First American Art Magazine No. 15, Summer 2017

ANCESTRAL, HISTORICAL, & LIVING ARTS of INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 15, SUMMER 2017

DISPLAY UNTIL JULY 31, 2017

LEGACY OF SPIRO MOUNDS

MARCUS AMERMAN

FELIPE GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA

JAMES LAVADOUR

CHEROKEE NATIONAL TREASURES

NORA NARANJO-MORSE

FRAMING ART BY DESIGN PRINCIPLES

TANIA WILLARD

OCTOBER 6-7, 2017

the

Zuni

Show

August 19 - 20

Scottish Rite Temple Santa Fe 463 Paseo de Peralta TheKeshiFoundation.org

with support from the Zuni Pueblo

Knifewing by Robert Cachini Jr.

KESHi

thezuniconnection

227 Don Gaspar Santa Fe 505.989.8728 www.keshi.com Jewelry Fetishes Pottery

Bart Gasper Sr: Longhorn and His Entourage (detail)

SUMMER 2017 | 1

30 th Annual SIOUX FALLS, SD | SEPTEMBER 23 - 24, 2017 SIOUX FALLS CONVENTION CENTER

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 OLD COURTHOUSE MUSEUM

A TRADITION OF WORLD-CLASS NORTHERN PLAINS ART

NPIAM.ORG

WWW.

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Dwayne Wilcox - Oglala Lakota - Blue Bull 1st Place Mixed Media Fine Arts 2-D

WITHOUT A THEME

an immersive display showcasing seven premier North American artists mar 31 - nov 2

The exhibition will be housed in the Mashantucket Gallery until Nov. 2 and is included with a general museum admission.

Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center 110 Pequot Trail Mashantucket, CT pequotmuseum.org SUMMER 2017 | 3

12 TH ANNUAL

CHEROKEE ART MARKET OCTOBER 1 4 & 1 5

Bryan Waytula - “Girl of the Water” (drawing) Best of Class

Sequoyah Convention Center at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa CherokeeArtMarket.com

|

(877) 779-6977

© 2017 Cherokee Nation Businesses. All Rights Reserved.

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ISSUE NO. 15, SUMMER 2017 FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

The Artistic Legacy 18 of Spiro Mounds America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Guaman Poma and The First New Chronicle and Good Government Annick Benavides

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Honor & Revival: 36 Cherokee National Treasures Mary Ellen Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Frame, Mat, Glass?

How Do You Decide?

Rose Marie Cutropia

46

ARTIST PROFILES 46

James Lavadour Walla Walla Painter & Printmaker Staci Golar

52

Nora Naranjo Morse Tewa Sculptor Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

58

12

Seven Directions Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute-Modoc)

14

Spotlight

16 Double-Headed Serpent America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

40

Marcus Amerman Choctaw Beadwork Artist RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Tewa)

Recent Developments

Art + Literature Gregory Scofield (Metis) Jack Sabon (Ahtna Athabascan) Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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Calendar

92

REVIEWS

52

Art Exhibit Reviews

70

Book Reviews

80

IN MEMORIAM Beau Dick 90 (Kwakwaka’wakw) America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Tania Willard 64 Secwepemc Interdisciplinary Artist Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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COVER: Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), Moonrise Over the Little Bighorn, 1995, glass seed beads on cloth. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Issue No. 15, Summer 2017 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online)

JUNE 30-JULY 2, 2017 RADISSON HOTEL & CONFERENCE CENTER 2040 Airport Drive, Oneida, WI

Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Circulation Manager: Talullah Begaye (Choctaw-Chickasaw-Navajo) Copy Editor: Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Samonia Byford (Cherokee Nation), Rosa Cays (Chicana), Staci Golar (Cornish-Welsh-American), & Michelle Lanteri Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Design Consultant: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) Social Media: Staci Golar (Cornish-Welsh-American), Michelle Lanteri, & America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Regional Representatives:

Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute-Modoc) Northeast: Kelly Church (Odawa-Ojibwe) Northwest: Marianne Nicolson, PhD (Dzawada’enuxw Kwakwaka’wakw) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba-Eastern Band Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni)

Editorial Advisory Board:

heather ahtone (Choctaw-Chickasaw) Jonathan Batkin James T. Bialac, JD Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, PhD (Hopi-Choctaw) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) Ken Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho-Seneca) India Rael Young

Advertising Representatives:

Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com Pauline Prater (Cherokee Nation), pauline@firstamericanartmagazine.com International distribution by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services.

First American Art Magazine, LLC, is not responsible for the content of any article or for the statements of any advertiser. First American Art Magazine welcomes queries about editorial submissions. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or artwork.

Art Classes Woodland Art Demonstration Largest Juried Show of Woodland Indian Art

Copyright © 2017 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except those specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Questions About Subscriptions?

For subscription services, changes of address, and wholesale inquiries: email circulation@firstamericanartmagazine.com or visit www.firstamericanartmagazine.com/subscriptions

Letters Policy Coordinator, Loretta Webster info@woodlandindianart.com 920-713-8030 www.woodlandindianart.com FREE ADMISSION--OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Letters to the editor are welcome and may be emailed to us at info@firstamericanartmagazine.com or mailed to: First American Art Magazine, Attention: Editor 133 24th Avenue NW #126, Norman, OK 73069

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EDITOR’S GREETING

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N THE EARLY 15TH CENTURY, approximately a hundred years after the collapse and abandonment of Cahokia and less than a century before the arrival of Cristóbal Colón on the shores of Hispaniola, a group of Caddoan-speaking people sealed a tomb within Craig Mound; an abandoned Spiro Mounds site in what would someday become Oklahoma.

They buried innumerable remains from their dead along with exquisitely crafted, ceremonial artworks. This is one of the largest assemblages of precontact artwork found in the Eastern Woodlands of North America.

Cedar poles collapsed inward on themselves, creating a protective pocket of air, and copper helped preserve fragments of twined textiles, rivercane baskets, carved wooden sculptures and masks, shelling engravings, copper plaques, stone effigy pipes, and other items of paramount complexity.

Of course, the people of Spiro never intended for their artworks and departed relatives to be disinterred.

The fact that these works have reached us through the centuries is fraught with dilemmas—on one hand is how profoundly troubling it is that this site was desecrated, and on the other, these preserved works and fragments now provide us with an unparalleled glimpse into the techniques, materials, and iconography of master artists of the Mississippian era, including perishable items that made up the majority of precontact material culture and have not been as well preserved outside the region.

In 1618, about 165 years after European and African contact, a Quechua man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote and illustrated an epic volume of history and events of the time, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government). He set Andean

Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute-Modoc) and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Milestones, 2010, acrylic, paper, willow, mixed media on wood panels, 40 × 16 in.

oral history down in ink and relayed events he had observed firsthand, including bitter cruelties that Spanish explorers and clergy committed on the Indigenous population, to his intended recipient: King Philip III of Spain. His tome did not reach Spain and instead ended up in Denmark where it languished in obscurity until its rediscovery in 1908. The 1,189 pages of history is a boon to scholars as art historians take great delight in the 398 illustrations in the book. While not his anticipated audience, we are fortunate to witness this vision of Andean life during cataclysmic changes.

Where will the art we create end up? The unpredictability of how art will ultimately find its audience is part of the excitement and challenge of the process. Native art history is still a burgeoning field in flux, since so many different media, regions, and cultures have not been adequately studied. One tribe is striving to chart the course of how its art will be seen in the future.

Instead of letting outside experts or the markets dictate the future of its artistic expression, the Cherokee Nation has created a program in which it honors and collects work by

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community-based, customary artists who give back to the tribe by designating them as National Treasures. In doing so, the tribe hopes to keep their voices alive far into the future.

Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short) goes the popular Latin saying. However, this rings true only for a small minority of art. Most visual artworks are destroyed over time— thrown away or ravaged by light, dust, or other elements. To help ensure your art collection can survive to impact future generations in unpredictable and exciting ways, you can take practical steps to safeguard it. Framing works on paper behind glass is one means of protecting them, and our final feature unpacks some of the considerations behind this time-tested practice.

Who knows, through space and time, how our art will affect those in the future? And what does the historical art of ancestral Indigenous Americans have to tell us today?

A benchmark of art, as opposed to propaganda or decor, is that art is fluid and polyvalent enough to keep resonating and keep evoking new insight, generation after generation.

—America Meredith

LETTERS TO FAAM German Silver Jewelry of the Southern Plains Indians

H

APPILY, I RECEIVED a new subscription to your magazine. The German silver article is my particular interest, as I have been working with the material recently.

I thought your readers would appreciate historic information in a book, The Kiowas, by Mildred P. Mayhall from 1962. Her book includes a compilation/composite of what are known as the Sett’an and calendars (notations of striking events). The entry for summer 1866 follows: The Flat Metal (or German Silver) Sun Dance was held on Medicine Lodge Creek near its mouth in Oklahoma.

A trader brought the Kiowas a large amount of flat sheets of German silver which they hammered into belts and ornaments. The pictograph shows a medicine lodge and a strip of hide covered with silver disks finished with a tuft of horsehair. … They obtained some genuine silver disks in the old days from Mexican silversmiths near present Silver City, New Mexico, and also used silver dollars. Charles W. Whitacre brought the German silver to the Kiowas. He was known as “Tsoli” (Charley). For years he had a trading store near the present agency at Anadarko, until he died accidentally in 1882.

Robert Blanchett Santa Fe, NM Thanks for calling our attention to Mildred P. Mayhall’s book, The Kiowas, and the passage related to the trade of materials and the production of German silver jewelry. We are always happy to receive letters that convey an article not only of interest to readers but also related to their own area of study.

German silver is an important Native American art form that deserves additional research and attention.

—Denise Neil-Binion

Water Is Life

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N YOUR MOST RECENT “Editor’s Greetings” column (No. 13, Winter 2016/17), you described your hope that both a non-Native arts professional and a tribal member who is not a participant in the art world would find value in your lovely journal. I am happy to report that, although I am neither an arts professional nor a tribal member, I truly appreciate your writing and your presentations of tribal

artists. I am a wholly nonartistic, East Coast suburbanite, and I eagerly await each issue of FAAM and the worlds your staff shares with me.

The nonviolent protests by the water protectors at Standing Rock (and by their surrogates at events around the country) captured the attention of so many concerned people from all walks of life. It was nice that you made a timely inclusion of works by a few different artists to show a variety of artistic approaches to the situation. I do hope to see more work from Starr Hardridge (Muscogee Creek), whose intense Severed Black Snake is chilling. In the same issue, I also enjoyed Kevin Simpson’s biographical article about the weavers in Oaxaca. I like that he and the artists were willing to share the details of the artists’ personal and family lives to illustrate the artistic process.

Please keep up the good work. Besides the writing and the selection of artists, the quality of your magazine is top-notch: the paper stock, the layout, the crispness of colors, and graphics. I enjoy every issue!

Cindy Bortman Winchester, MA Thank you so much, Cindy! It’s wonderful to hear that our content is appreciated by readers who don’t already have a background in Native American arts. The art and discussion in the Native art world addresses subjects that affect us all. Indigenous perspectives have much to contribute to understanding today’s world and humanity’s future course, so it’s heartening to hear that the material resonates with you. Starr Hardridge lives in Connecticut, so hopefully you will get to encounter his work in person soon. Thank you for your support! —America Meredith We welcome your letters to the editor! If we print your letter, we will send you a free copy of that issue of the magazine. Please email your letters to us at: info@firstamericanartmagazine.com or­mail letters to: First American Art Magazine, Attention: Editor 133 24th Avenue NW #126 Norman, OK 73069

Errata IN FAAM ISSUE NO. 14, SPRING 2017, in Teri Rofkar’s memorial on page 89, we mistakenly listed her date of death as December 12, 2016. The Tlingit textile artist passed on December 2, 2016.

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5TH ANNUAL NATIVE AMERICAN ART MARKET AND CULTURAL CELEBRATION JULY 14-15, 2017 FRIDAY ARTIST AWARDS RECEPTION Dahl Arts Center

RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA www.nativepop.org

SATURDAY NATIVE FINE ART, FASHION SHOW, FILM SHOWCASE Main Street Square Wade Patton (Oglala Lakota) “Summer Storm” (detail) 2016 Ink/Prisma color

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS ANNICK BENAVIDES is pursuing her PhD in art history at

Harvard University, with interest in Indigenous Colonial art of the Andes. Previously she worked as director of El Museo Pedro de Osma in Lima, Peru. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of New Mexico and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Williams College. She worked for several years developing educational outreach programs for adult and schoolaged visitors to art museums in the United States and Peru.

CAROLYN BUTLER-PALMER, PhD, is associate professor and Williams Legacy Chair in the Modern and Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Victoria. In 2017, she collaborated with David Anthony Neel and Lou-ann Neel in the creation of Ellen Neel: The First Woman Totem Pole Carver exhibit at the University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Gallery.

Dr. Butler-Palmer is currently working on a book project about Charlie James’s granddaughter Ellen Neel, David Lyle Neel, and his descendants David Anthony Neel, Edwin Neel, and Ellen Neel (all Kwakwaka’wakw). She is also completing an article with legal scholar Vanessa Udy on Ellen Neel and copyright in Canada, to be published in RACAR. ROSE MARIE CUTROPIA is an independent curator and an archivist with almost 40 years of interior design experience.

Proud to be an IAIA alumna with a bachelor of arts degree in museum studies, Cutropia was the design curator on the IAIA

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Museum of Contemporary Native Arts team that produced Lloyd Kiva New: Art, Design, and Influence.

ROSEMARY DIAZ (Santa Clara Tewa) is a freelance writer

based in Santa Fe. She studied literature and its respective arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University, and University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Beadwork, Collector’s Guide, Native Peoples, and the Santa Fean, and she is featured online at Indian Country Media Network.

SUZANNE NEWMAN FRICKE, PhD (Ashkenazic-

American), wrote her art history dissertation at the University of New Mexico on 20th-century Native pottery. She has taught art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Fricke co-curated two exhibits that traveled in Russia in 2012 and 2014. She curated a third show, Woven Together: Celebrating Spider Woman in Contemporary Native American Art, which exhibited in two Russian museums in 2015.

STACI GOLAR (Cornish-Welsh-American) holds a bachelor’s degree in art with a minor in sociology and anthropology from Eastern Oregon University, and a master’s degree in arts administration from the University of Oregon. After completing an arts management internship at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Reservation, she went on to work for SWAIA’s

Santa Fe Indian Market, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the International Folk Art Alliance. She has also served as a public art program and grant panelist, and has helped organize numerous community arts events as a volunteer. Her writing has been featured in the Santa Fean, Native Peoples, Santa Fe New Mexican, Bead and Button, and other publications. A lifelong advocate of the arts, and an artist herself, she believes in the transformative power of art and in those who create it.

WORKSHOPS AND FESTIVAL

MICHELLE LANTERI is a contemporary art scholar and curator serving as interim director of the University Art Gallery at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. With her thesis focused on Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke [Crow]), Lanteri earned a master of arts degree in art history, Native American studies minor, and certificate in museum studies with unwavering support from the Departments of Art and Anthropology at New Mexico State University.

MARY ELLEN MEREDITH (Cherokee Nation) owns Meredith Interests and Noksi Press, a Cherokee-language publishing company based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She is an emeritus board member and past president of the Cherokee National Historical Society and served as interim director of the Cherokee Heritage Center (1999–2004). She served on the board of the Oklahoma Humanities Council and is a board member of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM).

She curated art shows at the Center of the American Indian and is an avid collector of Native American art.

DENISE NEIL-BINION (Delaware-Cherokee) earned her

master of arts degree in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico. Her research interests center on Native American artists in Oklahoma. She is a PhD candidate in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma and currently resides in Norman, Oklahoma.

MATTHEW RYAN SMITH, PhD, is a curator, writer, and

educator of Euro-Canadian descent. Smith is currently the curator of the Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant in Brantford, Ontario, and the curator-in-residence at McIntosh Gallery, Western University. He is also a sessional professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Matthew is the Canadian section editor of the forthcoming Art Market Dictionary and resides on the editorial board of the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS).

NEEBINNAUKZHIK SOUTHALL (Chippewas of Rama

First Nation) is a graphic designer and artist, working in a variety of media including photography, body painting, and three-dimensional art at Neebin Studios. She graduated magna cum laude in 2011 from Oregon State University and earned a minor in visual arts and an honors BFA through the University Honors College and OSU’s competitive graphic design program. Southall works at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, where she photographs, designs, and manages media.

YVONNE N. TIGER (Seminole-Muscogee-Cherokee) is an adjunct faculty member at Montana State University, Northern, and freelance writer. She holds a bachelor of arts degree with honors from Smith College and a master’s degree in United States history and a master’s degree in Native American studies, Native American art history, and curating, both from the University of Oklahoma.

She is also the media manager for Indigenous Comic Con.

Idyllwild Arts Summer Program - The summer tradition that began in 1950 to bring the best artists in their fields to teach under the pines continues today. Intensive hands-on workshops in Native American Arts such as Hopi Jewelry, Navajo Weaving, Cahuilla Pottery, and Native Plants; as well as music, dance, theater, visual arts, writing and filmmaking are offered to students from age 5 to 105. Each year more than 1,800 adults and children attend the Idyllwild Arts Summer Program.

Register Now! www.idyllwildarts.org/nativearts summer@idyllwildarts.org 951.468.7265 Use the PROMO CODE: FAAM2017 for $25 off of any Idyllwild Arts Summer Adult Programs. Only 10 available!

Expires: 5/10/17

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City hired Jim Pepper Henry (Kaw-Muscogee) as its executive director. Henry recently resigned as the executive director of the Gilcrease Museum and has formerly directed the Heard Museum, Anchorage Museum, and Kanza Museum, which Henry helped establish.

by Kananginak Pootoogook (Inuk, 1935–2010). The exhibit, Viva Arte Viva, was curated by Christine Macel and will remain on view through November 26, 2017.

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario, selected Ian A. C. Dejardin as its new executive director. Dejardin previously served as the Sackler Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.

The Farmington Museum is renovating a building in downtown Farmington, New Mexico, in order to launch a new Farmington Museum of Navajo Art. Bob Culpepper, owner of the building, which housed the Foutz Indian Room, donated it to the museum in 2013.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery of Manitoba established an Indigenous Advisory Circle to facilitate Native peoples’ input in exhibits, programming, education, and outreach, and to strengthen ties to the Native community. Julie Nagam (Métis) and Heather Igloliorte (Inuk) are co-chairs of the new advisory group.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has integrated Native American art into its American Wing. Indigenous American art was previously exhibited solely in the Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries. This decision follows Charles and Valerie Diker’s donation of 91 historical Native American artworks to the museum.

ART FAIRS Canada’s contribution to the Arsenale and Giardini venues at this year’s Venice Biennale include drawings

House Innovation Award, and Michael Roanhorse (Navajo) won the Andy Eisenberg Award for Contemporary Jewelry.

ART SHOWS Tony Tiger (Muscogee-Seminole-Sac & Fox) won best of show at the 46th Annual Trail of Tears Art Show at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma. Classification winners were Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation), painting; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; Renee Hoover (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Chase Earles (Caddo), pottery; Toneh Chuleewah (Cherokee Nation), jewelry; Brenda Bradford (Cherokee Nation), graphics; and Merlin Little Thunder (Southern Cheyenne), miniatures; and Kellie Vann (Cherokee Nation) emerging artist. Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation) won the Bill Rabbit Legacy Award, and Paul Hacker (Choctaw) won the Betty Garner Elder Award.

AWARDS & HONORS Delina White (Leech Lake Ojibwe), Beaded Pouch, glass seed beads, smoked elkhide.

White won the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) Mentor Artist Fellowship.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Best of Show winner at the 59th Annual Heard Museum Guild Fair and Indian Market was Don Johnston (Unangan). Classification winners were Olin Tsingine (Hopi-Navajo), jewelry and lapidary; Al Qöyawayma (Hopi), pottery; Zoe Urness (Tlingit), paintings, drawings, graphics, photography; Mavasta Honyouti (Hopi), Pueblo carvings; Nathan Hart (Southern Cheyenne), sculpture; Barbara Teller Ornelas (Navajo), weavings and textiles; Glenda McKay (Ingalik Athabascan), diverse art forms; Don Johnston, baskets; Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty (Fort Peck Assiniboine-Sioux), beadwork and quillwork; and Sho Sho Esquire (Kaska Dena-Cree), personal attire. Marlowe Katoney (Navajo) won the Conrad

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Marking the 150th anniversary of the founding of Canada, the Hnatyshyn Foundation created the REVEAL Indigenous Art Awards and present them to 150 Aboriginal Canadian artists working in visual arts, literature, music, performing arts, and media arts. Each award includes $10,000 to “help fuel Indigenous arts practice for the next 150 years.” To access a list of all 150 award winners, visit rjhf.com/programs/indigenousawards.

The First Peoples Fund selected four Indigenous culture bearers to receive its 2017 Jennifer Easton Community Spirit Awards. They are Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo), Jonathan James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Norma Blacksmith (Oglala Lakota), and Timara Lotah Link (Coastal Chumash).

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) Indian Arts Research Center chose Loren Aragon (Acoma), Warren Montoya (Santa Ana-Santa Clara Pueblos), and Jordan Craig (Northern

Cheyenne) as its Native American Artists Fellows for 2017–2018.

The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF) announced the recipients of its inaugural Mentor Artist Fellowships. Each mentor/ apprentice team receives $30,000. The twelve mentor artists are Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangan), Lani Hotch (Tlingit), Royce Manuel (Akimel O’odham), Delbert Miller (Skokomish), TahNibaa Naataanii (Navajo), Jackson Polys (Tlingit), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Wayne Valliere (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe), Delina White (Leech Lake Ojibwe), Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), Laura WongWhitebear (Colville-Sinixt), and Shirod Younker (Coquille-Coos).

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton, Oregon, chose its three 2017 Golden Spot Residency Awards, which include two Native artists: Demian DinéYazhi’ (Zuni-Diné), and Marie Watt (Seneca). Each artist will spend two weeks at Crow’s Shadow to create a series of limited edition, handpulled prints.

The American Art Awards selected Blue Rain Gallery of Santa Fe as one of the 25 Best Galleries and Museums in America. Founded in 1993, Blue Rain Gallery is owned by Leroy Garcia and represents Native and non-Native artists.

Political cartoonist Marty Two Bulls Sr. (Oglala Lakota) was a finalist for the Herblock Prize and was awarded $5,000. The Herb Block Foundation sponsors the prize to recognize “excellence in editorial cartooning.”

PUBLICATIONS Native Peoples magazine published its last issue in November-December 2016. Founded in 1987, the magazine was originally a journal of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.

Filling the gap for general interest Native news and culture, Indian Country magazine returned to print with its April-May 2017 issue. This

Native American rock art, such as these Fremont culture petroglyphs at Sego Canyon, Green River, Utah, are now the official Utah state works of art. Photo: Rennett Stowe (CC-BY-2.0)

bimonthly print and digital magazine is published by Indian Country Media Network, which is owned by the Oneida Nation of New York.

PROJECTS Filmmaker Takuma Kuikuro (Kuikuro) invited the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation, based in Spain and England, to collaborate with Kuikuro artists and community members in Xingu Indigenous Park in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The partnership is digitizing images, sounds, and other aspects of Kuikuro culture and creating 3-D maps of Kuikuro lands using drones and LiDAR technology.

The Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) in Rio de Janeiro hosted a seminar on the project.

CRIME & LEGAL MATTERS The National Movement of Maya Weavers, which represents Maya weavers in Guatemala, seeks to protect their intangible cultural heritage and intellectual property rights through amendments to copyright and industrial property laws. The Guatemalan Commission of Indigenous Peoples of

the Congress of the Republic has voiced its support of these legal protections for Indigenous weavers who have seen their textile designs copied and mass-produced by international fashion designers without attribution, permission, or compensation.

Utah passed the S.B. 171 Utah’s State Works of Art Designation, which not only protects Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), but also “designates Native American rock art as the state works of art.” Utah is home to more than 1,000 rock art sites, with some dating back 12,500 years.

John Torres Nez (Navajo), former chief operating officer of SWAIA, admits to embezzling money raised

by Native American Artists for Japan, an impromptu charity to raise funds for 2011 tsunami victims, which was meant to go to the Red Cross. The State of New Mexico agreed that if he pay $36,819 to the Red Cross and publish a public apology, Torres Nez can have probation instead of prison time.

A 135-year-old totem pole was burned through suspected arson. The pole, Supernatural Halibut, was erected on Gitwangak land in northwestern British Columbia in 1880.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

MELISSA MELERO-MOOSE

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ELISSA MELERO-MOOSE (Fallon Paiute– Modoc) is a mixed-media visual artist, curator, writer, mother, and founder of the art collective Great Basin Native Artists (GBNA) in Reno, Nevada. She resides in Hungry Valley, Nevada, on the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. Melero-Moose has earned a BFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a BS degree from Portland State University in Oregon, and artist fellowships from the School for Advanced Research, SWAIA, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

Melero-Moose’s artwork integrates organic materials found in her home of the Great Basin high desert (such as willows, pine nuts, and cattails) and her interpretation of the Paiute and Modoc cultures and landscape. Her goals for the GBNA collective are to generate awareness of Native arts in Nevada and California; create opportunities for Native artists in the region with exhibits and workshops for the business of art; and develop a useful directory to connect artists with their community and the public.

Maidu Museum and Historic Site, Roseville, California. Image courtesy of the museum.

ABOVE. Just outside of Sacramento, California, the Maidu Museum and Historic Site is a key venue that has been exhibiting California Native arts for the past seven years. The historic site is located in the suburban sprawl of Roseville on 35 acres that were once Nisenan Maidu tribal lands. The museum offers tours of numerous petroglyphs on sandstone boulders, hundreds of bedrock mortar holes, and plentiful indigenous flora and fauna. The upper level of the museum building, inspired by round houses, is the Indigenous Art Gallery, where changing exhibits have included notable Native artists like Jean LaMarr (Paiute-Achomawi), Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Maidu-Wintu), Judith Lowry (Maidu-Hammawi-Washoe),

Melissa Melero-Moose. Photo: Garret Vreeland.

and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (NavajoSeminole-Muscogee), all of whom are either from or reside in California.

Tribes and their Native youth programs to paint murals on the new cultural center in San Diego, CA. aliciasiu.com

BELOW. Did you ever wonder

CENTER. The C. N. Gorman

how a city as big as Los Angeles gets its fresh water? The story of one of America’s oldest water wars is told in the documentary, Paya: The Water Story of the Paiute. The film reveals the previously untold account of the water disputes between the Owens Valley Paiute and the city of Los Angeles. Produced and directed by Jenna Cavelle with interviews by Harry Williams, Alan Bacock, Teri Red Owl, and Kathy Bancroft (all Paiute). payathemovie.com Visual artist, organizer, and activist Fawn Douglas (Las Vegas Paiute) is a constant force in southern Nevada. She advocates for the need to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, the “Change the Mascot” campaign, the “We Stand with Standing Rock Rally,” and she was pivotal in the recent National Monument status of the sacred site of Gold Butte. fawnart.org Alicia Maria Siu (Pipil) painter and muralist, is currently partnering with the 13 bands of the Kumeyaay

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Museum on the University of California, Davis, campus is exhibiting the Great Basin Native Artists: Contemporary Indigenous Women Painters, featuring Karma Henry (Fort Independence Paiute), Topaz

Paya: The Water Story of the Paiute, a documentary directed by Jenna Cavelle.

Leah Mata (Chumash) displayed her exquisite Indigenous Californian jewelry with abalone and pine nuts and her Chumash regalia (leahmata.com).

Jones (Shoshone-Lummi-KalapuyaMolalla), and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Sqelix’u-Métis-Shoshone), and me. The exhibit will run through June 16, 2017. Girl Power! gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu

WEST. The Bay Area’s Black Salt

NORTH. The film, Neither Wolf

Nor Dog, based on Kent Nerburn’s 1994 novel of the same name, opened in select theaters this past February.

Directed by Steven Lewis Simpson and starring David Bald Eagle (Cheyenne River Lakota, 1919–2016), Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee), and Zahn McClarnon (Standing Rock Sioux), the film will have limited showings throughout the country, but you can lobby for it to be in your area. facebook.com/neitherwolfnordog

EAST. Crossroads: Art + Native Feminisms, hosted by The Feminist Art Project (TFAP), was a day of discussions at the College Art Association annual conference in February at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (visual artist) and symposium chairs Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe performance artist) and Kat Griefen (lecturer at Rutgers University and art dealer) worked for more than a year to host all-Native, woman artist panels for the event. Panelists included Carly Feddersen (Okanagan-Sinixt), Ryan Elizabeth Feddersen (OkanaganSinixt), Grace Rosario Perkins (Navajo-Akimel O’odham) of the Black Salt Collective, Charlene Teters (Spokane), Gloria and Muriel Miguel (both Guna-Rappahonack) of Spiderwoman Theater, and Quickto-See Smith, who was the keynote speaker. feministartproject.rutgers.edu

Loren Aragon, Broken Ground Collection, 2016, custom-printed silk charmeuse, silk taffeta, silk organza, cotton sateen.

designer Loren Aragon showcased his flair for contemporary fashion and jewelry design (aconav.com). Heidi BigKnife (Shawnee) of BigKnife Designs, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, had a booth showing silver jewelry with a unique twist (bigknifedesigns.com).

Collective is an all-women of color art group consisting of Sarah BiscaraDilley (Chumash-Chicana), Grace Rosario Perkins (Navajo-Akimel O’odham), Anna Luisa Petrisko, and Adee Roberson. An Art Matters grantee, Black Salt Collective has exhibited their collaborative work in six countries and recently curated Visions into Infinite Archives, an exhibit with more than 30 artists at SOMArts in San Francisco.

Biscara-Dilley says, “Our work as a collective highlights collaboration, shared experience, but also the ways that our experiences as black, brown, and Indigenous women are distinct; varying but bound up in each other by ongoing colonial processes and, beyond that, the ways our communities have always been connected through travel, shared narrative, art, prayer.” Look for their forthcoming book to be published

by E. M. Wolfman this summer! blacksaltcollective.tumblr.com

SOUTH. The 59th annual Heard

Indian Fair & Market took place in Phoenix in March, with great weather and a reunion of hundreds of Native artists exhibiting their wares. Besides having a blast passing out copies of FAAM at our booth this year, my highlights were the Friday night fashion show where Acoma fashion

Black Salt Collective, San Francisco, California. LEFT to RIGHT: Sarah Biscara-Dilley (ChumashChicana), Adee Roberson, Grace Rosario Perkins (Navajo-Akimel O’odham), and Anna Luisa Petrisko.

Photo: Texas Isaiah Horatio-Valenzuela.

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SPOTLIGHT

Unknown Mixtec artists, Double-Headed Serpent, ca. 1400–1521, Spanish cedar wood, turquoise, red spiny oyster, conch, pine resin, copal, beeswax, hematite, 8 × 17 × 2 1/3 in., collection of the British Museum, Am1894,-.634. Photo: Geni (CC-BY-SA).

DOUBLE-HEADED SERPENT Once possibly a gift from the ill-fated emperor Moctezuma II to the Spanish invader Hernán Cortés, this scintillating Mixtec turquoise mosaic has enthralled generations of art lovers across the globe.

T

HE FLORENTINE CODEX, a 16th-century encyclopedia of Central Mexican culture and history compiled by Spanish Friar Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua artist-scholars, describes the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II’s first encounter with Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés in the year 13-Rabbit.

Instead of attacking the strangers, he welcomed them to his lands and dispatched couriers

to present them with precious gifts.

Among these “was also a serpent wand inlaid with turquoise.”1 This passage might be a description of the Double-Headed Serpent, although we may never know for certain. The Double-Headed Serpent is a turquoise mosaic sculpture, one of nine at the British Museum and one of only 25 known to survive in Europe.

Believed to be worn as a pectoral, the Double-Headed Serpent dates from the 15th or early 16th century.

Part of its fame, no doubt, arises from its being on display at the British Museum in London, where it can be seen annually by 6.7 million visitors. The mosaic sculpture was even chosen to be part of A History of the World in 100 Objects, but it is also a powerful and sublime work of art. The fact that it traveled across the Atlantic to Italy and survived through the centuries adds to its prestige. Similar mosaics were recycled for their raw materials

1. Miguel León-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006), n.p.

2. Colin McEwan, Andrew Middleton, Caroline Cartwright, and Rebecca Stacey, Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 13.

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SPOTLIGHT

As Karl A. Taube, an archaeologist

by Florentine workshops.2 In 1894, illusion of the creature. Two larger renowned antiquarian Sir Augustus and professor at the University holes toward the top of the main body Wollaston Franks purchased the of California, Riverside, writes, were presumably used to suspend the serpent from an Italian collection “turquoise related more to warfare, piece, which was likely worn around for the British Museum, where it has fire, meteors, and the souls of heroic one’s neck as a pectoral. The concave remained ever since. warriors and kings” and also “the backside, now bare, was once gilded, Even if the Double-Headed fiercely blue heart of the pulsing implying that its was meant to be seen, Serpent had not been embellished flame.”5 which suggests the possibility of the with precious stone and shell and These shell and stone tesserae sculpture having been carried on pole, were just its wooden base, it would are set into the wood with a masterful like a flag or heraldic crest. still be a masterpiece. The single piece range of adhesives that include pine Rich with layered meanings, of Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) resin, copal, and beeswax. Today the the Double-Headed Serpent stirs our is carved to represent an undulating eye sockets are hauntingly bare, but imaginations and inspires us with its snake with two heads. Perfectly traces of beeswax hint that round exquisite craftsmanship and ferocious symmetrical, the body has two stones, such as iron pyrite or obsidian, beauty. Its complicated history speaks upward curves and three downward may have once filled them. of the devastating loss of lives and curves and terminates on each side Strategically placed holes in the lifeways in the 1521 fall of the Aztec in a head with menacing, open jaws. wood suggest the sculpture’s use.

Each Triple Alliance but also of the endurThe elegant sweep of jawline and ance of Indigenous values and the throat has small holes that perhaps the tightness of the sensuous curves ancestors’ ability to speak to us today facilitated the insertion of moving convey powerful tension. tongues to enhance the lifelike through their visual arts.

The surface is covered with over 2,000 individually cut tesserae, or small tiles, of ocean-blue turquoise and red Pacific spiny oyster, with teeth carved of white conch.

The color of the turquoise has been compared to life-giving water and the green of the tropical quetzal bird. The tiles are carefully positioned so as to sparkle and shimmer, like cut, delicate beads on a dancer’s regalia today. The turquoise was likely mined by Ancestral Pueblo people, who worked with the semiprecious stone for centuries. In Mesoamerica, turquoise only became widespread after 900 CE,3 during the Postclassic period, when trade networks linked what is now Arizona and New Mexico, part of Oasisamerica, to central Mexico and the city of Teotihuacán.

In Nahuatl, turquoise is xihuitl, and xiuhcoatl is the “turquoise fire Detail of Double-Headed Serpent. Artists dyed the resin, visible around the circular tesserae, red serpent” that relates to comets.4 with hematite. Photo: Jaipasdepseudo (CC BY 4.0).

3. Karl A. Taube, “The symbolism of turquoise in ancient Mesoamerica,” in Turquoise in Mexico and North America: Science, Conservation, Culture and Collections, edited

by J. C. H. King, Max Carocci, Caroline Cartwright, Colin McEwan, and Rebecca Stacey (London: Archetype Publications, 2012), 117.

4. Taube, “The symbolism of turquoise in ancient Mesoamerica,” 117, 122.

5. Ibid., 132–133.

6. Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 213.

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The Artistic Legacy of

SPIRO MOUNDS

By America Meredith

I

N EASTERN OKLAHOMA near the Arkansas border sits Spiro Mounds, an extraordinary Mississippian mound complex abandoned by 1450. House mounds and two platform mounds ring its central plaza; to the west stand the two Ward Mounds and Craig Mound.

The Caddo name for this site is Ditteh and was built by the Keeohnawah’wah, or “Old People.”1 The 1930s looting of Spiro is considered one of the greatest travesties in American archaeology. The mound complex produced one of the largest assemblages of precontact artifacts of any site in the country, most notably fragile, perishable fabrics and basketry. Today, Spiro’s future is uncertain.

Classified as Caddoan Mississippian, Spiro is part of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere, a widespread network of Eastern Woodland cultures centered on the Mississippi River that flourished between 800 and 1500.

Maps often give the false impression that Spiro was an isolated community. In reality, Spiro was part of a regional cluster of mound sites, villages, and camps in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas that traded east and west.

“From AD 850 to 1250, Spiro was one of at least twelve ceremonial centers in the region, with it and the Harlan site being preeminent among independent Arkansas River communities,” writes

Unknown Middle Mississippian Artist, Cup, ca. 1200–1400, incised whelked shell, Craig Mound, Spiro Mounds, 13 1/3 × 7 in. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 18/9121.

archaeologist Timothy Perttula.2 At least 72 mound sites have been identified in the Arkansas River basin alone.3 The same culture that built Spiro first built mounds at the Harlan site in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, then the Norman site in Wagoner County. After establishing Spiro, they built the nearby Skidgel Mound.

While many mistake the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere for a single culture, it is a shared set of conventions and a network of many cultures from diverse language families across a broad geographic expanse.

Mississippian cultures generally share maize horticulture, shell-tempered pottery, social stratification, and monumental earthworks in the Eastern Woodlands.

“Now we understand better than we did 20 or 30 years ago that the major Mississippian period centers had very distinctive cultural expressions,” says George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, chairman of the Caddo Heritage Museum board, and a professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.4 Spiro Mounds stands out from other Mississippian centers. Dennis Peterson, archaeologist and site manager of the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center, points out that “Spiro had a smaller population, which didn’t necessitate the primary use of maize.”5 Peterson also points out that Spiro didn’t need defense structures because they were surrounded by cousins.

Not only does Spiro have an astonishing array of artwork, conditions

1. Vynola Beaver Newkumet and Howard L. Meredith, Hasinai: A Traditional History of the Caddo Confederacy (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2009), 36.

2. Timothy K. Perttula, “Spiro Mounds,” in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Volume 1, Neil Asher Silberman, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 211.

3. Gregory Vogel, “Viewshed Characteristics of Caddo Mounds in the Arkansas Basin,” in Archaeology of the Caddo, Timothy K. Perttula and Chester P. Walker, ed.

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 142.

4. All quotes by George Sabo III from discussion with the author, March 27, 2017.

5. All quotes by Dennis Peterson from discussion with the author, March 15, 2017.

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Craig Mound with yaupon holly and poke growing at Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma. Photo: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation).

there preserved perishable items such as wood, basketry, and textiles that quickly degenerated elsewhere in the humid southeast. Perhaps as much as 95 percent of precontact material culture was perishable. Spiro artifacts provide one of the few windows into this world.

Context & History WHEN SPIRO WAS FIRST SETTLED during the Evans Phase (900–1050), Toltec Mounds in central Arkansas was a prominent spiritual center, and early Spiro pottery resembles that found at Toltec Mounds and at Caddo sites along the Red River. “But then Spiro took off on its own, particularly after Toltec fell into disuse after about AD 1050,” explains Sabo. “It became a very important ceremonial center of its own renown.”

In the Harlan Phase (1050–1250),6 the nearby Harlan mound group reached its zenith, while Spiro had its largest residential population, residing in rectangular, wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs. Men fished and hunted deer, bison, raccoons, geese, wild turkeys, and various small game. Women harvested water lily rhizomes, hickory nuts, acorns, hazelnuts, persimmon, pawpaw, and Jerusalem artichoke, and farmed maygrass, little barley, beans, squash, and maize.7

The nearby Norman site was an important ceremonial center with six mounds 8 during the Norman Phase (1250–1350). Around 1250, when most of Spiro’s residents moved to nearby villages, Spiro functioned as a ceremonial center and cemetery.9 Major changes happened during the Spiro Phase (1350–1450). “Spiro continued as a spiritual center long after the collapse of Cahokia, which was believed to have been around 1275 to 1350,” says Peterson. Cahokia, today in Collinsville, Illinois, was the largest precontact city north of the Rio Grande.

Archaeologists debate Cahokia’s impact, but some consider it to be the origin of many Mississippian traits. Peterson is skeptical and explains, “Cahokia was the big city, but for the Mississippian peoples, it’s really about these regional powers.”

When Cahokia collapsed, its residents, which may include ancestors of Dhegiha Siouan tribes, migrated westward.10 “Early on in the history of Spiro, we can trace a lot of interactions and relationships with places like Cahokia.

But after about 1400,” says Sabo, the archaeological evidence “in the Spiro area indicates much stronger ties developing with Southern Plains tribes to the west.”

Circular houses replaced the rectangular houses. The main east-west trade routes shifted south to the Red River valley

region while trade along the Arkansas River basin increased connections to the Plains and Southwest.11 In the early 15th century, the people of Spiro buried an unprecedented, unparalleled concentration of sumptuous ceremonial and prestige goods in the largest cone of Craig Mound, a unique structure of four conjoined conical mounds. The cone was capped, and Spiro Mounds was abandoned.

In Fort Coffee Phase (1450–1650), Spiro Mounds remained largely unoccupied. Anthropologist Charles M. Hudson believed that Hernando de Soto’s 1540–42 expedition camped near Spiro. In 1700, the Mentos, a band of Wichita, lived at the convergence of the Arkansas, Neosho, and Verdigris Rivers,12 and the Osage settled the region in the late 18th century.13 From 1831 to 1833, Choctaw people were forcibly relocated to the southeastern corner of Indian Territory.

Today, Spiro falls within the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma tribal jurisdictional area. The Choctaw didn’t settle the site—then an impenetrable canebrake.

Anthropologist Frederic Clements wrote that the Choctaw and the freedmen were “familiar with ancient burial mounds in their Mississippi and Alabama homeland and so recognized the true nature of these earth structures.”14 When the federal government divided Choctaw lands into

A. T. Mayes, “Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma: Dental Evidence for Subsistence Strategies,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 26, no. 5 (August 14, 2015): 751.

James A. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center: The Archaeology of Arkansas Valley Caddoan Culture in Eastern Oklahoma, Volume 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum, 1996), 29–30.

8. Vogel, “Viewshed Characteristics of Caddo Mounds in the Arkansas Basin,” 146.

9. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 197.

10. Robert L. Hall, “The Cahokia Site and Its People,” in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 101–102.

11. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 31–32.

12. Mildred Mott Wedel, “The Deer Creek Site, Oklahoma: A Wichita Village Sometimes Called Ferdinandina, An Ethnohistorian’s View,” Oklahoma Historical Society Series in Anthropology 5 (1981): 21.

13. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 27.

14. Forrest E. Clement, “Historical Sketch of the Spiro Mound,” Contributions to the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation 14 1945), 51.

6.

7.

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where he saw a vitrine “that was of nothing but Spiro, which was cool for somebody from Oklahoma.” One display briefly lit up to reveal a fragment of bobbin lace openwork. “But to see not only fabrics that are a thousand years old here in the US, but incredibly complex, tatted lace, this is incredible. It blew my mind …” He was hooked.

Archaeological research at Spiro Mounds has grown less invasive and destructive. Sabo says, “We’ve been using some of the modern technologies that are available to archaeologists, like groundpenetrating radar, magnetometry, and electrical resistance,” which have revealed previously unknown archaeological features.

Earliest photograph of Craig Mound, prior to any excavation, December 1913, collection of the Oklahoma Historical Society, P1986.001. Photo: Joseph B. Thoburn. Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

individual allotments, most of Spiro Mounds was allotted to Rachel Brown, a Choctaw freedman, who protected the mounds from trespassers. One night, Rachel Brown “was mysteriously roused from sleep and, on looking out toward the mound, saw it covered by shimmering sheets of blue flame. In this ghostly illumination she distinctly perceived a team of cats harnessed tandem-fashion to a small wagon which they were pulling around and around the summit.”15 Brown’s land went to William Craig, who also protected the site. Then his grandchildren inherited the land when they were minors. In 1933, during the Great Depression, their maternal grandfather and guardian leased the land to pothunters.16 Six local men formed the Pocola Mining Company and dug into the mounds until their lease expired in 1935, despite desperate attempts by archaeologists and the Oklahoma Historical Society to stop them. The quality and quantity of the works they excavated aroused attention from collectors. After the article, “A ‘King Tut’ Tomb in the Arkansas Valley”

sensationalized the looting further, gawkers flocked to the site.

The six pothunters didn’t record where artifacts or burials were placed.

Horrified by the destruction of this irreplaceable information, Oklahoma legislators passed one of the first state laws protecting antiquities. Only briefly deterred, the Pocola Mining Company hired coal miners to tunnel directly into the center of Craig Mound, where they discovered the Great Mortuary Chamber.

They even detonated dynamite in Craig Mound. Archaeologists Philip Phillips and James A. Brown noted, “They managed to wreak havoc on one of the most unusual mounds in the Eastern United States.”17 In 1936, University of Oklahoma archaeologists began excavating the site. In the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers purchased the land, and Craig Mound was reconstructed. The Oklahoma Historical Society opened the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center to the public in 1978,18 where archaeologist Dennis Peterson is the site manager.

As a teenager, Peterson visited the National Museum of Natural History

Exchange Networks THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Spiro artifacts come from the largest cone of Craig Mound. The earlier feature of secondary burials is called the Great Mortuary Chamber, and a second feature, the Spirit House, was where ceremonial items were carefully laid out as a cosmogram and imago mundi around 1400.19 Effigy pipes, masterworks of precontact sculpture, were placed in cardinal directions. Copper plates wrapped in hides were displayed in intricately doublewoven, rivercane baskets. Engraved, whelk shell cups encircled the entire chamber.

The staggering quantities of rare and precious items include fossilized shark spine, mastodon molars, nine T-shaped pipes, 18 copper plates, 20 bone hair pins, 30 copper axes, 54 marine shell discs, 604 pearl beads, and 50,899 hand-ground shell beads.20 Throughout the chamber were hundreds of burials, some in cedar litters.

All the artworks from Craig Mound are grave goods.

While the accumulation of such diverse and masterfully made items is remarkable, even more astonishing is that so many perishable items survived the centuries. The earthen walls of the Spirit House in Craig Mound were

15. Clements, “Historical Sketch of the Spiro Mound,” 52.

16. David La Vere, Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut’s Tomb (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 47–48.

17. Philip Phillips and James A. Brown, Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 1978), 3.

18. “Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center,” Oklahoma Historical Society, web.

19. James A. Brown, “Spiro Reconsidered: Sacred Economy at the Western Frontier of the East Woodlands,” in The Archaeology of the Caddo, Timothy K. Perttula and Chest P. Walker, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 117–138.

21. Timothy K. Perttula, “The Archaeology of the Caddo in Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, Eastern Oklahoma and East Texas,” in The Archaeology of the Caddo, Timothy K. Perttula and Chest P. Walker, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 22.

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exceptionally high in lime, and copper salts further preserved wood, cane, and textiles that would normally decompose rapidly in the humid environment.

Inwardly leaning cedar poles, shaped like a tipi, created an air pocket, which saved fragile items from the crush of tons of earth.

How Spiro came to possess such a wealth of exotic items is debated. How much was traded and how much was religious offerings? Perttula writes, “The accumulation of shell, copper, and other mortuary objects is best attributed to the attractions of the ‘sacred economy,’ not the operation of a centralized chiefdom or the mobilization of a long-distance network of trade and exchange.”21 Spiro was part of an exchange network that spanned coast to coast.

Haliotis shells came from the Pacific Ocean, Olivella dama shells from the Gulf of California, and Busycon shells from Florida along the Gulf of Mexico.22 Peterson believes that Spiro was central to a trading economy by exporting bois d’arc bows and bison scapula hoes. Meat, furs, and textiles were also potential exports, albeit perishable, so no evidence of these survived.

Spiro pottery and shells have been discovered in Southern Plains villages in Western Oklahoma. Southern Plains villagers, likely ancestors of the Wichita, were farmers and bison hunters from Texas and Oklahoma. Southern Plains pottery of Washita River phase (1250–1450) features styles possibly adopted from Spiro.23 A Spiro engraved shell gorget was found at a Washita River site in Chickasaw, Oklahoma. Oklahoma Archaeology Survey archaeologist Richard Drass says that the Spiroan items in these sites suggest trade from Mississippian cultures to the Plains.24 Since Southern Plains villages traded with Ancestral Pueblo peoples, they might have been the conduit for the Cerrillos turquoise and a cotton textile found at Spiro. Ancestral Pueblo peoples were part of a long-distance trade network that reached Mesoamerica.

This may have been how an obsidian knife arrived at Spiro, the only concrete link between Mississippian peoples and

ABOVE: Unknown Late Mississippian Artist, Mace, ca. 1200–1300, chipped stone, Craig Mound, Spiro Mounds, 20 × 5 1/2 in. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 20/7099.

BELOW: Unknown Caddoan Artist, Tripod Vessel, ca. 1200–1500, hand-coiled clay, Le Flore County, Oklahoma, 13 1/3 × 7 in. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 20/742.

22. April K. Sievert with J. Daniel Rogers, “Artifacts from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma,” Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 49 (2011), 119–120.

23. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 32.

24. Richard R. Drass, email message to author, May 4, 2017; Richard R. Drass, “Washita River Phase,” Southern Plains Village Complexes in Oklahoma, 2001, web.

25. John H. Blitz, “New Perspectives in Mississippian Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Research 18, no. 1 (March 2010): 14.

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Jeri Redcorn (Caddo-Potawatomi), Bell Dance Red, hand-coiled pot. Image courtesy of the artist.

Mesoamerica.25 Spiro symbolism is often mistaken for Mesoamerican. While most archaeologists today reject the idea of Mesoamerican influence at Spiro, archaeologists of the 1930s and 1940s believed Mississippian iconography came from Mesoamerica. Maize and tobacco both traveled northward from precontact Mexico, and ceremonies and stories might have accompanied these lifechanging crops. Anthropologist Robert Hall (Mohican-Menominee-Odawa) reframed the debate: “As impressive as the cosmologies of Mesoamerica were, they nevertheless emerged from a background ultimately once shared by all [N]ative Americans of their day, often cross-fertilized as ideas diffused from area to area.”26 Perhaps the spiritual

traditions of the Southeast, Mesoamerica, and other regions of the Americas share a common source.

Cultural Affiliation WHO BUILT SPIRO MOUNDS? Archaeologists use terms like Arkansas Valley Caddoan and Northern Caddoan.27 In truth, we don’t know what most precontact tribes called themselves. Four contemporary groups are possible candidates as the descendants of Spiro culture: the Caddo, Kitsai, Wichita, and Tunica.

Arkansas archaeologist Frank Schambach suggests the Tunica are the descendants of Spiro culture,28 but his hypothesis has not gained traction among his peers.29 Instead, most agree

that the residents of Spiro were Caddoanspeaking people. The Caddoan language family includes Arikara, Caddo, Kitsai, Pawnee, and Wichita. Some archaeologists believe that the Kitsai,30 Wichita,31 and Caddo are the most likely descendants of the people at Spiro, and the term Caddoan includes them all.

The Kitsai spoke a language distinct from either Wichita or Caddo. Historic Kitsai homes along the Grand River in northeastern Oklahoma share similarities to residences at Spiro. At different times, Kitsai families lived among both the Caddo and Wichita. The sixth and seventh songs of the Caddo turkey dance cycle are sung in Kitsai.32 Today, Kitsai descendants are part of both the Wichita and Caddo.

Neither the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes nor the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma is a single, homogeneous ethnic group. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes include the Wichita, Waco, Keechi (Kitsai), and Tawakoni, among others. The Caddo Nation is a confederacy of at least 25 tribes. The three major Caddo groups were the Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches, which were composed of smaller groups.

“The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Caddo Nation both consider Spiro a site that is sacred, and they trace their ancestry back to the communities that were involved with Spiro,” explains Sabo. “From an archaeological perspective, we have difficulty establishing firm links between most Mississippian period groups and the historic tribes … because of the extensive disruptions and reorganizations that took place between 1500 and 1700.” Diseases introduced from Europe killed a majority of Native Americans, and warfare and the Indian slave trade disrupted and depopulated tribes further. Sabo further explains, “Especially in the Southeast, there was a dramatic transformation of the cultural landscape, and during that period, a lot of communities amalgamated. They don’t

26. Robert L. Hall, An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 162.

27. James A. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 28.

28. Frank F. Schambach, “Some New Interpretations of Spiroan Culture History,” Archaeology of Eastern North America: Papers in Honor of Stephen Williams, Archaeological Report 25 (1993): 187–230.

29. For a spirited response of Schambach’s Tunica hypothesis, read J. Daniel Rogers, “A Perspective on Arkansas River Basin and Ozark Highland Prehistory,” Caddoan Archaeology 2, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 9–13.

30. Charles L. Rohrbaugh, Spiro and Fort Coffee Phases: Changing Cultural Complexes of the Caddoan Area (doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982), 238–239.

31. Don G. Wyckoff, Caddoan Adaptive Strategies in the Arkansas Basin, Eastern Oklahoma (doctoral dissertation, Washington State University, 1980), 534.

32. Newkumet and Meredith, Hasinai, 102.

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have direct ancestry to any one particular group but rather drew ancestors from a number of groups.”

Ceramic artist Chase Earles explains how Caddos dealt with neighboring tribes: “The only way you could be by our homeland is some of your people come and live in our village and have a family. And we had to have some of our people go to your village and have a family. That way we are bonded by kinship, so we are friends, allies; taysha is what they call it.

The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) established procedures for federally funded institutions to inventory and potentially repatriate Indigenous human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and items of cultural patrimony.

The law forced museums to work with tribes and gave tribes a legal voice in the handling of this material.

As required by NAGPRA, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History met with Wichita and Caddo leaders in 1996. When the museum proposed displaying Spiro artifacts in a permanent exhibit, both tribes pointed out these were grave goods and sacred.

Joe Watkins (Choctaw) wrote that former Caddo chairman Vernon Hunter “felt that the artefacts demonstrated the high level of accomplishment of the Caddo Tribe in the past, and could be a source of pride to contemporary tribal members, and should be proudly displayed in the Caddo Tribe’s Cultural Heritage Center near Binger, Oklahoma.”33 Gary McAdams, former Wichita president, believed “the artefacts were not meant to be in a museum display but were meant to be buried away from the sight of individuals who had no right to view them.”34 “Passage of NAGPRA created the opportunity for many Native community members to visit the collections where the cultural objects of our ancestors are held,” writes Stacey Halfmoon (CaddoDelaware-Choctaw), who served in the Caddo Nation’s NAGPRA office.

“The experience is hard to define and highly personal for each person who has had this opportunity. Even when

Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), K’ah-un K’ah (Duck Bottle), 2016, incised, hand-coiled, pit-fired Red River clay with shell temper, 15 × 14 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

‘cultural affiliation’ is not completely clear according to the sciences, the connection is powerful and undeniable.35 “To hold a beautiful object that was molded by the hands of your ancestors—stunning pieces that you had never even known existed—evokes a fierce pride and a disorienting frustration. A frustration at having been denied this heritage,” Halfmoon writes. “Patterns and symbols perhaps foreign to us now but still sending out their message. I would dream of these symbols and patterns for years after seeing them. It felt like a foreign language that I desperately wanted to learn and translate, so that I could understand what was important to my ancestors.”

Halfmoon explains that tribes have to study the academic literature and consult their own oral history and elders. “Do we rebury? What about the

associated or unassociated funerary objects? Different groups within one tribe may have different opinions on these matters, naturally.… Tribes don’t always have immediate answers nor do they always have the capacity to answer these important questions quickly. In my experience, when approaching issues this sensitive, with implications for future generations and cultural traditions, you don’t rush.”

Elizabeth Horton, a paleoethnobotanist and archaeologist at Toltec Mounds, echoes Halfmoon’s sentiments. “Because these collections are considered sacred materials by the Caddo Nation and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes,” Horton writes, “I have both a professional scientific and basic ethical responsibility to get the science right, while at the same time being attentive to the needs and wishes of the descendant communities.”36

33. Joe Watkins, “Artefactual Awareness: Spiro Mounds, Grave Goods and Politics,” in The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice, Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert, and Paul Turnbull, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 155.

34. Ibid.

35. All Stacey Halfmoon quotes from email message to author, May 6, 2017.

36. Elizabeth Temple Horton, email message to author, May 8, 2017.

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The Artwork THE ART OBJECTS FROM SPIRO have incredible research potential. Spiro basketry includes a series of doublewoven, twill-plaited, rivercane baskets.

Complex designs with red and brown splints were woven into the lids, unique to each basket. Horton wants to research what dyes were used and determine the geographical origin of the rivercane. Her target region is “from the western portion of the Arkansas River Valley east to the Mississippi River Valley and from the Red River Valley north to the Missouri River.”

She writes, “Some of these are almost certainly local to the Spiro area itself.”

Having studied basket fragments, Horton shared her knowledge of precontact weaving with Rose Drake (Cherokee Nation), a basket weaver from Missouri, who in turn led workshops with Wichita and Caddo students. Drake’s dream is to restore the meticulous basketry traditions of Spiro and the Ozark Highlands to the descendants of these cultures.

Gary McAdams invited Drake and her fellow members of the Oklahoma Native American Basketweavers Association (ONABA) to the Wichita

ABOVE: Rose Drake (Cherokee Nation), Spiro-style Basket (detail), 2017, commercial cane.

BELOW: Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo-Delaware), Unending, 2016, commercial cane, 5 × 5 × 3 in.

Photo: Yonavea Hawkins. Both images courtesy of the artists.

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Tribal Complex to teach a workshop.

Fourteen students learned how to weave small mats with a twill design from the base of a Spiro tray. Drake taught a second, more intensive workshop with three Wichita students. “They were to then teach other members of their tribe.”

Most Spiro basketry is double woven with a diagonal weave, which demonstrates the weavers’ sophisticated mathematical knowledge. “The problem with the Spiro Mounds baskets is that they were woven by master weavers,” writes Drake. “These baskets were meant to hold gifts to the gods.”

The bundles and scraps of cloth discovered at Spiro may not look impressive but are likely the most significant finds at Spiro. Cordage and cloth were fundamental to life in precontact times, but so little has survived to the present.

Spiro lace captivated Dennis Peterson as a youth. Etowah Mounds in Georgia and the Stone site in Tennessee both have evidence of precontact lace, but only impressions of it in stone and pottery remain. Only at Spiro did remnants of the lace—possibly made from milkweed fibers—survive. Through remnants, researchers can learn what materials were used to make cloth and what colors they were dyed.

Textiles from the nearby Ozark Highlands also survived, and Horton has studied and compared those to the textiles at Spiro. Cloth was used to make items such as pouches and storage bags, wrapping, shrouds, skirts, shawls or matchcoats, breechcloths, sashes, headbands, fishing nets, and shoes.

Slippers and sandals were made from Eryngium yuccifolium, commonly known as rattlesnake master. Portraits of people and immortals in copper, ceramics, shell, stone, and pictographs offer further clues of how textiles were used in clothing and adornment.

Penelope B. Drooker, curator of anthropology emerita at the New York State Museum, writes that “types of pliable fabrics besides those mentioned include very elaborate openwork designs similar to European bobbin lace, made with white or natural plant-fiber yarns.” She also describes “twined tapestry, in which different-colored wefts are used to build up mosaic-like designs, which is known

only from Spiro.…” Patterns were also painted or resist-dyed onto woven cloth.

Fabrics came from plant and animal sources, such as pawpaw, beargrass, perhaps milkweed and false nettle, rabbit, bison, and feathers. “Some of the fabrics are really complex, and others are very simple. We have fabrics that are woven with feathers in them incorporated inside the weaving process,” explains Dennis Peterson. Hybrid yarns were handspun from vegetal fibers and rabbit fur or the soft turkey, swan, or goose.

Few contemporary artists use precontact materials. Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw-Choctaw) has experimented with bison fur found not only at Spiro but also throughout the Southeast.

She taught workshops on twining pouches with bison fur. In 2000, Wheeler studied textiles in the Smithsonian’s collections, including Spiro cloth. She had no intention of weaving historical replications but rather entirely new pieces inspired by the precontact cloth.

Wheeler made a man’s kilt inspired by resist-dyed Spiro fabric in the National Museum of Natural History Museum. “There’s a rock drawing of kilts on men, and they’ve got circles all over them,” says Wheeler. A fragment of Spiro twined tapestry inspired another piece.

“I knew it was going to be a Minco cape, because I saw so many capes in the illustrations from Mississippians,” Wheeler says. “I fell in love with that fragment and imagined it on the back of a cape,” says Wheeler. She has never collaborated with an archaeologist before but would relish the opportunity.

Of the ceramics at Spiro, most are Williams plainware and probably locally made. More ornate pottery resembled that from Toltec Mounds and Red River Caddo sites. In the 1930s, the ancient art form of Caddo pottery died out completely, not to be revived until Jeri Redcorn (Caddo-Potawatomi) began experimenting with clay in the 1990s. She saw Caddo pottery for the first time at the Museum of the Red River. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she said, and immediately thought that it could be revived.

With no Internet, Redcorn visited libraries and museum collections and talked to archaeologists and ceramic artists. “It really meant a lot to me that someone should do this.”

Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw-Choctaw), Minco Cape, loomed-woven flax, worn in the play Lowak Shoppalá. Image courtesy of the artist.

Redcorn took some her of early pottery to the Caddo Conference in Austin. “The archaeologists were just ecstatic that someone Caddo was making Caddo pottery.” In 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama displayed one of Redcorn’s pots at the White House. Today Jeri Redcorn’s pottery is in the permanent collection at Spiro Mounds.

After organizing her own ceramics classes, she thought, “If any Caddo comes to me and asks, I’ll help them along, and then Chase came along, so I was just so happy. And then the next year his father and his brother.” Chase Earles is a

ceramic artist, his brother, Chad Earles, is a painter and graphic designer, and their father, Wayne Earles, is a stone sculptor.

“They’re pretty amazing,” says Redcorn.

“My work that I do … is made in that ancient way, so I literally go down to the Red River and dig the dirt,” says Chase Earles. “I dove headfirst into the complete history of our tribe. I studied and talked to so many of our elders and dug up so many of our elders’ records, learned the songs, learned the dances, and participated in reviving the language.”

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TOP: Candice Byrd (Quapaw-OsageCherokee), Gorget, 2015, incised shell. First gorget made by artist.

BOTTOM: Candice Byrd (Quapaw-OsageCherokee), Gorget, 2016, incised shell, hide thong. Images courtesy of the artist.

to harvest clay from Caddo homelands, how to hand-process it, and how to fire it in pits. The Caddo clay doesn’t accept colored slips well, so Earles creates designs by incising them into the pot’s surface. While the nature of the clay doesn’t lend itself to the finely polished finish, the pottery is astonishingly thin and lightweight.

“People approach me about Spiro.

I know my work is connected to it, but I also believe strictly in not copying Spiro stuff blatantly. I just don’t use anything except for the turkeys, the snakes, and the spirals, because I know what those are.

I can use those respectfully, and I know what they mean.”

Even utilitarian lithics at Spiro have aesthetic appeal, with their colors and graceful shapes. Projectile points were chipped from chert, jasper, quartz crystal, and novaculite. Elaborate maces, too fragile to use as weapons and thought to be ceremonial, are often portrayed

in shell art. Other lithic tools include boatstones used as atlatl weights. Stone was carved into fine beads, earspools, pendants, gorgets, T-shaped tobacco pipes, and one chunkey stone.

Effigy pipes representing female and male figures carved from Missouri flint clay rank among the most famous works from Spiro. “The large ceremonial pipes were likely not owned by individuals and might have been used for hundreds of years,” said Peterson. “These are not trade items. These are things that are very specific ceremonial items.” The pipes have been dated from 1100 to 1200, so would have been antiquities when they were interred.

Wayne Tay Sha Earles is a talented stone carver. He primarily engraves his stonework with Caddo pottery designs and also carves boatstones, maces, and other cultural items. He carefully considers the ethical implications of working with Spiro forms. “I think that if there were present-day Spiro people, they would probably not want the grave goods messed with nor any sacred items,” he writes, “but I believe they would want the world to see and enjoy their wonderful art. So, I do this in my art that is inspired from Spiro art, which I have seen in books and museums.”

Wooden arrows, atlatls, and bows have not survived to present day but played an important role in Spiro lifeways. Jeri Redcorn’s brother Phil Cross (Caddo-Potawatomi) makes Caddo bois d’arc bows. Cross, the Caddo Nation tribal historical preservation officer, also constructs Caddo houses: rectangular, wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof houses, similar to those at Spiro, and circular, beehive-shaped grass houses.

Cedar was the material of choice for woodcarving at Spiro. The National Museum of the American Indian holds a haunting cedar carving of a human face with shell inlays for eyes and mouth and deer antlers emerging from its head.

Wood was also carved into human figures, effigy bowls, boxes, and earspools.

A pair of earspools portrays either canines with exaggerated snouts and long tongues hanging out. Many wooden items were once covered with copper foil.

Several items in Craig Mound

37. Brown, “Spiro Reconsidered,” 117.

38. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 20.

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were once covered in copper, which helped with their preservation. Copper was made into wire, pins, rolled into beads, or embossed into repoussé plates.

Most of the copper came from the Great Lakes, but Peterson says some come from Georgia. “They’ve documented what seems to be a copper workshop at Cahokia,” says Sabo, and Cahokia may have exported the copper plates early in the Mississippian period. Lightweight and small, they were excellent ways to transport symbols to distant communities such as Spiro.

Spiro Mounds boasts the greatest concentration of precontact shell engraving in what is now the United States. “The number of distinct engraved marine shell cups on record from Spiro’s central mound feature is more than 100 times the total known from all contemporary centers,” writes Brown.37 “The Craig material not only has unique stylistic characteristics, but the subject matter is very distinctive. There’s imagery on some of the Spiro engraved shell that’s plausibly interpreted as scenes from the narrative traditions of the time,” says Sabo. “Several of us are trying to systematically look at the whole corpus of shell art imagery, paying attention to how some of that imagery occurs on other kinds of artist media in other genres, like in rock art, for example.”

Philip Phillips defined two periods of shell engraving: Craig Style, possibly local and more numerous, and “the other, more foundational one, the Braden style … an exotic introduction from Cahokia and the Mississippi Valley region.”38 “Some of the engraved shell that we find at Spiro also reflects the classic Braden style,” agrees Sabo. “The material was probably made at Cahokia, but the problem that we have is figuring out exactly where things were made, and, the same is true with the Craig style engraved shell at Spiro. It’s a regionally distinctive style, so it’s at home in the Spiro area, but we haven’t found any workshops where the shell was produced.”

Cahokia is widely regarded as being settled by ancestors of Dhegiha Siouan people. “The Osages, in particular, and Quapaws as well, feel very strongly that they can trace their ancestry back to

Cahokia. Some archaeologists working there will hedge that, and for good reason,” says Sabo, since conclusions aren’t certain. “But one of the important lines of consensus among many archaeologists is that Cahokia does represent a pre-Columbian manifestation that was ancestral to later Dhegiha Siouan peoples.” These include Omaha, Ponca, and Kaw tribes.

Shell engraving is currently undergoing a revival. Emerging shell carver Candice Byrd (Quapaw-OsageCherokee) studies under Knokovtee Scott (Muscogee-Cherokee). Byrd says Scott’s advice has been “never copy another artist’s work, no matter how long they’ve been dead. Make the designs your own.”39

Ethics VISITORS TO THE SPIRO MOUNDS Archaeological Center are often disappointed that replicas, not originals, are on display. Several have been stolen from institutions in the past. Original baskets and fabrics are usually just scraps, so replicas suggest what pieces looked like when new. Historical replicas are useful.

Incredible potential lies in studying the materials and techniques of art at Spiro for Native artists today. There would be nothing but support for any artist willing to twine textiles from pawpaw fibers.

Using the designs from Spiro is another consideration. Some designs, such as the forked eye motif or the Sun-Circle motif, were used throughout the Eastern Woodlands centuries before Spiro and continued into historic times.

Other specialized designs are not found anywhere else other than Spiro.40 While anyone, Native or non-Native, can speculate the meaning of the symbolism through the lens of their own cultures, as 21st-century people, we do not understand what these symbols meant to the people who made them. We do know they were profoundly sacred.

Native artists should strive to show these symbols and objects the respect they held to the cultures that made them.

“These shell artifacts that all of the

Wayne Tay Sha Earles (Caddo), P’-i-ta-u-ni-wan’-ha (To have power from), monolithic axe.

Photo: Wayne Tay Sha Earles (Caddo). Image courtesy of the artist.

graphics come from are ancient. They are from a time and a people that are so different then now,” says Chase Earles.

“Things changed so violently, especially in the Southeast, that those lines broke down. We get splinters of knowledge.

“I personally don’t use symbols out of these books much anymore,” Earles says. Students worldwide learn by copying earlier masters, but these are usually exercises not finished art, in the journey to find their own voice. “I did use a lot of the symbols thinking, ‘Oh this is our people …’ Then you learn where it comes from and [it] might not be yours.

It might be from a different mound.”

Respect for the sacredness of the symbols gives him pause. “Some of these things are very sacred, some of these things are from burials, and some of these things are sensitive. If you’re going to present yourself as a Native American artist, you are representing your tribe. That is your culture.”

Problems arise when artists claim particular symbols as being from their own tribe when they are not. Tribes, more than any other group, should understand that these images are sacred and should be respected. With so much misinformation about pre-Columbian cultures, Native peoples should hold each other up to higher standards of providing accurate information about their past.

Conclusion MORE THAN 100,000 SPIRO OBJECTS have ended up in at least 65 different museums. The National Museum of Natural History, Gilcrease Museum, and Sam Noble Museum all have major Spiro collections.

“Here at the University of Arkansas, we had a visiting archaeologist from Germany. When he got here, the first thing he wanted to do was go visit Spiro,” says Sabo.

As Spiro’s single employee, Peterson creates programming, such as the kite festival and solstice tours. “It’s like he does everything he can to keep it going,” says Earles, “because so many people just don’t care about that place.”

Spiro has always been underfunded, but the State of Oklahoma faces increasing budget shortfalls and has sold and closed state parks. Anyone interested in contributing to the maintenance of Spiro Mounds or getting more involved can join the Oklahoma Historical Society or the Spiro Mound Development Association, the center’s local friends’ group. For membership information or other inquiries, email Dennis Peterson at spiro@okhistory.org. Contributions can be made to the Oklahoma Historical Society with a note saying funds should go toward Spiro Mounds.

OKHISTORY.ORG/SITES/SPIROMOUNDS

39. Candice Byrd, email message to author, May 8, 2017.

40. Brown, The Spiro Ceremonial Center, 20.

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GUAMAN POMA AND THE FIRST NEW CHRONICLE AND GOOD GOVERNMENT After four centuries, the revealing text and abundant illustrations of a long-lost manuscript shed new light on Indigenous perspectives of Peruvian history.

By Annick Benavides

I

N 1616, FELIPE GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA traveled to Lima, the capital city of colonial Peru, to dispatch a lengthy letter to King Phillip III of Spain. Guaman Poma was born to Indigenous parents shortly after Francisco Pizarro violently disrupted the Inca Empire. He witnessed rapid political and social transformation in the Andean world as a result of Spanish colonization and had much to report about this experience. Guaman Poma intended for his letter to journey from Lima to Madrid, a long voyage that involved perilous travel across the Atlantic Ocean and Iberia.

Who transported this carefully transcribed and illustrated letter? We don’t know. What is almost certain, though, is that it never arrived in the hands of Phillip III. Guaman Poma’s masterpiece letter, entitled El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno [The First New Chronicle and Good Government], vanished from the historical record.

Three hundred years later, Professor Richard A. Pietschmann happened upon a striking manuscript at the Royal Library of Denmark. The handwritten manuscript presented an Indigenous account of the Inca Empire and Spanish conquest of Peru. What’s more, it expressed outrage over Spanish colonial administration and passionately advocated for the well-being of Indigenous Andeans.

Interspersed throughout the manuscript were hundreds of full-page illustrations. It was a manuscript that forevermore transformed the study of Andean culture. It was Felipe Guaman Poma’s letter to the King of Spain.

Nueva corónica i buen gobierno is a fantastic and rare resource. Guaman Poma’s line drawings are rich in detail and made with considerable delicacy. Although the text is primarily in Spanish, it features frequent and at times

lengthy components in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. The bilingual components in the manuscript suggest Guaman Poma spoke several dialects of Quechua as well as the Native language Aymara. References in the text and illustrations demonstrate that he was familiar with important European books and prints. Guaman Poma, for good reason, has come to represent the eloquent, colonial, Indigenous voice.

Within Guaman Poma’s manuscript, historians and anthropologists have found vital information pertaining to the ancient Inca world. It explains Inca administrative organization and census procedures found nowhere else.

It also advocates for the protection of communal assets known as sapçi in Quechua, a word meaning “what belongs to everyone” (fig. 1). This includes agricultural land, the herding sector for llamas and alpacas, and storehouses.

Under the Spanish colonial system, communal lands were marked off and possessed by those with power at accelerating rates. Guaman Poma argues incessantly against practices that undermined sapçi resources for Natives, such as compulsory labor in mines, forced service to priests, state corruption, drinking, and sexual abuse.1 In contrast, Guaman Poma indicates that Inca rulers respected communal sapçi. He illustrates an Inca ruler and an accountant conversing among sapçi storehouses (fig. 2).

The accountant is using a quipu, a knotted string device used to register information in the Andes. The Incas used it to record numerical data and, some argue, narrative stories. It is challenging to fully grasp their significance today. Guaman Poma’s drawings of quipu in use are among his most famous illustrations.

1. For an ethnographic analysis regarding Guaman Poma and contemporary Andean sapçi, see Frank Salomon, “Guaman Poma’s Sapçi in Ethnographic Vision” in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds in Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica, ed. Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015): 335–396.

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ABOVE, FIGURE 1: Marleny Puquio Muñua (Peruvian, Mestiza), Agricultural Land of the Lucanas Province, 2015, photograph, Peru.

Image courtesy of the artist.

RIGHT, FIGURE 2: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540– 1616), Drawing 132, Storehouses of the Inca, qullqa [p. 337], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, 1615, book illustration, ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal Library of Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

Guaman Poma discusses a myriad of Inca ceremonies in the manuscript. He explains the Inti Raymi festival with lyrical virtuosity. Inti Raymi was the Inca’s winter solstice festival performed in honor of the sun deity Inti. The Inti Raymi festival was prohibited by the Spanish during Guaman Poma’s lifetime, but it experienced a mid-20th-century rebirth and has been performed in a modernized fashion in Peru every year since 1944. Guaman Poma’s drawing of Inti Raymi presents the Inca singing a poem of despairing love to a llama, soon to be sacrificed, in the main ceremonial square in Cuzco (fig. 3). Poems such as this one are known as Warikza arawi in Quechua: songs of thanks, songs about the deeds of others, or songs about absent lovers. The poetic sequence constructs for posterity a descriptive guide for performing Inti Raymi. The Warikza arawi recorded by Guaman Poma resemble language used by contemporary Quechua speakers when describing ritualized performances.2 2. For more information regarding Guaman Poma’s poetic presentation of Inti Raymi, see Bruce Mannheim, “What Kind of Text is Guaman Poma’s Warikza Arawi?” in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds in Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica, ed. Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015): 211–232.

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FIGURE 3: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540–1616), Drawing 124, Feast of the Inkas: wariqsa, dance; arawi, song of the Inka. He sings with his red llama [p. 320], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, 1615, ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal Library of Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

All the drawings in the manuscript were produced with the same dark ink used for writing the text. As an artist, Guaman Poma preferred contour lines to cross-hatching and shading. This enforced continuity between the illustrated line and the written line. He either drew the illustrations before he filled in the pages with text or produced image and text simultaneously. His process contrasts with the 16th-century tendency to write the words first and then go back and insert images into spaces left blank. The coherence of his artistic endeavor is further secured by Guaman Poma’s inclusion of text, such as dialogue or labels, in every drawing. All this seamlessly integrates drawing and narrative.3 The dynamic wealth of information contained in the drawings of the manuscript has attracted much attention. The drawings were created using European visual templates, but they were also sites where Guaman Poma explored Indigenous worldviews. Most often the drawings

complement the text, further developing or emphasizing certain points. But occasionally the drawings complicate or modify a message found in the text. With drawing, Guaman Poma was able to express himself in ways unavailable with the written word. The illustrations interact with the written content, activating both Indigenous and European perceptions. This visual interplay demands nuanced attention from readers.

Certain formatting conventions evidence Guaman Poma’s intention for the manuscript to be published and widely distributed. These conventions include running titles placed across the page to fit a letterpress, modern pagination, and catchwords to ensure proper sequencing during the printing process. Though the formal addressee is the King of Spain, the text is addressed to other people as well. In certain sections, Guaman Poma clearly addresses the Indigenous people. In these sections he will often use Native phrases that would have been inaccessible to the Spanish monolingual reader. For example, he includes in the chapter on the Inca queens a “Prologue for the Andean Reader.” He addresses these Andean readers in Quechua as: “coya, capac uarmi, curaca uarmi.” The titles for these Indigenous readers remain unintelligible for those who do not know Quechua. These instances that resist translation prove Guaman Poma aspired for his work to be accessed by readers in Spain and Native Peru.4 Guaman Poma, as author, is a prominent character in the manuscript. His is the narrator’s voice. The information he provides was acquired through personal experience and during interviews with Native leaders (fig. 4). The chapter on Inca history features a self-portrait of the author interviewing Native informants who stand around him.

The informants’ headgear indicates the diversity of places they hail from in the Andean world. Communication between Guaman Poma and his informants is implied by their hand gestures.

Another drawing illustrates the presentation of this manuscript to the Spanish king by the author himself (fig. 5).

The self-portrait situates the author in conversation with King Phillip III in Madrid. The author kneels before the king who sits on a throne. Guaman Poma holds open his manuscript with his left hand and converses with the king with his right hand. This image is titled “The author Ayala” presents his Corónica to Philip III, King of Spain. Guaman Poma takes on the influential role of counselor to the king. Often this drawing is called an “imaginary” portrait because Guaman Poma never traveled to Madrid to speak personally with the king. But other Indigenous people did travel across the Atlantic to the court in Madrid to present their petitions to the crown. Others, who could not travel, such as Guaman Poma, wrote to the king personally. They

3. For a discussion of Guaman Poma’s unification of writing and drawing as an Indigenous expression, see Tom Cummins, “The Uncomfortable Image: Pictures and Words in the Nueva corónica i buen gobierno” in Guaman Poma de Ayala: The Colonial Art of an Andean Author, ed. Rolena Adorno and Mercedes López-Baralt (New York: Americas Society, 1992): 46–59.

4. Gregory Khaimovich, “In Search of the Background for the Bilingualism of El primer corónica y buen gobierno” in Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds in Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica, ed. Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), 189–210.

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ensembles for the characters in his manuscript. His drawings informed him of their grievances and solicited specific exhibit individualized tunics, shawls, and accessories worn protections and privileges.

Guaman Poma was born shortly after the Spanish inva- by all members of society during the Inca and colonial sion, most likely near the mountain highlands of Ayacucho. times. Some of the patterns he drew on Inca tunics have He traveled around Peru as an assistant to a church extir- been located on Inca textiles in archaeological contexts. One pattern was particularly pator of idolatry, as a important to the author: civil functionary in land the one on the tunics transactions, and as intérHis drawings exhibit individualized worn by his grandfather, prete de la corte (court tunics, shawls, and accessories worn his father, and himself. interpreter) for Indigenous The distinctive design people. His name has been by all members of society during the possibly represents a in several legal documents Inca and colonial times. local flower or tassels, from Ayacucho dating or mimics ermine. In back to the 1590s. Indeed, repeating this distinctive his knowledge of the pattern, Guaman Poma accentuates the connection with Spanish juridical system was so intimate that he includes correctly worded legal testaments and appeals in his his patrilineal ancestors. With this visual relationship, the drawings and prose. Later in life he settled in the Lucanas leadership talents and military accomplishments of father Province, outside Ayacucho (fig. 6). About half of the popu- and grandfather coalesce in the figure of the author.

The author’s mother also appears in the manuscript. lation of present-day Lucanas speaks Quechua or Aymara as While she does not sport the same pattern on her clothing their first language. Spanish is the other primary language.

Guaman Poma’s father was of Native nobility, of the Yarovilca lineage in Lucanas. The Spanish appointed Guaman Poma to the position of administrator of the province of Lucanas, recognizing his status as an hereditary lord. The author writes frequently of the accomplishments of his father in the manuscript. He presents him as a military ally to the Spanish during the invasion. He claims his father, as an emissary for the Inca, immediately recognized the authority of Francisco Pizarro in Peru. This rhetorical maneuver, though seemingly counterintuitive, functioned to make the Spanish occupation of Peru illegitimate. Because the Natives recognized the Spanish, Guaman Poma argues, there was no justifiable conquest. The Spanish authorities had no right to seize land and take sovereign control over Indigenous people.

The manuscript presents Guaman Poma’s grandfather, Guaman Chaua, as an important leader during the time of the Inca (fig. 7). He visually portrays his grandfather wearing a magnificent plumed headdress and special regional accessories, gripping a weapon in each hand. On the same page, Guaman Poma drew a heraldic coat of arms. The Spanish crown granted coats of arms to Indigenous leaders during the colonial era in recognition of their noble ancestry or as recompense for their support during the invasion.

Guaman Poma designed an unofficial coat of arms for his grandfather, which he adopted for himself in a self-portrait on the first page of the manuscript. This coat of arms is composed of distinctively Indigenous symbols: a falcon, a puma, and weapons used by Native forefathers. The two FIGURE 4: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540–1616), Drawing 146, Guaman Poma says, “But, tell me,” as he inquires about the animals create a pictorial likeness of the two things to which history of ancient Peru [p. 368], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, the author’s name refers to in Quechua: Guaman [Falcon] 1615, ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal and Poma [Puma].

Library of Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

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as the male members of appears as a plaintiff the family, she does appear suing the Chachapoya, a Through his mother, Guaman Poma dressed in fine Inca-style Native people from the claims descent from the powerful attire. Through his mother, Amazonian borderlands Guaman Poma claims living in the Ayacucho Inca rulers of Cuzco. descent from the powerful region, for lands he Inca rulers of Cuzco. declares belonged to him When he was nearly finished with the manuscript, through ancestry. To bolster his legal claim, he presented Guaman Poma went back through the text and changed as evidence two line-drawing portraits of his ancestors and his own title of “capac,” which means “principal lord,” and a hand-drawn map of the Ayacucho region. The extent replaced it with “capac apo,” which means “prince.” During to which a colonial Indigenous person could lay claim this process he also added labels to the family portraits, to ancestral land is debated, considering the widespread inserting grandiose titles for himself, his mother, his father, practice of sharing sapçi land before the Spanish invasion. his uncle, and his grandfather. Why did he do this? It’s not The lands Guaman Poma claimed as “ancestral” may have entirely clear, but it may relate to the fact that by the time he been sapçi or belonged to the Inca state.5 Nevertheless, completed his letter to the King of Spain, he felt compelled to we find Guaman Poma mobilizing art and his Indigenous reestablish his reputation after a disastrous legal dispute. ancestry as legal tools to advance in the colonial world.

This dispute was uncovered in the 20th century, After a decade of litigation, the lands in dispute were when a document owned by the Prado-Tello family of declared to be the lawful property of the Chachapoya Peru was published. In this legal document, Guaman Poma people. Guaman Poma’s claim to the land was deemed false.

Additionally, a criminal sentence was imposed on him: 200 lashes and exile from Ayacucho for two years. Although we are not sure if Guaman Poma had been working on his letter to King Phillip III before he received this criminal sentence, the disadvantageous legal dispute probably induced his creative endeavors. His communication with the king demonstrates an effort to establish his noble ethnic identity and to recuperate his reputation.

That the manuscript involves a self-interested project should not detract from Guaman Poma’s eloquent resistance to colonial administration. The manuscript forcefully denounces the people and practices that imposed hardships on Indigenous peoples. The author is enraged by the excessive tribute demands placed on the Native Andeans by the Spanish state. He documents cases where the greed and sins of the Spanish harmed vulnerable Indigenous populations. He also notes that corruption caused hospitals and legal systems to falter. Guaman Poma virulently attacks Catholic priests, a courageous act in the heavily Roman Catholic colonial world. He depicts priests forcing Natives to work for them or perform sexual favors. Priests are shown abusing Native people during confession. His drawings portray several Indigenous Andeans, including the elderly and children, as victims of beatings inflicted by priests.

One villainous priest is singled out in particular: Martín de Murúa (fig. 8). Murúa was a Spanish Basque man who worked as a Mercedarian priest in Peru. While he lived in Peru, Murúa began preparing an illustrated book about the history of the Inca Empire. Guaman Poma worked with Murúa. He provided information as a Native informant FIGURE 5: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540–1616), Drawing 343, “The author Ayala” presents his Corónica to Philip III, and created numerous illustrations for Murúa’s book.

King of Spain [p .975], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, 1615, Guaman Poma was definitely inspired by Murúa’s project. ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal Library of His manuscript shares intimate correspondences with the Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

5. This hypothesis is articulated eloquently in this essay by José Carlos de La Puente Luna, “Cuando el «punto de vista nativo» no es el punto de vista de los nativos: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala y la apropiación de tierras en el Perú colonial,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 37, no. 1 (2008): 123–49.

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FIGURE 6: Fernando Espinoza (Peruvian, Mestizo), Plaza de Armas of Ishua, in the Lucanas Province, ca. 2010, photograph. Image courtesy of the Municipality of Ishua, Lucanas, Peru.

book produced by Murúa. On occasion, he copied texts or images almost verbatim from Murúa. But, in his manuscript, Guaman Poma criticizes Murúa severely. He accuses him of abusing his parishioners so mercilessly that they were forced to run away from their homes. Guaman Poma documents Murúa’s frequent physical violence toward Indigenous people; he holds Murúa responsible for beating one Native woman to death.

While Guaman Poma is highly critical of bad priests, he enthusiastically supports Christianity. The illustrations and text emphasize the advantages for Andeans to practice piety and Christian devotion. As narrator, he creates a relationship of moral and spiritual authority compared to his readers.

The religious advice that Guaman Poma offers the audience recalls sermons published in Peru that were intended to convert Native peoples to Catholicism. Arguments against

the colonial administration of Peru, published by Dominican friars such as Bartolomé de las Casas, also influenced Guaman Poma. Members of the Dominican order share his opinion that the Spanish should return property and governing privileges to the Native lords of Peru.6 The author describes his creative manuscript as a chronicle. Chronicle texts recounted stories of encounter and conquest in the 16th-century Hispanic world. They were written in an historical and literary style. Chronicle authors, nearly all Spanish men, often attempted to convey something about the culture and history of Indigenous peoples. When Guaman Poma, as an Indigenous man, took up writing a chronicle, he was motivated in many regards by the necessity for Natives to stake their own place in this genre.

Chronicle texts often replicate the authoritative tone of legal writing. During Guaman Poma’s lifetime, Indigenous

6. Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Rolena Adorno was the first scholar to dedicate major research efforts to the textual references in the manuscript. Her seminal book on Guaman Poma is widely cited.

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FIGURE 7: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540–1616), Drawing 62, The twelfth captain, Guaman Chaua, qhapaq apu, powerful lord [p.167], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, 1615, ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal Library of Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

FIGURE 8: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Quechua, ca. 1540–1616), Drawing 258, The Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa abuses his parishioners and takes justice into his own hands [p. 661], El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, 1615, ink on paper, 5.7 × 8 in., Ayacucho, Peru, collection of the Royal Library of Denmark, Gl. kgl. S. 2232, 4º. Image courtesy of Royal Library of Denmark.

nobility titles were vied for in legal claims and counter claims. It seems as though Guaman Poma took advantage of the chronicle genre to formally request noble privileges and a coat of arms from the Spanish king. Documents created by other Indigenous lords of Peru requesting coats of arms from the king contained illustrations of the coat of arms and portraits of noble ancestors. Not coincidentally, Guaman Poma includes portraits of his noble ancestors in the manuscript and designed his family’s own prospective coat of arms. 7 Guaman Poma had every intention for the manuscript to arrive in the king’s hands. Scholars have unearthed a letter he wrote, informing King Phillip III that the manuscript was on its way. Guaman Poma likely died shortly after dispatching his masterpiece to Madrid in 1616. Somehow the manuscript found its way to the collection of the Royal Library of Denmark, where it is now carefully conserved and curated. The library has published a digital facsimile,

accessible online at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/ info/en/frontpage.htm. The eventual home of Guaman Poma’s letter suggests that a Northern European purchased the manuscript, likely as propaganda against the Spanish Empire. Whoever purchased the book likely donated the manuscript to the Royal Library of Denmark at some point.

There it remained, unknown to the academic world, until its stirring rediscovery in 1908.

One thing is for certain: Guaman Poma produced an artistic masterpiece that has been profoundly influential in the Andean world. The comprehensive reporting on ancient and colonial events is immensely valuable. The text and drawings provide a quasi-encyclopedic review of people and institutions in the Inca and Spanish Colonial world. Even though the author laments often in the text that “there is no remedy” against colonial injustices, his creative actions prove otherwise. He strove, through writing and visual representation, to transform his world.

7. Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

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HONOR & REVIVAL Cherokee National Treasures How does a tribal community safeguard its customary arts? One tribe’s solution is to officially honor its artists and traditionalists and establish a masterapprenticeship program that sustains cultural arts for generations to come.

By Mary Ellen Meredith

T

UCKED BEHIND THE SPIDER GALLERY and Kawi Café is a single-story, red sandstone WPA building in downtown Tahlequah. This is the Cherokee Arts Center, which houses the studio and office of the Cherokee National Treasures Mentoring Program. The program is the culmination of years of effort by citizens and the Cherokee Nation to allow master artists to share their skills with younger community members.

The Cherokee Nation’s mission statement asserts the tribe’s commitment to “preserving and promoting Cherokee culture.” As the nation has strengthened over the past 40 years, its ability to support cultural art forms has resulted in many programs. One such program designates master artists and other traditionalists who have excelled at their chosen media and share that knowledge with others as National Treasures. “The title National Treasure is conferred upon those citizens who have made a lifelong commitment to the Cherokee cultural legacy through the preservation and revival of traditions that are at risk of being lost from generation to generation,” states the tribe’s website.1

Mentoring Future Artists THE CHEROKEE NATIONAL TREASURES mentoring program now has its own governing committee, which hires chosen National Treasures to teach their art to two or more students for 20 class hours. Although most of the Treasures are skilled in other media, they are hired to teach in the area in which they are considered a master and for which they were honored. Treasures can also mentor more advanced students and teach them in the studio or at any other suitable space, including the master artist’s home.

1. “Cherokee Nation Honors National Treasure Recipients,” Cherokee Nation, May 6, 2011, web.

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Cherokee National Treasure Bessie Russell of Rocky Ford, Oklahoma, with a double-woven, honeysuckle basket. Photo: Jane Osti (Cherokee Nation).

Image courtesy of photographer.

In its first year, the National Treasure Mentoring Program offered classes with four different artists in their areas of expertise: Bessie Russell (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Bill Glass (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Dorothy Ice (Cherokee Nation-Keetoowah), weaving; and Knokovtee Scott (Cherokee Nation-Muscogee), shell carving. With each year, the Cherokee Nation has increased funding for the program, allowing more mentors and apprentices to be involved. Each mentor is hired for a limited amount of time at a capped salary to allow as many masters and apprentices as possible to participate in the program, but some don’t care about the pay. Jane Osti, a potter, Cherokee National Treasure, and committee chair, says, “Some of the National Treasures enjoy the experience so much that they continue to teach even when they are not paid, as they have been doing for generations.”

The program provides all necessary materials for both students and teachers. The committee is responsible for working with the masters, apprentices, and supporting staff.

Students are chosen for their aptitude and willingness to devote the time necessary to learn their chosen craft, while masters or Treasures are selected based on their availability and teaching ability.

Rebuilding Community & Culture THIS ORGANIZED, ROBUST PROGRAM is very different from the situation the Cherokee Nation found itself in when its government was essentially disbanded on the eve of Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Even though community members continued doing their artwork, they were largely unknown outside of their own communities. During the Great Depression, Cherokee actor and humanitarian Will Rogers collected hundreds of the iconic double-walled Cherokee baskets, but only because he knew a woman to whom area basket makers were willing to sell. Strangers interested in collecting Cherokee baskets were frustrated because, except for a few local markets, there was no way to reach the artists.

Occasionally the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) developed programs to encourage the production of Indigenous arts. John Ketcher, Cherokee Nation Deputy Chief from 1985 to 1995, was a weaver in the Sequoyah Indian Weavers Association and later traveled the nation to teach and encourage community artists. Ketcher was honored as a National Treasure in 2011. Cherokee arts slowly evolved from a necessary part of daily life to a commodity that provided additional income for one’s family. Groups such as the Methodist mission in Cookson, Oklahoma, traded in baskets and other Cherokee artwork as part of its ministry.

During the 20th century, historical art forms were taught at Sequoyah High School, a BIA boarding school in Tahlequah now owned and operated by the Cherokee Nation, and the school sold student pottery to raise funds.

Still, not until Cherokee Nation Principal Chief W. W. Keeler

Vivian Cottrell, Cherokee National Treasure, with a double-woven, naturally dyed cane basket, Chewey, Oklahoma. Photo: Will Chavez (Cherokee Nation). Image courtesy of photographer.

implemented a plan developed by Principle Chief J. B. Milam was there permanent support for the art and artists. In the 1960s, the Cherokee National Historical Society (CNHS) was founded as a state chartered nonprofit to preserve and promote Cherokee language, history, and culture. This began an ambitious program of construction and cultural preservation.

The first phase of the construction of Tsa-la-gi, now known as the Cherokee Heritage Center, was the replica precontact town known as the Ancient Village. For the first time in Oklahoma, Cherokee customary artists were hired to demonstrate their arts to the public in the village. This allowed and encouraged them to perfect their creations and pass that ability on to other “villagers.”

Shortly after facilities were built in 1971, the CNHS launched the annual Trail of Tears Art Show, a competitive, juried art show with classifications for basketry, ceramics, painting, graphics, sculpture, miniatures, and works with a “Trail of Tears” theme. Open to all tribes, the show allows Cherokee artists to compete and view the works of artists from other tribes and regions. In the beginning, the competitive show was exclusively about the Trail of Tears, a series of forced Indian removals of the 19th century. As the years have passed, Trail of Tears has become a category instead of the overarching theme. In 2000, the Cherokee National Historical Society created a second competitive show and SUMMER 2017 | 37

sale, Cherokee Homecoming Art Show, which showcases the work of citizens of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina, Cherokee Nation, and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.

After the Cherokee Nation ratified its 1975 constitution, the tribe stabilized and grew. The nation opened gift shops to sell Cherokee art. John Ketcher continued to seek out, identify, and promote Cherokee artists. The Ancient Village at the Cherokee Heritage Center continued to employ community artists to create Indigenous art forms, teach younger “villagers” their techniques, and share their knowledge with the public.

Martha Berry (Cherokee Nation), Sun Circle Moccasins 2, deerhide, wool, glass beads, silk ribbon, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

The Lost Arts Project & Living Treasures

BY THE 1980S, when fewer Cherokee families practiced ancestral art forms, the Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee National Historical Society continued to seek ways to recognize those artists who had continued and improved these historic arts. In 1988, the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee National Historical Society, and the Bilingual Education Center at Northeastern State University collaborated to encourage and promote traditional Cherokee arts. This coalition created the Lost Arts Project, which first sought to revive tribal fishing techniques, the game of Cherokee marbles, and the crafting of local hunting tools: frog and fish gigs (pronged hunting spears of metal, wood, or river cane), river cane blowguns, and bows and arrows.

Later, as the Lost Arts Project evolved, its members created the Living National Treasures designation to recognize “master craftsman who have not only mastered their

art but passed their knowledge on to the next generation.”2 As the award became more encompassing and as the desire increased to recognize those who had passed on, the name of the award was changed to Cherokee National Treasures.

In 1988, the award was presented for the first time to Cherokee artists Alex England for bow making, Todum Hair for gig making, Anna Sixkiller Mitchell for pottery, and Lyman Vann for bow making. Blowgun making was added in 1989. Blowguns are hollow river canes used to shoot darts, typically sharpened wood fletched with thistle down. In the 1990s, basketry, carving, traditional clothing, loom weaving, traditional foods, flint knapping, doll making, stone marble making, and turtle-shell shackle making were all added. The shackles are hollowed-out tortoise shells filled with small pebbles and strung together with leather thongs that women tie around their legs to make percussive sounds while they stomp dance. More categories were added in this century, including quilting, mask making, painting, beadwork, flute making, storytelling, metalsmithing, and stickball stick making. These are bentwood sticks, usually hickory, each with a looped end with leather netting for playing stickball, the rough Southeastern Woodland game similar to lacrosse but with very few rules. As a hallmark of adopting new technologies into tribal lifeways, the program added digital design in 2015.

When the Lost Arts Project began, Cherokee language speakers were plentiful. As time has passed, the use and knowledge of the language has rapidly declined. So, language was added as a category in 2008. The Cherokee Nation recently launched a master-apprentice language program separate from the visual arts master apprentice program, although members share information with each other.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller was the driving force behind beginning the program. Her vision was to bestow the Living Treasures designation to community artists who not only excelled in their art form but also devoted much of their lives to passing on that knowledge to others. As the Living Treasures Program developed, the process of selecting treasures evolved.

The name was changed from Living Treasures to National Treasures when the selection committee recognized that certain truly gifted, departed community members deserved to be recognized. The National Treasures themselves took over selection and management of the program and developed more objective, detailed criteria and judging processes. They expanded the criteria to include Cherokee citizens living outside the Cherokee Nation’s tribal jurisdictional area of 14 counties in northeastern Oklahoma.

While a greater pool of Cherokee people nominated candidates, the National Treasures board took charge of the determining process. They developed an evaluation system and secret paper ballots to remove personalities and politics from the process.

2. “The Lost Arts Project—1988,” Cherokee Heritage Center (brochure, Park Hill, Oklahoma, 2014), pdf.

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Arts Stewardship THE CHEROKEE NATIONAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY and the tribal government recognize the National Treasures with honoree dinners as well as art exhibits at their museum, the Cherokee Heritage Center, each year. The heritage center offers short classes in Cherokee art forms and brings teachers into public school classrooms to teach about Cherokee culture and history using hands-on projects as the focused activity for learning. The Cherokee Nation also holds an intertribal, competitive art show during the Cherokee National Holiday, a cultural gathering held every Labor Day. As Cherokee National Treasures began entering competitive shows and markets across the country, the Cherokee National Historical Society obtained a grant in 2002 to provide support for those wishing to enter distant shows by helping photograph their artwork, sharing access to computers to prepare artist statements, and teaching classes on marketing their works.

Each October, Cherokee Nation Businesses hosts the Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa in Catoosa, Oklahoma. This weekend market draws artists from many federally recognized tribes, and as a juried and judged art fair, it is increasingly recognized for the quality of the art it features and attracts collectors from across the United States.

As the tribe has been able to build casinos, health facilities, and other public centers, the council codified a practice that had been followed informally for several years. The tribal council passed the Cherokee Arts and Facilities Act of 2005 to “earmark a percentage of construction or renovation cost on all facilities built by the Cherokee Nation … to be used for historically and culturally appropriate artwork done

by Cherokee Nation citizens.”3 Currently the amount is equal to one percent of the total construction or renovation costs for all projects exceeding $500,000. These funds go toward the purchase and installation of these artworks. This allows for tribally appropriate art at the nation’s facilities and allows visitors and employees alike to become steeped in the arts of the Cherokee National Treasures and the people they have formally or informally mentored. In this way, art reaches audiences who might not visit galleries or museums.

In 2011, the nation commissioned Cherokee metalsmith and jeweler Toneh Chuleewah of Evening Shade, Oklahoma, to create official medallions. These medallions were then presented to all of the National Treasures, allowing instant recognition at art shows and other public events.

This past January, the tribe published Cherokee National Treasures: In Their Own Words, a large, hardcover book edited by Shawna Morton Cain and Pamela Jumper Thurman, PhD (both Cherokee Nation). This lavishly illustrated book is the result of five years of numerous interviews with the National Treasures or their families, and it contains

Cherokee National Treasure Knokovtee Scott of Rose, Oklahoma, engraving shell gorgets. Photo: Jane Osti (Cherokee Nation). Image courtesy of photographer.

enough history, lists, and interviews to bring together the whole National Treasures project in a comprehensive manner. It represents a herculean effort.

When the Lost Arts Project began, Indigenous art forms were passed down in communities and families. As Perry VanBuskirk recalls in his interview for the National Treasures book: My Grandpa, he said, “If somebody gives you something or teaches you something, you teach someone else.” He said, “Everything that I teach you isn’t mine. It isn’t me.

It is something that is being given and taught to me.”

Grandpa said, “All I’m doing is holding it until it is time; the time is right to pass it on to that next one that needs it or that wants it.” He said, “The biggest thing is the one who wants it.”4 As mainstream culture and the wage-economy has crept into the Cherokee Nation, our own art has suffered, but we have taken steps to protect our cultural expressions.

The Cherokee National Treasures program honors excellent community artists and lets the larger tribe understand their importance to their people. The program also showcases their artwork to an increasingly wider audience, and the mentorship program ensures younger generations will keep our tribally specific art forms alive long into the future.

3. “An Act Relating to the Preservation of Cherokee Culture at Cherokee Nation Facilities,” Council of the Cherokee Nation §2: Purpose (Legislative Research Center) (passed July 13, 2005).

4. Shawna Morton Cain and Pamela Jumper Thurman, Cherokee National Treasures: In Their Own Words (Tahlequah, Oklahoma: Cherokee Nation, 2017), 294.

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FRAME, MAT, GLASS? HOW DO YOU DECIDE? Framing flat art using the principles of design.

By Rose Marie Cutropia

F

OR MANY COLLECTORS AND ARTISTS, the frame on a work of art is an essential element of the piece as a whole. . Frame and mat, or frame alone, are chosen to complete the thematic design begun with the creation of the artwork itself. But how to decide on the elements of the frame itself? Metal or wood? Mat or no mat, and what color, what texture?

And let’s not forget the cost of framing in determining the value of the artwork.

The choices are endless, but if the eight basic design principles are followed when deciding on a frame for two-dimensional art, the outcome should be successful. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

First, find a framer with good aesthetic sense and reliable technical skills. Make them your partner in creating the most perfect setting for your art. On a recent visit to Hand Graphics Studio and Gallery in Santa Fe, Sandy Flynn offered invaluably thoughtful and creative solutions to my framing questions. Her knowledge and artistic eye made mine better at seeing how the various framing options might turn out.

Keep in mind the eight basic design elements to consider when making framing and matting decisions.

Whether used individually or in combination, these eight fundamental components of art and design can help alleviate some of the uncertainties involved in finishing your artwork. The

coordinated grouping that integrates the individual components.

All images courtesy of the author.

photographs illustrate the principles expressed by the definitions.

Balance & Contrast Balance. The arrangement of

elements so that no one part of a work overpowers or seems heavier than any other part. Think of balance as the means to link the artwork to its surroundings. Many times this is achieved by using complementary color tones—opposites on the color wheel.

Large pieces, or pieces in larger spaces, require frames and mats with more physical presence, while smaller works are best suited to more subtle framing choices.

In the photograph above, a triple mat and a burnished frame with a simple silhouette are all from the same color family. Together they form a

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Contrast. The dichotomy created when multiple themes are presented within an overall design scheme. By the same token, contrast can be used to highlight different aspects of the artwork.

With light-colored works on paper, small windows of darkercolored matting materials can create a distinctive perimeter before the finishing effect of the frame. With some dark-colored pieces, a lighter mat window or a double window with both light and dark mats can juxtapose one art attribute against another.

In the example below, a simple frame profile in a medium stain is used to distinguish a double mat of dark over light.

Together, balance and contrast can be used to illustrate an artwork’s individuality.

Rhythm. The indication of

movement by the repetition of elements.

Rhythm can make an artwork seem active. Rhythm duplicates designs from the artwork to create an energetic interchange between it and essential themes in the artwork.

Repetition and rhythm can enhance an artwork’s personality.

Dominance & Harmony Dominance. The differential

between emphasis and visual weight in a composition. Dominance allows an artist to enrich an artwork by providing an outer boundary that defines the work it contains. This physical border uses visual weight to accentuate the art as a comprehensive whole.

Harmony. The use of similar

elements throughout the work to achieve an uncomplicated look to a piece of artwork. Harmony in framing art is the same as in music. Different elements are mixed to create consonance. Mats and frames combine color and texture to unify diverse art aspects.

In the photo above, on the left a dark-textured liner adds substance to a wide frame in burnished silver with gold highlights. On the right, a light linen liner complements a textured frame in antiqued silver.

Dominance and harmony can be used to develop an artwork’s character.

Repetition & Rhythm Repetition. The repeated use of

objects, shapes, space, light, direction, and lines. Through repetition, frames and matting can be used to echo diverse aspects of a two-dimensional piece of art. For paintings, designs contained within the frame can mirror motifs contained within an artwork.

For works on paper, lines can be cut on the outer mat that relate to design themes within the work itself.

Unity & Variety Unity. The way in which different

its surroundings. Artists can integrate the framing into their creative process by making it a part of their artistic expression. On the other hand, framing can also be viewed as a decorative element that enhances the piece’s value.

Some artists choose their frame and mat selections as part of an overall signature. In this case, no matter what the art theme, medium, or size, all their artwork is framed alike. This branding technique helps to make their work immediately recognizable to collectors.

parts of an artwork build on each other.

Through unity, a frame’s design can work synchronously with a mat’s color and texture to develop a new profile for a piece of art. In this respect, framing relies on the same attributes as painting or printmaking.

In the example on page 43, a unique contour is established with a double (dark over light) mat delineating the space between a mottled wood fillet and a correspondingly finished frame with clean lines.

Variety. The quality or state of having

different forms or types of emphasis, size, and color. Variety in framing can be used to highlight the scope and magnitude of a piece of art. An ornate frame with a textured liner can be used to add more depth to a painting than simply using a frame alone. Using two mats and a fillet liner can increase a print’s mass and also accent its more restrained undertones.

In the examples on page 43, a series of mats (light, medium, and dark) is used in diverse ways to create a choices that explores possible variations.

Together, unity and variety help to augment an artwork’s temperament.

Other Considerations KALETA DOOLIN, director of Contemporary Culture, Inc., suggests, “Consider frames as physical and metaphorical borders.”1 They provide a visual space to separate the art from

For collectors, framing is limited by their budget and how much they wish to allocate for framing a work. For dealers and artists, framing materials and labor can be big-ticket items that can price the artwork out of its market.

In his blog post, The Challenges of Framing Art, Jason Horejs writes that with an artwork priced at $2,500 to $10,000, 7 to 15 percent of the final sales price will cover framing.2 With a net cost of $175 to $700, his suggestion is to include this amount when calculating a selling price. Add the framing costs plus

1. Kaleta Doolin, “Art in the Community: The Frame Project,” Contemporary Culture, 2007, web.

2. Jason Horejs, “The Challenges of Framing Art,” Red Dot Blog, October 31, 2013, web.

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any sales commissions to the amount you desire as profit. Then, double or triple that sum to establish a selling price that will yield a sufficient return to make it all worthwhile. For example, you would add your net of $600 to the framing costs of $160 and a sales commission of 50 percent for a total of $1,520. Have a feeling for what the market will bear and round up the price of this piece of art to $1,600.

Jason Horejs also suggests to artists, “Find a frame that you feel is absolutely spectacular—a frame you would love to buy if money were no object.” Divide the cost of the frame by 15 percent to get the estimated selling price. Divide the estimated selling price by your sales commission and add that number to the original estimated selling price to calculate the actual selling price. In our example, $160 divided by 15 percent is about $1,067, which when divided by our sales commission of 50 percent is approximately $534. Added together, the retail selling price for the artwork would be $1,601. Rounded down to $1,600, the artist would make about $600 in profit (minus supplies, overhead, etc.).

Horejs also states that framing costs and retail costs are inversely

proportional. He says, “As the price of the art goes up, for example, the [percent] spent on framing can go down.” However, it is important to understand that the threshold for this gap is very high. Artists will be better served by making the calculations described above.

What does an artist do if an interested buyer dislikes the frame and mat selections you have invested in with so much time, effort, and money? First, don’t take it personally. They like your artwork, and that is most important.

Again, Jason Horejs writes, “You’ll still be glad you invested in a good-quality frame—the buyer might simply have passed the work by otherwise.” Flash them your biggest smile, deduct about a third of the framing costs from the retail selling price, and remove the frame. Your buyer will be happy for the discount, and you will have a beautiful frame to use on another piece of art.

Glass & Mats WORKS ON PAPER require mats or glass, particularly delicate artworks, like pastels, that can be damaged if touched.

Canvases don’t require mats or glass; they can just be framed in wood. What

about the glazing options available for framing two-dimensional works on paper? In general, basic glass is a good choice for protection against dust and scratches. Unfortunately, it does not block any UV rays that can cause fading and discoloration. In fact, basic glass “cooks” the ink and paper used in creating the artwork and increases the degradation rate substantially. Basic glass also promotes reflection or glare, which makes it hard for others to see the beauty of the artwork. However, the lower price point for this product as compared to other glazing options makes it a popular choice.

Thankfully, new technologies have tackled the triple threat of UV rays, light transmission, and glare to develop new glazing options. One frame company has three new types of glass that can address 99 percent of UV rays, between one to eight percent reflection, and between 90 and 96 percent light transmission.3 When planning for longterm protection of your artwork, you may want to add one of these products to your framing selections. Just remember that this cost should also be added to all the others when calculating your retail selling price.

When it comes to mats, always choose acid-free mat board. “Buffered pH neutral” is the same as “acid free,” and is necessary to ensure that the mat itself does not destroy paper. A better, albeit pricier choice is conservation-grade, acid-free mat board, which also has lignin removed from the mat.

Lignin is the natural binding agent in wood that can discolor paper and make it more acidic over time.

With all these factors in mind, think of your framer as a partner in helping to maximize the aesthetic potential of the piece being framed.

Weigh out the design principles when choosing a frame, mat, and glass, and keep costs within the realm of the total value. Most importantly, be creative with the finishing touch that will complete your artwork.

3. Frames USA, “ What are the Different Types of Picture Framing Glass?,” News and Tips on Framing and Picture Frames, April 5, 2013, web.

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3 1ST A NNUA L

RED EARTH FESTIVAL JUNE 9-11, 2017

3 Full Days of World Class Ar t | Dazzling Per formances Cox Convention Center | Downtown Oklahoma City

“ Bl ue C or a l b y Ka r i n Wa l k i ngs t i c k . C oi l e d re d c l a y e a r t he nw a re . 6”x 6”x 6 ”

Red Earth Art Center | Free Admission | 405.427.5228 Open Weekdays 10-5 pm | 6 Santa Fe Plaza | redearth.org

BLACKBURN ART STUDIOS

Artwork by James & Joanna Blackburn

Located at the ARTesian Gallery & Studios • Sulphur, Oklahoma

www.jblackburnstudios.com SUMMER 2017 | 43

appraisals for Insurance, Estates, Donations, Divorce Identification of Items Inventory of Collections appraisals of rugs, basketry, pottery, jewelry, paintings, sculpture, graphics

Leona M. Zastrow, PhD

505-466-8581 ✠ epicinc@earthlink.net ✠ americanindianartappraising.com 44 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist creator and coyote compete to make man, 2016, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 20 × 28 inches

benjaminharjojr.com

Bead Artist

Kenneth Williams, Jr.

Northern Arapaho/Seneca

Santa Fe

“Kyi-Yo Visits the Wolf Trail” Collaboration Pipebag with Jackie Larson Bread. This side by Kenneth Williams, Jr.

kwilliamsjr2@hotmail.com © All Contents Copyright 2016, Kenneth Williams, Jr. All Rights Reserved. Photograph: Neebinnaukzhik Southall.

SUMMER 2017 | 45

CHOCTAW BEADWORK ARTIST

MARCUS AMERMAN

By RoseMary Diaz A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

W

RITING ABOUT THE ART of Marcus Amerman is a challenge. So much has already been written, and most of the best adjectives to describe his work have been penned time and time again. Hence, not being one to shy from an etymological adventure, I turn to my decades-old copy of Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words and set to task to find some less-oft inked narratives.

Here, given in an order that strings together the definitions to compose an iambic condensation of how I observe Amerman and his genius, are a few semantic rarities that stand up to the dare of attaching descriptive to the earthly evidence of this art-cosmonaut’s creative process.

Skookum: first-rate; best. Gonfalonier: standard-bearer.

Factotum: serving or working in a wide range of capacities. Luminiferous: bringing light. Emicate: to sparkle.

Iridine: rainbow-like. Deodate: a gift or offering to God. Filipendulous: strung on a thread.

Attempts have been made to “genre-fy” Amerman’s work as Photorealism and Native Pop, and, although it does lay heavy stress on both terms, neither supports full enrollment in its respective school. So, since invention is the brainchild of necessity, the artist turned to his own gift for faceting together what works and conceived both the notion and the noun: Photo-Beadalism was born and literally forever changed the face of the art form. Through a process that involves inserting a sheet of Pellon® fabric interfacing between a source image and a backing of fabric or hide and filling in the digitized space with individual size 13° beads to form a full-color, detail-rich pictorial, Amerman’s creation now looms in an artistic category of its own. This labor-intensive technique can demand more than 75,000 beads per an 11-by-17-inch image.

Known primarily for his uncannily realistic-looking beaded portraits of Native cultural icons (Chief Joseph, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Quanah Parker, Sitting Bull), celebrities of stage and screen (Cindy Crawford, Brooke Shields, Val Kilmer, Winona Ryder), and pop culture icons (Scully and Mulder of The X-Files notoriety, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, Wonder Woman), Amerman’s work has appeared in

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Marcus Amerman. All images courtesy of the artist.

countless publications and has been the subject of study and lecture among the art-inquisitive the globe over.

The artist’s formal education includes studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he earned his BFA degree at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

He has long been a top contender at the Eiteljorg Museum’s Indian Market and Festival in Indianapolis, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, and SWAIA Indian Market in Santa Fe. His work has been exhibited at notable art venues throughout the world, including Far Eastern Art Museum, Khabarovsk, Russia; Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, London, United Kingdom; and Museum of World Culture, Göteborg, Sweden. It can also be found resting among the treasures of numerous public collections. Goldie Hawn, Elton John, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, and Renée Zellweger rank among Amerman’s private collectors.

There has also been an interesting variety of decennial recognition for Amerman: In 1984, his invention of PhotoBeadalism splashed onto the scene and took Native America by storm; in 1994, The Bradford Exchange minted a series of plates based on several of the artist’s renditions of Native American leaders; in 2004, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe commissioned him to bead a portrait of the late Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002), beloved life-long ambassador of all things empowering to American Indian people, for installation in its eponymous

MARCUS AMERMAN

Detail of Quanah Parker, 1995, glass seed beads, fabric.

wing; and in 2014, the artist was honored with distinguished fellowship from United States Artists (USA) Fellows, which bestowed upon him the title of USA Rasmuson Fellow.

Other creative endeavors include collaboration with celebrated glass artist Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and a commission from the American Indian College Fund (AICF) to produce five beaded portraits for its national magazine campaign.

Amerman shared some of his thoughts on creativity, creating, and the Creator with First American Art Magazine.

From his home in Kooskia, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Reservation, here is what he had to say.

RMD: How do you prepare yourself to be creative?

MA: I prepare for being creative by cleaning my house, washing my clothes, chopping the wood and stocking the

fridge. I prepare for placing endless rows of round beads into an ordered pattern by first ordering my life. The bills must be paid. The wood has to be chopped. There must be food and sparkling water in abundance so that I minimize any distractions that would take me away from doing beadwork and breaking the hours of casual concentration I employ as I watch matching hours of movies and my favorite cable television shows. My new favorite is Desus & Mero on the VICELAND channel.

Sometimes I start by doing little projects with big beads and work up to a big project with all my smallest beads. I don’t require myself to get back to work after a big project until I’m ready, but I do start preparing my work area, project, and materials so that they’re ready when I do get the impulse to bead. I only work on one piece at a time. Each round

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PROFILE

The Man with No Name, 1997, glass seed beads, collection of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

bead-Frisbee I use contains nine circular containers, each one holding a different color of bead. I use two or three Frisbees for smaller jewelry projects, and up to seven for larger, framed pieces. Beadwork takes a long time, and I like to stay at it until I’m done, so I prepare for it like it is an ocean voyage.

What one element is absolutely necessary for your artistic 48 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

process?

After much thought, I’ve surmised that what I require to keep moving forward is the idea that what I create will be around and appreciated long after I’m dust, and that my ideas and innovations will have affected my Indian people for the better. It’s also very helpful to feel unlimited. Yeah, I might need all of those things. And the LED magnifying

MARCUS AMERMAN

“Art is my God—what I make should be tax exempt for this reason.”

The Heat, 2013, glass seed beads, fabric. Photo: Cara Romero (Chemehuevi).

lamp that I now use, but usually just for the threading of the needle.

What time of day do you prefer to work?

I can work all day, but I usually spend the morning taking a casual walk through Looking Glass Park, watching eagles fish for salmon and other such natural interactions, and running any errands that might get me out of my well-lit seat on the end of the couch.

Over the years, you’ve done a bit of everything—dance, fashion design, glasswork, painting, performance art, woodcarving—and you’ve always returned to beadwork.

How do you explain your creative proliferation across such a broad artistic spectrum? And what is it about the bead that has held your attention for so long?

I chose beadwork as the artistic medium to pursue because it and its accompanying techniques are the most “Indian” of all the mediums. Indians love beadwork, and they love to wear it, and they’re all kind of experts at it, because it’s just part of our culture—much more than other cultures around the world, except for maybe the Zulu of South Africa.

I can express myself much better in beadwork, especially my framed pieces, but I use many other mediums to communicate things that I can’t say in beadwork. There is so much creative cross-fertilization when you create many things out of many different materials. I like to think that, for me, beadwork was born first and is the elder sibling

that is the breadwinner of the house and feeds and clothes all the other mediums I pursue such as painting, sculpture, woodcarving, performance art, fashion, collage, and glasswork. Beadwork is the responsible one that makes all the money so that the other mediums can have clothes on their back and can go to school.

Although I love creating in many different mediums and learning new processes and techniques, I know that “the Bead” and I were destined to be together in this life. I’m very proud of the beaded portraits I completed recently for AICF’s national magazine campaign, and I see personal innovation and evolution in them, but I know that my big beadwork splash in this genre came when I was 24 years old and that I’ve just been riding that since. I’m proud of it, though. It’s a nice horse to ride … and it’s wearing a fully beaded outfit. And soon, so will I. It probably happened mostly in my mind. I knew I’d done something new and original when I first beaded Brooke Shields on the back of my motorcycle jacket. I wore it around Indian Market that year, and it garnered a lot of shock and awe. I knew I was on to something. The next woman I did in blue beadwork got into Playboy magazine in 1984. That was kind of splashy.

I was always shooting for attention on a bigger scale than others knew. It must be that overcompensating type of attention-seeking that can make an artist strive for excellence and be obsessed enough not to give up. The real coup de grâce is being egotistical enough to think that you’re SUMMER 2017 | 49

PROFILE

good enough and that it’s worth it.

That’s crucial. Everything an artist does is a self-portrait, and I really saw myself in this work. The melding of Western Realism and Native ingenuity I saw in it reflected my own dual racial heritage. It balanced my two worlds.

Perhaps that’s the reason behind its popularity: it’s a crossover hit.

Artistically I find it satisfying because it’s realism in the otherwise historically abstract medium of beadwork. I like the idea of combining two things that don’t usually go together. It’s my story, it’s the story of my art, and it’s the story of my people.

The universe is beaded. We live in a beaded universe. The bead, the round, beautiful bead, is a sacred shape. The sphere is a shape that reminds us of the circular nature of existence in the same way that the circular sun and moon do; in the same way that the eagle builds its nest in a circle reminds us. The circle is the foundation and fabric of the universe. And now we know, that if we could truly see, down to the atomic and subatomic level, we would see all things, even air, as made up of circular atoms and molecules. If we were able to see in this sacred way, the world around us and even our own reflection in the mirror would appear as if it were all made of beadwork. We would see that we belong to a beaded universe.

So, to do beadwork is to unconsciously meditate on the metaphor that we are each of us a bead woven into the fabric of life.

We are, each of us, a beaded person inhabiting a beaded universe, and as such, are all part of the bigger picture.

Art is my religion. Creativity that balances form and content and recognizes the sublime is what I believe in.

I hold the creative principle sacred, and I practice what I preach by simply creating. That’s why I like [working in] so many mediums. It’s unbridling my creativity. I’m always creative, and I’m at my best and happiest when I am creating something new. I’m only really [truly] comfortable in my human skin when I’m creating. And

Bahe Ketchum, Diné Codetalker, passport wallet, glass seed beads on leather, private collection.

when I’m not creating, I’m thinking of other things to create. I joke to myself, “ABC: Always Be Creating!”

This ability and obsession with creating explains to me why I’ve succeeded at art and at little else. I feel like I devote myself to art [the way] a religious man devotes himself to God. Art is my God—what I make should be tax-exempt for this reason.

Your world travels have been extensive. Do you have a favorite art destination, or is there a place you found especially inspiring?

My favorite international travels have involved cultural and artistic exchanges with Indigenous peoples. It makes me feel like I belong to a worldwide tribe

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of Native creators. It’s great to learn a people’s cosmology as expressed in the materials they use and the art they make. It’s also great to learn that many Native peoples of the world make their own version of frybread.

What’s your dream project?

My dream project is to recreate myself, and, since “clothes make the man,” I’m making a mid-length, smoked buckskin beaded coat and a beaded, grizzly bear-claw necklace for myself.

I have a pair of lion’s teeth I’ll add to it, which I obtained during a cultural exchange in South Africa.

If you could collaborate with any artist from any time or place in history, who would you choose?

MARCUS AMERMAN

Greetings from the Smithsonian, 2014, glass seed beads, fabric. Photo: Cara Romero (Chemehuevi).

I would collaborate with Leonardo da Vinci, and we would travel through time and prepare Native cultures for the coming of the white man.

What do you hope your creative legacy will be?

Although I feel somewhat accomplished in many and various mediums, I’m sure I will only be remembered for inventing Photo-Beadalism (and the term Photo-Beadalism). As Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message.”

Is there anything that frightens you about being so close to your creative forces/muses/the otherwise divine/ God? As in: “There’s no escape … you belong to us/Me?” You are correct about the horrible

aspects of being a true believer. To be blindly devoted is to be blinded to other things in life that you won’t pursue or learn how to pursue. My conception of my existence is based on my relation to creativity and not to what’s been created for me to exist within. My work is to create a balance between these two things, and I don’t think I’m very good at it. I’m too uncompromising.

To do my art well, I have to overcome.

I have to break rules, stretch limits, destroy barriers, push envelopes, shatter illusions, and generally fight the powers that be. The problem is that that same attitude has to be held at all times toward all things. You can’t

compartmentalize that attitude and just reserve it for when you are in the studio or on the clock. It’s your life.

You have to live it and think it and do it all the time. Art is your life. It’s much easier to see art as a job, an occupation, a livelihood or a gift. I don’t see what I have as a gift. I have to pay for that “gift” every day of my life, and that is the price that it extracts: your life.

I take some solace in the notion that I never really had a choice. I was made for art. I made the deal to be a devoted creator before I was born. I accepted all the conditions. That is why, when I’m asked for advice about art or life, I always give the same answer: “Read the fine print.”

MARCUSAMERMAN.COM SUMMER 2017 | 51

WALLA WALLA PAINTER & PRINTMAKER

JAMES LAVADOUR

By Staci Golar

N

EARLY 20 YEARS have passed since I last reported to my internship at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Reservation.

I’d drive through the rolling wheat fields just outside of Pendleton, Oregon, arrive at my desk, turn on the computer, and hear jazz streaming through the offices bathed in the bright light of summery, eastern Oregon mornings.

Housed in the old St. Andrew’s Mission schoolhouse situated at the base of the Blue Mountains, Crow’s Shadow is a nonprofit organization founded with the idea of using art as a transformative tool within the Native American community. The ground floor contained the offices, print studio, and gallery for the arts center. Artist and founder James Lavadour lived and worked upstairs at the time, blasting classics by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and others while he painted. Those days he was primarily working on a 16-panel public art commission called Standing Among Ghosts (though he always has dozens, if not hundreds of pieces going at once), logging five to six hours of painting time before we arrived to work at 9:00 a.m.

A lot has happened in the two decades that have since passed. Standing Among Ghosts was installed in the Seattle Seahawks football stadium. Crow’s Shadow has thrived— hosting hundreds of artists, students, and classes—and celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2017. I finished graduate school and moved away from Oregon. And Lavadour, well, he moved into a home studio further out on the reservation, went to Italy and back for the Venice Biennale, participated in at least 20 solo exhibits and 30 group exhibits, received an honorary doctorate among other major awards, such as the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Art, solidifying his reputation as one of the preeminent painters in the Pacific Northwest.

Where exactly did the path of artistic success start for Lavadour? In the linear sense, it began where it does for most of us: childhood. The artist remembers being enthralled by the water-stained ceiling of his grandmother’s house, something he counts as an important influence on his work to this day. Day to day, a family of makers and artists surrounded him. His brother Joey is considered a master of the art of Plateau basket twining, for example,

James Lavadour. Photo: Walters Photographers, Pendleton, Oregon. Image courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art.

while his mother painted, and other relatives created beadwork. He also remembers being, in his own words, “a terrible student,” but who was simultaneously encouraged by family to continue with his art.1 In a more spiritual sense, Lavadour’s path started with his ancestral roots, his dedication to his tribal community, and his connection to the land. While his parents moved the family away from the reservation in Pendleton to work at a penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington, Lavadour would return home when he was in his 20s and worked in education, natural resources, and even as a drug and alcohol counselor, all roles that supported the community.

“I moved back to the rez in 1975,” Lavadour remembers. “I wanted to do something in the world, and things were happening here. Terrible things had been going on, and we were right on the precipice of it getting better or worse.

People were coming back from Vietnam; planners came home from places like Stanford and so on, and things started to change. Tribal government started to be better developed.

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes attributed to James Lavadour in this article derive from a conversation between him and the author in March 2017.

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JAMES LAVADOUR

Out of Range, 2013, oil on panel, 36 × 48 in. Image courtesy of the artist and PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon.

The big issues of the day were salmon and restoring salmon.

At first there was a lot of outside opposition, but my tribe was a leader in restoring the community through the return of the salmon. That was a huge thing here! I realized I was around the most creative people there are; people who brought back salmon, developed their own legal systems.

The reservation really transformed in 40 years.”

While not exposed to any formal art training until much later in life, Lavadour had always devoured art books and painted whenever he found a spare moment.

Determined to develop his art, he traveled to more metropolitan communities in western Oregon and Washington and found representation in galleries, like the now celebrated Sacred Circle Gallery in Seattle.

“Sacred Circle is where I met Joe Feddersen, Edgar Heap of Birds, Emmi Whitehorse, Bob Haozous, Lillian Pitt, Rick Bartow. Just everybody was there. That was my first gallery experience. I was a part of that generation of artists, and that’s where I learned my chops about the business of art.” Part of what made this gallery well known was that it only showed art created by Native people. “At the time there

was a real separation of ‘Native art’ and ‘contemporary art’,” Lavadour recalls. “Sacred Circle and Native art ran parallel to the contemporary art world, but there were not many crossovers yet. For the most part, Native Americans were left out of the art business.” Lavadour notes that he had a hard time fitting into the “Native art” world, and if you keep up with his work, you know he purposely eschews the term Native artist due to the restrictive implications it can contain.

That doesn’t mean Lavadour denies his heritage or the unique place he comes from. It’s quite the opposite, really.

His commitment to his community of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and his belief in the unique vision of its people are both a large part of why he felt so compelled to start an arts center.

“I believe Indigenous creativity is different from mainstream, contemporary creativity,” he notes. “It’s based in community. Indigenous people use art in different ways.

They do use it for identity, and it can be a repetitive affirmation of who we are. Contemporary creativity is always about destroying what was already done and finding the next new thing. Indigenous creativity affirms and reaffirms and SUMMER 2017 | 53

PROFILE

Land of Origin, 2015, oil on panel, 39 × 78 in. Image courtesy of the artist and PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon.

passes something on to the next generation. It’s part of how an Indigenous culture maintains itself. But [mainstream] contemporary art and creativity is based on economy.

It’s a huge economic thing, and it’s very competitive. It’s academic. It doesn’t necessarily make it better art, just very different. I think of Crow’s Shadow Institute as a place where the Indigenous creativity and contemporary art intersect— causing moments where we ask, ‘Whoa! What is going on, what is happening here?’ Looking for the unknown in these intersections, revealing new stuff and going forward.”

Lavadour’s own work has been written about extensively in literally hundreds of publications, from books to magazine articles to Internet blogs. When I ask if there is anything that hasn’t been adequately expressed in all this coverage, he chuckles and says, “Well, I don’t know. I guess nothing has been adequately expressed.” But before anyone in the journalism world gets upset, it’s worth noting that this isn’t because a writer did a terrible job, or that Lavadour can’t talk about his work. It’s because for Lavadour the act of painting—the process, the result, the research—is always evolving, and he’s always learning new things about it.

Consequently, he’s always learning new things about his role as an artist.

Lavadour is mostly known for his landscapes (though there was a time in the early 1990s when he explored figurative work until, as he says with a laugh, “I saw Rick Bartow’s figures and realized I was no good at it”). His paintings emit the grand sense of scale that is Mother Nature in the Pacific Northwest, even when they are done on small panels. They consist of layer upon layer of oil paint, applied dry and 54 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

wet, to wood panels that are then scraped to bring forth the horizon lines and sense of geology that are no specific place and yet every place, particularly to those familiar with eastern Oregon. His work has been compared to Abstract Expressionism, sometimes to Romanticism, and even to German artist Gerhard Richter. His autodidactic approach and its result haven’t placed him as easily into categories as some painters, however. “My art has defined itself. I’m not an identity type artist; that’s not my thing. I’m more into the process of painting. The process and journey of painting has become more and more interesting and compelling the longer I work at it.”

The ever-present, silent partner in this journey has been the land where James is from. He becomes notably eloquent and philosophical when explaining how the land is not separate from him nor is it separate from the act of painting. “Everything that is in the land is in me,” he says.

“In eastern Oregon, you’re only separated from the world by your doorway. The mountains, the wind and rain are right there. I grew up with the cultural understanding that this is our place in the world and the idea that the land and I are one. I live in a community where the earth is not just landscape; the land is who we are and it is our identity.

Everything we are comes from the land. We are related to the land, and our culture regards all the land and its creatures as relatives. I don’t see myself as making pictures but more [as] a conduit between what the land is and transmitting and transfiguring that through my actions. Paintings are things to look at, devices to contemplate the great questions about our personal existence. Paint is, for me, the traces or

JAMES LAVADOUR

Stage, 2016, oil on panel, 28 × 32 in. Image courtesy of the artist and PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon.

tracks or evidences of that understanding. Every day is a new understanding, a new click in a broader life understanding of who and where I am and how I came to be.” His work is an ongoing emotional interpretation of the land, a study in its energy and how much of the land exists in him—in all of us—and how much he exists in the land.

While much of this is communicated in the textures, layers, and shapes of the paint (getting up close to his work is recommended), his color palette locks in a universal recognition of land and place for a viewer. Lavadour’s use of oranges, yellows, blues, greens, and browns was at first unintentionally masterful and intuitive but has been honed with an introduction to printmaking. “I have learned how to make a movement and a countermovement, like music, in my painting, and I was more interested in the mineral properties of paint and how it flowed, the erosion of it. For a long time

I just did monochromatic work. Then I began to do layers. I didn’t start thinking about color until printmaking.”

Initially a painful process due to its emphasis on the technical, “Printmaking helped me to separate and understand my process,” Lavadour says. “I was doing the process intuitively, but with the printmaking discipline it’s one color at a time. Once I got the handle on that, it opened up ideas about form and process. It really was one of the reasons why printmaking was so exciting for me. I am a self-taught artist, so everything I know I’ve stolen from some other artist.

But printmaking was a collaborative thing, and I started to dissect my process because of that. I have spent years just understanding how my hand moves. You can see these loopy marks in sketchbooks, understanding how my hand moves … understanding how my body works. It’s helped me to realize my art is the same thing as the land itself.

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PROFILE

Red River, 2012, cast urethane, stainless steel, paint, collection of Oregon Department of Transportation, Salem, Oregon. Photo: Frank Miller. Image courtesy of the Oregon Arts Commission.

“I believe painting is an event of nature; every brushstroke is a physical event.”

Whatever flow going on with the land is going on with my body. Printmaking was a more scientific study of what it is I actually do. It was totally liberating once I did it. I became ten times more productive.”

While Lavadour’s prints sometimes take an unexpected turn, becoming more monochromatic and yet less earth toned than his painted work, they maintain a strong sense of the landscape and are structurally similar to his painted pieces. Even though they are less texturally rich due to the inherent nature of the printmaking process, they reflect the same gestures and movements in the way the ink is laid down.

The continuous movement that translates to the energy Lavadour says connects him to the land, and the land to his work, became three-dimensional when he completed his first set of sculptural works at the Walla Walla 56 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Foundry a few years ago. “I took drippy black-and-white paintings up there and they put it in the CAD [computer assisted drafting] program, and the result was like looking at the basalt layers of the Columbia River Plateau. It blew my mind! It was a profound experience, and for several years, I did not know what to make of that. It was such a profound observance for me.”

One of the results of that foundry work is a set of three cubes that contain bright orange geographic forms set in clear resin. They are installed outside of the Oregon Department of Transportation building in Salem, Oregon.

Another, Ruby Lift, allowed the forms to stand on their own and will soon be in the hands of a private collector. These mountainous, cast-resin sculptures recall cross sections of topographical maps made dimensional and are a fascinating departure for Lavadour, both in medium and final result.

At the same time, they completely verify what he has been working on all these years.

“I believe painting is an event of nature; every brushstroke is a physical event. I try to make painting out of the first mark, where all the cosmic energy is. And the second mark is supporting it, or spreading it out, or thinning it

JAMES LAVADOUR

Red Rock, 2015, oil on panel, 32 × 48 in., private collection.

out. I’ve been trying to make work that is constructed that way, out of the unconscious mark. That’s where the energy is; that is actual energy. It’s not a representation of energy, it is energy, and it has an effect on the world, your spirit, and how you look at the land itself. I’ve tried to eliminate culture, politics, and even identity from my work, and be the land itself when I make a mark day after day, layer upon layer of paint. This water, sediment, micro- and macrocosm in a stain on a piece of canvas—well, this was the first time I’d ever seen that grown out into a 3D brushstroke [in this foundry work]. The rivers, the mountains were there in the brushstroke, made dimensional in these sculptures.”

At 65, Lavadour seems to be more in the flow as a painter than ever. He recently completed a one-man show, Ledger of Days, at PDX Contemporary Art, his longtime gallery in Portland, Oregon, and is prepping for a new exhibit at the Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee.

Entitled Recent Findings, it opens in May 2017 and is being shown in conjunction with State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, the Crystal Bridges Museum’s traveling

exhibit that will land at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Lavadour’s art will occupy both galleries at the Cumberland with new works on paper and panels, including a 90-by-102-inch, nine-panel painting on the main wall of the lower gallery.

Lavadour will also be part of Converge 45, an annual event of arts and ideas happening this summer in Portland.

Converge 45 bills itself “as an opportunity for artists, collectors, curators, scholars, and the public to take part in the unprecedented collaboration of Portland’s leading arts institutions, galleries, and artist-run spaces,” and Lavadour is completing a 36-foot-long grid of paintings for the event.

With all this ongoing success and critical acclaim, is Lavadour ever surprised that this has been his life’s work? In short, no. “This is all I ever really wanted to do,” he affirms.

“I’ve wanted to make art since I was a kid. I didn’t get rich, but I have what I need, and I’ve supported my family. It’s been a really good thing in my life. It has opened doors for me, allowed me to travel and do things I wouldn’t have otherwise. No, I’m not surprised. I’m grateful.”

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TEWA SCULPTOR

NORA NARANJO MORSE

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

N

ORA NARANJO MORSE employs a range of media and forms, including sculptures of bronze and trash, film and poetry, earthworks and architecture. Yet, always at the core of her work is clay. “Clay is an anchor to me.

It helps me to become more open to other materials.”1 She describes herself as “an open vessel. It is essential to my creative process that I remain open to absorb information, feel emotions, and ultimately react, whether I’m forming a sculpture, filming, or choosing words.”2 Born in Española, New Mexico, Naranjo Morse has spent most of her life in the Santa Clara Pueblo community. Her art reflects her commitment to her home coupled with a worldly perspective. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of Santa Fe, got married, and had twins, a boy and a girl. As the youngest child of Rose Naranjo, she comes from a family of noted Santa Clara potters.

Rose raised nine children and taught them the value of family, community, and artistic work. Several of Rosa’s children have become professional artists, scholars, and architects, namely Michael Naranjo, Tessie Naranjo, Rina Swentzell, and Jody Folwell.

“Historically, our individual lives were interdependent with our family, community, and environment to survive; everyone in the community was on an equal playing field contributing to the whole as best they could.

Those attitudes continue today.”

By raising her own children at Santa Clara, Naranjo Morse avoided “outside elements and influences that don’t promote those communal values.” Naranjo Morse passed on the importance of integrating art and life

Nora Naranjo Morse working in her studio. Photo: Eliza Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo). Image courtesy of the artist.

to her daughter, who is building her own home next to her mother’s. “My daughter, Eliza, and I are neighbors, so we share information and perceptions of ourselves and our work. She’s creating her art in the way she is because that was modeled to her. The collaborative art projects we’ve done recall the tradition of intergenerational exchange and collaboration in creating, building, and living.”

Naranjo Morse’s father was skilled in many areas: he was a carpenter, artist, builder, and Baptist minister.

He enjoyed the challenge of making things himself. “My dad was a builder, and as a child, I watched as he problem solved construction issues. Having that strong role model gave me confidence.

I witnessed the process of navigating toward a solution. My father taught me how to build something out of whatever material that was available. Other people in my community were like

that as well. We didn’t have a lot so we had to be resourceful.” Naranjo Morse continues his example. She constructed her own studio out of adobe, though it was a challenge. “A 55-year-old woman has no business building a studio by herself. I got help when it became too much work for me alone, but just the idea that I thought I could do it is a testament to what my family and community instilled in me.” The new studio allowed the artist to think bigger. “I built my own adobe studio with high ceilings to allow the work to grow. I can think in [terms of] larger sizes now.”

The process for making ceramics is a physical challenge, “requiring tenacity, strength, and knowledge of the material. Understanding clay takes time. The process is laborious and unpredictable. I was helping my daughter, Eliza, with a project last year.

She was making a clay model of the

1. All quotes, unless otherwise specified, are Nora Naranjo Morse in discussion with the author, March 24, 2017.

2. Susan Peterson, “Pottery by American Indian Women: Nora Naranjo Morse,” Women Artists of the American West, 1997, web.

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NORA NARANJO MORSE

Moon Orchids, 2012, hand-built Santa Clara clay and Taos micaceous clay, 30 × 60 in., collection of the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth, D2015.1.1-10. Image courtesy of the artist.

Paolo Soleri [Amphitheater in Santa Fe, which was threatened with demolition and known for its sweeping lines] for a SITE Santa Fe exhibition. Paolo Soleri is a complicated building to begin with but to reconstruct it in a smaller form was challenging. We could not have made the model without having an understanding of our clay material.”

Naranjo Morse learned to find, process, and use clay from her relatives.

“I stand on their shoulders. I didn’t learn this by myself. I learned this by watching my mother, and she learned it from watching her mother, and on and on.” As a 21st-century artist, she experiments with other materials as well, though she remains true to her identity. “Pueblo cultural values are embedded in me. They are consistent and valuable even in my contemporary experience. My responsibility as an artist, mother, and community member is to take these core values and practice

them daily. I use my resources, all of them, to articulate my artistic vision.”

The artist admires many potters.

“Pueblo women in the past approached their clay work with a utilitarian and ceremonial intention. A few of them approached clay with a strong, creative vision. These artist’s signature vessels mark them as these magnificent potters. Nampeyo’s saucer-shaped vessels are astounding examples of this kind of individual vision.” Her ability to shape the clay impresses Naranjo Morse, especially how she let the walls flare out, then back in. “Shaping a vessel the way Nampeyo did is complicated and demands a particular knowledge with the material, and yet the result is an architectural approach that seems otherworldly. Masterful.”

The work of 20th-century Acoma potter Lucy Lewis, with beautifully rounded shapes and complex fine line designs, also impressed Naranjo

Morse, who observed that “to create such complicated and stunning designs comes from a place I can only identify as spiritual. From one point of the vessel meeting with connective clarity to the other side speaks to Lucy’s ability to connect to her creative center.”

She also admires contemporary potters, including Lonnie Vigil (Nambé) and her sister Jody Folwell.

“Lonnie Vigil is a genius. He knows his clay like nobody else. Jody’s relationship to her material speaks to her ability as an artist and a cultural person. When Jody creates, she’s certain. There’s no second-guessing.

Like my mother, Jody flows easily between her work and her day.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Naranjo Morse successfully sold her artwork at the Palace of the Governors portal and Santa Fe Indian Market, especially her Pearlene series. It features a rounded Pueblo woman who mediates between

3. Nora Naranjo Morse, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 14.

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PROFILE

Stories Upon Stories, 2010, cast aluminum, ed. 1/4, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (26/5837). Photo: Eric Swanson. Image courtesy of the artist.

her Pueblo home and the wider world.

Pearlene “comes from the Pueblo idea of the kosa, or clown in Tewa. The Pueblo clowns mirror human foible and do it in a humorous way. Pearlene was a female version, and it was my first experience in saying these things.”

With Pearlene, the artist could be humorous while commenting on issues Native women face in contemporary life. She explored the character in poetry as well as ceramics through her 1992 book, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay, in which she writes, “Pearlene fluctuates between confusion and clarity, reverence and mischief, while searching for her niche in life.” [3] The Pearlene series sold well—so well that the artist was offered a chance to commercialize the figure. “A businessman asked if I would be interested in mass-producing Pearlene. It was a pivotal moment for me. Creating Pearlene was about experimenting with an old process of clay making for self-discovery and expressing identity.

To jeopardize that essence by means of mass production would affect my creative integrity and that did not fit into the worldview I come from.

That was a turning point for me.” The prospect of commercializing ended the project. Naranjo Morse produced one last Pearlene, gave her a male companion, and then moved on.

This also spurred the artist’s decision to leave Indian Market, as intimidating as the prospect was.

“Being part of Indian Market defined me in ways important to my creative process. However, in other ways, it was limiting. The markets were a safe place for me to understand and navigate creating art as a profession. After a while, I knew my art didn’t fit in the Indian art markets anymore. The eightby-ten booth I was trying to sell out of was containing me. I decided to leave.”

Naranjo Morse was free to move beyond the usual modes of commodification and began exploring. She worked on large-scale ceramic pieces such as Four Figures for the Legacy of Generations, a group exhibition of Southwest pottery that showed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Heard Museum. She constructed narrow, ogive-shaped, black-and-white pieces ranging from four to eight feet tall. Their firing required her to think about construction.

“With larger-scale clay forms, I start with a much thicker base. As I move upward, the walls become thinner. While the form is still green, I cut the form in sections. I’ll fire the sections either in an electrical kiln or in a large pit fire, depending on

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the weather. I use a combination of Santa Clara and micaceous clays for a stronger material, especially for the larger sculptures.” The combination of clays for strength and the firing in separate pieces allows for a large sculpture that appears to be one piece.

Naranjo Morse has created several pieces about contemporary life at Santa Clara Pueblo. “Santa Clara is a microcosm of the larger world. For example, historically, Pueblo people built homes in a more communal atmosphere. People helped each other. Because of social and economic shifts, we rarely build our own homes.

Governmental HUD [Housing and Urban Development] homes are available for pueblo people to purchase a house. A shift occurs when there is a payment-based approach to housing in contrast to building one’s homes.

Continued assimilation affects me … in profound ways and as an artist. I’m compelled to articulate that through my work.”

When the National Museum of the American Indian issued an open call for entries for its public sculpture garden, Naranjo Morse’s proposal was chosen from a pool of more than 55 entries. Always Becoming, a group of five sculptures that range from seven to 19 feet high, was dedicated on

NORA NARANJO MORSE

The Black White and Brown of It, 2008, clay, nine totems, each 114 in. high. Photo: Addison Doty. Image courtesy of the artist.

September 21, 2007. Naranjo Morse organized a team to build the installation: her niece Athena Swentzell Steen, Steen’s husband, Bill—both experts in the adobe construction—their children, Juan Morales Valdez (Tepehuán), and his family from Durango, Mexico. The title of the piece considers how, for the artist, “Our culture is always becoming.”

The sculptures were constructed of natural materials including earth, straw, stone, wood, bamboo, and grass, and each were named like members of a family: Father, who holds a viga brought from the artist’s home; Mother, with a circular cutout facing the south; Little One, Moon Woman, a clay, hive-like shape with clay spheres representing moon phases; and Mountain Bird, with poles arranged like a tipi. The figures’ organic materials adapt to the changes in weather and seasons; they age and reform. Such

a highly visible installation has proven rewarding.

“Millions of people pass through the Smithsonian Mall ever year and Always Becoming has the opportunity to engage the viewers about Native culture, land, and the stewardship of both. It is a place that you can speak to these things that are happening to all of us, whether we are Native or not. Several people sent me images of the women’s rally after the Trump inauguration. You could see Always Becoming behind the platform where these women were standing. I’m proud Always Becoming became a part of such a historic event.”

“Always Becoming wears down purposefully, and that begs a few questions: How are we shifting? How do we conserve the spirit of us? How does culture become different from my mother’s generation and her mother’s

generation? I went to the border of Mexico where my sister’s daughter, Athena, is a master adobe builder. She and her family work with a nonprofit organization helping women in Mexico build their own homes.” For a month and a half, the team built the sculptures from the raw materials they’d gathered.

“Nobody understood what we were doing. Most of the people who go into NMAI are looking for stereotypical aspects of Native culture.” The artists invited passersby to help build the structures and have a personal investment in them.

Over the last eleven years, the pieces have been “wearing down and becoming a refuge for the wildlife that still exists in the city.” Bees and birds, including hawks, have made homes on the sculptures. “There’s my stewardship of the sculptures themselves and the environment they live in now. Every SUMMER 2017 | 61

PROFILE

Gathering, 2012, clay, discarded plastic, wire, 48 × 120 × 11 in. Photo: Addison Doty. Image courtesy of the artist.

year I go back and look at the pieces to see where they are and how they have dissolved. I think the pieces will outlive me, which means a newer generation can be introduced to Always Becoming.

A new generation will have the opportunity to continue the core values and concerns of our people and be a part of that dialogue.”

When consulting with NMAI about the future of the works, “We wondered, ‘What do we do with pieces that are melting down? Do we accession them into the collection, or do we leave them where they are?’ I believe in repurposing. We made a new piece from the stuff that had melted down into the ground. We just collected it, put it in barrels, kept it safe, and then used it again.” Pottery making typically requires a temper, an additive to strengthen the pottery and prevent breakage. Ground potsherds can serve

as temper to form new pots with parts of the old, a culturally informed renewal process.

Recently, Naranjo Morse has been creating large sculptures using the garbage she finds from around her home and during her travels, including New Zealand, Mexico, and other locales. “In the trajectory of my experience, it seemed like the next logical place to go.” She began by collecting bits of garbage from the local trash heap. “I went to go gather clay in Santa Clara. After gathering clay, I walked over this little hill to the valley where the Santa Clara dump is. There was so much stuff; it was overwhelming. That visual juxtaposition was alarming.

“I went down there and saw brightly colored shapes. I didn’t know why, but for about a year, I started collecting from the dump—wire, plastic, whatever was there. I just

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picked up stuff and I took it to my studio. Then I started washing it, learning about the material and, in a sense, deconstructing what I had been socialized to believe, like, ‘If you have money, go to Walmart and buy something. Then throw the plastic in the bag and then it’s gone and you never have to deal with it again.’ I started thinking more about what I consume and what I discard. That became an integral part of the message in these pieces.”

These works highlight the ephemeral nature of commercial products. Naranjo Morse observes, “Everything has a shelf life: our food, our furniture, our clothing. Part of the trajectory for me is how do I use this information now to speak to these issues that are happening to all of us, not just to Native people. And the sculptures are fun but they come from a conflicted place, so for me to be

NORA NARANJO MORSE

able to [go] through that process and find someplace where I’m okay with this, where I’ve tried to do the best I can, and where I’ve found the color and the beauty in them, in a sense, and let them, in a sense, shine. And that becomes very calculated because I don’t just throw it together. I’m very conscious of the kinds of colors I find.

I’m always looking on the ground now. What are people throwing away?

Especially if it is brightly colored, I’m going to pick it up and wash it off and use it. I’m not afraid to take them and then reconfigure them.”

As her found-material sculptures grew in height, they required structural stability. “They were kinetic and they had this beautiful movement. Except they were so wiggly that they would fall over. They needed a stabilizing force.

That’s when I decided to use clay. Clay anchored them. They weren’t falling over anymore. I started working with the clay and this material that had been discarded to look at the whole idea of how, no matter what happens, the earth is the stabilizing force.”

In 2014, curator Lance Fung selected Naranjo Morse and Eliza to create a performance piece as part of the 5 × 5 Public Art Project, in which five curators each chose five artists to create public artworks in Washington, DC. Fung’s exhibit was called Nonuments, which unlike monuments across Washington DC, celebrated the lives of ordinary people.

The artists created Digging, in which they dug up the ground in an empty lot to build a mound, then leveled the earth again. “At the end of the project, nothing was built. It was not a finished, product-driven project.” The piece considered inequality in the workplace, in which heavy, physical labor is paid little while other, less demanding tasks command high salaries. They performed every day for a month in a vacant lot on the south side of Washington, DC, in sweltering heat.

Dressed in different worker’s uniforms, including scrubs, business,

Title Pending (work in progress), 2017, clay, discarded materials, light, 216 x 108 in. Photo: Eliza Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo).

and HAZMAT suits, they attracted the attention of passersby. “Many viewers of the installation performance had no clue what we were doing but they still stopped and talked with us.” In the project statement, Naranjo Morse observes that “the act of unearthing the ground is humbling.” She notes that “Digging also unearths unrealized opportunities that would otherwise remain buried. In our performance, we are using digging as a metaphor for the challenges we face. Should we define our experiences from manufactured sources and cultural invention? Or, do we choose to dig toward the center of who [we] are, finding a solid foundation to move forward.”4 Naranjo Morse continues to innovate. “Clay makes me think about all sorts of things. It connects me to other people.” In August 2017, she’ll travel to the Longhouse Education and Culture Center at Evergreen State College to

complete a collaborative installation called Swimming Together, which is made up of fish sculpted from clay. “I am going back to continue the piece with other Indigenous people from the US and New Zealand. Eventually, the fish will be installed in one of the Longhouse’s new buildings. We are coming together, to make together, to exchange together, to swim together.”

Naranjo Morse appreciates this point in her life. “I want to make art.

I’m tenacious. I’m more fearless. I’ve kept that precious creativity alive.

Creating helps me to navigate social, political, cultural issues. It makes me more curious and I’m inspired by what I learn. It’s not to say that I don’t get scared, because I always get scared when I start big. But now I know that I’ve been in that place before. I’ve been at square one before. The process feeds me on a creative and spiritual level. I live for that.”

NORANARANJOMORSE.SQUARESPACE.COM

4. “DIGGING, a live performance piece in Lance Fung’s NONUMENTS Exhibition,” Nora Naranjo Morse, August 21, 2014, web.

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SECWEPEMC INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

TANIA WILLARD

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

T

ANIA WILLARD is an artist and graphic designer based on the Neskonlith Reserve in British Columbia, and a member of the Secwepemc Nation. Her artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout North America, and her work resides in the collections of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Thompson Rivers University, and Kamloops Art Gallery. She has participated in artist residencies in Vancouver and the Banff Centre’s Visual Arts Creative Residencies with the themes of “fiction” and “Trading Post.” Willard is a former Aboriginal curator-in-residence at Kamloops Art Gallery and grunt gallery.

While at grunt gallery in 2008, Willard and Skeena Reece (CreeTsimshian-Gitksan) curated an online exhibition, Beat Nation, which grew into the major traveling exhibition, Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, produced by Vancouver Art Gallery and co-curated with Kathleen Ritter. From 2012 to 2014, the exhibition opened in cities across Canada. In 2016, Willard and Karen Duffek co-curated the solo exhibition, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories, at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. That same year, Willard received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. I spoke with Willard to discuss her work and latest projects.

MRS: When did your interest in art and visual culture began to flourish?

Was it an “aha” moment, as they say, or was it gradual, more organic?

TW: My work within the arts has been gradual, but one of my early memories around art making and thinking was courtesy of Daphne Odjig. When I still lived on my reserve in the early ’80s

fruit at a powwow when you saw kids breakdancing through the powwow. In your own words, “That was probably my first exposure to those ideas of what crossovers there could be between what we consider traditional and what we consider contemporary.”

Can you elaborate on these potential crossovers? Has this idea changed or evolved for you?

Tania Willard. All images courtesy of the artist.

—I do now as well, but during my teen years I lived in nearby small towns—a lot was going on in terms of Indigenous politics and resurgence. My aunty and uncle (who was chief of our reserve at the time) were talking about a recent meeting with Daphne Odjig, and I remember them mentioning that artists think differently. I was pretty young, maybe five years old, but it sticks in my memory. I knew I wanted to pursue creative work since I was an early teen, but growing up in a small town in BC with no role models, I had no idea what that meant. I did go to art school but really found my voice as an artist within anarchist and Indigenous politics. Now I think a lot of those earlier influences have come to a confluence, and I live and work back home on my reserve and take time in my work and life to value Indigenous art, politics, and lands. For me this is enacted as a project I call BUSH gallery.

You’ve cited a childhood experience that profoundly changed your view of Indigenous art. You were selling

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Oh wow, yeah, this is a lifetime kind of question. Those dancers came through at Kamloopa Powwow, and I remember they did a blanket dance to collect money as they traveled around dancing.

Thing was, at that time, most kids I knew at reservations near small BC towns were listening to alt-rock or metal and only just getting into hip-hop. It was a transitional time in many ways for my generation. Everything I do is linked to ideas of futurity and continuum, and this is in many ways a political decision that speaks to the presumed fate of extinction that many settlers expected, and that most Canadian government policies are based on. So centering our culture as cultures of the present and future is a reaction to that obscurity and extinction. I think “traditional” forms are important, but I question what the distinction between contemporary and traditional really is, both from within Indigenous communities but also thinking through contemporary art.

We can see ways in which Indigenous art was not part of the cultural landscape in Canada other than in museums and education and ways of positioning us in the past. So Indigenous art histories that speak to our artists who work in contemporary art become these places to question these distinctions, dislocations, and dismissals. I just make my way and my life through it. I center and value my language, land, and family, and try to carry this through in different ways through my work.

TANIA WILLARD

Ancestral Remains, part of the #haunted_hunted series, 2016, installation detail, wooden table, glass seed beads, porcelain cups and saucers. Photo: Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC.

Can you talk about your experience growing up in Armstrong, British Columbia, as well as on the reserve?

How do those experiences inform your current work?

[Laughs] I don’t know. Armstrong is a small town and was even smaller when I was growing up. It made me understand the almost complete erasure of Secwepemc presence in especially small towns in BC. We learned about “Indians” as far off in the North and eastern Ontario. It was rarely positioned that these towns were nearby or adjacent to reservations, or that our cultures had anything we could “learn” from in school. Now this seems completely bizarre. A generation before me, instead of erasure, Indigenous people struggled with more derogatory and directly racist experiences. However, that erasure made me want to reassert my presence as a Secwepemc person.

Now I think conversations are shifting, and sometimes people want to discuss more mixed heritage experiences or just make work and not be always qualified as Indigenous first in their artwork. But,

for me, the tactic of visibility was and is important as a way of fighting erasure.

I am also of mixed heritage. My mom’s side of the family is Scottish/Irish and their connection to this land is also important to my experience and me. I do think it is important in some audiences and work to resist being placed in isolated categories as Indigenous and to talk more about intersectionality.

As an artist, designer, and curator, how does this multidisciplinary approach blend and bleed into the others?

After a few years of curatorial work, I felt disconnected to home and to Secwepemc experience. I had my first child and struggled to make enough money as a self-employed creative person, so I worked in these different modes. My role as a mother also felt disconnected to my curatorial and artwork. Now I resist moving to a city to get a job as a curator or artist or designer. Thanks to the Internet, I can work from home, from my reserve.

Being home and building a house on

the land as well as having my children attend the immersion school in our language is fundamental to everything I do. Though I still work in these modes that are at times disconnected, I experiment with their synergy and possibility through BUSH gallery. At BUSH gallery, I invite artists and thinkers and audiences to work together to examine these ideas and hopefully create ideas to fill the gaps between these ways of working. I am interested in collapsing barriers and borders around how we work, where we work, and why we work as artists, etc. Though Indigenous artists are in some of the top galleries, these are spaces we are fitting into. What is an Indigenous model of a gallery? Are their points of possibility and overlap between birch bark harvesting and performance art or critical writing and farming? So BUSH gallery allows me to move in the liminal spaces and the gaps [where] I find the possibility of transformation.

What is the philosophy that drives your artistic practice?

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Staking Claim(s) #BUSH, 2014, installation with land, land marking flags, land marking spray paint, cord, and stakes. A performative work for the grasshoppers, bees, hawks, and whomever else may have been watching.

It is just part of my impulse and instinct to appreciate and value and advocate for strong ideas, visions, and methods. I make my living with my work, and some of it is more enjoyable than the rest. I work hard, I try out ideas. Most of all I value the conversation and dialogue and ideas of my peers working in arts.

I am trying to be more aligned with joy. I am joyful when I learn language, when I make things, when the ideas are relevant for other artists or community or even to my family or myself. I am also at times disillusioned, and the one thing I have faith in at those times is the power of the creative act—not all the time, though [laughs], but those moments when something—art, music, dance—speaks to your spirit.

Do you have an intended audience?

I make things and have conversations, ideas, and actions, and they sort of land where they land in terms of an audience.

However, I also was aware working in the very white world of white-wall galleries that, even when I tried to work closer to home, getting people from

Native communities to the gallery was a hard sell. I could spend my whole life doing that, but ultimately that only benefited the institution. Instead, I chose to ground myself in community and not always seek that through my art or curatorial practice. BUSH gallery is a bit of an experiment to take the gallery to community instead of always trying to get community to come to the gallery. I am interested in spaces of engagement, whether that is a community dinner, political rally, school, gallery, or the bush.

Earlier series such as Claiming Space and Disparity examine themes of Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism. In Disparity, you cast a series of baskets in resin, essentially plasticizing them forever, which conjures up themes of cultural preservation, dislocation, appropriation, and more. One work, The Combo (2012), emerges from a mentorship with Neskonlith basketry artist Delores Purdaby. Here you weave a drink, fries, and burger container and 3D glasses using cedar root and birch bark. It’s a dynamic

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take on consumer capitalism, waste, and exploitation; more so since the documentation of the work is shot against a forest background. How do you view your early works and projects, and how does your early work differ from your newer work?

That basketry work was the beginning of centering Secwepemc aesthetics and knowledge in my production as an artist and then as a curator in my later works in Kamloops Art Gallery. I see a very clear connection to moving back home, and BUSH gallery and other current projects are just a continuation of these interests. I am still learning about baskets, and they still form an important metaphor for my work. I speak about the mímc or birch bark basket as a container for my work as a mother, curator, artist, farmer, and more. This is also an effort to recenter the possibility of abundance, an effort of strength against a tide of colonial ideas that are always trying to push dystopia, which in some ways is a logical conclusion of a settler mindset.

TANIA WILLARD

The Combo, 2012, cedar root, birchbark, colored transparency, plastic tray. The outcome of a mentorship with Delores Purdaby (Neskonlith).

More recently, you’ve developed a collaborative series with the New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society Collective. As part of the project, you’ve created the hashtag #BUSHgallery to forge a kind of art gallery that is exactly that, the bush. Works in this series incorporate neon-orange marker flags, survey tape, stakes, and spray paint— all items that signify “development” of the land. It’s powerful. How did this project come about, and what is the value of collaborative projects?

I asked myself, What does an Indigenous-led model of a gallery look like? Key components surfaced: land pedagogy, interconnected or relational practices, intergenerational and matriarchal models, as well as ephemeral and collaborative work. Important in this project is to point to the structural exclusion of Indigenous lands as sites of significant cultural infrastructure and resource, which is why we often are moving to cities to find work as artists or in the cultural sector.

This is the focus of my work lately; importantly, BUSH gallery is also on the reservation. I found myself working in ways in contemporary art that seemed to predicate participation with moving to cities and circulating in spaces where we are always minoritized. Although we have a pretty progressive picture of Canadian contemporary art that centers on Indigenous art, the whole industry is built on Western art assumptions.

Community-based initiatives are elemental to your work. For example, you’ve helped to create community murals, printmaking workshops, language-learning tools, and so forth.

The young ones are drawn to art. It is a driving force in pop and counterculture, so it is about creating invitation and engagement. Intergenerational approaches are important; this is an Indigenous model of engaging in creative practices and one that the rest of contemporary art can learn a lot about through Indigenous art.

Collaborative and relational art practices are key in bringing a wider appreciation and engagement with the arts into our communities. I seek to create spaces of intersection and collaboration between

We often talk about our successes, but not enough emphasis is placed on our failures. What, if anything, do you struggle with most when creating artwork?

artists and nonartists in the same way that other specialized industries can serve publics. The science of art can bring many benefits to communities, and I believe in the power of art to speak to the spirit.

How can artists and curators engage younger audiences in art and visual culture?

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PROFILE

Ghost Sickness, 2007, woodblock print on paper, 1/1 ed.

I struggle with time! As a mom with two younger kids, time and focus really tax me. This is also why BUSH gallery and #callresponse projects are steadfastly on the side of Native feminisms that center the important work we do as Indigenous women in our families and communities. And this is said within a space of honoring all gender roles and nongendered spaces in our communities. I also struggle with the precarity of the work.

We need more Indigenous curators and arts professionals in full-time, permanent positions. The flexibility of self-employed work is great but takes its toll. So, you know, a familiar artist’s rant, time and money [laughs].

What are your hopes for contemporary Indigenous art in Canada?

First of all, I see it as going and [having] already gone beyond borders. Of course, the important work of Indigenous curators like Paul Chaat Smith, Candice Hopkins, Greg Hill, Daina Warren, Michelle LaVallee, David Garneau, Ryan Rice, and others have worked to internationalize Indigenous arts practices and exhibitions.

I think we have already—and we will continue to—destabilize and transform the practice of contemporary art into a more engaged and relevant space for diverse communities. I would like to see an opening up wherein Indigenous art is contemporary art with the context of Indigeneity valued but not anthropologized.

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As a fellow curator, I’m interested in your methods and attitudes toward curating. What lessons did you take away from your experience curating Beat Nation?

Well, BUSH gallery is also a reaction to my experience as a curator, though I am thankful for my experiences. I also felt the pushback wherein an institution could have a large Indigenous-focused show, and then they could check the Native exhibition box and not return to it for a few years. This is cynical, but I think when our populations, politics, and land are still marginalized, it is also very real. I am interested in deepening my thinking and conversation about what curatorial practice means and what

TANIA WILLARD

resonance it might have and not have in our communities as well as in cities and galleries across the country. I also think understanding the previous generations’ work and promoting a pedagogy of Indigenous creative practice is important to all art history.

Mash-up or remix culture is a crucial aspect of our engagement with culture today. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud calls this idea postproduction. Certainly this was a central element of Beat Nation and much of contemporary Indigenous art produced in Canada today. What is the appeal?

Remix was apparent in Beat Nation, but I don’t really think of the show in that way, specifically because I really resist the idea of newness, like the young generation and the idea that we have new ideas, new media, and new ways of working. This is not in the postmodern sense, but more that I see many threads over time with the way our ancestor artists worked and think it is important to value this contribution and history.

I see that our ancestors always did this, trading and incorporating other aesthetics, concepts, and practices where they had resonance in local community.

I mean, this is really a human quality, and I think now to speak of spaces of intersectionality is potentially more generative. It gives us agency and freedom as opposed to the ways in which “museum quality” connoisseurship siloed our artistic production.

Though I am really interested in relational and dialogical practices, I also understand them outside the art world context and the “coining” of ideas by Western curators, etc., as rooted in our experience and ways of being within Indigenous community. In some ways, we look to these critics to validate our ways of working, but I also want to be clear that validation within a local and Indigenous context is as valued to me as looking at the international, often Western-centric and predominantly white world of contemporary art.

What does curating mean to you?

#haunted_hunted, ongoing series in collaboration with the New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society Collective that seeks to represent the pop culture reference of settler guilt via the “It’s built on an Indian graveyard” plotline. Photo: Aaron Leon (Splatsin).

Previously, I really focused on my responsibility to promote artists, their practices, and to facilitate a dialogue with their ways of working and concepts within an audience. Lately, and within the context of BUSH gallery, I am interested in disattenuating the borders between artists and curator.

My curatorial space becomes an extension of my artistic process. I am careful, though, not to make this an exercise of ego where I am the center of this blurring of borders. I still feel a responsibility within the work but also embrace the space of both dialogue and individual reflection that prioritizes our relationship to land and resources, the basis of our futurity and the focus, or what I think should be the focus of transforming in terms of ideas about what we might be leaving our great-great-great-grandchildren.

Who or what are your significant influences? What matters?

I have a long list of influences: our extraordinary Indigenous ancestors, art aunties, contemporary art elders, and the support of our families to allow us to do the work we do. But what matters is how our work affects the communities and cultures around us. In this time of urgency in environment and politics,

what matters is coming together, making art central in transforming the ways we organize ourselves and advocate for the futures we want to make reality.

What projects are you working on now?

LandMarks2017 is a project that is an exciting extension for me to think about the concepts I put into practice at BUSH gallery. Though I am in a more formal role as curator. I also continue to enact BUSH gallery, and I invite BUSH gallery conversations and the viral potential of the idea: How do you imagine galleries in your home communities, on and off reservation and rural or city based?

I have several public art projects and am finishing graduate school with a focus on a project called Anthro(a)pologizing.

Drawing from multiple anthropological sources that framed Secwepemc culture, language, and governance, my thesis work for grad school will explore specific sites of obscuring the ethnographic gaze. I also have a piece in and was invited to do some writing for Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native American Art at MoCNA [IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts] that opens in July 2017.

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REVIEWS GREAT FALLS, MONTANA

Emergence: A Collective of Plains Indian Warrior Artists Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art

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PENED IN 1896 as the city’s first high school, the building that currently houses the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art continues to be a center of community education and culture. Paris Gibson Square provides art classes, hosts public lectures and discussions of important contemporary issues, exhibits pieces from their permanent collections, and holds special shows, such as Emergence. The museum was recently the site for the High Noon Indigenous Fashion Show, which featured StillSmoking Designs’ spring fashion line.

This most recent show, Emergence: A Collective of Plains Indian Warrior

Artists, entices visitors to explore the diversity of contemporary Northern Plains Native American art by showing the work of most of the artists in the newly formed Creative Indigenous Collective. Established in July 2016, the collective is comprised of six Native American artists: Robert Martinez, Lauren Monroe Jr., Ben Pease, John Isaiah Pepion, Gina StillSmoking (Sicangu Lakota, not part of this exhibit), and Louis StillSmoking.

Robert Martinez, an award-winning Northern Arapaho artist, grew up on the Wind River Reservation. After high school, he attended the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing with a minor in sculpture. The reservation and its tribal community, as well as Wyoming and the people of this Western frontier, influence his work. Martinez’s bio declares “the past and the present often resonate strongly in Wyoming, and those historical chords echo throughout his work.” Using primarily airbrushed acrylic and oil in a limited palette of strikingly vibrant colors, Martinez melds the faces of Native people, some historic photographic portraits, and

Lauren Monroe Jr. (Blackfeet), They Were Lovers, 2016, acrylic, 24 × 30 in.

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elements of mainstream pop culture.

The painting Long, Long Ago depicts an older Indian man wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and holding a wing fan, with a blanket loosely wrapped around his waist.

Lauren Monroe Jr. is a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Browning, Montana. Monroe’s art reflects the influences of his life on the reservation in an effort to create an appreciation of the Pikuni culture and to inspire discourse. A self-taught artist, his work has been described as “abstract and surreal.” A man of varied interests and talents, Monroe is shooting his first film, for which he is both the writer and director. He is working toward an MFA in screenwriting from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He still lives on the reservation and works for his tribe’s fish and wildlife department as a grizzly conflict prevention specialist.

Louis StillSmoking is a member of the Blackfeet Tribe and currently resides in Pierre, South Dakota. He studied art at Montana State University and his art was featured in the 2015 President’s Fine Art Series Creative Nations Benefit Art Auction. StillSmoking works in a variety of media. His use of maps as the background for his oil paintings seems to signify an understanding of place, of home, and of tribal roots.

His artist bio states, “My work is very specific in nature to my culture and my personal views of the world. I like to use very exploratory color fields in my compositions. The use of color and the use of my tribe’s cultural imagery are very important in building a good painting. I try and rely on other modes of composition like impasto layers and line to build a sense of realism. The layers of paint allow for the viewer to focus on the subject with the ease of the handling of the paint.”

Ben Pease, a Crow and Northern Cheyenne artist, was raised on the Crow reservation in southeastern Montana. He currently studies studio art at Montana State University while working as a mixed-media artist. Pease uses antique paper and ephemera,

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found objects, India ink, and acrylic.

His work has multiple focal points that stem from his experience in the world as a “rez kid” to the “culturally rich, contemporary storyteller” he is working on becoming. Pease’s art is a means of educating others about Indigenous worldviews and the validity of Native art in contemporary culture.

John Isaiah Pepion is from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. He aspired to be an artist from a very early age and was mentored by his grandfather and by Blackfeet artist Ernie Pepion. He attended the United Tribes Technical College and IAIA, graduating with degrees in art marketing and museum studies. Art has deepened Pepion’s understanding of his tribe’s history and culture and has also been a source of healing for him. Pepion works on antique paper, mostly ledger paper, a medium he first undertook in 2005.

He creates vivid imagery from culturally based knowledge through watercolors, oil-based colored pencils, and ink.

One of Pepion’s pieces in the Paris Gibson show, Emergence, which gives the exhibition its name, depicts eight black-and-white magpies on ledger paper. Seven magpies regard one magpie in flight. This drawing aptly illustrates the mission of Creative Indigenous Collective as people who have come together to learn from each other.

These artists chose collaboration in an effort to share their knowledge and connections, to harness their collective power to open doors previously closed to them as individuals, and to help each other progress in their artistic careers. The collective looks forward to incorporating other emerging artists into the group, such as musicians and writers, and hope to exhibit their art in Montana and beyond. By inviting the collective to exhibit their work in a space that is such a vibrant and vital part of Great Falls, Paris Gibson Museum gives visitors a chance to experience contemporary Native American artistic voices. This educational opportunity is vital in an area where Native people tend to be the subjects of non-Native art rather than the artists.

The Paris Gibson Museum of Art is a welcoming place to discover and admission is free. Their ongoing exhibit, Lee Steen: A Montana Original, is an extraordinary example of Outsider Art with a story rooted in the state.

Also of note is the ongoing art installation Jean Price: Three Thousand and Counting, which is a commemoration to the US soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq. Price created a dog tag for each soldier, and continues to add to the visual display of the country’s human loss to war. —Yvonne N. Tiger

OKLAHOMA CITY

Jeffrey Gibson: Speak to Me Oklahoma Contemporary

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N THE LAST DECADE, Jeffrey Gibson has dramatically shifted artistic styles: from biomorphic paintings on canvas and paper to hard-edged abstraction on rawhide, then textile assemblages and now monumental, mixed-media sculptures and video. Nonetheless, a common thread runs through all these genres.

In recent years, Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw and Oklahoma Cherokee interdisciplinary artist, left Brooklyn for upstate New York, where he teaches at Bard College. He earned his BFA from Art Institute of Chicago and, in 1998, his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, with support from his tribe under the leadership Chief Phillip Martin.

At a recent talk at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Gibson shared how he had offered to teach art classes on his reservation, but Chief Martin told him that he was making more of a positive impact in the global art world. As Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee) has pointed out visual artists are ambassadors for their tribes. It’s to the credit of the larger art world in evolving its relationship to the Native community, that Gibson can be himself—that not all gallerists, curators, and audiences demand he play the role

of Super Indian or expect him to speak on behalf of all Native peoples. However, this did not happen without struggle, and much of the discourse around his work still fixates on his role as a Native artist in the mainstream art world. An articulate and nimble navigator, Gibson leads non-Native audiences past their hang-ups and guides them to a new, interstitial zone.

While the artist has lived in many cities in many countries, including Korea and Germany, this first solo exhibit in Oklahoma is something of a homecoming. His mother’s family is from Briggs, Oklahoma, so his relatives were able to attend the opening reception. Curated by Jennifer Scanlan, the curatorial and exhibitions director for Oklahoma Contemporary, Jeffrey Gibson: Speak to Me features four components: his video art, beaded wall hangings, ceramics, and figurative sculptures in the round.

The video, one becomes the other, arose from a 2014 residency at the Denver Art Museum and features dancers from the museum’s annual Friendship Powwow, as well as curator John Lukavic, PhD, and other staff members. Gibson invited members from the local Native community to interact with the museum’s extensive collection of historic Indigenous artworks. Their bittersweet conversations with the items are interspersed with drumming by the Plenty Wolf Singers, a Lakota northern drum group, and haunting scenes of Lukavic opening and closing vaults. A dancer’s swaying buckskin fringe starkly contrasts with the stationary hide bags encased in vitrines. The geometric split-screens echo Gibson’s abstract style. The desire to portray Native people’s dialogues with their ancestors’ creations comes from Gibson’s early experiences working in the collections of the Field Museum. He observed firsthand the negotiations and repatriation of ceremonial items, where tribal elders spoke with these items as fellow living beings.

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the same vein as 19th-century Navajo weavers, Gibson uses zigzags and other geometric patterns with clashing colors to maximize the optical illusion of pulsating movement. His oversized, loomed beadwork appears to spin and vibrate, and the text panels assume the persona of a streaming LED display.

The swell of two-tone, black-and-white yarn in What We Want, What We Need

forms a checkerboard pattern, like those of Gibson’s 1980s Vans shoes, and, unintentionally, like that of an Inca infantryman’s tunic uniform. After all, early Indigenous artists were masters of abstraction.

Borrowing from different cultures and subcultures, Gibson creates “mash-ups,” first expressed as hanging textiles but now evolving into

Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw-Cherokee), The Clown, 2014, wool, acrylic yarn, goat fur, glass pony beads, deerhide, quartz crystals, tin cones, steel studs, wood, dye, 80 × 34 3/4 × 15 in.

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three-dimensional installations. As a 13-year-old in Korea, Gibson discovered the liberation of the club scene, where dancers felt free to express themselves through their personal styles. The way cultures and subcultures use personal adornment to convey identity continues to fascinate the artist. He adds iconic accessories to his textiles, such as steel studs favored by metalheads and punks.

Song lyrics from Gibson’s eclectic musical tastes furnish text.

Powwows also inform the work.

Nothing in the show overtly expresses Choctaw or Cherokee cultural identity; here, Gibson is interested in Pan-Indianism and the powwow scene that helped keep his mobile, urban family connected to Native cultures.

He sources materials for his wall hangings and sculptures from powwow vendors and, with a team of assistants, transforms these into powerful displays of cross-culturalism.

While his materials, pony beads, rickrack, fringe, ribbons, and jingles are elements of powwow regalia, the resulting artwork don’t share powwow aesthetics—the pieces are too angular, too disjointed, too busy—and more closely aligned with the jubilant excess of Mardi Gras Indians’ attire. The beaded designs look more KwaZulu than Native American, and his palette is straight from the early 1990s rave culture: blaring yellows, detergent-box oranges, hot pinks, teals, black, and white.

The jingle is a particularly prominent component to his work.

Originally crafted from rolled-up tobacco can lids, these are sewn onto women’s dresses to produce tinkling sounds for the jingle dress dance.

Around 1900, an Ojibwe man dreamed of four women wearing these dresses, so he made the dresses and taught the songs and healing dance to his wife and three other women. Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe) is another New York interdisciplinary artist who works with jingles, but her approach is performative, while Gibson emphasizes the visual aspects of the metal cones.

Wanting to break away from the constraints of loomed beadwork, Gibson turned next to the tactile

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medium of clay. The artist says that the pots in this show were inspired, in part,

by Mississippian head pots—a series of portrait effigy jars from Arkansas and Missouri of tattooed, deceased males.

The polychrome dripping colors and loose, gestural forms harken back to his earlier nonobjective abstract paintings in which impasto applications of paint assumed sculptural dimensions.

Gibson has moved on to three-dimensional installations by draping his mixed-media cloaks, growing ever larger, over frames of driftwood and crowning them with his ceramic jars, evoking human or equine forms. Perfectly static sculptures in a silent gallery space don’t seem representative of dancing, singing, and music, but through carefully orchestrated repetition, Gibson invokes motion and sound.

Some of the components in his sculptures are personal keepsakes; others are almost over-the-top stereotypically “Native”—quartz crystals, flint arrowheads. These seem like metaphorical bones tossed to a non-Native audience craving Indianness, so that Gibson can get be free to get on with the business at hand: creating, working with color, texture, and all the formal elements that hold his artistic interest. Regarding the loaded designation of being a “Native American artist,” he told Forbes art critic Adam Lehrer, “I used to worry about the label being limiting. But then you realize that the label isn’t going anywhere and if we are going to describe each other in this way; you’re whatever and I’m Native American; then I’d rather proactively use it strategically.”1 Gibson’s career is hitting its stride. He has a robust exhibition schedule and is represented by Marc Straus in New York. He hints at the intriguing possibility of venturing into performance, which might be revealed in the traveling, mid-career survey currently being planned by the Denver Art Museum for 2018.

—America Meredith 1. Adam Lehrer, “Artist Jeffrey Gibson Explores Complexities in Human Movement in New Show at Marc Straus Gallery,” Forbes, October 29, 2015, web.

Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee), Enate, 2017, photograph from videotaped performance.

Image courtesy of the artist.

PORTLAND, OREGON

Connecting Lines Portland Art Museum

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N VIEW at the Portland Art Museum’s Center for Contemporary Native Art through October 29, 2017, Connecting Lines features the art of Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee) and Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation). The artists met in 2015 when they both received Contemporary Art Fellowships from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. The artists’ bond formed during this period led to the development of this exhibition.

Hill’s performance and installation, Enate, focuses on issues of violence against Native women, female empowerment, and Native sovereignty, as she specifically calls attention to the sexual abuse of Indigenous women. Mallory’s installation, Recurring Chapters in the Book of Inevitable Outcomes, consists of tall shapes resembling chard timbers or skeletal plant stalks surrounded

by colorful, lively, spore-like forms.

Her work is inspired by a rereading of Cherokee history and addresses ideas of disruption, repair, and renewal.1 Entering the gallery, text panels introduce the visitor to the thematic elements of the exhibition. Statements by curator and scholar Ashley Holland (Cherokee Nation), as well as by Mallory and Hill, aid the visitor in providing a context for which to view these works of art. As Holland notes, Connecting Lines documents the struggles, fears, hopes, and successes of these two Cherokee artists and each work presents concepts of survival, culture, and self-representation, resulting in an exhibition that explores issues of contemporary Cherokee identity and continued connections to the past.2 Hill’s Enate is a complex installation that includes a performance recorded in the gallery space. During the performance, projected on a continuously looping video within the gallery, Hill cloaked herself in a red mantle constructed of 6,956 silk taffeta silhouettes resembling ancient depictions of women. The number is not arbitrary; it represents the average

1. “CCNA: Connecting Lines: Brenda Mallory and Luzene Hill,” Portland Art Museum, accessed April 25, 2017, web.

2. Ibid., Ashley Holland, introductory text panel, pdf.

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Brenda Mallory (Cherokee Nation), Recurring Chapters in the Book of Inevitable Outcomes, waxed fabric, nuts, bolts, welded steel, 2015. Image courtesy of the Portland Art Museum.

number of Native American women in the United States who report sexual abuse each year. The silhouettes of the female figures have been dyed a vibrant red using cochineal to demonstrate the importance of this natural dye prior to colonization. The color is meant to imbue the cloak with feminine power.

The work makes a powerful statement. Hill is hidden by the mantle as she writhes beneath the weight of the taffeta. She eventually emerges from constraints of the cloak wearing a delicate, silk robe. Like the mantle, it too has been dyed in the same dark, rich red of the cochineal. As the performance piece plays again and again, the mantle hangs from the ceiling, hovering over the viewer who is compelled to look above and engage with the piece. The silk robe hangs nearby on the wall. Its thin, lightweight material stands in stark contrast to the heft of the taffeta mantle.

Just as Hill intends the use of cochineal to represent a reclamation of power, her emergence from the mantle is a metaphor for reclaiming power for the Indigenous women who have endured sexual abuse.

The soft, tactile quality in Hill’s work stands in contrast to the tangible sculptures in Mallory’s installation.

Mallory’s work is a combination of rigid geometric and organic forms made from waxed cloth, nuts, bolts, and welded steel. Each individual piece that forms the installation could stand on its own as a work of art. Together the work becomes multi-surfaced and immersive.3 Recurring Chapters in the Book of Inevitable Outcomes creates a landscape that is both foreign and inviting. There is a sense of the sublime in which the artist’s work can be interpreted as beautiful and dangerous.

The sculptures draw the visitor into the space, but at the same time the black, tower-like forms repel the viewer from fully engaging with the less ominous, organic, spore-like forms. According to Holland, Mallory’s work is a representation of her own self-realizations.

Despite this openness, there is a sense that something is being kept from the viewer, protected within the imposing structures and complex spheres.4 The Center for Contemporary Native Art is a small but important space housed within the galleries at the Portland Art Museum. It is dedicated to presenting the works and perspectives of

3. Ashley Holland, “Connecting Lines,” brochure, 2017. Her essay, copies of which are available to museum visitors, provides a closer look at the art and artists and helps to gain a deeper understanding of the displayed works. The essay is available online at portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/ccna-connecting-lines.

4. Ibid.

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today’s Indigenous artists, who are fully engaged in the curatorial process, interpretation, and programs associated with each exhibition. This approach challenges museum visitors to think about Native American art and culture as dynamic and changing rather than being stuck in a romanticized, ethnographic past. Connecting Lines is a complex exhibition that requires the viewer to engage with art, performance, and text. If visitors take the time to immerse themselves in this powerful exhibition, they will be rewarded by a deep and meaningful experience that connects past with present. This show demonstrates the ongoing struggles and successes of these artists within the context of their Native American heritage and contemporary experiences.

—Denise Neil-Binion

SANTA FE

Athena LaTocha: Inside the Forces of Nature IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

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PON MY FIRST STEPS toward the South Gallery at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, I was surprised to find a seemingly modest representation of works by Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa LakotaOjibwe). On display in the gallery’s hallway from January 20 through May 13, 2017, a vinyl text introduction and a video monitor playing a Q&A between the artist and curator Manuela Well-Off-Man and documenting the artist sketching in a wooded landscape were placed as welcoming guides into the space. What happened next was my sighted glance of a complete, wall-filled drawing, which made my heart skip a beat. Four small studies were installed in the wall parallel to the mural. These densely layered artworks were exploding with information,

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feeling, movement. I knew I was in for a challenge to clearly describe my responses to LaTocha’s direct and experiential landscape drawings, as well as what I thought I was seeing.

That initial feeling of a modestly filled space had completely washed away. Perhaps the placement of this exhibition in a smaller gallery and the style of its display were merely trickster gestures to invite viewers to get close to these enigmas of truth that made me question my capacity for reading each and every mark located in the depths of each composition. The more I looked, the more the marks morphed and changed. LaTocha’s landscapes surely are alive.

La Bajada Red (2016–17) is LaTocha’s wall-sized drawing comprised of three horizontal panels of paper drenched with sumi and walnut inks and La Bajada red soil. This work—created while LaTocha had the paper on the floor as she embedded scratches, blots, veins, and soil skins—is a sweeping motion of roundness that reaches in all directions. In some parts La Bajada Red has an even sheen from the walnut oil that also offers warmth and light to the whole piece. In other areas, LaTocha has built up the sumi ink in a way that recalls tree bark. This composition dances, records the artist’s steps of creation, and very directly honors the earth at work. La Bajada Red is a maze of pathways—perhaps a creative ceremony that traverses through rain, wind, light, darkness, fog, snow.

There are allusions to mold, to tides, to dew. Spaces converge and overlap. Then they split apart and reunite.

La Bajada Red is more than infused; it is webs of life, of blood, of crescendos of nerves and birth.

In this work, LaTocha celebrates the art of giving form through being inside the landscape, through its unevenness, creases, and cascades.

The artist’s mark-making process has a duality to it. Many lines give way to biomorphic forms that fade in and out. The work becomes an ecosystem before the viewer’s eyes. Perhaps the

Athena LaTocha, La Bajada Red (detail), 2016-2017, sumi ink, walnut ink, La Bajada red pigment on paper, 104 × 362 1/8 in.

demonstration of LaTocha’s landscape becoming, appearing, materializing the unknown gives audiences a hope and option to believe in the support of the earth. This work invites a close eye toward ever-changing concepts right in the same composition that appeared differently minutes earlier. The deep shadows in La Bajada Red give weight to this work; they acknowledge peaks, valleys, and atmospheric gusts.

In the introductory video in the hallway outside, the artist mentions a politicized layer of her practice that is also located in her landscapes. LaTocha broaches the unavoidable intersections of landscapes and ruthless industry; the sumi ink particularly resembles petroleum. LaTocha also makes use of thick bicycle tire treads, another linkage between mass commerce, art, and landscapes. However, here, it seems the tread strips become ink brushes and are given their due as a contemporary art tool that speaks to an endless number

of experiences held by the artist and viewers. This is a reminder that all materials are available for giving form and creating language.

As another performative aspect of this work, the La Bajada red soil continuously falls off of LaTocha’s composition. The earth in constant motion shines on in these moments.

However, as the accompanying label indicates, the artist also allows for an allusion to erosion to be present. Here, the earth speaks, even in the gallery setting as a new home. This detail of LaTocha’s work gives emphasis to the La Bajada red soil, where viewers can examine its granular form. The soil looks quite different with the wood floor as a support; in the drawing, the soil takes on a more epithelial and protective appearance in thick layers.

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a quiet, strong environment. In the next one, sweeping textures of the earth are explored in combination with a glow, a shine, and a feeling of wind. The third study bears a striking resemblance to La Bajada Red, more so than the others. This particular work embodies a pathway, waves of a journey, marks of action that suggest clouds and snow. The fourth study reads as an environment that houses smoke, movement, and the alchemy of the earth. This work’s paper is noticeably more curled than that of the other three of the artist’s studies.

LaTocha’s landscapes are felt by the artist herself. She sees them from inside and looks at them at eye level, with their eyes meeting her glances.

The artist draws the community of the landscape from within, listening to voices, noting gestures, and giving form to collaborations within the expansive collective. Thus, LaTocha’s Inside the Forces of Nature is aptly named. The exhibition is high energy, intense, multisensory, personal, and prominent.

The art of perspective is given center stage in this exhibition. The artist’s immersion into the landscape gives way to a completeness of space, a barrage of questions, and an embracement of the uncertain. I hope to experience this artist’s works again at another point on the unseen path of what lies ahead and converges with the present.

LaTocha earned her MFA from Stony Brook University in New York and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The artist is from Alaska and currently resides and works in Brooklyn. She will be featured in two upcoming exhibitions in South Dakota, at the Journey Museum and Learning Center in Rapid City and the South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings.

I hope your path crosses with her artworks, in an exchange of glances with the landscapes. —Michelle Lanteri

SANTA FE

Plunder Me Baby: Paintings and Sculpture Peters Projects

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LTERNATELY HUMOROUS AND DISMAYING, Mestiza artist Kukuli Velarde’s Plunder Me Baby: Paintings and Sculpture at Peters Projects explores the ugly legacy of colonization across the Americas. On exhibit from December 16, 2016, through February 11, 2017, at Peters Projects, the show featured ceramic figurines from Velarde’s Plunder Me Baby series and paintings on aluminum from her Cadavers series.

Velarde studies and adopts certain aesthetic qualities from Pan-American historic forms, including Olmec acrobatic figures, Nazca ceramics, Moche portrait vessels, Aztec feathered warrior statues, and Spanish Colonial retablo paintings, as well as canonical images from the Italian Renaissance, such as Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Michelangelo’s Pietà. Velarde treats the original as a template and incorporates her own face and body into the piece, a borrowed self-portrait one could say. By integrating images from Pan-American histories her work considers how racism, sexism, and classism have impacted Native life in the Americas.

Velarde was born in 1962 in Cuzco, Peru. She started drawing and painting as a child. Her parents encouraged her efforts and even organized annual exhibitions of her work from the time Velarde was 10 years old until she was 20. Before starting college, she had doubts about herself and her craft, worried that she only considered herself an artist because of her parents. She attended Hunter College in New York for her bachelor of fine arts degree where she explored

her creativity and turned away from painting to ceramics. After a two-decade hiatus from painting, she returned to the medium for her Cadavers series. Though she returns to Peru every year, Velarde lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her husband and fellow artist, Doug Herren.

She uses her own face so as not to insult anyone else, and the use of her own naked body is also part of her self-exploration…

Her self-portraiture allows Velarde to address the ugliness of contemporary culture, especially its principles of beauty. She uses her own face so as not to insult anyone else, and the use of her own naked body is also part of her self-exploration, showing herself as she is, not idealized, noting that “I’m painting my body because it is mine.”1 Velarde considers herself more “Indian than Spanish,”yet she sees how she is trapped by colonial paradigms. She observes a double standard in Peru: Pre-Columbian American arts and cultures are celebrated while the living Natives are denigrated and disrespected.

The South American standards of beauty are based on European qualities, as seen in the media in magazines and television. Velarde references a recent study about attractiveness in South America, noting that Peruvians were rated the lowest by other South Americans, which she ascribes to the fact that Peruvians are often more Native-looking.

Each piece is given a long title that mixes English and Spanish racial slurs against Indigenous Americans.

Her piece Chola Puteadora: Gabby!!

Need to be put on her place … Métale mano (2007), made of brown clay with underglazes and wax, is based on stirrup-handled ceramics from the

1. Peters Projects, “Discussion with Kukuli Velarde & Garth Clark,” Vimeo, February 2017, web.

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Nazca culture from around 500 CE. Velarde sculpted her own face on the female form, her legs crossed in front of her torso to reveal her genitalia, placing her sexuality in the forefront.

The term chola translates as a woman of mixed Native and Spanish heritage yet has a negative connotation to upper classes. Puteadora translates as bitch, a strong figure who needs to be taken by the hand and put in her place. Velarde’s India Patarrajada: She will do all the

acrobacies [sic] the Master orders, pero no esperes que te quiera mucho ...

(2008) is based on a ceramic figurine of an acrobat from the Tlatilco culture of 1250 to 800 BCE. Many specialized art forms emerged during this period of the Olmec horizon in San Lorenzo in Central Mexico. Archaeologists associate these hollow vessels with the ceremonial practice of ingesting hallucinogens such as mushrooms.

Resting her head on her hands and her

Kukuli Velarde (Mestiza), India Patarrajada, She will do all the acrobacies the Master orders, pero no esperes que te quiera mucho…, 2008, white clay, wax, casein paint, resin, 22 × 15 × 16 in.

feet on her head, Velarde’s title translates as “barefoot Indian,” an insult to rural, Indigenous people who wear huaraches or go without shoes. With the artist’s own face on the contorted body, Velarde is the “barefoot Indian” forced to perform for the master.

For the paintings in the show, Velarde used oil and acrylic paint on aluminum plates rather than on canvas.

The artist prefers the hard surface as well as the attached bolts because they give a sense of armaments and weaponry to the pieces, though Velarde notes that metal is fragile and can be bent and ruined. “I like the idea of vulnerability in my work. I like the idea as a woman to be strong in spite of my vulnerability.”2 In the painting Nak’aq Archangel (2006), Velarde adopts a Cusco School style of painting, depicting her own naked, decapitated torso, her head in the hands of the archangel. Though identified as Nak’aq, the sword in the archangel’s hand also references Michael who defeated the demon. Nak’aq is the Quechua word for an evil monster who takes human form, who seeks out Natives and cuts their throats, then steals their body fat for chicharrones or fried snacks. It was later rumored that conquistadors used the fat to lubricate their metal guns and cannons. Velarde points to a contradiction that within Andean cultures, fat was considered a sign of good health and beauty, while Western standards prize thinness.

The artist places herself severed in the middle of this contradiction, her head cut from her body.

Velarde has shown internationally and has received many awards, including a 2003 Pew Fellowship and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. Velarde’s unsparing revision of the past addresses larger cultural issues from the impact of colonization, the historic roles of women, class distinctions, and cultural paradigms of beauty, yet her work is always personal as she explores her identity in the world.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

1. Ibid.

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TORONTO

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience Art Museum at the University of Toronto

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N NEARLY THE LAST DAY of Cree artist Kent Monkman’s show Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, a crowd outside of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto steadily grew in anticipation for the doors to open. An hour later, the venue was packed. Deliberately coinciding with Canada’s celebration of 150 years of confederation, the show provides important, alternative perspectives to sanitized national narratives. On view for a relatively short time, January 26 through March 4, 2017, the exhibit will tour eight other venues in the upcoming years.

Before attending the exhibit, I studied some of the works online and thought seeing them in person would be a rather straightforward experience.

Based on Kent Monkman’s past performances of his drag/two-spirit character, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, I expected something lighter. However, the way Kent Monkman contextualizes his paintings with historical artworks, and driven by the narration of his character, it made a powerful, more serious impression. I experienced rushes of emotion throughout the exhibition.

Historical works on loan for the show amplify the narratives in Monkman’s paintings, installations, and panels, and vice versa. Giving familiar tropes a twist, many of his acrylic-oncanvas paintings (apparently many created with the help of assistants) riff on glorified, historic European, Canadian, and American works in composition, subject matter, and style, notably grand scenes in lush landscapes and naturalistic renderings. While the works can be visually appreciated immediately, many carry layers of meaning and abound in historic

references and minute yet telling details.

Sections of the show follow chapters taken from Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s “memoirs,” her perspectives on Canada’s history. Panels styled as antiquated pages are trilingual, as are the gold vinyl titles: Cree syllabics first, English second, and French third. The exhibit begins with Chapter VII through chapter IX, then goes back to VI through I, all dealing with significant moments in Canada’s fraught relationship with Native peoples. Given the time jumps, it was necessary to cycle through the show a few times to get a full sense of the narrative.

The first section, Chapter VII, The Rez House, includes a classic painting of the Virgin Mary with Christ, as well as facsimiles of pages from Wilderness Kingdom: Indian Life in the Rocky Mountains; 1840–1847, by Jesuit priest and artist Nicolas Point.

These framed pages lead to a full-scale diorama, a contemporary scene inspired by the Nativity that depicts the birth of the time-traveling Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. A baby bearing the adult face of Miss Chief lies on a Hudson Bay blanket. This disturbing sight is in keeping with early European conventions of too-old depictions of the Christ child. Humbly clothed parents hover over the baby; the father wears what looks like a Chicago Blackhawks hockey jersey only the mascot sports eye shadow and lipstick. Indications of rural reservation poverty such as shack walls, canned goods, soda in a baby bottle, a small portable stove, a lamp, and a container of gasoline surround the figures. The background is a grand natural scene, but in the distance, a Native child is forcibly taken from a mother by a nun and a Mountie.

Tucked behind the diorama, one display case seemed out of place, particularly since the rest of the show seemed so deliberately considered.

Two pairs of praying hands were in the form of silicone sex toys, black and red respectively. I only noticed them on my way back toward the entrance.

Chapter VIII, Sickness and

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Healing, presents The Death of the Virgin (after Caravaggio), a scene of a young woman in a hospital surrounded by mourning family next to a nurse’s bag from 1916. In the same grey space is Chapter IX, Urban Res, which includes detailed, large-scale paintings of a dark, disturbing side of Native experiences in cities, particularly those of Native women. In Le Petit dejeuner sur l’herbe (2014), female figures in the style of Picasso’s Cubism stand and writhe on the street outside of a hotel while angels fly above. Bears roam a city street in Bad Medicine as a Baconesque female figure lies in the street—seemingly a victim of violence, addiction, or both—with the contents of her purse spilled on the ground. A bear roars at an angel above her body. In Struggle for Balance, two men attend to another crumpled, Cubist woman as violence erupts around them, again with angels on the wing.

The next room, Chapter VI, Incarceration, comments on Native imprisonment in Canada. Panels share shocking, recent statistics of the number of Natives imprisoned: up to 65.3 percent of the population at Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba.

Orange-clad inmates run amok in Cash for Souls, grabbing individuals in white garb while angels and a helicopter fly overhead. Across from the painting is Seeing Red, in which a Picasso-esque bison falls before Miss Chief, clad in a skin-tight bullfighter outfit, as all kinds of action takes place in the urban scene. The work defies simplistic interpretation. On display in the same room are leg irons from Nanaimo, British Columbia, dating from 1870 to 1910, and steel handcuffs used on Louis Sam from 1884. Louis was a Stó:lo First Nation teen wrongfully accused of murder and lynched by a mob. Historic photos line the wall, including those of notable Cree Chiefs Pîhtokahanapiwiyin (Poundmaker) (ca. 1842–1886) and Big Bear (ca.1825–1888) while at the Stony Mountain Institution. Across from the photos is a strange painting, Reincarceration, where haunting Giacometti-esque figures emerge from the water, transformed into half-dressed

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humans through ceremony. The old and the new reveal that Native imprisonment has been a persistent theme since Canada’s inception.

The next section is Chapter V, Forcible Transfer of Children. On one side of the doorway is a case filled with small souvenirs made from 1925 to 1931

by Kapawe’no First Nation children at the Grouard Indian Residential School for the principal, and on the other side are carved Haudenosaunee cradleboards. Chapter V may be the most somber, and sobering, section of the exhibit. In a black room, a heartbreaking piece, The Scream, depicts the violence and chaos of nuns and the RCMP stealing Native children from their mothers. Ornate cradleboards line the walls, interspersed with wooden facsimiles painted grey—phantom boards representing the children.

A room with green walls showcases Chapter III, Wards of the State/The Indian Problem, which features historical portraits of Queen Victoria, Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the seventh prime minister. Monkman’s painting, The Subjugation of Truth, depicts Chief Poundmaker and Big Bear grimly sitting across a desk at the mercy of Canadian bureaucrats. In shadow, their legs are in irons. Poundmaker’s actual moccasins are displayed in the room, as is a reproduction of Treaty #7, which belonged to a chief. A Country Wife, seemingly representative of negative Native-settler relations, carries a clear undercurrent of abuse, with an empty bottle on the floor as a drunk MacDonald stands next to a seated Miss Chief wearing European clothes and looking up with tears streaming down her face.

In the hall, Chapter IV, Starvation, presents another of Monkman’s installations, Starvation Plates. A sumptuous table is set for a feast, with champagne, wine bottles, grapes, and hors d’œuvres, all under a display case with china commemorating the Canadian centennial. In stark contrast at the far end of the table are dishes out in the

open, printed with bluish photographic images of men on top of piles of bones.

Small animal bones are scattered among the plates, making a strong statement about the haves and have-nots. On the walls are paintings of bison by Albert Bierstadt, Paul Kane, George Catlin, and an anonymous artist, demonstrating the bison’s numbers and their key role in Native cultures. A gun, perhaps like those used to slaughter the bison, is on display nearby. Iron Horse portrays Native men pushing and pulling a giant metal horse on wheels along railroads tracks as Miss Chief ushers forth.

Miss Chief reveals, “They told us how

important the Iron Horse was, and the riches it would bring to all. Blinded by their promises, I led the way.”

In Chapter II, Fathers of Confederation, Miss Chief uses her body in an attempt to gain power with Canadian bureaucrats in a red-painted room. This is the most sexually explicit portion of the show and clearly a dig at Canada’s revered politicians. In The Daddies, Miss Chief lies disrobed before a group of men. The piece is a play on Robert Harris’s The Fathers of Confederation, on display with Harris’s studies and sketches. While Miss Chief whips a subservient man in The Bears

Kent Monkman (Cree), Death of the Virgin (After Caravaggio), 2016, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 51 in.

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of Confederation, all kinds of startling, sexual antics take place between men and bears against a grand landscape.

The room devoted to Chapter I, New France, Reign of the Beaver, is painted in a cheery yellow. In the installation, Scent of a Beaver, Miss Chief wears moccasins and an elaborately embroidered dress lined with beaver fur, her hair piled high as she swings back and forth on a rose-covered swing. She is attended by two European suitors, presumably the French Lieutenant General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and the British General James Wolfe. This was when things were going well, though not so much for the beaver. Study for the Beaver Bacchanal shows beavers in a hedonistic heaven next to [a print of] Garland of Fruit (ca 1900–1925) by Peter Paul Rubens, but the beavers soon become victims of the fur trade. A beaver skin and moccasins and gloves by contemporary Dene artists accompany the flat art. Beavers are brutally killed by Europeans and Native peoples alike in Study for Les Castors Du Roi, a piece informed by Pierre Quentin Chedel’s 18th-century engraving, Beaver Hunting in Canada, displayed next to it. Beavers plead for their lives as trappers kill them in The Massacre of the Innocents. It’s not often the perspective of the beaver is considered, and it’s horrifying.

The exhibit is a clever means of stoking greater awareness and understanding of Native people’s experiences in Canada, present and past. Rather than being a mere gimmick, the drag/two-spirit character, in spite of her silly name, serves to pique people’s curiosity. Miss Chief brought the narrative alive and made the history more immediate.

Softening the edge with this touch of humor, the sumptuous yet troubling art of Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience still allows for emotional engagement and sobering consideration of an untold perspective.

—Neebinnaukzhik Southall

BOOK REVIEWS ART HISTORY

From Myth to Creation: Art from Amazonian Ecuador Dorothea S. Whitten and Norman E. Whitten Jr. University of Illinois Press, 2016

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HIS DECEPTIVELY SLIM VOLUME holds a wealth of information and provides a window into the intricate symbolism behind the sophisticated, visual language of Canelos Quichua ceramics. The first edition was a catalogue for a temporary exhibit in 1988 at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Soon after, the authors’ collection of Canelos Quichua art became the centerpiece of the permanent South American exhibit at the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at the University of Illinois. The book has been expanded and updated with a new forward and an additional chapter to provide a lasting resource about Canelos Quichua artwork.

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The authors are a husbandand-wife team of ethnographers.

Norman Whitten is the curator of the Spurlock Museum. Dorothea Whitten, who walked on in 2011, served as a research associate for the University of Illinois’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Together the couple published several books about the Canelos Quichua.

Even in Ecuador, the Canelos Quichua are not well known, and their artwork is often misattributed to their Jivaroan-speaking neighbors, the Shuar and Achuar. They live in the western lowlands of Ecuador, in the northwest part of the immense Amazon rainforest. In the 15th century, the Inca Empire brought the Quechua language north into Ecuador. There it became the lingua franca of many tribes on the move due to the 16th-century Spanish incursion. The Canelos Quichua live at the base of the Andes in Pastaza Province, southeast of Quito.

They alternate between living in small hamlets and scattered homes along the edge of the rainforest, or sacha, where a family will clear a garden, or chagra.

Since the main text was written 28 years ago, it’s interesting to see how discourse about Indigenous art has changed. The Whittens were ahead of their time in their desire to contextualize the artwork within its own culture. By spending extended periods living in Quichua communities, the authors gleaned extraordinarily intimate knowledge of Canelos Quichua oral history, worldview, and ceremonies. They devote most of the book, in an almost quixotic attempt, to explaining Canelos Quichua cosmology. How can an outsider unfamiliar with the Amazon rainforest truly understand any of this? Undaunted, the authors spell out as much as they can by explaining concepts and providing images of artwork that manifest these ideas and spiritual entities.

The three primary “spirit masters” portrayed in pottery are: Nungwi, who

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controls the clay for pottery and soil for agriculture; Sungui, who dwells in the water; Amasanga, whose domain is the rainforest. Transformation and dualism are key concepts in Canelos Quichua religion. Male immortals have female components. Human-like entities have animal components. When the Whittens relay an elaborate story about two mythological brothers—the younger of whom keeps getting into predicaments and ultimately transforms into bracket fungi—it is profoundly satisfying to turn the page to see an effigy pot of bracket fungi with a human face and have an inkling of what is going on.

The authors identify three significant design motifs that, at first glance, just look like geometric patterns. The tortoise or turtle imagery resembles their shells by means of concentric polygons. The anaconda design features conjoined diamond patterns with dots. Finally, the iguanid pattern has stretched-out hexagons, narrower than the turtle pattern. All these animals have complex significance. While Canelos Quichua symbolism may not directly translate the symbolism of other Amazonian tribes’ or precontact ceramics, the reader can still extrapolate the potential of complicated meanings behind these related art forms.

Male spiritual leaders, who are visionaries and healers, advise Canelos Quichua communities. A spiritual leader will have either a sister or a wife who is a master ceramic artist, who can express his visions or oral history through pottery. Both the male spiritual leader and the female potter are called yachaj, or “one who knows.”

Hand-coiled, pit-fired Canelos Quichua ceramics are either sturdy blackware—fired twice, used for cooking and serving food and drink—or ornate polychrome used in ceremonies and festivals to prepare or serve aswa, a fermented manioc drink, or visionary sacraments such as ayahuasca and datura. Communities actively trade different colored clay slips, which range from pure white, honey yellow, amber, crimson, purple, to black. The pots are glazed with shinquillu, a resin likely from the amescla

tree, Protium heptaphyllum. The designs painted on the surface often correspond to the three-dimensional forms of the pots.

The Whittens include quite a bit of Quichua vocabulary throughout the book, including art terms such as aswa churana manga (fermented manioc drink decorated jar). The zoomorphic effigy figurines, jista puruwá, are animated by the artists’ keen, firsthand observation of the living animals in their own habitat.

The authors explain that Canelos Quichua artists portray outsiders in their artwork and how the artists are adapting to a shifting economy within the Ecuadorian nation-state. Foreigners entering the Amazon are considered to be monkey people who are not quite human. Oil bosses in particular are popular subjects caricatured in pottery. While pottery is a woman’s art, Canelos Quichua men adapted their practical carving skills to create wooden sculptures for the external art market. “This ability to create beauty through knowledge yields financial independence, and hence the promise of power to control their own lives, to loosen, or even cut, the bonds of foreign domination,” as the Whittens explain on page 25.

From Myth to Creation features more than one hundred photos, and each image of artwork is accompanied by the artists’ names. Several artist biographies are listed with photos of the artists or their families, all too rare in writing about Latin American Indigenous art. This step of putting faces to the work humanizes the artists and provides a valuable record for future researchers. For example, Apache Vargas (Canelos Quichua) is one of the most prolific master potters featured throughout the book. Her biography reveals how watching the movie Godzilla inspired her to create an effigy pot of this monster. Instead of just being a pop culture novelty, this pot fits into the Canelos Quichua ethos.

The Whittens explain the caiman’s significance in Vargas’s culture and how this giant reptile can be a force from the rainforest protecting its domain from the urban expansion of the not-quitehuman, monkey-people foreigners.

The final chapter, added to the second edition, discusses how the Whittens came to collect Canelos Quichua pottery. As ethnographers in the tribes’ territory, they were met with requests for medical supplies.

When they were able to transport medical supplies, they were gifted pots

Alegria Canelos (Canelos Quichua), Tucuna, 1985, ceramic, tree resin, pigment, 4 1/4 × 7 in., collection of the Spurlock Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1997.15.0389. The shape of this vessel is either a star that turns into a beautiful woman or a brazil nut used in festivals of the monkey people.

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in thanks. In 1974, the community built its own Sacha Museu to showcase its culture to visitors; however, the rainforest museum was not economically stable, so community leaders asked the Whittens to sell ceramics in the United States to raise funds to sustain it. In 1976, the couple founded the Sacha Runa Research Foundation, a nonprofit that sold ceramics to provide medical care and support to the Canelos Quichua. Besides selling pottery, they also curated several exhibitions in Ecuador and the United States.

Based on input from the artists, the Whittens defined four broad themes in which to frame the artwork in subsequence exhibits in the US and Ecuador: Control of Power, Self-Presentation, the Sounds of Spirits, and Sustaining Life. These became the organizational framework for the permanent exhibit at the Spurlock Museum.

With barely any English-language material available about Indigenous Amazonian artwork, particularly literature directly informed by the artists, From Myth to Creation is a valuable resource and one I would recommend to anyone interested in Indigenous art of the Americas as an introduction into an understudied but fascinating region.

—America Meredith

artists approach new media and digital image making.

The examination of new media and the digital by Indigenous artists is not new, per se. Buffy SainteMarie (Piapot Cree), Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Coast Salish-Okanagan), and Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwê (CreeMétis, 1958–2006), among many others, practiced in these areas starting in the mid-1980s. What is new, however, is how Indigenous artists use new media and the digital in a networked culture dominated by information technology, and what meanings result from these transactions. In the

JOURNAL

words of the editors, new media is “a significant tool of conveyance in a longstanding relationship between people, the cosmos, and the land.”

As the editors correctly emphasize, the critical response to the “explosion” in production surrounding new media and the digital is severely lacking. The opportunities (and problems) presented by the Internet, software, hacking, remix culture, social media, “apps,” video games, surveillance states, virtual reality, and so forth, strengthen the potential to further develop this rich field of study. By gathering scholars, curators, and artists together, this publication creates a decolonized act of community founded upon pedagogy and knowledge sharing.

PUBLIC 54, Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, eds.

Public Access Collective, 2016

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UBLIC is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, academic journal featuring interdisciplinary scholarship with a special focus on art and visual culture. For issue 54, PUBLIC invites scholars and curators Heather Igloliorte (Inuk), Julie Nagam (Métis), and Carla Taunton to unpack the ways that contemporary Indigenous

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Of the important arguments presented in the essays published here, several contributors reinforce the idea that Indigenous cultures have always been immersed in new technologies that shape and twist the fabric of cultural knowledge. Nagam’s essay, “Deciphering the Refusal of the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/Self-Determination and Civilized/Savage,” proposes that new media in particular is a furtherance of technological experimentation since time immemorial, affecting the ways that information and forms of communication are interpreted, circulated, and made anew.

Laura E. Smith echoes a similar line of inquiry by paraphrasing Angela Haas’s notion that “American Indians [are] the first skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas,” specifically in the use of wampum as a coded political and aesthetic signifier.

The innovative technology found in new media and the digital permits the deconstruction and transmission of old and new stories, which builds upon the tradition of storytelling in Indigenous communities. Moreover, the artist projects in the publication including—but not limited to— Skawennati (Mohawk), Jordan Bennett (Mi’kmaq), Amanda Strong (CreeMétis), and Scott Benesiinaabandan (Wasauksing Ojibwe), speak directly to the concept that new media and the digital offer productive means of thinking about the powerful relationship between aesthetics and resistance. While these artists gather to question new media and digital environments today, writers such as Jason Edward Lewis (Native Hawaiian-Samoan-Cherokee descent) and Elizabeth LaPensée (AnishinaabeMétis) imagine the future of new media and digital practices for Native artists and designers. For example, in his essay, “A Brief (Media) History of the Indigenous Future,” Lewis investigates new media’s impact on Aboriginal cultural production

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and collective identity through his research group, Initiate for Indigenous Futures (IIF). Their research attempts to determine how present actions such as the establishment of sovereign territory in cyberspace ensure survivance for future generations 150 to 200 years from now.

For LaPensée, games (and gaming) enact a crucial role in framing survivance, namely by honoring elders’ stories and conveying Indigenous worldviews. She contends that gaming may serve functions other than entertainment and play, to instead represent other, more complex subject matter: the game as a response to settler-colonialism, the game as medicine, as history, as resistance, as network, as presence, as pedagogy, and, perhaps most important of all, the game as community. Together, these essays articulate an emerging discourse that considers the past, present, and future of new media and digital practices by Indigenous artists.

PUBLIC’s edited volume, Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital, is a strong contribution to new media and digital practices by Indigenous visual artists, an emergent field of study lacking in scholarly attention yet ripe with consequences for aesthetics, technology, and community. Canada appears to be leading the discourse by considering this publication among others, such as Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture (2005), Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (2012), and Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art (2014). While these books and catalogues fill broader gaps in the histories of new media and the digital, this text convincingly succeeds in supplementing fresh narratives and voices in one of the most fascinating focuses of art by Indigenous artists.

—Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

MONOGRAPH

Yakuglas’ Legacy: The Art and Times of Charlie James Ronald W. Hawker University of Toronto Press, 2016

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onald Hawker’s Yakuglas’ Legacy: The Art and Times of Charlie James offers new insight into the career of the eminent Kwagiulth and Kwikwasut’inuxw carver Charlie James (ca. 1867–1938) and presents images of artwork, souvenirs, and ceremonial regalia attributed to James that are now housed in collections around the world. The book sets out to rekindle art-historical interest in James who was, as Hawker notes, a significant contributor to Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonies and “part of the first generation of artists to be known by name among Euro-Canadians.”

Totem Carvers: Charlie James, Ellen Neel, and Mungo Martin (Panorama Publications, 1982). Although Nuytten’s book links James to other Northwest Coast artists and family members such as Mungo Martin and Ellen Neel, it is tightly focused on the chronology of his life, leaving aside discussion of his style and the sociopolitical milieu in which James worked. Hawker’s book sets out to fill the gap by situating James at the intersection of Indigenous and settler worlds, specifically considering Kwakwaka’wakw societies, the Indian Act, and James’s own life experiences.

Hawker’s book adds especially to our understanding of art in the 1930s, a less studied period when scholars had scant funds for fieldwork. The experiences of European and settler artists such as the Expressionists, Surrealists, and Abstract Expressionists have dominated coverage of that period. There is little discussion of complementary Indigenous experience and activity, found in texts such as the Museum of

Hawker presents James as a cosmopolitan figure who readily adapted from one cultural environment to another.

James’s name may not be especially familiar outside of Northwest Coast art-historical and Native circles, but his poles are noted in the writings of anthropologists Franz Boas and C. Marius Barbeau. Perhaps the most familiar image of totem poles worldwide is of his pair of Thunderbird house poles, now in Vancouver’s Stanley Park since their removal from the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Alert Bay in the 1930s. James’s carving also appears in Emily Carr’s paintings of Alert Bay and in Edward Curtis’s film, The Land of the War Canoes (formerly known as the Land of the Head Hunters). Given such exposure, it is surprising that prior to the publication of Hawker’s book, the only significant publication about James’s art and life is the first chapter of Phil Nuytten’s The

Modern Art catalogue, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984) and the Vancouver Art Gallery’s The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art (2011). The cross-cultural discussion was significantly recalibrated to the experiences of Kwakwaka’wakw artists with Aldona Joanitis’s Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (1991) and then Leslie Dawn’s essay, “Cross-Border Trading: Mungo Martin Carves for the World of Tomorrow” (2008). Yakuglas’ Legacy builds upon this work, showing us how Northwest Coast carving, and James’s practices of carving in particular, fit into that world in the early 20th century.

The main body of the text is composed of six chapters, beginning with “James’ World.” This chapter SUMMER 2017 | 83

REVIEWS

covers the longest span of his life, beginning with his birth in Port Townsend, Washington, circa 1867 and proceeding through his move to Alert Bay in 1914. Hawker presents James as a cosmopolitan figure who readily adapted from one cultural environment to another. For example, he points out that although James’s mother was Kwakwaka’wakw, James did not learn to speak the Kwak’wala language until he moved to Fort Rupert in his early teens, shortly after his mother’s death.

Hawker similarly points out that James became a carver about the time he married Sarah Nina, suggesting that this capacity, too, was picked up later in life. Hawker also presents the villages of Fort Rupert and Alert Bay as centers that combined conventional potlatch with commercial, labor, and tourist economies.

The “James’ World” chapter is written in a fashion that is accessible to a general public that may know little of the political history, as well as academic audiences seeking to broaden their knowledge of James. Though Hawker gives us an illuminating view, he unfortunately does not contend with alternative, biographical accounts of James’s life. A 1938 obituary written by the Anglo-Canadian painter Walter Joseph Phillips for The Winnipeg Tribune, for example, suggests that the orphaned James was rescued after a shipwreck by a Kwagiulth family. Exploration of such alternative biographical accounts would do much to enrich our understanding of James’s artistic identity and the historical conditions within which such an account would have been created, perhaps by James himself.

Hawker extends his discussion of James’s work to five chapters encompassing “Style,” “Masks and Ceremonial Objects,” “Totem Poles,” “Model Poles and Curio Items,” and “Two-Dimensional Art.” “Style” offers up original, art-historical scholarship.

In this chapter, Hawker focuses on how the development of the Americanist tradition of anthropology impacted the interpretation of James’s works by casting them as ethnographic

objects rather than artwork. Hawker identifies the hallmarks of his unique style by comparing it to those of his Kwakwaka’wakw contemporaries including John Davis, Willie Seaweed, Bob Harris, and Arthur Bondsound.

The final four chapters categorize his work as their titles suggest. Through such presentation and generous colorplates offered by the press, the book functions as a comprehensive guide that draws upon collections from around the world: American Museum of Natural History, Royal British Columbia Museum, Seattle

Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, U’mista Cultural Centre, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, University of Washington’s Burke Museum, and Museum of Vancouver.

These four chapters also discuss James’s participation in ceremonial life, the forces of colonialism that reshaped Northwest Coast artists’ productivity, and the resulting trade that moved his art around the globe. For example, in the “Totem Poles” chapter, Hawker brings to light unusual pieces such as a painting by James on the top of a crate of canned salmon. He also uncovers the history of the Memorial Hall Pole, which stood for years in Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria and now finds its home at the U’mista Cultural Centre

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in Alert Bay. The Memorial Hall Pole was carved because of James’s family connections to the St. Peter and St. Paul’s Anglican Parish in Esquimalt.

Due to the pole’s height, it could not be installed in that parish church so it was placed in Christ Church Cathedral.

In the final chapter, “Two-Dimensional Art,” Hawker provides us with a careful discussion of James’s painting and drawing, including a page from his notebook that features a painting of killer whale made in collaboration with his granddaughter Ellen Newman Neel. Hawker expands his discussion of James’s flat design to include a chest of drawers and painted canoe paddles. The highlight of the chapter is Hawker’s discussion of a rarely seen Hamatsa bird painting.

James’s capacity to render threedimensional space in this work sets it apart from his other paintings. Within the Pacific Northwest, this painting, as Hawker points out, foreshadows the work of mid-20th-century painters such as Judith Morgan (Gitxsan) and George Clutesi (Tseshaht), who were well known for their use of perspective.

James’s paintings also resonate in the work of his grandson David Neel Sr., who experimented with rendering three-dimensional space in his acrylic paintings in the late 1950s.

The comprehensive set of photographs that depict James’s work is one of the book’s major strengths. Also included are many historical documentary photos of James’s artwork, such as a most impressive photograph of Samuel Barrett, anthropologist and director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, with a ’Namxxelagayu mask.

Many of the photographs in this book have not previously been published, and some works that have been reproduced before, such as James’s paintings, appear for the first time in color. Yakuglas’ Legacy: The Art and Times of Charlie James makes a major contribution to the literature on Northwest Coast Art that will support undergraduate education as well as the historical research of carvers themselves. —Carolyn Butler-Palmer, PhD

August 10 - 13, 2017 IN THE RAILYARD: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, NM Featuring 70+ exhibitors, with material ranging from contemporary to historic. The show will include paintings, sculpture, and fine art of all kinds, furniture, books, fashion, jewelry, textiles, and tribal, folk, American Indian, African, and Asian art.

Thursday, August 10, Gala Opening Night (6 - 9pm) Friday-Sunday, August 11–13 (11am-5pm)

BENEFITING

August 15-18, 2017 IN THE RAILYARD: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, NM When the world comes to Santa Fe for the best in American Indian Art – Its heritage will be found at The Antique American Indian Art Show, at El Museo in The Railyard.

Tuesday, August 15, Gala Opening Night (6 - 9pm) Wednesday-Friday, August 16–18 (11am-5pm)

BENEFITING

ObjectsOfAr tShows.com SUMMER 2017 | 85

ART + LITERATURE: METIS POET

GREGORY SCOFIELD

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

G

REGORY SCOFIELD is a Red River Metis of Cree, Scottish, English, French, and Jewish descent whose ancestry can be traced back to the fur trade and to the Metis community of Kinosota, Manitoba. He taught First Nations and Metis literature and creative writing at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the Alberta College of Art + Design. He currently holds the position of assistant professor in English at Laurentian University where he teaches creative writing, and previously served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg, and Memorial University.

What is your advice to future poets and writers? More specifically, what is your advice to future Indigenous poets and writers?

My advice is to find and read poets that you love. Have an affair with their work, their minds and, of course, to keep writing. To write your way out of the darkness, to find a certain light that brings you joy and pride.

On a related note, I’m curious to know how your position within the institution has changed your approach to writing, if any?

My current position hasn’t really changed my approach to writing. If anything, I’m a lot more conscious of time or lack thereof.

Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, Indigenous storytelling The Gathering: Stones for dates to time immemorial. the Medicine Wheel (1993).

How do you position contemporary storytelling In addition to several through media such as volumes of poetry, Scofield poetry, fiction writing, is the author of the memoir song lyrics, and so forth Thunder Through My Veins within this rich history? Is (1999) and his latest collecthere a difference, or does tion of poetry is Witness, storytelling follow a linear ABOVE: Gregory Scofield, self-portrait. Both images courtesy of the author.

I Am (2016). In 2016, The OPPOSITE: Cover of Witness, I Am (Harbour Publishing, 2016). trajectory?

Writers’ Trust of Canada I believe the foundation— awarded Scofield with the the roots—of Indigenous writing is grounded in our oral Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. I had the opportunity of stories and the way in which we approach these stories; the communicating with Scofield through email exchanges in telling of them and the protocols around them. If you look at February and March of 2017. the body of past and contemporary Indigenous writing, you will see our stories are rooted in our languages, our histories, MRS: Thank you for granting this interview, Gregory. our lands, and traditions. Furthermore, you will see we are First, I’d like to ask you a general question, however it is an important one: What is the philosophy that drives your writing our way out of colonization by returning to these very things, these very teachings. writing practice?

GS: The philosophy that drives my writing practice is the desire to explore the unknown, the desire to make sense of the unknown, and to give the unknown a sense of ceremony, a sense of justice.

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Must a great writer also be a great listener? It would seem, at least to me, that the two are so closely related that they appear one and the same.

I agree wholeheartedly. A great writer is a great reader.

ART + LITERATURE

There is a definite shift in writing. More so, there is a definite Your 1993 debut collection of poems, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, finds you negotiating your shift in the way in which I approach the story. One thing Metis and European heritage while living on the fringe. is certain, however. I always begin and maintain a sense of It’s a profoundly autobiographical examination into the ceremony while I’m writing. Once I’ve begun writing, I’ve vortex of family, community, and history, seemingly quite entered a sacred space, a lodge, and I’m forever mindful of cathartic yet deeply challenging to put down on the page. the spirits and songs.

Last year, you published In speaking of your the collection Witness, approach to writing, “Everything we do, from brushing I Am. From your first I’d like to ask you what our teeth to walking down the collection to your most comes naturally to you recent is a 23-year period. street, is a political act.” as a poet and writer; and How have you grown as a alternatively, what, if writer during this time? anything, do you struggle Have your interests shifted with during the writing significantly or is there a process? thread that runs through all your work?

I can only hope that I’ve grown as a writer. My experiences—like my interests like my abilities like my challenges like my worldview—have changed and continue to change and shift. Thank God for movement and for the ability to grow wings.

How does your Indigenous identity influence your approach to writing and creativity?

I am a poet through and through. I’ve often wished I were an incurable novelist.

But I’ve also wished I was born with thick black hair, the color of a crow’s wings.

Either way, I’m a trickster.

After all, it’s not how we tell the story; it’s simply about the story.

The question of audience is crucial. Who do you write for specifically, and has this shifted throughout your life?

My identity influences everything I write about. I was once told by a writing mentor that everything we do, from brushing our teeth to walking down the street, is a political act. I’ve been actively engaged with this political act ever since I began writing.

I write for anyone who’ll listen. I’ll write for Cree speakers. I’ll write for people struggling with issues of identity. I’ll write for the little boy down the street, who feels no one is listening to his story.

How does your process differ when writing poetry as opposed to writing texts of another genre, say, your poignant memoir, Thunder Through My Veins? Do poetry and prose require different states of mind? Does memory

Yes, I’m in the courting stage of a new memoir. Whether we fall in love will be another story.

force another form, another manner of writing?

Finally, do you have any future projects planned?

Twitter: @GREGORYSCOFIELD SUMMER 2017 | 87

ART + LITERATURE

Untitled I was born into this fair skin A long way from a fair land A long way from home I was born with my right foot crooked A long way from the mountaintop A long way from home Into this fair skin I came môniyâw, môniyâw Jack Sabon (Ahtna Athabascan), Root Thoughts IX, 2017, oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches. Photo: Ward Rice, Stowe, Vermont..

white person

A long way from home My right foot crooked

Despite I persist. Anyway.

Still. Despite.

There is a sound left in my chest And my ribs, not broken from all of this, Take the shape of crows Made from clay, made from water.

Here, I listen for songs. pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum.

They persist. Anyway.

Still. Despite.

When I turn home, one day My eyes hollow like the canyon I will ride first to the east Then to the west, to the south And then onto home.

The crows, empty of songs, will be gone.

Again I will be clay.

Again I will be water drumming, sha-shaa, sha-shaa, sha-shaa.

I will persist. Anyway.

Still. Despite.

—Gregory Scofield

I was born at the bottom of the mountain A long way from home Fair in my skin, fair in this housing I was born to be unseen môniyâw, môniyâw A long way from home In this fair land I was born I was born at the bottom of the mountain I was born into this fair skin A long way from home In this fair skin I was born to be unseen nanâskom, nanâskom the red ochre I come from on the mountain

I am grateful

—Gregory Scofield

Jack Sabon is an Ahtna Athabascan painter living in Vermont. The Ahtna culture and homelands along the Copper River in south-central Alaska inspire many of Sabon’s paintings, as does his former home in Santa Fe and his current home between the Worcester Range and the Green Mountains. Sabon earned his BFA degree from Maine College of Art in Portland, after earning his AFA degree with honors from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His works range from highly naturalistic land and seascapes and stylized works with cultural symbolism, including that of the Native American Church of which Sabon is a member, to nonobjective abstraction—but they all share a vivid palette inspired by nature. He constructs and paints twelve-sided hand drums and occasionally sculpts in stone.

Sabon has exhibited nationally and often shows locally. He recently taught classes at the T. W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier, Vermont. More of his work can be seen at sabonart.com.

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ART + LITERATURE

Panic Mostly it comes on the thin breath of night, The ending song of the day Silk in its slinking, quickly It moves. Quickly it pitches.

It could be joyous depending on the day.

It could be all splinters the next.

Either way, it loves me.

I am its score. It conducts me.

I am its chest with twelve beating drums.

I am its nostrils with two wobbly notes.

I am its trumpet sounding my bones.

I am the empty chair of the flutist.

Once it pinned me to the bed and Kept me there for three days.

I was all nerves and too many eyes.

My feet thought they were going away.

In the terrible symphony I saw my lungs turn into powder.

I saw my tongue roll over on itself.

Then the orchestra nearly packed up.

It had two horns and a pointed chin.

The very image of my mother’s making In her time away, her fractured head Reorganized into some newly zapped package.

It kissed my lips and from my strappings, I rose like Icarus. I said, Enough Before I bit its poisonous tongue.

Then the true conductor came and I began to play.

Still it comes on the thin breath of night, All its golden gadgets set to sounding.

It is true. It loves me.

I am its brimming ovation.

—Gregory Scofield

Jack Sabon (Ahtna Athabascan), Root Thoughts I, 2009, oil on panel, 30 x 40 in. Photo: Ward Rice, Stowe, Vermont.

SUMMER 2017 | 89

MEMORIAL

BEAU DICK November 23, 1955–March 27, 2017

Beau Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, 1955–2017), Komokwa Mask, red cedar, paint, cedar bark.

Photo: Frans Lanting Studio.

I

N THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART in Athens, Greece, as part of documenta 14, an entire room is animated by installations of Beau Dick’s multilayered and exquisitely carved Kwakwaka’wakw masks and coppers—customary shieldshaped copper plaques that represent immense wealth—one forged from decommissioned Canadian pennies.

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Plans had been made for Beau Dick to dance at the museum, but these did not materialize; he never recovered from a series of strokes and ultimately walked on at the age of 61.

Not only did Beau exhibit his work internationally—albeit sometimes reluctantly—he supported his community at home in ’Yalis, Alert Bay, British Columbia. He was a hereditary chief, artist, mentor, drummer, singer, dancer, activist, and father. This larger-than-life individual, whose Kwak’wala name was Walas Gwa’yam (Big Whale), was born Benjamin Kerry Dick in Alert Bay. Both his parents were Kwakwaka’wakw.

His father was Benjamin “Blackie” Dick, or Awalaskenis (To Make a Great Statement), a respected visual artist, and his mother was Geraldine Dawson Dick, daughter of Hereditary Chief Albert Dawson, or Gwa’yamdzi.

As a toddler, Beau lived in Okwunalis (Kingcome), then Geraldine and Beau moved to Vancouver. Beau moved back to Alert Bay as a teenager, and there he began woodcarving with his father and paternal grandfather, Jimmy Dick, or Kwaxsistala. Later, he studied under Kwakwaka’wakw sculptors including Tony Hunt and Doug Cranmer, and Haida sculptors, such as Bill Reid and Robert Davidson. Beau briefly returned to Vancouver to finish out his high school education, but he eventually returned to Alert Bay where he learned dances, songs, history, and many other aspects of Kwakwaka’wakw expression in addition to the visual arts. He was active in potlatching and was ultimately initiated into the Hamatsa society and became a hereditary chief of the ’Namgis First Nation.

An early breakthrough in his formidable artistic career was Beau’s inclusion in the Legacy exhibit organized by the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. This decade-long group show emphasized cultural continuity and showcased living artists of the time, a

departure from previous blockbuster exhibits of historical Northwest Coast art. Beau showed in the Canadian Pavilion at Expo ’86 and took part in the reopening of the Canada House in London, United Kingdom in 1998.

In 2010, he participated in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, curated by David Elliot.

Despite his artistic success on the world stage, Beau placed his community first. Curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish) writes of Beau and his carvings: “He is continually short-circuiting their status as a commodity. In 2012, he removed the forty Atlakim (Forest) masks from the walls of his gallery and brought them back to his community in Alert Bay, where they were danced for a final time and then ceremonially burned.”

That same year, the Idle No More movement swept through Canada. In February 2013, Beau and his daughters Linnea and Geraldine organized a public intervention they called More Than Idle No More. Participants walked more than 500 kilometers from Quatsino on northern Vancouver Island to Victoria, where Beau broke a copper to shame the British Columbia legislature for their support of environmental destruction—particularly the polluting of salmon farms—and their cultural genocide against First Nations peoples. This was the first shaming ceremony performed since the 1950s. The Times Colonist quoted Beau in saying, “The copper is a symbol of justice, truth and balance, and to break one is a threat, a challenge and can be an insult. If you break copper on someone and shame them, there should be an apology.”

In 2014, Beau Dick and his family performed a second pilgrimage and shaming ceremony, Awalaskenis II: Journey of Truth & Unity. They traveled across Canada from Alert Bay to Ottawa, visiting Native communities en route as they gathered supporters. Beau then broke a copper at Parliament Hill, directly challenging the federal government to protect the environment and to honor its treaties to Aboriginal peoples.

Beau’s ceremonial life informed his artistic and political expressions, and he inspired the next generation of Northwest Coast artists. He mentored numerous young carvers directly, including Alan Hunt (Kwakwaka’wakw-Tlingit) and Cole Speck (Kwakwaka’wakw). Countless others can study the large corpus of artwork he left behind for years to come.

As Marsha Lederman, the western arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail writes, “Masterfully carved, aesthetically stunning—his masks come alive on the wall.

This is art that haunts: You can’t shake it, and you don’t want to.” Through him, Kwakwaka’wakw philosophies continue to reach a global audience. —America Meredith

wah.shka Marcella Ernest Shan Goshorn Keli Mashburn

An Indigenous art exhibit on the occasion of the

57th La Biennale di Venezia May 11-May 19, 2017, 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM Vento di Venezia, Certosa Island

Opening May 11, 2017, 6:30 to 8:30 PM

Symposium Wah.shka: Indigenous Arts & the Environment May 15, 2017, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

SUMMER 2017 | 91

CALENDAR

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

CALENDAR May 2–27: Portland, OR Rick Bartow: Tot Blumen at the Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street | (503) 222-1142 | froelickgallery.com May 4–28: Seattle, WA Salish Sound Waves at the Stonington Gallery, 125 S. Jackson Street (206) 405-4040 | stoningtongallery.com May 4–June 10: Winnipeg, MB Traces, with Tanya Lukin Linklater, Dion Kaszas, and Jaime Black, at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, 203–290 McDermont Avenue | +1 (204) 942-2674 | urbanshaman.org May 4–December: Bar Harbor, ME 16th annual Waponahki Student Art Show at the Abbe Museum, 26 Mount Desert Street, featuring Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq youth | (207) 288-3519 | abbemuseum.org May 5–June 10: Minneapolis, MN Jim Denomie: Oz, the Emergence at the Bockley Gallery, 2123 W. 21st Street | (612) 377-4669 | bockleygallery.com

(855) NAAA-INC EMAIL INFO@NAAAINC.COM VISIT WWW.NAAAINC.COM CALL

May 5–December 31: Santa Fe, NM 2017 Native Treasures Arts Exhibition at the Governor’s Gallery in the Roundhouse, 490 Old Santa Fe Trail, hosted by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture | (505) 476-1269 | miaclab.org May 5, 2017–January 21, 2018: Santa Fe, NM New Acquisitions: 2011–2017 at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, 108 Cathedral Place (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/museum May 6: Zuni Pueblo, NM Zuni Pueblo MainStreet Festival at 1239 State Highway 53, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. Dances, artwork, raffles, speakers, and food (505) 782-7239 | zunipueblomainstreet.org May 6–September 23: Stratford, ON Nanuk’s Journey: Inuit Art from the Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario at the Stratford Perth Museum, 4275 Huron Road +1 (519) 393-5311 | stratfordperthmuseum.ca May 9–October 9: New York, NY American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue (212) 535-7710 | metmuseum.org May 13: Seattle, WA Native Art Market at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington Campus, 17th Avenue NE and NE 45th Street, 10:00 am–4:00 pm | (206) 543-5590 | burkemuseum.org May 13–August 11: Park Hill, OK Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art at the Cherokee Heritage Center, 21192 S. Keeler Drive (918) 456-6007 | cherokeeheritage.org, returnfromexile.org May 14, 2017–April 18, 2018: Santa Fe, NM A Universe of Meaning: The Bead in Native American Art and Adornment at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo Road | (505) 982-4643 | wheelwright.org

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CALENDAR

May 26–September 17: Seattle, WA Re:definition, 2nd edition, Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine Street, curated by Tracey Rector (Seminole-Choctaw). Opening reception Friday, May 26, starting at 6:00 pm (206) 682-141 | stgpresents.org/redefinition

May 20–July 1: Nashville, TN Recent Findings by James Lavadour at the Cumberland Gallery, 4107 Hillsboro Circle. Opening reception Saturday, May 20, 6:00–8:00 pm | (615) 297-0296 | cumberlandgallery.com May 20, 2017–February 18, 2018: Los Angeles, CA Standing Rock: Art and Solidarity at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way | (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org

May 27: Sulphur, OK Third Annual Artesian Arts Festival, sponsored by the Chickasaw Nation, in Artesian Plaza, West Muskogee Avenue, 10:00 am–8:00 pm | (580) 272-5520 | chickasaw.net

May 25: Barrie, ON Call to Action #83 at the MacLaren Art Centre, 37 Mulcaster Street, inspired by Canada’s Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission | +1 (705) 721-9696 | maclarenart.com

May 27 & 28: Flagstaff, AZ Zuni Heritage Festival at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org

May 26–28: Santa Fe, NM Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival, hosted by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, at the Santa Fe Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | (505) 982-7799 x3 | nativetreasures.org

May 30–September 24: Duluth, MN Sinew: Female Native Artists of the Twin Cities Take Over the Northland at the Tweed Museum of Art, 1201 Ordean Court | (218) 726-7823 | d.umn.edu/tma

May 26–July 28: Brantford, ON 43rd Annual First Nations Art Exhibition, juried art show, at the Woodland Cultural Centre, 184 Mohawk Street +1 (519) 759-2650 | woodland-centre.on.ca

June 1–30: Seattle, WA Masters of Disguise III: Group Mask Exhibition at the Stonington Gallery, 125 S. Jackson Street. Opening reception Thursday, June 1, 6:00–8:00 pm | (206) 405-4040 | stoningtongallery.com

May 26–July 28: Brantford, ON Rivers of Thought, solo show for Quinn Smallboy (Cree), at the Woodland Cultural Centre, 184 Mohawk Street +1 (519) 759-2650 | woodland-centre.on.ca

June 4–August 13: Pine Ridge, SD 49th Annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show at the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School, 100 Mission Drive (605) 867-5491 | redcloudschool.org/ArtShow

May 26–September 4: Friday Harbor, WA First Nation Legendary & Emerging Artists at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, 540 Spring Street | (360) 370-5050 | sjima.org

Contemporary Native Art Show Permanent Collections Historic Tours Gift Shop Open Daily Free Admission

artwork by Micheal Two Bulls, Battlefield A

100 Mission Drive, Pine Ridge, SD 57770 www.redcloudschool.org/heritage 605.867.8257 WINTER 2016/17 | 93

CALENDAR

June 8–July 29: Vancouver, BC UNGALAQ (When Stakes Come Loose), solo show for Maureen Gruben (Inuvialuk), at grunt gallery, 350 East 2nd Avenue #116.

Curated by Tania Willard (Secwepemc). Opening reception Friday, June 8 | +1 (604) 875-9516 | grunt.ca June 9–11: Oklahoma City, OK 30th Annual Red Earth Native American Cultural Festival at the Cox Convention Center, 1 Myriad Gardens (405) 427-5228 | redearth.org June 10: Flagstaff, AZ Navajo Rug Auction at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road, 9:00 am–1:00 pm | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org June 17: Santa Fe, NM Poeh Summer Arts Market at the Poeh Cultural Center, 78 Cities of Gold Road | (505) 455-5041 | poehcenter.org June 17–September 10: Calgary, AB Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, project by Kent Monkman (Cree), at the Glenbow Museum, 130 9th Avenue SE +1 (403) 268-4100 | glenbow.org June 17–September 10: Kalamazoo, MI Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 314 S. Park Street | (269) 349-7775 | kiarts.org June 18–October 8: La Malbaie, QC First Nations in Québec at the Musée de Charlevoix, 10 chemin du Harvre | +1 (418) 665-4411 | museedecharlevoix.qc.ca

June 22–September 9: Warm Springs, OR Celestial Visions at the Museum of Warm Springs, 2189 US Highway 26, works from the permanent collection relating to astronomy and the solar eclipse | (541) 553-3331 | museumatwarmsprings.org June 23 & 24: Okmulgee, OK Muscogee Creek Nation Festival Council House Art Market at the Muscogee Creek Nation Council House, 106 W. 6th Street | (918) 549-2434 | creekfestival.com June 23–25: Indianapolis, IN Eiteljorg Indian Market & Festival at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 500 W. Washington Street.

Reception Friday, June 23; market Saturday, June 24, and Sunday, June 25, 10:00 am–5:00 pm | (317) 636-9378 | eiteljorg.org June 24–TBD: Philadelphia, PA Moundbuilders: Ancient Architects of North America at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street | (215) 898-4000 | penn.museum June 25–July 2: Idyllwild, CA Native American Arts Festival at Idyllwild Arts, 52500 Temecula Road. Exhibits, performances, demonstrations, films, and the Michael Kabotie Lecture Series | (951) 659-2171 | idyllwildarts.org June 25–July 8: Idyllwild, CA Louder Than Words: Indigenous American Art and Activism at Idyllwild Arts, 52500 Temecula Road. Curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) | (951) 659-2171 | idyllwildarts.org

ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE FROM COVER TO COVER. What You’ll Learn May Surprise You. • A Guide to the Cherokee National Museum Newspaper Collection • Records of the Moravians, Volumes 1-6 • The Development of Law and Legal Institutions Among the Cherokees • The Life and Times of Reverend Stephen Foreman Enjoy these and many other hard-to-find books on Cherokee history and culture.

21192 S. KEELER DR., PARK HILL, OK 74451 (888) 999-6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG

94 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

June 30–July 2: Oneida, WI Woodland Indian Art Show & Market at the Radisson Hotel & Conference Center, 2040 Airport Drive, free admission (920) 713-8030 | woodlandindianart.com

Arctic and Indian arts for the 21 century st

26 Maine Street Kennebunkport, Maine 207 967-2122

July 1 & 2: Flagstaff, AZ Hopi Heritage Festival at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org July 1, 2017–February 4, 2018: Los Angeles, CA Ancient Bodies: Archaeological Perspectives on Mesoamerican Figurines at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard | (323) 857-6000 | lacma.org July 4–6: London, England, UK 38th Annual American Indian Workshop 2017, at Goldsmiths, University of London, 8 Lewisham Way, New Cross. Theme: “The Art of Resistance and Resurgence” | aiw2017.wordpress.com July 7–9: Collinsville, IL Cahokia Mounds Contemporary Indian Art Show at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 30 Ramey Street.

(618) 346-5160. | cahokiamounds.org July 7, 2017–January 21, 2018: Santa Fe, NM Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native American Art at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, 108 Cathedral Place | (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/museum July 8: Bar Harbor, ME Native American Festival and Basketmakers Market at the College of the Atlantic Campus, 105 Eden Street (207) 288-3519 | maineindianbaskets.org July 14 & 15: Rapid City, SD 4th Annual Native POP: People of the Plains, A Gathering of Arts and Culture, in Main Street Square. Awards reception Friday, July 14, 5:00–8:00 pm, tickets available. Market Saturday, July 15, 10:00 am–6:00 pm, free entry | nativepop.org July 15–October 22: Kalamazoo, MI Our People, Our Land, Our Images, 26 Indigenous photographers from the US, Canada, Peru, and New Zealand, at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 314 S. Park Street | (269) 349-7775 | kiarts.org July 22 & 23: Plymouth, MA Second Annual Cultural Survival Bazaar at DCR Pilgrim Memorial State Park, 79 Water Street, 11:00 am–6:00 pm (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.orgg July 28, 2017–July 31, 2018: Santa Fe, NM Action Abstraction Redefined at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, 108 Cathedral Place, features artwork from the 1960s and 1970s in the permanent collection (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/museum July 29 & 30: Tiverton, RI 17th Annual Cultural Survival Bazaar at Tiverton Four Corners Art Center, 3852 Main Road, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org

The artistry of Mary Tafoya Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets shop online: www.homeandawaygallery.com

JOAN CABALLERO SANTA FE APPRAISAL CREDENTIALS

ISA & USPAP

N AT I V E A M E R I C A N A R T (505) 690-8482 joancaballero@msn.com www.collectorsguide.com/jcaballero

For more events, visit our online calendar at FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR SUMMER 2017 | 95

ADVERTISER INDEX American Indian Art Appraisals americanindianartappraising.com 44 Antique American Indian Art Show Santa Fe objectsofartshows.com 85 Blackburn Art Studios | jblackburnstudios.com

43

Joan Caballero | collectorsguide.com/jcaballero

92

Cherokee Art Market | cherokeeartmarket.com

4

Cherokee Heritage Center | cherokeeheritage.org

interior back cover Cherokee Heritage Press | cherokeeheritage.org

94

Chickasaw Nation, Southeastern Art Show & Market chickasaw.net interior front cover Orlando Dugi | orlandodugi.com

44

Exhibit C Gallery | exhibitcgallery.com

7

Benjamin Harjo Jr. | benjaminharjojr.com

45

Home & Away Gallery | homeandaway.gallery

95

Idyllwild Arts | idyllwildarts.org/nativearts

11

Indian Arts and Crafts Board | iacb.doi.gov

96

Keshi the Zuni Connection | keshi.com

1

Mahota Studios | margaretroachwheeler.com

33

Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center pequotmuseum.org

3

Native American Art Appraisals, Inc. | naaainc.com

92

Native POP: People of the Plains | nativepop.org

10

Noksi Press | noksi.com 96 Northern Plains Indian Art Market | npiam.com

2

Raven Makes Gallery | ravenmakesgallery.com

93

Red Cloud Indian Art Show | redcloudschool.org/heritage 92 Red Earth Festival | redearth.org

43

Southwest Traditions | southwesttraditions.com

19

wah.shka | nancymariemithlo.com

91

Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian wheelwright.org back cover

96 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Kenneth Williams Jr. | kwilliamsjr2@hotmail.com

45

Woodland Indian Art Show & Market woodlandindianart.com

6

Carolyn Bernard Young | carolynyoungceramics.com

33

The Zuni Show | thekeshifoundation.org

1

CHEROKEE HERITAGE CENTER PPRESENTS RESENTS

MAY 13 - AUGUST 11 Don’t miss this national traveling exhibition of contemporary Southeastern Indian art displaying the works of more than thirty renowned Native American artists.

SPONSORED IN PART BY:

Margaret Roach Wheeler Handwoven Cotton, Glass Beads, Brass Bells

21192 S. KEELER DR., PARK HILL, OK 74451 (888) 999-6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG

© 2017 Cherokee Heritage Center. All Rights Reserved.

© 2017 Cherokee Heritage Center. All Rights Reserved.

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Wheelwright Museum OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

www.wheelwright.org 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505-982- 4636 or 1- 800 -607- 4636

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A Universe of Meaning May 14, 2017 – April 15, 2018 Support for this exhibition is provided in part by the Enivar Charitable Fund in Memory of Nancy Florsheim; Leo and Donna Krulitz; Richard and Willa Sisson; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts; and several other donors. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall.