First American Art Magazine No. 23, Summer 2019

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 23, SUMMER 2019

DISPLAY UNTIL SEPT. 30, 2019

MIAMI RIBBONWORK

D. Y. BEGAY

AMANDA CROWE & HER LEGACY

BENJAMIN HARJO JR.

CLEMENTE HUMANITIES COURSE

FREDDY MAMANI

UP & COMING ARTISTS TO WATCH

TYRA SHACKLEFORD

M A H OTAT E X T I L E S.C O M NATIVE SOUTHEASTERN HERITAGE CELEBRATED THROUGH WOVEN DESIGN

Art Artof of Native NativeAmerica America THE THECHARLES CHARLES AND ANDVALERIE VALERIEDIKER DIKER COLLECTION COLLECTION Highlighting Highlighting masterworks masterworks from from Indigenous Indigenous cultures cultures across across North North America, America, this this landmark landmark exhibition exhibition is is thethe first first toto feature feature Native Native American American artart in in The The Metropolitan Metropolitan Museum Museum of of Art’s Art’s American American Wing.

Wing.

These These superb superb objects objects include include sculpture sculpture from from British British Columbia Columbia and and Alaska, Alaska, California California baskets, baskets, pottery pottery from from southwestern southwestern pueblos, pueblos, Plains Plains drawings drawings and and regalia, regalia, and and rare rare accessories accessories from from thethe eastern eastern Woodlands.

Woodlands.

metmuseum.org metmuseum.org

Now Now onon view view

#ArtofNativeAmerica #ArtofNativeAmerica

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TheThe exhibition exhibition is made is made possible possible

by The

by The Peter Peter Jay Jay Sharp Sharp Foundation, Foundation, the the Diane Diane W. and W. and James James E. Burke E. Burke Fund, Fund, the the Enterprise Enterprise Holdings Holdings Endowment, Endowment, andand the the Walton Walton Family Family Foundation.

Foundation.

Tsimshian Tsimshian artis,artis, Headdress Headdress frontlet frontlet (detail), (detail), British British Columbia, Columbia, ca. 1820–40. ca. 1820–40.

The Metropolitan The Metropolitan Museum Museum of Art, of The Art, Charles The Charles and Valerie and Valerie DikerDiker Collection Collection of Native of Native American American Art, Art, Promised Promised Gift of Gift Charles of Charles and Valerie and Valerie Diker.

Diker.

Art for a New Understanding Native Voices, 1950s to Now August 29, 2019 – January 12, 2020

2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC nasher.duke.edu/voices Dana Claxton, Cultural Belongings (detail), 2015. LED firebox with transmounted Lightjet Duratrans, 72 × 96 inches (182.88 x 243.84 cm). Collection of Eira Thomas. © Dana Claxton.

Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now was organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

The exhibition was co-organized by independent curator Candice Hopkins (Tlingit, citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation in the Canadian territory, Yukon), Mindy Besaw, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Support for this exhibition and its national tour is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sotheby’s Prize.

At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is was made possible by the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, with additional support from The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions.

VISUAL VOICES C O N T E M P O R A R Y C H I C K A S AW A R T

108 Cathedral Place | Santa Fe, NM AUG. 16, 2019 - JAN. 19, 2020 Opening Reception Friday, August 16 at 5 p.m.

CHICKASAWARTISTS.COM Grant provided by the Chickasaw Nation

Tyra Shackleford - The Lady, 2017 Fingerwoven sprang textile installation Soy silk yarn, 90 x 132 x 102 in., courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis.

NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN ART MARKET

The Art of Jack Malotte JUNE 8 — OCTOBER 20, 2019 A lifetime of artwork by this Native American artist of the Great Basin

MAJOR SPONSOR: The Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada SPONSORS: Nevada Arts Council, Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors SUPPORTING SPONSORS: Anonymous, Kathie Bartlett, National Endowment for the Arts MEDIA SPONSORS: KUNR Reno Public Radio, Sierra Nevada Media Group

IMAGE: Jack Malotte, Untitled (detail), 1982, ink, acrylic and colored pencil, 22 x 30 inches.

BUYING OR SELLING INDIAN ART? KNOW THE LAW Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, all American Indian and Alaska Native art and craft products must be marketed truthfully regarding the tribal enrollment and Indian heritage of the artist or craftsperson.

Allan Houser, Chiricahua Apache, “Apache Fire Dancer” © 1961, Collection of the Southern Plains Indian Museum, USDOI, IACB

TAKE HOME A TREASURE FROM INDIAN COUNTRY-BUY WORKS PRODUCED BY MEMBERS OF FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED TRIBES. For a free brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, including how to file a complaint, contact:

U.S. Department of the Interior

Indian Arts and Crafts Board Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov | Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

KERI ATAUMBI AtaumbiMetals.com

PHOTO: CARA ROMERO

SWAIA Booth POG-125

issue no. 23, summer 2019

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Take a Closer Look: Four Emerging Artists Shine in the Spotlight

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Tewa)

24

Amanda Crowe & Her Legacy: Eastern Band Cherokee Woodcarving

By Tammi J. Hanawalt, PhD

30

peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki aacimooni: A Story of Miami Ribbonwork

By Scott M. Shoemaker, PhD (Miami), George Ironstrack (Miami), and Karen Baldwin

36

Reclaiming Space in Native Knowledges and Languages The Clemente Course in the Humanities

By Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek)

44

Recent Developments

By Mariah L. Ashbacher and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Seven Directions 20

By Hallie Winter (Osage Nation)

54

Art+Literature 96 Suzan Shown Harjo

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Collections: 100 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD Spotlight: Melt: Prayers for the People and the Planet, Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota)

By Mariah L. Ashbacher

104

Calendar

By Travis D. Day and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

109

60

REVIEWS

ARTIST PROFILES D. Y. Begay: Diné Textile Artist

By Jennifer McLerran, PhD

16

54

Exhibition Reviews

78

Book Review

94

IN MEMORIAM

Benjamin Harjo Jr.: 60 Absentee Shawnee/Seminole Painter and Printmaker

By Staci Golar Freddy Mamani Silvestre: Aymara Architect

By Vivian Zavataro, PhD

66

Tyra Shackleford: Chickasaw Textile Artist

By Vicki Monks (Chickasaw)

72

66

72

Joe Fafard, OC, SOM (Métis)

By Gloria Bell, PhD (Métis)

106

Frank LaPeña (Nomtipom Maidu)

By Mariah L. Ashbacher

107

Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk)

By Jean Merz-Edwards

108

cover Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/ Seminole), creator and coyote compete to make man, 2016, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 20 × 28 in., private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

SUMMER 2019 | 11

Artist-in-Residence Program | Fine Print Studio & Gallery | Non-Profit

Issue No. 23, Summer 2019 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Managing Editor: Mariah L. Ashbacher Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Jo Ann Reece Proofreaders: Mariah L. Ashbacher, Travis D. Day (Scottish/WelshAmerican), Staci Golar (Cornish/Welsh-American), Michelle J. Lanteri, and Kerrie Monahan-Peterson Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Social Media: Staci Golar (Cornish/Welsh-American), Michelle J. Lanteri, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Regional Representatives

Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) Great Plains: Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Northeast: Kelly Church (Odawa/Ojibwe/Potawatomi) Northwest: Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Band Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni)

Editorial Advisory Board

heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw) Jonathan Batkin, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian James T. Bialac, JD Teri Greeves (Kiowa) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DFA (Hopi/Choctaw) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage Nation) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) Ken Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca) India Rael Young, PhD

Advertising Representative

Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@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.

D E M I A N D I N É YA Z H I ’ No Place Like Hózhó six-color lithograph 39.75 x 30 inches, edition of 15 hand printed & published at Crow’s Shadow Press

Copyright © 2019 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.

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CHEROKEE ART MARKET OCTOBER 12 & 13, 2019

Martha Berry - “Sageeyah Gold: Honoring the Pollinators & the Humans Who Protect Them” (textile) Culture Keeper Award

Sequoyah Convention Center at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa cherokeeartmarket.com | 877.779.6977 © 2019 Cherokee Nation Businesses. All Rights Reserved.

READERS RESPOND!

O

UR THIRD READERS' SURVEY revealed that our letters section is the least read section of First American Art Magazine, so I’ll use this space to share the results of FAAM’s third online survey, which specifically targeted paid subscribers.

Our gender gap is closing: FAAM engages 54 percent women readers and 46 percent men. Educational backgrounds remain impressive with 100 percent of respondents attending some college. An inspiring 37 percent hold a master’s degree, while 29 percent hold a doctoral degree.

An overwhelming majority collect Native art, with 97 percent owning artwork made by Indigenous peoples of the Americas and 87 percent planning to travel to a Native art event. Of course, people living in major Native art centers, such as Santa Fe, generally don’t need to travel to experience an array of Native art exhibitions and events.

Unsurprisingly, FAAM subscribers are avid readers with eclectic interests.

Smithsonian Magazine is the most widely read magazine, closely followed by the New York Times, the most read newspaper. FAAM readers reported Art in America followed by Inuit Art Quarterly as their most-read art publications, while the New Yorker and Santa Fean are the favored regional magazines. The National Museum of American Indian’s magazine, Indian, was the most-read publication on Native Americans. FAAM readers keep up with world events by reading the Economist, Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. Finally, a surprising number of readers listed various archaeological publications, both popular and academic.

FAAM subscribers ranked artist profiles, feature articles, exhibition reviews, Andrea L. Ferber’s Collections, book reviews, and Recent Developments as sections they read the most. Since the Letters section was overwhelmingly ranked as the least read, we will discontinue it (unless someone sends a particularly compelling correspondence).

“

I like the variety you provide.

Opens up the art world for me.

”

“

Most of the magazine [content] is not seen elsewhere.

Keep up the great work! I love it!

“

”

I read your magazine cover to cover. I like how you take pains to challenge stereotypes about Native art and artists.

”

When asked what they want to see in future issues, responses ranged from the general to the highly specific; for instance, a feature article on birchbark biting including a list of artists (yes, we’ve discussed covering birchbark biting many times, and I’ve contacted an art historian about writing this article).

Requested topics include emerging artists (see RoseMary Diaz’s article in this issue), various aspects of collecting art (established collectors will be queried for their advice to aspiring, new collectors in the next issue, FAAM No. 24). The people

14 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

who requested profiles of non-artists involved in the Native art world might peruse our Seven Directions column, in which curators and other behind-thescenes art professionals share their top seven lists.

A couple of subscribers suggested that we expand or contract our scope; however, covering art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas—North and South—is the core of First American Art Magazine’s mission, so this will never change. Several respondents said they enjoy reading about artists they hadn’t read about before, so we’ll keep challenging ourselves to cover new and historic Native artists who haven’t yet received the recognition they deserve.

When asked, “What do you want to know about Native American art but were afraid to ask?” we received several intriguing responses, so we posed some of the questions to an online discussion group of intertribal artists working in a wide range of media.

The first question was, “How do you feel about non-Native people collecting your art?” Some artists responded that non-Native people constituted the majority of people who collected their work. Several artists said they appreciated the opportunity to teach others about their cultures. One artist pointed out that work available at an art show or market is not going to be ceremonial work and would be geared toward diverse audiences. The prevailing sentiment was that the artists felt honored that people—no matter what their background is—appreciated their work enough to collect it.

The second question was, if someone enjoys talking to artists but is not buying, are they wasting the artist’s time? Crunch times, such as the first hours of major art markets or crowded openings, are not good for casual conversation that could interfere with serious collectors trying to reach the artists. Some people didn’t mind chatting for a few minutes but didn’t care for sustained conversations; others were perfectly happy to share their cultural knowledge or have longer conversations with genuinely interested visitors. Some pointed out that a person might not collect now but perhaps might in the

future. Others shared that one interested person attracts more curious people; a lively discussion can grow to include many people. So, one might be cognizant of the artist’s mood and other visitors also wanting to talk to the artist. Silversmith Steve Mashburn (Cherokee Nation) says, “It has never cost me a buffalo nickel to be friendly, smile, and speak.”

One question was, “What makes an artwork, exhibition, or artist qualified to be featured in FAAM? How ‘Native’ does the art or artist have to be?” Since all of us at FAAM are deeply involved in the Native art world—whether as artists, curators, collectors, dealers, or all of the above—we go to elaborate lengths to ensure a level of objectivity in choosing artists to profile. Every 18 months we take nominations from our editorial advisory board, regional representatives, editors, writers, and other involved parties. The nominees have to be established enough in their career that they have a solid oeuvre of works and enough stories to tell. We might cover emerging artists but

not an artist at the absolute beginning of their career. Then we create online profiles with images and links so nominators can research unfamiliar artists and rank the artists anonymously to create a pool for the upcoming issues. These are then scheduled so that the widest range of cultural backgrounds, geographic regions, and media are featured in each issue. As long as the artist belongs to their tribe and maintains an active connection to their community, they can pursue any techniques or subject matter.

We’ve agreed that shoddy exhibitions don’t merit space in the magazine.

Exhibitions have to achieve a certain level of professionalism to warrant inclusion. In exhibitions that mix Native and non-Native artists, we will cover shows that feature a majority of Native artists, but we also cover Indigenous artists participating in major, international art events like the Venice Biennial and documenta.

In our Spotlight column, first proposed by collector James Bialac, we alternate between significant historic pieces and

compelling contemporary pieces that stand out at major art events, such as the Heard Fair or Santa Fe Indian Market.

Some Native artists mentioned they wanted advice and information about grants, fellowships, and residencies. We have resources for artists on our website and regularly share grant, fellowship, residency, employment, and other opportunities on our Facebook page, @FirstAmericanArt, and Twitter feed, @FirstAmArt. We sincerely appreciate your feedback! You’ve inspired several articles and sparked great conversations. If you want to anonymously query a group of Native artists, email us your question at info@firstamericanartmagazine.com. We can ask the artists and relay the answer back. If you have any other questions, feel free to pose them to our social media at any time.

Thanks for helping us at FAAM serve you better as we all move forward!

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) SUMMER 2019 | 15

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) hired Jocelyn Piirainen (Inuk) as assistant curator of Inuit art and Lisa Charleyboy (Tsilhqot’in) as its manager of Indigenous initiatives. Piirainen, a curator and filmmaker, will help with the acquisition, conservation, and documentation of the WAG Inuit collection.

Charleyboy, a journalist, television and radio host, editor, author, and documentary filmmaker, will help with WAG’s outreach to Indigenous communities and developing Indigenous programming.

Denver Art Museum hired Dakota Hoska (Oglala Lakota) as its new assistant curator of Native American art. A painter, art writer, and curator, Hoska most recently served as research assistant in Native American curation at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She earned her master's degree in art history with an emphasis on Native American art history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

The Art Institute of Chicago has postponed its planned exhibition of precontact Mimbres ceramics from the Southwest due to cultural sensitivity concerns raised by Native communities.

Previously slated to open on May 26, 2019, Worlds Within:

I D Y L L W I L D

A R T S

Mimbres Pottery of the Ancient Southwest was meant to display 70 pieces from a private collection pledged to be donated to the museum. However, because Mimbres ceramic works (dating from around 1100 CE) are associated with burials, the institute is now consulting with Pueblo advisors, including relatives of precontact Mimbres people.

Autry Museum of the American West is seeking proposals to transfer ownership of the grounds and building of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles.

Charles Fletcher Lummis, an anthropologist, journalist, and advocate for Indigenous rights, founded the Southwest Museum in 1914. Since 2003 it has been operated by the Autry Museum, but representatives for the Autry say the Southwest Museum needs several million dollars in major renovations to bring it up to industry standards. The 400,000 objects in the Southwest’s collection are now held by the Autry in a separate storage facility, and many of the galleries, closed to the public, are being used by the Autry Museum as conservation labs. The Southwest Museum building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in the California Register of Historic Places, as a City of Los Angeles Historical Cultural Monument, and was named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2015.

S U M M E R

P R O G R A M

Native American Art Workshops and Festival 2019 June 9-July 5

Exhibition / Lectures Performance / Workshops idyllwildarts.org/nativearts

summer@idyllwildarts.org 951-468-7265 Scholarships for Native American adults and kids available

16 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

7TH ANNUAL

COLLECTIONS The late Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess, an art historian and educator who promoted Native art through her Calgary Galleries Ltd. in Alberta, bequeathed a massive collection of Inuit artworks to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Her gift includes 750 contemporary Indigenous sculptures, 120 works on paper, and 25 historical Inuit artworks. The museum is planning a traveling exhibition to display works from the Hess collection. The philanthropist also donated works

by Bill Reid (Haida, 1920–1998) to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology and works by Alex Janvier (Denesuline/Saulteaux) to the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

NATIVE ART MARKET & CULTURAL CELEBRATION

Sisters Margaret Hermann and Kathleen Walz donated their mother Lenore Walz’s collection of Native American artworks and books to the anthropology department at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU). Their gift includes Southwest ceramics and baskets, Guatemalan Maya huipiles, and more than 100 books on Native American history and anthropology.

Hermann says the sisters chose NMHU because they were impressed by Professor Orit Tamir’s vision of using the collection as a teaching resource for students and the local Las Vegas, New Mexico, community. NMHU students are learning how to trace provenance, to identify iconography and materials, and to prepare objects for exhibition or display in a gallery.

ART SHOWS The Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah held its 48th annual Trail of Tears Art Show and Sale, an intertribal, juried art exhibition in Park Hill, Oklahoma. Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation) won the Grand Prize. Toneh Chuleewah (Cherokee Nation) won the Betty Scraper Garner Elder Award; Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) won the Bill Rabbit Legacy Award, and Daniel HorseChief (Cherokee Nation/Pawnee) won the Trail of Tears Award. Classification winners were Troy Jackson, pottery; Vivian Cottrell (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Norma Howard (Choctaw/Chickasaw), miniatures; Toneh Chuleewah, jewelry; Melinda Schwakhofer (Muscogee), graphics; Johnnie Diacon (Muscogee), painting; Tama Roberts (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; and Gary Henson (Cherokee Nation), emerging. The center added a youth competition this year, and Emma Sherron (Cherokee Nation) won first place in the youth classification.

JULY 19-20, 2019 RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA

FRIDAY ARTIST AWARDS RECEPTION

SATURDAY NATIVE FINE ART, FASHION, FILM & PERFORMANCE

ART MARKETS Best of Show winner at the 61st annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market was Ephraim Anderson (Navajo) for White House Revival II, a weaving inspired by Ancestral Pueblo designs. Classification winners were Liz Wallace (Nisenan/ Washoe/Navajo), jewelry and lapidary; Daryl Whitegeese (Pojoaque/Santa Clara Pueblos), pottery; Thomas Tapia (Tesuque Pueblo), paintings, drawings, graphics, photography; Donald Lomawunu Sockyma (Hopi), Pueblo carvings; Cliff Fragua (Jemez), sculpture; Ephraim Anderson, weavings and textiles; Rhonda Holy Bear (Cheyenne River Lakota), diverse art forms; Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin Unangax), baskets;

WWW.NATIVEPOP.ORG Joanne Brings Thunder (Eastern Shoshone), My Mom, 11” X 17” Mixed media

SUMMER 2019 | 17

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Leah Mata (Northern Chumash), personal attire; and Terrol Dew Johnson (Tohono O’odham), open standards. Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota) won the Idyllwild Arts Imagination Award, while Lyndon Tsosie (Navajo) won the Conrad House Innovation Award. Junior Division Award winners were Tara Lujan-Baker (Taos Pueblo) for ages 12 to 14, and Isaiah Begay (Navajo) for ages 12 to 17.

curator from Ottawa, won the Artistic Achievement Award, and Lee-Ann Martin (Mohawk), a curator from Carp, won the Outstanding Contribution Award. All eight award recipients were presented with a bronze medal and received a $25,000 stipend. Winners will also have their work shown at the National Gallery of Canada, and film shorts about their careers will be created and publicly shown on flights and passenger trains.

Clancy Gray (Osage) was the Honored One at the 33rd annual Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City. Rosemary Hill (Tuscarora) won the Grand Award for Best of Show, while Lester Ortiz (Navajo) won the President’s Award, and Judy Tafoya (Santa Clara Pueblo) won the Upshaw Award. Category winners were Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware), beadwork; Alberta Henderson (Navajo), textiles; Yonavea Hawkins, cultural items; Daniel Worcester (Chickasaw), diversified arts; Linda Kukuk (Choctaw), drawing, graphics, and photography; Abraham Begay (Navajo), traditional jewelry; Clifton Aguilar (Kewa), contemporary jewelry; Donn Clark (Mescalero Apache/Navajo), oil and acrylic painting; Lauren Reed (Choctaw), water-based painting; Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), traditional pottery; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), contemporary pottery; and Gene “Iron Man” Smith (Choctaw), sculpture.

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) announced the recipients of their 2019 Awards for Excellence. Karen Kramer, curator of Native American and Oceanic art and culture at the Peabody Essex Museum, received an award in the exhibitions category for curating T. C. Cannon: At the Edge of America.

John Lukavic, curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum, received an award in the article, essay, or extended catalogue category for “What Should Have Been, What Is, and What Will Be” in Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, published by the Denver Art Museum and DelMonico Books/Prestel. The 20 honorees were chosen from 150 nominations in a variety of curatorial fields. This is the 15th year that AAMC has recognized curators and institutions for achievements with awards from their peers.

The Chickasaw Nation hosted its 6th annual Artesian Arts Festival in Sulphur, Oklahoma. Crystal Hanna (Cherokee Nation) won best of three-dimensional art, Norma Howard (Choctaw/Chickasaw) won best of two-dimensional art, and J. Eric Smith (Chickasaw) won best of cultural arts. Classification winners were Lisan Blair-Tiger (Cherokee Nation), sculpture, ceramics; Gene Smith (Choctaw), sculpture, other; Sandy FifeWilson (Muscogee), jewelry, stone; Abraham Begay (Navajo), jewelry; Mary Wilds (Chickasaw), textiles; Beverly Callahan (Chickasaw), textiles, hand-woven; Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/Seneca), diverse 3D arts; Starr Hardridge (Muscogee), painting; Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation), drawing; Brad Woods (Chickasaw), photography; Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox/ Muscogee/Seminole), graphic arts; Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), mixed media; Vivian Cottrell (Cherokee Nation), baskets; Cody Harjo (Seminole), jewelry, beaded; Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware), beadwork/quillwork; Sheila Little Harjo (Seminole), regalia; Jerry Sutton (Cherokee Nation), musical instruments; Danny Beaver (Muscogee), weaponry; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Wayne Edgar (Chickasaw), diverse cultural arts; and Lauretta Newby-Coker (Choctaw), miniatures.

AWARDS & HONORS The Jerome Foundation chose 60 artists from Minnesota and New York as its 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellows, including Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), a painter and mixedmedia artist based in Shakopee, Minnesota. Each of the 60 early career artists chosen receives a $40,000 stipend.

The Canada Council for the Arts honored two Indigenous artists with its 2019 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Jeff Thomas (Onondaga), a photographer and 18 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

The Artist Trust, based in Seattle, selected Joe Feddersen (Okanagan/Sinixt) as one of its 13 fellows for 2019 and Asia Tail (Cherokee Nation) for its Vadon Foundation Native Artist Fellowship, a merit-based award for active, professional artists living in Washington, which includes a $10,000 stipend.

Susan Avingaq (Inuk) of Igloolik and Jaco Ishulutaq (Inuk) from Pangnirtung are the winners of the 2018 Nunavut Commissioner’s Arts Award. The honor includes a cash prize of $5,000 and a certificate from Nunavut Commissioner Nellie Kusugak. Avingaq, a storyteller and performer, is also an actor, author, illustrator, and costume designer. Ishulutaq is a sculptor.

The Ucross Foundation, an arts program based in Wyoming, awarded Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee) with its 2019 Ucross Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists. The fellowship includes a month-long residency, a $2,000 stipend, and an exhibition of her work at the Ucross Foundation Gallery in 2020.

Nevada Humanities presented Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) their inaugural 2019 Humanities Rising Star Award. Melero-Moose of Sparks, Nevada, is a nationally recognized mixed-media artist, the founder of Great Basin Native Arts, and the Great Basin representative of First American Art Magazine.

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe announced their 2019–20 Native American Artist Fellows: Timothy Edaakie (Zuni), ceramic artist; Ian Kuali’i (Native Hawaiian/Mescalero Apache descent), mixed-media artist; and Leah Mata-Fragua (Northern Chumash), basket maker, carver, and regalia maker. According to their website, SAR's highly sought-after residential fellowships provide “artists time to explore new avenues of creativity and invites them to grapple with ideas that advance their work and strengthen their existing talents.”

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts announced their 2019 Golden Spot Residency Award recipients. Among the three winners is Natalie Ball (Klamath Modoc), a multidisciplinary and installation artist who works from her ancestral homelands in the rural community of Chiloquin, Oregon. Ball will be an artist-in-residence at Crow’s Shadow in November 2019.

Alberta University of the Arts bestowed world-renowned painter Alex Janvier (Denesuline/Saulteaux) with an honorary master of fine arts degree. A member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., Janvier became the university’s first known Indigenous graduate in 1960 when he earned his fine arts diploma with honors.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES The Guna, one of seven Indigenous groups in Panama, have succeeded in convincing Nike to cancel plans for a new limited edition shoe featuring a Guna mola design. Nike planned to incorporate the historical Guna design in a new shoe that was meant to pay homage to Puerto Rico, despite the Guna having no historical connection to the island. Panamanian law recognizes protection of the intellectual property of Indigenous groups.

This past March, US District Judge Charles Goodwin ruled that the 2016 amendment to Oklahoma’s 1974 Indian Arts and Crafts Sales Act is unconstitutional, because it supersedes federal requirements laid out in the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA). The 2016 amendment requires an artist to be a

citizen of a federally recognized tribe in order to have their artwork labeled as Native American, while the federal IACA allows for artists enrolled in federal or state recognized tribes and tribally designated artisans to market their work as Native American. Supporters of the amendment feel it closed a loophole and offered better protection to artists and consumers.

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office defended the state law and is now reviewing the decision. A similar bill, HB 1384, was introduced in Missouri in 2018 but has not been voted upon by the Missouri Senate. These amendments would have taken enforcement of fraudulent “Native” art from the federal to the state level.

In 2014 in Indiana, the FBI seized thousands of artworks, other objects, and Native American human remains from Don Miller, the late ethnographic collector. Seeking to repatriate the objects and remains to Native American communities, the FBI has launched an invitation-only website which gives access to Native American leaders to view objects.

Images of remains will be viewable on a case-by-case basis.

The FBI says they are doing all they can to ensure that items that might be deemed sacred are protected, but the agency needs the public’s help with information. Some objects can be viewed by the general public in photos released by the FBI to raise awareness of repatriation efforts. Representatives of tribes and cultural specialists from North and South America with information can email artifacts@fbi.gov.

—Mariah L. Ashbacher and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

SUMMER 2019 | 19

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

HALLIE WINTER OSAGE CURATOR SHARES HER TOP SEVEN LIST

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URRENTLY SERVING as collections manager and registrar, Hallie Winter (Osage Nation) is a member of the curatorial team at the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City. She has worked in the museum field since 2006, and she served as the director of the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, from 2015 to 2018 and undertook a major renovation project at the first tribal museum established in the United States. The American Alliance of Museums awarded Winter their 2018 Nancy Hanks Memorial Award for Professional Excellence, and the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development chose her for a 2018 Native American 40 Under 40 Award. Before returning home to Oklahoma to work for her community, Winter was the program coordinator for the Art of Collaboration in Buffalo, New York, a comprehensive back-office

alliance widely recognized as the first of its kind in the nation.

Included in this collaboration are the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA Gallery), Big Orbit Gallery, and Just Buffalo Literary Center. Winter lives with her husband Kenneth Gilmore and their fur babies in Oklahoma City. and Métis people; safety, security, and accessibility; and energy independence and efficiency. Up to $6 million is available for 24 projects. This funding provides mentoring and technical guidance for Indigenous innovators to form their initial ideas into construction-ready projects. This will be followed by up to $2 million for the construction of 15 to 24 of these projects. The application deadline is August 1, 2019. impact.canada.ca/en/ challenges/indigenous-homes

NORTH: Indigenous Homes Innovation Initiative Innovation and creativity wanted! The Indigenous Services of Canada has recently launched the Indigenous Homes Innovation Initiative. Described in a statement from the co-chairs of the Indigenous steering committee, “the Indigenous Homes Innovation Initiative is based on a simple yet powerful idea: that the best solutions come from those who live the problem every day.” The initiative is designed to fund projects led by Indigenous peoples to design and build more effective, sustainable, and culturally inspired living spaces in rural and urban First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities.

Individuals of First Nations, Inuit, or Métis heritage can apply for funding to develop and implement projects that fall under one of six focus areas: traditional building styles and techniques; using the home for empowerment, capacity building, and support for local businesses; support for vulnerable populations; culturally inspired urban spaces for First Nations, Inuit, 20 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

above, top Hallie Winter. Photo: Ian Brown. left Constructing a sixplex housing unit on Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, Ontario.

Image courtesy of Indigenous Services Canada/ Services aux Autochtones Canada. above, bottom Destruction at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. Image courtesy of Instanews Cherokee County. right Osage eye chart. Image courtesy of the Osage Nation Language Department, Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

SOUTH: Caddo Mounds State Historic Site Relief Effort A group of Caddo Nation citizens returned to Alto, Texas, within the Hasinai Caddo homelands in April to participate in the Caddo Culture Day at the Caddo Mounds State Historic Site. Sadly, that day did not turn out as planned, as the site was hit with EF3 tornadoes. On April 13, 2019, the storm took one individual’s life and left several others in the hospital; it also destroyed the visitor center and grass house on the Caddo Mounds site.

The customary grass lodge, constructed in 2016, was a beacon of cultural heritage, a teaching tool of Indigenous knowledge, and a pathway to understanding between the Caddo people and the non-Caddo members of the local community. The cleanup and rebuilding of this invaluable site has already started but has a long way to go. You can donate at thcfriends.org to help in the rebuilding effort. If you would like to support the victims of this tragedy, you may donate at gofundme.com/ caddo-mounds-tornado-tribal-victims.

EAST: Wah Zha Zhe Language Revitalization According to UNESCO, approximately 600 languages have disappeared in the last century and continue to do so at a rate of one language every two weeks.

Since 2003 the Osage Nation in Eastern Oklahoma has been working diligently to make sure their language does not become one of these statistics. The Wah Zha Zhe were devastatingly close to losing their language after decades of colonization and assimilation. With the support of tribal leadership and encouragement of tribal citizens, an official language department and immersion school have been created.

Following their mission to “revitalize the Osage language to its purest form and to teach our people to speak Osage within the realm of our unique ways and in daily conversation,” the language department has initiated programs to preserve and revitalize the Osage language. Free online and in-person classes are now available, and approximately 300 individuals are enrolled in these classes today. Just last SUMMER 2019 | 21

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year the Osage orthography was included into Unicode. Tribal citizens and the public can now download the orthography font onto their phones, computers, and tablets. A creative and appealing language app is also available for Apple and Android devices. Technology allows tribal citizens across the globe to engage with their cultural heritage, revitalize their language, and strengthen their Osage identity. osagenation-nsn.gov/ who-we-are/language-department WEST: Colorado Plateau Foundation The 2018 Fiscal Year Indian Country Budget Request from the National Congress of American Indians states, “Significant gaps in environmental protection that should be met through the implementation of monitoring, regulatory, and on-the-ground activities still remain in many areas of Indian Country.” Native peoples across the United States have been fighting for the protection of water, sacred and endangered landscapes, sustainable and community-based agriculture, and the preservation of their languages for centuries.

The Colorado Plateau Foundation, a Native-led organization, assists other Native-led groups in the Colorado Plateau to close these gaps, promote real and practical activities, and connect Native organizations to national philanthropic communities in order to enact positive change in the long-term sustainability of their communities. For a minimum of 12,000 years, Native peoples have inhabited the area known as the Colorado Plateau. Today the plateau is home to tribes including the Acoma, Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Kaibab Paiute, Navajo, Ute, Mountain Ute, White Mountain Apache, and Zuni. Since 2012, the Colorado Plateau Foundation has given more than $1.6 million to over 60 Native-led initiatives in this area. Responding to communities’ needs and consulting with cultural and community leaders allows the foundation to create positive, forward momentum in Indian Country. coloradoplateaufoundation.org UP: Native American Astronomy Outreach at Lowell Observatory Astronomy has been practiced for as long as humans have been looking at the sky. Native American cultures hold an extraordinarily rich knowledge of astronomy. Through oral history, this knowledge has been passed down from generation to

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generation for millennia. But even with all of this Indigenous knowledge, only 25 Native Americans earned bachelor’s degrees in astronomy from 2003 to 2013, according to the American Institute of Physics.

Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, wants to increase that number by engaging Native American youth in the science of astronomy through the Native American Astronomy Outreach Program. This program for fourth- through eighthgrade students allows them to better envision themselves as scientists. By creating cultural and local connections through astronomy, the program creates relevant connections to their lives. Astronomers are paired with teachers in classrooms throughout Arizona’s Native American communities to provide astronomy activities and educational programs while building student confidence to explore careers in the sciences. Now in its 23rd year, this program has impacted over 3,000 students and 100 teachers. If you would like to learn more about this program, including how to sign your school up, please visit lowell.edu/ native-astronomy-outreach. To donate to this program, please visit lowell.edu/priority-projects/native-american-outreach.

DOWN: Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists Curators Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Kiowa) have been working with 22 scholars and Native women artists throughout the United States and Canada over the past few years to develop the exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia).

above, left Young Hopi girl in the Colorado Plateau. Image courtesy of the Colorado Plateau Foundation. above Students tour the telescope used to discover Pluto at Lowell Observatory. Image courtesy of the Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. opposite, top Freda Diesing (Haida, 1925–2002), Old Woman with Labret, 1974, alderwood, paint, hair, cedar bark, abalone, glass beads, moosehide, bone or plastic, collection of the Royal BC Museum, RBCM15057. Photo: ©Canadian Westcoast Art. Image courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives. opposite, bottom American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, Oklahoma City. Photo: Matt Brown.

KESHi thezuniconnection

Spanning more than 1,000 years of history, this exhibition will feature and honor the achievements of over 115 Native women artists from the United States and Canada.

The first major survey of Native Women artists, Hearts of Our People will run from June 2 to August 18, 2019, and is free to Native audiences while at Mia and before the exhibition travels to other venues. You can also purchase the catalogue online from the museum shop. new.artsmia.org/ hearts-of-our-people-native-women-artists

Indian Market Shows August 16 –19 Keli’i Eli Camille Bernal CENTER: American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (AICCM) Seven months ago I joined the curatorial team at the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum. Initiated in 1994, the AICCM will open its doors to the public in the spring of 2021. Over the course of the next year and a half, the AICCM curatorial team will continue to develop inaugural exhibitions, conduct tribal consultations, and ensure that the AICCM will serve as a living center for cultural expression—all this while promoting awareness and understanding for the public concerning the 39 tribes located in Oklahoma and the larger Indigenous global community. We hope to see you all at the grand opening! theamericanindiancenter.org

Frankie Poblano Kateri Quandelacy Sanchez Dinah Gasper & Debra Gasper Maegan Shetima & Shannon Waatsa Please contact Keshi for detailed information

227 Don Gaspar Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.989.8728 www.keshi.com Ray Tsalate: Warrior Maiden Necklace, detail SUMMER 2019 | 23

TAKE A CLOSER LOOK Four Emerging Artists Shine in the Spotlight Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.… Respect that knowledge and learn from others. It will bring out the best in them, and it will bring out the best in you.

—Bill Nye, 2019 commencement speech, Goucher College1

By RoseMary Diaz

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HE TASK OF INTRODUCING up-and-coming artists and their work to a wider audience is an exciting one—to play a small part in getting their stories to the page, as they move toward greater recognition in their careers. Offering a closer look at a few of Native America’s most talented younger artists, this feature aims to inspire a deeper appreciation of what each of these artists does and how they do it.

Sometimes, even a why is divulged.

I queried each of the four artists— Samantha Jacobs, Matagi Sorenson, Dana Warrington, and Jodi Webster—on aspects of their art-making lives, including early influences. I asked how they describe their work, how they persevere through creative challenges, and about the idea of creative legacy.

Whether negotiating several projects simultaneously, navigating the responsibilities of single parenthood, packing for a son’s out-of-state commencement, or preparing for final exams, respectively, all four artists graciously accepted FAAM’s invitation to share their creative insights.

Presented with a little background information and some career highlights, here’s some of what was revealed.

SAMANTHA JACOBS CARIBOU-HAIR TUFTER Samantha Jacobs (Seneca) was born in Gowanda, New York, near the Cattaraugus Reservation, and raised in the Pinewoods community. As a child, she was part of a Native American dance troupe called the Buffalo Creek Dancers and “did the powwow circuit.” She was led to her art form “out of necessity. As I grew up, I learned to make my own outfits. … Part of that was learning to bead. As an adult, I became more interested in the history of the beadwork and the art of my people, the Haudenosaunee,” also known as the Iroquois Confederacy.2 Jacobs belongs to the Turtle Clan and was born into a family of artists, who provided the foundation for her art education. “I have had the pleasure to learn from many over the years,” she reflects, “but my first teachers were my mother,” Mary Jacobs, and elders Beverly Porter and Lillian Kane (all Seneca). Her sisters are also creative, as well.

Other influences include Caroline Parker (Tonawanda Seneca, ca. 1824– 1892) and Parker’s sisters, whose works “basically defined what ‘Seneca Style’ work is, historically,” explains Jacobs.

During the mid-19th century, Seneca

1. Bill Nye, “2019 Commencement Speaker: Bill Nye,” Goucher College, May 24, 2019, web.

2. The profiles were compiled from email correspondence, telephone conversations, and interviews with the artists.

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women “worked with moosehair and beads and did embroidery and beadwork. Their work has held up against the test of time: you can see the shift from old-school, natural embroidery elements to the full use of glass beads,” but they kept the signature Haudenosaunee style throughout their evolution.

Jacobs, who achieved her own style of intricate beadwork and moosehair tufting, is paying those lessons and inspirations forward as a cultural educator who generously shares her knowledge. She says, “It was essential that I learn as much as I could, so I would have a strong base to teach. I’m fortunate to have a job that falls in line with my passion for creating and sharing my knowledge with others.”

The artist doesn’t follow a routine, but Jacobs does have a special space to stimulate creativity: “My work area is right in front of the window, so I can see the birds fly by, the bees buzzing around, the wildflowers swaying in the breeze, and deer munching at the edge of the woods.

I’m inspired by nature and by what I see around me. Having access to that space is important for my creativity.”

On sometimes uncooperative muses, Jacobs shared, “When I’m stuck or I don’t like how a piece is working out, I put it to the side and pick up a different

project from my rotation of current pieces. I’m a slow multitasker, so I have a constant rotation of projects. … Items that get put to the side may sit for years until I’m ready to try again; sometimes I just take things apart and start over.”

While Jacobs acknowledges the importance of respecting the voices and visions of her elders, she also notes the value in acquiring new creative skills. “I think my work is an example of what’s possible when opportunities are available to create that cross access and age [barriers]. I learned from my elders, and I keep what they’ve taught me close to my heart and am mindful to live by their words. But I’ve also gone out of my way to find teachers who will share their skills with me so I can incorporate different styles and mediums into my work. Blending of all that I’ve learned up to this point is what my work is now.”

Jacobs’s work is now widely respected and highly sought after. She is a member of the Native Roots Artists Guild, a juried group of about 70 artists. “Having artists who I respect ask me to create work for their exhibits and collections is pretty cool. I was also pretty stoked to win a couple of ribbons at Indian Market, and at the Hodinöhsö:ni' Art Show” at Ganondagan State Historic Site located in Upstate New York. The New York State Museum in Albany recently acquired Jacobs’s 2018 Santa Fe Indian Market winner, a pair of beaded mukluks titled Foxy Lady, for their permanent collection.

MATAGI SORENSEN MATAGI SORENSEN (Yavapai/Apache) was born in Cottonwood, Arizona, just outside the Yavapai-Apache Indian Reservation—some of the most beautiful land on earth. Sorensen spent his childhood here.

The silversmith drew inspiration from his father, who “did some metal work when I was a kid,” his great-grandmother, a respected basket maker, and his own understanding of the natural world. “Everything in nature has been manipulated by something else to become what it is,” Sorensen says. “Everything in nature is interdependent.” Fortified with his connection to family and place, he reflects, “I still fall back to that family tenacity, where once you approach a piece, you don’t set it down until it’s done.

No breaks, no vacations.”

That perseverance has served Sorensen well through endeavors both academic and artistic, including his pursuit of formal education, and his ability to apply the results of that scholarship to what he does professionally. “I didn’t attend school until college,” says the artist. He passed his GED at age 24, then attended Yavapai College. “I took a few art classes, and knew art was my calling.” A move to Flagstaff followed, where Sorensen earned a BFA with an emphasis in metalsmithing from Northern Arizona University in 2011. Currently working on a master’s degree at Arizona State University, the artist says, “Now is the time to use what I learned as an undergraduate. It’s time to put all of that together.”

Practical reasons led Sorensen to pursue art as a career: “As a single parent, I needed a job I could do at home.” The artist’s daughter, Seraphina, has been his inspiration and motivation to grow as an artist and endure life’s challenges. She has been

top Samantha Jacobs (Seneca), That One Time In Tahiti..., 2019, velvet, Pellon, glass beads, caribou hair, brass sequins, marginella shells, cotton, 10 × 10 × 81/2 in. Both images courtesy of the artist. bottom Samantha Jacobs (Seneca), Happy Anniversary, Kehala, 2019, caribou hair, moose hair, glass beads, velvet, cotton, satin ribbon, commercial leather, 11 × 8 in., collection of K. Smith.

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left Matagi Sorensen (Yavapai/Apache), Blackened Lace Cuff, 2019, oxidized sterling silver. Both images courtesy of the artist. right Matagi Sorensen (Yavapai/Apache), Carved and Etched Cuff, 2018, oxidized sterling silver, 21/2 × 5 × 1/4 in.

his rock. “Because I’ve had to be there for her, I’ve had to force myself to work past burnout, and push beyond that place.”

Sorensen’s work has evolved from trading post–style artwork to the more complex, elegant forms he is now known for. His designs, shapes, colors, and settings are reminiscent of natural wonders of the artist’s homeland: its vast, weathered landscapes, constellations often visible to the naked eye in that part of the desert, and the abundance of flowering plants springing from the dry, sandy ground. Turquoise set above coral resembles a cloudless sky over the warm desert, or, when inverted, a sunset over a cool, clear lake. Strands of thick, silver wire or flat planes of gold provide the track for bright blue and green earthlike stones resting mid-orbit. Sorensen’s hand-fabricated and cast sterling silver resembles otherworldly flora. A motif he uses is devil’s claw (Proboscidea species), a low-lying, moccasin-catching seed pod. He gathered it with his great-grandmother, and it reminds him of “her enduring presence, the subtleness of her colors, the perfection of her weavings.”

Sorensen knows the importance of letting art take its course. “Some pieces take a year to make,” he explains. “I usually make several versions and eventually settle on a shape.” Some ambitious pieces came out as failures, but he doesn’t

lose heart since every piece is a learning experience, “and with metal, you can always melt it back down.”

Before Sorensen translates his designs into permanent renderings, he sets them to paper: “I have a hard time sitting still, so I need to sketch out my ideas to get [that energy] out of my system.” Harnessing his restlessness has been met with due reward, including top-tier awards from the Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival, Native Treasures, and the Southwest Indian Art Fair.

Sorensen aspires to be “part of the dialogue about current problems and issues, and the future of Indian art and culture. There’s a lot that needs to be talked about.”

DANA WARRINGTON W H E N DA NA WA R R I N G TON (Menominee/Potawatomi) turned 16, his mother sewed a shirt and dance apron for him, and then she “told me I was on my own,” he recounts. “If I wanted nice regalia, I would have to learn how to make it myself.” He took her words to heart, and having watched his mom bead throughout his life, he was able to pick up the techniques. “Looking back on the situation, it was probably one of the best things she ever did for me. … She made me stand on my own feet and pushed my willingness and creativity.”

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Warrington grew up in the village of Keshena on his Menominee father’s reservation in northern Wisconsin. His earliest influences were drawn from “years of dancing in the powwow arena” and the unique, handmade regalia. He also credits his maternal grandmother, Dorthey Young, for instilling in him “a pure love and passion for creating artwork. She taught me that the ability to do artwork is a gift from God. She also taught me to share my knowledge with anyone willing to learn. The ability to teach is a gift from God. My part of the deal is to work hard, persevere through the hard times, and try my best to live a good life.”

Not too long ago, “porcupine quillwork was a dying art form,” says Warrington. “Very few Natives were still doing it, and even fewer were doing it at the art market level.” He developed a passion for teaching porcupine-quill wrapping: “For me, a big part of doing the markets has been educating non-Natives about the amount of work and skill that go into the art form. In their eyes, quillwork does not have the same value as diamonds or silver, so education of the craft is still very important to its revitalization.”

Exhibiting in the art world can be intimidating, Warrington concedes: “But you just have to put on that brave face and believe you belong here. I had a lot of success very early in my career. It’s come with a load of stress—constantly trying to

create at this high level while I’m still figuring out the art world.

Recently, I was asked what a young artist needs to make it in art markets. I can [answer] that it in one word: ‘Courage!’”

Sometimes, a leap of faith is also required. “When I decided to venture into the art markets, I shut down my internet business and basically put all my eggs in one basket,” Warrington admits.

“It was a scary time, wondering if I did the right thing or if I was going to fall flat on my face. The first show I ever did was the Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival in 2017. I had no idea what a juried competition was! I won best of show with an oversized pipe bag named Family Traditions.” Around here, we call that being off to a very good start.

“The life of an artist is full of high times and low times,” Warrington acknowledges, but he has become resilient in navigating those ebbs and flows. “When I’m with a group of artists at a show, it’s like a high. Just the vibe of being together and feeding off of each other’s energy.”

Warrington has also learned to overcome creative challenges, taking them in stride: “When I’m having difficulties with a particular piece, I’ve learned to put it aside for a bit and move on to something else. … The end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 were quite challenging; my creativity levels dropped to almost zero. I had to take some time to put my life back in order … before my creativity came back.” His creative process always “starts with prayer and a good smudge. I need to clear my mind of any negative energy before I start working or it shows.”

Warrington describes his work as vibrant and innovative, explaining: “‘Vibrant’ has to do with [my] color palette. I create about 30 shades of quills. I use modern materials, such as liquid Rit dye mixed with sugar, and Kool-Aid mixed with vinegar. I’ve learned that different factors can produce different shades of the same color, and mixing colors can [produce] in-between shades.

We’re an HD generation; I believe this is one of the things that makes this art form more appealing to younger generations.” “‘Innovative,’” Warrington continues, “has to do with the fact that Native people have survived because of our ability to adapt to our surroundings. The same can be said for our artwork.

Although I use modern materials, I still use the same basic techniques [my] ancestors used a hundred years ago. To me, those are time-honored traditions we cannot forget if we expect these art forms to survive for another hundred years.”

JODI WEBSTER

bottom Dana Warrington (Menominee/Potawatomi), Man's Quilled Headband, ca. 2017, porcupine quills, porcupine guard hairs, brass, hide. Both images courtesy of SWAIA. top Dana Warrington (Menominee/Potawatomi), Wapenonah, ca. 2017, hide, porcupine quills, metal brads, cowry shells, hawkbells, ermine, satin ribbons, wood, paint, 30 × 10 in.

“MY GOAL IN ART has been to find a way to carry on Woodland designs, while also countering stereotypes of what Native American art is or how it is made,” states Jodi Webster (Ho-Chunk/Prairie Potawatomi). “I grew up around a lot of sewing and beading, and from this, I felt an expectation to know how to do traditional crafts. I’ve never felt that one’s gender should dictate or limit one’s artistic medium of choice, so I have always been curious about what happens when one challenges the expected.”

Born and raised in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, Webster was influenced by artists within her family and beyond. “Whether at a powwow or a religious event, I would marvel at everyone’s beadwork, fabrics, use of color, and the manner in which they put everything together,” she recalls. “I saw this up close with my SUMMER 2019 | 27

left Jodi Webster (Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi), Appliqué-Etched Bone Bead Necklace, etched hairpipe beads, sterling silver, semiprecious stone beads, 4 × 17 in. Both images courtesy of the artist. right Jodi Webster (Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi), Homage to Anishnaabe Jingle Dress, silver, leather, 3 × 34 × 1/8 in.

great-aunt, who did beadwork daily as a means of sustaining herself. I see my work as merely planting the seeds for sustainability for the next generation.”

Even though she “always did well in art,” Webster didn’t think school was for her. “In 1997, I thought I would try IAIA, but didn’t last. For high school, I attended two Indian boarding schools, and I felt the experience there was too similar. A major takeaway from [the Institute] was seeing a number of Native American female instructors with master’s degrees whose schooling was obtained in predominantly Anglo academic environments—a courageous act for a woman of color. There is such a lack of women of color in the university systems.”

Inspired by their efforts, “I now have an associate’s degree in graphic design, a BFA in painting and drawing, and an MFA in jewelry/metals. ... I thank my family and friends who endured my struggles and gave advice along the way.

That long journey may not have happened without their support.” Webster continues, “My children were able to watch me go through the struggles of acquiring my degrees while also making time to be a mom. I hope that by leading by example, my children will be prepared to push through the struggles to go on to receive a higher education.”

Webster “participated in Native art markets for a few years and met some

great artists,” but noticed the lack of Woodlands representation in the jewelry category. “So, as an undergraduate, I took a jewelry course. I did well and was encouraged to switch my major, but that wasn’t an option because I was about to graduate.” Luckily, “a jeweler friend offered studio space. I took him up on his offer (Thank you, Cody Sanderson!) and spent time in Santa Fe. I was interested in learning about various metalsmithing techniques but not in appropriating styles or motifs of the Southwest. In the art field, Native and non-Native, there is an expectation to propagate stereotypes. ...

To battle the challenge, I simply continue to push myself and stay true to my initial goal of carrying on the designs that are indicative of my region.”

Webster draws a broad comparison for the use of technology: “Why do Native Americans have electricity, travel in cars, or use cell phones and social media? We have simply adapted to our surroundings yet have been able to retain important facets of our culture. …

The appliqué designs worn by Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi women of the Upper Midwest were carried through various forced removals and are still available today. I want to keep these designs alive,

yet not be limited to solely wearing them in traditional clothing. The pieces I make pay homage to the past, but working professionals should be able to wear them on a daily basis.”

In her ongoing efforts to challenge stereotypes about Native Americans and their art-making tools of choice, Webster’s work is produced utilizing 3D CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) software and 3D printers. She says of her preference for 21st-century, cutting-edge tools: “By highlighting stereotypes, I’m asking, Who is molding the stereotypes?

Who is promoting them?”

Webster explains: “My ancestors worked with metal. They acquired those new skills and also traded for the most modern fabrics and beads to adorn themselves. As an artist, my motivation for acquiring new skills and applying them to my making is no different than what was done in the past. My goal is the same: survival.” Not just for herself, but for her people and her culture.

THESE FOUR ARTISTS will all participate in the 2019 Santa Fe Indian Market.

Look for them in Santa Fe, online, and at other markets and art exhibitions, where they are sure to garner more attention and accolades.

RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo/Mexican-American/Scots-Irish) is a freelance writer based in Santa Fe.

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ᎠᏂᏣᎳᎩ ᎠᏂᎷᎪ ᎤᏁᏅᏒ ᏧᎾᏟᎶᏍᏔᏅᏅ ᎬᏂᎨᏒ ᏄᏅᏃ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏂᏍᎪᎸᏙᎢ

24T H A N N U A L

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CHEROKEE HOMECOMING ART SHOW & SALE

SPONSORED IN PART BY:

Martha Berry “The Orange Monster’s Masquerade Ball” 2018 Cherokee Homecoming Art Show Grand Prize Winner -

AUGUST 10 – SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 Don’t miss this exclusive exhibition and sale of contemporary and traditional Cherokee art. and sale of contemporary and Don’t miss this exclusive exhibition

SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 AUGUST 10 – 2018 Cherokee Homecoming Art Show Grand Prize Winner Martha Berry “The Orange Monster’s Masquerade Ball”

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CHEROKEE HOMECOMING 24T H A N N U A L

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AMANDA CROWE & HER LEGACY Eastern Band Cherokee Woodcarving The Great Smoky Mountain homelands of the Eastern Band Cherokee boast an estimated one hundred distinct species of trees. While woodcarving has customarily been a man’s domain, an extraordinary woman became one of the most influential Cherokee carvers of the 20th century, and her students are bringing the art form into the 21st century.

By Tammi J. Hanawalt, PhD

O

N NOVEMBER 9, 2018, the Google Doodle celebrated the work of Eastern Band Cherokee artist Amanda Crowe in honor of Native American Heritage Month. Those of us that opened the animation created around the Google logo on that day and played the 50-second animated video encountered a portion of Crowe’s oeuvre that consisted largely of small carved animal figures. Her most prolific of these are delicate and finely finished little bears, of which she carved thousands. The movement of the wood’s grain, she said, “seemed to come alive beneath your hands as you whittle, and the grain helps the figures to come alive.”

Crowe began sculpting, or carving, in wood because she simply loved doing it and, as illustrated by Google animators, she taught thousands of others how to carve as well.1 Crowe’s legacy extends beyond where she made her home in the Qualla

Boundary, in what is now western North Carolina. Her inspiration as well as the methods she drew from as an artist and educator were deeply rooted in the artistry of the Eastern Band Cherokee people.

Here we examine Eastern Band Cherokee woodcarving, from its development to the work of contemporary artists who, directly or indirectly influenced by Crowe, have morphed community practices into a dynamic art form.

The history of Eastern Band Cherokee woodcarving is difficult to trace, due in part to the impermanence of the medium and because wooden objects carved before the 20th century were mostly made for practical use, including wooden spoons, dough bowls, and ball sticks. War clubs and masks were also carved from wood but were created for community use, and their designs and meanings were not shared with outsiders. Before the 20th century, the Qualla Boundary located at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains remained somewhat secluded. The difficulties of traveling in and out of the area helped to prevent inquisitive parties from conducting research among the Eastern Cherokee. However, in the 1880s the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology hired anthropologist James Mooney to study the “customs” and “historical character” of the Eastern Cherokee.2

1. Suzanne DePoe (Siletz), test engineer and member of the Google American Indian Network, was responsible for the acknowledgment of Amanda Crowe as a significant American Indian artist in the Google Doodle, November 9, 2018.

2. J. W. Powell, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1897–98, Part 1 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1900), 37. In the introduction, J. W. Powell remarked that “despite the historical importance of the tribe, they have, through a combination of circumstances, received comparatively slight consideration of literary and historical character.”

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Some of the first carved objects that Mooney collected were masks, which the Smithsonian accessioned. Most of the corresponding information Mooney obtained about the masks came from woodcarver Will West Long (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1870–1947). Long’s command of the Cherokee and English languages and his extensive knowledge of Cherokee histories made him a valued collaborator, not only to Mooney but also to other anthropologists. For more than 40 years Long worked with various anthropologists to help them identify Cherokee objects and better understand Cherokee culture. But, as art historian Anna Fariello points out, Long helped to publicize what was considered sacred knowledge.3 Of the masks Long identified, those that most interested outsiders were the booger masks, often carved from pieces of wood or gourds to represent human faces, primarily intruders. Some of the booger masks were used for mimicry and satire, while others had darker connotations.4 Mooney wrote about pipes that demonstrated the Eastern Band Cherokee mastery of carving, but these were stone, not wood. But because there is little documentation regarding the carved pipes, it is challenging to know exactly when they were created. Most of the earliest examples of Cherokee pipes were excavated from mounds and made from clay and stone.

Stone pipes, as described by Mooney in the late 19th century, were carved with a knife in soft steatite, or soapstone.

These pipes often contained small figural carvings, primarily of quadrupeds that were placed atop the pipes’ platforms facing away from the bowl, toward the smoker. Mooney commented on the pipes’ artistry: “The designs represent bears and squirrels perched in front of the bowl. The carving was done with a common pocket knife, and the pipes are afterward greased to color them. In the last century, the Cherokee were famous among all of the southern Indians for their skill of carving pipes of stone.”5

THE ROOTS OF CHEROKEE WOODCARVING WHILE WOODEN MASKS and certain pipe designs were based on animals, no evidence remains of wooden animal sculptures, such as those made by Crowe, created by Cherokee artists prior to the 20th century. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Eastern Cherokee contended with troubling issues and

above Amanda Crowe (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1928–2004), Dancing Bear, late 20th century, walnut, collection of Lambert Wilson. Photo: A. Meredith. opposite Amanda Crowe (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1928– 2004), Bear, late 20th century, walnut, 2½ × 3½ × 1¾ in., private collection. Photo: A. Meredith.

3. M. Anna Fariello, Cherokee Carving: From the Hands of Our Elders (Cullowhee, NC: Curatorial InSight, 2017), 17. I am indebted to the information provided to me by Anna Fariello about the history of Eastern Cherokee woodcarving.

4. Joshua Adams in discussion with the author, February 8, 2019. The purpose of the dance dictates which types of masks are worn.

5. John Witthoft, “Stone Pipes of the Historic Cherokee,” Southern Indian Studies 1, no. 2 (1949): 45. John Witthoft questions if the quadrupeds represented are actually bears and squirrels, although he does agree that more figures were animals than human.

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above Amanda Crowe and her students from Cherokee High School demonstrate woodcarving to visitors at the Craftsmen’s Fair at the Qualla Boundary, Cherokee, North Carolina, ca. 1963. Image courtesy of the Cherokee Field Office, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, US Department of the Interior. opposite The Great Smoky Mountains. Photo: Christine Jessel Grider.

an unstable economic situation, which endangered their rights and homeland.

Out of necessity, items created for personal use or ceremony became commodities, and hand-created objects, or crafts, became a means to survive. Tourists played a role in bringing revenue to the area, and in 1914 the tribe held its first annual Cherokee Indian Fair under the authorization of Cato Sells, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, to showcase and market Cherokee crafts. The greatest surge of tourism was brought to the Appalachia region in the 1930s through the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Great Depression had struck the Eastern Band Cherokee hard when the local lumber industry all

but collapsed. The development of the area as a tourist destination, along with a profitable craft industry, appeared to be a way for the people to recover and prosper.

Still, the solution was far from perfect.6 Despite the devastating blow to their economy, in the 1930s the Eastern Cherokee people took control of their education systems and added Cherokee craft-centered programs to the curriculum. In 1937 Goingback Chiltoskey (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1907–2000) launched the woodworking program at the Cherokee high school. Chiltoskey was also instrumental in the creation of the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, an artist cooperative created in 1946, which served to “provide a year-round market for handicrafts, to promote higher

6. For a more complete conversation about the development of the parkway, see Anne V. Mitchell, “Culture, History, and Development on the Qualla Boundary,” Appalachian Journal 24, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 144–91. The Eastern Band Cherokee protested the opening of the Blue Ridge Parkway for several reasons, including their land rights.

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standards of workmanship and design, to help craftsmen solve their problems, and to secure better prices for craft work.”7 Chiltoskey left Cherokee, North Carolina, when he took a job as an engineer during World War II. During this time, the crafts movement effectively diminished. It was 1953 when Amanda Crowe began to teach woodworking at Cherokee High School— and apparently she never looked back.

In her artist’s statement from her 1962 solo exhibition, Crowe claimed she was drawing and carving at four years of age. As a child, “[I] must have known what my profession would be, even if I did not know how to get the special training.”8 But the opportunities came to her through her mother, teachers, and friends, who all saw to her art education. Perhaps more importantly, she had family that carved.

Methods of craft production were taught and handed down generationally, and learning from family members at an early age was essential to Crowe’s understanding of carving. By the age of eight, Crowe was already selling small carved animals.

At some point in her childhood, Crowe was orphaned, and her foster mother sent her to high school in Chicago where she accepted a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute. Following her graduation, she accepted a fellowship that took her to San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico, where she studied under José de Creeft at the Instituto Allende. Her résumé from 1962 indicates that she designed for corporations and accumulated national and international awards. Crowe’s inspirations were broad, and she sculpted in a variety of media, including clay, plaster, stone, and wrought iron. For example, a blocky terracotta figural sculpture featured on the cover of her 1962 exhibition catalogue shows influences from both Anglo modernists and Maya sculptors. Crowe’s career could have taken a much different direction, but instead she went home. She had been away from the Qualla Boundary for twelve years when she decided to return.

Fariello explains that Crowe’s return to her childhood home was not a mystery, as many Cherokee return to the Qualla Boundary after years, even decades.9 Perhaps Crowe felt she needed to return to where and with whom she felt most comfortable and do what she knew and loved best: to carve. Wood had always been Crowe’s favored medium. Her mastery was demonstrated in the almost magical way she used the wood’s grain to energize her sculptures. To look closely at one of her larger works, Madonna and Child (1951), reveals how the grain of the wood follows the curve of the mother’s leg. Overall, the grain lines appear as if configured in a preplanned pattern to follow the curves and joints to emphasize the dimensionality of the bodies. Crowe commented on her process that “wood is blessed with the quality of stimulating an emotional response at many stages of the carving.… Each piece leads to other ideas, during and after the carving is finished.”10

J. BUD SMITH CROWE FOUND JOY and stimulation in teaching others. She taught not only technique but also entrepreneurial aspects of carving. She and her partner, Doris Coulter, even produced woodcarving kits with instructions and rough blocks of partially carved wood. Multiple generations of

carvers studied under Crowe, including Virgil Ledford, Lloyd Carl Owle, and Pete Long (all Eastern Band).

Long took over for Crowe after she retired, but he only taught for two years when another of Crow’s former students, James “Bud” Smith, EdD (Eastern Band Cherokee), stepped in to teach the carving and sculpting classes at Cherokee High School. Smith earned his master’s degree and doctorate in education and lived away from the Qualla Boundary for about 20 years. He worked in law enforcement and as an education administrator but continued to sculpt and to study art. Not being from a family of carvers, Smith was introduced to carving through Crowe; however, Willard Stone, an Oklahoman carver, left a deep impression on Smith and greatly influenced his stylistic choices.11 Smith’s aesthetics demonstrate influences from Stone, but, as Smith explains, aspects of his work are identifiably Eastern Band Cherokee.

“The way you can tell that the sculpture is from this area is that [Eastern Band] carvers from here always end up with a knife in their hand. Also, you can always tell by the way a wood sculpture is finished.”12 Indeed, you can see the results in Smith’s carefully finished and uniquely designed wood sculptures, which appear to curl and fold in motion with the direction of the wood’s grain. Each sculpture is carefully varnished with layers that enrich

7. Reprint from the 33rd Cherokee Indian Fair program (1950). Fariello, Cherokee Carving, 6.

8. Sculpture and Carving by Amanda Crowe: An Exhibition, September 28–October 31, 1970 (Cherokee, NC: Members’ Gallery of Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, 1970).

9. Anna Fariello in discussion with the author, February 6, 2019.

10. Sculpture and Carving by Amanda Crowe.

11. Willard Stone was born and raised in Oklahoma and studied at Bacone College, where, under the likes of Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee/Pawnee/Wichita, 1907–1959) and Woody Crumbo (Citizen Potawatomi, 1912–1989), he developed his distinctive style reflective of Art Deco and Art Nouveau.

12. James “Bud” Smith in discussion with the author, February 18, 2019.

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the bare wood, adding depth to Smith’s extraordinary interpretations of human, animal, and spirit forms.

Smith feels there is a difference between art and craft.

“Craft” he believes, “can be elevated to art.” Certainly, only a thin line separates art from craft, and Crowe’s work was viewed as both, so it might be questioned whether she taught her students art or craft. Smith admired Crowe—after all, she was one of his first teachers—but Smith points out that the one thing that Crowe did not provide in her classes was individuality among her students. Crowe taught basic carving skills based on the patterns she created and did not encourage her students to explore and create their own designs, but many, like Smith, found their own artistic path after they left Cherokee High School. When Smith took over the woodcarving classes established by Crowe, he added an advanced class, which allowed students to expand on their own ideas.13

JOSHUA ADAMS ONE OF SMITH’S STUDENTS, Joshua Adams (Eastern Band Cherokee), was exceptional. With historic practice and design as his base, Adams creates his artwork in a way that both addresses the continuation of culture and speaks to current issues.

Adams grew up in what he says is a family of carvers and, like Crowe, he never envisioned himself doing anything else.

He studied under Smith in high school and attended Western Carolina University. There, he found outlets for his creativity working in a tattoo shop where he made designs for T-shirts, skateboards, hats, shoes, and other graffiti-inspired art. His desire to experiment, along with a bit of counterculture edginess, is evidenced even in his culturally based artworks. Adams works in a spectrum of art forms and media, from pottery and weaponry to paintings and film. Still, his favored material is wood, and most remarkable are his carved wooden masks. Some are solely for ceremony, while others—usually the larger ones—refer to historic Cherokee masks but are made for sale. More recently Adams has experimented with painting masks because patrons have requested this, but he prefers to let the wood grain show through, as in his False Faced God (2016). Adams carved faces into the features of a base mask, carefully sanding and finishing the raw wood to bring out each naturally made line, each knot, and each color variant. This mask won first place in the sculpture classification at the 2016 Santa Fe Indian Market.

Adams finds that of all his masks, the booger masks elicit the most interest, and he explains that these masks are perhaps more complex than people think. Certain booger masks have powers that relate to specific dances, some of which are for fun and performed to bring the community together. Others, as they were in the past, are for more serious purposes. He commented on one of his masks in particular: The hornet's nest mask is one of our oldest traditional booger masks. Commonly known as a smallpox or death mask, it has several different roles in several different sacred Cherokee dances. Mask makers would find a hornet’s nest in the winter time and that would be what you used. My version, which 13. James “Bud” Smith in discussion with the author, February 18, 2019.

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is titled Death to Power, Death to Politics, is a cultural statement aimed at the current political climate both nationally and locally.14 Although Adams enjoys experimenting and having fun with his artwork (his Shapeshifters series features birds with human heads, and he has carved a zombie mask), he takes his Cherokee heritage very seriously and feels the need to reinforce an understanding of Cherokee culture and values. Adams currently teaches woodcarving at Cherokee High School.

WOMEN’S WORK AS A CARVER, Amanda Crowe was a bit of an anomaly because she was a woman. Gender roles among Eastern Band Cherokee artists, in the time that Crowe was maturing and developing as an artist herself, had been long established. Men were carvers, and women were basket makers, ceramic artists, and textile weavers. Crowe was an exception to what was considered the norm, but I found no evidence that Crowe faced any opposition to her being the instructor of woodcarving at Cherokee High School.

Through teaching, she perpetuated Cherokee knowledge, not only bestowed to the 2,000 some students she taught but also the artists she influenced throughout generations. Joshua Adams affirms he has students in his woodworking classes at Cherokee High who show great potential as carving artists, and some are women.15 Crowe’s life reminds us that Native women do carve. Ellen Neel (Kwakwaka'wakw, 1916–1966), Freda Diesing (Haida, 1925–2002), Doreen Jensen (Gitxsan, 1933–2009), Lena Amason-Berns (Sugpiaq), Rebecca Lyon (Dena’ina/Alutiiq), Danika Naccarella (Nuxalk/Kwakwaka'wakw), and Arlene Ness (Gitxsan) are all Native women carvers who deserve recognition. Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual continues to promote Eastern Band Cherokee artists in the Qualla Boundary, and they have a permanent exhibit dedicated to Crowe

that includes some of her woodworking tools, along with an elegantly carved giraffe, her impressive Madonna and Child, and, of course, some finely finished bears.

Tammi Hanawalt, PhD, is an art historian, educator, and associate curator at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

above Joshua Adams (Eastern Band Cherokee), False Faced G o d , 2 0 1 6 , ce d a r. I m a g e courtesy of the artist. opposite J. Bud Smith (Eastern B a n d C h e ro ke e) , C ra n e s , butternut wood. Image courtesy of Joshua Adams.

14. Joshua Adams in discussion with the author, January 18, 2019, and email message to author, February 6, 2019.

15. Ibid. Joshua Adams mentioned that sometimes women shy away from his class.

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PEEPANKIŠAAPIIKAHKIA EEHKWAATAMENKI AACIMOONI A Story of Miami Ribbonwork

By Scott M. Shoemaker, PhD (Miami),1 George Ironstrack (Miami), and Karen Baldwin

MAACIIKAAHTOOTAAWI: LET US BEGIN

D

URING A TORRENTIAL OKLAHOMA RAINSTORM i n No o š o n k i , S i i p i o n k i (Miami, Oklahoma) on June 26, 2015, nearly 50 Myaamiaki,2 Miami people, gathered together to learn about peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki, Myaamia ribbonwork. This was possibly the first time this many Myaamiaki had gathered together in one place to make ribbonwork for more than one hundred years. The workshop was filled with stories, laughter, and reconnecting with one another. It was one of many gatherings of Miami people over the past few decades as part of a larger language and cultural revitalization effort called myaamiaki eemamwiciki, the Miami Awakening.

Our community has dramatically transformed through this effort, sparked by the reawakening of Myaamiaataweenki, the Miami language. The language, and many cultural practices, entered a state of dormancy after the passing of our last fluent speakers in the mid-20th century. In the early 1990s, tribal citizen Daryl Baldwin became interested in the

language around the same time that Dr. David Costa began working on his doctoral dissertation on the MiamiIllinois language at the University of California, Berkeley. Through years of research and hard work, Baldwin reclaimed numerous important documents spanning 300 years from archives across North America. Informed and

1. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe; the Miami Nation of Indiana is not federally recognized. The two groups work together on language and cultural revitalization projects. —Ed. 2. Myaamia is the singular form and Myaamiaki is the plural form.

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M i te m h s a a h ko l ay i , a woman’s wearing blanket worn by Mahkoonsihkwa (Frances Slocum, 1773–1847), likely made by her and her daughters Keehkinehkišwa and Oonsaahšinihkwa, ca. 1830. Collection of Wabash County Historical Museum, Wabash, Indiana. Photo: Andrew J. Strack (Miami). Image courtesy of the Wabash County Historical Museum. a b ov e

opp osite P e e p a n k i š a a p i i ka h k i a eehkwaatamenki, Myaamia ribbonwork workshop, in Noošonki, Siipionki (Miami, Oklahoma). Community members coming together to learn the art of ribbonwork. Photo: Andrew J. Strack.

guided by the memories and knowledge of our elders, this extensive archival record was used in a careful manner to revitalize Myaamiaataweenki as a part of daily life. Today hundreds of Myaamiaki use the language on a daily basis as well as a generation of children whose first words are in Myaamiaataweenki. This same attitude of careful, well-supported growth informs how we approach other areas of reclamation and revitalization.3 The Myaamia Center (MC) at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, has been instrumental in this educational effort.4 The MC, known as the Myaamia Project from 2001 to 2012, emerged from a relationship between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University that began in 1972. The Miami Tribe initiated the MC to further develop the tribe’s language and cultural education. The MC’s innately multidisciplinary work balances research, theory, and praxis.

In 2014 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded the MC an Art Works grant to produce educational materials and programs for myaamia eehkwaašikonki peepankihšaapiikahkia: Miami Ribbonwork Project.5 This threeyear project focused on creating the skills and knowledge necessary for tribal members to revitalize the art of ribbonwork. The goals of the program were

successfully met through conducting a series of workshops, production of an instructional booklet, and the creation of videos that remain available online.

The initial workshop was held during the 2015 annual Miami Tribe of Oklahoma National Gathering Week, which includes educational programming, social activities, and a competition powwow, and culminates in the nation’s general council meeting and elections. For years tribal cultural leaders have noted that the reclamation and ongoing revitalization of Myaamiaataweenki and Myaamia culture has led to ever-increasing participation in tribal events. The revitalization of peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki is a prominent example of this phenomenon.

EEMPAAPIIKINAMANKWIKINEEPWAAYONEMINAANI: WE PICK UP THE THREADS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER intermingled with the staccato rhythm of typing and mouse clicks filled the research library of the Cultural Resources Center of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Images of

elm-bark baskets, plum-stone dice, silver brooches, and numerous examples of intricately sewn ribbonwork from the 19th century flashed on the monitors in the room. This intergenerational team of Myaamiaki had come to Washington, DC, and Suitland, Maryland, in August 2005 to create a digital exhibition of some of the Myaamia objects held by NMAI. Over the course of two days, Myaamia youth, adults, and elders lovingly held and photographed stunning examples of their ancestors’ artistry, which included many pieces of ribbonwork. It had been more than 90 years since these items were surrounded by a community of Myaamia people. Through the workshop, this team curated their ancestors' objects and metaphorically danced them back into the web of Myaamia community that links the diaspora across the United States.

In many Myaamia families, we cherish and continue to hold on to old family photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that show family and community members dressed in their finest Miami clothing, such as leggings, wrap skirts, and moccasins with intricate ribbonwork items handed down as heirlooms for special occasions.

These photographs preserve examples of a peak in the practice of ribbonwork

3. Daryl Baldwin and David J. Costa, “Myaamiaataweenki: Revitalization of a Sleeping Language” in The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, ed. Kenneth L. Reader and Lyle Campbell (Oxford University Press, 2018), 553–70.

4. In 2001 the Myaamia Center was known as the Myaamia Project. It transitioned to a full research center at Miami University in 2013.

5. The Myaamia Center applied for and received a 2014–16 Art Works grant (#14-5500-7032) from the National Endowment for the Arts. The myaamia eehkwaašikonki peepankišaapiikahkia: Myaamia Ribbonwork Project team consisted of Karen Baldwin, Dr. Alysia Fischer, and Andrew J. Strack.

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WAAWAAHSINAAKWAHKIA PEEPANKIŠAAPIIKAHKIA: SHIMMERING RIBBONS

among Myaamiaki and mark a moment of dramatic loss as impoverished families sold ribbonwork-embellished clothing to outside collectors.

The making and wearing of ribbonwork continued into at least the late 19th century within the Myaamia communities in Indiana and Indian Territory. However, beginning around 1908, Myaamia people began selling large amounts of clothing with ribbonwork adornment to collectors.

Like most Native communities, this was also a time when anthropologists (both trained and amateur) collected much of our material culture in an attempt to “salvage” what was left of our “authentic” cultures while our communities and families struggled to survive. This suggests that by then, the need to create and wear clothing with ribbonwork was no longer common within the community. Making ribbonwork was in steep decline during this period, as few pieces are known to be sewn after the 1930s. This coincides with the various factors leading to the dormancy of Myaamiaataweenki later in the 20th century, among them rapid land loss, forced assimilation, and discrimination.

Like our language, these items became scattered and far removed from us, eventually making their way to NMAI. Significant collections of Myaamia ribbonwork are also cared for by the American Museum of Natural History, Cranbrook Institute of Science, Milwaukee Public Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Wabash County Historical Museum, and several other institutions. This process of collection removed most ribbonwork from the Myaamia community and temporarily severed our connection to the art form, because we were largely unaware of the locations of these collections.

Not until the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) were we reconnected with these items. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma applied for and received a NAGPRA documentation grant from 2003 to 2004. This enabled a small number of tribal representatives to visit and document museum collections.

Like the vast language materials stored in boxes on shelves in numerous archives, these items were also lying dormant, waiting for Myaamia people to reawaken the layers of knowledge they hold for us.

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THE SUN SPARKLED on the surface of the Nimacihsinwi Siipiiwi, or Mississinewa River, as the quickly moving current cut past the waapahsena (limestone) face of Aašipehkwa Waawaalici, Seven Pillars. The voices and splashing footfalls of Myaamiaki, young and old, echoed off the eroded and soot-stained caves of the ancient rock formation as the group crossed through the ankledeep water and reached the limestone shore below the caves. Myaamia people have lived near and visited Aašipehkwa Waawaalici for uncounted generations.

The relentless flow of the Nimacihsinwi Siipiiwi had eroded the caves to a mere few feet deep, but community stories preserve memories of a time when the caves were deep enough for small gatherings. On this summer day in 2009, the small group of Myaamiaki listened as their relative, a geologist who works at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute, described the ancient inland sea and the bountiful life that dwelt there 425 million years ago that together created the layers of limestone that make up Aašipehkwa Waawaalici.

This site and others like it along the rivers of Myaamionki, Miami land, play significant roles in our aalhsoohkana, winter stories, and aacimoona, historical narratives. This combination of ancient stone and water produced the pillars and caverns, and the stories about them continue to draw Myaamiaki to the site.

On clear sunny days, the white face of the waapahsena and dark interior of the caves reflect off the rippling surface of the Nimacihsinwi Siipiiwi, creating a mesmerizing display of the contrast between earth and sky, creation and destruction, and the past and the present.

When ribbons first arrived in Myaamia villages through ancient trade routes connected by the rivers of Myaamionki, our ancestors incorporated these objects into the community and named them peepankišaapiikahki in our language. This term describes

the appearance of ribbons, and can be literally understood to mean “that which is a flat cord.” Myaamiihkwiaki, Miami women, quickly incorporated these new materials into their existing art practices and designs by cutting and sewing them onto local materials like hide and newer materials like wool cloth.

Eehkwaatamenki describes the process by which ribbons are “sewn” down. Peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki, ribbonwork, describes the material and the process that creates waawaahsinaakwahki, a shimmering that causes the eye to focus back and forth between contrasting geometric abstractions.

Long before access to ribbons, these abstractions were executed in other materials. Very few Myaamia items from this early period exist. Painted hides associated with our younger siblings, the Inoka (commonly and collectively referred to as the Illinois people), date to the 18th century as well as woven bags that contain similar geometric abstractions of

important beings in Miami cosmology who inhabit various layers of the waters, earth, and sky.

Ribbonwork is also an interaction with a metaphorical layering of people, time, and place. By the late 1790s and early 1800s, through trade and diplomacy, mitemhsaki, women, and aleniaki, men, both played crucial roles in obtaining a regular and large supply of silk ribbons.

Myaamia aleniaki were largely responsible for conducting trade and diplomacy, but mitemhsaki were responsible for expanding the visual vocabulary of geometric designs made possible with access to silk ribbons.

The earliest known recording of distinctively Myaamia ribbonwork comes from the journals and paintings of George Winter and James Otto Lewis. Winter painted portraits of many Myaamia and Potawatomi people in the 1830s and wrote that each community used their own “singular forms” of textile art. Lewis painted Indigenous people throughout

above Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) and family, ca.

1897, on the porch of his home near Peru, Indiana. Ribbonwork pieces are among the many heirlooms being held. In 1905, Godfroy lost a long legal battle to retain the trust status on his inherited reserve lands. He and his family later sold these items to collectors in an effort to pay taxes and retain land. Image courtesy of Wabash Carnegie P u b l i c L i b ra r y A rc h i ve s , Wabash, Indiana. opposite Mitemhsa ataahsema (woman’s leggings), collected

by Mark Raymond Harrington in 1910 from Harvey Ward in Indiana, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 027954.000, Suitland, Maryland. Photo: Karen Baldwin.

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the Great Lakes and further west during the 1820s.

During the first three decades of the 19th century, our ancestors were forced to cede nearly their entire homeland through a series of treaties. In exchange for land taken by the United States, these treaties provided goods and annuity payments to Myaamia people. They also had tremendous access to ribbons and broadcloth used for clothing. In 1839 while visiting the cabin of Mahkoonsihkwa at Šiipaakana Minooteeni (Deaf Man’s Village, near Peru, Indiana), Winter observed “Two or three pair of handsome ‘leggins’, with handsome borders, or ‘wings’, decorated in the primitive colored ribbons, some sewed in diamond forms, others in straight lines” hanging from the rafters. He wrote, “Much expense is devoted to this ornamental part of the Indian’s costume.”6 When Lewis and Winter arrived in the 1830s, the Myaamia had already perfected a uniquely Myaamia style of ribbonwork.

In 1840, the Miami Nation signed its last treaty in Indiana that relinquished the last reservation land in the state and called for the removal of the Miami Nation from Indiana to a new reservation in what would become Kansas. The United States forcibly removed them in 1846 and fragmented the Myaamia peoples’

connections to one another and the land. Those who were forced into Kansas suffered extreme difficulties in adapting and rebuilding the nation in a new and unfamiliar place. A few Myaamia families had treaty and congressional exemptions from removal and remained behind on small family reserves scattered throughout northern Indiana. Oral histories describe constant movement back and forth between Kansas and Indiana following the 1846 removal; however, the relocation impacted community integrity and continuity. It is no coincidence that innovation in ribbonwork ceased after this period, and shortly thereafter fell into decline.

The Kansas reservation lands were broken into individual allotments beginning in 1854, but thousands of acres were intentionally set aside for future generations and future emigration of Myaamia who remained behind in Indiana. Myaamiaki in Indiana continued to gather for dances and adoptions through this period, and Myaamiaki in Kansas gathered with one another and other neighboring tribes like our elder brothers, the Shawnee, for social dancing.

Ribbonwork was still worn and created throughout this period, but increasingly Myaamia people began to dress in styles similar to their American neighbors.

After the US Civil War, all the tribes living in Kansas faced increased pressure to leave the state and move to Indian Territory. Following the 1867 Treaty of Washington, the Miami Nation began the drawn-out process of relocating to a new reservation in the northeast corner of Indian Territory (Oklahoma) that they shared with our younger siblings, the Peewaaliaki, or the Confederated Peoria Tribe. Once again, forced removal fractured the Miami Nation as some families remained behind in Kansas and had their tribal citizenship stripped from them. The Miami-Peoria Reservation was allotted in 1889, and within 25 years all of the allotted lands lost their federal trust protections.

Those Myaamiaki who remained in Indiana also experienced a rapid loss of reserve land. By the early 20th century, the remnants of collective Myaamia homelands in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Indiana passed to non-Myaamia control.

In order to survive, Myaamiaki moved all over the United States in search of work.

As our community became scattered, our knowledge, our language, and our material culture also became scattered.

The vast majority of Myaamia ribbonwork items in museums were collected in Indiana and Oklahoma from

6. George Winter, “Journal of a Visit to Deaf Man’s Village, 1839,” in The Journals and Indian Paintings of George Winter, 1837–1839 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1948), 151–96.

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around 1910 through the 1920s. The provenance of museum artifacts often have very little information about from whom and where they were collected.

Through archival and photographic research, we have been able to reconnect many of these items with known families and in some cases with the individuals who wore them. Yet the record is silent regarding the specifics of the artists who made most of the ribbonwork in these collections. We know few details about the many Myaamiihkwiaki artists from our community who transformed simple strips of ribbon into complex, intricate, and shimmering works of art. We assume these women artists did not work in isolation, and that ribbonwork clothing is the collective work of several family and community members coming together to make garments for relatives.

MAACIIHITIINKI NEEMIIHKAMANKWI: WE DANCE THE ADOPTION DANCE A WARM BREEZE blew through the open windows of the Miami Indian Village Schoolhouse on the Meshingomesia Reser vation on the morning of Friday, June 13, 1873. Pakankia, the oldest son of the Miami band leader, Mihšiinkomiša, sat on a chair before a group of Mihšimaalhsaki (Americans) who had been coming to the reservation nearly every Monday through Friday for the past month. The Secretary of the Interior appointed these men to serve on a commission to record testimonials from Myaamiaki to determine who was eligible to receive an allotment on the nearly 5,400 acres reserved for his band in northern Indiana under the treaty of November 28, 1840. Six years earlier, the band council had made the difficult decision to pursue allotment of the communally held land into individual parcels in an effort to retain control over these lands. On June 1, 1872, Congress approved “an act to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to make partition of the Reservation to Me·shin·go·me·sia, a Miami Indian.”

The commission determined each petitioners’ eligibility by ascertaining whether they had kinship ties to the

above Oonsaahšinihkwa (Jane Bundy), ca. 1877, wearing a ribbonwork wrap skirt, blanket, and moccasins that exemplify the concept of waawaahsinaakwahki. The daughter of Mahkoonsihkwa, also known as Frances Slocum, and the Miami war leader Šiipaakana, also known as Deaf Man, she was an important and powerful figure within the Miami community.

Along with her sister and mother, Oonsaahšinihkwa sewed the leggings observed by George Winter during his 1839 visit. She also probably created this clothing. Image courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. left Mihtehkihkwa (Forest Woman), mother of Pakankia and wife of Mihšiinkomiša. Numerous items, which she likely made, were collected from the family in the 1910s and 1920s. Image courtesy of Doug Peconge (Miami). opposite Working from the center outward, each ribbon is layered on top of the previous, revealing and concealing parts of the ribbon below. Photo: Karen Baldwin.

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above Mahkisina (moccasins) collected from the Peconge family by Milford Chandler in Wabash County, Indiana, in the 1920s. These are attributed to Meshingomesia and were likely made by Mihtehkihkwa, collection of the Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 2207. Photo: Andrew J. Strack. opposite Miami University Myaamia graduates, Spring 2018. All myaamia students are gifted a graduation sash upon graduating from the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Each sash has hand-sewn ribbonwork and silver buttons. These sashes are given in honor of their accomplishments, their sacrifices, and remind them of their ongoing obligations to their people. Photo: Karen Baldwin.

Miami leader Mihtohseenia, father of Mihšiinkomiša, and were residents of the reservation at the time of its creation.

Pakankia was called back to discuss the role of adoptions. Adopting someone in place of a deceased relative was an important practice for both the mourning process of family and ensuring the journey ahead for the recently departed relative.

Pakankia said, “They must make a suit of clothes just as they want them for the person that they adopt. Then they invite the one they want to adopt and when he comes and sits down and they put these clothes on him.”7 The making of clothing was a healing process that brought the women of a family together. The joint effort of these women connected the family, the deceased, and the adoptee. The practice of adopting and the making of clothing for adoptees, family, and community members continued for at least the remainder of the 19th century within the Miami communities scattered in Indiana, Kansas, and Indian Territory. Essential items of clothing such as mahkisina (moccasins), wiihkweetiona (leggings), akootema

(skirts), and waapimotaya (blankets) were all elaborately decorated with peepankišaapiikahkia eehkwaatamenki.

The practices associated with adoption are no longer broadly present within the Myaamia community; however, the revitalization of ribbonwork has been followed by a revitalization of the significance of ribbonwork items.

Ribbonwork-embellished clothing and other items serve as significant gifts to honor family and community members.

This use of ribbonwork has moved beyond making customary clothing to meeting other 21st-century community needs.

As of 1991, Miami University now offers the Miami Heritage Award to Miami tribal members who gain acceptance to the university. Throughout their time at Miami University, these students participate in the Myaamia Heritage Program (MHP), which consists of eight semesters of coursework and considerable mentoring and advising. The MHP’s main objective is to create a learning community that mirrors the kinship structure of the broader Myaamia community.

Through this familial structure, students study the courses Myaamia Language and

7. “An Act to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to make Partition of the Reservation to Me-shin-go-me-sia, a Miami Indian,” approved June 1, 1872. National Archives. Record Group 75, Irregularly Shaped Papers, 1849– 1907, Entry 310, Item 95, Box 53, page 411. “Record of Testimony taken before the Commission appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to make partition of the reserve granted to Me-shin-go-me-sia in trust for his band by the 7th Article of the treaty of November 28th, 1840 between the United States and the Miami Tribe of Indians in accordance with the act of Congress approved June 1st, 1872.”

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Culture, Myaamia Ecological Perspectives and History, and Contemporary Issues and Sovereignty. Seniors work on a two-semester capstone project designed to facilitate each student finding their own way to give back to the Myaamia community.

Throughout their four years at Miami University, students learn about the changing visual aesthetics of their people over time. Many of them learn how to sew ribbonwork and proudly wear the T-shirts and other clothing with prints of similar geometric patterns. A few of these students have also begun to tattoo some of these patterns onto their bodies. Most of these Myaamia students leave Miami University with heightened understanding of the value and importance their community places on ribbonwork. On graduation day, they are presented with a unique graduation sash made by Karen Baldwin, wife of a tribal member. Sewn from red and black wool, the sashes include silver brooches and ribbonwork. A recognizable testament to customary clothing and historic ribbonwork artistry, the

sashes simultaneously reflect the needs and revitalized identity of a 21st-century tribal nation striving to educate the next generation.

MASAANIHKIAANKI KIINWAAPIIKAHKIA: WE MAKE LONG THREADS THROUGH THE JOURNEY of myaamiaki eemamwiciki, the Myaamia awakening, we strive to continue to pick up the threads of knowledge from our ancestors to inform our present and guide us into the future. We also strive to lengthen those threads left for us by our ancestors. Our continuance hinges on our ability to collectively grasp hold of the shared strands of the web of our experiences as people over time and carefully add to that web in a way that carries us into the future.

Ribbonwork began as an innovation incorporating new materials and became integral to our identities as Myaamiaki— intertwined with our families, our places,

our present, and our future. A visitor to a Myaamia powwow, stomp dance, or gourd dance would likely see handmade and machine-made ribbonwork now made of rayon taffeta instead of silk. Yet, as in generations past, this ribbonwork still shimmers as it moves with the rhythms of the life of the community. The visitor would also note that the contrasting geometric abstractions of ribbonwork have also spread to T-shirts, community flags, signs, the covers of publications, and tattoos. Once again, but in new and changing ways, these designs mark our families and our places.

How will the next generation of our people utilize the knowledge of ribbonwork that we have reclaimed and revitalized over the last 20 years?

We do not know. All we can do is work to pick up enough of the web, so they have something of substance to hold in their collective hands and hearts. We hope what we pass to them will also provide the opportunity to splice in the lengths of new cordage they will need in the future.

Scott M. Shoemaker, PhD (Miami), the Thomas G. and Susan C. Hoback Curator of Native American Art, History and Culture at the Eiteljorg Museum of Indians and Western Art in Indiana, researches Miami language and culture with a focus on ribbonwork. George Ironstrack (Miami), a Miami cultural historian and author, serves as assistant director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Karen Baldwin, a textile artist, studies and promotes Miami language and culture with her Miami family.

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Reclaiming Space in Native Knowledges and Languages

THE CLEMENTE COURSE IN THE HUMANITIES .

By Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek)

A

S I GROW OLDER, I laugh to remember how much I struggled in college humanities courses. Considering my love for the arts—painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture—this didn't make sense. It does make sense, however, when recalling darkened classrooms and aging films whose sound sputtered while yellow scratches wriggled like worms on the frames. The narrator's voice, reminding me of old cigarette commercials, droned on while tinny trumpets played in the background. I cast certain blame, too, on overly thick tomes masquerading as textbooks. I would have never guessed then how much I would love the humanities today.

Humanities in its simplest definition means all that tells the story of humans, all that expresses humankind.

It is the study of histories and cultures, languages, cultural practices, spirituality, art theory and criticism, music, literature, philosophy, jurisprudence, and more.1 The humanities are not the act of creating art or literature or law or music but the examination and interpretation of such things.

They are reflexive in the exploration of who we once were—individually and collectively—who we are today, and who we are becoming. Studying the humanities can be a journey into wonder, into the labors and delights of being human, and also into disappointments and pain.

No one knew this better than Earl Shorris (1936–2012), an American journalist, lecturer, editor, and novelist who held a deep passion for the humanities.

Shorris also cared for marginalized people in the world. As a thought leader in the early 1990s, Shorris doggedly set out to discover a key to alleviate poverty, crisscrossing the nation and interviewing more than 600 individuals of diverse backgrounds over five years. What he discovered about poverty was what he would call an inescapable “surround of force,” relentlessly pressuring the poor through hunger, illness, isolation, abuse, addiction, crime, and racism, among other social ills.2 What he didn’t expect was to find a solution—what he called his “riches for the poor”—in the most unlikely way.

It would also become a key to unlocking the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures for tribal people.

UNLIKELY SPACE THE LIGHT BULB CAME ON for Shorris during one of his interviews in a New York women’s maximum-security prison. He called it his “prison epiphany.”

The prison environment, Shorris observed, is a “highly evolved miniature” of the surround of force—a place where there are no constants, no reason, no

escape—a microcosm of society where force is continually applied by equals and unequals, and one merely reacts to it.3 In this environment he became good friends with female inmate Viniece Walker from East Harlem who called herself “Niece.” She was a high school dropout who finished her diploma in prison and pursued a college degree in philosophy, helping other inmates with problems of family violence. One day Shorris asked her, “Why do you think people are poor?”

Niece looked at him with a cold eye and responded, “You’ve got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children.

And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown … a moral alternative to the street.”4 Niece didn’t mention jobs or money or God or church or family during any of their talks, he noted. What Niece saw were the humanities. Niece saw an alternative to poverty in the opening up of new worlds to the mind and heart, of new understandings, considering paths outside the surround of force, and entering a wider world in which one sees, reflects, and reacts in new ways.

None of that was lost on Earl Shorris.

Taking Niece’s observations to heart, the author developed an innercity experiment to close the gap between those in poverty and the humanities in the

1. “What Are the Humanities?” Oklahoma Humanities, web.

2. Earl Shorris, “II. As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor,” Harper’s Magazine 295, no. 1768 (September 1997): 50.

3. Earl Shorris, Riches for the Poor: The Clemente Course for the Humanities (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 54–55.

4. Ibid, 96–100.

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same way that Ivy League college courses functioned. This experimental class first met in lower Manhattan at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center, and Shorris named it the Clemente Humanities Program. It was primarily populated by young people, age 18 or older, whose incomes fell near or below the federal poverty line and who could read a tabloid newspaper. The Clemente program offered the rigor of multiple disciplines by a qualified faculty in literature, art history, philosophy, American history, critical thinking, and writing, with no cost to low-income, urban participants. The course provided funds for the students’ childcare, transportation on the bus or subway, and even meals.

Shorris was convinced that a course in the humanities centered in Western classical thought would help anchor people in a sense of self and reflect on the world and their role in it. And so it did.

In the years that followed, the success of the course would confirm his belief that “people who know the humanities become good citizens, become active, not acted upon,”5 and by 1998, the Clemente courses grew exponentially from New York’s Lower East Side to 17 sites across North America. Taking notice, Bard College, a liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, began providing college certificates to all graduates of the course.

INDIGENOUS SPACE SHORRIS THEN STEPPED OUTSIDE of the Clemente Western model of the humanities and into the Indigenous worlds of the Yucatán and Alaska. In the small farming village of San Antonio Sihó on the western edge of the Yucatán peninsula, Shorris met with leaders to discuss the premise of Clemente and how it might impact the future of the people in the village. Whereas the courses at that time taught comparative histories of Western civilization and classics, something very different was obviously needed in San Antonio Sihó. The villagers themselves identified a need for a deepened understanding of what they called high Maya

above Chickasaw Clemente Class and Pan-American Indian Humanities Center Organizers. Front row, left to right: Geraldine Greenwood, Lona Barrick, Jay Goombi, Earl Shorris, Leerene Frazier. Howard Meredith in doorway with glasses, ca. 2001.

culture and the restoration of their Mayan language. Among the young people, use of language had deteriorated and very few could read or write it, so Shorris focused on a revised Clemente Indigenous course to develop reading, writing, and spoken K’iché Mayan. Their humanities curriculum focused on Maya culture, grounded in the milpa—the small communal farm governed by complex, reciprocal relationships between community members and crops—from which many notions of Maya culture were formed.

This new Clemente course was led by regional United Nations program director Raúl Murguía Rosete, and hosted such notable faculty as Alejandra García Quintanilla (Maya), professor of history at the University of the Yucatán, and poet Miguel Ángel May May (Maya), a Mayero (Maya speaker). Each traveled a difficult trip to the village to teach the young students. They were joined by an anthropologist and an ecologist who related science to Maya literature and Maya life.

The beauty of Maya art also became real when students were allowed to work on pyramids recently discovered nearby. At the close of the first year, the course had a zero-attrition rate.

Participant José Chim Kú (Maya) remarked, “The course has brought me knowledge; it has made it possible for me to come closer to the people that I did not value, like the old ones and children.

The school has given me courage as a

Maya. It has given me a new life.” Ruby Esmeralda Chay Chuk also spoke about her experience: “We had something very beautiful, and that is our history. To speak Maya is to feel strong. Now we know we are Mayas, but when we were born, we did not know it.”6 In 1999, Shorris traveled to Bethel, Alaska, the center of 56 Yupiit Alaska Native villages, to talk with Alaska Humanities Forum leaders and Yupiit scholars about an Alaska Native humanities course. Among the southwest Alaska Native people, two people groups bear the names of the Yup’ik languages, Yupiit and Cupiit. Funding was available to bring Miguel Ángel May May from the Yucatán to meet the Yupiit leadership and talk about what the Clemente course had meant to the Maya people. Alaska Native scholars and committed individuals then collaborated to propose a course to the University of Alaska for a year-long, multidisciplinary approach focused on Cupiit tradition, language, history, music, dance, art history, and literature. It would also involve Native elders.

To gain a grassroots perspective, some of the collaborators traveled from village to village to explain the course on local radio stations or in town meetings and to gather public feedback. What they heard was astonishing in depth and intellect. These public conversations helped guide the startup of the new Alaska Native course, Yaaveskarniyaraq, the Cup’ik/

5. “The Clemente Course in the Humanities,” National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014, web.

6. Shorris, Riches for the Poor, 232–39.

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Yup’ik Way, in the village of Chevak, just a few miles inland from the Bering Sea. After only two days of teaching, the students did not want to go home.7

LIKELY SPACE IT WAS A NATURAL FIT when Earl Shorris was invited to a conference in Oklahoma in 1999 to extend the idea of similar Clemente programs to tribal leaders and potential funders in the state. Oklahoma holds the secondlargest Native population proportion in the United States (12.9 percent), with 39 tribes now federally recognized.8 The conference was hosted by the Oklahoma Humanities Council under the direction of Anita R. May and gave Shorris a platform to talk about the Maya program and his hopes to reach Native American tribes to advance tribal language, philosophies, histories, and cultures. Anita May’s determination to introduce Shorris to Howard Meredith (Cherokee descent, 1938–2003), the professor and chair of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO) in Chickasha, was nothing short of genius. Meredith grabbed the idea immediately to incorporate into USAO’s Native American and liberal arts educational goals. USAO President John Feaver heartily agreed, and within a year Meredith had secured funding to launch the Kiowa and Cherokee humanities courses. A Chickasaw course would follow later.

Kiowa and Cherokee tribal members helped develop their respective curricula. Jay Goombi (Kiowa) and Emily Satepauhoodle (Kiowa, 1955–2011) served as collaborative developers and liaisons between USAO and the Kiowa Indian Tribes. Cherokee language instructor Eli Nofire (Cherokee Nation, 1931–2006) and Cherokee National Historical Society president and interim director of the Cherokee Heritage Center, Mary Ellen Meredith (Cherokee Nation), both assisted Howard Meredith in developing the Cherokee course. At that time,

the planners felt that Shorris’s model to understand Western humanities was a “bridge” of interrelationship between Indigenous cultures and Anglo-American thought, so classical works and literature were added for comparative study with the Kiowa and Cherokee material.9 Based on the success of these courses and another proposal by Shorris, USAO became the location for a Pan-American Indian Humanities Center. Scholars from two Yucatan universities, a Toronto university, and others from the United States gathered in Oklahoma in 2001 to plan the center’s mission and goals. Mary Ellen Meredith fondly remembers a second meeting the following year to continue the work at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill: “Simon Ortiz (Acoma) read us poetry and we stomp danced with Cherokee dancers from the nearby stomp grounds.

We traveled to Spiro Mounds, and May May and Alejandra Garcia Quintanilla translated the Maya codices, reading the stories aloud to us. David Scott [Cherokee Nation] was also with us, and he followed with the Cherokee oral stories that were similar. The symbols that we had just seen on the codex seemed to cover everything, and even the layout of the structure matched the cultural interpretations we had just heard from the Maya scholars.”

The Chickasaw Nation was next to launch its Chickasaw Clemente humanities courses, with Lona Barrick (Chickasaw) as the facilitator. Meredith had invited Barrick, the director for the Chickasaw Nation Purcell Area Office, to team-teach the course with him through USAO, and they agreed that the curriculum would offer respect for matrilineal society, the recognition of Chickasaw warrior protocols, perseverance, a strong sense of family, and business acumen.

With the support of Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby, Barrick had been involved with arts and cultural tourism initiatives that opened doors to conversation and study of the humanities, the environment, and political structures past and present. Chickasaw language bearers were also hard at work to revive the

Chickasaw language. Shorris wrote about meeting Barrick on the night she launched the first Chickasaw Clemente class when he was traveling across Oklahoma with Howard Meredith. Barrick invited him to attend with Meredith who was scheduled to teach literature. Shorris and Meredith were also eager to meet Chickasaw fluent speaker Geraldine Greenwood and found Greenwood’s Chickasaw language fluency and cultural knowledge extremely important in grounding the course.10 Today, the Chickasaw Clemente Humanities Studies Courses have grown, and East Central University (ECU) in Ada and Southeastern Oklahoma State University (SOSU) in Durant offer threecredit-hour courses each spring and fall. The course has also been taught at Murray State College in Tishomingo, and at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Michelle Cooke (Chickasaw) instructs two courses at ECU, as does Amy Gantt (Chickasaw), the course instructor at SOSU. The Clemente I course explores Chickasaw history and culture as compared with other world cultures and offers basic Chickasaw language instruction. Clemente II examines Chickasaw culture alongside other Indigenous cultures, with a continuation of Chickasaw language. Cooke, a senior staff writer for the Chickasaw Press, coauthored two Chickasaw language workbooks with the Chickasaw Language Committee and has taught the course and language component for four years.

Like other Clemente instructors, Cooke finds that the “seminar style” Clemente model of open discussion of questions from the assignments fosters creativity for thought within the classroom. Her primary concern at the beginning of each semester is developing a circle of trust so that students will become comfortable and honest in their responses.

Some of the toughest topics include forced removal, extermination, and Indian identity. Each course averages about ten students and regularly hosts cultural presenters to give students an appreciation for historical, cultural practices. The classes have been conducted for more

7. Shorris, Riches for the Poor, 240–48.

8. “Demographics: Indian Country Demographics,” National Congress of American Indians, web.

9. Anita R. May, “Commendatory Preface,” in ᎧᏃᎮᎸᏂ Kanohelvhi: The Cherokee Humanities Course, by Eli Nofire, Mary Ellen Meredith, and Howard Meredith (Chickasha: University of Science and Arts, 2003), ix–xi.

10. Earl Shorris, The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 81.

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than 15 years under the guidance of the Chickasaw Nation Division of Arts and Humanities and ECU’s professor emeritus, historian, and author Thomas Cowger, former Chickasaw Nation Endowed Chair in Native American Studies.

The Chickasaw Clemente classes inspired the annual Dynamic Women of the Chickasaw Nation Conference, now a two-day annual event; the Chickasaw Nation Dynamic Woman of the Year Award; and development of the yearly Lowak Sho’li (Carry the Fire) Humanities Forum, which hosts notable scholars addressing current issues and initiatives affecting Indigenous communities and fostering public dialogue and cooperation across Native and non-Native sectors.

The Chickasaw Nation’s language program has also borne much fruit since its earliest days through the work of the Chickasaw Language Committee: 50 fluent speakers, dictionaries and workbooks, a Chickasaw language revitalization program under director Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson, Chickasaw), 6,000 users of its Chickasaw Rosetta Stone learning system, and 15,000 individuals using online language resources each year.

RADICAL SPACE THE KIOWA CLEMENTE COURSE in the Humanities began in Clemente’s earliest days in Oklahoma and continues today in Chickasha and Anadarko. The course transitioned markedly in 2007 from its original comparative humanities model to a strictly Kiowa course.

Its instructor, Rachel Jackson (Cherokee Nation), took notice of students signaling a need to focus valuable time on Kiowa cultural knowledges, so she intentionally let go of institutional methods to meet the changing demands of the course. While she curates the language and cultural lessons with academic texts, the students today study only Kiowa history, culture, other humanities components, and language. The course is centered around Kiowa elders and cultural knowledges, which are captured on a digital platform to preserve the passing on of Kiowa lifeways, oral history, and language fluency.

Jackson and a project team that includes

above, top Kiowa Clemente Course participants Chelsea White, Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune, Dr. Jim Kennedye, and Dr. Rachel Jackson, Palo Duro Canyon. The Spring 2019 class hiked to the site where the US Army attacked a Kiowa camp on September 28, 1874, during the Red River War. above, bottom Cherokee Humanities Course at the Cherokee Heritage Center, Park Hill, Oklahoma. At far left: Ryan Mackey, Tonia Weavel, and Wyman Kirk.

tribal elders launched the online video archive, Khoiye Tdoen Gyah, or Kiowa Talk, at kiowatalk.org to close a gap for a younger generation of Kiowas eager to learn Kiowa ways, Kiowa language, and the passing down of songs and stories.11 The Kiowa Clemente Course in the Humanities has defined its own Indigenous space—cultural knowledges, social structure, language, methodology— not just in rewriting former practices and standards or utilizing technology, but in embracing more and more of what it means to be Kiowa. Jackson posits, “This approach makes it a very radical space stemming from the historical resistance that Kiowa people have practiced in the midst of settler colonial policy. They have always resisted, as they should, to the imposition of Western values and

perspectives on their own; the class is a great example of how that resistance continues, both metaphorically and practically.”

Each week the class opens with a prayer and shared meal among those present: tribal elders, six or so Riverside Indian School students who receive concurrent college credit, and anywhere from 10 to 30 other Kiowa participants.

Following Kiowa cultural protocols, the headman and elder Joseph Titus “J. T.” Goombi (Kiowa) begins the class and shares a story that captures the purpose and value of the course. He then sits in the back of the room. Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune (Kiowa) leads language instruction and provides Kiowa perceptions of tribal culture, a role that first began when the course started with Alecia Keahbone

11. Khoiye Tdoen Gyah, Kiowa Talk, web.

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above A social stomp dance during the Meredith Indigenous Humanities Center conference, Caddo Tribal Complex, Binger, Oklahoma, 2008. Photo: A. Meredith.

Gonzales (Kiowa/Kiowa Apache, 1926– 2011), an author, storyteller, and teacher at USAO. The students ask questions, but over time their questions change as they uncover nuances in the language, Kiowa epistemology, and meanings within tribal stories. “It is like witnessing a kind of enlightenment when students learn the old stories, returning to a center that was lost or obliterated by assimilation,” Jackson tells me.

The class revolves around the elders who keep the course stable. All learn ceremonial songs in Kiowa and also Kiowa Christian hymns as they are enriched by a sense of self as being spiritually Kiowa.

The sense of community is also evident as participants return year after year. “I follow their lead to learn how the course should go. My responsibility has been to get out of the way and support them in the way they see fit to do things and facilitate that as best we can,” Jackson concludes.

Howard Meredith and others also set a firm foundation for cultural continuance for the Cherokees in the Cherokee Humanities Course in Tahlequah and Park Hill. Sponsored by the Cherokee Heritage Center, grants, and generous donors who fund tuition, student travel expenses, and weekly refreshments, the classes are offered each spring and fall for three credit hours through Northeastern State University (NSU) in Tahlequah.

Following the principle that learning the

humanities removes barriers to confidence, develops critical thinking, and broadens interaction with the world, the requirements to enroll in the course include only an ability to read and write.

According to course coordinator and Cherokee Heritage Center education director Tonia Weavel (Cherokee Nation), the course’s impact is evident in the cases of at least ten or more Clemente students who completed their high school education after taking the course.

Inspired by the Cherokee course, a group of friends created the nonprofit Cherokee Arts and Humanities Council and published anthologies of Cherokee writing. One student attributes what she learned in Clemente with the courage to graduate with her four-year university degree and become a Cherokee language instructor in the Cherokee Immersion Charter School.

Meredith believed that the heart of the Cherokee Clemente course was in the recovery and revealing of “the rich veins of myth and memory,” the ancient elements beneath the surface of the dark soil of Cherokee civilization and Cherokee state of mind.12 Today’s Cherokee Clemente course instructors Wyman Kirk (Cherokee Nation) and Ryan Mackey (Cherokee Nation/Muscogee/ Delaware/Natchez) still carry Meredith’s original intent and bring that heart and soul into the classroom. Mackey, who

serves as Cherokee language curriculum supervisor, believes that Indigenous languages are the primary vehicle and home for culture.

“To understand our language is to know our culture. Our deep philosophical values are encoded in the language. It is not a cultural expression; it is the agency of the culture,” Mackey explains to me.

The course plays a vital role to introduce language, motivate people to learn, and push toward language acquisition. “We give people a taste of the language, and they fall in love with it,” he says.

T h e Pa n - A m e r i c a n In d i a n Humanities Center was renamed the Meredith Indigenous Humanities Center to honor the late Howard L. Meredith.

It still supports Native scholarship and encourages the teaching of Indigenous humanities and languages for these and other tribes, such as the Nahua, Musqueam, and Ojibwe. Clemente courses have also expanded into prisons and are changing lives for US veterans through the Clemente Veterans’ Initiative.

An estimated 1,300 students enroll each year in 62 various Clemente courses worldwide in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Australia, and Korea.13 The Clemente course was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and CNN, among others.

I became a lover of humanities because I became a lover of Clemente.

I facilitated the Chickasaw Clemente courses for five years at ECU in Ada as part of my work with the Chickasaw Nation and then became the course instructor for three years at ECU. I’ve gazed into many tribal faces around horseshoe-configured tables and watched lives change. Like Shorris and Meredith and Niece, I am convinced the humanities offer enlightenment, an epiphany into the joy and love of cultures, preservation of Indigenous lifeways, and languages—a revitalization of people. It is a bridge, a connector to new pathways of life.

12. Eli Nofire, Mary Ellen Meredith, and Howard Meredith, ᎧᏃᎮᎸᏂ Kanohelvhi: The Cherokee Humanities Course (Chickasha: University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, 2003), 25.

13. Cherokee Heritage Center, “Humanities Course,” web.

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AUGUST 8-11, 2019 El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, NM

AUGUST 13-16, 2019 El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, NM SPECIAL EXHIBITS The Museum of International Folk Art will curate a special exhibit on Alexander Girard.

Hosted by Objects of Art Shows and El Museo Cultural. Runs during both shows.

Four Winds Gallery presents a special showcase exhibition, “Tradition and Innovation, the Legacy of Julian Lovato”. Runs during The Antique American Indian Art Show only.

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SANTA FE

SUMMER 2019 | 49

nelda Schrupp Pheasant Rump Nakota Jeweler & Sculptor Lakota, ND

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Northern Plains Indian Art Market September 20–22, Sioux Falls, SD

Cherokee Art Market October 12 & 13, Tulsa, OK

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benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist blessings from above and below, 2018, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 20 × 28 inches

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MELISSA MELERO-Moose Great Basin Native Artist m e l i s s a m e l e ro. c o m

Beads and Basket Design, mixed media on canvas, 2019

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UNIQUE, INNOVATIVE BLACK ASH BASKETRY & FIBER ARTS

HEARTS OF OUR PEOPLE: NATIVE WOMEN ARTISTS MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS, THROUGH AUGUST 18, 2019 SWAIA BOOTH 738 LIN-E SHARING WITH SALLYANN PASCHALL, 2019 SWAIA FELLOW, PRINTS AND PAINTINGS

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BLACKBURN ART STUDIOS Lighthorse

by James Blackburn 30” H x 24” L x 13” W, Bronze

Located at the ARTesian Gallery & Studios Sulphur, Oklahoma

www.jblackburnstudios.com Email: blackburnartstudios@gmail.com

PROFILE

DINÉ TEXTILE ARTIST

D. Y. BEGAY

By Jennifer McLerran, PhD I am blessed that I can stand outside my home (hogan) and see in all four directions.

There are formations outlined in stepped patterns painted in bundles of red streaks, subtle shades of pinks, clusters of dusty ochre, and flickering sand-tone colors. At dawn shoots of pale, baby blue awaken the sky, and yet sometimes I see deep, dark indigo, pinks, and shades of soft yellows.

The sunrise is often my canvas; it seduces my imagination with colors, curiosity, and beauty. These images are replaced at the end of my day by flaming oranges as the sun sets for the evening, and night takes on dark, forbidden colors. These daily encounters with light, color, and remarkable land formations, and a lifetime of memories are what I reflect on, interpret, and explore in my tapestries.

—D. Y. Begay1

W

ATER IS THE TOPIC of D. Y. Begay’s newest series of tapestries. This may seem an unlikely choice for an artist known for weavings that reflect the Southwest landscape.

Those who follow Begay’s work have become accustomed to her terraced designs that reference the region’s desert mesas, surface textures that approximate those of its dramatic rock formations, and colors that capture the subtle hues of its vegetation. Water, it would seem, is not part of her lexicon. As Begay has commented, “My resources for color are lodged in dried, weathered locations, forbidding holes, crevices in canyon walls and tree trunks.”2 But if we examine the development of Begay’s work over the past several decades, we see a gradual

evolution of form and color that reflects the fluid and transformative effects of water.

This new direction in Begay’s work is the result of her persistent fascination with natural forces that transform the landscape, forces that challenge her ability to represent them in the static, two-dimensional form of weaving. Her medium, vegetal-dyed wool, becomes fluid and dynamic, producing forms and colors that seem to change before our eyes. The way in which Begay conveys a sense of fluidity, masterfully shaping the materials of her craft to reflect the landscape, is powerfully expressed in Navajo journalist Betty Reid’s description of the weaver’s work: Rays of sunlight bounce off of soft yellow wool, red mesas and sweeping

plateaus. Strands of fiber weave into canyons and out of hills and ravines.

The designs play off of the multi-colored textures of Navajo Nation landscapes. Sometimes red mesas spring up in brown hues with a yellow backdrop, bringing the earth to life through wool.3 Begay was born and raised in the small community of Tselani (“Many Rocks”) on the Navajo Reservation, and over the course of her artistic career, she has repeatedly returned to her place of origin for inspiration. She records the beauty of this precarious, high desert landscape. Begay tells us, “I live in northern Arizona in a beautiful community of wide-open space, beautiful mesas and canyons, and endless colors in the sky in the early mornings and in the

1. D. Y. Begay, “Weaver’s Statement,” in The Weavings of D. Y. Begay (Davis: C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis, 2013), 4.

2. D. Y. Begay, “Weaver’s Statement,” 6.

3. Betty Reid, “Stories To Tell,” in Tselani/Terrain: The Tapestries of D. Y. Begay, ed. Jennifer McLerran (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona, 2018), 18.

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above Ni’hoochii’, 2005, vegetal-dyed wool, 20 × 36½ in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite D. Y. Begay (Diné) at her loom. Photo: Kelso Meyer (Diné), the artist’s son. Image courtesy of the artist.

evenings. I am blessed with all this natural beauty.”4 Recording its mesas and rock formations, its constantly changing textures and colors in finely woven tapestries, Begay memorializes her experience of a land that is rich with natural beauty.

Begay attended boarding schools in Chinle and Santa Fe and earned a teaching certificate from Arizona State University. While studying at ASU, she took fiber arts classes that exposed her to diverse textile practices and techniques, and this experience has influenced her work. Begay has exhibited her weavings in major museums and galleries, including the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, New York City, New York; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Kennedy Museum of Art, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio; Museum of Northern Arizona,

Flagstaff, Arizona; and National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. Her tapestries have been collected by major museums in North America and Europe and published internationally, and she has co-curated exhibitions and authored catalogue essays for the National Museum of the American Indian, Wheelwright Museum, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and Kennedy Museum of Art. Over the last several decades, Begay has traveled extensively, visiting weavers and studying textiles throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, but she has always returned to the landscapes of northern Arizona, her major source of inspiration. She explains, “The place is sparse. Vegetation is not visible, but the colors in the sand and the mesas are painted with some of the most incredible tones of ochre, and when the sun is rising or setting it is overwhelming with beauty. I can never get enough of the physical beauty the natural light brings to

the place.”5 Begay’s long exposure to the northern Arizona landscape has offered her insight into the subtle beauty that the dry, high-desert region offers. She has watched its shapes and colors metamorphose in a day and across the seasons. She is especially fascinated with the ephemeral qualities of light and color at the point of interface between night and day and seeks to capture their shifting effects.

This liminal moment is captured especially well in a 2005 tapestry, Ni’ hoochii’. B egay explains that “Ni’hoochii’ is a Navajo word that describes the lighting condition that occurs during a sunrise in the very early part of the morning or during a sunset with red vibrant colors reflecting on the horizon.”6 In Ni’hoochii’, undulating bands of color, ranging from rust to crimson to dark brown, stretch horizontally across the lower section of the weaving and appear to recede toward the horizon. At the same

4. D. Y. Begay, Artist’s Notebook (unpublished manuscript, April 2005).

5. Begay, Artist’s Notebook (June 2006).

6. Begay, Artist’s Notebook (December 2005).

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Those, like Begay, who have grown up here, know this landscape intimately; they have seen winter blizzards and summer floods reshape it.

time, the rich texture of the handspun wool leads our eye back to the tapestry’s surface, creating an ambiguous, spatial relationship similar to the “push-pull” effect of modernist painting theorized by artist and teacher Hans Hoffman. The illusion of recession into deep space in Begay’s works is achieved through manipulation of color and texture rather than perspectival rendering of representational form. Bands of the same colors as those at the weaving’s base stretch across the upper section of the piece, suggesting a correspondence between earth and sky.

The colors and visual textures of the weaving’s upper and lower portions are saturated, implying weight and substance.

The weaving’s midsection, on the other

hand, appears light filled and airy, conveying intangibility, the fleeting, the ephemeral. This is a landscape and a world undergoing dramatic change through the natural force of light. This is a landscape and a world that is fluid and in flux.

In another textile, Night Way (2008), the transition from night to day is more dramatically announced. The yellow light breaking through the horizon is less subtle, more dominant. Reid comments, “Night Way is composed of pitch-dark bands. A streak of mustard and pale yellow runs across its center. A Navajo viewing the tapestry might see the sun overcoming dawn during a winter healing ceremony.”7 Natural Two (2010) also features rippling bands of color that resemble wisps of clouds or eddies of water. The most saturated tone in the piece is found in the orange zone that runs across the weaving’s middle and which, ironically, comes forward visually at the point where the deepest recession into space would be. Begay redeploys the same modernist painting strategy to reassert the flatness of the picture plane as she used in Ni’hoochii’, reminding us that although an illusion of depth may be created by the artist through manipulation of the formal aspects of her medium, it is actually a flat, two-dimensional surface upon which the image appears. Palette of Cochineal (2013), Intended Vermilion (2015), and Baa’hozho (2014) are other works by Begay that feature a luminescent horizon as a signifier of liminality.8 Begay’s fascination with transformation is conveyed not only through the visual aspects of her weavings but sometimes in their physical conversions.

Unsatisfied with static, two-dimensional textiles, she has explored weaving as a sculptural form through creation of pieces that fold, drape, and assume new configurations. She has created Chief Blankets that envelop the human form, their designs joining together on the front of the wearer’s body to assume new, bold geometric designs. One series of Begay’s work emulates parfleches, Plains

7. Reid, “Stories to Tell,” 21.

8. See Jennifer McLerran, ed., Tselani/Terrain: The Tapestries of D. Y. Begay for reproductions and discussion of these pieces.

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D. Y. BEGAY

painted rawhide bags that wrap around their contents. Like the Chief Blanket, the parfleche enfolds and contains, protecting its contents and, through the process, new designs are revealed. In 2002 she created two weavings based on parfleches, Dakota Style and Cheyenne Style, exploring the ways they transform when folded. The weavings not only assume the shape and structure of parfleches, but they are also woven with designs that replicate those found on historical Plains bags, which take complete form through the process of assembly.9 While light dramatically transforms the Southwest landscape, water is an equally transformative force. Brutally cold and snowy winters and drenching midsummer monsoons are common in the Southwest. Those, like Begay, who have grown up here, know this landscape intimately; they have seen winter blizzards and summer floods reshape it. They have seen the landscape undergo continuous change through the forces of water and light. This variation, which can be as slow and subtle like the play of light across a canyon wall or as bold and fleeting as a bloodred sunset streaming over a mesa, fascinates Begay.

The land upon which the Navajo Reservation sits was once covered by a vast inland sea, and the traces of this are readily evident to those who choose to look for them. Observing the land surrounding her reservation home, Begay notes, “Sometimes I envision the ocean waves and can smell the salt … and sometimes I see heat waves dancing across the horizon on a hot summer afternoon.”10 Night Waves (2013), a piece that seems to emulate mist or clouds, was inspired by Begay’s observations of ancient changes to the landscape created through the force of water.

In 2003, Begay created Drought 2002, a pictorial weaving recording the consequences of the previous year’s drought. 2002 was one of the driest years on record in northern Arizona and, according to ecologists, presaged the impending effects of global warming on the high-desert Southwest. Begay

witnessed firsthand the immediate effects of drought, such as loss of vegetation and animal habitat, as well as its more longterm consequences from wildfires and catastrophic flooding. In one of her few realistically rendered pieces, she portrays the parched northern Arizona landscape.

This is a scene set in the full, midday sun.

Greys, browns, and tans predominate.

However, hints of green appear on the mesas, reminding us that within this

above Natural Two, 2010, vegetal-dyed wool, 51 × 33 ½ in. opposite Night Waves, 2013, vegetal-dyed wool, 37 × 30 in.

9. See Jennifer McLerran, ed., Weaving Is Life: Navajo Weavings from the Edwin L. & Ruth E. Kennedy Southwest Native American Collection for a discussion and reproductions of these pieces.

10. Begay, Artist’s Notebook (2012).

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above Blessings of Rain, 2015, vegetal-dyed wool, 16 × 46 in., collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota.

Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. opp osite N á h o o k ǫ s j í H a i (Winter in the North)/Biboon Giiwedinong (It Is Winter in the North), 2019, vegetal-dyed wool, silk, cotton, 31 × 57 ½ in., collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art. Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

terrain lies the potential for growth and change. Blessings of Rain (2015) and Feasting on Green (2015) present the same landscape affected by precipitation.

Returning to a more abstract idiom, Begay represents the undulating terrain with subtle gradations of forest green, olive, and gold. It is as if solid land has succumbed to the rain, losing its substantiality.

More recent effects of water’s force also concern Begay. Begay grew up on the Navajo Reservation in a home without running water. Hauling, storing, and recycling water were necessary daily activities in the Begay household. Water was valued, protected, and conserved during her childhood, and Begay has continued to conserve and recycle it today. While her Santa Fe home has all the modern conveniences, she still captures rainwater, repurposes grey water, and xeriscapes her yard. To her, water is a precious resource.

It is also a source of inspiration. Begay knows that in the arid Southwest, one must be prepared for whatever changes nature brings, and when water is involved, one must be especially vigilant. In times

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of drought and also times of abundance, water—or lack of it—may jeopardize one’s very existence.

Water is one of the most unpredictable and potentially most disruptive forces of nature. One must prepare for those stretches of time when water is scarce by conserving and rationing it. One must also anticipate and plan for those times when it is abundant. Times of overabundance can be most threatening. Arroyos suddenly flooded with rushing water uproot trees, sweep away buildings, and make roads impassable. Water can transform the northern Arizona landscape and the lives of those who inhabit it in an instant.

An estimated 30 to 40 percent of Navajo Nation residents live without running water and must haul it to their homes. They often travel many miles on rough and sometimes barely negotiable dirt roads to obtain water for their homes, livestock, and crops. They must frequently wait in line for hours to fill bottles and tanks carried in the beds of their pickup trucks and then carefully ration water

D. Y. BEGAY

at home before making another trip to a water station. Such trips are routine.

And, to make matters worse, reservation residents who do have running water worry that it may be contaminated by the abandoned uranium mines that dot the landscape.

Like the ever-changing natural forces of air and light that have been Begay’s recurrent subjects, water, too, is elusive. So it is not surprising that when recently presented with a commission that challenged her to capture the transitory qualities of water, Begay rose to the challenge. The subject of the piece, the water-rich landscape of northern Minnesota, offered her the opportunity to explore new terrain and experiment with a new palette. Jill Ahlberg Yohe, associate curator of Native American art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, commissioned Begay to create a textile for the upcoming exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.11

To research the piece that bears titles in both the Navajo language and Anishinaabemowin, Náhookǫsjí Hai (Winter in the North)/Biboon Giiwedinong (It Is Winter in the North) (2019), Begay traveled in the depths of winter to the Ojibwe Grand Portage Reservation in northeastern Minnesota to observe the interactions of light, air, and water. Over several days, she stationed herself before a half-frozen lake. January in northern Minnesota seems lifeless, but Begay found the winter landscape teeming with life, changing by the minute. Mists and clouds rose and fell, merged, separated, and disappeared. Chunks of ice and snow slowly melted and refroze. The elements seemed in a constant state of flux, unstable and unpredictable. Returning to her Santa Fe studio, Begay set to work on her

piece, using a combination of hand- and machine-spun, vegetal-dyed wool, cotton, and silk fibers to create a textile that she describes as a portrayal of “the landscape transforming itself.”

Náhookǫsjí Hai (Winter in the North)/Biboon Giiwedinong (It Is Winter in the North) has ushered in a new direction for Begay. In the past, when she traveled away from the Southwest, she would explore local textile practices, adding to her repertoire of forms, materials, and techniques. Creating a weaving that captures the wintry landscape of northeastern Minnesota, she has sustained her long-standing fascination with capturing the mercurial ways of air, light, and water in a static medium. At the same time, she has extended her reach to other landscapes.

Jennifer McLerran, PhD, is an assistant professor of Native American art history at Northern Arizona University and the author of A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy 1933–1943.

11. Co-curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Kiowa), Hearts of Our People: Native American Women Artists is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through August 18, 2019. It will then travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An exhibition catalogue, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2019), which includes essays, personal reflections, and poems by 22 members of the exhibition advisory board and other leading scholars and artists in the field is available.

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PROFILE

ABSENTEE SHAWNEE/SEMINOLE PAINTER AND PRINTMAKER

BENJAMIN HARJO JR.

By Staci Golar

A

RTIST BENJAMIN HARJO JR. has a warm laugh, kind eyes, and a wide smile. He has a wry and mischievous wit but is friendly and welcoming at the same time. Well known for his vibrant work and masterful drawing skills, he is a regular at Native art markets and other art events. He’s regularly honored at them, too—he was selected as a featured artist at the Santa Fe Indian Market and Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, for example.

You’ll almost always see him wearing his signature black and red beret, something he jokingly calls his “personality.” Asking him about it grants a surprising jumping point into his very origins as an artist. “I wear my beret in honor of Seymour Tubis,” Harjo recalls thoughtfully, “because whenever he walked into a classroom, he always took his beret off and put it up on a nail. It’s in remembrance of him.”1 Tubis was Harjo’s instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and worked there from 1963 to 1980. He established the printmaking department, organized studio courses, and taught a new generation of Native painters in the early days of IAIA.2 Both Tubis and the school ended up being hugely influential to Harjo’s work—just not in the way he had originally planned.

From New Mexico to Oklahoma and Back B OR N I N C L OV I S , N E W MEXICO, Harjo moved to Byng, Oklahoma, at age ten. He grew up with his grandparents, exploring nature, getting lost in comic books, and often

taking sketch pads to the woods or river to draw and explore for hours. As a child he loved to illustrate cartoons specifically, and regularly entertained classmates by sketching popular characters like Woody Woodpecker. He even sold comic strips to his school paper.

Harjo knew he needed a more formal art education if he was going to make a career out of his artistic talents. A chance encounter with a brochure advertising IAIA and its animation courses happened while he was in a waiting room at the Shawnee Indian Clinic with his grandma. He knew it was where he wanted to go, so not long after graduating high school, Harjo hopped on a bus with a one-way ticket to New Mexico to pursue his dreams of being a cartoonist.

Imagine the utter disappointment he felt

when he arrived in Santa Fe only to find the school no longer offered cartooning courses. Nevertheless, he stayed at the urging of Tubis and immersed himself in a creative environment that offered instructors like Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache), Charles Loloma (Hopi), and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), and classmates like Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Kevin Red Star (Apsáalooke), and T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), a veritable who’s who of Native art.

“When I went to IAIA, it was like a whole door of creativity opened up to me, with the different students and different tribal groups and the learning process there,” Harjo remembers. “I do the work I do now because I got involved in the other aspects of art, from painting to printmaking, after I couldn’t study animation at IAIA.” Tubis taught Harjo the ins and outs of woodcut printmaking, and he says that the process made him start seeing patterns and textures in everything. “To this day I do woodblock printing,” he says, which offers a more immediate, effective, and readily available process that doesn’t require special equipment.

After graduating from the institute in 1966, Harjo’s art career was put on temporary hold between 1969 and 1971 when he was drafted to serve with the army during the Vietnam War. When he returned to the United States, he enrolled at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater and earned his BFA in 1974. He remembers instructors such as J. Jay McVicker fondly and notes they were integral, like Tubis, to his development as an artist.

It’s clear that mentorship impacted Harjo in a profound way; he regularly

1. Unless otherwise noted, information and quotes attributed to Benjamin Harjo Jr. in this article derive from discussion with the author, March 2019.

2. “Seymour Tubis,” Lost Art Salon, accessed May 9, 2019, web.

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BENJAMIN HARJO JR.

above evolution of color, 2017, graphite, pen and ink, Prismacolor pencil, gouache, acrylic on Arches watercolor paper, 10 × 18 in., private collection. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Benjamin Harjo Jr. wearing his signature beret.

gives his teachers credit for the way they guided his work and his career. As he grew and found success, Harjo took inspiration from these individuals and he too began mentoring others. He has taught art classes to youth, lectured at schools and museums around the country, and has led workshops at a variety of institutions. Bob Hamm, professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University, once said of Harjo, “You just capture that feeling that he really cares about students. He is one of the warmest artists I’ve ever known.”3 In 2012 Harjo was inducted into the Oklahoma State University Alumni Hall of Fame, one of several honors he has received throughout his career. Other recognition includes a 2009 Lifetime Achievement award from the Native American Art Studies Association, several Best of Show awards (including the 2014 Cherokee Art Market, and the 2007 and 2009 Masters Show at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum), and a Gold Medal at the American Indian Cowboy Artists Wichita Show, just to name a few.

Similarly, the list of exhibitions he’s participated in is long, having shown work in group shows at institutions like the Gilcrease and Brinton Museums in the United States and the Franco-American Institute in Rennes, France, as well as venues in Somalia, Japan, and Korea.

Several solo exhibitions stand out as highlights in Harjo’s career, such as the more recent We Are a Landscape of All We Know at the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art in 2018, and The Earth, the Moon and the Stars Above, a major retrospective of his work at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe in 2004. Between commissions and collectors, his work has ended up in national museums, the homes of former Supreme Court justices, and more.

Harjo gives credit to Barbara, his wife of more than 35 years, for much of this success. “For a while I worked with the youth council in Tulsa doing recreational and cultural activities in classrooms,” Harjo notes. “But after I saw

a lot of my fellow art comrades starting to make names for themselves, I decided it was time to jump off and start doing my art full time. It felt like a lot of door-todoor sales at first. I was doing art shows in banks, malls—wherever they were having some type of show.”

When he married Barbara in 1982, she agreed to take on and manage his career. “She’s like my Snidely Whiplash,” he says laughing, making reference to the mustached villain who served as Dudley Do-Right’s antithesis in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. “No, she is the manager, and I am the artist. I think it’s a great combination because a lot of times artists are very scattered.” Those who know Barbara know she is not Harjo’s archnemesis but rather his greatest supporter. She keeps on top of the paperwork, deadlines, bookkeeping, product development, and everything else that is involved in having a thriving, full-time art career. Her role frees him up to focus on creative work, a luxury that few artists have.

3. Bob Hamm quoted in “Benjamin Harjo: OSU Alumni Hall of Fame,” OStateTV video, 9:18, accessed May 5, 2019, web.

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Similar to Seminole patchwork, Harjo’s designs aren’t just for show. They also tell stories if you’re privy to the vocabulary, where shapes become narratives about clan names, rain, lightning, animals, and so much more.

Process, Patterns, and Patchwork HARJO’S CREATIVE TIME and process varies from day to day but is rooted in constant drawing, as he’s done most days since childhood. “I don’t set a regular schedule for my work. I don’t do art nine to five every day, but I do a lot of sketching all the time. If I’m getting ready to do an art market or an art show, I’ll spend a lot more time producing artwork that I glean out of the sketches, taking time to make them into finished pieces.”

Using a variety of media—pen and ink, Conté crayon, gouache, acrylics, and oil-based printing inks—Harjo focuses mainly on two-dimensional work like drawing, woodblock printing, and

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painting. In his artist statement he says, “Painting, printmaking, and drawing are liminal spaces in which ambiguous ideas can play upon the mind and defy immediate categorization that stifles deeper conversation and connection in today’s society.”

Harjo’s mostly black-and-white, pen-and-ink drawings reveal so much of his early influences, namely his love of comic books. The drawings are stylistic, and sometimes the figures look like the mid-century Golden Age of cartooning.

Other times they morph between totally nonobjective abstraction and clearly recognizable figures. More often than not they include a bit of both, as well as hyper-detailed, interspersed blocks of patterns. With his woodcuts, one sees subtler, earthier color palettes, larger

BENJAMIN HARJO JR.

swaths of color, and more figurative work.

When it comes to gouache and acrylic paintings, Harjo fills his figures to the brim with color, but in neat, ordered ways. Negative space is left to define forms. The results are joyful, sometimes even whimsical (though he has explored very serious subject matter, too) and offer a dazzling array of patterns and designs for the viewer to work their way through. While they don’t quite move like the intentional illusions in Op Art, the designs do reveal new and sometimes surprising imagery the more time one spends viewing them.

A clear connection to Seminole patchwork, a textile art form known for its rows and layers of colorful, intricate, geometric appliqué patterns, is also apparent in Harjo’s art. These types of rows in Harjo’s work are often incorporated among less abstract, more realistic forms that emerge among the patterns and designs. Similar to Seminole patchwork, Harjo’s designs aren’t just for show.

They also tell stories if you’re privy to the vocabulary, where shapes become narratives about clan names, rain, lightning, animals, and so much more. The paintings and drawings become even richer when one realizes they are imbued with the symbols of his ancestry in order to share important stories. As Harjo notes in a recent artist statement, he’s trying to lure the viewer in with these stories and often uses humor to create “a cross-cultural space that transcends language and time—a space open to possibilities” where the Trickster blurs all binaries.

Does he have a favorite way to “tell” these stories? “Gosh, I enjoy all of them,” Harjo answers, referring to drawing, painting, and printmaking. “But sometimes I get bored painting and I want to draw, so I work out some pen and inks and then I get bored with those and so on.” Regardless of the artistic vehicle, he always draws out areas first, laying ink or paint down second, often tracing patterns multiple times across one piece.

Though he doesn’t do them as much anymore, his miniature paintings

were another exploration that highlighted his mastery of color and draftsmanship.

“Santa Fe [Indian Market] used to have a miniature category and they had certain specifications: to do work that was one and a quarter inches or three by three inches, things like that. I did that when my eyes were pretty good, and I could still see up close and do details,” he chuckles.

While his techniques have stayed consistent, Harjo’s subject matter has evolved through the years. “I drew a lot more people in the beginning,” Harjo

above when death walked the plains, 1995, pen and ink on paper, 26 × 18 in., collection of Mary and Peter Goetz. opposite beauty upon the wind, 1989, gouache on paper, 24 × 30 in., collection of Letitia Chambers.

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ab ove dreamers of the immortals, 2019, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 191/2 × 27 in. opposite women of the night, 2014, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 11 × 14½ in., private collection.

remembers. “I used to draw from photographs of various people, some from the Curtis photographs, for example, but I’ve not relied as much on that imagery as I have on what I perceive in objects—things that inspire the imagination to create.”

He finds this creative motivation everywhere. “If there are smudges on the back of a semitruck, it will give me a visual of an image. Or a bug splatter on the windshield; I’ll see an image in it. Kind of like when kids look out the window at school, and a cloud is going by and in that cloud is an image. It’s just a way of seeing.”

Lately his art has incorporated more avian imagery. “Birds and my relationship with them are starting to become very prominent; the pieces still have people in them, but they have a lot of bird imagery, too.” When pressed about why that is, he says, “The shape and the freedom of the pattern of birds allows for experimentation not only in design but

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[also] in color. I like drawing the waterbird [a symbol associated with the Native American Church], eagles, hawks, and hummingbirds. Sometimes my birds are very stylistic and kind of vacillate between a non-bird and bird form.”

Beyond Neo-Cubism HA R JO HAS OF T E N B E E N REFERRED TO as the “Picasso of Indian Art” due to his skills with abstraction (perhaps by a person who had never seen Harjo’s work next to a Kandinsky, though?), and the term is even on his website. A rather Picasso-esque figure seems to be looming in his 2005 Market Treasures piece (though some have said it looks like it could be a grumpy collector at Indian Market). If you ask him what he thinks about it all, he laughs in his characteristic way and says, “Oh, I think it’s kind of funny someone said that one

BENJAMIN HARJO JR.

time. I thought, Oh no. I like the style, I do, but [Picasso] wasn’t an influence.”

Harjo’s work is sometimes abstract and sometimes quite narrative and literal.

“But,” he says, “my work has a lot of other influences, many of which I encountered as a student at IAIA and Oklahoma State University. So many of the earlier schools tried to stifle creativity in [Native artists] but the institute kept opening doors for us to experiment and look at all different art forms.”

While the Picasso moniker may grant a kind of credibility in some circles and paints an immediate mental picture, especially for audiences unfamiliar with non-Western artists, it’s unfortunate in its misclassification of his work, placing it in a Eurocentric model that doesn’t allow his unique talent and thoughtfulness to stand on its own. It also doesn’t fully acknowledge the work’s deeper influences that, of course, go back to Harjo’s roots and upbringing. He is undeterred by it all and knows where the credit lies.

What’s next for Harjo? Beyond always prepping for the next event or exhibition, he’s constantly being fueled by his imagination to create something new, taking in ideas to reinvent them and present them in different ways. He says, “One painting will inspire another piece of work, and so on; I have no shortage of ideas. I’ve been going through things, looking for older woodblock prints, and I have several sheets of tracing paper of work I’ve done and several sketchbooks all over the place. Nothing is dated as to when they were started, because I may lay one down and pick another up so then it all jumps around.” He pauses and then says, “If historians ever come in, they are going to have quite a time trying to say, ‘Well, he did this during this year,’ because I don’t even know when I did it!”

A dream project for Harjo at this stage in his career would be doing something that would last longer than his lifetime. “I think about doing animation, as well,” he says wistfully, and one can immediately visualize the delightful, colorful figures and landscapes that a

moving, animated Ben Harjo world would contain.

Harjo doesn’t seem to have regrets, however, and is grateful for what he gets to do and his place in the art world. “A lot of times when people refer to me as one of the foremost American Indian artists, I think, well, there are a lot of ‘foremost’ artists out there. There are a lot of artists that don’t get recognition for the great work they do, and some of us have had lucky breaks and support from a lot of collectors over the years. We have to

recognize and appreciate that they took an interest in what we do.

“My role as an artist is not as outspoken as some,” Harjo continues, “but I do have moments where I try to convey some of the issues and things that happen in our world. At the same time, I also try to produce works that have humor and that give people a sense of feeling good when they see my color palette.

“I’ve always been an artist. That is what I was born for, and that’s what my life’s interest has always been.”

BENJAMINHARJOJR.COM Staci Golar is an arts administrator, jeweler, and freelance writer living in San Diego.

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AYMARA ARCHITECT

FREDDY MAMANI SILVESTRE Written by Vivian Zavataro, PhD Translated by Vivian Zavataro & José Luis Monteverde

I

NTERNATIONALLY KNOWN for his colorful and intricately embellished buildings, Freddy Mamani Silvestre (Aymara) has changed not only the cityscape of El Alto, the second-largest city in Bolivia, but he has also challenged the country’s architectural scene. Mamani is creating a new language inspired by the country’s Native heritage, sometimes referred to as “New Andean architecture.” Initially ignored by architects of academia, then despised by the same group, the groundbreaking artist is also revolutionizing Bolivian buildings with his own style.

Mamani’s works are sometimes referred to as cholets—a fusion of the words cholo (a derogatory term used to refer to a man of Indigenous ancestry) and chalet. Polemic at first, Mamani’s cholets are becoming more and more recognized as a true representation of Bolivia’s national architectural style. Mamani has come a long way, from a small-town boy to a radical, self-taught architect. He has built more than 100 buildings in Bolivia and a growing number of projects around the world.

Where It All Started BORN IN 1971 in the small community of Catavi, located in the department of La Paz, Bolivia, Freddy Mamani Silvestre grew up in a big family with five siblings.

From an early age he accompanied his father to construction sites where he played with sand and the wind, imagining himself as a grown-up civil engineer.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Mamani started working as a mason at the age of 15 as a necessity. As the older brother, he had to contribute to the household income in order to provide for his younger siblings and parents. According

to Mamani, he and his siblings grew up in poverty with very little economic resources, but this part of his life was essential for his growth—personally and professionally.

While working as a contractor, Mamani never forgot his dream of being an engineer. He attended university in the evenings after his long workdays, a time he proudly remembers. He started as a bricklayer and now holds three university degrees: two in engineering and one in architecture. He regards these accomplishments as prizes he could not have achieved without the motivation and advice of his parents. Published articles have asserted Mamani’s parents were not supportive of his studies; however, when talking to Mamani about it, he was astonished and said that his family always cherished and encouraged his academic and professional endeavors.

Mamani and his family hold a tight and tender relationship. All of his siblings work with him, some as architects and others as engineers, which, according to him, creates a very friendly and familiar environment. Despite the fact that he has

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around 200 employees, he says they are all like family members.

Although Mamani is internationally known as an architect, not until recent years did he officially receive his architecture degree. Before, he was constantly criticized by his peers for not holding such a certificate. Even after finishing his degree, Mamani’s work is still met with disparaging reactions by the Bolivian architectural métier. Many well-established Bolivian architects see his buildings as overly decorated, tasteless works, but Mamani does not seem to let these critiques affect him. He says these criticisms are “a mountain to climb and overcome, making [him] a better professional.” The Bolivian architectural academics do not like the fact that he started as a bricklayer rather than an architect and see him as an outsider.

Mamani sees his work as a response to what his people and community need and not what a particular style dictates.

“Nothing will detain me,” he says.

“With honor, humility, and sacrifice, I will keep going as long as God and time allow me to keep going.”

FREDDY MAMANI

above Three buildings designed by Freddy Mamani on Carretera a Viacha Ladislao Cabrera, near the Hospital Municipal Modelo Corea, El Alto, Bolivia. Note the twin serpents in the central façade. Photo: ©Yuri Segalerba, @yuriorbital. All rights reserved. opposite Freddy Mamani Silvestre on the roof terrace of one of his new building projects in El Alto, Bolivia. Photo: Georg Ismar, dpa Picture Alliance. ©George Ismar/dpa. All rights reserved.

By using criticism as a stepping stone and by being true to himself, his culture, and historic customs, Mamani has rejected the preferred Western architectural styles and created his own. Today other contractors and architects in El Alto are following in Mamani’s footsteps by integrating color and intricate designs to their buildings’ facades. Mamani states that it does not bother him that others are imitating his style as he believes it makes El Alto look better. In addition, these projects are also creating revenue for the city as tourists from all over the world now come to El Alto just to see these works of art.

The Birth of the New Andean Architecture IN THE OCHRE-COLORED CITY of El Alto, colorful and extravagant buildings adorn the cityscape. Located outside of La Paz, one of Bolivia’s two capital cities, El Alto sits at the edge of the Andean Plateau. The city is cold, dusty, and windy, with an average temperature of 49 degrees Fahrenheit. El Alto, with its harsh weather, environment, and altitude, is one of the highest cities in the world, hovering at 13,000 feet above sea level. Its strategic location and natural resources made El Alto the perfect settlement spot to many Native populations from surrounding

areas. In the past decade its population has grown exponentially, and with it so has economic dynamism. Today El Alto holds more than one million inhabitants, or Alteños, largely comprised of Quechua and Aymara peoples.

Alteños are known for their trading skills. They work extensively with China, importing goods and dispatching them around Bolivia and neighboring countries.

With Evo Morales’s election to presidency in 2006, the city also gained political relevance due to its Native majority. Morales, also of Aymara origin, revised the country’s constitution in 2009, encouraging Bolivia’s indigenization and giving the country a new name, the Plurinational SUMMER 2019 | 67

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State of Bolivia.1 Morales’s presidency and the city’s growth made possible the birth of a culturally and economically emergent class: the new Aymara bourgeoisie, many times referred to as choliburguesía. These are Mamani’s main clients: prosperous Aymaran merchants who commission incredibly colorful buildings in order to display their success and affluence.

Mamani feels fortunate to be able to work for these entrepreneurs, who more often than not give him complete autonomy to use his creativity and talent.

El Alto has never previously been known for its colors or unique architectural style. On the contrary, the city was nothing more than ordinary with its flat, plain, brick buildings. Little did its population know that their cityscape was to radically change. It was 2002. Mamani’s assignment was to create a commercial building for a cellphone import company.

He suggested a new, unique style for the building, inspired by Andean cultural traits, forms, and colors. The investors gave him free creative reign.

Mamani had a couple of goals in mind. First he wanted to add some color to his city and bring joy to its inhabitants.

Secondly he aimed to create a new style of architecture that spoke an Andean language, departing from the minimalist, European styles that Bolivian architects were taught in school. He says, “I wanted to give life and color to an otherwise monochromatic city surrounded by mountains and vegetationless streets.” The result was an incredible building with an amazingly intricate facade. Hues of green contrast with red lines. Oddly shaped glass windows add a reflective feature to the building, making it seem from outer space or from the future in the midst of mud-colored scenery.

1. Elisabetta Andreoli, “New Andean,” The Architectural Review 237, no. 1420 (2015): 92.

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Many other buildings were to follow.

After staring at these incredible structures, one cannot help but wonder where Mamani gets his inspiration. Some would say Transformers or other sci-fi movies, but the answer lies deep in his Aymaran roots. “No science fiction ever crossed my mind,” he affirms. “I live in the reality of my people, the landscape of the mountains, the animals, rocks, and flowers that surround me.” The ruins of the imperial capital of Tiwanaku also inspire the architect. He rescues lines and motifs etched into Tiwanaku’s reliefs and incorporates them into his designs. He argues that “Tiwanaku’s designs can all be translated into symmetrical forms, which give my buildings their own unique identity while still incorporating ancient ideas and traditions to them.” The colors come from local textiles called aguayos. Aymaran mothers use aguayos to carry their babies around.

FREDDY MAMANI

These are decorated with bright colors and animal motifs. Using these Indigenous art forms as points of departure, Mamani reclaims his roots, his identity, and his culture through architecture.

Cholets AT THE BEGINNING of each project, Mamani and his team, like many architects and engineers, use computer programs to design the proposed project’s floor plans, elevations, sections, building structures, electrical, and sanitation plans.

However, the artistic aspects of his buildings are not premeditated. Mamani says that all the decorative aspects are drawn by hand, often on walls, and these evolve together with the building process. He affirms that the final vision with all its details and intricacies is always complete in his mind.

A common aspect to every single one of his buildings is the layout: the ground floor is dedicated to commercial spaces; the first floor up, roughly 6,500 square feet, is the event hall; the next floor is for apartment living, and the top floor is the penthouse where the owners of the building reside. This part of the building always has a different design when compared to the rest of the construction.

Mamani’s intention is to distinguish the owner’s nobler, private living space from the commercial areas below. The top floor is also referred to as the “chalet,” inundated with natural sunlight and an incredible view of the Andes. Some also relate the location of these homes to the Andean belief of being close to hanaq pacha, or the upper world.2 The main feature of a Mamani building is the salon de eventos (ballroom), which is even more elaborate than the façade. Some of these ballrooms have more than 30 incredibly sumptuous chandeliers. The walls and ceilings are painted with flashy colors, such as lime green and bright orange. These spaces are built with the intention of being used for house parties, receptions, banquets, meetings, weddings, and other family and community celebrations.

While the apartments above the event halls can also be rented, these are most often allocated for the owner’s grown children. Mamani proudly argues that once finished, his buildings are able to generate income to the owners. More often than not, the commissioners are able to recuperate the money spent— US$250,000 to US$500,000—in a period of two to three years.

Even though the buildings share functional commonalities, the architect guarantees that each edifice is unique in design, color scheme, and artistic

above Freddy Mamani cholet, El Alto, Bolivia. Photo: Tatewaki Nio, cargocollective.com/ tatewakinio, @tatewaki_nio (CC BY-ND 2.0). opposite Princípe Alexander ballroom, Avenida Bolivia 27, El Alto, Bolivia. Photo: Georg Ismar, dpa Picture Alliance. ©George Ismar/dpa. All rights reserved.

2. Antonio Castillo, “Bolivia’s Neo-Andean Visionary,” Inside Story, September 12, 2018, web.

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Freddy Mamani is a man of few words and his business mainly relies on word of mouth. He does not have a website, email, or a telephone number readily found on search engines. New clients mostly reach him via Facebook or at inaugural events for his newly built projects.

From El Alto to Paris

above The Continental Palace Mar & El and Gran Roma event center near Avenida Juan Pablo II, El Alto, Bolivia. Photo: © Yuri Segalerba, @yuriorbital. All rights reserved. opposite Projection and event room designed by Freddy Mamani, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, as part of the exhibition Géométries Sud: Du Mexique à la Terre de Feu (Southern geometries, from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego), November 13, 2018: Photo: JeanPierre Dalbéra, fondationcartier. com (CC BY 2.0).

expression. Mamani uses geometric shapes, lines, and zoomorphic shapes, all painted in different colors. Reflective glass used on the façades adds even more flair to these already complex designs.

One of the most impressive examples of Mamani’s work is the Salon de Eventos Princípe Alexander. The project was commissioned by Alejandro Chino Quispe (Quechua) back in 2014. This is one of the largest buildings Mamani has ever designed and includes a full-sized soccer field, apartments, a swimming pool, and not one but two ballrooms.

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FREDDY MAMANI recently participated in the exhibition Géométries Sud: Du Mexique à la Terre de Feu (Southern Geometries: From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego) at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, France, from October 2018 to February 2019. The exhibition proposed an immersion into the abstract, geometric forms of Latin America, bringing together 250 artworks made by more than 70 artists, from pre-Columbian times to today. In many aspects the exhibition was revolutionary, criticizing the deep hierarchies present in art history by creating a display in which the public took the viewpoint of South American artists. Given the great array of periods and artists presented, Southern Geometries could have resulted in a superficial exhibition trying, like many other institutions have done in the past, to be more inclusive. However, the presentation did embrace abstraction not from the typical Eurocentric perspective but gave voice to Latin America’s diversity of cultures and formal languages.

The first work the audience was exposed to when arriving at Southern Geometries was Mamani’s ballroom.

Commissioned specially for the show, the installation was definitely a highlight for most visitors. Mamani built an event space similar to the ones he has built all over El Alto. Even though the installation was just a little taste of the architect’s work, the ballroom did not shy from the real thing, with all of its colors, designs, and modern chandeliers.

I asked Mamani how it felt to be showcased in one of the major cultural hubs of the world. He told me, “To get to be part of a show at the Cartier Foundation has been a major achievement and a great honor on a personal level. In addition, to have my work featured in the exhibition

FREDDY MAMANI

catalogue was an invaluable professional accomplishment, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to be recognized internationally by such an important organization as the Cartier Foundation.”

I also asked him about his experience in Paris and if he would like to be part of more art exhibitions in the future, given that most of his projects are commercial and functional. Mamani responded with great enthusiasm that he enjoyed Paris, its people, culture, and language. He would love to be part of future shows, and now with this experience he is confident that he would be able to produce an even better presentation.

What the Future Holds AT THE END OF OUR INTERVIEW I asked Freddy Mamani some questions about the past and the future. In the midst of emotions and optimism, the architect shared some of his visions and memories.

VZ: From your first project to today, how much has your work evolved and changed?

FM: Since 2002 my work has evolved day by day, as I always look for progress and modernity. However, I have always kept my vision and I have never forgotten my roots, culture, and identity.

VZ: What are some of your current projects? Any other international ventures?

FM: Abroad, the last one was in Paris.

Currently I am working on my first hotel in El Alto under my own brand. It will soon be finished!

I would just play with mud and stones.

VZ: What are your future aspirations?

Wou ld you li ke to teach your architectural style to future generations of Bolivian architects?

FM: I have so many ambitions that they are endless. Only God and time will be able to tell. To teach the younger generation would be a dream. The problem right now is that I do not have the economic resources to make it happen, but I hope I can achieve this dream in the near future.

VZ: If you could go back in time and talk to yourself as a boy, what would you tell him?

VZ: Throughout the years the architectural style that you created has been given several different names, such as “Neo-Andean,” “Transformer,” etc.

How do you identify your own style?

FM: Just thinking about being a boy melts my heart and brings tears to my eyes. If I could go back in time and be a boy again,

FM: I have two registered titles: one academic, “Neo-Andean Architecture,” and one artistic, “CHOLET.” SUMMER 2019 | 71

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CHICKASAW TEXTILE ARTIST

TYRA SHACKLEFORD

By Vicki Monks (Chickasaw)

O

N A CHILLY MORNING at Kullihoma Grounds near Ada, Oklahoma, Tyra Shackleford reminisces about the first time she attended Chikasha Ittifama, or Chickasaw Reunion, when she was twelve years old. It was when she first became immersed in Chickasaw culture, history, the game of stickball, and the art of fingerweaving.

Two decades later, at the age of 33, Tyra Shackleford ranks among the most skilled Native fingerweavers who have elevated the customary technique into fine art. She’s won numerous awards including the 2017 Purchase Award at the prestigious Eiteljorg Museum’s Indian Market and Festival, when the museum invested in Shackleford’s The Lady, an elaborate sprang-woven cape.

Later in the day at Kullihoma, Tyra played a muddy and rough game of stickball. Chickasaw women were playing Choctaw women, marking a milestone.

For the first time in known history, these two tribes fielded all-women’s stickball teams to compete against each other. Tyra played offense, and early in the game she suffered a broken toe, but she kept playing.

That spirit of determination may explain why she has become one of the masters of fingerweaving—a complicated and exacting art.

VM: You said you’ve been coming here since you were a child.

TS: Some of my best family memories are out here. The Chikasha Reunion and stomp dance started in 1998, and my parents brought me and my sister. It’s where I learned how to stomp dance and how to weave and to play stickball. We’d camp here every summer. So this is where I learned a lot about my culture. I got to sit with elders and listen to their stories. I just love it. This place is really special to me.

I sat down with her all day one day and learned how to make a belt. I still have that belt; I still wear it. It’s a light blue and dark blue with a silver thread going through it. Wisey showed me how to do a basic chevron design. I went home and got some books and learned how to do other designs.

There are about five basic patterns and designs: the chevron, the lightning, the arrowhead, the diamond, and just a basic diagonal. You can manipulate these five to make more intricate patterns and designs.

VM: That sounds complicated. There must be certain mathematical skills to it.

VM: The stomp dance is important to all of the Southeastern tribes. Could you describe it?

TS: It goes back to our ceremonies, like Green Corn. The men sing the songs, and the women keep the rhythm of the songs with shell shakers. A long time ago, shell shakers were made with deer toes, and [now they are] turtle shells filled with river rocks. The women do a shuffle step to keep the rhythm of the songs. When we’re singing and dancing, we’re singing our prayers, and the smoke from the fire carries our prayers up to the Creator.

VM: You sat with your elders to learn fingerweaving. How did they teach you?

TS: I wanted to learn how to make a belt to match my dress, [one that I wore] with the dance troupe. Wisey Narcomey, a Seminole elder who danced with us, taught me how to shake shells, too. She was out here demonstrating how to do fingerweaving.

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TS: Yes. I’ve got a good math and science brain, and I think that’s why I was drawn to weaving, because it does take a lot of math. I like playing with it and making intricate patterns. I have one I call my flame design. I’ve only done it three times.

I made a belt for my dad, and I said never again am I going to do this, because it’s really hard. Then I ended up making one for me to match my dad’s, and I said never again. Then I made one more, and I took the weaving and sewed it into a vest, so my dad has a vest that matches the belt.

The flame design is started in the middle with black threads. I work my way out so that it’s dark red, a medium red, orange, yellow, blue—so it’s fire colors.

Each one of those colors is like a lightning bolt shape, but when they weave together and go out to the edge, it looks like fire.

VM: How did you come up with that design?

TS: I was inspired by a Seminole patchwork pattern. I think it’s called everlasting fire. I just kind of worked it until I figured out how to do it with fingerweaving.

VM: Your piece The Lady is made with the sprang technique. What is that?

TYRA SHACKLEFORD

TS: Let me start by telling you how I progressed in my weaving to get to the point of learning about sprang. For several years all I made were belts, and after I graduated college, I got to work for the tribe in the cultural resources department.

That was a great opportunity to do a lot of research and learn more about historical weaving and what my ancestors were doing prior to European contact. That gave me connections to other people.

I met Margaret Wheeler, a Chickasaw weaver who does loom weaving. We both have this passion for the history of our people, so we’d share research with each other all the time.

Margaret introduced me to the sprang technique. It’s found all over the world. Sprang is a Scandinavian term. In South America you can find it in Peru.

In North America a famous artifact is a shirt from a cave in Arizona. It’s beautiful lacework—an almost fully preserved shirt that dates from around 1300.1 We don’t know for sure if our Chickasaw people used sprang or not because our environment is not good for preserving textiles. We have small scraps of lacework found in the Mississippian and Southeast area, but we can’t tell for sure if it was done with sprang or if it was done with another technique.

Sprang is a lacemaking technique.

The unique thing about it is you do it on a frame. It’s not a loom. You just have something to anchor your yarn. And when you weave, there is no weft thread as it goes back and forth. It’s only your warp thread, and you pick up and drop threads and they cross each other. What happens is they end up getting wrapped around each other kind of like a knotless net or a chain link fence, so you are building your fabric from the center out.

What’s unique about this pattern is when you weave one row, you get that row plus you get the mirror image where the threads are anchored at the bottom of the frame. If you can find a full artifact, you’re going to find a center meeting line where you have the work that the person did and then you have the mirror image.

But because our pieces of Mississippian lace are just small fragments, we don’t

have that mirror image, so we don’t know for sure if that was the technique that was used or not.

VM: I’m thinking of a flat piece you did of two turkeys. Is that what you’re describing?

TS: Yes. With the Twin Turkeys piece I used a circular warp to get the mirror image of the second turkey. You have the center meeting line, and then the ends are where I cut it on the back of the circle, so then you get the fringes.

above The Lady, 2017, soy silk yarn interlinking sprang, 108 × 48 in. opposite Tyra Shackleford at Kullihoma Grounds, Oklahoma.

All images courtesy of the artist.

VM: Your image of the turkeys reminds me of some of the artifacts they’ve found

1. Carol James, “The Arizona Openwork (Tonto) Shirt Project,” in PreColumbian Textile Conference VII, ed. Lena Bjerregaard and Ann Peters (Lincoln, NE: Zea Books, 2017), 415–25.

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in Southeastern mounds. Is that where you drew your inspiration?

above Fingerwoven Shawl, 2013, wool yarn, deer antler, braintanned deerhide, warpface fingerweaving, 84 × 30 in. Model: Chelsea Wedlow (Chickasaw). Photo: James Wallace (Choctaw). opposite Twin Turkeys, 2018, soy silk yarn, interlinking sprang, 40 × 30 in. Photo: James Wallace (Choctaw).

TS: I did get that image from the Mississippian shell carvings. I love our ethnography from that time period. And then that image also has meaning behind it because Mississippian cultures have this belief of the Axis Mundi, which connects the three worlds: the world we live in, the world above—the sky world which is where Aba’Binni’li’ (God) is—and then the underworld.

I had to learn how to design my own patterns in sprang. When I was doing the Twin Turkeys, there wasn’t a pattern to go by. I had to take this shell carving image and translate that into the weaving pattern. The Canadian weaver Carol James helped me learn how to do that. I had seen her work, and thought, I want to do that with Chickasaw influence. I want to do something that represents our culture.

VM: One of your mentors, Margaret Roach Wheeler, has talked about how wearable art has only recently been accepted as fine art.

TS: It’s getting there, but it’s tough. I think in the Native art world it’s accepted because it’s part of our culture. Native art has always been utilitarian. We’re starting to get seen and recognized in the broader art world, but it’s a slow process.

VM: Do you see your work as reviving historic techniques and lost knowledge?

TS: There’s a lot of textile evidence in the Mississippian time period. Our first [European] contact was with De Soto’s expedition in 1540. That’s the first written record of our people.2 The men on that expedition talk about textiles in those journals. Then we didn’t have contact

2. See Rodrigo Rangel, “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto by Rodrigo Rangel,” trans. John E. Worth, in The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543, ed. Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 247–75.

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TYRA SHACKLEFORD

with Europeans again for 200 years after that. But when you get into the 1700s, the fur trade era, we started trading with Europeans. It saved a lot of time to trade for cloth rather than to go out and gather the fibers, process the fibers, spin them into yarn, and weave them into fabric. So the adoption of those new trade goods made us lose weaving techniques. They all were almost lost to our people. We kept the fingerweaving going because that’s part of our stomp-dancing culture. But we quit weaving mantles when we adopted European-style clothing.

So getting to do these techniques that my people used thousands of years ago and keeping them alive is important to me. And trying to inspire young people who want to learn it to keep it alive for the future is important to me also. That’s what

I try to do with all my art. I’m hoping that some young person will see it and say, “I want to make something like that.”

VM: A video of you working on sprang shows you consulting a pattern set up on a music stand. It’s as if you have a piece of music there that you’re playing through weaving.3 TS: In this lacemaking technique, you’re picking up and dropping threads. You have to map out the pattern first on graph paper and translate that into the strings.

If the piece is 300 strings wide, what’s on that paper is telling me how many strings to pick up and how many to drop and where to do that.

With sprang you can weave solid fabric, or you can create [openwork, with] holes to create your designs. It is lacework,

but you’re playing where you put that solid and that hole to create these different images. That’s how I do the pieces like the turkeys.

VM: The Lady is currently touring with the Chickasaw art show Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art. Where has that shown?

TS: Visual Voices has been at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum and the Mississippi Museum of Art. It goes to Santa Fe next at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and after that will go to the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio. We’re hoping to find a venue to take it overseas.

Visual Voices is an exhibition that a group of Chickasaw artists brought about working with the American

3. The Chickasaw Nation, Chickasaw Artist Series: Hand Weaving with Tyra Shackleford, Facebook video, 1:10, January 23, 2018, web.

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that as a dress?” but I didn’t create it to be a wearable piece. I created it specifically to be a work of art.

VM: Why is it called The Lady?

TS: I was inspired by De Soto’s chronicle, because it’s the first written record of my people and the first written record of a lot of Southeastern tribes who share a similar culture with us.

There’s a story in one of these journals about a female leader of a Muskogean-speaking tribe. 4 Think about the time period and the mindset of the Spanish. They didn’t think highly of Indigenous people. They didn’t think highly of women, so for them to write about this woman is significant. When they first see her, she’s carried on a litter covered with a white cloth. You can gather that she is well respected and revered by her people. [The Spanish] kidnap her and take her with them as a slave, and one of her people helps her escape. It’s a beautiful story about this woman. So that image of her being carried on this litter covered in a white cloth—I wanted to portray her being larger than life and high above and to convey the strength that our people have had to endure these 500 years since that contact with the Spanish.

VM: How many hours did it take you to weave this?

above Oshiitiik (Daughter), 2017, linen yarn, deer antler, twining with warp-face fingerweaving, 37 × 8 in. Photo: James Wallace (Choctaw). opposite Sprang Cape, 2016, bison hair yarn, interlinking sprang, 84 × 48 in. Model: Mariah Bearskin (Ho-Chunk). Photo: James Wallace (Choctaw).

Indian Cultural Center and Museum in Oklahoma City, with a grant from the Chickasaw Nation. Fifteen Chickasaw contemporary artists were chosen to work with the curators, Dr. Manuela WellOff-Man and Karen Whitecotton [Citizen Potawatomi], to create pieces for the show.

Some pieces were already made, but some were created specifically to be in the show.

The Lady was created to be in the show.

It was a hard experience. Manuela pushed me outside my comfort zone. But if she had not done that for me, The Lady would never have been created. The Lady is a four-foot wide, nine-foot tall, largerthan-life shawl. People ask, “Can you wear

TS: I’m going to surprise you, and this is why I love sprang. The weaving goes faster than you think it does, so it was about 120 hours, which is amazing. But that 120 hours was five months for me, because I have a full-time job, and I have a family with two kids. My boy Xylan is eleven, and my daughter Zora is three. I get a couple of hours here and there to work.

My husband, James Wallace, is Choctaw. He’s actually the one that got me started into doing art shows and doing more with my weaving. When we met I was just doing traditional pieces like our belts or making replica twined bags. James has two degrees in theater and has worked

4. Christina Snyder, “The Lady of Cofitachequi: Gender and Political Power among Native Southerners,” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 1, ed. Marjorie Julian Spruill, Joan Marie Johnson, and Valinda W. Littlefield (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 11–25.

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in the arts for a long time. He’s the one who encouraged me to start branching out. He’s wonderful.

VM: It’s amazing that you can manage your family and work and still have time for your art.

TS: You know, I almost gave up art last year for stickball, because I went to the Mississippi [Choctaws’] World Series, and I got to play on a Bok Cito women’s team.

My artist friends like Randy Kemp, Dallin Maybee, and Brenda Kingery told me that the art I do is important. They didn’t even know I was thinking about giving up art.

Those conversations were important to me. I’m so honored to have those people in the field to call my friends.

VM: How do you figure out your designs on graph paper?

TS: Each square of the graph paper represents a string in a row. So I have to map it out and pick where I’m going to put my holes and where I’m going to put my solid woven fabric. It’s hard sometimes because [for example] The Lady is 600 strings, and they don’t make graph paper that big. You’ve got to use multiple pages, so I started using Excel.

I draw the image first. It’s similar to how some people do beadwork designs on graph paper, but then I have to take that image and all those squares and translate that into the words to know if I’m picking up or dropping a thread and which thread.

VM: It’s almost like computer programming.

TS: I wish someone would write a program for me, because it takes a lot of hours. The turkeys, for example, took me more than 100 hours to draw the pattern and translate the pattern into words, because there are rules you have to think about.

VM: What are your future plans?

TS: I’m trying to branch out this year.

Every year I try to do something different.

Right now I’m working on a piece that will be a two-dimensional piece woven with

sprang, but I want to incorporate fiber optics and weave the fiber optics into the fabric. That’s in process right now.

VM: Describe what the fiber optic element is.

TS: It’s a long strand of plastic or glass—a two-millimeter fiber optic cable. You bundle all of these little cables together and connect them to a light source. You

can have light coming out of just the end of the strand, or you can take sandpaper to the strand and scratch up the whole cable and then you can have light emitting out of the side the whole length of the strand. So I’m experimenting with it.

I’ve got a couple more weeks to finish this piece before my next show, but it will be interesting anyway just to do something different.

TYRASHACKLEFORDARTIST.COM Vicki Monks (Chickasaw) is a freelance writer, reporter, photographer, and radio and TV producer, with a focus on environmental threats to Indigenous peoples.

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ANCHORAGE

Kegginaqut: Yup’ik Masks Anchorage Museum

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N AN EVENT BOTH JOYOUS AND PROFOUND, after 111 years of separation, four Yup’ik dance masks are temporarily reunited in Alaska. Within the Anchorage Museum, the Art of the North Galleries evoke Alaska’s natural and cultural heritage. The gallery’s tall, glacial-white walls with square lights, reminiscent of ice chunks, provide a perfect backdrop for stunning artworks.

One wall is dominated by a mixed-media triptych by Alvin Amason (Sugpiaq), Everything I Love Is Here (2017), depictions of colorful salmon, a Kodiak bear, and airplanes from his grandparents’ stories.

Standing before the triptych at the exhibition opening is Aaron Leggett (Dena’ina Athabascan), museum curator of Alaska history and culture and president of the Native Village of Eklutna, the only federally recognized tribe headquartered in the municipality of Anchorage. He is honored to welcome kegginaqut dance masks back to the Yup’ik region.

A trio of Yup’ik drummers create a beat as a dance troupe enters, singing: My people, we come to you.

My people, we come to you.

My people, we simply come to you.1 Clad in exquisitely sewn fur parkas, the smiling dancers toss out rolls of freeze-dried seal gut, like glad streamers unfurling. Their leader explains, “We came in singing and dancing to bind you as the audience and we as the dancers in mutual respect.” The dancers and audience have gathered to celebrate the opening of Kegginaqut: Yup’ik Masks.

With a gentle, wise voice, the dance leader explains the dances, songs,

and regalia: “The stories are in the movements—cutting a walrus, hanging the walrus meat—Yup’ik aerobics! … This song was left to us by my real grandmother … Each garment has a name.” And most importantly, he explains that the lighting of seal oil lamps is to draw “our ancestors and loved ones here. They’re invited and are here with us tonight, sharing this momentous event.”

The dance leader is Chuna McIntyre (Yup’ik), who co-curated the exhibition with Sean Mooney, curator of the Edmund Carpenter Collection of Arctic Art at the Menil Collection. This collaboration is appropriate, as dance is a fundamental part of the celebration for the kegginaqut.

“Qaneryarangqerrsaaqut-am taukut.

Carrait qaneryarangqerlaryaaqut,” Mary Mike, Yup’ik elder, once explained. “There are stories behind those [masks]. There is something of significance to say about every little thing about them.”2 This is the remarkable story of the homecoming of the Tumanret, or four paths, masks that had been scattered on the wind.

In the Yup’ik world, kegginaqut were primarily made for ceremonial dances. They were usually made by the angalkuq (shaman) of a village or by carvers under direction of the angalkuq.

Likewise, a person may have a dream and commission a mask by telling the dream to a carver, “who would manifest the imagery from the dream.”3 In the village of Napaskiak, near Southwestern Alaska’s Kuskokwim River, Ikamrailnguq was an angalkuq and the probable producer of these four masks: these Tumanret masks represent the four winds from the four cardinal directions.

Just off the Anchorage Museum’s Gallery of the North lies a smaller gallery whose theme, Seeing Nature, blends Alaska Native and non-Native artworks.

The walls are lined with framed inks, watercolors, and oils on canvas. Five cases stand in the center of the room, four with Alaska Native stone carvings, one with

Wolf Hat (1989), a blue glass sculpture by Preston Singletary (Tlingit). At the far end of the long, rectangular gallery, the four Yup’ik masks reign, their cases floating on fog-grey walls.

After the dance performance and mingling, Monica Shah, director of collections and chief conservator, invites the remaining guests to gather around and listen to McIntyre and Mooney tell their stories. Before the kegginaqut, McIntyre sings an ancient warrior song.

The masks are car ved from driftwood. Their faces have downcast eyes and are surrounded by white feathers and wooden rings. “Cupluq—tubes at the chin and forehead—suggest winds emanate from these openings. Along with the arrival of animals in spring, the winds also represent the spiritual entity Ella: the weather, but also the universe and outer reaches of consciousness; of all that is known and unknown.”4 Charcoal, ochre, and/or a clay wash are used to add color. McIntyre explains that four colors are very important to the Yup’ik color palette: white for daytime and snow, black for nighttime and the spirit realm, red for blood, and blue for “beauty, the fleeting summer sky,” and “the rings are ripples in the universe.”

The attached grass adds to movement as dancers blow on it from behind. The lower portion of the mask with its swinging elements represents a labret and also the tail of the beluga whale (so important for its oil) with water dripping downward.

The hands have tiny stubs for thumbs, to protect people. If a spirit has thumbs, it can grab you; this way, the spirits can’t hold onto us.5 “An important fact about Yup’ik masks is that they were almost always made in corresponding pairs, or multiples, so that the stories they narrated could develop complexity, the way a chorus does in music, with harmony and counterpoint,” Mooney wrote.6 The Tumaneq kegginaqut, a strong set of

1. Chuna McIntyre, Yup’ik song’s English translation, Anchorage Museum, March 1, 2019.

2. Ann Fienup-Riordan, ed., Agayuliyararput: Kegginaqut, Kangiit-Ilu/Our Way of Making Prayer: Yup’ik Masks and the Stories They Tell, trans. Marie Meade (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), v.

3. Chuna McIntyre in “The Yup’ik Dance Masks Tradition with Yup’ik dancer Chuna McIntyre and Curator Sean Mooney,” YouTube video, 1:08:40, October 15, 2015.

4. Kegginaqut: Yup’ik Masks, exhibition label text, Anchorage Museum, 2019.

5. Chuna McIntyre, public comments at the exhibition opening, Anchorage Museum, March 1, 2019.

6. Sean Mooney, “Yup’ik Dance Traditions,” The Menil Collection, 2019, web.

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four, are fascinating to behold. The fact that they are here together goes against all odds.

Within Yup’ik dance, masks were often made by one person, for one dance, for one event. Afterwards they were often destroyed in a bonfire or left on the tundra by the side of a lake to naturally return to the elements. With the arrival of missionaries to Alaska, mask making was discouraged. And sometimes, with the rise of the market economy and interest by collectors, masks were sold. These four, which were probably made between 1900 and 1908, were gathered by Adams Hollis Twitchell, who married a Yup’ik woman and ran a trading post in Bethel, Alaska.

Records show that this group of masks were part of a shipment to Philadelphia on March 4, 1908, and went into George Gustav Heye’s collection, which became the Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, now part of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution.

Two of these masks are currently in the NMAI collection.7 The other two masks became separated. One became part of the

Adelaide de Menil and Edmund Carpenter Collection, part of the Menil Collection, Houston. The final mask lives in California at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. This one is strikingly different than the others due to its current state of incompleteness, yet it was instantly recognized by McIntyre.

In 2014, McIntyre was looking at dance items in Fowler museum storage when he opened a drawer and discovered the missing, fourth mask. The addition of it to the quartet of Tumaneq masks is absolute.

David Roche, director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, envisioned the 2018 exhibition, Yua: Henri Matisse and the Inner Arctic Spirit, which was also curated by Mooney in collaboration with McIntyre. As Yup’ik items from various parts of France and the United States were brought together at the Heard, its only venue, it was decided that the four Tumaneq kegginaqut needed to make a journey home to Alaska.8 They have arrived. Their jubilant homecoming is being celebrated at the Anchorage Museum and will continue through September 8, 2019.

—Bryn Barabas Potter

above Ikamrailnguq (attributed), Dance mask quartet representing Tumaneq (Windmaker Spirit), ca. 1908, driftwood, feathers, pigment, grass, (left to right) collections of the Menil Collection, Houston, Collection of Adelaide de Menil and Edmund Carpenter, A7626; Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, X65.4035; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 9/3429; and National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 9/3427, respectively. Images courtesy of their institutions.

7. Sean Mooney, comments at the exhibition opening, Anchorage Museum, March 1, 2019, and email messages to author, April 23 and 24, 2019.

8. Sean Mooney, email message to the author, April 24, 2019.

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CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA

Reflections: Native Art Across Generations The Fralin Art Museum at the University of Virginia

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EFLECTIONS: NATIVE ART ACROSS GENERATIONS is simultaneously a restrained and ambitious exhibition. Adriana Greci Green, the inaugural Mellon Indigenous curator, has taken her first exhibition in this role as an opportunity to bring contemporary Native American artists to Virginia and to demonstrate the strength of the Fralin Art Museum at the University of Virginia’s existing collection.

Given the lens of the exhibition, viewers are positioned to understand historical objects as the creations of generations of still extant peoples whose roots continue to this day in the practices of living Native American artists.

Reflections is on view in a relatively small, octagonal gallery. The unique space has been well utilized with a long temporary wall sectioning it off from the much larger gallery nearby. The effect is physical and conceptual separation; viewers should see this and expect a

different kind of show, which Greci Green delivers. The short main text panel expresses her curatorial approach: juxtaposing historical and contemporary Native American art to elucidate our understanding of both. Below the text is a glass case featuring one Cradleboard and three Toy Cradleboards from the 19th century to early 20th century made

by Khoiye-goo (Kiowa) artists, examples of expert beading and craftsmanship that serve as enticements to view the exhibition. Just to the right of this entry space is Kiowa artist Teri Greeves’s Sunboy’s Women (2011), a dazzling blue and red silk-paneled diptych beaded with the large outline of a hand to unite the panels and the two women in the epic figure’s life. This piece and Greeves’s high-heeled sneakers, Rez Pride/Rez Girls (2009) convene with the surrounding Kiowa beaded works mostly from the 19th century, demonstrating continuity and evolution of the forms.

Sunboy’s Women is a fitting start to a thoughtful and well-paced exhibition, which highlights larger works over smaller ones. The scale and groupings of art showcase the specificity of each living artist’s culture and the unique historical objects that their ancestors created.

Rather than competing, the historical and contemporary works complement, meriting additional, deeper viewing as

above Installation view of Reflections: Native Art Across Generations, December 2018. Photo: Marina Tyquiengco.

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does the slightly winding path created by encased objects. Much as the title implies, the works seem to be reflections, not exact matches.

As the Fralin is an art museum, the included pieces are presented as art, with unknown creators of pieces described as artists. The contemporary artists highlighted in the exhibition, Greeves, Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), Lily Hope (Tlingit), and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation), look back to look forward, invigorating established practices or history to create new art.

Greci Green’s appointment is part of a larger push by the University of Virginia to highlight Indigenous art and cultural production. Reflections: Native Art Across Generations successfully amplifies the voices of Native artists. Artists collaborated with Greci Green to select pieces and contribute statements. This approach bridges the museological gap between curator and artists, and between work by unnamed Native artists and named living Native artists. Each artists’ text panel is around 500 words, long enough to make a point but short enough to maintain the viewer’s attention. Significantly, these artist statements are the longest texts in an exhibition with few texts. Spending time with the artist’s words provides a unique experience in which the artist speaks directly to the viewer, less mediated by curatorial input. According to Greci Green, artists were given relatively loose directives on these statements, so each panel is distinct and personal as opposed to being standardized from artist to artist, a high point of an already deft exhibition.

In her text panel titled “Women Made All of These Things,” Teri Greeves presents a poetic dedication to Kiowa women. “Women Made All of These Things” could serve as a subtitle for the entire exhibition, which includes much beading and skin clothing thought to be women’s creations. Her text also serves as a dedication to her piece, Sunboy’s Women (2011), the abovementioned split-canvas piece of a young woman and older Spiderwoman joined together by a beaded open hand. The raw silk of the background adds to the sensorial nature of the work that calls for close attention and honors women with its message and material.

Wendy Red Star’s included works, seven prints from the 1880 Crow Peace

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Delegation series (2014), are the artist’s intervention into C. M. Bell’s late 19th-century portraits of important chiefs present at this historic meeting. In her text panel, Wendy Red Star provides a history lesson on the chiefs and the delegation images, which she carefully annotates.

The artist uses a teacher’s red pen to make corrections to these photographs, giving personality, names, and words to the men represented, including Alaxchiiaahush, also known as Many War Achievements or Plenty Coups, and Peelatchiwaaxpáash, known as Medicine Crow or Raven. The paired historical pieces, a lovely late 19th-century Drawstring Pouch by an Apsáalooke artist and an intricate late 19th-century Jacket, possibly made by an Apsáalooke artist, further humanize the original images. One sees these clothing items and can imagine the color and materiality of the delegates’ garments.

Red Star’s pieces could potentially evoke an understanding in viewers sometimes absent from exhibitions of art, namely that Native peoples, including Apsáalooke, Kiowa, Tlingit, and Cherokee, represent political as well as cultural entities.

Meanwhile, Lily Hope’s text provides an objective history lesson on Chilkat weaving. She states the art form was practiced by Nisga’a and Tlingit peoples and has spread across the Northwest Coast. Nearby is a late 19th-century Chilkat robe elaborately woven by a Tlingit artist as an honorific robe. Hope’s artistic contribution, Little Watchman (2017), is a child-size outfit composed of four pieces: headdress, apron, Chilkat jacket, and dance leggings.

Little Watchman is a deliberate reflection of the robe as a garment on a younger generation that shows how the robe would have been worn. The ensemble not only demonstrates Hope’s craftsmanship and true respect for the weaver(s) of the late 19th-century garment, but also her ability to imagine the Chilkat as alive in the 21st century.

Finally, in her text, Kay WalkingStick elects to emphasize the work of her generational contemporaries: Native American artists who have been successful in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Rick Bartow (Wiyot/Yurok, 1946–2016) and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Sqelix’u/ Métis/Shoshone). WalkingStick’s piece, Bear Paw Battlefield #2 (2003) pairs

well with Quick-To-See Smith’s collage, I See Red: Salmon Recovery? (1992), and Bartow’s Salmon Boy (2015). Though these three works are alike in their subject matter of the environment and natural world, their approaches of gestural line (Bartow), collage (Quick-To-See Smith), and combination of figuration and abstraction (WalkingStick) could not be more distinct. WalkingStick concludes the exhibition with an art history lesson, a statement of how to understand contemporary Native art generally as a conceptual rather than stylistic category.

Reflections: Native Art Across Generations ends on a forward-looking note as viewers can imagine a more extensive version of each artist’s miniexhibition. Aesthetically enriched and better informed, viewers will leave this exhibition eagerly anticipating more exhibitions like it from Greci Green and the Fralin, as I do. —Marina Tyquiengco

CHEROKEE, NC

Renewal of the Ancient: Cherokee Millennial Artists Museum of the Cherokee Indian

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HIS GROUP SHOW of Eastern Band Cherokee artists under the age of 40 was the first exhibition in the new changing gallery at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.

Renewal of the Ancient celebrated this emerging generation of artists and the continuing strength of Cherokee visual arts in a broad range of media.

Temporary exhibitions will provide the local community with new reasons to visit the Museum of the Cherokee Indians.

Its permanent exhibitions, Emissaries of Peace: The 1762 Cherokee & British Delegations and Story of the Cherokees, are geared toward outside audiences.

Founded in 1948, the museum is one of the earliest tribal museums, created to educate the many visitors to the Qualla Boundary about Cherokee culture and history.

In 1934, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established on ancestral

Cherokee lands and rapidly became the most visited national park in the United States. Bringing millions of tourists into once-isolated Cherokee communities, the park fostered an economy based on tourism at the Qualla Boundary. Visual arts have been part of this dynamic, and in 1946 Cherokee artists formed the first Native American cooperative in the country: the Qualla Arts Mutual.

Since then, selling visual art has provided income for several generations of Eastern Band Cherokees. But increases in tribal gaming revenue and diverse educational and business opportunities for younger Cherokees raise new questions: What is art’s role for the tribe as it grows beyond the tourist trade? And how does the millennial generation— defined by the Pew Research Center as those born from 1981 to 1996, now aged 23 to 38—engage with customary Cherokee arts and subject matter?

The 60 artworks by 30 artists in Renewal of the Ancient reflect a robust local arts community. “Art has always been the vessel used by our people to solidify our unique vision of the world,” write guest curator Josh Adams and museum board member Lambert Wilson in their introduction to the catalogue. “As technology and mediums continually change, the common thread of Cherokee culture only strengthens with each artist’s contribution.”

The exhibition included textiles, ceramics, metalwork, stone sculpture, basketry, beadwork, painting, mixed media, 3D printing, photography, and woodcarving—particularly booger masks. Booger masks appear to be more broadly defined in North Carolina than in Oklahoma and include hunting, buffalo, and snake-warrior masks. The booger dance involves men, wearing masks and blankets, who perform comically lewd acts and who represent disease-carrying spirits embodied by non-Cherokee people, particularly European-Americans.

The dance is ultimately a healing dance for the community. Curator/artist Adams is a carving virtuoso, commenting on current issues with his masks and carvings of booger figures. Kyle Morgan carved two stylized-miniature masks in cedar.

While John “Bear” Allison shot a series of masks—cloaked community members, their identities hidden—including SPRING 2019 | 81

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the exhibition’s poster image, Booger’s Courthouse.

The show’s photography was particularly strong, continuing the legacy of late Eastern Band photographer Shan Goshorn, who combined stunning portraits of tribal members with breathtaking landscapes. Allison’s four photographic prints on aluminum feature extraordinary scenes in the Great Smokies, from a brilliantly starlit nocturne to a frozen waterfall.

Likewise, Madison Hye Long of Painttown draws upon the interplay of light and shadow in the mountains of the Qualla Boundary in her radiant landscape photography. Long’s intimate knowledge of the remote corners of her homeland

and flair for dramatic portraiture, combined with professional skills gleaned at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, have already garnered her attention from the New York Times and the Travel Channel.

Mask motifs continued in a subtle nod to popular culture by John Henry Gloyne. Of Osage and Pawnee descent as well as being an enrolled Eastern Band Cherokee, he painted a carved buffalo mask—a mask representing the woodland bison once common in Cherokee homelands but whose form morphed in the early 20th century to resemble a horned devil. Gloyne’s rendering of a red serpent and heraldic ribbons displays his influences as a tattoo artist, while the title,

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The Process of Weeding Out, betrays punk influences: The Process of Weeding Out is also an obscure, all-instrumental album

by Black Flag from 1985 with Raymond Pettibon cover art, featuring a horned satyr examining sperm under a microscope.

Just as the show’s photography and paintings portrayed other art forms, many pieces also reference other artistic media, including Christy Long’s wooden carving of tortoiseshell dance shackles.

In a hilarious upset, Tonya Carroll of Birdtown, assisted by basket maker Louise Goings, wove Camera Basket, an unlikely sculpture of plaited white oak splint openwork complete with a lens and mode dial. Though the improbable result is wobbly and absurd, I hope Allison, for whom the basket was crafted, will consider the possibilities of making it functional through pinhole photography.

Another commentary on cultural continuity through changing technology and materials is Lauren Smith’s In His Footsteps. Her father J. Bud Smith is a woodcarver and former carving instructor at the local school, so it’s tempting to read their relationship into the piece. A larger wooden bear, looking upward, leads the march, followed by a smaller, walking bear figurine and a bear 3D-printed in purple plastic. While the form of the two small bears is identical, and the artist apparently brushed the surface to give it an interesting and finished texture, much is lost in the transition from wood to plastic—the values and hues of honey brown colors, deep sheen, and grain of the wood.

Museum staff told me an elders’ exhibition is the next show being planned for the space. Hopefully, this gallery will become a vital space for curated exhibitions of living Eastern Band Cherokee artists, as the Museum of the Cherokee Indian joins other tribal museums with curated, changing exhibitions—including the Osage National Museum, Cherokee Heritage Center, Museum of Warm Springs, Poeh Center, Navajo Nation Museum, Iroquois Museum, and Ganondagan.

Some of the most compelling, insightful, and thought-provoking exhibitions today are happening at these museums, where curators draw upon community members and work from integrated, Indigenous perspectives.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

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CLAREMONT, CA

Courtney M. Leonard: Intermodal Pomona College Museum of Art

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OR THE MOST RECENT ITERATION of her Breach series, ceramic and multimedia artist Courtney Leonard created the site-specific installation, Intermodal (BREACH: Logbook 19), at the Pomona College Museum of Art from January 22 through May 19, 2019. Leonard transformed the space into a coastal harbor, with ceramic replicas of faucets, whale teeth, box traps, and fishing nets set on wooden pallets used for shipping.

As a member of the Shinnecock Nation from Long Island, New York, Leonard sees the destruction of oceans as a personal issue: her tribe experienced toxic algae that destroyed sea life and rendered local seafood inedible. Intermodal intends to start dialogue on a range of issues both personal and global, including the impact of trade and industry on the environment, challenges to tribal sovereignty from colonization, the history of Native foodways, global slavery, and the current state of whale hunting.

Though the ideas presented in Intermodal are severe and distressing, Leonard is mindful that museumgoers tend to resist overly didactic or depressing exhibitions. She works to make her installation visually appealing, full of colors and textures, to encourage visitors to linger and meditate on the work. With its low ceiling and lack of natural light, the gallery space becomes a grotto by Leonard and the museum staff lowering the lights and painting the walls grey. Splotches of red on the walls and floor suggest elevations, algae blooms, or even the blood from butchering a whale.

When the Pomona College Museum of Art invited Leonard to study its collection and to create an installation based on her findings, she continued the Breach series she has been exploring for the past five years. Intended to spark conversations around the connection between water and land, installation elements reflect both the natural world and the impact of trade.

With an MFA degree from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA degree from Alfred University in New York—both specializing in ceramics—as well as an AFA degree in museum studies and three-dimensional design from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Leonard enjoys studying material culture and archives. The artist created Intermodal (BREACH: Logbook 19) in response to her study of the Pomona College collection in a process she compares to a call and response in dance. Each version of Breach responds to its location: the museum’s building and its surrounding geography.

In the Pomona College collections, L e onard dis covere d names and photographs of historic basket makers, a welcome contrast to many museums that do not acknowledge individual makers of baskets. Pomona College has an extensive collection of Indigenous Californian baskets, many of them gathered in the early 20th century by Emil P. Steffa, a Pomona graduate and ethnohistorian who collected baskets from the Cahuilla and other California tribes while working as a water resource surveyor. Though most collections of Native art lack archival information about the artists, Steffa recorded data about the weavers’ lives and work, which he included in his studies, such as “Basket Makers of the Coachella

Valley” from 1927. One basket in the collection had symbols woven into the structure for the makers as well as a bat intended to symbolize Steffa, suggesting how the weaver was studying Steffa just as he was studying her. Steffa took pictures of the weavers next to the baskets. Leonard used these images in the video running on the gallery wall. From the Pomona collection, Leonard was especially struck by a Pomo burden basket, a large conical woven basket used to carry food. She placed it at the exhibition’s entrance to introduce topics of nature and food, and questions the term burden, since carrying food is a blessing not a hardship.

Leonard continues the theme of food and transportation, suggested by Intermodal, with the pallets and crates placed in the center of the room. On one pallet the artist placed about 40 to 60 ceramic replicas of sperm whale teeth, as many as found in one whale, underscoring the importance of whales as a source of food for many Indigenous communities, including the Shinnecock. The practice of hunting whales has been impeded ecologically and socially. Large ships used for transporting goods drive away whales while many whale hunters have been publicly criticized.

Leonard clustered water pipes sculpted from red clay with an iridescent

above Courtney Leonard (Shinnecock), installation view of Intermodal (BREACH: Logbook 19), 2019, site-specific installation with ceramics. opposite John Henry Gloyne (Eastern Band Cherokee), The Process of Weeding Out, acrylic on canvas.

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glaze and hung them with oyster shells from the open faucets. The more permanent structure of plumbing imposed upon water suggests how formerly migratory people were forced to stay in one place permanently and kept from traveling to gather materials.

The shells reference Shinnecock historical culture since Shinnecock were significant producers of wampum and used oyster shells as ornaments in clothing. Plumbing pipes demonstrate the incursion of industrial materials to nature, the contamination to the environment from metal and plastic, including what has happened to the water in Flint, Michigan.

In addition to whale teeth and the pipes, Leonard constructed ceramic forms to resemble fishing nets, cylindrical box traps, and conical fishing nets. She sculpts woven forms in ceramics without using an interior armature and uses glaze to strengthen these delicate structures. Her box traps have many circular holes cut out of the micaceous clay cylinder to create an almost lacy appearance.

Intermodal (BREACH: Logbook 19) highlights Leonard’s talent as a ceramist, her ability to reshape a space, and her interest in museum collection and archive research. Her work has been attracting more attention. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently acquired one of her artworks, a wooden pallet with ceramic whale teeth. She has been awarded several residencies from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Leonard has found opportunities for travel and has been to Nova Scotia, New Zealand, Alaska, among other places, to explore the connections between the natural world and human intervention, and the destruction by industry.

Courtney M. Leonard: Intermodal underscores how Indigenous peoples were once instructed on water and land use by outsiders, but now their cultural practices are considered models for how to restore and preserve the natural environment.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

INDIANAPOLIS, IN

Harry Fonseca: The Art of Living Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art

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HE HARVEST (1980) portrays four women with long black hair wearing ankle-length skirts walking in front of a row of trees and a pink fall sunset. Carrying cone-shaped baskets full of acorns, their faces are striped with green mildew. The painting is part of a lesser-known series

by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946–2006) focused on Maidu culture.

The Harvest was included in a year-long exhibition at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art celebrating a gift of over 80 works given to the museum by the artist’s partner, Harry Nungesser. The painting complements another of Fonseca’s works already in the permanent collection, Maidu Dancers (1979), in which four men, wearing clamshell necklaces, flicker bands, and riggings, pause against a yellow ochre background. The artist learned Maidu songs and dances in the sixties from a group intent on reviving cultural awareness near Chico, California.1 Fonseca is best known for his Coyote character, which he began depicting in 1972. In a serene acrylic from 1979, Coyote stands in the silence of falling snow as tall as the bare trees around him with contemplative, humanlike qualities. Some paintings and prints of Coyote sparkle with glitter, expressing Fonseca’s playful disregard for academic media.

This show featured drawings, watercolors, lithographs, screen prints, and acrylic paintings on paper, canvas, and Masonite. Fonseca also designed posters for exhibitions, music and film festivals, and casinos. Personal photo albums available to visitors in the first gallery made engagement with Fonseca’s life especially intimate. Here was the artist having margaritas on the hood of

a car in the desert, and hanging out with his friends Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Bob Haozous at the Grand Canyon or Santa Fe Indian Market. His sense of humor is reflected in these photos and in his art.

Beyond his own heritage, Fonseca was motivated to create through his study of petroglyphs, Mimbres pottery, opera and music, popular culture, Navajo Chief Blankets, and other art historical precedents from Sandro Botticelli to Jackson Pollock. Southwestern cultures influenced his work after a move from his native Sacramento to Santa Fe in 1979. In a controversial move, Pueblo Koshares appear, like Coyote, as contemporary trickster characters.

Fonseca’s use of gold paint and gold leaf in particular series conveys pointed meanings. In 1992 he made a small image in response to the devastating impact of the California gold rush on Indigenous populations. The artist channeled his anger into Gold & Souls, which has a black cross, symbolizing the supposed faith of prospectors, against a field of gold––their real god––and splatters of red, the blood of their victims. In a short recorded interview accompanying the exhibition, Fonseca shared that he initially intended to make only one painting, but his passion led him to create a series of 150.

Several years later Fonseca made large-scale mixed media works focusing on St. Francis of Assisi. In these, a dark silhouette appears to emerge from a sacred light. The artist shared in a 2005 interview with the museum that his interest in the historical figure was based on the fact that he had “transformed himself from a position of wealth to a simple person.”

Some viewers may see the paintings as religious, but for Fonseca they are about beautiful transformation.

A notable yet unacknowledged thread throughout Fonseca’s work is a celebration of his homosexuality. In Untitled (1983), Coyote sits playing a (phallic) flute, coquettishly hiding his large penis. In this particular iteration, viewers are more apt to focus on the cerulean sky and gestural qualities of the lines, leaving the sexual theme a footnote.

1. Jennifer Complo McNutt, ed., Harry Fonseca: The Art of Living (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2018), 8.

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above Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946–2006), The Harvest, 1980, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis. © Harry Fonseca Collection, Autry Museum of the American West.

By contrast, the phallus takes center stage in Fonseca’s paintings based on Mimbres pottery. The images in Fertility and Turtle (both undated) were directly appropriated from painted bowls currently in the collection of the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. Coyote is often escorted by a fictional female counterpart, Rose, whom the artist said was fashioned after liberated Indian women he knew. But occasionally Fonseca sketched a male coyote couple, casually strolling together in leather jackets. The importance of these autobiographical portraits is in their ordinariness.

Gold #2 (Mozart) and Mozart Requiem (both 2002) are elegant in their simplicity. Inspired by first phase Chief Blankets with horizontal bands and limited palettes, they are also reminiscent of Minimalist paintings by Frank Stella and Agnes Martin.

Harry Fonseca was recognized early in his career with solo exhibitions at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in 1983 and 1996. He was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship in 2005, at which time the museum acquired several works and recorded interviews with the artist. Unexpectedly, he walked

on the next year. The Art of Living and the inclusion of Fonseca’s works in many collections around the United States, as well as museums in Germany and Japan, give testament to a prolific creative career unconstrained by any particular medium or stylistic approach.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

LONDON, ON

From SkyWorld to Cyberspace McIntosh Gallery, Western University

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ADIATING with powerful pink energy, the exhibition From SkyWorld to Cyberspace envelops visitors into a nonaggressive, educational, femme, and transitory space. Blending URL, IRL, and science fiction with Indigenous Futurist near-realities or possible realities and ancestral knowledges, Skawennati is encouraging a rearticulation of the visualization of

the Haudenosaunee on Turtle Island and, specifically, the portrayal of Indigenous women within cultural activity and environments.

B orn to the Turtle Clan in Ka h naw à : ke Mohaw k Te r r itor y, Skawennati is based in Montreal, Quebec. Among many achievements, she codirects, with Jason Edward Lewis, Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), “a research network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Indigenous virtual environments.”1 Her artistic practice deals with metanarratives of conquest and Native realities on what is now known as North America.

These realities are an imagining of what the future holds for bodies of the Onkwehonwe (Indigenous peoples) and illustrate how contemporary art practitioners aid in the retelling of ceremonial oralities, including ancestral creation and spiritual stories passed down orally.

S k a w e n n a t i ’s m o s t r e c e n t exhibition, From SkyWorld to Cyberspace, was curated by Matthew Ryan Smith. This show was on display in the McIntosh Gallery, a classical structure built in 1942 and situated on the campus of Western University in London, Ontario, formally known as part of the area of land along the Askunessippi (Antlered River, now the Thames River).

The first image visitors encounter upon walking into the exhibition space is the large machinimagraph, a still image taken from a machinima game, of the Celestial Tree in Skawennati’s project She Falls for Ages (2017), an Indigenous Futurist world conceived, built, and shot on location in AbTeC Island in Second Life, an online virtual world. Machinima is a filmmaking and storytelling technique involving three-dimensional or virtually realistic environments, which Skawennati defines, and she is one of the leading practitioners. Relatable to photographic methods (e.g. portraiture, landscape, still-life, etc.), a machinimagraph is a still image taken from the virtually built environment of the machinima, or of its digital objects in cyberspace, and then produced IRL (in real life).

1. Skawennati, “She Falls For Ages,” Leonardo 51, no. 4 (2018): 431–31, via Project MUSE, web.

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above Skawennati (Mohawk), Celestial Tree: She Falls for Ages, 2017, machinimagraph on paper, 461/2 × 461/2 in.

Moving into the space of From SkyWorld to Cyberspace, we hear dialogue streaming on the left. Turning to look, we encounter xox Voyager, Skawennati’s avatar, virtually teaching an ancestral ceremony of the natural environment, speaking in English, French, and Kanien’kéha. In Words Before All Else, xox opens with “the first verse of the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen, the Haudenosaunee’s ‘Thanksgiving Address,’ a text … spoken at the opening and closing of all Haudenosaunee gathering.”2 Directly across from Words Before All Else, the three-part machinima (of six), hangs two images: a larger than life-size machinimagraph and a photograph of xox and of Skawennati in character as xox, titled Dancing With Myself (2015).

The diptych frames the entrance into an adjoining room, asking the visitor to move with and within, between the characterization of the artist in the retelling of Indigenous knowledges.

Once in the second room, after imaginary dancing with the avatar, I turn right to see She Falls for Ages playing on a monitor at the end of the room, and immediately my understanding of Indigenous knowledges shifted. A metamodern exercise in reconstructing how Indigenous peoples are imagined, the machinima is narrated by a female voice, who utilizes the beauty of translation to retell the Haudenosaunee creation story. Skawennati sets what was once considered by Euro-Canadians to be an ancient story stuck in the problematic “primitive” past, into a futuristic, science fiction environment. Furthermore, the narrator describes and translates Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) stories into English, influencing a recognition of how oral traditions can be discussed in new ways, revealing that not only do people move into the future but so do spiritual belief systems. They never stop growing,

2. “Screenings: Words Before All Else in the Digital Age,” Art Gallery of Ontario, 2018, web.

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shifting, and changing to benefit how future people envision and experience their worlds.

After watching the machinima, my first thought, humorously, was of the sticker that would be found on old VHS tapes, “Be Kind Please Rewind.” I then felt prompted to revisit the exhibition anew, or perhaps as a rewinding of how I first engaged with other objects in the space, and more importantly how Indigenous history is recognized. By returning, I found an overlooked sculptural work.

Generations of Play 3D (2017) is a collection of three dolls: the first made out of corn husk, the second an appropriated Barbie, and the third a 3D print. Each doll represents a figure in the archetypal story of the Three Sisters, in degrees of materiality, referencing the past, present, and future of female indigeneity.

One critique I have of the layout of the space is in how the viewer experiences the two machinimas. The monitor showing She Falls for Ages only offers one headset to visitors, while Words Before All Else is transmitted into the room.

Preferably, either multiple headsets would be available for viewing She Falls for Ages, or the sound could somehow be transmitted into the room but not interfere with the other. When I was revisiting the exhibition for this review, another gallery-goer was in the room with me and seemingly wanted to also watch the machinima. Unable to do so, she eventually walked away and left the gallery. Making more equipment available for accessible engagements with the work could have led to a possible discussion of how two strangers experienced the work together, providing a deeper, more nuanced educational experience.

Considering myself (a ginger Canadian of British and Australian descent) aware of the enduring subjugation of Indigenous peoples in our present day, I came to the realization that I continue to hold onto past Eurocentric and nostalgic visualizations of the first inhabitants of London, Ontario. These ideas and images are ingrained in my imagination by way of dated education and how the media continues to portray

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Native communities locally, provincially, and nationally. Being immersed with language and translation from the machinima works in Smith’s curated exhibition, I am inspired to further research the languages spoken in London, specifically Indigenous languages.

London is comprised of numerous multilingual communities, with the majority of First Nations residents speaking Oneida and Ojibwe languages.3 However, English is the predominant language of the area. Skawennati’s format of integrating the Mohawk language into once violently-forced English translations of ceremonial oralities, creates possibilities for English speakers to engage with important Indigenous realities, previously denied by law. The translation exercise also enables Native peoples without knowledge of the Mohawk language to consider how their own languages could be used in the retelling of fundamental creation stories, and how their languages are also inherently involved in the future.

This is my first attempt of integrating Indigenous terminology within a typically historical lens, an art exhibition review, and it is somewhat choppy. However, the necessity of utilizing Indigenous language when discussing contemporary art made by a Haudenosaunee artist represents the inspirational beauty of this exhibition and demonstrates the educational goals and successes of Skawennati’s work. Both aspects will inspire visitors to further their own knowledge of contemporary Native or Haudenosaunee cultural practices, by way of learning linguistic tendencies in storytelling.

In a perfect world without financial constraints, I would love to see She Falls for Ages playing against the walls in a translucent domelike structure situated within Western University’s tree garden.

This projection would further experiment with the transitions between the virtual and the real and could also reference the homes lived in by the characters— specifically the protagonist, Ancient Flower, who willingly transforms into Sky Woman.

—Jennifer Lorraine Fraser 3. “London Census Fact Sheet 6: Indigenous Peoples, City of London,” 2016, Statistics Canada released October 25, 2017, web.

LONG ISLAND CITY, NY

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Surviving Active Shooter Custer MoMA PS1

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OCK E AYE VI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS: Surviving Active Shooter Custer, curated by Ruba Katrib, is a triumphant solo exhibition by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne) at MoMA PS1 through September 2. Surviving Active Shooter Custer demonstrates that Heap of Birds is highly capable of sharing ground with fellow global contemporary artists. The exhibition’s title refers to the controversial 19th-century American military leader General George Armstrong Custer, who in 1868 slaughtered many inhabitants of a peaceful Cheyenne community on the Washita River in Oklahoma.1 This episode of sudden, unprovoked violence is akin to the modern terror of active shooters. Heap of Birds invites viewers to remember this history rather than Custer’s death at Little Bighorn, which made him a martyr to many.

Scattered through the museum— upstairs and near the chalkboard museum map downstairs—are aluminum

signs from Heap of Birds’s Trail of Tears (2005). These simple text works, which aesthetically resemble directional signs, are inscribed with subversive messages related to the 1830s Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokee and other Native peoples from the Southeast United States to Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma. Heap of Birds is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, also forcibly removed to Oklahoma, giving him a place-based connection to this history. Trail of Tears invites viewers to think about this historical event rather than directing their movement. This technique of placing single works by an artist far from the artist’s main exhibition is frequently employed by MoMA PS1 curators. For this exhibition, the curatorial choice serves to indigenize a space that has been extremely global but has not shown many Native American artists. Individual signs from Trail of Tears ask, “DO YOU CHOOSE TO WALK” and “WERE YOU FORCED TO WALK,” thus viewers can consider their movements in the museum in relation to forced movements of Native Americans over time, including—but not limited to—Indian Removal.

Trails of Tears draws us into an exhibition that is quite distinct from the handmade, painterly aesthetic of the rest of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Surviving Active Shooter Custer. The exhibition is in three rooms. Viewers

above Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne), installation view of Health of the People is the Highest Law, 2019, monotype installation, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

1. This Day in History, “November 27, 1868: Custer massacres Cheyenne on Washita River,” History, February 25, 2019, web

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enter a large central room and have the option of going left, right, or straight ahead. The clean, white cube galleries seem full despite the limited number of works. The five pieces on view are made of many small works, which accumulate to take up physical and conceptual space.

The restraint of these large, all text-based yet gestural works is a compelling argument for the inclusion of more Native American artists in MoMA PS1. Heap of Birds’s practice is unique, but he is not the only Native American artist who makes highly skilled, contemporary art informed by his history and background. Surviving Active Shooter Custer fits into the space, follows the requisite format, and stuns.

Also on view is Karrabing Film Collective, an exhibition of films by the Karrabing Film Collective, an Aboriginal Australian group based in the Northern Territory. Like Heap of Birds’s work, this exhibition provides an example of Indigenous artists excelling in media of current art informed by intergenerational community knowledge and an Indigenous perspective.

Heap of Birds’s American Policy II (1987), at the center of the exhibition, is a large, colorful piece of 15 individual drawings on rag paper. Graphic and scrawling, this text art piece anchors the exhibition and creates the impression that his later work sprouted from this early work. The center drawing, “RELOCATE DESTROY,” ties back to the title of the exhibition and Heap of Bird’s tendency to embed his works with provocative captions.

The two pieces to either side of this work, Blue Tree (2005–17) and Genocide and Democracy (2016) represent a relatively newer, consistent mode of Heap of Birds’s work: monoprints. Blue Tree, according to the artist, is a more personal work, with several individual pieces relating to the domestic. Indeed, its references to food and self are distinctive from the two works in the left and right galleries. Blue Tree is also a testament to the meticulousness with which he preserves his own art, as the pieces all appear in uniformly pristine condition although some were made two years ago and others 14 years ago. Upon close viewing, Heap of Birds’s exploration of the text monoprint form is exceptional.

Each individual sheet of paper with its

distinctive coloring and text presents an idea expressed as a short phrase or poem and a painting, a set of unique gestures made by the artist. In each of the five works, viewers are provided with insight into the artist’s drive to reflect on the history of the United States from a Native perspective. Most of the pieces, if read left to right and top to bottom, end on a positive note, including Genocide and Democracy. Its bottom right piece reads, “NATIVES SURVIVE IN SPITE OF THE EMPIRE.” The side galleries present one large Heap of Birds work each—a massive, scrawling grid of monoprints and a companion “ghost print,” the faint images created from reprinting the monoprint.

Surviving Active Shooter Custer (2018) and Health of the People is the Highest Law (2019) each take up two of the four walls of their respective galleries yet fill them entirely. The sizable viewing spaces evoked for me the experience of entering a Mark Rothko room, with benches for taking in a few immense, hazy, glowing works by the late Abstract Expressionist. The presence of shades of red and orange may have lent this impression. Just as likely is that the well-placed bench and evocative text of individual monoprints in these works invites contemplation, slowing down.

Each monoprint has its own seemingly distinct shade with drips, watermarks, and distinctions in the letters, only making them more sensorial. It is difficult to imagine a more conventional way to hang these works, harder still to imagine a more effective way to display them. They appeal to both emotion—the affective response to a pleasing, overwhelming object—and thought: read these phrases and think what they could mean, individually and together.

Health of the People is the Highest Law takes its title from the bottom-right monoprint of the piece, which serves as a reminder and a warning. Individual monoprints point to issues that disproportionately affect Native Americans, such as intimate partner violence, liver failure, suicide, and diabetes. It is a standout of the exhibition for its specificity and universality. Many people in 2019 fear “DEATH FROM THE UNDER FUNDED SERVICES” especially when it

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comes to health care, or experiences of “ANXIETY FEAR QUIET TRAP ALONE DISORDER” in some combination.

The challenging and confrontational aspects of Heap of Birds’s artistic practice remain cautiously hopeful through his reminders such as “Health of the People is the Highest Law.” Perhaps by heeding this advice, we too can survive the active shooters of continued colonialism.

—Marina Tyquiengco

MINNEAPOLIS, MN

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists Minneapolis Institute of Art

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T THE CORE of Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a traveling exhibition that opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), is a revolutionary and logical premise: that women have made up an essential and unrecognized backbone in the production of Native art and material culture both historically and today. Organized by Mia’s associate curator of Native American art Jill Ahlberg Yohe and independent curator Teri Greeves (Kiowa), a Santa Fe–based beadwork artist, the show is presented by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and was put together with an advisory panel of 21 women, including Native artists and Native and non-Native scholars.

The exhibition is wildly diverse, illustrating in its multifariousness the distinct Native artistic practices from all parts of Canada and the United States.

Viewers would be hard-pressed to find one through line. Instead, a better way to see the show is to appreciate its variety of outstanding objects.

Among the showstoppers are two immersive installation bookends, framing the exhibition: Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota artist Mona M. Smith’s audiovisual acknowledgment of the Dakota land where Mia sits, via projection of moving water and land visitors walk through to

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enter the exhibition along with a video of Dakota speakers, and Kwakwaka’wakw artist Marianne Nicolson’s stunning Bax’wana’tsi: The Container for Souls (2006), an intimate play of light and shadows.

Another installation by Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan), Idiot Strings: The Things We Carry, marks the halfway point through the exhibition.

The sacs made from natural materials that hang from the ceiling look like condoms growing on vines. A meditation on trauma and secrets, the work is both achingly beautiful and deeply disturbing.

Zoë Urness’s (Tlingit) extraordinary digital photograph, December 5, 2016: No Spiritual Surrender (2016) is another highlight. Featuring Native US veterans trenching through the snow in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, the photograph depicts a striking scene, as its central figure dons a gas mask while clenching an American flag. The red of the American flag mirrors the red of tribal flags waving behind it, and the robe of another veteran in the group.

As you enter the gallery where Urness’s photograph is hung, you see it reflected by a glass case surrounding a robe made from a buffalo hide from the last buffalo hunt at Standing Rock in 1883.

The refraction creates an illusion that the photograph surrounds the viewer. As heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw), curator at the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (AICCM), deftly put it: “The wall is filled with an army overlooking that robe. It creates a sense of awe and delight to have our ancestors standing there.”

Hearts of Our People does a good job connecting the ways in which artists from generations past influence Native women artists creating work now. Perhaps this is most clearly seen in the work of artists employing artistic practices that have been passed down by family and tribal members, or who sought to reclaim such knowledge to use in their work.

The late Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1957–2018), for example, learned to weave double-woven Cherokee baskets and pushed the form in bold directions—often juxtaposing it with

above Unknown Innu artist, Hunting Coat, ca. 1750, caribou hide, pigment, collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Robert J. Ulrich Works of Art Purchase Fund 2012.27.

photography and other artistic disciplines.

In Hearts of Our Women (2015), Goshorn incorporates historical photographs of Native women on the outside of ten small paper baskets. On the interior of the baskets, you can see the names of the women, which Goshorn crowdsourced as part of her research—because so often in historical photographs, Native women were not named.

Other artists in the show reference the aesthetics of craft through the lens of abstraction and new media. For example, Sicangu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk’s acrylic painting Untitled: Quiet Strength I (2016) replicates the pattern and shape of porcupine quillwork. While Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s (Seneca-Cayuga) video of virtual reality patterns, 3D Beadwork (selections) (2018), creates a captivating experience of moving image, with beading practices as its source.

Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo descent) memorably pays homage to the black-on-black pottery style developed by San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso, 1887–1980) in the early 20th century, with Maria (2014). The intricately customized 1985 Chevy El Camino greets visitors before they enter the exhibition, adjacent to an example of one of Martinez’s works, Storage Jar (1940), made collaboratively

with her husband, Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso, 1879–1943). Simpson adorns both the interior and the exterior of the car in Martinez’s style and with Pueblo designs, paying tribute to her legacy.

Sleek and powerful, Maria also speaks to an alternative narrative about femininity and, in particular, what femininity means in the context of Native art. Simpson’s piece doesn’t confine the feminine to stereotype. Rather, this feminist vision is fast, revved up, and ready to take on the open road.

A few other moments in the exhibition offer similar challenges to mainstream notions of what a Native woman is supposed to be. Such as the inclusion of mask work by Northwest Coast artists Ellen Neel (Kwakwaka’wakw, 1916–1966) with Cedar Mask (1950) and Freda Diesing’s (Haida, 1925–2002) Old Woman with Labret (1974). Both women pursued carving careers despite being told by non-Native anthropologists that woodcarving was exclusively a male activity.

The exhibition also features Storage Jar (180–1880) by Arroh-ah-och (Laguna, c. 1830–c. 1900), a man-woman artist.

Arroh-a-och’s presence in the exhibition is an important inclusion of two-spirit people within Native communities, even if it is just one historical example.

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Unfortunately, this show lacks any works by living transgender (two-spirit) artists, whose contributions are an important element of an intersectional feminist future.

Still, there are other ways that Hearts of Our People chips away at monolithic notions of Native women artists, and it does this partly by showing the complex aesthetic evolution of Native artists across generations. The exhibition includes not only many contemporary artists making work today, but artists from generations past who also used innovation and transformation, drawing on Native cultural practices, as well as settler techniques and media. Chair with Quillwork Panels (1890), by an unknown Mi’kmaq artist, showcases masterful intricacy in the panels, while the chair beautifully incorporates a command of Victorian period furniture design.

Other ar tists, like Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), and Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota), navigate issues relevant to Native communities and artists, but through the tools of contemporary art. In a market where 85 percent of art in museums is by white artists and 87 percent is by male artists (according to artist and data journalist Mona Chalabi),1 these are artists who should be seen not just in Native-specific shows but more broadly.

Hearts of Our People at times seems almost too packed. Works by artists like Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) and Faye HeavyShield (Kainai) need a bit more breathing room in the gallery spaces. Heid Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) video with Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe) and Margaret Noodin (Ojibwe descent), could have used a separate room to create a more immersive experience. But these are good problems to have. With such an abundance of Native women artists to choose from, here’s hoping that mainstream museums across North America will pick up where this show leaves off.

—Sheila Regan 1. Mona Chalabi, “Museum art collections are very male and very white,” The Guardian (May 21, 2019), web.

OTTAWA, ON

Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth Carleton University Art Gallery

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URROUNDED BY THE ARTWORKS of Christi Belcourt (Métis) and Isaac Murdoch (Serpent River Ojibwe), I felt moved. It is hard to pin down the feeling that took me. Perhaps it is because of the humility, hope, generosity of spirit, and resiliency of the artists and artworks.

Large and small paintings and a series of silkscreen-printed banners make visible the importance of Belcourt’s artistic contributions to the conversation around Métis art and identity, affirming Indigenous rights, water activism, and all our relations on Turtle Island. Belcourt is an artist/activist and, with her collaborator Murdoch, is leading the resurgence of Indigenous advocacy through artwork, storytelling, and community building.

Belcourt’s work unites with the 21st century the iconography and visual knowledges and beyond of Métis women’s glass seed beading, silk embroidery, porcupine quillwork, and moosehair tufting. Belcourt’s style of painting reads visually like beadwork on canvas.

Thousands of dots form the intricate compositions that require hundreds of hours to complete.

This technique brings the visual vocabulary of 19th-century Métis artworks into current representation of the many branches of Métis throughout Turtle Island. This Painting is a Mirror (2012) uses a near-symmetrical composition of flora and fauna, including blue jays, hummingbirds, and robins. Two golden bees hover below the ruby-throated hummingbirds, and below them two more bees crawl over the green fern leaves near the center of the image.

The black background reminds me of the usage of black velvet by 19th-century Métis artisans. It makes the white tendrils

of the plants’ roots—as well as the variety of blues, pinks, reds, and greens—almost levitate off the canvas and surround the viewer, encompassing them in the world of other-than-human relations. The plants portrayed are medicinal and used in healing.1 A few weeks ago I stood in the McCord Museum surrounded by Métis, First Nations, and Inuit cultural belongings: dogsled carriers, chatelaine bags, finely quilled maple syrup baskets, and beaded baby carriers. I saw many beautiful things with a fine amount of care and precision in the making. Some of the cultural belongings we might identify as classic Métis style from what art historian Ted Brasser first identified in 1985 as the golden age of the Métis design.2 When we think of historic Métis art, we generally think about floral beadwork on black velvet and all the relations and all the care that informed Métis women’s lives and their making. With many of the museum pieces defined as Métis, the women makers remain unidentified—and overlooked.

This is a problem for current historians of Native American art but also kin relations who want to reclaim material things from their ancestors. This reclamation could potentially forge new understandings for future Métis generations.3 Resilience of the Flower Beadwork People (1999) and What the Sturgeon Told Me (2007) call to mind my Métis brothers and sisters spending time in the bush, the way Métis people live on the land, and the way fish support us. I remember the sound like crackles of electricity, the water swirling over the rocks as my mom tells me a story about the salmon. They come up the rivers around us and dig a nest with their tails in the sandy riverbank, preparing a nest for the females to lay eggs, and for them this is the last thing they will do. Salmon do so much for us, but what do we do for them?

The inclusion of inspirational phrases in Anishinaabemowin and English throughout the gallery reminds us of the ongoing process of reclaiming language for the growth and support

1. Christi Belcourt, Medicines to Help Us: Traditional Métis Plant Use: Study Prints and Resource Guide, trans. Rita Flamand and Laura Burnouf (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2007).

2. Ted Brasser, “In Search of Métis Art,” in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, ed.

Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 222–30.

3. Sherry Farrell Racette, “Beads, Silk and Quills: The Clothing and Decorative Arts of the Métis,” in Métis Legacy, ed. Lawrence Barkwell, Leah Dorion, and Darren Prefontaine (Winnipeg: Pemmican Press and Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2001), 181–88.

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above Christi Belcourt (Métis), What the Sturgeon Told Me, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 48 in.

of Indigenous identities, and the many relations the Métis have with Anishinaabe and Cree nations. The waterways especially connect us. View from the Canoe #2 (2007), composed of undulating circles painted in robin’s egg blue, floating on the water’s surface with bead-like rivulets of turquoise, light blue, green, and yellow, highlights the importance of the waterways that connected Métis, Anishinaabe, Cree, and other communities throughout the Great Lakes. The Métis traveled by canoe in the waterways throughout Turtle Island.

This painting speaks to the strength of the voyagers and the importance of canoeing in contemporary activities at Métis and other Indigenous gatherings.5 The Métis struggle for recognition and acceptance within society continues beyond the prophecy of Louis Riel (Métis, 1844–1885): “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.”5 Belcourt does not back away from the hardships that Métis people have faced in acknowledging the complexity of having Indigenous and

settler identities, as she provocatively presents in Bloodletting: Does This Make You More Comfortable With Who I Am? (2004). The composition features a woman with four thick rivulets of blood on her brown-skinned arm dripping into a bowl on her lap. This image brings to mind how divisive discussions of blood can be for Indigenous people of mixed ancestry and within Indigenous communities today as governments uphold proscriptive frameworks of Indigenous identities.

One side of her face is illuminated, and the other side is in shadow—recalling how Métis, Inuit and First Nations need recognition and acceptance in society beyond colonial settler frameworks.

The second room of the exhibition showcased Belcourt and Murdoch’s water and land protector banners made to honor the lands of Turtle Island and for Indigenous activists to use in their ongoing resistance to resource extraction.

One painting, Revolution of Love (2018), a 15-foot canvas recalling the legacy of history paintings, presents Indigenous women as history makers. Electric blue silhouettes the figures like a power line on Thunderbird bags of ancient times.

4. Gloria Jane Bell, “Voyageur Re-presentations and Complications: Frances Anne Hopkins and the Métis Nation of Ontario,” Wíčazo Sa Review 28, no. 1 (2013): 100–18.

5. Virginia Gluska, “The Meeting of Four Strings and a Bow,” Our Schools, Our Selves 21, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 103.

Riel was a Métis leader who was executed by the Canadian government as treasonous for the fight to have Métis people and their lands acknowledged by the Canadian state in 1885. His prophecy continues to inspire many Indigenous artists around the world.

The full moon illuminates a scene portraying the strength of matriarchal societies and the way Indigenous women come together to protect Mother Earth.

Like the paintings that reference Métis beadwork, the history/activist paintings present Indigenous communities in their ceaseless protection of water, a reminder that women are the first environment, and what we need is a revolution of love.

—Gloria Bell, PhD (Métis)

RENO, NV

See Her: New Works

by Dyani White Hawk Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno

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EE HER is an exhibition that rewards close looking. Comprised of eleven new works by Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), the show grows out of over five years of conversations between White Hawk and Paul Baker Prindle, director of the Lilley Museum of Art at University of Nevada, Reno. See Her gives viewers an exciting window on how White Hawk is building from the rich foundations of her previous work to pursue new aesthetic and interpretive directions.

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above Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), She Gives (Quiet Strength IV), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in.

The first thing visitors may notice when they enter the exhibition on the first floor of the Lilley is an absence: there is no wall text to introduce the theme of the show. Instead, visitors will find a stack of statements from Dyani White Hawk on a bench near the entrance.

The two-page statement outlines White Hawk’s vision for the exhibition and for this body of work as a whole. Wall texts, too, are minimal, providing just the title, date, and collection. This lack of curatorial authority allows viewers direct access to both the artworks and artist, a refreshing and candid presentation for striking new works. The accompanying catalogue of essays with contributions by diverse authors, including Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota),

Robert Cozzolino, and Caroline Kent, among many others, make the show an even more meaningful experience.

Paintings from White Hawk’s Quiet Strength series command the first part of the exhibition, and here viewers are first encouraged to look closely. Seen from a distance, these large-scale works consist of overlaying patterns, with triangles, lines, and waves dominating the visual plane. From up close, however, the paintings change. The patterns consist of thousands of tiny lines painted in rows, each an inch or so wide, painted to mimic lane-stitch beadwork or quillwork. The lines are painted on a gold background, just visible between. This background, as Cozzolino notes in his catalogue essay, brings to mind religious European works

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designed to transport viewers to heavenly or otherworldly space. Visually, the gold, copper, and bronze backgrounds on works throughout the show add depth and presence, catching the light and shifting with the angle of sight. The lines making up the foreground of the Quiet Strength series are also multilayered, carefully built-up strokes rather than quick dashes, created using a variety of colors that emerge only with proximity.

The layering of gold and color and the repetitive but organic pattern create a surface that seems to shimmer and shift. The size of this series enhances the effect: to stand close to a work in the Quiet Strength series is to be immersed in movement and energy. It is a disorienting experience, both orderly and unsound.

This fluid approach to spatial consistency and the feeling of depth and movement created by layers of color and texture is something shared by many works in the show. Moving further into the space, viewers are confronted with two smaller canvases, both 18 by 18 inches, each dominated by a rounded shape, taller than it is wide. These shapes may reference earlier works by White Hawk in which she uses an abstracted moccasin shape to refer to Native identity and art making practices. Supporting this idea is the beadwork: each shape is divided into horizontal bands covered with seed and bugle beads, which catch the light and make the shapes glitter as the viewer changes position. The horizontal bands complicate space rather than clarifying it. Like many others in the exhibition, these works are evidence of White Hawk’s interest in marrying the artistic practice of abstraction with Indigenous methods and themes—or rather, as White Hawk explains and Cozzolino and Kent explicate, of acknowledging the Indigenous source material of many mainstream abstract artists and, as Kent writes, embedding Native signifiers “into and alongside seemingly modern geometric forms and lines.”

Throughout See Her, the variety of line and depth of color keep these works from feeling repetitive. Instead, each

work is a revelation, with details that jump out upon close inspection. For example, a surface that appears to be black from a distance, is up close a shimmering mass of dusky purple and maroon bugle beads. Bisected by textural golden paintwork, the beads seem to undulate, straining against the formal grid in which they are arranged. On the back wall, Untitled—Black and Gold (2018) uses a familiar rounded shape in vibrant blacks and golds. In this work White Hawk seems to revel in contrasts, alternating smooth and twisted bugle beads, matte and glossy black tones, straight and curvilinear lines. The golden bugle beads, interspersed throughout the central motif, are spaced unevenly but with balance. Viewers may find themselves looking for patterns, as if they refer to a language that we could, with enough concentration, perhaps read.

The accumulated marks of these works create a feeling of movement and depth and complicate our understanding of space. The layering of color and media makes it hard to tell where we stand as viewers—and this, perhaps, is part of the point. In the artist statement accompanying the exhibition, White Hawk explains that these works are a product of shared stories, that Indigenous and colonialist art histories are now inseparable, and this work is meant to push against hierarchies of value that elevate some types of art while devaluing others. Cozzolino expands on this in his catalogue essay, explaining that the mainstream modernist artistic practices White Hawk references have often excluded Native voices.

White Hawk’s use of, and reference to, Lakota artistic practices in precious metals and oil paint—media historically associated with “high” European art—invites conversation about how the audience values art. The combination of materials, techniques, and motifs in White Hawk’s works demonstrate shared artistic legacies and situate the viewer between influences and ideas that are not easily separated. They make us wonder, finally, how to move our shared artistic story forward into the future.

The materials, in particular, point to this show’s focus on the resilience and artistry of Native women.

In her statement, White Hawk clarifies that this work reflects a “female, mixed heritage, Lakota identity,” and she hopes the exhibition encourages audiences to see and acknowledge Indigenous women. Although the stated theme of the show, this is clearly just part of the broader potential of this body of work.

White Hawk also promotes the idea of shared stories and reexamined histories, of honoring Native peoples, immigrants, and the earth. In her statement, she writes, “See your place in this web; think about your family history and labor to recognize our relatedness.” Different but related, collective but unique, her exhortations recall the lines of paint and beads that march steadfastly across the canvases of See Her. —Caitlin Earley

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BOOK REVIEW Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks Emily L. Moore University of Washington Press, 2018

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MILY MOORE’S BOOK, Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks, reframes the long-neglected Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) totem pole parks of Southeast Alaska as centers of artistic and cultural significance. The federally funded CCC program in Alaska ran from 1938 to 1942, selecting totem poles and clan houses from historic Tlingit and Kaigani Haida villages to be restored or reproduced by community-based teams of Alaska Native artists and installed in European-style parks. Moore has created an engrossing text that skillfully weaves prose, archival photographs, letters, and interviews with CCC artists and their descendants into a resource that tells a compelling story rich in ethnographic detail and historic interest.

Alaska’s New Deal totem parks have often been dismissed by anthropologists and art historians as collections of crude copies of 19th century “original” Tlingit and Kaigani Haida totem poles, too compromised by poor artistry and government involvement to merit serious consideration. Moore addresses these misconceptions by examining the totem parks within the contexts of Alaska Native–US government tensions and relations, the struggle for land, and the broader framework of 20th-century Northwest Coast Indigenous art continuity.

Through letters and journal entries, Moore clearly illustrates the divergent motivations of the US Forest Service and Tlingit and Kaigani Haida clans for participating in the creation of the totem parks, the former seeking to preserve and restore sculptural monuments that could serve as the basis of a national American art form, the latter to reaffirm hereditary prerogatives to land, resources, and connections to ancestors. Through these fundamental differences in positionality, Moore’s defense of the New Deal totem parks as centers of cultural importance and artistic achievement takes shape.

One of the most significant contributions of Proud Raven, Panting Wolf is that it reasserts the agency of the Alaska Native people who participated in the CCC program. By considering the negotiations, compromises, and conflicts that arose from the CCC’s implementation through a Tlingit and Haida cultural lens, Moore is able to paint a clear picture of the interactions between the non-Native administrators and the Native artists and owners of the poles.

The book particularly focuses on three head carvers of the CCC program: John Wallace (Kaigani Haida, ca.1850s–1950), Charles Brown (Tlingit, 1899–1970), and George Benson (Tlingit, 1900–1986). Wallace was the son of 19th-century Kaigani Haida master carver gid k’wáajuus (1822–1913) and

had worked on monumental poles with his father; he was also commissioned by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the US Department of the Interior prior to his involvement with the CCC program. Although Wallace was the most experienced carver and arguably accustomed to creating art for non-Native consumption, it is revealed in chapter 4 that he often clashed with Forest Service administrators over creative freedom and what constitutes a true “copy” of a totem pole. Brown didn’t have the extensive artistic background of Wallace, but he developed his carving skills quickly and was knowledgeable of clan histories and Tlingit law.

Brown frequently collaborated in this period with anthropologist Viola Garfield, providing much of the cultural knowledge that would become the book The Wolf and the Raven: Totem Poles of Southeastern Alaska (1948),1 even though Brown’s name was omitted as an author from the final printed version. Moore has in some way corrected this disservice by underscoring Brown’s original co-authorship status with the Wolf and Raven text and his central involvement with the New Deal totem parks project beyond just his role as an artist.

The other master carver that Moore examines in depth is Benson, who carried on as a professional artist for several decades after the closing of the CCC totem project. Benson participated in other federal Native art programs with the US Parks Service and Indian Arts and Crafts Board throughout the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a key figure in the resurgence of Tlingit and Haida art from his hometown in Sitka, Alaska.

A stated goal of Moore for Proud Raven, Panting Wolf is to reconsider the artistic value of the poles produced through the CCC and to defend the makers and totem parks themselves as important contributors to the mid-20th century revitalization of Northwest Coast art. By exploring the lives of these Native artists

1. Viola E. Garfield and Linn A. Forrest [and Charles Brown], The Wolf and the Raven: Totem Poles of Southeastern Alaska (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1948).

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Tlingit and Haida artists creating objects for cultural use have significant latitude for creative expression … and detailing their achievements, Moore succeeds in highlighting the merit and artistry of the totem park program and its importance in understanding the trajectory of 20th-century Alaska Native art.

What sets Proud Raven, Panting Wolf apart from other books that have discussed Alaska’s New Deal totem parks is the sensitivity to Tlingit and Haida law that Moore brings to the text. Rather than a critical aesthetic analysis of the poles or judgments on how closely the CCC iterations adhered to the “original” carvings that were replicated, Moore considers what ontological factors might account for perceived divergences in appearance, and what the artists themselves might have understood “copy” to mean. On page 31, Moore ties the differing conceptions of replication between the Forest Service officials and the Native totem carvers to Tlingit and Haida worldviews that inform a

“multidirectional view of ancestors and heritage.” In practice, this multidirectional view means that Tlingit and Haida artists creating objects for cultural use have significant latitude for creative expression, so long as the crest or story needed by the commissioning clan is depicted. In other words, the finished product does not need to be identical to its predecessor.

Later, on page 50, Moore coins the terms regenerative replication and preservative replication to differentiate between the types of copies that Native artists customarily make and the types of copies the program administrators were expecting. Deceptively simple, these terms respectively refer to the Indigenous viewpoint that objects such as totem poles are impermanent representations of eternal, inalienable prerogatives that do not have to be physically identical to their successive incarnations to be effective, and the contrary perspective of the Forest

Service administrators that physical appearance and aesthetic duplication are essential to a successful copy. As the whole CCC project was predicated on the replication of heraldic totem poles by Native artists to the satisfaction of Forest Service officials, Moore’s insights into these different expectations make clear the inherent conflicts within the very premise of Alaska’s New Deal totem parks project.

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks is a marvelous contribution to the growing corpus of research on mid-20th century Northwest Coast art. Packed with excellent storytelling, rich theory, and compelling historical details, this volume is an outstanding resource for collectors, artists, and scholars alike and will be an essential addition to any library on Northwest Coast or Alaska Native art.

—Christopher W. Smith

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Poet and Indigenous Rights Activist

SUZAN SHOWN HARJO

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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U Z A N S H O W N HA R J O (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee), born in El Reno, Oklahoma, lives and works in Washington, DC. A poet, writer, curator, and activist, she has shaped Indigenous policies in the United States for more than 50 years.

In New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she directed the drama and literature department and coproduced the biweekly radio show for WBAI-FM, Seeing Red. While in New York, Harjo also directed and acted in theater companies and independent productions. In 1965, after encountering displays of human remains, funerary clothing, and other sacred items while visiting the Museum of the American Indian with her mother, Harjo began to focus on reforming museums and returning ancestors and sacred objects to Native nations.

In 1 9 7 4 , Ha r j o m ov e d t o Washington, DC, to serve as news director of the American Indian Press Association and soon moved into legislative advocacy with the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest national Indian organization, for which she served as executive director in the 1980s. She helped shape President Jimmy Carter’s Native legislative agenda during his 1976/1977 campaign and transition. As a political appointee in the Carter Administration, she coordinated and documented the policy review of more than 50 agencies and was principal author of the 1979 President’s Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom. She also was legislative liaison for the Native American Rights Fund and the Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson law firm.

As a spokesperson and advocate, Harjo has appeared on national television and radio networks and programs,

MRS: You first published a poem in an Italian journal at twelve years of age.

Why did you turn to poetry as a child?

including twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and has been a longstanding columnist for Indian Country Today. The first Native woman Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, she was awarded the Institute of American Indian Arts’ 2011 honorary doctorate of humanities degree.

Harjo serves as the president of the Morning Star Institute, which organizes the Just Good Sports project and the annual National Prayer Day for Sacred Places. A founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, she was guest curator for its exhibition and editor for the accompanying catalogue, Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations. In 2014 she received the nation’s highest civilian honor from President Barack Obama, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Harjo has helped Native peoples to recover more than one million acres of Indigenous territory. In addition to these accomplishments, she continues to compose poetry.

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SSH: I started writing poems as my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were teaching me to sing, read, write, and recite/relate history. Different kinds of writing reflect distinct experiences and facets of a person, and some simply want to write themselves as poems. When I was eleven, I won a contest to write lyrics for the school song to music by Sra. DiGiovanni, the music instructor, who admired one of my poems, and soon after that an Italian magazine published it.

Those two things were super important, because I was not only in a new home and new school, but in a new world: Napoli, Italia, where Dad was with the US Army, attached to NATO. My younger twin brothers and I went from Muscogee farmland between Beggs and Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to one of the biggest port cities on the globe, where people were dropping in the streets from an Asian flu epidemic, and a smoking volcano was just across the bay, and who knew when that might erupt again. The countryside in both places was the same, beautiful, and I became part of the bay and ocean. But, as good as it was to be with our parents again, we missed home with our grandparents and extended families in both eastern and western Oklahoma. The Italianos I met were warm and friendly, more like our peoples than like white Americans, and there were no signs that read, “No Indians or Dogs Allowed.” It was socially, artistically, politically, and physically liberating, first of all because I wasn’t being beat up or called names or looked down on for being Native. Winning the contest and having a poem in a magazine lifted me up from lowly seventh grade-ness. Some

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cool kids in high school wanted to know me, and I got to meet actual writers, artists, and musicians. It was the most empowering culture shock ever, and it’s no wonder writing poetry to me still feels both safe and exciting, even if I sometimes feel like a little kid at the grown-ups’ table.

MRS: How do you reconcile the complex relationship between oral histories and poetry in your work?

SSH: Most of my poems are oral history, even if they are in my own words, and—no matter how poetic they may be—because they are about things original to and with me. Some of the history and laws I’ve made and helped to make are recorded one way for the act of doing and another for the act of making art—although I do like slipping poetry into legalese and history talk. Some of the hard work and hard subjects involved in change cry out for treatment in another form.

MRS: In 1975 you were one of 20 women, including Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni, to be featured at the event “Women/Voices at Town Hall” in New York. There you wrote and read “gathering rites,” a poem where you examine “some ways Native women have of being in the world.” Since then, you’ve recited the work on the west steps of the US Capitol and 2002’s Ladyfest DC in Washington, DC. I’m curious to know how you feel about that seminal poem nearly 45 years after its creation and how it changes for you each time you recite it.

SSH: When I look back on “gathering rites” or any poem I still like, I say to myself, look how much you knew or used to know or need to know to write about something; in this case, sweeping as women’s work. I want readers and listeners to think about the wide range of women’s jobs and skills and to shake the snobbish and stereotypical views about what is “professional work.” What strikes me is how little things have changed in our Native world and how so many non-Natives continue to view us in pejorative, one-dimensional terms, both as Native women and Native peoples.

MRS: How has your engagement in politics changed your approach to writing over the past several decades?

SSH: While I am enthralled with the history-changing potential and reality of policymaking and the political process, I’m always dismayed at the dishonesty, self-aggrandizement, and the stipulated truth that passes for legislative history, in the legal sense, or any kind of history, in common sense. At the end of a long

above Suzan Shown and Frank Harjo, 1972.

Image courtesy of the author. opposite Suzan Shown Harjo. Photo: A. Meredith.

process, which always is the product of work by a multitude of people and not just by a named few, so much cannot or must not be said, at least not for a very long time, that it is quite the relief to write about what led up to the law, without even referencing law, and in the form of standalone poems. It gets me back to the reasons for undertaking the custodial duty of policymaking in the first place or at all.

MRS: Is writing poetry a political act?

Is there something powerful in poetry?

SSH: Poetry is received and learned and remembered as music. It’s a heart thing. It’s something a person can keep in her/his pocket and use later or just know it’s there. Because it’s part of the beating life force, it’s catalogued according to emotion and can be called

up at a moment’s notice. It’s a political act because it involves … the people. A poem is written for another person or persons to read or hear, even if that person is one’s own older or younger self.

Some poems I write are for people who need to read something to others or need to have a way to articulate what they are feeling—to express what they are experiencing. I love that so many Native newspapers printed my 1991/92 poem, “jumping thru the hoops of history,” and that so many Native people read parts or all of it at Indigenous Peoples’ Day events and Columbus Quincentenary talkbacks.

I saw it read by Ysleta del Sur Pueblo children from under-fives to older teens.

Each held a candle and recited a single line as their beautiful faces were illuminated by the setting sun and candlelight, and I heard them rewriting my words and infusing them with new meaning.

I had been spurred to write that poem because of the continuously high rate of Native teenage suicide, and I wanted to give as many kids as possible as many reasons as I could for them not to feel bad about themselves or not to think their lives were worthless—putting the message, “It’s not your fault” into poetic form that, in its own singsongy way, could taunt those who tried to make our children and grandchildren think they were to blame. That evening in El Paso at dusk, I heard Native children saying, “It’s not my fault” and “Look at all the adult, learned, and holy people who did these terrible things to our world,” and “You’re not going to blame me or make me feel bad about myself.” Talk about a heart thing!

MRS: Likewise, is writing poetry a spiritual or perhaps even religious event or practice?

SSH: Some poems are physical and tap you on the shoulder or grab you by the throat to get you to write them. Some are magical and come to you in a dream or a vision or a sudden realization. Some are spiritual and come to you as prayer. All these forms are inspiration—the rest is the hard work of putting one word after, before, and with another. And, often the reader or listener cannot tell what the SUMMER 2019 | 97

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above Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche), National Museum of the American Indian director, and Suzan Shown Harjo at a Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations catalogue signing, 2014. Image courtesy of the US National Archives.

inspiration was, because the form it takes is so different. With others, there’s no disguising the inspiration or impetus no matter how many ways it’s masked.

M R S : In 2 0 0 4 , you pre s ente d Repatriation Laws and Policies: An Oral History Poetry Collection. Why that collection of poetry at that point in time?

SSH: In the early 2000s, Richard M. Leventhal became president of the School for Advanced Research and modernized and diversified the scope and opportunities of its excellent programs on its magnificent campus of adobe buildings.

Richard brought in the brilliant painter Mateo Romero (Cochiti) for envisioning sessions, and they invited me to be a part of the new SAR seminars and programs.

I was fortunate enough to receive SAR’s first back-to-back residency fellowships, one in poetry and the other as a summer scholar, which meant I had a gift of time to write a series of poems about the repatriation laws I had spent so many decades (1967 to 1990) working to achieve. It had been hard, debilitating, dangerous, heartbreaking, infuriating, awe-inspiring work, and the only way I could begin to write about it was in component parts, in poems. I welcomed the chance to live in New Mexico where so many experiences had informed and

inspired my cultural rights work, and to finally be able to deeply reflect on what I had been through while leading repatriation campaigns, uncovering the worst of what had been done to us, and discovering the great reservoir of goodwill for making a more just future. I am grateful for that time to reflect and write, and for the chance to present that body of work to friends, colleagues, and the public in several readings and programs in Santa Fe. MRS: As a curator, repatriation is the most important issue for museology in North America. I would fiercely defend this point. But how did you translate this spiritual, procedural, and often political practice into the stuff of poetry?

SSH: By returning to the essence, the spirit, and the breath before the idea. With “Snake Doctors,” I was able to return to the original “repatriators”, the dragonflies.

They have one set of wings for carrying prayers and the other for carrying spirits.

In my poem, “in the garden of the great collector,” I wrote about people I met and knew in New Mexico, the grotesqueries who were and are well-known and famous “Indian collectors,” which usually means they trade in dead Native people and the precious things they wore and were surrounded by when they were buried, before the great collectors robbed them from their graves. I wanted the

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great collectors to know that I might not have been able to stop all of them from stealing our ancestors and relatives, our sacred living beings, and our historical and cultural patrimony, but there are other ways to contextualize their nefarious activities and invite others to despise them. They may continue to evade the law, but I can continue to write about them and their place in repatriation history.

In “Children in the Meadows and Wetlands,” I related and combined oral history accounts of my relatives’ experiences at Carlisle, Chilocco, and Haskell federal boarding schools (and at Euchee Indian School, without naming it). Sadly, all those things are true, and some of the children still are there.

MRS: Regarding the text after it is published, do you see your poems as living in some sense, as something that grows and unfolds through the churning of time and space?

SSH: My articles, essays, columns, curatorial writings, reviews, testimony, declarations, and the like are all fixed points in time and are to be read and used as things attached to particular circumstances and in the context of their moment. Poetry and scripts are different.

They start off as collaborations and can have many lives, depending on new readers, actors, audiences, contexts, and passage of time. I’m always happy when people tell me they enjoyed, learned from, got something out of, or were moved or motivated by something I wrote. It’s probably a bit of reassurance that someone will read something of mine after I’m no longer writing.

MRS: Can you tell us about your future writing projects and/or future creative intentions?

SSH: I’m trying to download as much as I can for my grandkids and extended family and for people who can use what I’ve learned, figured out, and understand, so that some of them can do what’s needed for their next generations to love, respect, defend, and protect our Mother Earth and all her children.

ART+LIT

SNAKE DOCTORS (TVPVSVNVLKE, MEDICINE BEINGS, DRAGONFLIES) the Snake Doctors gather where Water meets Red Earth where Sunlight meets Green Corn they hover above the backs of Snakes and rest on the shells of Turtles

learning their secrets while feasting on insects

laying ribbons of Life between Wind and Water the Medicine Beings council when Dawn meets Dew and Mist when Sunlight makes them invisible they pause in mid-air, still and gleaming they float and drift in delicate splendor

touching Double Wings and

passing knowledge through them the Snake Doctors fly to the edges of Existence to the wells of Iridescence they shimmer you into Being they flutter you into breathing

nourishing you with Radiance

giving you to Eternity the Medicine Beings heal with Colors that vibrate and sing with the glory of the dying moment they carry Prayers on one pair of Wings they carry Spirits and Souls on the other

transporting precious treasure to Creation

transferring Life and Light

above Kevin Pourier (Oglala Lakota), Dragonfly Nation, 2016, buffalo horn, abalone. Image courtesy of the artist.

the Snake Doctors return in a flash of Medicine in the corner of your eye they brush your face with a Wing they catch your breath when you sleep

ah, the Snake Doctor breathes on me

ah, the Snake Doctor breathes on me —Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee) SUMMER 2019 | 99

COLLECTIONS

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

A

BIGAIL GREENE “ABBY” ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER helped to found the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1929 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art (established 1870) showed no interest in modern, avant-garde art. In a parallel scenario, when her son Nelson joined the Met’s board in 1930, he pushed the museum to collect precontact art. Two factors worked against him. At the time, objects from the ancient Americas were viewed by white academics through a narrow colonial lens as having anthropological and ethnological value, not as aesthetic works to be studied alongside European art.1 In fact, the Met had received a gift of Peruvian antiquities in 1882 but decades

later sent them to the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum.2 Further, Gustav Heye opened his Museum of the American Indian in 1916. The Met’s refusal drove Rockefeller to launch the Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) in 1954.3 In 1974 the MPA collections, library, and most of the staff, including curator Julie Jones, transferred to the Met to establish the Department of Primitive Art.4 From its inception, its focus on the Americas was ancient South and Central American cultures—never Native Northern American. This reflected Rockefeller’s personal collecting and the Met administration’s opinion that the aforementioned museums sufficed for Native American art.5

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD The Met is the largest art museum in the United States by both square footage and collection size. Seventeen departments oversee more than two million objects. Categorized by a combination of era, function, geographic region, and medium, an object’s departmental placement can significantly impact how often it exhibits and how it is interpreted within global history. Because work by Indigenous artists is spread out among numerous departments, to determine what percentage of the larger collection it constitutes is difficult. Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) manages about 6,600 works from the Americas ranging from 500 BCE to the present. The entire collection is online for public perusal: pendants, spindle whorls, clothing, jewelry, ancestor figures, weapons, dolls, musical instruments, architectural models, totem poles, watercraft, and more.

The Indigenous collection grew somewhat erratically over the decades.

In a 2015 interview, Julie Jones attributes this to persistent intolerance against the field as well as the department’s lack of an endowment. “We were not loved when we were first here, at all.… Acquisitions for us … [after transferring to The Met] came almost to a halt.”6 In the 1980s temporary loans from Eugene and Clare Thaw made possible two small exhibitions: Color and Shape in American Indian Art and Symbol and Substance in American Indian Art, both curated by Zena Pearlstone. The Thaws anticipated their unparalleled collection of over 700 objects would be accepted by the museum as a gift. Curiously, the offer was turned down.7 However, it was also during this

1. These biases began to shift in 1941 when the Museum of Modern Art staged Indian Art of the United States, curated by Fredric H. Douglas and René d’Harnoncourt; however, institutional racism, reflected in what is collected and exhibited, how objects are categorized and interpreted, etc., remains unresolved in most museums.

2. Joanne Pillsbury, “The Pan-American: Nelson Rockefeller and the Arts of Ancient Latin America,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 72, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 18.

3. Alisa LaGamma, “The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 72, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 22. The institution was actually chartered the Museum of Indigenous Art, but “the new institution was later renamed the Museum of Primitive Art because Rockefeller and the trustees felt too many people would associate the word ‘indigenous’ with ‘indigent.”

4. In 1991 the Met’s board of trustees voted to rename the Department of Primitive Art the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

5. Julie Jones, Judith Richards, Oral history interview with Julie Jones, April 21–22, 2015, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, 17.

6. Ibid., 44.

7. Janet Catherine Berlo, “The art of Indigenous Americans and American art history: a century of exhibitions,” Perspective 2 (2015), web. The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, built a dazzling new wing for the Thaw collection in 1995.

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COLLECTIONS

time that the spectacular Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened, highlighting the extraordinary collection of Oceanic art but also with bisj poles, memorials carved in mangrove wood by Asmat people of New Guinea. The museum is planning a $70 million renovation for these galleries to be completed in 2023.8 The Americas collection represents 234 cultures and 21 nations. The small percentage on view is arranged geographically in three main galleries.

Moving North to South, one first encounters Mesoamerica (gallery 358), then Precolumbian (357), then Native North America (356). One remarkable piece in the Mesoamerican gallery is a ceramic Teotihuacan-style host figure with a removable front from the 5th to 7th centuries. Within the hollow body of the seated man wearing large ear spools and a necklace are smaller figurines and medallions, which may represent ancestors or deities.

The Precolumbian gallery shimmers from the quantity and size of gold objects. Two Lambayeque funerary masks remain the largest precious metal pieces known from the ancient Americas.

One measures more than 16 by 28 by 4 inches. Joanne Pillsbury has been curator of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas since 2013, replacing Jones after her 38-year tenure. A specialist in Central and South American art before

1532, Pillsbury orchestrated the recent exhibition, Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas. It featured extremely rare feather paintings, intricate jewelry, and fine gold objects from multiple precontact cultures. The project was approached as a major, collaborative undertaking by scholars from many countries and continues to yield new findings. Pillsbury explained that most ancient American exhibitions are defined by current political nation-states, but the Maya and Inca empires spread across much larger geographic areas. In the United States the focus is on Mexico and Peru, but Golden Kingdoms considered the transnational exchange of ideas from Costa Rica, Panama, and other regions.9 Thirty-seven scholars contributed to a stunning catalogue.

The Native North American gallery, organized by region, presents objects similar to those gifted in the Diker collection, overseen by the Department of American Art. These include a 19th-century Tlingit raven rattle and Aleut dress parka with auklet beaks and feathers.

The temporary exhibition, Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, is on the opposite side of the museum, a distance of four city blocks.

In 2011, the R alph T. C o e Foundation gifted over 200 items to AAOA, notably two masks by Joe David (Nuu-chah-nulth), another by Robert

8. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Metropolitan Museum of Art to Renovate Its Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Galleries,” press release, November 19, 2018, web.

9. Joanne Pillsbury in discussion with the author, April 3, 2019.

above, top

Unknown Wari

artist, Earflares, 500–800 CE, bone, shell, stone, 23/8 × 113/16 in., coastal Peru, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978.412.215 and 216 (CC0). above, bottom Unknown Mesoamerican artist, Teotihuacanstyle Hollow Figurine with R e m ov a b l e C h e s t P l a t e , 400–600 CE, ceramic, pyrite, p i g m e n t , 1 4 ¾ × 1 0 5/8 i n . , Escuintla, Tiquisate region, Guatemala, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.226a, b. Photo: A. Ferber. opposite The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Photo: A. Ferber.

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COLLECTIONS

above Wendy Red Star (Crow), Peelatchiwaaxpáash/Medicine Crow (Raven), from the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation series, 2014, inkjet print, red ink on paper, 25 × 177/16 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has this artwork in its collection, L.2018.57.1. Image courtesy of the artist. opp osite, top C h eye n n e parfleche displayed in gallery with other modern art: 1875, rawhide, pigment, hide ties.

Photo: A. Ferber.

Davidson (Haida), as well as a tobacco bag and doll by Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine-Sioux). The Diker gift prompted a restructuring of the collection, part of which involves the transfer of the Coe collection from AAOA to the Department of American Art.10 Modern and Contemporary Art oversees work by at least five Indigenous artists: a painting and a lithograph by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Sqelix’u/ Métis/Shoshone), two paintings by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation), three signs by Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne),

two altered photographs by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), and one work by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Haida). Most were gifts rather than museum purchases.

The collection of modern and contemporary Indigenous art will not grow without a significant financial commitment. Until then, curators are incorporating newer approaches to “indigenizing” the museum.

Exhibited in the grand sculpture hall of the American Wing is a white marble sculpture, Mexican Girl Dying (1848) by Thomas Crawford. The youthful female subject is sexualized by the male artist: she holds her right breast as she reclines, parts her legs, and opens her mouth—more comparable to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa than anyone bleeding to death. Next to the typically dry, authorless museum label, another has been added: a poem by Livia Corona Benjamin (Mestizo), part of the “Native Perspectives” initiative that brings more Indigenous voices into the museum. Curator of American art, Sylvia Yount, coordinated the program’s unveiling to coincide with the opening of Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection. Eleven authors wrote commentary for twelve works, all available online. This program will expand as more Indigenous writers will be invited to respond to works in the permanent collection.11 In a temporary extension of this, Wendy Red Star wrote interpretive labels for Artistic Encounters with Indigenous America, a current exhibition of Native American portrayals by non-Native artists. In these she explains how European images of Native people constructed damaging stereotypes that stoked fear of the Other and supported colonial violence.

Yount discussed the latest developments and future plans for Indigenous art at the Met with me in December 2018. Until recently, she explained, each department largely operated as its own museum. But the new director, Max Hollein, encourages more interdepartmental collaboration. Curators have recontextualized some works by Indigenous artists with mixed results.

In “Beyond Inclusion,” emerging art historian and critic Christopher Green asks about the Diker collection exhibit,

10. Sylvia Yount, email message to author, April 9, 2019.

11. Sylvia Yount in discussion with the author, December 14, 2018.

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COLLECTIONS

“Does the purported migration [of Native American art into the Department of American Art] signal an expansion of the ‘American’ category, or an inclusion of Indigenous art in a nationalist history?”12 Green concludes Art of Native America results as the latter, because the objects are presented in austere galleries and, in his opinion, explained formally rather than culturally. In the press release and the exhibition catalogue, Yount states the Met “is committed to exploring thoughtfully and sensitively the entangled histories of contact and colonization.” While Art of Native America does not fully achieve this goal, single exhibitions rarely shift paradigms. Considering Yount’s 2016 integration of several objects from the Diker collection into the permanent galleries, her statement can be understood as a vision for possibilities beyond this initial temporary exhibition.

One of the most challenging and brilliant of these arrangements is in gallery 765, a juxtaposition of The Battle of the Little Bighorn (1920) by Standing Bear/ Mató Nájin (Mniconjou Lakota, 1859– 1933) between Albert Bierstadt’s Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1866) and a small bronze cast of James Earle Fraser’s End of the Trail (1918). Fraser’s patronizing image of a defeated warrior contradicts Standing Bear’s depiction of allied Natives defeating the US Army but entrenches the romantic settler myths perpetrated by Bierstadt’s vision of utopian paradise, open for white settlement. This is “exploring the entangled histories of contact and colonization from different perspectives.”13 Yount seems to be asking, “What do we do with these oppositional and irreconcilable narratives of American history? Let us sort fact from fiction.”

In a Met blog post, Yount described the exhibition of three historical Indigenous works in the American galleries. A 19th-century Iroquois beaded pouch hangs next to Gilbert Stuart’s painting, Mohawk Chief Thayendanegea, Known as Joseph Brant (1786). This pairing shows ways Native and non-Native cultures interacted and exchanged political and artistic ideas: a Euro-American artist painted a dignified portrait of a

Native diplomat and politician, and a Native artist represented an Indigenous oral history utilizing European materials.14 Attempts by the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art to integrate Indigenous art seem to follow William Rubin’s formalist and Eurocentric approach exemplified in his controversial 1984 exhibition, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art. In a modern art gallery, an 1875 Cheyenne parfleche was displayed with work by Marsden Hartley, Jean Dubuffet, Horace Pippen, and Constantin Brâncuși. Its label explained, “Throughout the twentieth century, artists interested in abstraction often looked to the indigenous arts of the Americas, including American Indian art, for aesthetic inspiration and validation.

The historical precedent of abstract art provided many living artists with the belief they were extending indigenous artistic ideas and traditions.”

Here at least visitors are offered some explanation of how this object relates to those around it. No context was offered for Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Yelthadaas (2010), a painting on a steel car hood displayed in a long hall across from Sol LeWitt’s temporary Wall Drawing #370. The latter is ten large squares with different geometric shapes delineated by black and white stripes running the entire length of the corridor. Yahgulanaas’s

work depicts three creatures inside a raven, beautifully abstracted in sinuous, formline style. Both works are contemporary, but beyond this parallels are few.

LeWitt’s monumental piece, meant to overwhelm one’s field of vision, dwarfed Yahgulanaas’s painting with the effect that the relationship was imbalanced and the conversation between the works stilted. The curators could have invited a Native artist to create a similarly sized mural. For example, Heidi K. Brandow’s (Navajo/Native Hawaiian) colorful Unit of Measure (2019) currently at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe would generate more dialogue with LeWitt’s work.

Institutional change happens slowly, but current shifts in fields of study and pressures to “decolonize” or “indigenize” are impacting even the staidest museums.

Though land acknowledgments are conventional in Canada and becoming more ubiquitous in the West, they are rare in New York, and the recognition of Lenapehoking historical homeland of the Delaware or Lenape people in Art of Native America was a first for the Met. Yount relays that the museum is in the process of hiring a NAGPRA specialist (to this point, compliance has been handled by the museum’s general counsel). A new director and curators engaging external voices shows advocacy for Indigenous art at the Met more than ever before.

12. Christopher Green, “Beyond Inclusion,” Art in America 107, no. 2 (February 2019), 75.

13. Sylvia Yount, “Entangled Narratives: Encountering Native American Art in the American Wing,” in Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, ed.

Gaylord Torrence (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 19.

14. Sylvia Yount, “Redefining American Art: Native American Art in the American Wing,” The Met Blog, February 21, 2017, web.

SUMMER 2019 | 103

SPOTLIGHT

MELT: PRAYERS FOR THE PEOPLE AND THE PLANET

By Mariah L. Ashbacher

A above Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota), Melt: Prayers for the People and the Planet, 2019, kiln-fired vitreous enameled glass mosaic on tile board, 30 × 30 in. opposite Detail of Melt. Images courtesy of the artist.

STANDOUT ART PIECE from this year’s annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, which won honorable mention in its division, was a glass mosaic work by Oglala Lakota artist Angela Babby. Entitled Melt: Prayers for the People and the Planet, the work was initially inspired by a black-and-white photograph Babby once saw of an Inuk girl with a husky pup in her hood. 1 Additionally, reports about how climate change, specifically glacial melting, is

affecting many Inuit villages and the continuation of their way of life particularly troubled the artist.

In 2017 the New York Times reported climate change had affected not only Inuit relocation but was also causing a rise in mental health issues among some of the Inuit, including a deep sense of isolation, which in turn is leading to an increase in substance abuse.

They are questioning their very identity.

They are “people of the sea ice,” one Inuk said, but “if there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”2 Many of the villages are accessible only in the winter when the waterways freeze solidly and become ice highways. Every year the freeze is coming later and is less reliable.

“They are the canaries in the coal mine of Americans having to relocate because the ground beneath their feet is being washed away,” Babby says, speaking of the Inuit in Alaska.3 In Babby’s mosaic, the little girl’s face is the focus as her deep, dark eyes stare back at the viewer. Her ungloved hands and head are unprotected from the cold as her husky pup sleeps, contentedly cocooned in the fur lining of her hood, a hammock supporting him behind her head. The scene is pregnant with tension.

What does she want to say to us? Her surroundings tell the viewer the rest of the story.

The realism of the portraiture that Babby achieves using glass mosaic is nothing less than remarkable. For Babby, glass offers a level of dimensionality she cannot achieve with paint. The realistic portrait of the girl and pup combine with

1. Richard Harrington (1911–2005) shot the original photograph in Coppermine, Northwest Territories, Canada, in 1949. The photograph is featured in Harrington’s book, The Inuit: Life As It Was (Hurtig Publishers, 1981).

2. Livia Albeck-Ripka, “Why Lost Ice Means Lost Hope for an Inuit Village,” The New York Times, November 25, 2017, web. The article also features illustrations by Inuk artist Heather Campbell.

3. Angela Babby, email message to author, March 17, 2019.

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june 2 - august 11, 2019

the abstraction in the triangular shapes that make up the landscape, broken ice pushed by flowing water and dirty, slushy snow. Babby states that “by adding in the ancient diamond-and-triangle design, I could symbolically express the metaphysical idea in Lakota religion that what happens here on Earth, literally our own actions, are reflected in the cosmos.” She uses a rippled, clear glass to replicate the prismatic glint of snow when light hits it. The landscape is a mottled glass made with silver that “grows into random circular patterns as it is made. Each multicolored sheet of this glass is one of a kind. I intentionally, carefully, cut it to maintain the pattern that it has as a solid sheet.” The neutral palette is interspersed with blues and lavenders representing the standing, unfrozen water.

Babby’s process is extensive and laborious, as each finished artwork represents at least seven steps. She first sketches her design and then transfers the sketch to cardboard. The artist then cuts cardboard into various shapes, traces these onto the art glass she needs to achieve her desired effect, and then hand cuts and grinds down the pieces. She paints certain pieces with vitreous glass enamels and fires them in a kiln at more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit; the powdery enamels become glass on glass. This part of the process may have to be repeated several times since the true color is only revealed after firing. Reassembled into her original design, the pieces are adhered to tile board and mortared. Finally, once the work is fully dried and cured, she seals it.

FAAM No. 10, Spring 2016, features a profile of Angela Babby in which she discusses how she honors her Lakota ancestors through glass mosaic art. More of her work can be seen on her online portfolio at angelababby.com.

Contemporary Native Art Show Permanent Collections Historic Tours + Gift Shop Open Daily + Free Admission The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School Pine Ridge, SD 57770 www.redcloudart.show 605.867.8257 SUMMER 2019 | 105

MEMORIAL

JOE FAFARD, OC, SOM September 2, 1942–March 16, 2019

M above Joe Fafard (Métis), C l a u d i a , 2 0 03 , b ro n ze, collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec. Photo: Gloria Bell, PhD (Métis).

ANY OF JOE FAFARD’S LARGE BRONZE COWS and laser-cut horses grace city spaces across Canada, bringing agricultural life to the urban.

Within the canon of acceptable Canadian art, artists and art historians have largely ignored animals and other nonhuman beings. Fafard challenged that elision in the field of art history by centering on animals and developing the field of sculpture, experimenting at first with clay miniatures of animals and people. At a turning point in his career, he was commissioned to do The Pasture (1985), seven bronze sculptures of recumbent cows at the Toronto-Dominion Centre. This experiment with sculpting bronze cows innovated the field of sculpture in form and medium and became the impetus for future series. Fafard used the bovine form throughout his lifework. He also created sculptural portraits of famous Canadians including politicians and artists.

Fafard grew up in the FrenchCanadian community of Sainte-Marthe,

Saskatchewan, and drew inspiration from his childhood agricultural community.

While he was raised in the Plains, he did not necessarily promote himself as Métis in a prominent way, and at first glance the iconography of his work might not seem to bear any relation to Métis.1 However, Running Horses (2017), with manes blowing in the wind cast in red powder-coated aluminum, reminds me of the importance of horses for Plains communities. Horses and people continue to work together into the 21st century through rodeos, equitation, and forms of agricultural labor.

Fafard named his sculptures of animals such as Claudia (2003). In his website bio, it says, “Some say that Joe Fafard added a sense of humour to his depictions of the everyday through his artwork; Joe said that he just never really took it out.” Fafard’s work, like his prolific career, enhanced our lives and reminds us of the care we should take of all our relations.

—Gloria Bell, PhD (Métis)

1. This identification or lack of identification with an Indigenous identity was not a central aim of his artwork. For more on the Métis, see my exhibition review in this issue of FAAM on Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth with Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch. For an early film on Joe Fafard, see Michael McKennirey’s I Don’t Have to Work that Big (1973), 27 minutes, online at the National Film of Canada’s website.

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MEMORIAL

FRANK LAPEÑA October 5, 1937–May 2, 2019

F

RANK RAYMOND LAPEÑA (Nomtipom Wintu) dedicated his adult life to his tribe and culture, working assiduously as a Native American educator, artist, and activist.

His artistic oeuvre encompasses many art forms, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, poetry, and dance. In addition to his work as an artist, LaPeña was also professor emeritus of art and ethnic studies, having served as director of Native American studies at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), from 1975 to 2002. Known nationally as a consultant, LaPeña was often called upon to lecture and advise institutions on Native American issues.

He was also a leader of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists, a group to which his son Vince also belonged.

LaPeña wrote and illustrated several volumes of his poetry. Other books he wrote include Dream Songs and Ceremony (Heyday Books, 2004), and he coauthored the forthcoming volume When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California (University of California Press, Fall 2019).

LaPeña’s childhood was not an easy one. He was born in San Francisco to Henry LaPena and Evelyn Gladys Towndolly-LaPena. His family was dispersed following the death of his father when Frank was only five years old. He was sent to Stewart Indian School in Nevada and then to Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, both federal boarding schools. As with other US government-funded residential schools, the goal was forced assimilation, and LaPeña was cut off from his tribe. When he was in the eighth grade, LaPeña was sent to a foster home and entered the public school system until his graduation.

LaPeña earned his BA degree from California State University, Chico, in 1965, a teaching certificate from San Francisco State College (now University) in 1968, and a master of arts degree in

above Frank LaPeña (Nomtipom Wintu), Gatekeepers of the Invisible, 2012, six-color lithograph, edition of 12, 1615/16 × 1615/16 in., collaborating printer Frank Janzen, hand-printed and published by Crow’s Shadow Press. Image courtesy of Crow’s Shadow, Pendleton, Oregon.

anthropology from CSUS in 1978. As a young man, he began to reconnect with his tribe and maternal family, the Towndollys, after moving to Redding, California, to raise his own family. It was then, many years after the fact, that he learned of his mother’s death in 1957.

LaPeña’s work was first exhibited in 1960 and since that time he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions all over the United States and internationally, including Europe, Central and South America, Cuba, Australia, and New Zealand. Most of his work focused on Northern California culture and religion, and it was often deeply personal.

However, beginning in 2003 he produced

works, including Ancient Guardians and Midnight Rainbow, inspired by cultures in Utah and New Mexico.

Several retrospectives celebrated the Wintu artist’s vibrant career, including The World Is a Gift (1988) at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. Bruce Bernstein, curator of that exhibition wrote, “Frank LaPeña is a teacher in the fullest sense of the word, connecting cultural worlds, the past and the future of Indian art, and drawing inspiration in the ancient landscape as well as what is today’s California.”1 Frank LaPeña was 81 years old when he passed on in Sacramento.

—Mariah L. Ashbacher

1. Bruce Bernstein, “Frank LaPena: The World is a Gift,” Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, October 24, 1988, web.

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MEMORIAL

TRUMAN LOWE January 19, 1944–March 30, 2019

T

HROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Tr u m a n Te n n i s L o w e , whose Ho-Chunk name, Wa kaj a hų kga, t ranslates as Chief of the Thunder, illuminated the way for many through his life and work as an artist, curator, and educator.

Born to Mabel and Martin Lowe at the Indian Mission near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, Lowe grew up the youngest of six children and spoke Ho-Chunk as his first language. The confluence of art and nature, which invigorates Lowe’s artistic repertoire, began during his childhood there. In a community where “everybody … practiced traditional crafts: basketry, beadwork, weaving, leatherwork,”1 young Truman learned basketry, ribbon work, and beading from his parents.

The natural world also flowed prominently through Lowe’s childhood and became a source of inspiration throughout his career as an artist. In a 2012 interview, Lowe shared this about his art: Having grown up along the Black River here in Wisconsin, I’ve always had a real fascination for rivers, and I do a lot of canoeing and spend a lot of time along moving water. It fascinates me more than books or poems. It’s just the ideas of where rivers come from and where they are going. They really symbolize our lives. Humanity has continued for generations, for thousands of years. We are alive for a brief part of it; it’s sort of like standing along the river’s edge.… You can watch it as it moves past you. Then eventually, it moves out of your sight. That’s sort of like your life.… I am trying to capture this image.2 The possibility of art as both a passion and profession led Lowe through his academic studies. Graduating with his bachelor of science degree in art education from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, in 1969, he moved with his

above Truman Lowe. Image courtesy of Nancy Lowe.

beloved wife Nancy Knabe Lowe (married in 1966), to Valders, Wisconsin. He taught art at Valders High School—about twelve miles from Lake Michigan—before receiving a Ford Fellowship to pursue his master of fine art degree in sculpture at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.

In 1971, Nancy and Truman welcomed their daughter, Tonia, into the world, and two years later Truman Lowe graduated with his MFA. Both UW–La Crosse and UW–Madison have awarded Lowe distinguished alumni awards.

From 1973 to 1974, Lowe began his academic career as a visiting lecturer at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. Missing the Eastern Woodlands, he returned to Wisconsin, becoming assistant dean of students at UW–Madison where he later served as Native American studies coordinator and assistant professor of art. In 1975, Truman and Nancy’s son, Martin “Kunu” Lowe (Ho-Chunk, 1975–2005) was born.

Over the years, Truman Lowe taught thousands of students and mentored numerous faculty members. While chair of the Chancellor’s Scholarship

Committee (1984–2004), Lowe recruited and supported students from underrepresented communities. Promoted to full professor in 1989, he served as department chair from 1992 to 1995. Upon his 2010 retirement from UW–Madison, Lowe was granted emeritus status.

John Hitchcock (Comanche), school of education associate dean of arts at UW– Madison says, “Truman Lowe has been an incredible influence on so many people as an artist, curator, and leader. … Truman has been a mentor to me as a strong American Indian artist who led with vision and generosity. … He would ask: ‘What have you been working on in your art?’ Then … smile really big in delight as you told him. Truman encouraged us to stay strong as artists and to our vision as makers.”3 From 2000 to 2008, Lowe took leave from UW–Madison to serve as inaugural curator of contemporary art for the opening of Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). At NMAI, he helped curate some of the most significant shows of our time, including Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser and Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian.

Truman’s artistic achievements were as impressive as his academic and curatorial accomplishments. Lowe garnered prestigious awards, such as the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Wisconsin Academy Fellowship, and Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award. His works have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, South America, and New Zealand.

As he moves down the river ahead of us and out of sight, Truman Lowe leaves in his wake a path for many to follow. May we continue to learn from his example.

—Jean Merz-Edwards

1. Truman Lowe, “Truman Lowe: Contemporary Native American Artist—Native American Culture,” PBS Learning Media, 6:04, accessed June 11, 2019, web.

2. Ibid.

3. John Hitchcock, email to author, June 10, 2019.

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CALENDAR

July 2–August 3: Vancouver, BC

nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations), Rebecca Belmore solo exhibition, at grunt gallery, 350 E. Second Avenue #116 | +1 (604) 875-9516 | grunt.ca

July 2–August 31: Muskogee, OK

The Art of Jerome Tiger at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, 1101 Honor Heights Drive | (918) 683-1701 | fivetribes.org

July 2–December 14: Fort Collins, CO

Walking in Beauty: Designs by Orlando Dugi at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising, Colorado State University, 216 E. Lake Street (970) 491-1983 | chhs.colostate.edu/avenir

July 5–August 3: Santa Fe, NM

Emmi Whitehorse: Mapping the Microcosm at Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 558 Canyon Road | (505) 992-0711 | chiaroscurosantafe.com

July 5–October 19: Pendleton, OR

Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes at the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, 47106 Wildhorse Boulevard, curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) | (541) 429-7700 | tamastslikt.org

MOHAWK & ABENAKI ART MARKET

Niio Perkins, Akwesasne Mohawk, beader Glen Swamp, Akwesasne Mohawk, basketmaker

CALENDAR

SATURDAY, AUGUST 24 Showcasing traditional and contemporary art by Native American artists.

July 5–November 3: Phoenix, AZ

Still Life No. 3: Raven Chacon at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue (602) 252-8840 | heard.org

July 6 & 7: Flagstaff, AZ

86th annual Hopi Festival of Arts & Culture at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org

July 10: Richmond, BC

Canadian, Contemporary and Northwest Coast & Inuit Art Auction at Maynards Fine Art and Antiques, 3331 Jacombs. Preview: July 6, 8, and 9, 10:00 am–5:00 pm | +1 (604) 675-2244 | auctions.maynardsfineart.com

July 12–14: Santa Fe, NM

16th annual International Folk Art Market Santa Fe at the Museum of International Folk Art, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 992-7600 | folkartmarket.org

July 12–14: Collinsville, IL

Cahokia Mounds Contemporary Indian Art Show at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 30 Ramey Street | (618) 346-5160 | cahokiamounds.org

July 13: Reno, NV

Reawakening the Great Basin: A Native American Arts and Culture Gathering at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 W. Liberty Street (775) 329-3333 | nevadaart.org

July 13 & 14: Prescott, AZ

Prescott Indian Art Market at the Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street | (928) 445-3122 | sharlot.org/festival/prescott-indian-art-market

July 17–20: Fairbanks, AK

World Eskimo-Indian Olympics at the Carlson Center, 2010 2nd Avenue (907) 452-6646 | weio.org

July 19 & 20: Rapid City, SD

7th annual Native POP: People of the Plains in Main Street Square.

Reception: Friday, July 19. Market: Saturday, July 20 | nativepop.org

July 19 & 20: Asheville, NC

Brunk Auction’s Premier Auction at Brunk Auctions, 117 Tunnel Road, featuring a large selection of Southwestern and Native American artworks.

Previews begin Wednesday, July 17 | (828) 254-6846 | brunkauctions.com

July 19–October 1: Rapid City, SD

Dustin Twiss and Brendon Albers: Storied Stone at the Sioux Indian Museum, 222 New York Street | (605) 394-2201 | doi.gov/iacb/twissandalbers

July 20 & 21: Newburyport, MA

Cultural Survival Bazaar at Market Square and Inn Street, 10:00 am–6:00 pm, free admission | (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org

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

SUMMER 2019 | 109

CALENDAR

JOAN CABALLERO SANTA FE

July 20–August 17: Toronto, ON

Itee Pootoogook: The Early Drawings at Feheley Fine Arts, 65 George Street +1 (416) 323-1373 | feheleyfinearts.com

July 20, 2019–February 9, 2020: Winnipeg, MB

Small Worlds: Inuit miniature carvings at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca

July 26–August 18: Santa Fe, NM

Drawing and Driving: Steven J. Yazzie at Axle Contemporary (505) 670-5854 or (505) 670-7612 | axleart.com

July 27: Walla Walla, WA

APPRAISAL CREDENTIALS

ISA & USPAP

N AT I V E A M E R I C A N A R T

Monothon 2019 and Crow’s Shadow Gala & Art Auction, at Foundry Vineyards Gallery, 1111 Abadie Street, 6:00–9:00 pm. Online auction of prints will run August 1–9 | (541) 276-3954 | crowsshadow.org/monothon

July 27 & 28: Victor, NY

Hodinöhsö:ni’ Art Show and Indigenous Music and Arts Festival at the Seneca Art & Cultural Center, 7000 County Road 41. Reception: Friday, July 26 (585) 742-1690 | ganondagan.org

July 27 & 28: Tiverton, RI

(505) 690-8482 joancaballero@msn.com www.collectorsguide.com/jcaballero

Cultural Survival Bazaar at Tiverton Four Corners Arts Center, 3852 Main Road, 10:00 am–6:00 pm, free | (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org

August 1–September 28: Santa Fe, NM

Sandra Cohoe: Solo Exhibition at FaraHNHeight Fine Art Gallery, 618 Paseo de Peralta #B | (575) 751-4278 | farahnheight.com

August 2 & 3: Norman, OK 7th annual Central Oklahoma Native American Art Sale at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds, 615 E. Robinson Street, south building, 9:00 am–5:00 pm (405) 830-1860 | clevelandcountyfair.org

August 2–11: Gallup, NM 98th annual Gallup Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial in downtown Gallup and other locations | (505) 863-3896 | gallupceremonial.com

August 3 & 4: Flagstaff, AZ 70th annual Navajo Festival of Arts & Culture at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Ft. Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org

August 8–11: Santa Fe, NM

Cannupa Hanska Luger with the Coe Center

Objects of Art Santa Fe at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia in the Railyard District. Opening Night Party: Thursday, August 8, 6:00–9:00 pm, $75. Show: Friday–Sunday, August 9–11, 11:00 am–5:00 pm, $15 or $25 run-of-show | (505) 660-4701 | objectsofartsantafe.com

August 9–12: Santa Fe, NM 41st annual Whitehawk Antique Indian & Ethnographic Art Show at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street (505) 988-9544 | whitehawkshows.com

Function began with a series of community workshops in which Luger led participants in the production of plates. It concludes with a dinner at the Coe, August 15, 2019. At dinner, participants share food and then at the end of the meal, stand and shatter the plates on the ground.

Function is simultaneously profound and silly, memorable and ephemeral, triumphant and mundane with the end goal of “turning a table into a bridge.”

Contact 505.983.6372 or bmurphy@coeartscenter.org for more info.

Coe Center www.coeartscenter.org

August 9–September 2: Santa Fe, NM

Rez Dogs II, solo exhibition of work by Chaz John (Winnebago/Choctaw) at Ellsworth Gallery, 215 E. Palace Avenue | (505) 989-7900 | ellsworthgallery.com

August 9–September 7: Santa Fe, NM

Rose B. Simpson: Solo Exhibition at Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 558 Canyon Road. Reception: Friday, August 9, 5:00–7:00 pm (505) 992-0711 | chiaroscurosantafe.com

August 9–September 21: Park Hill, OK

24th annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show at the Cherokee Heritage Center, 2119 S. Keeler Drive. Reception: Friday, August 9, 6:00–8:00 pm (918) 456-6007 | cherokeeheritage.org

August 10: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit Northwest Native Festival at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue, and Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Avenue (253) 272-9747 | tacomaartmuseum.org | washingtonhistory.org

August 10 & 11: Gallup, NM 3rd annual Gallup Native Arts Market at 215 Aztec Avenue (505) 399-2890 | gallupnativeartsmarket.org 110 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

August 10–November 17: Seattle, WA Natalie Ball: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Snake at the Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Avenue | (206) 654-3100 | seattleartmuseum.org

Arctic and Indian arts for the 21 century st

August 11–December 31: Spokane, WA As Grandmother Taught: Women, Tradition and Plateau Art at Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, 2316 W. First Avenue (509) 456-3931 | northwestmuseum.org

26 Maine Street Kennebunkport, Maine 207 967-2122

August 11, 2019–August 31, 2020: Santa Fe, NM San Ildefonso Pottery: 1600–1930 at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1269 | indianartsandculture.org

August 13–16: Santa Fe, NM The Antique American Indian Art Show at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia, with 70 dealers. Opening Party: Tuesday, August 13, 6:00–9:00 pm, $75. Show: Wednesday–Friday, August 14–16, 11:00 am–5:00 pm, $15, $25 run-of-show | (505) 660-4701 | antiqueindianartshow.com

August 14–17: Anadarko, OK 96th annual American Indian Expo at the Caddo County Fairgrounds, 1019 E. Broadway Street. Art exhibition will be at the Southern Plains Indian Museum, 801 E. Central Boulevard | (405) 638-2128

August 15: Santa Fe, NM Function, with Cannupa Hanska Luger, at Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, 1590-B Pacheco Street | (505) 983-6372 | coeartscenter.org/2019-function

August 15 & 16: Santa Fe, NM 44th annual Wheelwright Benefit Auction at the Wheelwright Museum, 704 Camino Lejo, supporting education programs and future exhibitions. Live and silent auction, artist demonstrations | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org

August 15, 2019–January 19, 2020: Santa Fe, NM Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place (505) 983-8900 | chickasawartists.com

August 16–31: Santa Fe, NM Preston Singletary: New Glass Sculptures at Blue Rain Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe Street | (505) 954-9902 | blueraingallery.com

August 17 & 18: Santa Fe, NM 98th annual SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in downtown Santa Fe. Saturday, August 17, 7:00 am–5:00 pm & Sunday, August 18, 8:00 am–5:00 pm (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org

August 18: Santa Fe, NM Ancestral Ink: A Symposium Honoring Indigenous Tattoo Traditions at Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive, 10:00 am–4:00 pm, free (505) 424-5050 | sfai.org/event/ancestral-ink

August 24: Blue Mountain Lake, NY Mohawk & Abenaki Art Market at Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, 9097 State Route 30, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (518) 352-7311 | theadkx.org

August 29, 2019–January 12, 2020: Durham, NC

18K Ring w/Peruvian Opal Althea Cajero

Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets shop online: www.homeandawaygallery.com

August 31–September 2: Kewa Pueblo, NM Kewa Pueblo Annual Arts & Crafts Market at Kewa Pueblo, I-24, 33 miles north of Albuquerque, exit 259, north 4 miles on NM 22, west 1 mile on local road. Look for signs. More than 300 artists, plus food, fresh produce, and dances

September 3–October 31: Muskogee, OK The Art of Solomon McCombs and Gary Montgomery at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, 1101 Honor Heights Drive | (918) 683-1701 | fivetribes.org

September 7–October 26: Montreal, QC Nicholas Galanin Solo Exhibition at Art Mûr, 5826 Rue St-Hubert. Reception: Saturday, September 7, 3:00–5:00 pm | +1 (514) 933-0711 | artmur.com

September 14: Novato, CA Native American Trade Feast at Miwok Park, 2200 Novato Boulevard, 11:00 am– 5:00 pm, visual arts, dancers, music, free | (831) 688-0694 | marinindian.com

September 14 & 15: Lawrence, KS

Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950 to Now at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive (919) 684-5135 | nasher.duke.edu

31st annual Haskell Indian Art Market on the Haskell Indian Nations University Campus, 155 Indian Avenue | (785) 749-8467 | haskell.edu/hiam

August 24: New Gloucester, ME

Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage at the Sam Noble Museum, 2401 Chautauqua Avenue | (405) 325-4712 | samnoblemuseum.ou.edu

11th annual Maine Native American Summer Market & Demonstration at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, 707 Shaker Road, 10:00 am–3:30 pm (207) 926-4597 | maineshakers.com/maine-native-american-market

August 30, 2019–May 10, 2020: Oklahoma City, OK Colors of Clay at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63rd Street | (405) 478-2250 | nationalcowboymuseum.org

August 31: Grand Coulee Dam, WA 5th annual Plateau Native American Art Market at North Dam Park, 10:00 am–6:00 pm, sponsored by the Northwest Native Development Fund and Titwáat Native Art Gallery | (509) 634-6382 | facebook.com/titwaatitgallery

September 14–December 8: Norman, OK

September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020: Kelowna, BC Daphne Odjig 100 at Kelowna Art Gallery, 1315 Water Street. Reception: Friday, September 13, 6:00–8:00 pm | +1 (250) 762-2226 | kelownaartgallery.com

September 20–22: Sioux Falls, SD 32nd annual Northern Plains Indian Art Market. Reception: Friday, September 20, at the Old Courthouse Museum, 200 W. 6th Street. Market: Saturday, September 21, and Sunday, September 22, Hilton Garden Inn–Downtown, 201 E. 8th Street, 10:00 am–4:00 pm | (605) 856-8193 | npiam.org SUMMER 2019 | 111

CALENDAR

September 21–26: Online

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

Inuit Art Auction hosted by Waddington’s, on view at Waddington’s Toronto, 275 King Street East, 2nd Floor | +1 (416) 847-6191 | waddingtons.ca

September 21–December 14: Fort Collins, CO Diné Bi’éé’ Dóó Bi’ootseed: Navajo Jewelry and Clothing at the University Center for the Arts, Colorado State University, 1400 Remington Street (901) 491-1989 | artmuseum.colostate.edu September 24–December 13: Aurora, IL Threads: A Line from There to Here at the Schingoethe Center of Aurora University, 1315 Prairie Street. Reception: Tuesday, September 24, 5:00–6:30 pm | (630) 844-7843 | aurora.edu/museum September 27, 2019–January 12, 2020: Nashville, TN Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Kiowa) (615) 244-3340 | fristmuseum.org September 28 & 29: Flagstaff, AZ 10th annual Hopi Native Arts & Cultural Festival, sponsored by the Hopi Tribe, at the Heritage Square, 22 E. Aspen Avenue at North San Francisco Street | (928) 522-8675 | hopifestivalonheritagesquare.com September 28–December 21: Victoria, BC We Carry Our Ancestors: Cedar, Baskets and Our Relationships with the Land at Legacy Downtown, 630 Yates Street. Curated by Lorilee Wastasecoot (Cree) | +1 (250) 751-6562 | uvac.uvic.ca/exhibitions

(855) NAAA-INC EMAIL INFO@NAAAINC.COM VISIT WWW.NAAAINC.COM CALL

September 28–December 21: Victoria, BC Urban Regalia: Contemporary Fashion by Sug-ii-t Lukxs at Legacy Downtown, 630 Yates Street. Reception: Thursday, October 10, 7:00–10:00 pm | +1 (250) 751-6562 | uvac.uvic.ca/exhibitions October 2–6: Minneapolis, MN 22nd biennial Native American Art Studies Association Conference at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, 1300 Nicollet Mall | nativearts.org October 3–November 30: Santa Fe, NM The Carson Twins, with Margaret and Elizabeth Carson (both Choctaw), at FaraHNHeight Fine Art Gallery, 618 Paseo de Peralta #B. Reception: Friday, October 4, 4:00–7:00 pm | (575) 751-4278 | farahnheight.com October 4 & 5: Tishomingo, OK 15th annual Southeastern Art Show and Market, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at the Historic Chickasaw Capitol Grounds, 411 W. 9th Street (580) 272-5520 | chickasaw.net October 6, 2019–April 5, 2020: Santa Fe, NM Diego Romero vs. the End of Art at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1269 | indianartsandculture.org October 9–12: Tuscaloosa, AL 31st annual Moundville Native American Festival at Moundville Archaeological Park | (205) 371-8732 | moundville.ua.edu October 11– 13: Catoosa, OK 14th annual Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa, 777 W. Cherokee Street. Reception: Friday, October 11. Market: Saturday, October 12, and Sunday, October 13 (877) 779-6977 | cherokeeartmarket.com October 12 & 13: Salt Lake City, UT Indian Art Market at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Rio Tinto Center, 301 Wakara Way, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (801) 581-6927 | nhmu.utah.edu Compiled by Travis D. Day and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM /CALENDAR 112 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Supporting educational programs and future exhibits.

AUGUST 15 – 16, 2019 Art Sale + Artist Demonstrations

Support provided by

Wheelwright Museum 704 CAMINO LEJO, SANTA FE, NM 87505 (505) 982-4636 • wheelwright.org

Santa Fe Indian Market Booth 222-PAL