quebec), was an artist whose work is characterized by its charged political content and themes of Indigenous power. He painted and illustrated numerous works, which often included text—one notable example being Red Man’s Great International Warrior Society, a poster that he created for AIM. Hall was also responsible for the imagery of a series of similar wellknown flags. His initial design, named the Unity Flag, was intended to bring together and represent all Native nations and features the head of a long-haired Native man wearing a feather in profile against a sunburst. A subsequent version

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During the Occupy movement, several posters arrived on the scene to offer critical, contrasting Indigenous viewpoints. Two such posters include Decolonize the 99% (by Ernesto Yerena, Sandra Castro, Orlando Arenas, and Richard Lopez), and Oakland is Occupied Ohlone Land (by Xicana activist-artist Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde).

Dignidad Rebelde, a collaborative creative effort between Melanie and her partner Jesus Barraza, has focused on many social issues affecting and involving people of Indigenous descent, including Idle No More, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the need for immigration reform, which is a strong theme in their work. The group tends to advocate for Indigenous solidarity and sovereignty, as is seen in Jesus Barraza’s poster entitled Indian Land, featuring North and South America alongside the text. With that in mind, not to be overlooked is the proliferation of political and activist design in Latin America, frequently involving subjects of Indigenous descent. For those interested in exploring the subject, check out Latin American Posters, edited by Russ Davidson, covering four decades of political posters in Latin America.

The ongoing Idle No More movement, which spread from its initial First Nations origins in Canada to the rest of North America and across the world, has carried iconic design and artwork with it. Designs by Dwayne Bird (OjibweCree) and Andy Everson (K’omoksKwakwaka’wakw) have come to

represent the movement. Interestingly, their designs rapidly spread throughout social media and were formatted specifically to be used as profile pictures and cover photos. Their designs have served as a rallying cry, generating awareness and mobilizing people to stand up for Native and environmental rights.

Klee Benally (Diné) is an individual whose activism permeates his life and design work. For one, Klee has tackled Native issues within his punk-influenced band Blackfire along with his two siblings, Jeneda and Clayson, and creates the design work for the band as well.

His activist stance doesn’t stop with the band, however. He also designs as part of Indigenous Action Media, which provides “strategic media support and direct action to address issues impacting Indigenous

communities” and has supported an impressive list of Indigenous causes and organizations, many of which Klee has produced designs for, such as Stop Uranium Mining and Protect the Peaks/ Save the Peaks. Klee, who is also the Project Coordinator for Indigenous Action Media, has protesting against the desecration of the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, sacred to many of the tribes in the area. A notable project he has been involved with is Outta Your Backpack Media, which empowers Native youth to speak for themselves via media by providing workshops and resources.

The Save Wįyąbi Project, founded by Lauren Chief Elk and Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, both Assiniboine women, is a social media project that advocates on behalf of Native women affected by violence and sexual assault raising awareness and creating a supportive atmosphere for survivors. The name Wįyąbi means “women” in Assiniboine.

Save Wįyąbi’s efforts drew attention to the need for the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, advocating for legal provisions to protect Native women, who are disproportionately at risk for sexual assault and domestic violence. Bold imagery surfaced in their efforts, with Save Wįyąbi’s release of several photographs of Native women with words such as Strong, Save, Empower, Fight, and Honor painted in red on their bodies. Jessa Rae Growing Thunder came up with the concept in a dream. Another poster features a photograph of a Native man with the word “Protect” on his body, alongside a woman with the word “Respect” on hers.

The posters’ text received an elegant, simple type/design treatment by designer Raymond Rivera (Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians). These images provided strong statements and were widely shared online.

When it comes to the personal being political, wearing t-shirts is a popular vehicle for declaring beliefs, and this is no exception among Natives.

Demockratees (www.demockratees. com), headed by Ryan Red Corn (Osage), features several statement tees, including one juxtaposing Vandalism against a depiction of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, making a pointed

statement about the desecration of the Lakota sacred Black Hills. Through his clothing line OxDx, Jared Yazzie (Navajo) created a t-shirt design emblazoned with the words “Native Americans Discovered Columbus,” turning a familiar colonial narrative on its head. Other designs of Jared’s include “Water is Life,” touching on the water rights issues and environmental risks that Natives in the southwest are facing, and an Idle No More–inspired design.

On the subject of t-shirts, last fall Gap released an appallingly glib tee emblazoned with the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” leading to massive public outcry. Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute), troubled by the tee, digitally mocked up some t-shirts of his own to highlight the seriousness of the issue, which were similarly styled with the phrases: American Expansionism, Indian Removal, Forced Assimilation, American Imperialism, Romantic Nationalism, and Mass Genocide. Gregg’s dark, witty critique made its point as it made its rounds on the blogosphere. Following widespread criticism, the Gap finally removed the shirt from their stores.

Given the issues that Native people have faced and continue to face, the aforementioned designs are just a small sampling of activist efforts made by Indigenous people. I encourage readers to continue exploring the subject, and please, let me know what you find!

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GUEST EDITORIAL

How Not to Write an Article on Native Artists Advice to Journalist X

By Melissa Melero

Y

EARS AGO, I was anticipating one of the first serious articles written about my work in a major publication.

I got my copy and casually (okay, maybe frantically) flipped to my interview. They spelled my name right— yahoo! I thought the worst had passed; then I read that I was born somewhere I wasn’t, I was raised somewhere I wasn’t, and there was an out-of-context quote so humiliating that I contemplated suicide (of the journalist that is). Unfortunately, I was not reading about someone else; my life was being recreated before my eyes. I thought back to the hour or more of the interview where the journalist and I had a great conversation about my work, my passions, and where I come from—all of this while he scribbled away on his little pad of paper, pretending to be taking notes. How does something like this happen? How did he not realize how important this is for me, for my Native background, for the world to learn about what is going in this little space of Native America?

written documentation and access to confirm that information on a website, so they would have unlimited ways to check all of those facts before reporting it to the public, right? Well, we would hope.

One of my best interviews was done by e-mail. I was sent a set of questions and had the opportunity to deliver well-thought out answers that I felt conveyed my work and me adequately.

There is a rising controversy in the journalistic field about email interviews, but so far I am all for it. Especially if that is the only way information can be somewhat accurate.

Journalists I polled for this essay mentioned that sometimes they have no control over what finally gets printed. One journalist said sometimes information gets twisted around in editing, and the journalist not made aware of the mistakes until after printing. It happens.

For many Native artists, what you say about your work, your culture, and your home is crucial because we are Don’t get me wrong—at that point in my art career the old saying rang true, representatives of our people. Readers “Any press is good press,” and one will take that information at face must simply roll with the punches. I value. Indigenous people are so rarely promised myself that I would never represented in mainstream media that put my life in the hands of another many Americans believe that we are journalist, unless I was completely extinct. No joke! As a representative comfortable with what he or she of my Native people, I try to get was going to write. I have broken Your interview should look nothing like this. Photo: A. Meredith as much valuable information out that promise to myself over and over there as I can. I don’t often read or again; I still get excited when I am hear about my tribe, or Natives for that matter, in mainstream asked to do an interview—I just can’t help myself. media. When I do see that bit of Native news written or broadcast, The pressures of deadlines can make getting every detail perfect my first thought is, “How will mainstream America perceive difficult, but how does one get almost every detail wrong? As badly this?” Where I come from, Natives are often viewed and treated as I wanted to write a revenge article on this particular journalist, I negatively. I am rooting for a better day. Things are getting better will take the high road and create a helpful guide, so the journalists since I was a child or when my parents were children, but when you don’t have the bad luck of some such artists approaching them in a mention “racism,” people get too defensive and want out of that dark alley (or Trader Joe’s) after writing a ridiculous and completely conversation as quickly as possible. That is too bad because there is false article about them. still so much to talk about and understand between Native and nonNative peoples.

First, there is this thing called the Internet. It’s a pretty neat gadget where you can look things up to confirm information. Please take Is there any accountability for journalists or editors who simply the time to check the interviewee’s name, where she comes from, what tribe she is and how to S-P-E-L-L all of that correctly. Getting do not care about facts? Other Native artists weighed in on the subject, and several have been the subject of a make-believe the tribe and its spelling is just as important as the name. To most fairytale. Misspelled names and tribes top the list of complaints.

Natives, where you come from is who and what you are. It is No fact-checking leads to random, wild storytelling. Humiliating, essential. out-of-context quotes are disrespectful. I still hope for a front seat when karma comes back for that dude. Ultimately, my advice to Thinking back to what I thought was a fantastic conversation between artist and journalist, I remember him asking where I was Journalist X, it is a precious package you carry to the world, so it is born and where my family came from. One would just assume, imperative you get it right! Oh, getting the images of our artwork you tell the journalists information about yourself, you give them right side up would be awesome too.

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GUEST EDITORIAL

Papyrus The Power of Bad Fonts By ᎧᏂᎦ ᎪᎳᎭ Roy Boney Jr.

T

HE IMPORTANCE of typography in a can sometimes be overlooked particularly when bombarded by text in various forms from road signs, menus, Facebook statuses, Instagram tags, and tweets. To stop and seriously consider the thought and finesse that goes into the design of letterforms can result in a sublime appreciation of x-heights, counters, ligatures, ascenders, descenders, stems, and spines. The shapes of glyphs in writing systems often are strong cultural identifiers.

Think of the uniqueness of written languages such as Japanese, Inuktitut, Hebrew, and Osage. These shapes play a large part in the visual expression of each of these cultures, and they help engender a sense of cultural pride and respect.

Recently the importance of typography was driven home for me in a very personal way. The Cherokee language has a unique syllabic writing system. Most Cherokees had become familiar with the typeface associated with the Cherokee printing press of the 19th century, and its shapes had become a part of our collective cultural identity. When I designed a sans serif Cherokee font and showed it to a group of Cherokee elders, the slight change to the letterforms was a shock to them, and this reaction was quite surprising to me. I described how the design would enhance readability on modern screen-based devices, and fears were allayed. Despite having formally studied design in college and worked as a graphic designer professionally, I had never experienced type’s true power in such a visceral way. The power of typography lies in more than simply stating information. It is a direct reflector of social and cultural identity.

So with the huge array of beautiful fonts available to users, why do people choose some of the most horrid ones?

Enter Papyrus. You know this font even if you aren’t familiar with the name.

You’ve seen it used for things such as the titles of natural health remedy books, the packages of organic hand soaps, and tacky birthday cards. The font was designed

Papyrus we can support.

Photo: Andrea Scheiber, Uganda, CC BY 2.0

by Chris Costello for Letraset in 1983.

Its design of rough-hewn edges recalls ancient script written with a quill. There is nothing inherently wrong with such a rustic design idea, and in some regard, it is a sign of inspired imagination to recall the Egyptian civilization. Papyrus as a writing surface was a major development for visual communications. It was made from the Cyperus papyrus plant, and a complex process was engaged to produce the substrate that involved cutting, soaking, pressing, and drying the plant. Knowledge, then as now, is power, and the Egyptian scribes who wrote on papyrus wielded much influence.

Papyrus as a font seems to have been informed by a lofty history.

Whatever Mr. Costello’s intentions for the font’s design, it has since become a negative element in Indian Country. The font has taken on the identity of a let’s-get-backto-nature vibe embraced by New Agers and hippies—the very same sorts of groups that perpetuate tired pan-Indian tropes.

Papyrus has become an oft-used font for anything Indigenous. The Native genealogy book you saw at the gift shop? The title is in Papyrus. Or what about the t-shirt with the buckskin Indian maiden idling by the stream? That “Native Pride” text across the chest is more than likely written in Papyrus.

What about the flier for the big powwow this weekend? Chances are “Indian Tacos” is emblazoned on it somewhere in Papyrus. An announcement for a public forum with a councilperson? The date and times are in Papyrus. I could list endless graphic materials made for Native design projects that utilize the Papyrus font. Not

only do the New Agers that latch onto Indigeneity—and all the gag-inducing stereotypes they attach to it—use this font when designing fliers, brochures, books, and websites about Natives, there are also many Natives who use this font as well. I could easily populate this article with egregious sample images I come across quite regularly, but I want to keep my friends, even the ones who use Papyrus, so this column should be viewed as a public service announcement about bad design.

A superficial glance may not reveal anything harmful about one’s choice of font. As long as one communicates the message, the mission is accomplished, right? We may know when and where the powwow is this weekend because of the flier we saw, for example. But harm comes from the symbolism of Papyrus being tied to ideas such as nature and ancientness. It paints us as noble mystic savages while forcing us to continually live as relics of the past.

These are the same ideas used throughout history to subvert us as people in attempts to destroy our cultures, languages, and land bases. It belittles our standing as vibrant, 21st-century people with strong cultures.

The fact that we have embraced an action such as graphic design speaks volumes about the true nature of how we exist in a contemporary context. Our choice to create communicative materials such as posters, fliers, t-shirts, newsletters, stickers, and websites means that we must be aware of the design elements of our content.

We must be sensitive to the symbolism of such elements like color, pattern, and even direction when designing materials. And the handling of typography is perhaps one of the most important because it conveys the most direct information. Regardless if your language has its own writing system and fonts, such as Cherokee and Inuktitut, or if it doesn’t, choosing typefaces that reflect your intended audience’s values will strengthen your text’s impact.

The next time you’re tasked with a design project, whether it’s a complex branding identity system, film subtitles (remember Avatar?), or a flier for the next tribal benefit, remember that a mouse click or finger tap to select your font is making a much larger statement than you may expect. It is your contribution to the reframing of the presentation and discussion of Native people. Choose an elegant font for your people. Or make your own font. Make your choice anything but Papyrus.

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PROFILE

Diné-Xicana Painter

Nanibah “Nani” Chacon Interview by Suzanne Newman Fricke

was done with the owner’s approval, she painted much of it surreptitiously. Though she now wonders, “What was I doing?” when considering her exploits, as a teenager, the unusual hours and the risks were part of the work. For Nani, graffiti is a social activity done in groups with friends. She keeps up with other street artists and still has a strong appreciation for the form, and she describes that she is “still in awe of the things people create.” Though she no longer paints street art regularly, she still has street credibility in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

A

S AN ARTIST, Nanibah “Nani” Chacon is fearless. Faced with a 100-foot-wide, 20-foot-high wall, Nani has no problem filling the large space—creating images that are as personal as they are immense, combining beautiful, archetypal women with abstract patterns based on Diné weaving. Her life, both her education and her personal experiences, has uniquely prepared her to create such large-scale work.

When Nani was only 15, she began her artistic career as a graffiti artist on the street, and for almost a decade she spray-painted images on trains, billboards, and walls under the name “QPID.” In her work on the streets, Nani approached each area fresh, with no preconceptions; she painted words and designs specifically related to the site.

Though she now works as a professional artist, the lessons she learned as a graffiti artist still apply.

Regardless of the space, Nani considers the features of the environment rather than the size. She does not have a set of images already planned out; instead, she considers the existing buildings, vegetation, vantage point, and lighting when designing each piece.

As a young street artist, she worked late at night and quickly by necessity. Though some of her work 16 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

Early in her career she was mentored by Carlos “Went” Rodriguez, an established and prolific street writer and tattoo artist. Working with Rodriguez became a sort of apprenticeship for Nani, and she enjoyed learning about materials, composition, and design. Rodriguez helped to shape the local scene, and he not only taught Nani ideas about creating images but also about the history of graffiti art in the area. The graffiti art in Albuquerque has influences from both New York–and Los Angeles–based artists, to create something unique to the area.

Nani’s ambitions changed when she turned 25 and became pregnant with her son Nakai. She found she no longer had the desire to go out at night but still wanted to create art. As her friends moved into graphic art and illustrations, she began drawing more and painting with oil on canvas.

She decided to pursue a degree in art education at the University of New Mexico, so she could teach, though she also took many studio courses. The study of art helped Nani in her own work. She believes that when “you learn the history of a mark, the history of a stroke, and how all of these things built up through the ages ... you may not see it when you are painting it, but even in contemporary art, the history is present.”

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, Chacon worked as a teacher for about six years—teaching elementary, middle, and high school students. She enjoyed her work at all levels in the classroom, but she was continually distracted by the desire to paint.

NANI CHACON

M

Y CURRENT WORK is based upon the images of women and their placement in contemporary culture. I portray these women in a semi-confrontational dialogue with the viewer, as to state the bridge of femininity ascends all paths. The pop-culture format of my paintings works in the tradition of illustrators of the 1940s and 1950s. The use of vibrant color in this format allows for an almost instant reaction from the viewer, much the same way one would react to an advertising ad or commercial illustration...

The characters of these paintings are not to subjectively portray a female dominance. Instead announce the common presence of women in all aspects of culture, inherent, and profound to the landscape as anything else. The subjects become a piece to embrace and confront the natural attributes women possess and add to the forefront of society. My most recent work focuses primarily on women of the Southwest. As an female artist from New Mexico from a bi-cultural background (Diné-Xicana), I see how the culture of New Mexico is unique to the region and unlike any other part of the world. In my work I aim to provide a glimpse at women not only in contemporary culture but throughout time, as I feel it is inherent to provide an image for our natural grounding to history, culture and ideologies, and how that has a dialogue with contemporary culture.

—Nani Chacon, Artist’s Statement

Against the Storm She Gathers Her Thoughts, 2013, acrylic latex mural on prepared surface, approximately 12 × 40 ft., Navajo Nation Museum, Window Rock, Arizona. Photo courtesy of the artist

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PROFILE

She Taught Us to Weave, acrylic latex, enamel, spray acrylic, spray enamel mural on raw brick, cinder block, and cement wall, 2012, Wells Park, Albuquerque, New Mexico, approximately 20 × 100 ft. Photo: Demian DinéYazhí (Diné), demian.dineyazhi@gmail.com

As she received more contract work and commissions, she was increasingly pulled out of the classroom.

She decided, “If I was going to be an artist, I should be an artist, and if I should be a teacher, I should be a teacher,” so she stopped teaching full-time and became a full-time artist.

Nani’s art is inspired by everything, but especially by mid-20th century graphic artists. She admires the work of Alberto Vargas, J. C. Leyendecker, and Gil Elvgren.

These artists created advertisements, magazine covers for the Saturday Evening Post, and the pin-up girls that integrate typographies, drawing, painting, and design.

This combination appeals to Nani, and she admires the artists from that time who had to have a broad skill set. These artists brought integrity to the process and worked hard to create a quality product.

She learned a variety of skills from drawing and painting to typography and graphic design to increase her abilities.

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Nani is also interested in the work of the Mexican muralist Jorge González Camarena who “makes me think on different levels.” Her current mentor in sign and mural painting is Leopoldo Romero, who grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but went to school in Los Angeles. He brought to Albuquerque his colorful style which combines historical and contemporary images and he often taught younger artists.

The past 12 months have been especially productive for Nani. She received and executed three mural commissions as well as participating in new art shows.

In December 2012 in Window Rock, Arizona, Nani created a 20- by 40-foot mural called Against the Storm She Gathers Her Thoughts for the Navajo Nation Museum. Nani painted an image of a woman with her back turned as she is pulling her hair in a bun in front of a storm rug pattern. The design elements of the rug are in the process of either forming or dissolving, giving the border area a pattern similar to an EKG reading, as if watching a heartbeat slow down. The figure of the woman evokes the influence of artists from the 1950s

NANI CHACON

Above: Biłsih (She’s Cool), 2012, oil on wooden panel, 10.75 × 23 in. Right: Tonantzin, 2010, oil painting on panel, 20 × 16 in. Both photos courtesy of the artist

with her curvy figure and her glossy hair and skin, though here she is not part of an advertisement but a reflection of the importance of female figures like First Woman and Spider Woman from Diné creation stories.

This piece will be painted over this fall, but, as Nani expressed, “You can’t take it with you.” The ephemerality of murals does not bother the artist. “Once I create something I am done with it.”

Making images it is what matters to her.

Early in 2012, the young painter won the commission to create a mural in the Wells Park Mural Project part of International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA). The space for the mural is 100-feet long and over 20-feet high. For that project, she took the responsibility to create an image for the public seriously. The site is located along the line for the Rail Runner train for visitors and commuters, a public site where Nani wanted to show that Native

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PROFILE

“ideas are deep and relevant,” not only in the past but in the present as well.

intentions in doing that.” She wanted it to have a narrative, a story, with images to be seen by the public.

In She Taught Us to Weave, Nani chose to depict Spider Woman, the figure who taught the Diné to weave, next to raven and the Diné word for peace and balance, Hózhó. The figure of Spider Woman fits with the ISEA’s theme of technology since weaving was major technology among the Diné—a practical tool providing warmth but also expressing the “balance and beauty” of Diné philosophy.

The Wells Park Mural also has a radio component.

Nani’s sister, Autumn Chacon, who works in radio, built a transmitter to broadcast the Diné words for “Walk in beauty” on Part 15 FM transmitter 96.9 as the audience passes directly in front of the mural. Though not everyone hears it, the transmission of the words reinforces the idea of technology and balance.

The mural questions the use of advances and asks how it can be used responsibly. Nani considered how that mural would be seen from a moving train, and she created large, clear images set out to form a narrative. The lines inspired from the weaving motifs carry the viewer from one side to the other, visually connecting the three images. Understanding that the remote location of the piece might invite tagging, she intentionally placed the central figure higher on the wall so the main images could not be written over. “I understand that mentality. I understand their

In April 2013, the Nativo Lodge in Albuquerque invited four Native artists to each redesign a room in the hotel. Along with Rhett Lynch (Diné), Heidi Brandow (Native Hawaiian-Diné), and Ehren Kee Natay (DinéKewa Pueblo-Cherokee), Nani painted the walls of her room to create a new space.

For Creation at Dawn, she incorporated the thirdphase Chief’s Blanket pattern from the carpet into her mural, integrating the idea of weaving into the overall space. She painted a representation of First Woman emerging from the diamond shape found in the Chief’s

Left: Diné Classic, 2011, oil on canvas, 28 × 40 in. Right: Chicana Classic, 2011, oil on canvas, 28 × 40 in. Photos courtesy of the artist

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NANI CHACON

Manifestations of Glittering World, 2013, enamel and acrylic latex on prepared stucco, mural at the Allan Houser Art Park, Museum of Contemporary Native American Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of the artist

Blanket pattern, a motif that is repeated across the wall three more times as the four bluebirds fly towards the window. Since birds make one of the first noises in the morning, they symbolize the idea of starting over, creativity, and rebirth. Even the idea of four birds is symbolic since among the Diné, everything is in fours, such as the four sacred colors and the four directions.

Nani wanted the piece to be directional and inclusive, moving from the woman to the window, making the window part of the design.

This piece will stay on the MoCNA wall for an undefined length of time until a new artist will eventually be chosen to paint another mural in that space.

After finishing the piece for Nativo, Nani immediately began work on another mural. In May 2013, Nani completed a mural called Manifestations of Glittering World in the Allan Houser Court at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe. The image of a woman sifting sand through fist in front of the design for a woven textile suggests the passage of time but also the continued presence of Diné culture.

Though she has begun showing at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market and other art venues, she likes creating art for the masses, not only small paintings in galleries or private homes but also something out on the streets.

For Nani, “My biggest goal is not that someone buys a painting but that someone has a personal connection to one of my pieces. ... [T]hat they take something away from it, whatever their thoughts are and whatever the connection was.”

For all her glamour with her one-shouldered dress and shiny curls, the woman in the mural wears a pensive, uncertain expression. The layering of the weaving pattern, the diamonds and the crosses from a thirdphase Chief’s Blanket pattern over the woman’s face connects her to deeper history.

Nani’s artistic journey took her from the large-scale graffiti created outdoors, to smaller oil paintings on canvas created in a studio space, and now back outside for her murals. She wants her art out in public spaces where many different people can see it.

All quotes from an interview with Nanibah Chacon by Suzanne Fricke at Nativo Lodge, April 23, 2013.

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PROFILE

Eastern Band Cherokee Interdisciplinary Artist

Shan Goshorn Interview by JoKay Dowell

D

EDICATION. HOWAELISDI. Insight. Alinihehi.

Assertiveness. These are but a few traits that lead a person to success. Add creativity, reciprocity, a big smile, and Shan Goshorn comes to mind. Since childhood, she has known where her life’s path would lead. Living between the city and her Eastern Band Cherokee grandmother’s home on the Qualla Boundary in lush, mountainous North Carolina, she developed a strong work ethic while honing her skills and dipping into the Oconaluftee River and her own Cherokee culture and history.

Goshorn might be best known for her hand-painted photographic prints or her commentary exhibits of commercial products appropriating American Indian images for capital gains. But for the past several years, she has taken the occupiers’ language—in the form of treaties, compacts, and speeches, such as that of founder and superintendent of the infamous Carlisle Indian School, Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt—printed those words onto paper that is then cut into strips, tinted, and woven into Cherokee basketry, a blend of the hilvhiyui and contemporary.

She is sure her Cherokee maternal grandmother, and even her parents, did not always understand her creative adanvtesgv, but that did not deter her, for that in itself is a fundamental quality of what constitutes art: provoking the observer to ponder the thing he or she beholds, then questions, and takes a second look.

Understood or not, Goshorn maintained her course. As is with political and social activism, some will “get it,” and come along; others will not. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to return the love and support to the community; reciprocity is an important value in American Indian or Indigenous communities.

To creative people toying with the idea of dedicating their life’s work to art, she encourages, advises, and teaches the technical aspects but warns that, while some might think an artist’s life is easy, it is no such thing.

The artist must also demonstrate dedication, tenacity, and commitment while learning the business side of art, in order agelasdi the path to success. And, in the end, accept and embrace the frustration born of creativity that demands accurate calculations, as she does when nearly completing a basket only to discover what she’s weaving 22 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

The artist with one of her works under construction Photo: Lorae Davis

will not come together as planned—take it apart, re-figure the mathematics, and start again. And maybe, again. And again.

Goshorn’s dedication has paid off in big ways. After saving for 20 years, she built a bright open studio in the back of her home in midtown Tulsa. She has shown in such prestigious venues as Gilcrease and Fred Jones Jr. Museums in Oklahoma. Recently, Goshorn was awarded three major fellowships: the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, which includes a monetary award and an exhibition of her art in the Eiteljorg Museum; the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, granting her access to historical photographs, objects, ethnological records, treaties and other documents; and the Southwest American Indian Arts Institute Discovery Fellowship, which will be used to support her Smithsonian research.

Weaving the history of her Cherokee grandmother’s people with spirituality and creativity into beautiful, sometimes haunting, works of art, Goshorn leaves a legacy of activism entwined with art, inciting future

SHAN GOSHORN

Separating the Chaff, 2013, basket woven with Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks, acrylic paper. Photo courtesy of the artist

generations to stand confident in who they are. For that is the right way of living, the traditional Cherokee way of living. And so, it will continue.

Where did you grow up?

I divided my time between a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, and Cherokee, North Carolina. My mother grew up in Cherokee, left the Qualla Boundary to attend school, then met and married my dad. They moved to Baltimore, and every summer we would all go visit my grandparents. When I turned 15—right around the time my grandfather died—I started spending the whole summer down there by myself with my grandmother. I would work in Cherokee and just be there to help her and keep her company.

So where in that did you find the artist in yourself?

I’ve always been an artist. Always. I entertained the idea of becoming a veterinarian when I was in high school and actually took some veterinary courses but decided it just wasn’t it. Art is what I wanted to do. Art is what I had to do. Nigada.

Tell me how the artist in you was initially influenced by your Cherokee culture, your summers in Qualla, and how that experience still influences you artistically.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked at the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual Co-operative, which is the tribal member-owned co-op of Cherokee arts and crafts. Members must have their art juried in, so the work is the best of the best. Many tribes currently recognize the Co-op as the model of how indigenous people can successfully market their crafts. Being there I met crafts people, learned the process of gathering of materials, and was exposed to a lot of traditional dinatlilosdisgi.

My college summer employment was with the North Carolina office of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (Department of the Interior). One of my jobs was to help put together shows for other artists, so I had extensive exposure to contemporary Native arts. When I graduated from college, the IACB commissioned me to do about 20 pen-and-ink drawings of basket designs. After I did about 10 or 12, I thought, “You know what? I could do this.” I understood the math and the rhythm of basket patterns, and I figured I could do it. But I didn’t even try until 2008, when I had the idea of creating a piece

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Education Genocide: The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School (under construction), 2011, basket woven with Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks. Double-weave rivercane basket with lid in the background.

regarding sovereignty, and baskets seemed a good venue.

I specifically wanted to use the Tobacco Compact to illustrate the conflict between the Cherokee Nation and the State of Oklahoma… It was by weaving a basket in the traditional pattern called “Spider’s Web,” that I was able to show how tangled these negotiations had become and how interwoven the two governments were. Because that compact had been in arbitration for so long, I left it deliberately unfinished to show that this tension may never be resolved; it may never be finished.

Several years ago, you asked several community activists, including me, to write a short paragraph about the appropriation of Native images by corporate media for advertising. What other ventures have you made into “activist art?”

Oh yes! That was for a piece called Reclaiming Cultural Ownership, Challenging Indian Stereotypes. As a woman, I have always been political in my work, but I didn’t address tribal issues until 1992. I had been exhibiting for a couple of years with Richard Ray Whitman and Edgar Heap of Birds who encouraged me to explore an idea I had for a quincentennial response. I started gathering 24 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

up merchandise that used Indian names to promote products. Once I opened my eyes, it was shocking how many of those products were all around us. I created a body of work called Honest Injun about the commercial usage of Indian names and images that was exhibited for Amnesty International.

I sent my kids into stores and said, “Bring me everything you can find with Indians on it.” And in 15 minutes we had a cartload—items I had even purchased without paying attention, which is what American consumerism is all about. I have since collected over 300 products. And I’m not talking cigar store Indians; I’m talking stuff that was being manufactured at the time that we collected it.

I did a series of black and white photographs of these products that I painted with one color, red, to show, gigage: aquatseli dikanodi: the color of our blood, of anger, a way to get peoples’ attention. The display was once referred to as “Indian Pop art” because it was using graphics from different products that appropriated Indian images.

I showed that series for several years, along with an accompanying slide show when asked. Sometimes,

SHAN GOSHORN

Kituwah Motherland, from the Earth Renewal Series, 2010, hand-tinted, digitally layered black and white photograph, featuring Kituwah Mound in Swain County, North Carolina

somebody would “get it.” Occasionally people would come up to me later and tell me, “You know, I didn’t get before, but now I do.” So, the work was a lot about planting seeds.

But later somebody made the remark, “Okay, I get it.

But with what do we replace those images?” And that’s where Reclaiming Cultural Ownership came up. It’s the only photojournalistic work that I’ve ever done. I started photographing Indian people just doing everyday things, predictable stuff like Cheyenne drum maker Daniel Drew covering the head of a drum, Walker Calhoun in front of the sweat lodge, people gathering supplies, etc.—things people expect to see. These photographs would be countered with unexpected images like tribal members protesting a proposed toxic waste dump site on Indian land or an all-Indian board of directors—things that surprised many viewers. I was pleasantly surprised too, by how many of the events I shot were tradition-based. I was happy to include photos of a contemporary Native dance troop practicing social dances to be performed on stages around the world or a Native American television show in production that featured Native people in everyday life. It was affirming to see how vibrant and alive Indian people

are but still so strongly rooted with aquatseli kanohelvhi.

Since then I have created several bodies of work that address different issues using a variety of media. Even though I was trained professionally as a silversmith, photographer, and painter, I don’t consider myself any of those things. I think of myself as a Native artist who chooses a medium to best express a statement. In addition to basketry, I also work in glass and beads and hope that I am always continuing to explore new avenues, including some new ideas I have percolating for an installation piece.

What do you say to young artists who show potential and want to focus their educational experience on art?

I always go out of my way to encourage students of all ages. Whether it’s speaking to organizations, hands-on workshops or lecturing in colleges, it is important to me to reach out to students. Whenever I have an exhibit, I try to also give a presentation to the student body or public because I think it is so important adagalasdadisdi aniyvwi.

I tell them to always go for asquadonvhi. Be the best you can be, figure out a way to do what you love, and the

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money will follow.

My parents were concerned that I wanted to be an artist.

They tried to guide me in the direction of being an art teacher, because they thought that would be the way to secure an income. But once they saw how determined I was, they became my biggest cheerleaders—huge fans of whatever I wanted to do!

For years I know my grandmother didn’t “get” half of the stuff I did back then, especially when I was in college, but I always knew that she was proud of me and wanted me to continue to represent Indian people in a good way.

Artists, in general, are not well-versed in selfmarketing, hence the phrase, “starving artist.” Has that changed and how can that be addressed? Are there any art schools also teaching the business side of art?

I have been fortunate to be right- and left-brain balanced.

I think there are lots of artists that are much better at their craft than me, but I am fiercely driven to do this, and I am a really hard worker. The integrity of my word is also critical to me… if I say I’m going to do something, I do it.

Being dependable has done a lot for my career.

There are workshops offered by artist groups to teach the business side, which is good. I often wondered why the art school I went to didn’t offer courses on marketing or bookkeeping or taxes. What a nightmare. I mean, what were they thinking? Didn’t they think any of us would make it?

But even without those courses, college is invaluable… just the act of going to college teaches you so much about things like discipline, about how to study and igvnadodi tsvsa, how to manage time.

I have been supporting myself exclusively with my art for over 30 years. It was imperative for me to establish my career before I got married. One of the things that contributed to my success was how diversified I was when first starting out. I was an artist-in-residence for years. I did some commercial arts for a little while— no experience, I just taught myself on the job. I did storytelling in the schools and libraries and public speaking to organizations about art, activism, and other things. I taught workshops.

At one point, I thought I should have a stamp for the back of my business cards that read “Light hauling available” because I would do just about anything to keep in business. But with this diversity, if work was not happening in one area, chances were good that I’d find work doing something else. Oh—I also showed my work to everyone and just marketed the heck out of myself.

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SHAN GOSHORN

Above: Removal (Ancestral Homeland and Oklahoma Indian Territory), 2010, baskets woven with Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks, acrylic paint. Opposite above: High Stakes: Tribes Choice, 2010, silver gelatin, black and white photograph tinted with fine grade glitter, 30 × 20 × 22 in. Opposite below: Cherokee Burden Basket: Singing a Song for Balance, 2012, basket woven with Arches watercolor paper splints printed with archival inks. Photos courtesy of the artist

What is currently your main focus?

I am always experimenting, but right now I am mostly focused on paper basket making. I worked so hard for years to educate audiences about contemporary Native issues. These baskets have been successful in stimulating honest dialogue, so I may be doing them for a while. I have a lot to say.

One recent basket shows 39 pair of moccasins in a continuous spiral, “walking” around a basket woven with splints printed with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It is a reference to the 39 federally recognized tribes who were removed to Oklahoma. I sent out an email asking people to send me images of their moccasins, and they came from all over via smart phones and email! It is a combination, “high-tech meets hilvhiyui.”

Another shows a familiar photo of the Carlisle Indian School student body in 1912, combined with the address given by Lieutenant Richard Pratt, in which he coined the phrase “kill the Indian, save the man.” On the basket’s interior are the names of the 10, 000–12,000 Indian kids who went through the infamous boarding school.

So much of traditional basket-making is the elaborate process of preparation and gathering of materials. Mine

is elaborate in a different way that involves a lot of research. In fact, as I was going through that roster of student names, I came across the names of two of my great-grandparents. We had always known that they had attended but, even so, it was an extraordinarily moving experience. I realized then that it is the information gathered in research that pours the soul into my work.

I spent hours working on that basket while sitting with my dad before he died. I carried it back and forth to North Carolina on a plane in a box my husband built, and worked on it every day while I was with him. I worked on it while he was dying, and I poured so much sorrow into that basket, I think that is perhaps part of the reason that piece has affected so many people. It took Grand Prize that year at Red Earth and is currently traveling with the Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3 exhibit.

As satisfying as those honors are, the most rewarding response is that people are still contacting me to tell me that Educational Genocide: The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School has moved them to tears. A ho!

Shan Goshorn will have Indian Market booth #511- SF.

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the 200th anniversary of Métis Artist and Indigenous Activist alongside the War of 1812, a conflict between

Dylan Miner Interview by America Meredith

B

ORN IN RURAL MICHIGAN, Dylan Miner is an educator, writer, historian, and curator, as well as an artist working in multiple media. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, coordinates MSU’s new Indigenous Contemporary Arts Initiative, and is an adjunct curator for Indigenous arts at the university’s museum. A widely published scholar, Miner is also a member of Justseeds, a graphic arts collective. He earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico and currently lives in East Lansing, Michigan with his wife, Dr. Estrella Torrez, and their two daughters.

In your solo exhibition Waasawaabaamina (Prophecies), you examined the teachings of prophets, including Tenskwatawa (Shawnee) and Louis Riel (Métis).

What do you think these men have to communicate to us today?

What artworks did you create based on their teachings?

That body of work was for an exhibition at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, Canada. For Waasawaabaamin I wanted to interrogate the teachings of our elders, both from my community and from other Indigenous nations. I chose the notion of “prophecies” for a variety of reasons, but primarily as a way to think about traditional knowledge and its ongoing implications today.

The word waasawaabaamina is an Anishinaabemowin verb that means “to see far.” The meaning of waasawaabaamina is conceptually quite different than a Western definition of a prophecy. To some degree the name itself was playing

the United States and EnglandCanada that was precipitated by the pan-Indigenous prophesies of Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee leader known as “The Prophet,” and Tecumseh.

For the exhibition, I turned to these historic antecedents, among others, as points of entry into Indigenous resistance and the prophetic visions of our ancestors. Instead of seeing prophecies as truth-telling and seeing into the future, I loosely conceptualized Waasawaabaamin as ongoing teachings that enable us to directly confront globalization, colonialism, and capitalism. The exhibition hung at the exact time that the Idle No More movement grew across Canada. Although planned for over a year, I think that Waasawaabaamin speaks to the way that indigenous activists use these teaching to move our communities into the future.

Dylan Miner working with youth at the Turtle Island Aboriginal Education Center, Windsor

with these two competing worldviews and the tension between them.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines prophecy as “that which is done or spoken by a prophet; the action or practice of revealing or expressing the will or thought of God or of a god; divinely inspired utterance or discourse.” My application of the term is Indigenous in orientation, yet recognizes the way that non-Native people commonly fetishize Indigenous prophecies.

Regardless of the historical traumas that it has perpetrated, settler society commonly maintains an ongoing fascination with Indigenous prophets.

All of the work in Waasawaabaamin was created in 2012, an ideal time to re-interrogate Indigenous prophesy from an anti-colonial and Indigenist perspective. Last year was marked by the supposed end-of-days prophecies of the Maya and Hopi

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The Saginaw Chippewa’s Ziibiwing Center for Anishinabe Lifeways and Culture is the best example I can think of a museum based on an Indigenous perspective, since their exhibits are based on the Seven Grandfather Teachings.

Have you used these teachings in your artwork?

Ziibiwing Center is an amazing museum. It is one of the premier Indigenous cultural spaces on Turtle Island. I have worked with Ziibiwing on a few projects and sit on the board of the Michigan Indian Education Council with Judy Pamp, Assistant Director of Ziibiwing. I have wanted to exhibit there for some time. Through Judy and Shannon Martin, Director of Ziibiwing, the museum became interested in my project Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes), an ongoing collaboration with Native youth.

Anishnaabensag

DYLAN MINER

Waasawaabaaminaa (Prophecies), 2012, installation at Gallery 101, Ottawa. Photo courtesy of the artist

Biimskowebshkigewag is a socially engaged art project that uses bicycles, especially lowrider bikes, as the point of entry into thinking about migration stories, traditional modes of transportation, and health for contemporary Indigenous youth.

Initially it was funded through the National Museum of the American Indian. I spent two weeks in the NMAI archives in Maryland looking into Métis, Anishinaabeg, and nēhiyawēwin [Plains Cree] forms of transportation: canoes, footwear, dog sleds, Red River carts, snowshoes, etc. What became especially clear during my research was the interrelationships between all of our communities, especially because our community members and families constantly migrated across the continent and built new kin relationships.

I took my research back to Lansing’s urban Native community and collaborated with youth to build a series of lowrider bicycles using Niizhwaaswi G’mishomisinaanig, our Seven Grandfather Teachings.

We created bicycles based on each of the seven teachings. I brought in language teachers, elders, young Native professionals, two different Native youth programs, university students, and two other Indigenous artists. The logistics were quite extensive, but the final outcome was worth it.

The seven teachings represented in the bikes include nbwaakaawin (wisdom), zaagi’idiwin (love), minaadendamowin (respect), aakwa’ode’ewin (bravery), debwewin (truth), dibaadendiziwin (humility), and gwekwaadiziwin (honesty). The youth collaborators, which included

elementary, middle, and high school students, selected which teaching their bikes would represent. They have been exhibited at Ziibiwing, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute (Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla museum in Oregon), University of Iowa Museum of Art, Great Lakes Folk Festival, and Michigan State University. Since Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag is an ongoing collaboration, new bicycles were also created for an exhibition at Fort Lewis College and Turtle Island Aboriginal Educational Centre in Ontario, as well as for the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture. This summer I built more bikes at the Santa Fe Art Institute and MoCNA during Indian Market 2013. I would love to continue working with both reservation and urban Native communities to help youth create FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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their own bikes based on their communities’ knowledge, language, and visuality.

“Contemporary art” has changed the geography of artistic practice, reconfiguring the relationship between an artist and her or his audience. Since the late 1960s, artists have gone beyond so-called modernist and postmodernist aesthetic choices, becoming progressively interested in artworks that collaborate with communities, as opposed to solely making art for communities. Many Indigenous artists are working in this way. This artistic practice is known as “socially engaged art,” “participatory art,” or “collaborative art” and views the social relationships between collaborators as central to the success of an artwork. Sometimes the artwork is the collaboration itself, as opposed to being the final product. The artworks I make as part of Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag are the social relationships made between myself and the collaborators.

In this way, Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag addresses the need within the urban Native community to revitalize and maintain Indigenous history and language by engaging with contemporary youth culture. The final outcome of these long-term collaborations are ridable bicycles which signify traditional teachings, propose alternative Indigenous histories and subjectivities, and provoke us to think about sustainable modes of transportation. Drawing on the importance of hip hop within the urban Native community, the lowrider bicycle serves as an ideal site of investigation since it allows youth collaborators to bring preexisting knowledge to an intergenerational collaboration.

For me, this project evokes the bicycle as a contemporary evocation of the Red River cart (li michif sharey), a common and important

marker of Métis identity and communal livelihood. For the Métis nation, li michif sharey symbolizes the way that Indigenous communities have commonly migrated from one location to another, frequently crossing illegitimate national borders in the process.

Anishinaabemowin and Michif languages figure prominently in your art practice. For those us of less familiar with Métis culture, could you explain what Michif is?

Both Anishinaabemowin and Michif, as well as Nahuatl to a lesser extent, play significantly into my practice. It is critical to continue to employ Indigenous languages on a daily basis. As a non-fluent speaker, someone who knows only the most basic elements of either Anishinaabemowin or Michif, the use of these languages serves as a decolonizing maneuver in my work.

Anishinaabemowin is the language of the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi). Michif is a common language of the Métis or Michif, my community; although our ancestors would have also spoken Anishinaabemowin, Nēhiyawēwin, or Nakawēmowin [Western Ojibwe].

Many people know us as the Métis or more pejoratively, as halfbreeds.

As a non-speaker, I employ these languages in my art as a way to communicate directly with the ancestors.

In the United States, the terms Métis and Michif are less familiar than they are north of the border.

In Canada we are identified as one of three aboriginal people (First Nation, Inuit, and Métis).

The term Métis is similar to the Spanish word mestizo, meaning a person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. However, unlike its application in Latin America, the term Métis generally defines a specific Indigenous people of who have historically lived from the Great Lakes watershed, across the northern plains, and

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into the Canadian subarctic. With the arrival of francophone and English-speaking fur traders, a new Indigenous culture emerged, one that maintained kinship ties with Anishinaabeg, nēhiyawēwak (Plains Cree), omaškêkowak (Swampy Cree) and Nahkawininiwak (Saulteaux), but existed as its own culture. The common story is that French, English, and Scottish fur traders married, in the “manner of the country,” Indigenous women and started families. Over the course of many generations, their halfbreed, fur-trading children intermarried with other Métis children, creating a uniquely Michif culture. Personally, I descend from the Miner, Brissette, L’Hirondelle, and Kennedy Métis families.

This, of course, is a gross generalization of Michif history, and one that I attempt to work against.

What is important to understand is that because of the fur trade, as an economic system, Indigenous people were brought into the wage economy. This included my family.

Once that happened, many of them crisscrossed the continent, using their Indigenous knowledge as wage laborers. In response to increased migrations due to the fur trade, Michif communities emerged throughout the Great Lakes and across the plains.

What is interesting is how the Canadian and US governments responded differently to the demands of the Michif, as Indigenous people.

While I do not believe in the need for government recognition to exist as an Indigenous people, it is important that Métis people have Status in Canada and not in the United States.

There are many historic communities in Michigan, Montana, and Minnesota, yet these cousins have few Indigenous rights. Inversely, Canada recognizes Métis Status, while the United States ignores us.

My family was in Michigan before treaties were signed, although

DYLAN MINER

Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes), 2012, installation, Power Plant, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

these ancestors then fought against the United States and relocated to Canada, as did many resistant Métis and Anishinaabeg.

Manitoba, for instance, was brought into confederation by the struggles of the Michif and Nēhiyawēwin. We were subsequently stripped of our rights during the 20th century.

This past March, however, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Canadian government failed on their obligation to the Michif and our landbase of over 1.4 million acres.

Two months previously, the federal court in Canada ruled that the Canadian government has the fiduciary duty to treat Métis people as “Indians,” as defined under the Indian Act. These recent decisions will have huge implications on contemporary Indigenous issues in Canada and hopefully this will trickledown into the United States.

Your family is Métis and Chicano, and your art draws heavily from Latino elements. How has Latino art inspired you, and why is crossing boundaries so fundamental to your work?

My father’s family are Michif people from both sides of the CanadaUS border. My mother’s family were Scandinavian migrants who relocated to the Great Lakes. I was raised within and married into a Xicano or Mexican-American migrant farmworker community in rural Michigan. From an early age, I saw the similarities between the earthbased ways of my Michif relations and my Indigenous migrant Xicano relations. For both Xicanos and Michif, we have similarly suffered at the hands of colonial regimes, which have stripped from us our Indigenous status and tried to deny us our language, culture, and ability to self-govern.

Moreover, Xicanos and Michif, alongside our First Nations and American Indian cousins, suffered directly from shifting US, Mexican, and Canadian borders. My family fought against the Americans in the War of 1812, yet was forced to leave Drummond Island following the Treaty of Ghent and migrate, with other Michif and Anishinaabeg, across Lake Huron into the Georgian Bay. Because two settler-colonial governments, Canada and the United States, created a fictitious border that zigzagged between St. Joseph Island (Canada), Drummond Island (United States) and Cockburn Island (Canada), my family was forced to migrate to Penetanguishene and eventually to Parry Sound, both in Ontario. The border violently prevented my family from living where we wanted to live.

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resonated with me, and possibly with a whole generation of younger Native artists who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. As a Michif artist, I operate for the most part outside the capitalist art market, making work that cannot be turned into a commodity.

Otepaymisiwak, relief print and colored pencil on paper, 12 × 12 in.

harvesting territories were eventually taken away. The same can be said about the Mexico-US border.

Xicano activists have for some time argued that “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us!”

My wife’s family are Hispanicized Indians, people who were known as genizaros. They have been in Texas and New Mexico since time immemorial, yet their identity was changed because of shifting Spanish, Texan, Mexican, and then US American hegemony. The border literally changed who they were.

So I was raised seeing Xicano or Mexican-Americans as Indigenous people, just as I saw myself and my Michif relations as Indigenous.

I came of age within the secondgeneration of the Chicano Movement and have seen the kin and familial relationships that exist between Great Lakes Native peoples and Xicanos. Artistically, I began working

as a printmaker inspired by the long printmaking tradition in Xicano and Mexican communities. The Taller de Gráfica Popular and Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl were crucial to my early growth as a relief printer. I then began working in serigraphy, a form that was significant for Xicano artists during the 1960s. This led me to work with Justseeds, an activist poster collective.

Native artists face ongoing pressure to be apolitical, especially here in New Mexico.

Why would anyone expect Native artists to not make political statements? What can artists do about this situation?

I come to my work as an artist from my position as an activist.

I am unapologetic about making my work political. I recently read a quote from Ryan Red Corn (Osage) who stated that “We’re Indian… we’re political by default.” This idea

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My work comes from my specific position of being an activist and a socially engaged artist. My personal activist orientation has a multiple roots, one being my parents’ union activism, as well as my identity as a Native person. Our Nēhiyawēwin (Cree) cousins have a few ways to describe who we are as Michif people. This includes terms like Apitaw’kosisan and Otipemisiwak.

The latter means “the people without bosses.” This has to do with our horizontal and egalitarian Michif social relations. Michif people have also been in multiple anti-colonial resurrections in both the United States and Canada.

From Riel’s insurrections on the Canadian prairies to the Mica Bay Uprising in the Great Lakes to more contemporary Red Power movements, Michif people have always resisted outside control.

I take my identity as Otipemisiwak quite seriously. To be Otipemisiwak means that I must act in a certain activist and political manner. It isn’t coincidental that anarchist intellectual George Woodcock wrote an impressive biography of Michif guerrilla fighter Gabriel Dumont or that non-Native activists look toward the Northwest Rebellion as a significant anti-colonial uprising.

The last year has shown that Indigenous activism isn’t dead. Idle No More, a movement begun by four women in Saskatchewan, has become a global movement by and for Indigenous people. It shows that even a “non-political” round dance is a radical event. I would argue that Indigenous art, by its very existence, is political art. Whether our work is overtly political, as is much of my

DYLAN MINER

Graphic Protest, 2011, installation, Central Michigan University Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artist

work, or the political sentiments exist solely through articulations of “survivance,” Indigenous artists are all political.

What new art and writing projects are you currently working on?

I am in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute and at MoCNA, working on new bicycles. I continue to do workshops. I recently made two mobile printing presses with Native and Latino youth on both sides of the Canada-US border. This project called Dismantling the Illegitimate Border looks at the violent history of the Canada-US border on Indigenous communities.

My most exciting project is Michif– Michin, an investigation of traditional medicinal practices in the Great Lakes. I am exhibiting an installation and artist’s publication for the Flint

Public Art Project. Next summer, I will also be in residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture and have a solo exhibition of this project. Michif–Michin includes the harvesting and collecting of medicines. I will travel and visit with knowledge-keepers, as well as make drawings, prints, video, installation, and various publications. This project is a form of decolonial knowledgemaking, as my great-grandmother was known for her ability as a healer.

I am also doing a project looking at the Great Michigan Fire and Great Thumb Fire, two massive forest fires that swept across Michigan in 1881 and 1871, respectively. Caused by poor forest management and logging, these fire burned 2.5 million and 1 million acres each. They are indicative of the intimate relationship between ecological destruction,

capitalism, and colonialism. I am doing a series of large-scale relief prints from old-growth timbers that were harvested during this period.

I will also include time-based or performance practices, as well as creating drawings from the charcoal of the burnt timbers. Most of my new work is about the history and culture of Anishinaabewaki, the Indigenous Great Lakes region.

Finally, I have two book projects.

One is on Indigenous perspectives in Xicano art and another interrogates Indigenous Aesthetics. Hopefully you will see those in print in the next year or two. Otherwise, I will just continue teaching, raising my daughters, visiting with elders, making art, being healthy, and trying to dismantle colonialism. In other words, living.

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Arapaho/Seneca Beadwork Artist

Ken Williams Interview by Teri Greeves

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HEN I FIRST met Ken Williams, he was an incoming freshman at the Institute of American Indian Arts where I taught the bead-working classes.

He enrolled in my Intro class, and I knew immediately there was nothing I could teach him technically. And after getting to know him better, I soon realized he knew more about Native art than most PhDs in the field. His curiosity was endless; he had seemed to have already read everything that had been written about Pueblo pottery, Indian basketry, contemporary Native painters, Native jewelry, and Navajo weavers. And he hadn’t just read things; he knew living Native artists, and often times, he knew who their artist parents, grandparents, and children were and already had a piece by them in his art collection.

He was 19 years old at the time.

How does any young person come to find their calling? For Ken Williams, I believe it is based on inherent respect: respect for his parents, respect for his family, respect for his tribes, and finally respect for his cultural legacy. It started for him as a child, surrounded by the beautiful objects that his family and communities cherished and shared with him. It continued as a desire to understand those objects, not just as things to be bought and sold in this contemporary market-driven world, but as the stories and worldview of his parents’ peoples. And it grew into a respect for other Native people and their creations. He can see the beauty of an artist’s genius; he can see the beauty of the historical

in awe of what they surrounded themselves with. I have always been interested in traditional religious things, and my parents knew this and encouraged my curiosity. My grandpa had a room full of those types of things and could also see how much I appreciated them. These objects were things of beauty and value beyond dollars.

knowledge it takes to create a piece; he can see the beauty of innovation in contemporary Native art. He sees beauty. And he has been chosen to be more than just an admirer; he has been chosen to be a maker.

I started beading when I was about five or six years old and later spent time on the Wind River Reservation with my mother’s Arapaho family. My late uncle, Robert Spoonhunter, took me in. He showed me how to make things, and he explained the designs and colors to me. By this time, I was making things to sell. There was a hippy couple right off the reservation in New York where I grew up, who owned a shop, and my parents would take me there to sell my pieces. They would send me in the store alone so I would learn to speak for myself and negotiate on my own. My mom and dad were strict; they said I had to learn how to work for the things I wanted and that nothing would be handed to me. After making a sale to the shop, I would come out with $40 to $50. It was a huge sum for a kid as young as me. But I wasn’t interested in buying candy and games; I would buy pots and baskets with my money.

Or, I found I could get an even better deal if I traded my work for a piece in their shop I liked. I still do that, wheel and deal. It’s led me to my passion for collecting.

How were you introduced to Native “art”?

What was your experience learning how to bead?

I was always one of those kids that hung out with older people. My dad liked to visit with the elders and would take me along. We would spend time with them, chopping wood, visiting, eating together.

I would see their homes full of beautiful Indian things: baskets, beadwork, carvings, etc., and I was

I saw the people around me doing beadwork, and I wanted to learn how. No one sat down initially to show me; I just started doing it.

Once people saw how interested I was in beadwork, they would give me supplies for encouragement.

When I would visit my relatives at Wind River, we used to host beading

Ken Williams making a fashion statement at the Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe. Photo: Robert Mesa

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KEN WILLIAMS

Onondowaga Memories, hoof container with portrait of Seneca chief Cornplanter, 13° Czech cut beads, 15° Japanese seed beads, various antique and vintage micro beads, bronze, copper, sterling silver, 24-karat gold, platinum, wampum, merino wool, smoked brain-tanned white deerhide, cotton lining, silk ribbon, and antelope hooves

parties at my relatives’ homes. My aunts and uncles would put on a big pot of coffee, and we would sit together and visit and bead. They were really fun get-togethers. All the materials were fully accessible, and the adults would just tell us to go for it and make whatever we wanted.

It wasn’t exactly easy though. When I was 12 years old, I was working on a bag with a fully beaded front done in lane stitch. I had finished the beadwork and proudly showed it to my aunt for a critique. She looked at it carefully and ran her hand over all the beadwork I had just labored on for hours. My aunt told me I had pulled all the stitches too tight. So she took out the scissors and before I knew it, she had cut off all the beads. She just handed it back to me. I could have cried and stopped right there, but I didn’t. I threaded another needle and kept beading. It sounds harsh; traditional teaching methods are not a really nurturing way to learn, but they

encouraged me in their own way.

When I was a young teenager, I started working with geometric designs. I had more access to my mother’s side of the family, so those designs were all around me. But I was also interested in my father’s side and the beadwork of the Northeast. I tried the raised beadwork that Seneca are famous for, but I found I preferred Plains styles.

As a young person, we didn’t have cell phones, computers, casinos, and the like to take up our time. We did beadwork and made things, because it was fun. Even when I was a little boy, I knew I had missed out by not being able to learn things from my great-grandma who had already passed. I didn’t want to regret not knowing, so I would ask anyone who would answer about how things were made, why they were made that way, what they were made for. I was a pesky little kid, but my elders

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PROFILE

miniature cradleboards with these designs.

Re-tro-spect-ing Traditional Values, elk hoof bag and kit: glass beads, metal beads, hide, wood stroud, elk, bladder, awl, antler, glass and cork containers

understood; they were patient with me, and they showed me.

After I graduated from high school in Utah, I attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. I decided to take a class with you. I thought it would be easy credit since I already knew how to bead, but you gave me a “special” syllabus. On the final project, everyone was to make a pair of beaded moccasins with designs from their tribe. Except you told me I couldn’t do that assignment because I already knew how to do my family’s designs. I was mad, and I didn’t want to do what you had asked. But I did it anyway, and those moccasins with beaded Sponge Bob and Patrick Starfish in full Plains Indian regalia won first place at SWAIA’s Indian Market that year.

I continue to learn new things today.

My family used elk-hoof bags for storage of important things, and my great-grandma would sometimes use one as an everyday purse. In my visits home, I realized they were becoming exceedingly rare to find. No one was making them anymore, and I didn’t want to lose the knowledge, so I knew I needed to make one. I asked a

friend if he would bring me some elk legs the next time they went hunting.

I bagged them and put them in the freezer, and then, when the weather cooled off, I got them out and started to process them. It was stinky work, but I followed my family’s directions and made one. To date, I have made five hoof-bags; two are purses, and the other three are “kits.” With the kits, I wished to tell a story. The beaded tops have pictorial imagery that go with the objects I made for inside the bags. Together, the bag and the objects tell the story. I feel like learning how to make these hoof bags was important, not just for me to make a piece of “art” but so that the knowledge of how they are made isn’t lost.

How has your work evolved?

My early work was learning from the “masters.” I was handed down designs from family, which is the traditional way that these designs are kept and repeated into the present.

As is custom I could repeat these designs once they were given to me, and that is what I did. I made small pieces: bags, moccasins, and

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After my time at IAIA, I started making my own imagery in beads.

My work is technically traditionally based, but it’s influenced by the contemporary world. For instance, I really love Plateau beaded purses.

They are so fun, like little beaded paintings. I’m really fond of the happy, whimsical ones: a mouse eating huckleberries, a girl in a canoe with boys watching her from the riverbank, a kitten playing with a ball of thread. The people who made these bags did not limit themselves to traditional florals or geometric designs. Looking at them inspired me to make a series of flat bags where I used imagery of historical Native people, but I chose contour beading techniques to fill in the background with a color scheme influenced by a Katy Perry music video.

Recently, I have been working on another series where I take photographs of the old timers and rework them into beadwork. I can make those old black and white pictures come to life with glass beads.

Those people in the pictures speak to me, and I am attempting to pay honor to them by bringing them back though my work. And really, in the end, what is contemporary today will be traditional tomorrow.

But this is a double-edged sword.

When I first started showing and selling my beadwork, which was all traditionally based, I had a certain set of collectors. Now, my work doesn’t quite fit into their ideal of a Cowboys and Indians collection. I have had to reach out to a new audience who is open to beaded pieces that aren’t just reproductions of the past. So while I have lost a certain audience, I have gained a new one.

This isn’t to say that I don’t continue to make what could be considered

KEN WILLIAMS

Ken Williams (Northern Arapaho/Seneca) and Orlando Dugi (Diné), Looking Forward, Looking Back, front and back views of a mirror bag with portrait of Charles Alexander Eastman (Dakota), co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 13° Czech cut beads, 15° Japanese beads, antique and vintage micro beads, bronze, copper, sterling silver, 24-karat gold electroplated cut glass beads, wool, horse hair, brass sequins, brass hawk bells, French handmade tassels, vintage glass tile beads, brass beads, brass cones, Japanese cut crystal, silk ribbon, cotton lining, and braintanned smoked deerhide

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PROFILE

traditional objects. I am really proud of the fullsized Great Basin-style cradleboard I made. With this piece, I was able to not only work in beads and buckskin, but also with willow weaving. I knew a cradle maker in Utah and came along with her one year when it was time to gather the willow. I wove the backboard in willow and then hung onto it for several years. I had a beautiful white elk hide I had been saving for it as well, and then I found a photograph of three Shoshone girls. I feel those girls in that picture chose me, and I knew when I saw them they were the right subject matter for this piece I had imagined. Everything kind of fell into place with the cradleboard, and I was able to create it when all the pieces came together. I couldn’t have made this piece before then.

How has being a collector of Native art influenced your work?

I make beadwork because I love it. But I also make beadwork because I can sell it or trade it for pieces I want for my collection. I love many different kinds of Native art, and it influences my work in many ways, not as imitation but as inspiration. Take Charles Loloma and his niece Verma “Sonwai” Nequatewa’s work: their jewelry has not only influenced contemporary jewelers but Native artists in all mediums. I want to produce quality work that people will love and enjoy, but I also want to make things that people will want to collect. The Native art I have in my personal collection moves me. And it inspires me to create beauty that will hopefully move others.

Current Exhibition It’s in the Details: Beadwork and Fashion by Orlando Dugi and Kenneth Williams Slater Gallery, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, NM. Through January 10, 2014.

Left: Candy Gurl from the Southwest, flat bag with portrait of Grandma Rose Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo), 13° Czech cut beads, 15° Japanese seed beads, antique and vintage micro beads, bronze, copper, sterling silver, 24-karat gold beads, human hair, Amazon parrot and African grey parrot feathers, Swarovski crystals, smoked braintanned deerhide, cotton lining, vintage Russian beads, rock candy Opposite: Cradling Traditions, 13° Czech cut beads, 15° Japanese seed beads, antique and vintage micro beads, brass beads, human hair, copper, sterling silver, 8° 24-karat gold electroplated glass beads, human hair, smoked braintanned deerhide, silk ribbon, brass hawk bells, cowry shells, vintage basket beads, abalone shell, wool yarn, and willow

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Top of the World Bound Seven Pacific Northwest Coast, Alaskan, and Canadian First Nations Artists Reflect on Challenge, Opportunity, and Santa Fe Indian Market

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

I

N COMPARISON to Earth’s geological record, the everunfolding story of the cosmos, or the cultural history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the passage of 88 years is perhaps as momentary as a shooting star. But the perspective is a bit different when time becomes less objective, expanded by the impatient present, and something important and promisingly fruitful is suspended in the waiting and possibility of each passing year.

Three years ago this month, the perspective of time changed again: the waiting was over, and possibility became reality for many artists when the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts (SWAIA), parent and producer of the annual Santa Fe Indian Market since 1922, offered an invitation for permanent inclusion in its world-renowned market to artists of Canadian First Nations ancestry. Internationally acclaimed, multi-medium artist Ed NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band of Shuswap Indians/Stl’atl’imx) was among the first artists of such distinction to hold a booth at Santa Fe Indian Market, and since then many others have basked in the proverbial limelight. Having achieved notoriety at what is unarguably the world’s largest and most prestigious Indian art market, a vast and varied virtual labyrinth of color and form within which many of Native America’s most splendid

manifestations of artistic expression reside, these same artists have shrewdly wrested their Warhol-allotted 15 minutes of fame from the clutches of the minute-hand and extended them far beyond any hourly horizon.

To record each of these artists’ accomplishments here would require nearly as many pages as this entire publication, so let it suffice to note that collectively these artists have received every major award at North America’s premiere Indian art markets: the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, and the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and Festival.

They are widely collected across the globe and represent the best of the best in their respective genres.

First American Art Magazine recently caught-up with several of these well-ribboned artists whose work draws directly from Pacific Northwest Coast and Alaskan and Canadian First Nations traditions of creativity, and we asked them to share a few thoughts about some of the challenges and opportunities they have encountered when exhibiting and marketing their work in the Southwest, namely Santa Fe, New Mexico, and its celebrated Indian Market. We also asked what they would like to convey to the public through their art. Here are some of their musings on those queries…

Opposite: Lisa Hageman Yahgulanaas (Haida), Wosk Woven Sea Bordered Robe, Dance Apron, Leggings, variable measurements, collection of Yosef Wosk, hat: model’s own. Photo: Kenji Nagai

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M

y style of weaving, known as Raven’s Tail, is a rare form of gravity-weighted weaving that involves no implements or mechanisms. This style is virtually unknown in the Southwest, so it’s necessary to educate the viewers. A finished Raven’s Tail weaving looks like other finished weavings, but the time it takes to create a piece is far greater: one Chief ’s Robe can take an entire year or more to finish. That is the reason I choose to weave in public at Indian Market, and the response I get makes the work all the more enjoyable. There has been such a warm reception to my work in the Southwest that it has made me feel welcome. I was very aware of the incredible skill of the Southwestern, and it has been heartening to discover that there is an interest in my form of weaving also. I was recently invited to speak at Parson’s School of Design in New York—this invitation came about only because of my involvement with Indian Market.

We live in a fast-paced world where technology evolves rapidly.

We are used to convenience and quick fulfillment of our wants and needs. It’s important to remind the public of the on-going, painstakingly careful creation [of Indigenous arts], and the incredible worth associated with that. It is much more gratifying [for a collector] to have a conversation with a potter, jeweler, weaver, or any specialized artist, and [for the artist] to have a piece handed into the care and safekeeping of that person. The final piece is not one of 10,000 that came off of an assembly line, cheap in price, quality, and integrity. Instead, it is a unique 42 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

representation of the relationship between artist and collector.

The public is an integral component to the continuation of all the arts, and Indian Market is such a wonderful opportunity to have face-to-face interactions with so many exceptional artists.

I think that there is strength in numbers and in diversity. People have said how glad they are to see new varieties of art at Indian Market. Some have even admitted that their first visit to Market was the year I was accepted.

Lisa Hageman Yahgulanaas (Haida) Ravenstail Textile Weaver Masset, Haida Gwaii, BC

O

ne of the biggest challenges I faced in the Southwest was finding a place to sell [my work]. I was overwhelmed with excitement when I found out Indian Market opened its doors to Canadian First Nations Artists, and even more excited when I was accepted.

I’ve been honored to have had so many fashion shows in the Southwest... There is an energy here like no other. The people have always been welcoming and encouraging and ready to collaborate, whether it’s with a show, a photo shoot, or as mentors. I was able to connect with (award-winning Cochiti Pueblo potter cum fashion designer cum multi-genre artist) Virgil Ortiz, who is encouraging and has been a big inspiration to me.

I would like people to view my fashion design work as art.

Some of my gowns have been inspired by my tribe’s legends, and through that I’m sharing something that I hold most dear—my culture. My canvases also reflect what inspires me, and each person gets something different out of each piece.

It’s definitely a good time to be Indigenous. I never did understand why we weren’t included [in Indian Market], but I’m honored and proud to be part of it now, along with so many amazing artists. This year I was accepted for my paintings! It has motivated me to keep pushing my boundaries as an artist.

Sho Sho Esquiro (Kaska Dene)

Fashion Designer, Artist Vancouver, BC

T

his will be my fourth year at Indian Market. I had toyed with the idea of applying, but I wasn’t sure if Northwest Native art would be of interest to collectors. Two of my trips included the opportunity to bring my dance group, Git Hoan (People of the Salmon) along, and I’m happy to say that we were very well-received. Many people attending the market have never been exposed to Northwest Native dance, and much less to the art of the culture. Bringing Tsimshian art and Northwest Native art and dance to the Southwest is a part of what I have been involved with for many years. Thirty-four years as an artist, dance leader, and culture-bearer has provided me with opportunities to travel, all over this country, and to Canada and Europe to demonstrate our art and culture through song and dance. There are so many different Indigenous tribes, and we are all unique, in our origins, our art, and our way of life. I had a desire to show that our culture is alive and well, and [our art] can stand strong outside of the coastal area.

There are still obstacles to overcome. To be more understood, and accepted as unique but equal in the eyes of the judges, for example. There are so many categories, but because there have

not been a lot of entries from my area, the art that we Northwest Coast artists bring is still lumped into a where-do-we-put-this category and does not [always] get proper display or equal consideration. That would be easy to change if more Northwest artists applied. But I’m happy to be returning for this year’s market, and happy that the organizers are trying to attract more Northwest Coast Native artists.

David A. Boxley (Tsimshian) Woodcarver, Kingston, WA

I

t took a while to be able to apply [to Indian Market]. Finally, I was able to apply and I got in. I wondered about the expense of just getting there. So I talked it over with my husband and decided that if I didn’t break even we would call it a vacation.

So we hopped on the ferry to Bellingham, Washington, and drove to Santa Fe. It was a very fun trip!

Opposite: Lisa Hageman Yahgulanaas (Haida), Hageman-7idansuu Robe, 60 × 40 in., collection of Chief 7idansuu Jim Hart. Photo: Kenji Nagai. Below: Diana Willard-Douglas (Haida), right, and her daughter Gianna Willard (Haida) with their cedar weaving hats and open-weave basketry. Photo courtesy of the artist. Above right: Haute couture by Sho Sho Esquiro (Kaska Dene). Photo courtesy of the artist

I’m a weaver and I was juried in for my baskets. Baskets are very time consuming [to make] so I usually don’t have very many. But I have been very fortunate to have won a ribbon every year—That is cool!—so people will watch for my work.

I’ve been in Ketchikan for 24 years, and raised my kids here.

Yes, my daughter also weaves, and does Market with me. We have always felt very welcome, and have met so many wonderful artists from all over the country. I’m inspired by their work and FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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look forward to seeing them every year. We keep in touch on Facebook.

I was so excited when Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) won Best of Show a few years ago. It gave the basket-weavers a bit more acknowledgment. I wear clothing that shows that I’m from the Northwest, and people recognize it right away and they ask questions. I love to answer questions about my heritage. I find that people are very interested in Alaska and in baskets.

Diane Douglas-Willard (Haida) Basket/Textile Weaver Ketchikan, AK

T

he greatest challenge to showing my work in the Southwest is physically getting the steel sculptures from Bellingham to Santa Fe. Works in steel are heavy, and as my work has progressed the dimensions have increased and the physical weight of the finished pieces and the costs [of making and shipping them] have likewise increased. Exhibiting has become a gamble. But my damage plan has always been to fall back on employment at blacksmith shops in the Santa Fe area to earn enough to return home.

Another challenge is explaining why I make Northwest Coastal art, since it’s not part of my tribe’s artistic heritage. The years I spent tattooing in Bellingham, before leaving to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), brought clients who repeatedly asked for designs from books. Some of the designs were not only too dense to reproduce, but were actual clan emblems. I began making my own designs at that point.

After graduation I had my own blacksmith shop in Taos. I was approached to build other artists’ designs. After producing a few pieces, I moved back to Bellingham. Up here, when I approached Native artists about collaborating, I got repeated suggestions to “just do it yourself.” The awards I’ve earned [by doing it myself ] have encouraged me.

Conversely, one of the opportunities provided by showing at Indian Market is being able to display my level of skill in what is often thought of as an abandoned craft—working over the anvil, hammering hot steel into a new shape. There is a constantly evolving diversity within Native art, and Santa Fe has a rich history in blacksmithing traditions. The blacksmithing community is as distinct a community as the Native art community, and I enjoy my place within both.

Another important opportunity is in the social gathering with other artists and family, catching up with old friends and making new ones, and in seeing the progress in [their] careers. Indian Market is the only outlet I have outside the Pacific Northwest.

Jason Reed Brown (Koyukon Athabascan) Metalworker Bellingham, WA

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hen showing my work in the Southwest, I often hear “This is not Southwestern jewelry!” or “This is not Indian!” Many people are afraid to invest in something new, so I have to educate [the public] as I go and explain why, what, and where. I’ve been at 44 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

Above: Jason Reed Brown (Koyukon Athabascan), Salmon I, sculpture. Photo: Robert Archuleta. Opposite above: Jerry Laktonen (Koniaq Alutiiq), Rain Mask, basswood, yellow cedar, reed, sinew, dyed quail feathers, bone, abalone, and paint. Photo: Paul Nicholson/The Legacy Ltd. Opposite below: Nelda Schrupp (Pheasant Rump Nakota), Tatanka, denim lapis lazuli, argentium, silver, horsehair

this for 25 years and have been developing an abstract style with futuristic appeal. I use a self-developed technique of “Construct, Deconstruct, Reconstruct.” So I also hear, “It’s so refreshing to see something new!”

Showing at Indian Market has opened me up to an expanded audience-galleries, collectors, and museums.

My work is not just jewelry. Each piece is a masterfully crafted, miniature sculpture based in my [cultural] tradition, but with a futuristic approach. Some of the early metalworkers of the Northern Plains also worked with tin, which was available through trade with other tribes and fur traders of the day.

I grew up in Alaska, in a small village as well as in Kodiak, where our Native art was [virtually] unknown and unappreciated.

As time went on I realized that this was a bad thing—for the Native people to not have a center of pride in learning about the beautiful and interesting history of our art and culture. I think I knew that to go into Alutiiq art might be the key to [bringing together] many areas of my life.

M

In addition to exposing the world to an obscure and beautiful art, there would be results both in the world recognizing an ancient yet still-emerging culture, as well as in my home finding pride in its own past. The Northwest Coast art forms deserve a better place in the overall Native art world. I attend the only Northwest Coast art market, in Tacoma, and I see so many talented artists struggling... to find a place within the [art world]. I think this could have something to do with [Northwest Coast artists] not having expanded out to an area where there is a culture of Native Art.

Exhibiting my work to people who had no background on [my] people—who were just discovering their own art—was challenging. I had to do a lot of explaining, where I was from, what tribe I was… Alutiiq art was much closer to unknown then.

I’m not really sure what drove me [to show at Indian Market], but I did get a lot of positive response, which kept me going from year to year.

I started out on a low budget and a dream and was often struggling to make it. The logistics were the hard part, and putting out masses of energy to physically get my work [to Market]. But that was what was absolutely necessary to survive, and I did what I had to do.

Jerry Laktonen (Koniag Alutiiq)

Woodcarver, Mask-maker, Granite Falls, WA

Nelda Schrupp (Pheasant Rump Nakota) Jeweler, Sculptor, Lakota, ND

y first year at Santa Fe Indian Market, I traveled from Kodiak to Santa Fe in five flight-jumps. Kodiak to Anchorage, Anchorage to Seattle, Seattle to San Francisco, San Francisco to Dallas, Dallas to Albuquerque. Once in Albuquerque I took a shuttle to Santa Fe. And there I was, in Santa Fe for Indian Market.

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Stitches in Time: The Rebirth of Southeastern Woodlands Beadwork

By America Meredith

“I

DON’T THINK Cherokees had much of a beading tradition,” I blurted out to my sister at the 2005 opening of the Oklahoma History Center’s Native American gallery. The museum curator overheard and asked if he could show me something. That something was a 1840s Cherokee beadwork sampler of a vine with stylized flowers and strange blue growths, outlined in white. It was psychedelic. That was my first taste of Southeastern Woodlands beadwork, and I was hooked.

Martha Berry (Cherokee Nation), a leading advocate for the revival of Southeastern Woodlands beadwork, beaded a bandolier bag called, Hidden in Plain Sight. It’s an apt term, since, after that day in 2005, I encountered Southeastern Woodlands beadwork in books, museum collections, and photographs and have often wondered why I never knew about this artwork before?

Southeastern Woodlands beadwork is characterized by curvilinear designs and the strategic use of negative space.

Beaded moccasins are usually deerhide and cloth. Beaded sashes, belts, bandolier bags, jackets, purses, leggings, and Left: Martha Berry (Cherokee Nation), The Fourth Estate Bandolier Bag, Czech glass beads, pony beads, wood stroud, calico lining, yarn tassels, 2009, 17 × 11 in. Photo: Dave Berry.

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garters are primarily sewn on blue or red wool stroud, backed by calico.

White is the predominant color for the beads; imported glass beads replaced precontact pearl and shell beads. Many designs are simply red, blue, and black, but others have wild palettes of pinks, greens, golds, pastels—all arranged for maximum visual impact. The fluid designs are abstract, floral, zoomorphic, and very rarely anthropomorphic. They have been compared to one-celled organisms viewed through a microscope.

The “Golden Era” of Southeastern Woodlands beadwork was the late 18th century until the Removal Era in the 1830s. Alabama, Koasati, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, Natchez, Seminole, and Yuchi people were forcibly removed from their southeastern homelands to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Some tribes stayed in the southeast, and today Southeastern Woodlands tribes are headquartered in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. Mississippi Choctaw have beaded baldric sashes continuously to the present.

Florida Seminoles beaded bandolier bags until the 1920s.

While women had beaded purses and moccasins, overwhelmingly, women created beadwork for the men in their lives to wear. “Humans are just like peacocks,” observes Choctaw bead artist Jerry Ingram.

“All the males want to show off.”

Seminole traditionalist Pedro Zepeda agrees: “One thing about Seminoles, we tend to dress up more than other tribes.”

Several Cherokee traditionalists in Oklahoma refused to believe that we had our own traditional beadwork styles.

Martha Berry, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, collectively convinced the tribe by curating the art show, Beadwork Storytellers: A Visual Language at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma, in 2008.

“The biggest problem in reviving southeastern beadwork is there is so little in Oklahoma,” says Berry. The key was bringing the beadwork to the tribes. She

brought in 18th-century southeastern beadwork from Scotland that had not been in the Americas in over two centuries. She brought in the work of other southeastern beadworkers, such as Jerry Ingram and Brian Zepeda.

Seeing was believing. While still only a few dozen people bead Southeastern Woodlands-style beadwork, the numbers are far larger than they were 15 years ago, and the knowledge of the beadwork among the tribes has jumped exponentially. I interviewed four beadwork artists instrumental in this remarkable revival to get their stories.

Jerry Ingram “When I was a kid, I was interested in beadwork,” says Jerry Ingram, “and the only place I saw any was the department store in Idabel.” An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Ingram was born in Battiest, a small town in the southeastern corner of Oklahoma.

“When I was little, I’d draw on grocery bags, or backs of calendars.” He attended high school in Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. “Just before I left I found out Josephine Wapp had an Indian Club that taught beadwork.” In end Ingram just taught himself how to bead.

“I just wanted to do it, so I looked at things in the museum and figured out how they were made. I read all kinds of books,” says Ingram. Between him and his wife Sally, “We have a library filled with art books.”

Studying graphic arts at Ocmulgee, Ingram focused on painting and first only beaded and quilled items to have realistic props from which to paint. Eventually, the beadwork and quillwork took over Ingram’s art practice.

Ingram visited museum collections such as the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where William Wierzbowski, keeper of collections, purchased two of his contemporary southeastern bandolier bags for the permanent collection. Ingram has taught beadwork at the Institute of American Indian Art, and many of his art pieces have appeared in films, beginning

Jerry Ingram (Choctaw). Photo: A. Meredith

with Powwow Highway. Most recently Ingram created the horsehair headgear designed by Patricia Michaels for her Project Runway finale.

Despite these successes in the intertribal arena, Ingram says, “I know I’m Choctaw, so I still make southeastern clothes.” He shows regularly in Oklahoma. “Martha Berry helped me out. She got me in to the Cherokee Heritage Show. I sent an entire outfit. I finally met her in person at the Cherokee Art Market.”

Martha Berry Her grandmother taught her how to sew, so Martha Berry felt beading would be a way to honor her Cherokee ancestors.

Finding no books on Cherokee beadwork, she began collecting photographs of southeastern people wearing beadwork— most of which was Plains-style beadwork.

The first southeastern beadwork she encountered was the red stroud bandolier bag at the Denver Art Museum. “It blew me away,” says Berry. “I thought, ‘What is that?!’” Since that discovery, Berry has been a woman on a mission.

“Everything I do is to educate people and get the beadwork in front of their faces.

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advocates beading in a historical way of two-needle appliqué, using an embroidery hoop to stretch the hide or wool. Since the hoops can be turned any angle, the stitches come out even.

Her method is to draw designs on graphic paper, trace them onto muslin, and then baste the design through the muslin to the wool stroud. “That way I don’t have to use marking pens.” She chooses her colors then begins beading. “A lot of design is on the fly—I adjust the design while I bead.”

With so many orders, Berry doesn’t always have work available to enter shows, but she tries to enter Cherokee art shows. She creates her own designs incorporating ancestral motifs. In her bag, The Fourth Estate (page 46), she uses precontact sun circles, Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary, and computer icons to express the history of written communication.

In 2005, Martha Berry had a booth at the Heard Museum Guild Art Market.

Joe Baker, Delaware beadworker, was delighted to see her bandolier bags. Besides Baker, “almost to a person, they had never seen it or heard of it.” She spent the entire market educating people about beadwork.

Lisa Rutherford Primarily a potter, Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation), first took one of Martha Berry’s beading classes in the early 2000s. “Ever since, I took every class she taught. She’s actually threatened my life before if I ever stopped beadwork.”

Above: Martha Berry. Photo: Dave Berry Below: Lisa Rutherford in Cherokee, NC

and flood them images.” People became interested in Southeastern Woodlands beadwork just when the Internet made the research easier. Her daughter Christina created a website for Berry 15 years ago, allowing her to share information freely with anyone interested in southeastern beadwork.

Berry regularly teaches classes at the Cherokee Heritage Center and the Oklahoma History Center. Berry

“My grandma was a painter. She taught me how to draw when I was five. She let me use oil paints when I was way too young to be using them,” Rutherford explains. “I was always in trouble in school. I’d finish reading before everyone and sketch, and get in trouble for not paying attention.”

“I’m such a history nerd. I want to know the how’s and why’s and everything,” Rutherford laughs. She specializes in traditional-style Cherokee beaded purses but is interested in all historical southeastern fashion. Her personal regalia is inspired by 18th-century Cherokee clothing. “It’s so comfortable. I can wear a wood skirt and leggings all day. I can wear

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linen no matter how hot it is.”

Though she lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Rutherford regularly travels and exhibits in Cherokee, North Carolina. She collaborates with Eastern Band Cherokee artists such as Andy Grant, Ernest “Beaver” Grant, and Robert “Hoss” Tramper. In North Carolina bead artists tend to be more experimental since beadwork is taught from a young age in local schools.

“People always ask what size beads I use. I use any beads I can get my hands on,” she says. “I might outline a design with larger beads and fill it with smaller beads.”

“I do original designs. I don’t want to copy the old designs exactly.” An example is her bag Old School. Sitting in the Owen School’s building, Rutherford looked up at the antique tin ceiling tiles. “The designs looks like a bird, so I used it.”

Brian Zepeda Both Brian Zepeda and his brother Pedro Zepeda, enrolled members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and members of the Panther Clan, practice and teach a wide range of traditional Seminole art forms, from carving functional dugout canoes to building chickees—traditional shelters with thatch roofs and no walls. They both have worked for their tribal museum, Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, and educate the public about Seminole culture and history.

Brian Zepeda focuses on beadwork. When I asked how he came to know such a wide range of artistic practices, he said, “We grew up in a village.” The family lived traditionally. Tahama Osceola, his grandmother taught him to sew at a young age, but he learned beadwork on his own.

Zepeda always knew about Southeastern Woodlands beadwork, since it was continuously made at least until the 1920s in Florida. Until, as Zepeda says, “the automobile came, and they made actual roads in Florida.”

“When I told my uncle I was interested in beading, he told me, ‘There are rules to making beadwork.’ For instance, you don’t eat while you’re working on a piece.”

“People might make a bag or a sash, but the only other consistent beader of the southeast style here is Carol Cypress.

Carol and I are always showing each other our beadwork.” Zepeda also stays in touch with Eastern Band Cherokee beaders, such as Bo Taylor.

The first bandolier bag Zepeda made, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum bought. The subsequent bags were in such demand that finally, he had to turn down offers so he would have a bag of his own to wear.

“I’ve made a bag in 30 days, but when I’m using those 24° beads, I’ve taken two years to finish a bag. I usually have two to five different projects going on at a time,” says Zepeda. “I make beadwork for myself, my kids, my brother Pedro, elders, museums, and collectors.”

“Looking at the older beadwork, they didn’t all make them the same way,” The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum has the largest collection of Southeastern Woodlands beadwork in the world, except possibly the Smithsonian; however, Zepeda has been able to study his tribe’s beadwork as far away as Berlin, Germany.

Symbolism and Tribal Distinctions “The Cherokee, Creek, and the other southeastern tribes use more of the negative space in the design; they let the wool show through, while the Delaware tend to bead all over,” says Rutherford.

“Some of the motifs are the same. Every

once in a while I’ll see Plains beadwork that looks southeastern and vice versa. I think they traded back then just as much as we do today.”

The number of tabs on the straps can help identify the tribe. Shawnee, Delaware, and Seminole might have three tabs on each side, while Cherokee only have two or four.

“The easiest ones to pick out are Choctaw,” says Brian Zepeda. “They use red and white beads, with white spirals.

Cherokees used a lot of plant insignia.

Creeks and Seminole use animal designs.”

Many of the designs represent clans. Pedro Zepeda explains, “Some of the symbols are not a direct correlation to the clans, but X-symbol would be used when there’s X-clan, and Z-symbol represents Z-clan.”

Among Seminoles, Brian Zepeda points out, “In Oklahoma, they still have the Raccoon Clan. Panther, Wind, and Bird are the most common here. They still have Alligator in Oklahoma too.”

Corn is a common symbol in the beading, as are medicine plants. Some flowers include precontact sun-circle designs.

Leggings, Belts, and Jackets “The snake patterns at the bottom of their legging show respect for snakes,” Jerry Ingram explains. “Where I grew up, there were a lot water moccasins.”

Living alongside poisonous snakes requires mutual respect.

“People liked to get coats from the soldiers as spoils of war,” says Ingram. Hunting jackets of fabric or buckskin are becoming increasingly popular, and artists recreate beaded and fringed jackets based on 19thcentury examples.

Above: Brian Zepeda (Seminole Tribe of Florida), bandolier bag, seed beads, cut Pony beads, wool stroud, yarn tassels, calico lining. Photo courtesy of Martha Berry Below: Martha Berry (Cherokee Nation), Fire Carrier’s Footsteps, glass seed beads on wool saved-edge stroud; leather, silk satin ribbon, 4 × 8 × 9 in. Photo: Dave Berry

Belts include cloth belts with beaded designs and long ties with tassels and fingerwoven belts with beads worked into the weaving. The latter are more common today among Osage and Quapaw artists.

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“I just love working with buckskin,” says Jerry Ingram. “My daughter and I get high from the smell of smoked hides.”

Ingram experimented with dying hides in the traditional manner: “I brought black walnut from home. My mother had a black walnut in her front yard. I crushed the husks to powder, put it in warm water, and soaked the hide. Some people say you can add wild onion to preserve the color.” The walnut makes a deep purple or brown.

Baldric Sashes

Above: Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation), Hidden Fire, woman’s beaded purse. Below: Jerry Ingram (Choctaw Nation), baldric sash, glass beads, wool, cotton. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall

While men from all southeastern tribes traditionally have worn beaded sashes over their shoulders, the baldric sashes in museum collections are overwhelmingly Choctaw. “Alabama and Koasati have similar designs to the Choctaw,” says Ingram. The designs are considered to be far more ancient than other beaded items.

The white coils are also founded in ancient ceramics, and Ingram says they can represent “two snakes always uncoiling and recoiling.”

“During wartime,” Brian Zepeda says the sashes and bags “were communication without speaking. You could see who was Snake Clan, and if you were Panther Clan, you could find the Panther Clan people.”

“The sashes are such a delightful mystery,” says Berry. “They are distinct even from other southeastern beadwork.” There’s a stitch only found on the baldric sashes. “It is very elegant and simple, once you learn how to do it. There is one horizontal bead and one vertical bead in each stitch.” Berry calls this the “two-bead line stitch” that she says “looks like footsteps.”

Purses Southeastern tribes avidly collected Iroquois purses in the 19th century; however, three examples of purses specifically made

by Cherokee women in the 19th century spawned a revival of women’s beaded handbags. Now Martha Berry teaches purses at her beginning workshops. “It’s made all the difference in the world,” she says, “because students are much more likely to finish a purse than they are to finish a bandolier bag or sash. Purses are a smaller project, take less time, can be used every day, and can be framed as art.”

The purses are teardrop-shaped, made from either wool stroud or deerhide, and often have looped beaded fringe. They can have drawstrings or small flaps with more beadwork.

Moccasins Eastern moccasins are pucker-toed, that is, they are made from a single piece of hide with a seam up the back and the front. The entire interior can be cloth, and cloth can be sewn on the flaps and vamps. Having the beadwork on a separate piece of cloth allows it to be reused when the soles of the moccasins get worn out.

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The patterns on the baldric sashes resemble overviews of certain stomp dances that coil around the dance leader. They also relate to stickball, and are traditionally been by players.

Bandolier Bags Bandolier bags are the undisputed kings of Woodlands beadwork.

They had small square pouches with triangular flaps and straps worn over one shoulder. “The first ones I ever saw, I noticed they were small, about 29 or 32 inches,” says Ingram. “I try to make them longer for people these days, since are people are bigger.”

“Only certain people can make certain parts of the bags,” explains Pedro Zepeda. “There’s certain things you have to have done or certain lineages you have to belong to wear the bags. People won’t say anything, but that traditional knowledge is still around.”

These bags have been described as shot pouches, but Martha Berry discovered that many of the early straps only had a couple stitches holding them to the bag. They were not designed to carry heavy weight and were far too ornate for such a mundane purpose. It is far more likely the bags carried pipes, flints, tobacco, and other medicine. Today, they typically carry keys and cell phones.

“Sometimes I put a button and loop on the strap,” says Ingram,

“in case a person wants to change it over.” The straps typically have different designs running up each side, and calico underneath.

Jerry Ingram made a bag inspired by an historical Seminole bag. The story the bag illustrates goes: “Two guys were in the woods. A lady comes up and says, ‘You should learn to relax and enjoy life.’ She told them to meet her the next day. The next day she gave them dried leaves and seeds and told them to plant the seeds.

‘You’ll grow more leaves, let them dry, and then put it in a pipe and smoke them.’ The boys couldn’t tell if they dreaming, and the lady told them they knew it wasn’t a dream because they could see their breath. When you smoke, you can see your breath.”

Decoding the designs is a fascinating pursuit; however, some meanings may never be known, as Ingram points out.

“A Creek lady at the IAIA Museum said often only a medicine man and the person wearing the bag knows what the designs mean. It’s like a prescription.”

Above left: Specialized stitch found only in southeastern baldric sashes, by Martha Berry Right: Jerry Ingram (Choctaw), bandolier bag with designs that could represent smoke, breath, and the Wind Clan. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Community Response increasingly common both back east and in Contact Southeastern Woodlands beadwork is

“I’m glad people are recognizing that we had a beadwork tradition that was unique and not made for tourists,” says Rutherford. “Look at the [precontact] shells carvings. The people had beads around their ankles and wrists. The material and techniques have changed, but the beads have always been there.”

“I almost cry when I see a photograph where people are dressed up to stompdance wearing beaded sashes,” says Berry. In less than two decades of concentrated effort by a team of bead artists, wearing

Oklahoma, at dances, and other events.

“I believe that the revival of any lost art tradition is vital to understanding who we were as a people, in the same way that speaking the language gives us a blueprint for ‘real’ Cherokee thought,” says J.P. Johnson (Natchez/Cherokee), a cultural specialist for the Cherokee Nation. “We should as an entire people be trying to revive everything. As we shed our colonized minds, bodies, and spirits, we may—just as some of the prophecies say— get it all back.”

• Martha Berry: www.berrybeadwork.com • Jerry Ingram: email ingrambead@yahoo.com Indian Market booth #274 PAL-N • Lisa Rutherford: www.facebook.com/pages/LisaRutherford-Traditional-Cherokee-Arts, Indian Market booth #901-CAT • Pedro Zepeda: www.facebook.com/ pedrozepedaseminole FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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Cultural Heritage, Art, & Living Beings Justice Lost in Translation

By Suzan Shown Harjo

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HIS APRIL IN PARIS, a French judge ruled that 70 Native American sacred objects could be sold to the highest bidder, denying pleas from the Hopi Tribe, Survival International, the US Ambassador to France, and Director/Actor Robert Redford to halt the auction.

“To auction these would be, in my opinion, a sacrilege—a criminal gesture that contains grave moral repercussions,” said Redford in a written statement before the court ruling. “I would hope that these sacred items can be returned to the Hopi tribe where they belong. They are not for auction.”

US Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin also issued a statement on April 11, following diplomatic meetings the day before: “Hopi representatives have requested a delay in the sale in order to better identify and determine the provenance of the objects.

A delay would allow the creators of these sacred objects the chance to determine their possible rights.” He suggested using the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property, which France and the US have signed, as a vehicle for halting the auction.

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View of the Hopi Reservation, Arizona. Photo: Moyan Brenn (CC BY 2.0)

Judge Magali Bouvier ruled against Survival International France and the Hopi Tribe on April 12. She declared the auction legal and said it could proceed: “The mere fact that these objects can be considered ritual objects, symbols of a given faith, or divine or sacred representations does not render them untradeable and therefore their sale does not amount to a manifestly unlawful disturbance or an imminent damage….”

The sacred objects went on the block immediately after the judicial decision. Sixty-six were sold for a whopping $1.2 million dollars. The decision gave a green light for French citizens to freely trade in Native cultural property, and at least two auctions of such objects have taken place since the April ruling. In an earlier auction in December 2012, 23 Hopi sacred objects were scooped up, including one by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Two prominent museums in Arizona—the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff—joined Hopi leaders on April 9, calling for the sale of sacred objects to stop.

The Néret-Minet Tessier and Sarrou auction catalogue listed the seller of the “masks” only by the initials “L.S.,” characterizing him as a “connoisseur with peerless taste.” L.S. was identified in the media as a French “collector,” who had

worked in the American film industry for 30 years and was sometimes a guest of Hopi people on their land in Arizona.

According to Hopi Tribal Chairman LeRoy N. Shingoitewa, the sacred objects were made between 1880 and 1940 and stolen in the 1930s and 1940s. The tribe issued an advisory before the auction (emphases in the original): “These sacred objects should be referred to only as sacred objects. Incorrectly labeling them is very disrespectful to the entire American Indian community and the Hopi Tribe. The following terms are deemed highly offensive and disrespectful when referring to sacred objects: ‘masks’ (and) ‘artifacts.’”

The sacred objects were made between 1880 and 1940 and stolen in the 1930s and 1940. and tribal law, “a subsequent purchaser cannot acquire good title to a stolen object. Objects representing religious and cultural patrimony may not be purchased, sold, or otherwise transferred. To do so is to commit a theft.”

“It is also highly offensive and disrespectful to the Hopi Tribe for any images of the sacred objects to appear in print, on television, or online.” The auction catalogue and much of the media coverage carried full-color photographs of the sacred objects.

Pointing out that the auction house “declines to reveal” the identity of the owner, Shingoitewa wrote, “You are quoted as saying you can prove that these religious objects were not stolen.” The chairman asked for “copies of any certificates of ownership in your possession that you believe establish, or help establish, the chain of title for Hopi religious objects you propose to sell.”

Most of the 70 sacred objects that went on the block in Paris are Hopi, and the others are Acoma, Jemez, Navajo, and Zuni cultural patrimony. The sacred objects are made of carved wood; decorated with feathers, hide, corn pollen, and other organic material; and painted with natural paints. They are made to be beautiful, arresting, dramatic, portentous, and original because of the purpose they serve in ceremony and prayer. They are not art first and ceremonial objects second.

They are, first and last, sacred within a specific cultural context. They are owned communally by a society, village, and/or clan and cannot lawfully be sold by anyone within or outside the moiety.

Judge Bouvier ruled, without asking for or receiving L.S.’s purported chain of title or allowing the Hopi Tribe to review such evidence. “Lastly,” she opined, “while the concerned masks retain a sacred value for individuals who claim to belong to the Hopi Tribe or to practice such Tribe’s religious traditions, and while they are religious in nature and embody the spirit of such individuals’ ancestors, such masks cannot be deemed human bodies or parts of human bodies (whether living or deceased), which are protected under general principles recognized under applicable law and set forth in…the French Civil Code.”

“This sale is not just a business transaction,” as Auctioneer Gilles Néret-Minet was quoted in an April 3 New York Times article, “but an homage to the Hopi Indians.” The Times also reported Néret-Minet as saying, “I think the Hopis should be happy that so many people want to understand and analyze their civilization.”

Hopi Chairman Shingoitewa faxed a letter to Néret-Minet on April 4, making clear that the Hopi were neither happy nor homaged.

“Judging from the photographs of the Hopi religious objects you intend to auction, it seems clear that they are genuine articles of religious and cultural patrimony. These Katsinam, or friends as the Hopi call them, represent the spirit of deceased ancestors, animals, natural features and events, and various deities. They are used by Hopis in connection with prayers and ceremonies in which Hopi religious leaders perform their trust obligation to protect the world.”

Shingoitewa asked Néret-Minet to “postpone” the auction “so that the tribe may have an opportunity to investigate the circumstances under which these religious objects were acquired.” The chairman pointed out that, under federal

Reacting to the ruling, the Hopi Tribe released two statements, one by Hopi Tribal Councilman Mervyn Yoyetewa, Mishongnovi Village: “It’s a very sad morning for me and the Hopi people.”

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read the other statement by Chairman Shingoitewa. “It is sad to think that the French will allow the Hopi Tribe to suffer through the same cultural and religious thefts, denigrations and exploitations they experienced in the 1940s. Would there be outrage if Holocaust artifacts, Papal heirlooms, or Quranic manuscripts were going up for sale on Friday to the highest bidder? I think so. Given the importance of these ceremonial objects to Hopi religion, you can understand why Hopis regard this—or any sale—as sacrilege, and why we regard an auction not as homage but as a desecration to our religion.

Our Tribal Council will now convene to determine the Hopi Tribe’s next steps in this shameful saga.”

Stephen Corry, Director of Survival International, which mounted the legal challenge to the auction, stated, “Potential buyers of these objects should be aware that the Hopi are profoundly distressed at their sale, and regard them as the rightful property of the Hopi people. French law appears to offer the Hopi little comfort, but we still hope that justice will prevail, and that these objects can still be returned to their proper owners.”

“This is a very unfortunate outcome, as these objects will now be sold and dispersed, and the likelihood that they will eventually return to their true home amongst the Hopi is severely reduced,” said Skadden, Arps Attorney Pierre ServanSchreiber, who represented Survival International France and the Hopi Tribe in court. “It also probably means that French institutions are still not fully aware of the devastating consequences that such mercantile fate for truly sacred objects may have on tribes who have already suffered so much.”

Servan-Schreiber and Survival International rescued one of the Hopi Katsinam by winning an auction bid and by returning the sacred object to Hopi tribal and religious leaders on July 15. Another was purchased at the auction by the family foundation devoted to the late Joe Dassin, who was a French singer and friend to many Hopi people. It will be returned later this year.

Corry issued the following statement on the occasion of the return in July: “The sale of Hopi Katsinam would never have happened in the USA—thankfully US law recognizes the importance of these ceremonial objects. It is a great shame that French law falls so far behind. We’re delighted that at least two of the Katsinam have been saved, and can be returned to their rightful owners.”

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Auctioneer Néret-Minet held forth on the French judge’s decision and on American law. He was quoted in the British Telegraph in April as being “happy that French law was respected….I am also very concerned about the Hopis’ sadness, but you cannot break property law. These are in [private] collections in Europe: they are no longer sacred.

When objects are in private collections, even in the United States, they are desacralized.”

The auctioneer misses the mark widely by claiming that sacred objects in private hands are “desacralized” under US law. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) of 1979, as Amended, and other US laws have criminal provisions regarding the acquisition or excavation of Native cultural items, including by private persons. NAGPRA is structured around federal and federally-assisted repositories that hold Native human remains and surrogates, funerary objects, sacred objects, and/or cultural patrimony. The agencies, museums, and educational institutions with a federal nexus are the largest holders of repatriable Native remains and cultural items.

While the laws may be geared toward the institutions, there are numerous causes of action that run against private persons, from collectors to grave robbers. One of these in NAGPRA is taken from the pages of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), prohibiting illegal trafficking in Native American human remains and cultural items. Federal prosecutors have pursued private “collectors” who have illegally trafficked across state lines, either physically or virtually, and have stopped sales of Native cultural items, including sacred objects and cultural patrimony, on eBay and other Internet sites.

Judge Bouvier should have allowed for a closer look at L.S. and his collection methods and chain of title, as well as the international and American legal tools available to her, rather than whitewashing everything under the color of French law.

“If we lose this case, there will be no more sales of objects of Indigenous art in France,” the auctioneer said before the ruling, according to an April 11 Associated Press report.

“I guess that museums will be obliged to give back their collections. It’s major….It would be terrible for the art market in general.”

Similarly, hyperbolic statements were commonly heard in the 1970s through the1990s from breathless American collectors,

who opposed our efforts to achieve repatriation laws.

Repatriation would signal the end of Native collections, collectors warned, even after a decade and more of practical experience under NAGPRA proved their predictions to be wrong.

The late Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), an author, attorney, educator, and one of the architects of repatriation, was fond of making fun of that specter: “They think we’re going to go up and down the museums’ aisles with shopping carts, grabbing everything we can.” American collectors were wrong then, and French collectors are wrong now.

traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself, rather than property owned by an individual Native American, and which, therefore, cannot be alienated, appropriated, or conveyed by any individual regardless of whether or not the individual is a member of the Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization and such object shall have been considered inalienable by such Native American group at the time the object was separated from such group.”

“They think we’re going to go up and down museums’ aisles with shopping carts, grabbing everything we can.”

There also is a French echo of another common refrain by some American collectors in the day: art trumps everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Zuni War Gods were highly prized in the global art market. They are carved wooden Living Beings, made as beautiful as can be to honor and stand for a deceased person. They are placed on the grave to be taken by the elements, representing the person’s journey to the next world.

Thieves steal the War Gods from the tops of graves, thus disrupting the deceased person’s journey. In one photo from the early 1900s, a single anthropologist’s “collection” of War Gods is piled high like a fresh supply of cordwood.

War Gods were being sold at top dollar as art objects by the most prominent auction houses. In that case, the only good title that could have been conveyed was by the deceased or by the Living Being itself. All else is simply bad paper.

Ultimately, NAGPRA settled the question by making repatriation categories for funerary objects, sacred objects, and cultural patrimony, with no category for objets d’art.

Under NAGPRA, sacred objects are described as “specific ceremonial objects which are needed by traditional Native American religious leaders for the practice of traditional Native American religions by their present day adherents.”

In crafting the repatriation laws, we resisted the many heavyhanded efforts to define the sacred. No other religions or people are required to define the sacred, and Native peoples should not have that burden either.

“Cultural patrimony” in NAGPRA is described as “an object having ongoing historical,

The Hopi Katsinam are both sacred objects and cultural patrimony, under NAGPRA. In some cases, they are surrogates for humans or remains, and, as with the Zuni War Gods, are Living Beings.

Although Judge Bouvier ignores the repatriation laws, she takes pains to dismiss the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978, which was the umbrella policy for the follow-on repatriation process laws. It was under AIRFA that the first federal repatriations were done in 1979.

“While the [AIRFA]…recognizes the religious freedom for American Indians and the right for the same to practice their traditional religions,” stated the judge, “no provision forbidding the sale, outside of the United States of America, of objects having been or likely to be used for religious ceremonies is applicable in France.”

The judge also slammed closed the “free, prior and informed consent” door of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which France voted to adopt in 2007, along with most of the world community of nations.

She characterized it in the following way: “And while…the signatory states have committed to ‘provide redress […] developed in conjunction with Indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs,’ such declaration does not constitute a legal basis for an action brought against an auction house seeking acquirers for goods that a private individual claims to rightfully own.”

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Colorado River Geoglyphs: Guardians of a Sacred Landscape

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

A

NCIENT MONUMENTAL figures scratched into the desert of such an immense scale they can only be clearly seen from the air. Human figures, animals, mysterious abstract designs— carved into the arid expanse of southern California and Arizona, these are the Colorado River Geoglyphs.

Similar to the Nazca line in Peru, these figures are the greatest concentration of geoglyphs in North America. Estimated to number 600, they cluster around both the Lower Colorado and Gila River Valleys. The most famous of these are the Blythe Intaglios.

The first time I read about the Blythe Intaglios years ago, I knew I had to see them. These figures span the Palo Verde Mesa, with the Big Maria Mountains to the west, the Colorado River and Highway 95 to the east, and the town of Blythe 15 miles to the south.

I was able to make that visit this year. The Colorado River was a serpentine ribbon of blue flanked by lush green growth. It snaked its way through the desert—the silica-rich rhyolite rocks glittering in the sun. Winds drowned out the sounds of distance traffic and brought aromas of desert plants. The Maria Mountains were sharp razors on the skyline, looming in the distance, over the desert pavement of Palo Verde Valley. At close range, the rocks formed a surprisingly colorful mosaic: vivid greens, rosy pinks, purples, slate blues, browns, greys, and the pure white of quartz crystals.

Seeing the Blythe Geoglyphs firsthand revealed how vulnerable they were—a scooping of the earth, a gesture recorded on the landscape for centuries.

The Colorado River stretches 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California in Mexico.

Its chilled, blue waters feed an oasis of fertile farmland, threading through the

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Mojave Desert and then the Sonoran Desert, some of the hottest and driest deserts in North America. Annual precipitation averages less than six inches, and temperatures reach 122°F. “It’s one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world,” says Cara Romero, a Chemehuevi artist living in Santa Fe. Romero is a photographer and videographer, as well as an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Art. Currently, Romero serves as program director, promoting Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Bioneers, a nonprofit group finding “nature-inspired approaches to the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges.” She has served as a tribal councilperson and cultural resource director of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. She grew up on the California side of Lake Havasu. “I think of Chemehuevi as home. I go back there about four times a year.”

Above: the mountains along the Colorado River. Photo: Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) Below right: Cara Romero and her son. Photo: Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo)

Romero has visited many of the Colorado River geoglyphs on hikes with her friend, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, whose passion for studying and protecting the geoglyphs is unrivaled.

Figueroa, a teacher and activist of Xicano and Chemehuevi descent, has spent the last 58 years studying the local rock art. For decades, Figueroa has been part of several successful efforts to save the geoglyphs from destruction.

“He’s representing the Ancients,” says Romero.

Giant Portraits in a Desert Gallery ROCK ART in the southwest dates from at least 10,000 years ago up to the present. In the region, rock art takes many forms, including petroglyphs, pictographs, cleared circles, cairns, alignments, and geoglyphs. Geoglyphs, also called “gravel pictographs,” are immense images created on the ground.

“Intaglio,” pronounced “in-TALee-oh’,” is a term borrowed from printmaking. Printers make negative engravings by etching or incising a positive image below the printing plate’s surface. The term here describes how

ancient artists created the geoglyphs by scraping off the surface rocks, revealing the lighter layer of calcium-rich, hardpacked soil exposed to the surface.

The dark coating on the rocks is “desert varnish,” also called “desert patina,” a fine red, brown, or black coating of clay, iron, and manganese that forms slowly over centuries in arid regions. “It takes thousands of years for that patina to form,” Romero points out. “Conversely, it takes only seconds to disturb it; then it’s ruined forever.”

“The desert used to be an ocean, before humans,” Romero says. “There’s a two-millimeter shell of topsoil. It’s as fragile as an eggshell. The seeds are embedded in this layer and when it rains there’s a wild bloom.”

“I would go to the geoglyphs and learn with Alfredo, as an elder,” says Romero. “We’d go hiking, and he’d teach about the sites and their meaning.”

The Blythe Intaglios feature six figures in three locations: three humanlike figures, two quadruped animals, a spiral, and a circular shape. The spiral glyph could represent a snake; however, spirals also represent waters or winds.

The four-legged animal figures are interpreted differently, as horses, dogs, ocelots, or mountain lions. The

horse theory is dubious, since the geoglyphs date earlier than the Spanish reintroduction of the horse in the late 16th century. If the quadrupeds are big cats, or nume in Mojave, they could be Hatakulya and his older brother Numeta, mountain lions who aided the Creator and created deer (Kroeber 762).

Some interpret the Blythe humanlike figures as Mastamho, the Creator, and his twin brother Kataar, who opposed creation ( Jones and Klar 289).

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From top to bottom: Ancestral Yuman peoples, Blythe Intaglio, monumental geoglyph. Aerial photo: Airphoto–Jim Wark.

Overturned boulder illustrating desert varnish.

Road sign on US Route 95 for the Blythe Intaglios. Rocks forming desert pavement at Blythe site. Lower three photos: A. Meredith

oriented toward the south and their arms outstretched, are now enclosed by kite-shaped protective fences.

One is conspicuously male, with wavy arms and a flexed left leg. A circular dance path, crossing the figure’s knees, is still in evidence. Another figure,105.6 feet long with an arm span of 91.8 feet, has visible knobby knees.

The figure once had hair, fingers, and toes. Tank tracks cross its right arm.

The Blythe Intaglios were unknown to non-Native peoples until 1931 when pilot George A. Palmer flew over Blythe. He saw a colossal human figure on the desert floor and, disbelieving his own eyes, circled around only to see several more of the giant figures (Aveni 230). When a National Geographic expedition saw the largest figure in 1951, members of the expedition measured it as being 171 feet tall. They described it as a female, with “an elongated neck, and quartzite stones to represent eyes, mouth, and breasts” (Seltzer 400).

At least 60 geoglyphs throughout the region feature anthropomorphic beings, such as the Winterhaven Stick Man or the Kokopelli geoglyph.

Kokopelli, the ancient and immortal hunched-back flute player, is a fertility figure known throughout the Southwest. At 200 feet long, his geoglyph, located eight miles east of Blythe, is the largest in the area (Figueroa).

Rock art is difficult to date, but techniques are being developed and refined. In 1993 Jay von Werlhof, Ronald Dorn, and others tested 13 different rock art sites. They examined the age of lichen and other organic matter embedded in the varnish on stones (von Werlhof et al. 257–9). While contested, the results are impressive.

The team found ages beginning in 1294 to 772 BCE at the dance circle at Yuha Mesa to the most recent Winterhaven Stick Man, from 991 to 1392 CE. They dated the Blythe Intaglios from 668 to 1158 CE (von Werlhof et al. 264).

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The figures are thought to portray immortals from oral history, particularly creation stories. They are placed in locations significant to local tribes’ cosmologies ( Jones and Klar 289).

Groups of people working together most likely created the geoglyphs, probably over long stretches of time.

Dancing is evident at many of the sites from areas tamped down by human feet ( Jones and Klar 288). The geoglyphs are linked to mourning ceremonies and are seen as markers of sacred places along pilgrimage routes.

In 1901 an anthropologist observed Akimel O’odham people holding ceremonies near a giant geoglyph on the Gila River. The colossal image was that of Hâ-âk, a monster, and they were celebrating her destruction. She was born with claws and sharpened teeth and fed on O’odham children. A hero, Elder Brother, killed her in her cave, and the geoglyph served as a shrine to commemorate this event (Seltzer 404).

Peoples of the Colorado River THE LOWER COLORADO RIVER VALLEY is home to five reservations.

From north to south, they are Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), Quechan, and Cocopah. Hopi and Diné members of the Colorado River Indian Tribes moved to the region only after World War II, while the Maricopa people left the Colorado River in the 18th century for the eastern Gila River for Arizona.

Two major language groups, UtoAztecan and Yuman, are represented on the lower Colorado River. The Uto-Aztecan speakers who remain in the Colorado River Valley are the Chemehuevi. “They are one of the 17 bands of South Paiute,” says Romero.

“The Chemehuevi were originally from Las Vegas to Blythe, to Hesperia [California].”

Chemehuevi, a Mojave term for “those who play with fish,” call

Ancestral Yuman peoples, Blythe Intaglios, monumental male human-like figure, quadruped, spiral geoglyphs. Aerial photo: Airphoto—Jim Wark

themselves Nuwu. The dams that formed Lake Havasu flooded part of their historical homeland (Pritzker 23).

Despite speaking an unrelated language, Chemehuevi people share many cultural traits with Mojave, their longstanding neighbors.

Most Colorado River peoples speak Yuman languages. The majority of lower Colorado River geoglyphs are credited to Yuman peoples (von Werlhof et al. 267). Several tribes’ oral histories trace their creation to the north of their present homelands, where they emerged to this world through Avi Kwa Ame, Spirit Mountain, located west of Laughlin, Nevada.

While the tribes have shifted territories within the Colorado and Gila Rivers landscape, they have been in the general area for ages. They share similar cultures, once based on floodwater farming, until dams blocked the rivers. Traditionally, they cultivate maize, beans, squashes, and gourds and harvest wild mesquite beans. While their traditional governments are minimal and non-hierarchal, each group maintains a

strong sense of tribal unity, shaped in part by years of ritual warfare.

After Spanish explorers charged up the Colorado River in 1540, looking for but not finding an imaginary city of gold, they and the Mexicans mostly left the tribes alone. Non-Natives did not settle in the region in large numbers until the fur trapper arrived in the 1820s, followed by gold-hungry European-Americans headed to California in the 1840s. Due to the late arrival and sparse presence of nonNatives, the tribes held onto their own traditions and lifeways. Cocopah people built homes of thatched arrowweed as recently as the 1960s.

The Mojave, or Pipa Aha Macav (“People by the River”), are the northernmost and largest River Yuman-speaking tribe. The Maricopa, or Piipaash, lived for centuries between Mojave and Quechan territories. Smaller tribes, such as the Halchidoma, merged into them, and they moved to the Gila River in the 17th century. Quechan people, the Xam Kwatcan, live further south, near the mouth of the Gila

River. Southernmost are the Cocopah, or Xawil Kunyavaei, whose lands stretch from Yuma County, Arizona, to Mexico, where the Colorado River delta spills into the Gulf of California.

Dreams are paramount among Colorado River tribes. They can endow the dreamer with powers in public speaking, healing, or battle. They are visits from ancestors. Discussed, pondered, recited, and sung about— dreams don’t just predict the future; they shape the future.

Colorado River tribes have complex theologies, some beliefs of which are shared among the tribes.

One perspective of Creation is that Sky rained down on Earth, who then conceived and gave birth to Matavilya, a deity who formed the land from mud and created humans and other animals. Matavilya was killed by his own daughter, Frog Woman (Stewart 65). Matavilya had two sons, Mastamho and Kataar. These twins emerged from under the waters. The former, Mastamho, or Kumastamo, gave language, songs, and culture to the FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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House cave where the Bill Williams River joined the Colorado River, the songs describe the landscape through the Great Basin west to the Pacific Ocean.

By morning, the songs have returned to the Rock House, guiding the spirits over the Milky Way. The songs, pilgrimage and trade routes, and rock art, including the geoglyphs, all testify to the interconnectedness of the Colorado River peoples and their sacred landscapes.

Threats and Triumphs Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Water Blessing, 2012, photograph. Model regalia maker: Tiffany Adams (Chemehuevi-Miwok-Maidu). Photo taken at dawn at Havasu Lake, California

people and all aspects of how to live.

Mastamho divided the people into tribes and clans and delineated their territories.

He created the sun, moon, and the Colorado River. Mastamho then turned himself into an osprey and flew off into the Unknown. Kataar is an evil twin who opposed creation.

Interconnected Landscape A WEB OF FOOT TRAILS linked all the communities of the Colorado River with the Great Basin, the Pacific Coast, the Southwest, and Mesoamerica (Dubin 467). The CocoMaricopa EastWest Trail and North-South Quechan Trail are still visible where they cross at Blythe Mesa (Figueroa 4). Traders and long-distance runners used the trails for tribal commercial and social needs.

Rock art marked routes for longdistance traders (Dubin 467), including petroglyphs and rock cairns that served as roadside shrines near treacherous stretches of desert. The Colorado River tribes exported farm produce and

baskets for shells, such as clams, abalone, olivella, and mussels, from the Pacific Ocean and salt and conch, spondylus, glycymeris, and more olivella shells from the Gulf of California. Malachite and agate were mined in Mojave and Yavapai lands and exported (Dubin 462).

“Chemehuevis were known as mimics and would speak four or more languages, which is something a trader would do,” Romero suggests. Guided by rock art, the runners and traders also had songs with a “certain cadence,” she says.

Because of the songs, “they would know certain markers for springs or watering holes.” Historically, the runners could clear 100 miles in a day (Stewart 60).

The most important ceremonies among Colorado River tribes are their multi-day morning ceremonies.

Known as karuk, kerauk, or chekap, in the ceremonies, men sing cycles of hundreds of songs that take the departed soul on the spiritual journey to the afterlife.

Chemehuevi are renowned for their Salt Songs. Romero participated in the Cultural Conservancy’s Salt Song Trail Project, filming and editing Chemehuevi and other Paiute peoples’ Salt Songs. Beginning at the Rock

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DESPITE THE GENERAL PUBLIC knowing about the geoglyphs since 1931, the ancient artworks have been subjected to insult and injury. In 1942 and 1943 General Patton’s North African tanks corps trained for war in the deserts of Northern Africa by driving around in circles on top of the Blythe Intaglios (Seltzer 390).

The National Register of Historic Places added the Blythe Geoglyphs in 1975 and fenced the area in. Some visitors complain about the fences; however, the multitudes of off-road vehicles (ORVs) necessitate such protections. The Kokopelli Geoglyph was once the site of a motorcycle racecourse. A heartbreaking account of senseless destruction occurred at ancestral Kumeyaay sites, some dating back over 3,000 years (von Werlhof et al. 264), on Yuha Mesa in Imperial County, California. The sites along with their protective fences were deliberately destroyed by off-road drivers and bikers.

Still, the geoglyphs and their allies have faced larger foes and emerged victorious. From 1975 to 1979, Alfredo Figueroa and others successfully fought the development of the Sun Desert Nuclear Power Plant. In the 1990s, local activists kept a nuclear toxic dump out of Ward Valley, where the endangered desert tortoise and sacred sites west of

Needles, California, were threatened.

All five Colorado River tribes joined together to form the Colorado River Nation Native Alliance to fight the nuclear dump. In 1998 protesters held a 113-day occupation of the proposed waste site ( Jones).

Responding to escalating threats to the sacred sites, Figueroa and 14 “indigenous and culturally aware individuals” formed La Cuna de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle Advisory Committee in 2000. The committee is “dedicated to physically protecting the Blythe Giant Intaglios, other geoglyphs, and several hundred sacred sites that are located along the Colorado Rivers from Needles, California, to Yuma Arizona” (Figueroa 32).

In 2010, several massive solar power projects were fast-tracked for construction on BLM lands, including Chevron’s Blythe Solar Power. The local tribes and La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle support solar energy in general, but they organized to stop this poorly planned facility. Construction threatened ancient trails and at least eight monumental geoglyphs, including the Kokopelli glyph. Tribal protests stopped plant construction, but only after an access road completely destroyed one geoglyph.

“There are just a few people who are devoted to desert conservation fighting wealthy Californians, who see the desert as a wasteland. It’s hard to pull Western people into the notion of a cultural landscape,” acknowledges Romero. But these passionate activists stay focused.

“We gather at Ward Valley every year in February as a memorial for defeating the nuclear waste site.” This annual celebration of successfully fending off the nuclear waste dump is not unlike the Akimel O’odham’s ceremony celebrating the defeat of the monster Hâ-âk.

“It’s not just a matter of protecting the sacred sites,” according to Romero, but the entire region. Endangered animals migrate through the region, crisscrossed by prehistoric trails.

While many of the geoglyphs are on private land with their whereabouts kept secret for their protection, the Blythe Intaglios are open to the public 24 hours a day. The best way to view them is also the least intrusive—by flying or parasailing over them In 2006, the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe passed an explicit resolution: “The ‘Blythe’ Intaglios fall within our ancestral and historical land use area[;] we wish to protect and preserve them for future generations” (Figueroa).

“The tribes have their differences,” Romero admits, “but this has been something all the tribes have cooperated together on.” When protecting the geoglyphs, “All the tribes have come together to say, ‘These are our predecessors.’”

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Pitstop in the Mojave, 1999, photograph, self-portrait in a Joshua tree in Searchlight, Nevada

Works Cited • Aveni, Anthony F. Between the Lines: The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

• Dubin, Lois Sherr. North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present. New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1999.

• Jones, Kate, ed. “Environmental Justice Case Study: The Ward Valley Struggle.” University of Michigan. 2004 Web. 30 June 2013.

• Figueroa, Alfredo Acosta. “Stop the Destruction of Our Sacred Sites.” La Cuna de Aztlán Sacred Sites Protection Circle, 2010.

• “Indigeneity Program.” Bioneers. 2013. Web. 7 July 2013.

• Jones, Terry L. and Kathryn A. Klar, eds.

California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity. Lanham, MD: AtlaMira Press, 2007.

• Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Handbook of the Indians of California. New York: Dover Publications, 2012.

• Pritzker, Barry M. A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

• Romero, Cara. Personal interview. 22 June 2013.

• Seltzer, Frank M. “Seeking the Secret of the Giants.” National Geographic Magazine.

September 1952. Vol. 102, No. 3.

• von Werlhof, Jay, Casey, Harry, Dorn, Ronald I., and Jones, Glenn A. “AMS 14C Age Constraints on Geoglyphs in the Lower Colorado River Region, Arizona and California.” Geoarchaeology 10.4 (1995): 257273. PDF file.

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Albuquerque

Octopus Dreams: Works on Paper by Contemporary Native American Artists 516 Arts

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ISTORICAL IMAGES float within a contemporary visual lexicon: Rasputin contemplates payday loans (Marty Two Bulls Jr.), Sequoyah holds his Cherokee syllabary (America Meredith), a sepia-toned self-portrait is superimposed in front of a tipi painted with Hello Kitty (Debra Yepa-Pappan). Tonto and a package of Tums antacids participate in abstract swarm of shapes and borrowed images ( Jaune Quick-to-See Smith). Apache helicopters dance in the sky behind President Obama (Charlene Teters). Photographs and drawings of cowboys, Indians, dancers, acrobats, animals, plants, and abstract forms recombine and converse with one another in the exhibition in the upstairs gallery of 516 Arts. Actually, two exhibitions of contemporary Native American art have opened at 516 Arts.

There are resonances between the two exhibitions, even with quite different uses of space and media.

The exhibition in the upstairs gallery space is titled Octopus Dreams: Works on Paper

by Contemporary Native American Artists.

Knowing the origins of the exhibition adds substantial interest to this assembly of 56 works by 36 different artists.

Octopus Dreams, by independent curators Beverly Morris (Aleut) and Suzanne Newman Fricke (Ashkenazic American), was designed for exhibition at a fine arts museum in Russia, the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, where the exhibition won the Grand Prix for best exhibition at the museum last year. After traveling to several locations in Russia, this is Octopus Dreams’ first showing in the United States.

Morris and Fricke selected these works specifically with the idea of presenting them to a Russian audience likely to have little knowledge about Native Americans and Native American art. The oldest works are from the 1990s, but most of the works were created after 2000.

The curators worked within some very tight logistical restrictions, particularly the requirement that all the works travel in a diplomatic pouch. The physical dimensions of the diplomatic pouch limited size—no larger than 32 inches by 20 inches. Additional restrictions also excluded any kind of plant or animal material other than the paper itself. The end result is an installation of works on paper that are intimate in scale, and accessible, rather than overwhelming.

Even with the restriction on size and materials, the range of work is quite diverse. There is a diversity of subject matter, with some works clearly politically charged, others subtly so. Some works rely on popular culture visual references, other

Marty Two Bulls Jr. (Oglala Lakota), Payday Loans, 2011, cyanotype, serigraph, with chine-collé. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Fricke

rely on indigenous cosmologies, and other selections make creative and ambiguous combinations. The works included in Octopus Dreams are also geographically diverse; recognizable pictorial styles have arisen from regional traditions of works on paper: Northwest Coast, Inuit prints, references to ledger drawings, plus the use of other flatly abstracted styles or symbolism from the southwest, the northeast, and the southeast.

A long history of artworks serves as international ambassadors, and this exhibition is most intriguingly viewed through this lens. Nearly all the works

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were contributed directly by the artists themselves. The artworks selected by the artists are all intended to communicate across cultural and political boundaries.

The title of the exhibition comes from N. Scott Momaday’s novel The Ancient Child (1990). The literary reference is about a switch in point of view. The passage in the novel asks whether the octopus dreams of the human protagonist after being washed ashore and then hand-carried back to the safety of the water. The title of the exhibition, then, does not take the stance of assuming that we are dreaming of the octopus, but rather invites us to imagine ourselves in the perspective of the other in an encounter with ourselves.

Generally speaking, when unfamiliar symbols combine with familiar ones, we work on figuring out meanings contextually. The visual metaphors tease out similarities between situations that do not seem similar at first. For example, the cyanotype with silk-screen and chinecollé titled Payday Loans (2011) by Marty Two Bulls combines a photograph of the assassinated Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin (ca. 1869–1916) with a pattern of circles, scientific drawings of predatory insects, and the words “Payday Loans.”

The combination of these visual references draws parallels between historic events, such as Rasputin’s prophecies of the downfall of the Russian Imperial family, the spread of European diseases in the Americas as a factor in colonial expansion, and current economic conditions, such as the predatory lending practices of payday loans. It is a puzzling combination of warnings of doom from multiple cultural contexts, with the topmost layer a bright orange tantalizing offer of a high-cost temporary solution. The image is disquieting even if each layer of visual reference is not comprehensible for a viewer.

Several artists with work in Octopus Dreams traveled to the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts for the exhibition in Russia. At the opening at 516 Arts, artist Deborah Jojola spoke briefly about the responses she observed from Russian viewers. Jojola explained that they came to the exhibition not knowing very much about Native American cultures, thinking there was only one big unified tribe, with tipis and hunting the norm. She was surprised to

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find that even so, they saw relationships between the artworks and their own history, particularly the forced cultural changes as a result of the Soviet history.

When it comes right down to it, many American audiences have very little more knowledge about Native American cultures than the Russian audiences have. The artists in this exhibition have always been making their art to communicate across cultural and political boundaries. Hopefully, the aesthetic beauty of many of the pieces entices questions and leads viewers to seek more knowledge.

During the discussion panel preceding the well-attended opening of the exhibition, the question was asked, “What makes Native American global?”

This was curator Suzanne Newman Fricke’s answer, “It is global because we sent it around the world.”

Perhaps more importantly, we brought it back home and now have the opportunity to look at it through new eyes.

—Lara M. Evans

Bristol

Sarah Sense: Weaving Water Rainmaker Gallery

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ARAH SENSE: Weaving Water is a “migrating” exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art which opened at the Philadelphia Street Gallery in the center of Bristol, United Kingdom in June, moved to Rainmaker Gallery in Coldharbour Lane from June to August, and will also show related works in the Parlour Showrooms in August.

Rainmaker Gallery is undertaking to show the work of some of the most up-to-date and exciting North American First Nations and Native American artists to emerge over the last few years. As a set of several interrelated exhibitions, Weaving Water provides audiences here in Britain with a look at examples of the recent work of the Choctaw and Chitimacha artist, Sarah Sense.

Sense is a widely appreciated and talented

Native American artist, whose works are held in numerous important collections, including the National Museum of the American Indian. She is an accomplished visual artist with experience working as a museum and gallery specialist, as well as a curator, writer, performer, filmmaker, and photographer. This international “migrating” exhibition emerged from a collaboration between Rainmaker Gallery’s director Joanne Prince, Sarah Sense, and Dr. Max Carocci, an art historian, anthropologist, and curator whose recent film works include the documentary piece, Written Out of History, directed and produced with Simona Piantiere (2010), examining the legacies of colonial practices as they affected many thousands of Indigenous captives and slaves, such as the Chitimacha sent from Louisiana to the Caribbean, and thus of relevance to the interests of Sarah Sense as a Chitimacha person.1 What has been brought together here is a hugely captivating set of works underpinned by personal experiences, which the artist speaks about eloquently in her presentations. She writes that she “taught herself how to carry on the tradition of weaving Chitimacha patterns, bringing [her] into a life of meeting and knowing other traditional artists.”

The exhibition contains a good range of works by Sense that constitute both single images and sometimes larger, combined sets of images. Each one displays intricate patterns of interwoven landscape photography, using the paper medium as a material for weaving, suggestively both hiding and revealing Sense’s own particular visions gained during her world-spanning travels. More specifically, the images are not simply interwoven but come together purposefully across their surfaces to form the same repeated patterns as seen on many Chitimacha baskets created by only a handful of artisans, in a traditional art form which saw reappraisal by museum specialists and collectors during the early part of the 20th century,2 Sense’s complex and ingenious interweaving of digital imagery, shot by the artist in various locations around the world, also contains an evolving picture or perception of what it means to be an Indigenous person today and to have this legacy as

Sarah Sense (Chitimacha-Choctaw), Weaving Water #6, 2013, bamboo paper, archival laser prints, artist tape, 27.5 × 19.7 in. Photo courtesy of Rainmaker Gallery

one’s own heritage. The artist’s connection to the Indigenous extends in her case from her ancestry and the family ties she has with one of the few Chitimacha basket makers who were able to carry their craft into the 20th century, one of whom was Sense’s great-aunt. Indigenous understanding often manifests itself in a relationship to the past. But in Sarah Sense’s work this awareness of her Chitimacha heritage combines beautifully and seamlessly with other sensibilities to become a resolved piece of work. Sense creates an almost magical web of entwined imagery where it is difficult to see where specific landscape qualities and their geographical boundaries cease and merge one into the other. Her references to the Chitimacha weaving tradition are the most emphatic and seem to hover over or even protect the landscapes, which are being evoked and interwoven into each other. The repeated refrain of “we are one world” and the Lakota blessing, Mitakuye Oyasin—“all are on the earth are related”—frequently came into my mind when looking at her exhibits.

In the case of Weaving Water, Sense has created several pieces based on the island landscapes of both the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, where she gained direct experiences with traditional basket makers as well as papermakers and learned from the work FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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of other Indigenous artists. She has witnessed herself the powerful forces of water and island relationships, carrying individual movement across land and seascapes, while at the same time connecting and holding us, as a created whole, in a delicate, balanced and fragile relationship across the entire planet. Environments, climates, populations, and many other factors face great challenges today as global climate change makes an impact. Sense’s work is able to evoke a counter to such catastrophes in the harmonies and interconnectedness, which are also part of human experience and need repeating and reminding more often.

However, not only are her woven photographic pieces conceived from a position that holds the world environments close to its central concerns, it is also made by someone with a particular Indigenous heritage. The understandings she has gained from her exploration of the world and through her own questing into what it means to be an Indigenous woman artist are apparent.

These images are literally creating and re-creating relationships that have always been a part of our history on the earth, as we are mobile and traveling beings, with our international connections of both a tangible and intangible nature. Sense manages to suggest both kinds of connections in her works: the tangible, in materials and elements of water, earth, and bamboo; and the intangible, in terms of identities, places, and traditions. Indeed, by the cutting and interweaving of several different photographs chosen from the areas where Sense was located during her world travels, she not only weaves waters but also worlds and world positions.

Sarah Sense additionally has been part of an important project called Weaving the Americas, which took her to meet with Indigenous practitioners in diverse regions of the Americas in order to locate, understand, and reveal works of important artists who may not have received the attention or recognition that their works deserve.

Weaving Water helps to bring these connections to our awareness in imagery that delights as well as tells us about pathways around the world that have brought this artist to new insights and understandings that she is glad to share with us. —Stephanie Pratt 1

See also the co-edited volume by Max Carocci and Stephanie Pratt, Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts. ( January 2012) Palgrave Macmillan, which is one of the first fulllength studies of the complexities surrounding Native American social incorporation practices over a long historical period addressing pre- and post- contact situations.

See Daniel Usner, “From Bayou Teche to Fifth Avenue: Crafting a New Market for Chitimacha Indian Baskets,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 79, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 339 - 374.

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Norman

Hopituy: Hopi Art from the Permanent Collections Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

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N RECENT YEARS the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art has received a number of important Native American collections resulting in the development of exhibitions featuring these new acquisitions. Hopituy: Hopi Art from the Permanent Collections features six types Hopi katsina figures depicted in 170 objects.

The exhibition is not restricted to the well-known katsina figures carved from cottonwood root, but also includes paintings, basketry, textiles, silverwork, and ceramics, which depict representations of the katsina pantheon as well as shared formal elements of color, pattern, and design. The purpose of this exhibition is to examine the katsinam from a distinctly Hopi aesthetic perspective or Hopituy.

In order to meet the goals set forth for the exhibition, the museum worked closely with Hopi artists including Neil David Sr., Delbridge Honanie, and Milland Lomakema. These artists generously met with curator heather ahtone (Chickasaw/ Choctaw) to discuss the katsinam and were contributors to the catalogue essay, “Distinctly Hopi.” As noted in the essay: “For many Western minds, understanding the katsinam as spiritual beings proves challenging due to the necessary belief in their seasonal transformation between the physical and the metaphysical worlds. But for the Hopi, the katsinam actively offer a way of living that strives for peace, balance, and self-respect that when practiced benefits the entire world” (22).

Delbridge Honanie (Hopi), Palhik Mana, ca. 1970-80s, cottonwood root, paint, feathers, leather, shells, height: 24 in., James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

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According to ahtone, key ideas represented in the exhibition are the presentation of katsinam as objects of art and to provide

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cultural context. Futhermore, it is important to educate the audience that katsinam are not only a part of the Hopi cultural past, but remain a prevalent and important part of Hopi life in the present.

“By presenting katsina selected for the Hopituy exhibition along with artworks that share the designs and colors, we hope to provide visitors and readers the opportunity to gain an appreciation for the katsinam’s beautiful formal elements – and to experience and understand how the manifestation of these katsinam actively participate in Hopi life and culture” (44).

While as many as 300 katsina figures have been documented within Hopi culture, this exhibition focuses on only six types: Angwusnasomtaqa (Crow Mother), Soyokokatsina (Ogres), Koyemsi (Mudheads), Palhikmana (Dew Drinking Maiden), Angaktsina (Longhairs), and Nimankatsina (Home Dancers). The exhibition is divided by type, with carvings and other three-dimensional works displayed in cases interspersed with two-dimensional works on the walls. Many of the cases are positioned away from walls providing the visitor access to view the carvings in the round, which lends an appreciation of the painstaking carving implemented by Hopi artists to capture all details of the katsina.

Labels corresponding to each work of art provide important descriptions of formal elements as well as brief discussions of how each katsina functions within Hopi culture. Cultural context is augmented by lyrics of Hopi songs (written in the original Hopi and corresponding English translation) exhibited on the walls and Hopi music played in the gallery.

The number of Hopi artists represented in the exhibition are too numerous to list but include Neil David Sr., Delbridge Honanie, Milland Lomakema, Michael Kabotie (Lomawywesa), Ted Dashee, Malcolm K.M.F. Fred, Roland Bahnimptewa, Shirley Adams, Waldo Mootzka, Mary Shelton, and many other accomplished Hopi artists.

The works featured in this exhibition were produced in the 20th and 21st centuries and were made for the market. An in-depth discussion of Hopi katsinam and the marketplace can be found in a second essay by Mark T. Bahti (Saami-American)

in the exhibition catalogue. Bahti notes that, “The market for Hopi cultural materials is relatively young” (52). Prior to the late 19th century, Hopi men carved the katsina figures as gifts to be distributed during religious ceremonies. When Americans began to collect carved katsina figures at the end of the 19th century, Hopi carvers responded to this new market. For the Hopi, “the katsina are guiding examples of cultural practices, the physical representations of which have become an integral part of the Southwest’s artistic signature,” according the museum’s website.

Hopituy: Hopi Art from the Permanent Collections at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is an exhibition worth seeing. The show is well designed in its presentation of the katsinam as art objects and provides enough context to give the audience a basic understanding of the way in which these six selected types of katsinam function within Hopi culture. The museum should be commended for reaching out to the Hopi community in the development of this exhibition. With so many katsina types housed in the permanent collections of the museum, subsequent Hopi katsina exhibitions will most likely be developed in the future. —Denise Neil-Binion ahtone, heather, Mark T. Bahti, Neil David Sr., Delbridge Honanie, Milland Lomahema, Mary Jo Watson. Hopituy: Hopi Art from the Permanent Collections, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

Sacramento

Contemporary Native American Art California State Capitol Museum

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N THE CENTER of downtown Sacramento, located inside of the majestic State Capitol Building, Contemporary Native American Art displayed a culturally rich assortment of Native American art from the California region. The exhibit, curated by the Maidu Museum and Historic Site of Roseville, California, was a “wonderful collaboration with our partners in California State Parks,” says Mark Murphy, Interpretive Services Supervisor of the Maidu Museum. “We

Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Wintu), SelfPortrait, 2001, mixed media. Photo: Melissa Melero

hope to work together to create more art shows and programs in the future.” The show included 20 artists from surrounding California tribes like Dugan Aguilar (Maidu/Northern Paiute/Achomawi), Farrell Cunningham (Maidu), Frank Day (Maidu), Billy Hawk Enos (Washoe/ Nisenan), the late Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu), Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Wintu), Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu/Hammawi/Washoe), Sheila Peck (Mountain Maidu), Larry Rodriguez (Luiseño), and Alan Wallace (Nisenan Maidu/Washoe).

Contemporary Native American Art, which exhibited February through May, consisted of a mixture of contemporary sculpture and jewelry like a colorful ceramic sculpture titled Hand Game Player

by Larry Rodriguez, a large (24 by 24 inches) beaded twine bowl basket by Sheila Peck with red and black designs interwoven throughout, numerous pieces of experimental jewelry with dentalium shell and beads, and several large paintings and prints by well-known California Native artists.

A unique print, titled Good Luck and Souls, by the late Harry Fonseca (1946–2006), painter and printmaker, is an 11 by 15 inch, mixed-media print from his estate collection. Considered one of the more political works from his 1992 Discovery of FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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more information about the Maidu Museum and Historic Site in Roseville, California, check out the website www.roseville. ca.us/indianmuseum or contact the museum at maidumuseum@ roseville.ca.us. —Melissa Melero

Santa Fe

The Durango Collection: Native American Weaving in the Southwest, 1860-1880 Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

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HAVE SEEN MANY Navajo rug exhibits in my days as a curator, all of which have had some great rugs. However, the Durango Collection, and this exhibit in particular, has some of the best examples of historical Navajo rugs in the country. It’s not a show with a few great rugs; it’s a show where every rug is a prime example.

Navajo Serape, ca. 1870, weft-faced plain weave; handspun native wool with three shades of indigo-dyed blue, vegetal-dyed gold, and red bayeta. 62 × 47 in. The Durango Collection, Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado.

Gold and Souls in California series, the print is small and simple with a gold leaf, textured rectangle in the center with a black cross in the middle and a faded red handprint over the two images.

Fonseca stated that this series “is a direct reference to the physical, emotional and spiritual genocide of the native people of California. With the rise of the mission system, and much later the discovery of gold in California, the Native world was fractured, and with it, a way of life and order devastated.”

An older work, titled The Burning, an oil painting from 1973,

by Frank Day (1902–1976), was a very contemporary piece in its time. In the 1960s and 1970s, Day sought to bring back California Native dance and visual art by portraying images of Native people, plants, and animals of the area through his unique narrative style. Day has exhibited at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, the Oakland Museum of California, and throughout the US. Another notable work is by Allan Wallace, known for his use of Maidu language text on his bold colored canvases, with a painting titled homa.na.wine.my (He’s Making Something), 2012.

Other stand-outs are a painting by Judith Lowry titled Fire Starters, (2010) and a 2001 self-portrait by Frank LaPena. For 66 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

The Durango Collection is part of the permanent collection at the Center for Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Assembled with the assistance of Mark Winters, owner of the famous Toadlena Trading Post in the beautiful Chuska Mountains on the Navajo reservation, the collection has examples of representing 800 years of Native weaving in the American Southwest. This exhibit displays only 20 important years of that time span (1860 to 1880). This period in Navajo history is one of capture, imprisonment, and return home. It is a period of great change across the West, and the rugs in this exhibit show that very clearly. The abundant text-panels give great historical content for each section of the exhibit.

The first thing you notice as you enter the Wheelwright Museum and when you walk into the exhibit is the space. The main exhibit space where this show is installed encircles a large hogan (a customary home of the Navajo people). And like a residential hogan, you enter towards the left and travel through the exhibit clockwise. This may be a detail only Navajo people would notice, but it is very respectful and appropriate for an exhibition that displays such beauty, in a Navajo way.

Similarly, the rugs are displayed either flat so that every detail can be seen, or better, worn on mounts so that visitors can experience the design elements as intended by the weaver. The attention to detail is impressive. Combined with a beautiful display and well-written and historically accurate text panels, this show will not disappoint. Whether you want to quickly get a taste of great Navajo rugs or spend a casual hour reading and learning as well, visit this great collection of historical Navajo rugs from this very important time period of “classics,” at the Wheelwright Museum.

The Wheelwright is free to the public daily, although donations are requested. The exhibit The Durango Collection: Native American Weaving in the Southwest, 1860-1880 will show through April 13, 2014. —John Torres-Nez

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Santa Fe

Stands with a Fist Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

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HE MUSEUM of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) opts for minimal wall-text these days, so with a quote from Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis) and a couple sentences on each artist, the viewers are on their way.

This makes for a more intuitive, unfiltered interaction with the artwork; however, one is left with questions, such as why the show was named for the European-American female lead in Dances With Wolves. An inside joke perhaps.

The materials are so visceral in this show that the intuitive approach might work.

Seriality, humor—at times, quite dark— and using materials against themselves seem to be uniting forces between the works.

One is first greeted by the postcard image, lakon:kwe, a series of ten mixed media pieces by Lindsay Delaronde (Mohawk) from Quebec, now living in British Columbia. “Lakon:kwe” means “woman” in Mohawk. These large-scale serigraphs on paper, two to the left, eight to the right, pair images of Princess Dianna with a woman who has otter fur hair wraps, a beaded rosette necklace, a geometric beaded belt, and sleeves and a mandarin collar peaking out from underneath her buckskin dress. Described as a “princess,” the Indigenous woman’s arms are akimbo, a stance of self-confidence, since her princess title came neither from birth or marriage but was earned through knowledge and sharing of culture. Dianna too wears clothing emphasizing her cultural heritage, a Tam O’Shanter and a plaid wool dress—her heritage was Scottish as well as English. However, neither woman is wearing regalia such as tiaras and sashes.

This omission serves to emphasize their shared humanity, rather than their positions in society.

With hyper-saturated colors on black halftoned figures, lakon:kwe echoes 1970s punk art, particularly Jamie Reid’s album-cover art for the Sex Pistols. However, instead of being cheap photocopies, these pieces are

handmade, silk-screened prints on wooden panels, and the blaring yellow and gold backgrounds have very visible brushstrokes emphasizing the painter’s hand at work.

Embedded in the paint are hairs or fabric threads further complicating the surface and emphasizing the organic.

Melanie Yazzie’s smallest work in the show, Growing Stronger, also sits at the show’s entrance. The 16-inch-tall bronze figure is a lapis blue woman with a full skirt embellished with gold. The serpentine images on her bare shoulders suggest an homage to Minoan snake-goddess figurines. Her hair, arranged in a tsii’yeel, or wrapped bun, is a perch for a fish and a beaver, both metaphors of female genitalia.

Her ribcage is cut out, defined by negative space, and her back has a cutout but pres-

Tania Lukin-Linklater (Alutiiq), In Memoriam, 2013, still from video art projection. Photo: A. Meredith

ent backbone with a heart-shaped pelvis.

Lotus and other floral designs decorate her skirt, which has a hinged door, not unlike that of a cast-iron stove, suggesting a “bun in the oven.” This figure, an amalgamation of sacred and profane metaphors for women and their sexuality, looks upward and holds her stumpy arms outstretched in an optimistic pose.

Melanie Yazzie (Navajo), who taught at IAIA back in the 1990s, is a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder. Known primarily as a printmaker, Yazzie has a monotype and painting style that is spontaneous and process-driven. To see her personal vocabulary encased in bronze and fabricated steel completely defies expectations. Pollen Keeper II is a human-sized, solid blue, fabricated steel sculpture. The

flowing organic shapes, reminiscent of her cutout Mylar templates for printing, cast extraordinary shadows on the walls. The structure is kept upright by two smaller tabs perpendicular to the main form— essentially paper doll technology applied to steel. Her other larger sculpture is red steel and imparts a queenly authority with a full skirt and circular base, and the same inset backbone.

The human form is implied via cloth through the sculptures and installation by Merritt Johnson, currently living in New York. She Drinks Mens Teeth and Blind Hide, both sculptures in the round, bear a disturbing resemblance to a huddled female draped in scarves and shrouds— garish widows in mourning? What would be the torso in She Drinks Mens Teeth is a coiled basket that previously appeared in Johnson’s performances, Museum Quality.

The figure supports a glass of resin, a fishing lure, and “man teeth.” Resin is the media Johnson uses in an counterintuitive way—representing liquids, poured into a puddle of concrete in Drape and Pile, resembling purple-blue deoxygenated placental blood in Sticky Blood or a beverage in She Drinks Mens Teeth.

Johnson’s wall pieces of pinned or taped fabrics also have a human-like presence.

They convey a surprising degree of emotion, from the forlorn Drape and Pile to the stretched out Pomp and Circumstance, which echoes the hooded prisoner of Abu Ghraib. Projecting from the wall is obelisk, symbol of masculine power, of a diminutive scale dwarfed by the Korean-made green velvet.

Shhhhhh features a much-weathered rabbit-fur sculpture, which strides across a lumpy fringed-velvet blanket on red plastic party cups. The creature wears a stethoscope and rubber tubing, implying that some medical examination is taking place of whatever is huddled under the velvet with a deflated-cloth snake tail extending out. The implied narrative is much more enticing than it is repelling.

Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) uses fabric to create a completely different mood— frantic and turbulent. Ball earned her MFA from Massey University in New Zealand and now lives in Portland, Oregon. Her installation includes three six-foot by FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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eight-foot “star-quilts” mounted on wooden poles, each anchored by a single stone, and focuses on Modoc history from the late 19th century to the present, especially the Modoc Ghost Dance.

Drawings are scrawled across the surface of the Coley the Giant in marker. The four-directions cross is repeated in a vertical line, where it morphs into a Christian cross. In the upper right is a worm’s eye view of a horse, horseshoes, and boots, as if the viewer is being trampled. Boney Fingers borrows its title from Hoyt Axton.

The underside of the star quilt displayed, revealing the labor-intensive stitches holding it all together. The embroidered contour of a suspended woman hangs and turns her skull-head upward, facing the viewer, as if pleading for help.

The artist describes the blank figure as a symbol of what has been lost.

Venice

Adam’s Honoring Unidentified series feature historical photographs of Native Americans printed on Japanese rice paper, meticulously mounted on Baltic birch panels, and coated with encaustic. The translucent wax layer renders the images blurry and indistinct and speaks to the cultural and historical loss that renders these people unknown to us today.

University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, Palazzo Cosulich

Honoring Modern Unidentified focuses on basketball’s role in Native American society, a subject expounded upon by authors Sherman Alexie and Natalie Diaz.

Adams cast basketballs in ceramic, a fragile medium for such an athletic symbol, and then coated them in wax.

The stitches are reminiscent of sutures, and spell “Incident Fort Klamath.” Fort Klamath was built in 1863; four Modoc men, including Kintpuash or “Captain Jack” who led Modoc resistance in 1872 and 1873, were executed and buried at the fort in 1873. Drawings of top-hatted, breasted figures, described as “bone dancers” in the artist’s notes, occupy the bottom, right corner, with horses’ heads on their clothing. Instead of comfort and domesticity, these quilts speak of frenzy and desperation—trying to hold it all together amidst chaos and unspeakable violence.

Mounted on wooden podiums, these basketball effigies are painted in a range of colors and etched with designs that trace the oval grains on their surface.

The designs range from lacy pentagrams, four-direction symbols, eagles, squirrels, to tulips, echoing Melanie Yazzie’s iconography.

Ball’s three ragdolls, Wailers—simultaneously crucified or swaddled in cradleboards—stand in the adjacent room.

Several of the artists’ series are broken up this way, which weakens the impact of the individual installations but strengthens dialogues among works of the different artists, many of which share themes and imagery.

Dual projections flicker on and off, featuring two women, moving as if newborns discovering their bodies, on an interior wooden floor. The scenes jump to the women flailing, writhing, and collapsing on a beach, where the ocean and sky obscure the horizon. The dance and score are at times melancholy and menacing, as the women appear to reenact birthing and dying.

Gina Adams has three series in the show.

The artist grew up in Maine and is an MFA candidate at the University of Kansas.

Her Honoring Loss Paintings are a grid of watercolor and graphite unframed works on paper, each featuring a figure on a horizon line with three clouds in the sky and elaborate dotted and dashed patterns filling the ground, in dazzling variety. Scanning from one image to the next feels like a stop-motion animation—colors fading in and out, the dots moving and pulsating.

Alutiiq dancer, choreographer, and performance artist Tania Lukin-Linklater’s poetry and video art In Memoriam were in a separate room. The poem in English and Alutiiq spills over three walls.

Stands With a Fist is emotional, tactile, and multifaceted. The artists echo and complement each other, and their works resonate to create a forceful presence, both plaintive and powerful.

—America Meredith Note: Merritt Johnson and Gina Adams both self-identified as being of Native American descent at the time of this exhibition but have since been revealed to have no proof of Indigenous ancestry.

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Air, Land, Seed

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RT PROVIDES a key to unlocking societal boundaries, and the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest contemporary art festival, remains a unique window for artists to engage thousands of viewers from around the world. This year’s curated theme The Encyclopedic Palace presented the works of artists responding to a range of critical global concerns: economic hardship, mass destruction, and conceptions of identity. Air, Land, Seed, an offsite exhibition at Ca’ Foscari Gallery, Venice, from May 30 to June 2, 2013, took a specifically Indigenous approach to these questions, one that has been largely excluded from mainstream discussions of contemporary art.

The systemic exclusion of Indigenous artists within the walls of art institutions is changing due to the efforts of vigilantes such as Nancy Mithlo and her team of artists and curators. Over the past decade, Mithlo, curator and professor of Art History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with a group of artists and curators, showcased the work of American Indian artists at the Venice Biennale.

Aiming to provide an expanded discussion on Indigenous identity and art within the global atmosphere of the Biennale, Mithlo has facilitated interventionist models such as IA3 (Indigenous Arts Action Alliance) collective, exhibiting the work of renowned artists including Harry Fonseca, Shelly Niro, and Lori Blondeau.

Past exhibitions of Indigenous art such as Pellerossasogna (2003) present the voices of Indigenous artists today: art that is confrontational and evocative. This year’s project was a continuation of that vision to present the convergence of struggles and inspiration that Indigenous people face today: economic and social hardships, appropriation, and most importantly, tales of resistance and survival.

The multisensory aspect of the exhibition including a poetry reading by Sherwin Bitsui, art by a collective group including Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye, John

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CosmoSquaw covergirl and David Garneau’s Cowboys and Indians (and Métis?). The large-scale print of death on a skeleton horse, like one of the four horseman of the apocalypse carrying a large needle similar to ones used to inject insulin for diabetes mellitus, is by Marwin Begaye. His print draws attention to the perilous state of health that many Indigenous people are living in.

The barbershop performance by Faisal Abdu Allah revolved around Allah, a barber and artist by profession, giving the audience haircuts and sharing tales of hair.

The organic nature of the haircuts and the stories shared allowed passerby to interact and tell stories of their own.

Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye (Diné), John Hitchcock (Comanche), Equivalences, 2013, screen print and drawing, 44 × 30 in. Photo: Gloria Bell (Métis).

Hitchcock, Ryan O’Malley, Henry Payer, Duane Slick, C. Maxx Stevens, Dyani White Hawk, and a barbershop performance by Faisal Abdu Allah provided opportunities for viewers to join the conversation surrounding Indigenous arts.

The opening of the exhibition was attended by many supporters of the collaboration between University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Ca’ Foscari University Gallery. Bitsui shared his poetry with a full house of artists, local students, curators, and supporters of this initiative to bring Indigenous perspectives onto the radar of the thousands of international visitors who attend the Biennale.

Within the gallery, Emily Arthur’s strangled bird prints, Duane Slick’s human-like buffalo faces, and John Hitchcock’s skulls, reminiscent of Epicentro work from 2011, draw attention to the violence and destructive measures of colonial land takeover, measures that Indigenous people continue to struggle against today. Tourists wearing Plains Indian headdresses and other Native American cliché images are pastiched into prints by Henry Payer, bringing to mind earlier artworks critiquing appropriation and stereotypes surrounding Indigenous identity such as Lori Blondeau’s

While the collaborative curatorial approach and the emphasis on the multisensory dimensions of Indigenous art was inclusive and echoed the values underlying the show, it resulted in a somewhat diffuse visual environment. While individual artworks held their own, the combined vision was lackluster, contributing to a sense of the show as being hastily organized and exhibited.

It seems that the difficulty of arranging funding and sponsorship for collaborative projects at the Venice Biennale along with the limited engagement of the exhibition contributed to the realities and difficulties of presenting Indigenous artwork at an international venue. The over-democratization of the curatorial process took away from the clarity of the exhibition’s message.

The beauty of Air, Land, Seed lies in its presentation of the solidarity of American Indian artists working in a variety of artistic media challenging an international audience. Future exhibitions on Indigenous arts at the Venice Biennale and within North America can build on this strength.

Report from

Indigenous Brilliance Seborga, Italy Indigenous Brilliance is a series of art shows curated by Cornelia “Elija” Vandenberg (Dutch) and Lyle Toledo Yazzie (Diné). In 2012, we launched a group show and lecture series at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute Gallery in London, United Kingdom.

In June 2013 this exhibition was held in Seborga, Italy, and the next showcase will be in Spain.

The show was held in a beautiful old palace with great atmosphere and was a triumph in public relations with many mentions in the press. This show continues our mission in bringing an awareness to the diverseness in creativity of original contemporary American Indian art. Not only did we have Native comedy and Native poetry reading, but we also had music and a talk on awareness of Indigenous rights and environmental issues. We had enthusiastic visits and support by the Italian public, the Village of Seborga citizens, and royalty, with even some celebrities who stopped by and visited the show.

The show featured a total of 29 artists from 16 nations. Sixteen were returning artists from the Highgate show [in the United Kingdom] and nine new artists who joined for the Seborga show. Along with the 25 artists four guest speakers/ artists spoke or performed—three were Indigenous and one, English. We had over 50 original works—prints, paintings, sculptures, and other media.

—Lyle Toledo Yazzie indigenousbrilliance@yahoo.com

The conversations that took place surrounding Indigenous worldviews and art at the opening and throughout the exhibition in Venice are building blocks from which curators and artists can continue to cross new bridges and sprout new ideas in the minds of citizens of the world.

—Gloria Bell FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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Book Reviews Catalogue

Beyond Geronimo: The Apache Experience

By Janet Cantley

Heard Museum, 2012

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HE NAME, face, and myth of Geronimo are such fundamental pieces of American pop culture that the mere mention of his name calls to mind a savage image. From February 2012 through January 2013, the Heard Museum presented an exhibition, Beyond Geronimo: The Apache Experience, which sought to dispel some of the myths whilst adding depth to the complex, but largely unknown, 19th and 20th century Chiricahua and Western Apache histories.

The exhibition included rare historical artifacts and the works by contemporary Apache artists who look to their tribal histories and cultural traditions to inform their art. The exhibition had the prestigious designation of Arizona Centennial Legacy Project, celebrating Arizona’s 100th anniversary of statehood in 2012.

The Heard Museum and the exhibit’s curator Janet Cantley published an accompanying exhibition catalogue of the same title.

The exhibition catalogue, like the exhibit, sets out to “shine a light on other Apache

leaders…to reveal their art, personal items and images, and to dispel some of the myths surrounding the larger-than-life figure of Geronimo.” In this respect, the book is less focused on artifact and art than it is concerned with educating the reader about Apache history, leaders, and the hardships that the people endured as a result of the Apache Wars. It is organized into five untitled sections: 1) the introduction and an Apache historical overview; 2) the Western Apache; 3) the Chiricahua Apache; 4) Geronimo; and 5) Contemporary Expressions. The book provides an appropriately concise and generally successful history of the Apache during their most pivotal era, the Apache Wars.

The images chosen for the book consist of historical photographs, pictures from the Beyond Geronimo exhibition space, closeups of artifacts, and plates of the art. The photographs of the exhibit space seemed an intriguing window into the exhibit, giving one a sense of being there. However, it might have been more judicious to use the space to include more close-up images of artifacts from the exhibition.

This issue was somewhat consistent throughout the book. In an exhibition that borrowed objects and images from 12 private owners, 12 institutions, and seven archives, one would expect to get a better sense of the objects on display, but that is not the case. A great deal of space was underutilized, such as on the two-page “Section” transitional pages that had the same basket pattern on all ten pages. That said, the close-ups of the artifacts are clear and detailed enough to see the intricate designs on the awls, dolls, and quivers.

The images of the cultural art produced

by Nalta and Naiche were stunning and important inclusions. The historical photographs of the People and the leaders contributed to the historical discussions, personalizing their stories. The plates of the artwork are beautiful with vivid colors. All of the images tell a story of the past, of traditional values, and of survival.

Section one provides enough historical depth to offer context to the book without getting too involved in extraneous events and details. The inclusion of the map of

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Apache traditional and contemporary homelands is an ideal visual tool for understanding all of the movement that occurred as a result of the Apache Wars.

The map, however, would have been more successful with the inclusion of dates for context and clarity. Also, the segment on “Apache Women” provided a moment of confusion. While the information is pertinent to other discussions within the book, it was abrupt and out of place in this section.

Sections two and three examine the 19th and 20th century histories of the Western Apache and Chiricahua Apache, respectively. In section two, we learn about the Western Apache before the Apache Wars and how their experience was different from the Chiricahua in that many of their warriors became the scouts who tracked the resisting Chiricahua. And while the Western Apache were not forced across the country to a Florida prison, they saw their homelands diminish before their eyes and were forced to move as white settlers continually encroached upon their lands. This section introduces four Western Apache leaders, Miguek, Pedro, Alchesay, and Nalta, men who knew and negotiated with the US leaders in Washington, DC, but whose names remain largely unfamiliar.

In section three, we meet the Chiricahua tribe in 1886, at the moment they become US prisoners of war who are removed to Florida. During their imprisonment, their children were sent to residential boarding schools, such as Carlisle. In 1894, the tribe was relocated to a reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The book then examines the lives of five Chiricahua leaders whose names and feats may be familiar to the reader. The success of these short biographical works lies in their demonstration of the ways in which all of these Apache leaders were acting as community leaders and tribal members, rather than acting as individuals.

Section four deals exclusively and very fleetingly with the stereotypes, myths, and pop culture image of Geronimo. One part of the section discusses the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, code named “Geronimo,” as a moment in which the

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use of this image stirred emotions and controversy. At that point, the discussion might have evolved into a fruitful analysis of the debate, but instead, the discussion abruptly ends. It was a missed opportunity indeed. The next part, discussing Geronimo’s image in film, in which several films are briefly examined for their handling of and portrayal of Geronimo, was successful.

The analysis was succinct with some very insightful points being made.

The fifth and final section presents the ten pieces of art by contemporary Apache artists, including the late Allan Houser, who were selected for their ability to go “beyond Geronimo.” These pieces include: mixed media, paintings, sculpture, and cultural art. Each piece is firmly rooted in Apache subject matter, demonstrating the Peoples’ ties to their land and traditional practices. The art tells stories of who the Apache were in the past and how they remain unchanged in the most important ways today: traditionally and culturally. One of the most stunning and thought-provoking pieces of the ten works is entitled, The Day Mother Shook (2012),

by Mescalero Apache artist Oliver Enjady.

The artist references the hide painting by of Western Apache leader Naiche. The piece also addresses historical and modern issues, such as the mistreatment of the Mescalero Apache at the hands of the US government who moved them from place to place, finally settling them on reservation land. The US subsequently polluted that land when, on July 16, 1945, it tested the first atomic bomb only a stone’s throw away from where the Apache resided, leaving a legacy of poisoned land and generations of cancer. As a result, the artist has lost many family members to cancer, including his mother. It makes one wonder if knowing one’s tribal history and traditions is enough to survive in the face of such insurmountable atrocities, yet artists like Enjady are not willing to surrender.

Overall, Beyond Geronimo: The Apache Experience exhibition catalog leaves one understanding the complexity of Apache history and that there were many, important, historical leaders—beyond Geronimo.

And, that for Apache people, the ability to understand who you are as a tribal member

should not come from Western history, pop cultural messages, and stereotypes.

Learning about who you are as an Apache person, as artist Dustinn Craig (White Mountain Apache-Navajo) says, should come from “their own community and people and [they should] learn to look within and beyond the history that is fed to them by dominant culture.” This understanding is the thread that weaves this book together.

—Yvonne N. Tiger

Catalogue

Blizzard: Emerging Northern Artists

By Candice Hopkins and Tania Willard grunt gallery, 2013

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LIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists, curated by Tania Willard, featured the work of Jamasie Pitseolak (Inuit), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit), Tanya Lukin-Linklater (Alutiiq), Geronimo Inutiq (Inuit), and Derek Aqqiaruq (Inuit). The show opened in July 2012 in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the grunt gallery, an artist-run space providing a venue for outsider art, emerging artists, experimental work, and other work, which may go unheralded in other spaces. During its existence, grunt gallery has committed to working with Indigenous artists; the Blizzard show is one example of this ongoing support.

On the cover, the catalogue for the show greets the reader with a charming soapstone and ivory tricycle, carved by Jamasie Pitseolak. Setting the tone for the work, the catalogue opens with a quote

by Heather Igloliorte: “There has been a noticeable shift over the last two decades to a focus on daring, new intercultural or transcultural subject matter... and what is hopefully a growing body of work that directly calls into question the legacy of trauma and colonization of the Arctic.”

For those (such as myself ) unfamiliar with the dynamics, history, and cultures of the far North, the foreword by Candice Hopkins and the curatorial essay by Tania Willard provide needed context for the show, speaking on outsider expectations, stereotypes, and paternalism, and the cultural overlaps, tensions, similarities, and differences of North and South. Tania goes into the positive and negative influences of the art market on Inuit art as well as the limitations of how Indigenous art is categorized, framed, and shown. By contrast, the show doesn’t try to fit the artists into boxes but allows for a complexity of experiences and thus presentations, whether including tangible objects, sound, or videos. The artists give their own takes on what it means to be from the North. While the show takes on a cerebral approach in intent, the works do stand on their own for immediate sensory appeal.

Jamasie’s appealing carved work includes a variety of objects, such as the aforementioned tricycle, a sewing machine, a ping pong table, a handgun, a woman’s shoe, and rather strikingly, a representation of a guitar and its stand entitled Esquimeaux Guitar, made from stone, caribou antler, sealskin, and ivory. Carving things such as a tricycle seems like it shouldn’t be a big deal, but that such objects are enough to warrant inclusion in a show about identity as well as extensive commentary in the essays seems indicative of severe limitations on how the art and people of the Northern regions are perceived and understood. The plates for Jamasie’s work were divided between and after the essays, likely for the sake of pacing, although they would have functioned fine together. Only three of the ten works were marked with dimensions, which made it difficult to fully appreciate the scale and craft of the small pieces.

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REVIEWS

website, most seemed to be around or under six inches in the longest dimension.)

As noted by Candice Hopkins and Tania Willard, Tanya Lukin-Linklater’s curious installation eskimo kissing booth plays with concepts of the misunderstood, affectionate gesture shared between close friends and family in her culture, as well as a critique the problematic historical displays of Northern peoples at world fairs. A neon sign with “eskimo kissing booth” in cursive hangs above a wall of tiles, evocative of an iglu, with four stacks of cards placed in front. Intended as takeaways, each card features a single red mark of the artist’s lipstick-covered nose.

Nicholas Galanin’s conceptual Polar Bear Welcome Mat is polar bear fur with the word “Welcome” spelled out with otter pelts. Candice responds to the mat, finding it “both inviting and repellent: the very moment I felt the desire to feel the brush of fur against my skin, to wrap myself in the warmth of the hide, the very idea of using the precious hide as a surface to wipe my dirty feet seemed sacrilegious.” She goes on to note that “Galanin’s welcome mat embodied the contradictions of the north. The polar bear is both a vital part of local economies through sustainable hunting practices and customs, and now, a poster child for climate change.” Certainly, the piece raises a lot of questions while having definite tactile appeal, even from the photograph.

Limitations of print come into play in regards to the work of DJ/electronic music producer Geronimo Inutiq (aka madeskimo). The plates do their best to give a sense of his display. Headphones connected to a music player are hung against a wall, alongside what are presumably printouts of his digital art, and another photograph captures a moment of two projected videos. (After reading the catalogue, I decided to look him up online.

If you have an appreciation for electronic music at all, be sure to check him out!

He’s good.) It’s also hard to get a sense for Derek Aqqiaruq’s 36-minute documentary on Northern Haze, an Inuit metal/rock band with Inuktitut lyrics. Stills from the film don’t seem to be included, but several pictures from the band are provided (and album cover inserts). The pictures

provided and the information in the essays are enough to elicit a desire to learn more about the band.

The catalogue ends with artist biographies and acknowledgments, though curiously, Derek Aqqiaruq doesn’t have a biography listed. It would have been nice to see an overall picture of the gallery included in the catalogue, to get a better sense of how the works relate to each other in the show. Although the catalogue may have a few quirks, the overall effect of it (and the show) serves to broaden understanding of Northern Indigenous people and art and to instill a curiosity to learn more.

—Neebinnaukzhik Southall

Criticism

Women and Ledger Art: Four Contemporary Native American Artists

By Richard Pearce

University of Arizona Press, 2013

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ESPITE THE EXPLOSION of popularity of ledger art in recent years, this is the first book exploring women ledger artists.

Author Richard Pearce is Professor Emeritus of English at Wheaton College with a background in cross-cultural feminism.

He examines four women artists—two from the Northern Plains: Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota) and Colleen Cutschall

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(Oglala Lakota) and two from the Southern Plains: Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa) and Dolores Purdy Corcoran (Caddo-Winnebago).

Pearce invested time and thought into presenting the artists and their work. What is odd is only two of Harjo’s artworks featured in the book are ledger art and none of Cutschall’s is. Harjo has certainly created innumerable ledger drawings and paintings throughout her career. Instead of ledger art, the focus of Pearce’s inquiry appears to be Plains narrative representational artwork. This broader focus contextualizes ledger art.

Whether Plains women should create narrative presentational artwork, traditionally a male art form, is still a matter of debate in certain circles. Colleen Cutschall observes that men appropriate geometric designs, such as those found on hide robes and parfleches that are traditionally women’s arts without public criticism. Men also bead and quill which are women’s art practices.

Both men and women painted on hides; however, typically each gender had its own styles. Americans slaughtering buffalo and forcing tribes onto reservations in the late 19th century resulted in less access to animal hides. At the same time, paper, muslin, pencils, pens, and other convenient art materials became available, including account ledger books with their characteristic grids that give the genre its name.

Pearce points out that during this time women developed pictorial beadwork and quillwork to tell their stories. These art pieces were removed from the communities that created them by collectors and museums, only to be rediscovered by the artists decades later. In her introduction, Barbara Hail mentions Ananti (Kiowa), the daughter or grandfather of Tohausen, who was a calendar keeper, creating figurative artwork on muslin in the 19th century.

Ananti was followed by Lois Smoky, the only female member of the Kiowa Six, who studied painting at the University of Oklahoma in 1927. Pearce calls her a ledger artist, but Native American art historians describe her artwork as Flatstyle or Kiowa, Oklahoma, or Southern Plains style painting.

Right: Jacob Meders (Mechoopda Maidu), One Drop, 2013, woodblock print

Ledger art faded away in the early 20th century to be revived in the 1970s by Virginia Stroud (United Keetoowah Band) and Sharron Ahtone Harjo. Harjo learned about ledger art from her grandfather Samuel Ahtone, who was himself a ledger artist. At Bacone College Harjo studied art under Dick West (Cheyenne), an alumnus of Haskell, Bacone, and the University of Oklahoma. Harjo championed a second wave of ledger art, using this narrative medium to relay family’s history and the history of the Kiowa tribe as a whole.

Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota) adopted ledger art as a style in the early 1990s “to tell stories [and] make commentaries.” As an artist-scholar, Haukaas fills her ledger drawings with historical cultural details, particularly expressed in women’s clothing and dance regalia. She expresses complex gender relationships ranging from a “manly heart woman” to a young winkte dancing with the women for the first time to girl’s puberty ceremonies—expressing the strength of Lakota women’s lives.

As an artist educating the public, Dolores Purdy Corcoran (Caddo/Winnebago) has to start by convincing people that the Caddos actually are a tribe. Inspired by the lone Caddo imprisoned at Fort Marion in 1875 to 1878, Corcoran began drawing ledger art in 2005. She often portrays the Caddo turkey dances and women wearing dush-tohs, hourglass-shaped hairpieces adorned with flowing ribbons, in bright colors on historical documents. Humor is a driving force in her drawings such as Caddo-lacs.

Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota), an art professor at Brandon University, developed a unique style of building up representational images through tiny paint strokes mimicking quillwork.

She designed a monumental sculpture, Spirit Warriors that was chosen as the Aboriginal Memorial at the Little Big Horn Battlefield. This bronze sculpture is an outline of three Lakota warriors riding into battle on horseback, with a Lakota woman handing one a shield with a medicine wheel. The horizon of sky and earth can clearly be seen through the negative space.

Creating a sculpture that honors all tribes who fought at Little Big Horn, the site of mass graves, is an awesome responsibility.

Despite initial resistance from her own tribe, Cutschall says the sculpture has gained acceptance, and people leave tobacco ties on the sculpture today.

Pearce spent six years in conversation with these four artists and shared his drafts with the artists for their input. By highlighting the first and second waves of ledger art, this book helps readers contextualize the third wave of ledger art that we are currently experiencing. Examining these contemporary Plains women’s artists illuminates the complexities of shifting gender roles in the Native art world and Plains communities.

—America Meredith

With one leg of seven, the other three, I learn to swerve in the creaking autumn bamboo like the sprinting fox sparrow.

—Duane Niatum (S’Klallam) The Philosopher Cat Shadow stared at the infinite in the window as if about to leap through to join the purple finch in the crabapple tree.

He sat grounded as a reflection in a mirror; the gods were the nerves of that concentration.

His fur grew thicker than approaching darkness.

No one lived the parable of dreaming more deeply than Shadow building his ladder to the iris in the sky.

He was the one at the threshold of moonlight asking first the question I had brooded over for years: If we knew where we were headed on this pathway of grief, would we have ever left childhood?

He turned around to look in my eyes, his glowed with the story of yellow agates.

—Duane Niatum (S’Klallam) FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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so you can gain their understanding Everything You Wanted To work of whose work is most exceptional within this niche. Asking whose work is is one question. Asking why is the Know about Pricing and superior necessary follow-up question.

Appraising Artwork, But Acquiring books addressing this type of art is additionally helpful. Magazines such Indian Art, Native Peoples, and Were Afraid To Ask asnowAmerican First American Art may cover the type

W

of American Indian art you are compelled to collect.

HETHER YOU are an artist, a collector, a scholar, or an enthusiast, it’s good to have a working knowledge of different facets of the art world. For all the endless discussion of art sales, the underlining business of pricing and evaluating art remains mysterious.

Why are some works more valuable than others? To shed some light on this subject, Corinne Cain kindly agreed to answer questions solicited from friends and family and online at our Facebook page.

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Cain is a senior appraiser in the American Society of Appraisers. She specializes in American Indian art but is also interested in other global arts. She founded an online blog, The Savvy Collector, in 1999 to educate the public about issues around purchasing art, including American Indian art. —AM Is collecting Native American art different from collecting other art?

Authenticity is an issue in collecting any type of art, but Native American art has some extra wrinkles—was the art made by an artist who is claiming their actual culture? This question references the artist who is a wannabe Native American, when no part of their heritage reflects Native American roots.

Collectors must be sensitive to improperly dated older artworks: textiles, beadwork, pottery, baskets, jewelry. The collector must rely on knowledgeable sellers until they are adept in recognizing misrepresentation independently.

Condition issues require familiarity with the media. When a collector greeted me with his most coveted 20th century pottery jar, I asked if I could use UV light to examine it more closely. Fortunately, he was able to return it to the gallery before they closed. It had been repaired

Corinne Cain, art appraiser from Phoenix, Arizona, answers our questions

more than once, hence the advantageous (low price).

If you are collecting beadwork, buy the bead books, read them, and take handson seminars so you can recognize sinew versus silk thread, so you can size and date the beads, so you can recognize stitch styles, so you know commercially tanned hides versus braintanned examples.

For beginning collectors, should they choose one media, one artist, or just collect what they like? What are some strategies for beginning a Native American art collection?

Start by attending a major show, like Indian Market in Santa Fe or Heard Museum’s market in Phoenix. On day number one, troll booths all day, purchasing not one thing. That night if certain items caught your eye, analyze common denominators in media, in subject matter, in culture.

Next day before purchasing an item, speak with the artist to understand what their concept was in making it. Ask that same artist to recommend two other artists working in a similar vein.

Next locate a curator who is known to have a deep understanding of this type of

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Investigate classes offered on the university level, junior college level, adjunct to a museum or part and parcel to a focused trip to visit makers consistent with what you are drawn to. Debbie Drye, for instance, shepherds visitors to Hopi and beyond, tailoring the travel to the specific intentions of the travelercollector. Museums, such as the Heard Museum in Phoenix, sponsor travel meant to appeal to current or future collectors.

Join a collector group in line with your interest. Call collectors whose collections are known to be astute and ask to be able to visit. Sincere appreciation is typically welcome to those who committed to the same type of items years earlier.

Attend artist or critic talks sponsored by universities or museums or art fairs.

How should beginning artists without a sales history price their works?

Books on the business of art usually advise pricing bases on costs of materials; however, this makes no sense, especially when the artists are gathering their own materials (such as basket weavers).

Solicit feedback from dealers selling artworks or known collectors of that type of artwork. If talking with someone who collects, be sure to tell him or her you will get back to him or her, once you have developed a consensus for pricing your work. They may choose a number to flatter their position without realizing this is influencing their input.

You will have to consider cost of materials when working with casting costs (sculpture) or when working in silver and gold, because you can’t afford to go background. A painter may defer their preference for alizarin crimson paint,

until their price structure is substantial enough to justify paint that costs over $28 a tube. These cost factors do not strictly dictate pricing, but they do represent a consideration.

What are some considerations when pricing fine art photography? How limited should editions be?

Rarity is equated with a higher price or value. Selling more than 20 impressions of any original photograph is indeed rare.

Should a particular image become iconic for the photographer, a second edition could be generated in a different size, if the image remains successful. R.C. Gorman undermined his own market by his prolific output.

Artists are advised to keep their retail prices the same no matter what— whether they are selling their works or a gallery is. Is there anytime this rule doesn’t hold true? What are the consequences of going up and down with prices?

By lowering prices you are potentially offending those who paid more, as they would like to think they didn’t pay excessively and that your work is growing in value (even if they have no immediate intention in selling). Artwork increasing in value makes a collector feel savvy and can prompt them to encourage their friends to purchase other examples of your work.

Please write down the prices of all your work at an art fair. Collectors have confided in me several times they are fearful that “their price” is higher if the artist believes he or she can afford a higher price. At an art fair, the price marked on work [or a price list] must be visible. If you choose to accept less, you can speak that reality, and then they will know how much better they have done.

assemble support for a type of value known as fair market value. Fair market value is required for these scenarios: donation, divorce, estate valuation. In most cases, fair market value is less than the value utilized for insurance coverage.

If you’re running out of space or your tastes have changed, how would you go about selling pieces from your collection?

Depends on the degree of popularity of what no longer interests you. There are art brokers such as Windsor Betts Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Larsen Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona; SavvyCollector.com is my company, based in Phoenix, Arizona. Often galleries representing those artists are not inclined to resell artworks, as their artists receive no proceeds.

It may be appropriate to use an international auction entity like Sotheby’s or Christie’s or Bonham’s or lower tier auction houses like Skinner’s, Swann, Heritage Auctions, Cowan’s, R.G. Munn, Allard Auctions or a regional auction located within a couple hundred miles of you. You may choose to list items yourself on eBay or Craigslist.

As an appraiser, have you ever encountered an art forgery?

Yes: a fake Zuni ceremonial bowl, fake prehistoric pottery, fake Rosa Bonheur painting, fake Miro prints, fake Picasso painting, fake Rembrandt etchings, fake Vasarely print, fake Salvador Dali prints— are what I can immediately remember.

How do you appraise extremely rare art forms—for instance, babiche bags or Apache fiddles?

Yes to Apache fiddles only because I crossconsulted with experts as well as highly practiced dealers. It would be my job to locate someone who is fluent in babiche bags.

When would you get your collection appraised? How do you find an appraiser who’s qualified to appraise Native American art?

For insurance coverage a written appraisal is required to obtain a rider to cover your collection. Currently, three different appraisal organizations grant designations in appraising American Indian art: the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), the International Society of Appraisers (ISA), and the Appraisers Association of America (AAA). ASA currently has six different individuals who are designated in appraising American Indian art. ISA has one individual with his CAPP credential in appraising American Indian art and several with a lesser type of accreditation.

Currently, no one is listed on the AAA website with the specialty of American Indian art.

Auction houses employ individuals who tend to know American Indian art: Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonham’s, Skinner’s, Heritage Auction, Cowan’s, R.G. Munn.

You need to call to find out if they will perform more than an auction estimate.

Dealers specializing in the sale of American Indian art can perform appraisals, unless the intended use is charitable donation and they sold the item to the donor. Otherwise, they are not specifically barred, but are obliged to state in the document their involvement with the item prior to performing the appraisal.

blog.savvycollector.com

What is the secondary market? How does it influence the appraised value of an artist’s work?

The secondary market refers to work sold a second time after initially being sold by the artist or by the artist’s representative (gallery). Secondary market sales are referenced when appraisers need to

Nez Perce dentalium shell choker, ca. 1875–1900, dentalium, blue glass beads, brass beads, sinew, hide spacers, deerhide thong, 13 in. Rydrick Collection, Nez Perce National Historical Park.

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IN MEMORIAM

Maria Tallchief January 24, 1925–April 11, 2013

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MERICA’S FIRST prima ballerina Maria Tallchief passed away on April 11, 2013, at age 88. Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on January 24, 1925, to Alexander Joseph Tall Chief and Ruth Porter. Although the family left Oklahoma and the Osage Reservation to advance the dancing careers of the both Maria and her sister Marjorie, the family’s ties to the Osage Nation and Oklahoma remained important.

When it was suggested that Maria change her surname to the more Russian sounding Tallchieva, she refused; however, she did change “Tall Chief ” to “Tallchief.”

At age 17, Maria went to New York, hoping to land a spot with a major ballet company. She danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for five years during which time she met the choreographer George Balanchine.

Ms Tallchief became his muse.

Balanchine eventually co-founded the New York City Ballet Company, and Maria Tallchief was its first star.

technique to a new generation of dancers.

Tallchief received both accolades and awards during her prolific career. The Oklahoma Legislature declared June 29, 1953, as “Maria Tallchief Day,” and the Osage Nation honored her with the title Princess Wa-Xthe-Thomba (Woman of Two Standards). In 1996, she received a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievements. Her Kennedy Center biography states, “Tallchief has been both muse and instrument, both the inspiration and the living expression of the best our country has given the world.

Her individualism and her genius came together to create one of the most vital and beautiful chapters in the history of American dance” (Kennedy Center). She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and was twice named “Woman of the Year” by the Washington Press Club. In 1999, Tallchief was awarded the American National Medal of Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her breakthrough role came in 1949 Although most of her life was spent with the Balanchine choreographed far away from the Osage Nation ballet Firebird. Her performance at of her youth, she remained proud the ballet’s premier left the audience of her cultural heritage, frequently chanting, “Tallchief! Tallchief! speaking out against stereotypes Tallchief! Tallchief!” Of her and misconceptions of Native performance, The New York Times Americans. critic John Martin wrote, “Tallchief Maria Tallchief, photo courtesy of Russ TallChief The New York Times hailed Tallchief was a miracle of classic brilliance” as “one of the most brilliant (Tallchief 132). Tallchief ’s dancing American ballerinas of the 20th was characterized by her precise footwork, upper-body styling, century” (Anderson).

Time magazine proclaimed, “Of all the and dazzling athleticism. Her virtuosity was praised in the United ballerinas of the last century, few achieved Maria Tallchief ’s States and abroad. artistry, a kind of conscious dreaming, a reverie with backbone” Although she continued to work with the New York City Ballet (Chua-Eoan). Of her own career Tallchief wrote, “I was in the until 1960, she made guest appearances with the San Francisco middle of magic, in the presence of genius. And thank God I Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, and the Hamburg Ballet among knew it” (Hazlack).

—Denise Neil-Binion others. Tallchief became the first American dancer to appear at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. She did not limit her performances to Works Cited the stage, making several television appearances including the Ed • Anderson, Jack. “Maria Tallchief, a Dazzling Ballerina and Muse for Sullivan Show and the Bell Telephone Hour, bringing ballet to a Balanchine, Dies at 88.” New York Times, April 12, 2013. Web. Chualarger audience.

After dancing professionally for nearly a quarter of a century, Ms Tallchief officially retired from dancing in 1966, but her work with dancers continued. She served as director of the ballet for the Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1973 to 1979, and founded the Lyric Opera’s ballet school where she taught the Balanchine 76 | W W W.F IR S TAM E RI C AN ARTMAGAZI N E.C OM

Eoan, Howard. “The Silent Song of Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina (1925-2013),” April 12, 2013. Web. • Hazlack, Sarah. “Maria Tallchief, ballet star who was inspiration for Balanchine, dies at 88.” Washington Post, April 12, 2013. Web. • “Maria Tallchief.” The Kennedy Center, n.d. Web. • Tallchief, Marie with Larry Kaplan. Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

IN MEMORIAM

George Horse Capture

Carl Ponca

October 20, 1937–April 16, 2013

August 25, 1938–March 27, 2013

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EORGE HORSE CAPTURE (A’aninin) and I were selected to open the National Museum of the American Indian’s Museum on the Mall on its opening day, September 21, 2004, and to welcome and lead people inside through the eastern doors that face the U.S. Capitol.

Everything was scripted and supposed to happen with precision.

We would exit the entrance 30 seconds before the first dignitaries arrived, the drum group would play, and we would lead separate lines of officials inside.

At the appointed time, someone pushed us outside, so we would not be a second late. We took our marks as the drum began its stirring song. It was a glorious Washington morning. The handsome, strong honor guard held U.S. and Native Nations flags that the fall breeze waved gracefully. The camp crier was in good voice, announcing the coming of big people. Two eagles, a male and a female, circled our end of the National Mall. We were in perfect balance and blessed. Except the dignitaries were nowhere in sight. The timekeeping handlers looked anguished, and we knew we were on our own. Our improvisational training in powwow and other stagecraft kicked in, and we walked a large circle, acknowledging the honor guard, crier, arena director, and each singer and drummer, as Native protocol dictated. We resumed our places, another song began, and our guests finally arrived, as if it had been planned that way all along.

George and I were not always in harmony. When he was a Plains Indian Museum Curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, and I was Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians and a Trustee of the Museum of the American Indian in New York, we were on opposite sides of the repatriation debate. Opponents of the legislation often invoked George’s name as a Native museum person who did not support what we advocated. After we won the 1989 NMAI law, with its historic repatriation provision, and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NMAI Director W. Richard West Jr. (Cheyenne) hired George, who became a major booster of the NMAI procedures for repatriation and the ceremonial area we had previously put in place.

George worked for NMAI for ten years, retiring in 2004 as Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources, capping a distinguished career in the anthropological and curatorial sides of museology. He died at 75 on April 16, 2013, at his home in Great Falls, Montana, and was buried on the reservation of his birth and youth, the Fort Belknap Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indian Community. He was a smart, kindly man who understood how to change with the times, and an excellent partner when the task required Native know-how and poise in public places.

—Suzan Shown Harjo

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ARL FRANCIS PONCA JR., Po’nge Wahtiankah, was an Osage artist, curator, and educator. He was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in the Grayhorse District of the Osage Nation and belonged to the Ponca-WashTage, Gentle Leader clan, and the Water People of the Hun-Kah Division. Ponca was the only child of Carl Francis Ponca Sr. and Agnes Mae Robertson Ponca.

His extensive education included graduating from Andres High School in Texas, attending Oklahoma State University, earning his BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) and earning his Master’s Degree in Education at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. Ponca also studied at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

While at the Kansas City Art Institute, Ponca studied sculpture under Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and Dale Eldridge. Both his daughter and granddaughter attended KCAI. In 1959, Ponca married Barbara Ann Furr. Together they lived in Texas, Missouri, California, and New Mexico, and raised two daughters, Kimberly Ann “Wendy” and Felicia Alexander.

“He was a good guy,” remembers Gerald Lujan (Taos Pueblo), who studied sculpture under Ponca during his first year teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1975. “He had a glass furnace going on in the barn on campus. He was a good teacher. He started up glassblowing, bronze casting—several techniques. He inspired a lot of sculptors like Presley LaFountain, Daniel Van Fleet, and others.”

Besides teaching at IAIA, Carl Ponca also curated and directed the IAIA Museum. He taught art classes in Fairfax, founded a local artists’ organization, and served as director of the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska and the Mid-America All-Indian Center in Wichita in the 1990s.

His talents weren’t limited to visual art. Ponca was an Arthur Murray certified dance instructor and the inventor of Ponca Punch—the recipe of which, says one member of the Ponca Tribe, “is as secret as Coke’s formula.”

In the early 1990s, Carl Ponca portrayed Kaw Chief Allegawaho in re-enactments of the Signing of the Council Oak Treaty of 1825. He felt it was important to expose the limited choices that Native leaders had when signing treaties.

Carl Ponca is buried at the Fairfax Cemetery in his hometown and is survived by his two daughters, his son-in-law, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Several of his family members are artists today.

—America Meredith FAL L 2 0 1 3 |

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By Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee/Citizen Potawatomi, 2013 FAL L 2 0 1 3 | 79

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Contemporary Master Weavers

Shan Goshorn

(Eastern Band Cherokee) Removal (Indian Territory), woven paper www.shangoshorn.com IM Booth #511–SF

Carol Emarthle-Douglas (Northern Arapaho-Seminole) Round Dance, coiled basket cemarthle@gmail.com IM Booth #115–POG

Kelly Church

(Grand Traverse Ottawa-Chippewa) Copper Nation Corn black ash, sweetgrass, dye, copper www.woodlandarts.com IM Booth #738 LIN-E

Cherish Parrish

(Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Potawatomi) The Next Generation, black ash, sweetgrass 2012 Best of Show at Eiteljorg www.woodlandarts.com

Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole), Greetings of Friends, 2013, gouache on paper, 20 × 26 in.