First American Art Magazine No. 24, Fall 2019

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

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

NO. 24, FALL 2019

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MahotaTextiles.com

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.

MARCH 7 & 8, 2020 MARCH 7 & 8, 2020

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- VENANCIO ARAGON - VENANCIO ARAGON BEST OF SHOW AWARDS RECEPTION MARCH 2020 AWARDS | $15,000RECEPTION BEST OF SHOW AWARD BEST OF6,SHOW MARCH 6, 2020 | $15,000 BEST OF SHOW AWARD

2301 N. CENTRAL AVE. PHOENIX, AZ | 602.252.8840 | HEARD.ORG/FAIR Venancio (Navajo), PrismPHOENIX, of Emotions.AZ Acquired by the Heard Museum Council at the 2301 N.Aragon CENTRAL AVE. | 602.252.8840 | HEARD.ORG/FAIR 2019 Indian Fair & Market. Photo Credit: Craig Smith, Heard Museum Venancio Aragon (Navajo), Prism of Emotions. Acquired by the Heard Museum Council at the 2019 Indian Fair & Market. Photo Credit: Craig Smith, Heard Museum

AMERICAN INDIANS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

John Vann

Ben Tincup

Roy Johnson

Jim Bluejacket

Bob Johnson

SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 – MARCH 28, 2020 Profiles of American Indian Major League Baseball players from 1897 to 1947. A rarely told part of baseball history and how American Indians shaped the game from its earliest years.

SPONSORED IN PART BY:

THIS PROGRAM IS FUNDED IN PART BY OKL AHOMA HUMANITIES (OH) AND THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES (NEH).

ANY VIE WS, FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS, OR RECOMMENDATIONS E XPRES SED IN THIS E XHIBITION DO NOT NECES S ARILY REPRESENT THOSE OF OH OR NEH.

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issue no. 24, fall 2019

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Tapis: Blankets in Celebration of the Sled Dog

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee)

20

The yәhaẃ Phenomenon: Lifting the Arts Together in the Puget Sound

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit)

26

Alaska Native Basketry: Diversity in the Far North

By Bryn Barabas Potter

32

Roma: Cleo's Story and Indigenous Depictions in Mexican Cinema

By Jeannette Martinez

38

Recent Developments

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

Seven Directions 16

By Tina Marie Osceola (Florida Seminole)

46

ARTIST PROFILES Linda Lomahaftewa: Hopi/Choctaw Painter and Printmaker

By Jean Merz-Edwards

46

Meryl McMaster:

Plains Cree Photographer

By Andrea Ferber, PhD

52

Josué Rivas:

Mexica/Otomi Photographer

By Vivian Zavataro

58

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Cowichan/Syilx Painter and Sculptor

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

64

12

Crossword Puzzle

By Travis D. Day

83

Art+Literature 84 William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine)

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

52

Collections: Denver Art Museum

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

90

Calendar

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

93

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

70

Book Reviews

79

Theater Review 81

IN MEMORIAM

58

64

Chester Kahn (Navajo)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

88

Marvin Oliver (Quinault/Isleta Pueblo)

By Staci Golar

89

cover Meryl McMaster (Plains Cree), Edge of a Moment, 2017, 60 × 94⅖ in., Giclée print.

Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

FALL 2019 | 7

Issue No. 24, Fall 2019 Artist-in-Residence Program | Fine Print Studio & Gallery | Non-Profit

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), and Jo Ann Reece Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Chase Earles (Caddo Nation) Social Media: Mariah Ashbacher, Parker Ashbacher, 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 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 Cliff Fragua (Jemez) Teri Greeves (Kiowa) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DHum (Hopi/Choctaw) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage Nation) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) 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.

YAT I K A S TA R R F I E L D S Sun Carrier Series one in a series of 16 unique monoprints 30 x 22.25 inches, 1/1 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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I D Y L L W I L D

A R T S

S U M M E R

P R O G R A M

Native American Art Workshops and Festival 2020 June 14-July 10

Exhibition / Lectures Performance / Workshops idyllwildarts.org/nativearts

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

Smithsonian

OCT 12

left M a r y G ay O s ce o l a (Seminole Tribe of Florida), Untitled, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 14 × 181/8 in., image courtesy of the artist.

Dogs are the first pack animal of the Americas and were the only beast of burden in North America prior to the European reintroduction of the horse.

EDITOR'S GREETING

W

H E T H E R YOU are entirely new to the world of Native art—in which c a s e , w e l c om e ! — or deeply devoted to and entrenched in our Indigenous art scene, we will strive to challenge your perspectives, introducing readers to new art forms or artists and offering new views on these creative people and their practices. An overarching theme of this issue is radical inclusion. Too often the mainstream art world is plagued by elitism and gatekeeping, but Native artists want to engage you. If you are Native or from any other background, all these art forms require cross-cultural understanding—a leap into different worldviews and perspectives. And there lies the core value of art, whether visual, literary, performing, or media-based: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes and, in turn, understand ourselves more deeply.

Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/ Tlingit) discusses radical inclusion in “The yəhaw̓ Phenomenon,” describing how American Indian curators and an Indian-American curator joined forces to create, as the project’s website describes, “an Indigenous-led, yearlong project that includes satellite installations, performances, workshops and trainings,

artists-in-residence, art markets, a publication, and partner events at more than twenty-five sites across Coast Salish territories and beyond.” Bringing established and emerging artists together, while drawing in the widest possible audiences, their model was successful for their Northwestern community. Here, they share what they’ve learned from the experience.

Taking art far beyond the gallery doors and urban centers, Athabascan, Métis, and other Subarctic artists collaborated to revive “Tapis: Blankets in Celebration of the Sled Dog,” as Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee) relates in her feature article. Their efforts culminated in the ceremonial dog team of the Yukon Quest wearing elaborately beaded, embroidered, and embellished blankets at the lead of the dogsled race.

This art form honors the first pack animal of the Americas, strengthening bonds between the species.

Film and video may very well be the salient cultural expression of our current times. In “Roma: Cleo's Story and Indigenous Depictions in Mexican Cinema,” Jeannette Martinez explores how cinema, straddling the world of art and popular culture, has changed along with Mexico’s national relationships

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to its Indigenous peoples. Unlike its neighboring country, Mexico integrated its pre-Columbian past and Indigenous peoples into the folds of national perception, and yet, as Martinez explains, this has previously been based on patronizing stereotypes. She finds hope in the recent inclusion of Indigenous actresses and Indigenous language in Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning film, Roma (2019).

In “Alaska Native Basketry: Diversity in the Far North,” Bryn Barabas Potter introduces us to basket-making practices in some of the most remote stretches of land and sea in North America. These basket makers renew their connections with the natural world, its plants, animals, and other beings, creating sculptures that hold our hopes for survival and a better future for us all.

Inclusion means recognizing different perspectives—perhaps seemingly conflicting on the surface, but pointing to larger, broader truths. Indigenous artists in our profiles, reviews, and features use wildly different tactics and messages to resonate with different audiences. Just as there is no one way to talk, walk, or dance, there is no one way to create art.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

Coe Center Experience our unique collections

Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2019

blurring the line

Rita Letendre (Abenaki) Sunburst, 1971 (detail) Oil on canvas, 31” x 40” Museum Purchase: Eiteljorg Fellowship

EITELJORG CONTEMPORARY ART FELLOWSHIP 2019

NOV 16, 2019–FEB 2, 2020

The line that separates contemporary Native art from customary Native art does not exist. The work of contemporary Native artists today is a continuum of Native expression.

—Jennifer Complo McNutt, curator of contemporary art Indianapolis | Eiteljorg.org/ContemporaryArtFellowship #EJBlurringTheLine Steve Smith (Kwakwaka’wakw), Spiraling Inward (detail), c. 1990

Free and open every First Friday of the month, 1-4 pm or you can give us a call to plan a visit!

1590B Pacheco Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505 coeartscenter.org / (505) 983-6372

SPONSORED BY:

FALL 2019 | 11

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS On August 30 the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas opened the Kickapoo Tribal Museum, located in the Kickapoo Government Center in Horton, Kansas.

The culmination of years of effort and planning, the museum celebrates Kickapoo culture and history. Featured exhibitions examine their migration history from the Great Lakes region, material culture including beadwork and clothing design, tribal sovereignty, and the contributions of Kickapoo veterans.

The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, received a donation of almost a thousand Inuit artworks from the estate of Dr. Margaret Perkins Hess (1916–2016) of Alberta. The late art historian, businesswoman, and rancher bequeathed work from her massive collection of Indigenous art to the University of Lethbridge and the University of British Colombia Museum of Anthropology in 2018, as well.

top Hoċokata Ti, the newly opened Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community cultural center, Shakopee, Minnesota.

Image courtesy of Goff Public. above Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfeet), 2019 Santa Fe Indian Market Best of Show winner with her artwork, Amskapipikuni Culture Keeper: The heart and soul of our family’s resilient Blackfeet culture keeper and wisdom keeper, Cecile Shildt, 2019, glass beads, cotton, fresh water pearls, 22 × 191/2. Photo: Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa).

MUSEUMS The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) opened the Hoċokata Ti (Dakota: “lodge at the center of the camp”) cultural center and communal gathering space in late July.

In addition to providing services to SMSC members, the center also features a public exhibition, Mdewakanton: Dwellers of the Spirit Lake, which tells the story of the Mdewakanton Sioux from their origins to the present day. Hoċokata Ti is located in Shakopee, Minnesota.

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The Henry Luce Foundation, through their American Art Program, has awarded the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a two-year grant of $890,000 designated for the study, digitization and conservation of two significant collections. One collection includes works on paper by artists Thomas and Mary Moran. The other collection is comprised of more than 1,500 Plains Indian art works ranging from the mid-19th century to the present day including hide paintings, ledger art, and contemporary paintings. The Gilcrease Museum, established by Thomas Gilcrease (Muscogee Creek, 1890–1962) in 1949, features a remarkable collection of Indigenous art and material culture from across the Americas.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) named Jaimie L. Isaac (Sagkeeng Ojibwe) as their new curator of Indigenous and contemporary art. Isaac has served as an Aboriginal curatorial resident and member of the Indigenous advisory circle at WAG.

Rural America Initiatives Presents the 5th Annual

BLACK HILLS

WINTER AMERICAN INDIAN ART MARKET Saturday, November 30, 2019, 10 a.m – 5 p.m.

Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn 505 N. Fifth Street, Rapid City, SD More than 40 tribally-enrolled American Indian artists and craftspeople from the Black Hills and area reservations.

For information, please contact Deborah Gangloff at

dgangloff@rushmore.com

“READY,” PAINTING BY JENNIFER WHITE (ARIKARA)

The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, hired Annika K. Johnson as their associate curator of Native American art, a position funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johnson earned her doctoral degree in art history from the University of Pittsburgh.

ART SHOWS The Cherokee Heritage Center at Park Hill, Oklahoma, held its 24th annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show.

Tonia Weavel (Cherokee Nation) won Best of Show. Classification winners were Phyllis Jimmeye, traditional arts; Mike Dart, traditional basketry; Crystal Hanna, contemporary pottery; Vicki Coppedge, contemporary basketry; Dino Kingfisher, visual arts; Troy Jackson, sculpture; Carolyn Pallett, beadwork; Karen Berry, textiles; and Toneh Chuleewah, jewelry. DeAnn McDaniel won the Emerging Artist Award, and Julie Brison won the Bill Rabbit Legacy Award. All award-winners are members of the Cherokee Nation.

ART MARKETS Jackie Larson Bread (Blackfoot) won Best of Show at SWAIA’s 2019 Santa Fe Indian Market. Best of classification winners were Sarah Aragon (Diné), jewelry; Russell Sanchez (San Ildefonso), pottery; Marwin Begaye (Diné), painting/drawings/graphics/photography; Aaron Honyumptewa (Picuris/Hopi), wood Pueblo figurative carvings and sculpture; Troy Sice (Zuni), sculpture; Venancio Aragon (Diné), textiles; Dana Warrington (Menominee/Potawatomi), diverse arts; Jackie Larson Bread, beadwork/ quillwork; Robert Begay (Diné), youth; and Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), basketry. Fourteen special awards were announced. These include the IAIA Distinguished Alumni Award, won by Monty Little (Diné), Bernard Ewell Innovation Award, won by Tom Farris (Otoe-Missouria/Cherokee), Tony Da Memorial Award, won by Jennifer Tafoya (Santa Clara Pueblo), and the Oqwa-Pi

Pueblo Painting Award, won by Thomas Tapia (Tesuque), and others.

The Best of Show winner of the seventh annual Native POP: People of the Plains Art Market and Cultural Celebration was Rhonda Holy Bear (Standing Rock Lakota). The category winners were Carlin Bear Don’t Walk (Crow/ Northern Cheyenne), two-dimensional; Rhonda Holy Bear, three-dimensional; Susan Hudson (Navajo), adornment; and Madison Burnette (Lakota/Dakota/ Cheyenne/Navajo), emerging. Special awards winners were Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota), innovation; Carlin Bear Don’t Walk, people’s choice; and Charles Her Many Horses (Sicangu Lakota), publicity award.

AWARDS & HONORS The McKnight Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Minneapolis recognized Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe) as a 2019 FALL 2019 | 13

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

REPATRIATION The US District Court ruled in July that EVE Auction House in Paris must return a ceremonial shield to the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico. The French auction house intended to sell the shield in 2016, but the US District Court stopped the sale because the century-old shield was one of several that had been stolen from a tribal home in the 1970s in violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Jerold Collings, who sent the shield to EVE Auction House, inherited it from his mother in 1984, but has ultimately cooperated with authorities to help its return to the pueblo. above A hoodoo at Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada.

Photo: Bobby Jo Grunewald (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Distinguished Artist. The award, which includes a $50,000 gift, honors resident Minnesotan artists who have made significant contributions to their community through their work. Denomie, a prolific painter who describes his politically charged work as “metaphoric surrealism,” is the first Native American to be chosen for this award. His narrative paintings often employ a humorous approach to encourage public discussion of sensitive, even inflammatory contemporary topics.

Denomie has won numerous awards for his work including previous fellowships from the McKnight Foundation in 2012 and 2018.

DESIGN

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a nonprofit art center in San Francisco, chose Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/ Hidatsa/Arikara) and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax) among its 2019 YBCA 100. Honorees participate in the annual YBCA 100 Summit.

T he U N E S C O Worl d He r it age Committee designated Writing-onStone Provincial Park a World Heritage Site on July 6. 2019. Writing-on-Stone, also known as Áísínai'pi (Blackfoot: “it is pictured/written”), includes multiple sites sacred to the Niitsítapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) and also serves as a nature preserve. The sandstone cliffs of the park contain the most significant concentration of petroglyphs and pictographs in the Great Plains, some of which date back thousands of years. The park, which encompasses 4,400 acres of coulee and prairie habitat, is located approximately 100 kilometers southeast of Lethbridge, Alberta, close to the US border in Montana.

PUBLIC ART The Walker Art Center selected Angela Papenfuss Two Stars (SissetonWahpeton Dakota) as the finalist for an Indigenous Public Art Commission in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Her proposed sculpture, selected from a pool of 50 submissions, will be installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in the fall of 2020.

I Am Anishinaabe has partnered with the Swedish-based Gudrun Sjödén fashion label to produce a new line of clothing and accessories. I Am Anishinaabe, the Minnesota-based team featuring mother Delina White and daughter Lavender Hunt (both Leech Lake Ojibwe), designed the Aki Collection. These brilliant colored Great Lakes floral dresses and purses are available through Gudrun Sjödén stores and online.

IN MEMORIAM Kent McManis, owner of Grey Dog Trading and founder of the Zuni Fetish Museum in Old Town, Albuquerque, passed away on July 13, 2019. Born in Albuquerque, McManis attended school in California and established his Native art business in Arizona. He was a passionate advocate for Zuni people and their artwork. He wrote and cowrote numerous books about Southwestern Native artwork, including Zuni Fetishes and Carvings and A Guide to Hopi Katsina Dolls, both coauthored with Robin Stancliff. The Zuni Fetish Museum opened two days before he walked on.

PRECONTACT SITES

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above Larry Kent McManis (September 17, 1952–July 13, 2019). Image courtesy of Grey Dog Trading, Albuquerque.

2019 WINTER INDIAN MARKET RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Holiday shopping with Native artists, in a festive setting at La Fonda on the Santa Fe Plaza!

Saturday, December 14, 9 am – 5 pm Sunday, December 15, 10 am – 3 pm 150 Artists Live Music & Dance Silent Auction Lodging Packages Available $10/$15 Weekend Pass 505 983 5220 www.swaia.org

Figurines by Linda Fragua. Photo by T. Clifford

Presented by SWAIA: Bringing Native Arts to the World Since 1922

FALL 2019 | 15

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

TINA MARIE OSCEOLA Seminole Judge, Entrepreneur, and Collector Shares Her Top-Seven List

A

N ENROLLED MEMBER of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Tina Marie Osceola lives in Naples, Florida, with her family. Osceola’s career history includes titles such as executive director of the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, public information officer with the Collier County Sheriff ’s Office, and currently, associate judge for the Seminole Tribal Trial Court.

Osceola spent her young life traveling the country with her brother and parents selling Seminole arts, crafts, and food. Traveling in a pickup and living in a small, four-person tent in 1975 exposed seven-year-old Osceola to a world that became her life’s passion. Osceola loves to travel to all corners of the country while experiencing the art, dance, and food of the people whose land she walks.

Tina has served on many boards of nonprofits including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the

above Tina Marie Osceola.

Image courtesy of the author. opp osite D o ro t hy G ra n t (Haida), Raven in Fireweed evening dress, 2018, silk, sheer tulle lace, 54 in. long. Image courtesy of the artist. left Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/Seneca) winning Best of Show at the 2007 Santa Fe Indian Market. Photo: A. Meredith.

NORTH: Dorothy Grant I first saw the legendary Dorothy Grant, an extraordinary Haida artist and fashion designer, at the grand opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. I fell absolutely in love with her clothing designs. It felt as if her use of bright colors sharply contrasted with black borders jumped off the garments and into my soul! A few years later we were introduced by a mutual friend and would meet up along the Native conference trail that I followed as an active board member of the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association. When I bought my first “Dorothy” at Santa Fe Indian Market, I was instantly hooked. Her Haida designs include the raven, whale, octopus, frog, and salmon. She shared stories of sourcing the silk fabric, the manufacturers, and her dreams of expanding her line. Dorothy’s designs talk to you, and each garment tells a different story of the Pacific Northwest. dorothygrant.com

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American Indian, the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, and the Southeast Tourism Society. She currently serves on the board of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

I OFTEN TELL PEOPLE that if I stay at home for too long, my suitcase will pack itself and leave without me! Traveling is in my DNA. I collect these memories like mental photo albums, and when some of my favorite places are brought up in conversation, I can almost start sorting through the landscapes, faces, and even smells of places I have visited.

When asked to organize my thoughts into the seven directions, I thought what a great opportunity to share some of the most inspirational artists from my travels both near and far! It is my hope that readers will take the time to enjoy some of the places that I have visited and meet some of the same people who I met along the way.

SOUTH: Ashley Cypress Finding inspiration without having to go far from home covers one of my favorite Miccosukee artists. Ashley Cypress is a source of never-ending creativity and light. She has mastered Miccosukee dressmaking while overlaying, quite literally, her own love of fashion. The result is a magnificent blend of contemporary fashion and textiles that provide a canvas for Miccosukee patchwork.

Ashley’s courageous use of new fabrics and styles have inspired others to do the same. Too often Native artists are expected to only produce what ethnographic academics would identify as classically representative of their particular tribe or region. Ashley busts through the confines of those opinions with such a force that textbooks will need to be rewritten! Instagram @alleykatkreations

up when talking to him. Dallin is an amazing artist who probably can’t even list the number of times he has taken home blue ribbons and accolades for his contribution to the art world. One of his most remarkable creations was a buffalo robe that combined beads and ledger art to tell a story. Dallin currently works for the Native American Rights Fund in Denver.

Instagram @thunderbeef4 ABOVE: Debbie Lujan I first visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico while on a cross-country summer expedition with my parents in

1975. At seven years old, I fell in love with the pueblo as well as the entire community. Taos always felt like a second home, and my friends from there are closer to me than some of my own family! So it would be fitting that one of my all-time favorite photographers, Debbie Lujan (Taos), would call this ancient pueblo her home. Debbie’s photographs capture all that make her home magical—from the pueblo’s architecture and its careful placement at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to its beautiful skies.

Regardless of whether her landscape is covered with the snow in winter or the

EAST: Miccosukee Creativity Center A young Miccosukee woman, Khadijah Cypress started the Miccosukee Creativity Center (MCC) in her own small community along the Tamiami Trail where alligators are almost more common than people. Rightfully dubbed a passion project, MCC is housed in a small concrete building next to the tribe’s village museum and cultural center. MCC is packed with shelves of fabric and spools of rickrack and bias tape for friends and community members to make patchwork items on the half-dozen sewing machines she has plugged in at any given moment.

Khadijah also has sweetgrass and palmetto fiber for those wishing to make dolls or baskets, and plenty of beading supplies for those who choose to explore their jewelry-making desires! I am completely humbled by Khadijah’s sense of community and willingness to share her knowledge of Miccosukee cultural arts. Instagram @sewing_center_mcc WEST: Dallin Maybee I was conflicted on whether my Northern Arapaho/Seneca friend, Dallin Maybee, was best described as a western representative, because of where he lives, or an above representative, because at six-feet, eight-inches tall, I have to look FALL 2019 | 17

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.

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 1849 C Street, NW, MS 2528-MIB Washington DC 20240 Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-2783253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb Joan Hill, Muscogee Creek Nation, Sacred Ceremony of the Temple Mound, Painting, ©1989

wildflowers of summer, Taos Pueblo provides Debbie with countless opportunities to shoot images that will capture your heart.

BELOW: Donna Frank I immediately thought of Donna Frank when thinking about below. While walking through the tall grasses of Florida, we often focus on not stepping on a snake, and we overlook the fact that we’re walking through Donna’s canvas. Donna Frank is a master Seminole basket maker who I have known my whole life. My parents bought many of her creations over the years and so have the leaders of her Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, and countless tribal members. Donna’s basket designs are a feat. She has shared pictures of herself sitting cross-legged on her bed or the floor while weaving a basket in her lap. Sometimes those baskets are bigger than a basketball hoop and others resemble a cauldron. Regardless of the shape she chooses to weave, I am blown away by her style and structure. Donna has become a sought-after teacher. She educates and mentors young basket makers by hosting field trips for sweetgrass and palmetto harvesting and classes for those wishing to learn the art of Seminole sweetgrass baskets. seminolesweetgrassbaskets.com left Deborah Lujan (Taos Pueblo), Bell Tower in Taos, digital photograph. opposite, top Donna Frank (Florida Seminole), Baskets, sweetgrass, palmetto fiber, cotton thread. Image courtesy of Michole Eldred. opposite, bottom Kenneth Johnson (Seminole/Muscogee), Cahcahwv, silver, copper, 18-karat yellow gold. Image courtesy of the artist.

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A downtown Austin, Texas gallery featuring traditional and contemporary fine art

by Native American Artists CENTER: Kenneth Johnson My mind immediately went to Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee/Seminole), from the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma, when thinking center. Kenneth is a jeweler and silversmith who uses Seminole motifs in his designs. I have known Ken over the years and am always awestruck by whatever new design or method he is mastering. Ken bravely conquers every project as if they are personal challenges. My favorite is one of his more experimental bracelets with a double, ivory-billed woodpecker design. Ken used silver, copper, and 18-karat gold accents to create a bracelet that looks like it could come alive and fly away.

His creations have so much power and life. kennethjohnson.com There are so many more people, places, and things that I could have included but I thought I would share the first to come to mind. May all of you meet people as interesting, kind, creative, and inspiring as these seven.

TAPIS Blankets in Celebration of the Sled Dog Dogs are the original beasts of burden of North America. As such, they were celebrated in the subarctic regions of Alaska and Western Canada with elaborate, beaded dog blankets—a practice that almost disappeared until Indigenous artists decided to reclaim it.

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee)

W

above A sled dog wearing a dog blanket and elaborate harness, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, 1962, collection of the NWT Archives/Henry Busse funds/N-1979-052: 5599. Photo: Henry Busse (1896–1962). Image courtesy of the Northwest Territories Archives. opposite, top Single-line dogsled team wearing tapis, 2018. Image courtesy of Robert Grandjambe (Mikisew Cree). opposite, bottom Dogs at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2018. Image courtesy of Robert Grandjambe (Mikisew Cree).

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E HAVE ALL HEARD the quote, “Dogs are man’s best friend,” and dogs play a central part in the lives of many people. Dogs provide companionship and sometimes protection. Many breeds help with our daily work, and some serve as part of the ceremonial and religious life of many Indigenous people. A strong bond exists between human and canine, so it comes as no surprise that the image of a dog would appear in Indigenous art throughout the Americas. However, it may come as a surprise that some art created by Indigenous artists is not of the dog but for the dog.

Indigenous people of the subarctic, including Cree, Athabascan, and Métis (also known as Michif) peoples, have a long history of creating intricate blankets, often referred to as tapis or tuppies, for their sled dogs. This art is created out of the highest regard and respect for the dog. The practice of creating tapis likely originated with the Red River Métis and then spread into Cree, Dene, and even Koyukon Athabascan communities.

Due to the prevalence of snow and ice, dogsledding was an important form of transportation for people of the subarctic, providing a means to travel and trade from one town to another. Dog teams could also pull heavy loads, which was

essential after successful hunting excursions or to replenish supplies of firewood.1 In his 1871 book, Red River, Joseph James Hargrave describes the glory of the sled dog: The starting of the Northern Packet from Red River is one of the great annual events in the colony.… The means of transit are sledges and snowshoes. The sledges are drawn by magnificent dogs, of which there are three or four to each vehicle, whose neatly fitting harness, though gaudy in appearance, is simple in design and perfectly adapted to its purposes, while the little bells attached thereto, bright looking and clearly ringing, cheer the flagging spirits of men and animals through the long run of the winter's day.2

BELLS AND TASSELS DOGSLEDDING WAS VITAL to the people of the Yukon region as a tool for survival. Dogs were celebrated as athletes and heroes, and honored with ornate blankets made of velvet, canvas or soft cloth, wool yarn, glass or metal beads, sinew, thread, cotton or silk ribbon, or hide. Purely decorative with no utilitarian intent, the blankets were beaded or adorned with bells and silk ribbons, and some were embroidered.

Textile and beadwork artist Florence Moses (Northern Tutchone/Gwich’in/ Hän) says tapis were not only worn to show pride in their animals, but also announced the sled dogs’ arrival: “As a dog team and its owner would approach a community, the owner would stop and put these wonderful beautiful pieces of art on the dog. So as they approach the community, they would hear the jingling of the bells ringing as the dogs ran with the blankets. It would announce they're coming in.”3 Robert Grandjambe (Mikisew Cree) is a dogsledder in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, Canada. Grandjambe runs the Atim Ostogwan (“dog’s head”) Dogsled

and Boat Tours in Alberta with his wife, Barbara Grandjambe (Mikisew Cree). In the snowy months, Robert gives dogsled rides to tourists who want to experience historical, single-line dogsledding. He is the only known individual in North America still doing this type of sledding.

Ideal for carrying heavy loads, single-line dogsledding is also used for hunting and cutting trails through the woods. The wooded area in Alberta is not suited for the double rows of dogs used in dogsled racing, and Grandjambe points out that single-line is not suitable for sled racing.

The toboggan used in single-line is heavy, as opposed to the lighter basket sled used in racing. Single-line sledding

1. Amelia Fay, “Dog Blanket,” Canada’s History, April 4, 2016, web.

2. Joseph James Hargrave, Red River (Montreal: Printed for the author by John Lovell, 1871), 155.

3. Priscilla Hwang, “Dog blankets making a comeback at 2017 Yukon Quest,” CBC News (February 4, 2017), web.

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also has a unique dog harness, custom made to precisely fit dogs. The last time Grandjambe saw a single-line harness for sale was in an Alberta store in 1974.

Grandjambe admires the beauty of the tapis on dogs at these celebratory races, and he shared some interesting history about them: The [Cree] trappers would come to town two times a year. The priests had the people convinced that if they believed, they would go to a better place when they died. The trappers came into town on Christmas Eve and Easter for Mass. Their dogs were dressed up in their beautiful tapis.

It was a competition. Times were tough back then—there were a lot of mouths to feed. The elders wanted to give away their daughters to the best provider. Beautiful tapis meant they had money and a good family.

The tapis were made by the trapper’s wife. If he wasn’t married, they were made by his mother or sister. It was a screening. The better tapis got the trapper the best wife.4

AN ART FORM IN DECLINE PAULINE LIVINGSTONE (MÉTIS), a beadwork artist, describes the magic felt when the dogs were approaching.

“During times of great celebration, or after a successful hunt, or trade, or just visiting relatives that hadn’t been seen in a long time, arriving dogsleds would be dressed in colorfully beaded or embroidered blankets with bells that could be heard from a distance,” she explains. “The dogs were moving over snow-covered trails, laden with supplies or gifts, and the bells signaled to their waiting families, full of anticipation, of what the loaded sled would bring.5 As time passed, Livingstone says, “The use of dogsleds became less popular with the introduction of snowmobiles. Travel became easier, required less preparation and packing of supplies, and they could reach higher speeds and cover greater distances. The use of dog teams 4. Robert Grandjambe in discussion with author, August 2, 2019.

5. Pauline Livingstone in discussion with author, August 8, 2019.

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and sleds fell out of favor for day-to-day use, and with the lessening need for the dogsled for survival, the art form of the sled dog blanket began to dwindle.”

Beadwork artist Diane Olsen (Gwich'in/Northern Tutchone/Hän) thinks it was not only faster forms of transportation that caused the dog blanket’s decline, but also the fact that Native children were being forced to attend residential schools, marking a greater assault on Indigenous cultures. One of the main objectives of residential schools was to force First Nations children to adapt to Euro-Canadian society. As a result, these children were taken away from their families and communal way of life. The children did not continue to make the art forms that generations before them had always made, and one of those lost art forms was the dog blanket.

Even though the practice of sewing dog blankets almost died out, First Nations artists in the Yukon who felt a growing need began “to learn who we are and where we come from,” as Olsen explains to me.6 Among the Métis, the basic techniques never really died out.

Livingstone says, “I believe beading has remained constant and sometimes became a necessity to feed families. Crafters could make and sell their items in order to put food on the table or earn a little extra to buy more beading supplies.”

“Beadwork was almost a dead art form back in the 1970s to 1980s. There were very few people who still did this kind of work back then,” explains Jennine Krauchi (Métis). 7 “As for myself, my mother and father ran a Native craft and clothing store during that time. My father and mother would make moccasins and mukluks and jackets and have the local women from nearby reserves do the small pieces of beadwork for the vamps, etc.

Being around these women and seeing these things, I just kind of gravitated towards learning how to do beadwork.”

Krauchi joined forces with other artists, who were determined to bring back the dog blanket.

YUKON QUEST’S FIRST NATION DOG BLANKET PROJECT THE DOG BLANKET REVIVAL was kick-started in 2016. Florence Moses recounts the moment: “A Gwich’in elder [Shirlee Frost] approached me with an idea of sewing dog blankets for the Yukon Quest to revitalize a First Nation tradition.”8 Soon Moses put out a request to other artists across the Yukon to create dog blankets for the upcoming 2017 Yukon Quest. Within four months, several women artists came together to create magnificent, eye-catching blankets for the sled dogs competing in the epic 1,000– mile race from Fairbanks, Alaska, to

above Paula Livingstone (Métis), placing her blanket on a sled dog at the Yukon Quest, 2017.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, top Jennine Krauchi (Métis), Tapis, 2017, glass beads, cloth, yarn, bells, commercial leather. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, bottom Jennine Krauchi’s dog modeling her blanket. Image courtesy of the artist.

6. Diane Olsen in discussion with author, August 7, 2019.

7. Jennine Krauchi in discussion with author, March 22, 2019.

8. Meghan Murphy, “Northern Winter Traditions,” Yukon Quest, January 30, 2019, web.

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also approached the organization and was interested in collaborating. Once the plan was set in motion, everything came together quickly. Ladies were asked to commit to finishing, and materials were selected and cut and divided among the women, each incorporating their heritage into the designs.” During the fall and winter of 2016, the artists met weekly at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre in Whitehorse to bead, discuss their progress, and motivate each other. Sometimes they met just to sit and share stories over tea, often with considerable laughter.

“As our project progressed, we learned that the Yukon Quest was incorporating a ceremonial start to the race led

by Indigenous musher Armin Johnson and his dog team,” Livingstone recalls.

“The ceremonial team was a way for the race to commemorate the cultural roots of the sport, which hadn’t been done for a number of years. We each selected a dog from Armin’s team to dress in our dog blankets and lead the start chute. It was amazing to be present in the moment, to feel the pride among the women and the contagious excitement of the crowds and the dogs as the team was counted down and set off along the snow-covered trail on the banks of the Yukon River.”

MATERIALS, METHODS, AND MOTIFS

a b ov e , top D i a n e O l s e n (Northern Tutchone/Gwich’in/ Han Hwech’in), Arrival of the Dog Team, 2017, glass beads, cloth, yarn, thread, bells. Photo: Florence Moses (Northern Tutchone/Gwich’in/Hän). Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Deb Enoch (Northern Tutchone/Upper Tanana/White River First Nation), Arrival of the Dog Te a m , d o g b l a n ke t w i t h beadwork design of sled dog and crest, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Yu k o n Q u e s t ceremonial dog team wearing tapis and mushed by Armin Johnson, 2017. Image courtesy of Paula Livingstone (Métis).

Whitehorse, Yukon. The group included Moses, Livingstone, Olsen, Krauchi, Shirley Adamson (Tagish), Nyla KlugieMigwans (Tłįchǫ/Northern Tutchone), Deb Enoch (Northern Tutchone/Upper Tanana), Karen Lepine (Hän/Tlingit), Elizabeth Moses (Gwich’in/Northern Tutchone), Velma Olsen (Northern Tutchone/Hän/Gwich’in), and Ann Tayler (Anishinaabe).

When Livingstone joined the sewing circle, little did she know how much work was involved. She gives enormous credit to Florence Moses and Diane Olsen for introducing her to beading and welcoming her into the sewing group: “Florence approached members of the sewing group with an idea to incorporate traditional art in the Yukon Quest. She

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SOME OF THE TECHNIQUES and many of the materials used among these dog blanket artists varied. Two common beadwork techniques involve “one needle and two needles,” says Krauchi, who uses the two-needle technique. “Some people may say that one way is better than the other, but I would have to disagree, having seen some absolutely amazing pieces done in both styles.”

Livingstone also used the two-needle technique. Not an experienced beader at that time, she tacked down every single bead, because it was such an important project that she wanted to have clean lines and flat beading. She chose navy blue Melton wool and seed bead colors that would stand out on such a strong colored background, opting for beads in greens, reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, purples, and blues. “If I didn’t think a color was suitable or stand out enough, I would take it apart

and start over.” She framed the dog blanket in gold-toned, commercially tanned deerskin fringe rather than the customary yarn fringe or tassels.

Recounting the history of Métis beadwork, Krauchi tells me: In the beginnings, it started with the Grey Nuns showing Indigenous women how to do silk embroidery using French floral patterns. When beads came to be traded by companies such as Hudson’s Bay and the North West Company, these [Métis] women took these beads and started designing their own patterns, which became the Métis style. These patterns were largely developed from combining the patterns of the French and what they saw in nature. For the Métis, these were wildflowers, buds, stems, and things like mouse tracks, which are prevalent in this style of beadwork.

We became known as the Flower Beadwork People.9 While Métis tapis are extensively beaded, Woodland Cree tapis are not. In more thickly wooded parts of Canada, the vegetation would grab and tear beads off the tapis. Barbara Grandjambe creates all the tapis for Randy Grandjambe’s dogs.

Most of her designs are embroidered with thread on wool or flannel, and she adds brightly colored yarn tassels, pom poms, ribbon, and sleigh bells.

Deb Enoch, who also uses the

two-needle technique, says: “For the dog blanket, a Melton material was used, glass beads, nylon thread, ribbon, tassels, and canvas. My blanket had the Yukon crest on it, as this was an item that I remember my mother making often.” Enoch says her aesthetic choices, designs, and techniques are “related to the culture of our people and also a personal choice of what design and materials to use.”10 Olsen did not have a specific family style and technique to use as guidance for her dog blanket design. She did incorporate historical materials used by family members, but then she followed her own creative choices. As Olsen tells me, “I have used stroud (wool), wool threads from my great-aunt on my maternal side to embroider with, seed beads, and yarn to the fringes, and, of course, bells.” She borrowed from historical examples to form the shape of the blanket but created new floral designs based on her research.

“I don’t have the designs of my family to use. I chose my favorite color, red. I wanted it to be bright and eye catching.”

HOPE FOR A REVIVAL SINCE DEVOTING THEIR TALENTS to the resurgence of tapis, these beadwork artists carry hope that others will catch

on to the joy of sewing the blankets and feeling the happiness of seeing spirited sled dogs sporting tapis. Not only did the ceremonial team of ten dogs proudly wear their unique blankets at the head of the 2017 Yukon Quest, but the blankets were also displayed as part of the exhibition, On Our Way Home, at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre in late 2017 and early 2018. Shown in the center’s lobby, the tapis were collectively titled Arrival of the Dog Team, and they became part of the Yukon Permanent Art Collection.

As Livingstone sums up her thoughts on the future of dog blankets: “I imagine there will be interest in reviving a wonderful history piece, a tribute to a simpler time, and a sense of connection to the land and community. When others learned of the project, they began sharing their stories and memories of their families harnessing dogs or hearing the sound of bells as a dog team was coming home.”

For these artists, rekindling the memories, skills, and ceremonies of Indigenous cultures makes all the work involved in projects like this worthwhile. And undoubtedly man’s best friend would also appreciate the comeback of an art custom made in their honor—bells and all!

Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee) is a writer, curator, and educator, who earned her master’s degree in education from Berry College. She believes the enjoyment of the arts and art-making should be accessible to all peoples.

9. Krauchi, Ibid.

10. Deb Enoch in discussion with author, August 8, 2019.

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THE YƏHAW´ PHENOMENON Lifting the Arts Together in the Puget Sound The Creator has left the sky too low. We are going to have to do something about it, and how can we do that when we do not have a common language? ...

We can all learn one word, that is all we need. That word is yəhaẃ. That means “to proceed, to go forward, to do it.”

—Vi taqwšəblu Hilbert (Upper Skagit, 1918–2008) in her telling of Lifting the Sky1

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit)

KING STREET STATION

O

N MARCH 23, 2019, my son and I walked into the King Street train station where we stood in line to enter the upstairs gallery. We had missed the opening ceremonies, and the massive crowd had moved into the ARTS at King Street Station Gallery. It was so packed they had limited the entry to one in, one out. As we made our way into the yəhaw̓ flagship show, the enormity of what was undertaken finally dawned on me.

Co-curated by Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole), Asia Tail (Cherokee Nation), and Satpreet Kahlon, the exhibition featured the work of more than 200 Indigenous artists representing more than 100 tribal affiliations and Indigenous communities, and adorned the structural and freestanding walls. Along the steps leading up to the gallery, a fiber dance skirt hung below bark in various states of preparedness in an installation by Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos). In the middle of the gallery, a roundhouse by Timothy

White Eagle (White Mountain Apache descent) with walls of chain suspended from the ceiling created a circular walk-in space with bunches of jingle-dress jingles dangled from medicine wheel–colored bungie cords, allowing visitors to walk the space and surround themselves with sound. Freestanding art installations stood tall, and pedestals sprinkled throughout the gallery showcased a vast range of multimedia works including professional photography, cedar weaving, beadwork, radical embroidery, paintings, clothing, regalia, melted plastic sculpture, seal-gut installations, and a full buffalo hide dyed rainbow colors.

More than 2,500 folks walked through that opening day, and initial estimates counted 7,000 visitors during the five-month run. Because of extensive programming in multiple venues, an exact accounting of how many folks have experienced the yəhaw̓ phenomenon in its many manifestations may not be known for sure.

From the first official yəhaw̓ event featuring Demian DinéYazhi’ (Zuni/ Navajo) during the Seattle Art Fair in the

1. “About,” yəhaw̓ , web.

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summer of 2018, to the Indigenous Latinx Showcase, to the Indigenous fashion show at the Seattle Art Museum, and up on through the mentorship programs that kicked off in September 2018, the yəhaw̓ show has relentlessly pursued what the press has deemed “the democratization of Native arts” around the Salish Sea (also known as Puget Sound) and beyond. In what has become a contentious discussion within the museum field about the ability to decolonize colonized spaces, the yəhaw̓ curators have led the project with the goals of decentralizing the curatorial process, sharing the work, and reciprocity. I was able to attend a curator’s panel featured as part of the closing weekend celebration of the King Street exhibition and sat down with the lead curators of yəhaw̓ . What follows is a compilation of the panel discussion and our conversation.

Miranda Belarde-Lewis: First of all, thank you for all of your work and for taking the time to sit down with me.

What was the original impetus for the yəhaw̓ phenomenon?

above HollyAnna "CougarTracks" DeCoteau LittleBull (Yakama/Nez Perce/Cayuse/Cree) discussing her sculpture TŁ'ÁAX'WMAMIN ACHA'WÁMIT TÚXIN (Lifts the Sky) at the yəhaw' opening reception, Arts at King Street Station. Photo: Sunny Martini.

Asia Tail: It came from a space of being involved in a past project and not being able to accept all the Indigenous artists.

I asked myself, what would happen if I forced myself to say yes? From there, Satpreet and I worked together and approached Tracy to figure out how to begin addressing these gaps.

MBL: Many of us in the ar ts community—those of us who know about the project—view yəhaw̓ as a model for the democratization of the curatorial process. Can you talk about that process?

AT: I think that term democratization came from the press. We’ve framed it as an opportunity to build arts infrastructure for many different types of creatives, and to decentralize and disrupt the curatorial process. Part of disrupting the curatorial process took place here for the King Street show with our decision to accept all Indigenous artists who wanted to be in the exhibition.

Satpreet Kahlon: We’re all creatives and felt like none of us had curatorial authority, but we knew we could extend trust to the artists. We could shield them from the doubts being expressed by the funders and the folks in the city’s arts office.

MBL: S. Surface, the program leader and curator of the ARTS at King Street, asked about the themes you’ve been working toward over the course of three years. What are those themes?

SK: The first question we were working toward was how to address gaps, gaps in opportunities and space for Indigenous creatives. We were also working to dismantle dominant narratives about us as artists. The four primary narratives were (1) that artists are unreliable; (2) that we have to wait for an opportunity to present itself to us; (3) that radical action has to be big, grand gestures; and (4) that we have to wait for the perfect organization to exist before we work with them. When it comes

to waiting for opportunities (2), the imagination of the city or state is never going to be at the level of the creators. We can’t wait for them to approach us. And when it comes to the question of what radical action looks like (3), I have to acknowledge Asia’s example of loving each other through the “diva moments,” of sitting with discomfort, and wanting to decentralize the process. This show happened because of Asia, from beginning to end.

Tracy Rector: I really have to acknowledge Satpreet. Asia and I have been used to working with projects that have little to no funding, and we’ve learned so much from each other and from her about how to have honest conversations about money, especially drawing on her fierceness when approaching funders. It’s been part of the process of having a diverse team; we’re all unapologetic in different ways.

SK: I would usually be the antagonistic one in meetings [laughs].

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MBL: Yeah, but then that makes Tracy and Asia look like the “reasonable” ones, right? [Laughs.]

AT: I definitely played good cop a lot of the time.

above yəhaẃ curators, Asia Tail (Cherokee Nation), Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole), and Satpreet Kahlon. Photo: Jenny Crooks. opposite Lummi Black Hawk Singers at the yəhaẃ opening reception, Arts at King Street Station, March 23, 2019. Photo: Jenny Crooks.

MBL: It’s even more effective if you get angry or passionate, right? That’s another asset to having a team—you were all able to share the cognitive and professional load of having to be the one expert or cultural authority. How did you all handle the day-to-day logistics of a massive project like this?

AT: We had clear leadership roles for different chunks of work, and we all worked to our different strengths. I’m good with email and chasing down artists, and if someone needed a blurb written up, I wrote it. Satpreet is bold and had worked with a lot of the sites before. Tracy is amazing with grants. We kept going back to our original proposal. Even though it

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changed over the course of three years, the vision stayed the same.

MBL: Looking back on how the different partners and sites became part of the multisite project, can you talk about the balance required when leveraging existing relationships with friends and colleagues at partner institutions?

TR: We had [more than] 25 partner sites ranging from large, recognized institutions to small independent venues, to Indigenous-run spaces. Each required a different relationship. We really did have to just trust them to step up … and for the most part they did. Our most extensive satellite projects happened with the Seattle Public Library, Vermillion, the Suquamish Museum, Alma Mater in Tacoma, and many others. The Seattle Art Museum hosted and collaborated on the fashion show, and every third Thursday, Alma Mater has been hosting coworking sessions featuring Indigenous artists and

creatives. It’s family oriented and centers on Native peoples. We make art, have food, laugh. They’ve been hosting it for the last year, free of charge.

AT: Being cognizant and embedded in community, like at the coworking sessions, really helped artists and community members know they had someone to help them navigate the arts process. It’s an Indigenous approach and definitely beyond traditional curatorial labor. It required different styles of care and communication.

MBL: Definitely. You worked with so many different artists on exhibitions and mentorships. What types of qualities were you searching for when you selected the folks for the mentorship opportunities you offered, and how did you select the mentors/mentees?

SK: We knew the gap is not just about exhibition space but also the sustainable network. We can see who’s still

working together now that the show is closing, and the passing of knowledge is really important. We wanted to create a formal process that would complement the informal scaffolding that happened organically as we were going. How could we help someone feel supported enough that they could support someone else?

Jessica [Ramirez (Chicana)] mentioned that today, that while she was curating the Latinx Showcase, she was being mentored

by Tracy and, in turn, Jessica was mentoring someone else.

TR: The mentorship aspect was integral from the start. It reflects reciprocity among creatives. There are different realities about what it means to be creative. We want to be able to informally and formally create a legacy and a pipeline for Indigenous creatives, carefully and thoughtfully.

SK: At the start we knew Indigenous artists were being ignored, and we thought, what

if we reached out to different sites and communities? What if we had so many people and places involved that they can’t ignore us? But then the expansion wasn’t anticipated. We didn’t know it was going to grow so big. Some people called it an “Indigenous takeover,” but at a certain point we realized that the audience was never non-Native. After a while it wasn’t about proving anything to white people anymore.

TR: Over the years, there was a shift in perspective. It went from “we’re still here” to “we’re taking up space.” That we were going to be unapologetically Indigenous and that’s when it got really fun [laughs].

MBL: It gets fun when we stop centering whiteness.

TR: Yes! We can start to see our world expand even more, and that’s really when we started to see our attendance grow.

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of the teen curators and to hear their experiences curating an exhibition at the Vera Project in Seattle.

AT: We’re engaging more of a whole person approach [so we can] have organic links to different age groups and ways of expression. The teen exhibition was one way; the zine is another example of that.

We knew we had writers in our network, and we had to figure out how to support them.

above, top Teen art show grand opening at the Vera Project. Photo: Mel Carter. above, bottom Jessica Ramirez (Chicana), curator of the Indigenous Latinx Showcase.

Photo: Leo Carmona.

MBL: And the zine just published the second installment. Amazing. As with any endeavor, the rapid growth of yəhaw̓ meant some growing pains, right? The explicit declaration to create a safe space for all the participants and your code of conduct policy state that you’re committed to creating an environment “free of harassment, discrimination, sexism, and threatening or disrespectful behavior” with special attention to those “who have violated the sacred, especially those who remain unrepentant with no movement toward healing and

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reconciliation.” Did you have community standards for conduct in mind or was that an emergent process? What was the goal of the conversations?

SK: We looked for models of restorative justice. We didn’t want a banishment model.

AT: And even though we invited the conversation, no one accepted the offer.

SK: Even though that offer was extended, we wanted—or I wanted—to prioritize the most marginalized and to hold people accountable for their actions. But at the same time, it’s really triggering. It’s my job to listen, but at a certain point I just shut down.

TR: It’s an incredibly triggering and traumatizing process. None of us were entirely prepared for this aspect of the leadership role. Having a social worker’s insights would have been helpful, especially because of our interpersonal relationships some of us have with the

dozen or so men—and they were all men—we received complaints about. It got to a point where we needed guidance.

MBL: Who did you reach out to for guidance?

TR: We presented and asked for guidance from the Cowlitz Tribal Health Services, some Native lawyers, the SUNN collective [Seattle Urban Native Nonprofits, a group of 14 Native-run nonprofit boards in the Puget Sound]. They all agreed that it’s hard. They all agree that they’re not sure how to handle this either. It was really an eye-opening experience and has shaped how we [Tracy and Asia] develop guiding values from the beginning in the future Tacoma space. How we instill expectations of safety and honor when creating new realities. We have a high learning curve but yəhaw̓ is a jumping-off point for creating intentional spaces. Not actively to heal but to incorporate it from a healthy vision from the beginning.

SK: That when you do this, you need a team you trust.

AT: There’s so much gaslighting; it’s very helpful to be able to have someone else there with you to make sure you’re not imagining things, even though you know you’re not. It’s better to have someone else there too.

SK: To acknowledge the money differences and power imbalances. These large organizations and cities have the money, and we as independent curators and artists don’t.

TR: A few years ago I was on a panel with Davida [Ingram] and she said that paying people for their effort is true equity. It helped me to see the world differently and gave me strength to advocate for myself and others. It’s okay to get paid for our expertise and life experiences, especially when we give so much and take that responsibility seriously. And when we challenge dominant narratives.

MBL: You mean we can try something and not have to win all the international awards on the first go???

TR: [Laughs.] This whole project was shaped by reciprocity and sharing.

Sharing the wealth, the work, the acknowledgment. And sharing all of that requires structure and communication.

Setting aside egos. Patience. Humility mixed with fierceness and a boldness to go against capitalist tendencies in ways that are decidedly more feminine and cooperative. But it’s helping to operate from a place of shared wealth. People have definitely been thrown off by it.

MBL: Thrown off by which part?

TR: All of it! [Laughs.] Everything from us going out to help the creatives fill out the applications to everyone will get into the show [at King Street]. When we were working with the city, they wanted a “point person.” We said, “Nope. Send it to all of us.” Even the term creatives.

We decided on that term because we wanted to recognize the range of ages and community members who don’t apply the label artist to themselves but are known in the community as makers. A lasting result from all of this is that we’re being asked for advice from non-Indigenous institutions, helping them to redirect support to locals, to create funds for Native communities and artists. And maybe that’s what we need for ourselves.

Some kind of organization that assists Indigenous artists and curators navigate and advocate for themselves, especially when working with the city and large institutions to create opportunities.

MBL: You mentioned a future Tacoma space. What else is happening as part of the yəhaw̓ legacy?

MBL: Challenging dominant narratives definitely requires being bold. Do you have any advice on being bold?

SK: There needs to be the dissemination of knowledge; that’s why we’re publishing the budget. The art world runs on a mythology of scarcity, and the myth that there has to be a prize. I remember someone told me they weren’t going to submit to the King Street show because everyone got in. They said, “Well, if everyone gets in, there’s no prize.”

TR: Everyone getting in is the prize! As for what’s happening next, we have the online gallery featuring the artists we’ve worked with; there’s the documentary short being filmed by Raven Two Feathers (Comanche descent), and the beginnings of conversations to create and own our own space in Tacoma. We want to be able to accommodate regional and international gatherings in a place of our own. We don’t want to rely on someone making space for us.

TR: During this whole process the situation at the border escalated. We wanted a strong focus on Indigenous Latinx, with the messaging of [we didn't cross the border,] the border crossed us.

As we were reaching out, we realized our own blind spots in the community and in our own language. We had to get the community involved so we asked for help.

We asked Jessica Ramirez to be one of our community curators. She curated multiple exhibits as part of the Indigenous Latinx Showcase at Vermillion Art Gallery and had a film screening at the Northwest Film Forum. Every time we needed help, we asked for it, and the community responded with support. Something we learned was that it was okay for us just to try. I think the messaging toward Indigenous women is that everything has to be perfect. We’re not encouraged to just … try something.

MBL: As you reflect back on what you’ve accomplished, what are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned?

Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit), is an independent curator in the Seattle area and an assistant professor of North American Indigenous Knowledge at the University of Washington's iSchool.

SK: We’re operating from an ethos of “We can do this now.” We don’t have to wait for anyone to ask us to do this. How do we continue to remind ourselves that there’s space for all of us?

MBL: Indeed, ladies. There is space for us all. Thank you for your boldness and for leaving a blueprint.

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ALASKA NATIVE BASKETRY Diversity in the Far North

By Bryn Barabas Potter

T

HE SUBJECT OF ALASKAN BASKETRY is as expansive as Alaska itself. From region to region, basketry styles vary according to cultural uses and plants found in the different environments. In coastal, southeastern Alaska where cedar and spruce trees reign, Eyak, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and neighboring artists plait and twine their bark and roots into baskets.

Sweeping westward, on the Aleutian Islands and islands and peninsulas of southwestern Alaska, Unangan (Aleut) and Sugpiat twine grass baskets as fine as fabric. Along the western coast, including scattered islands, the Cupiit, Yupiit, and others use grass for coiled basketry.

Iñupiat artists near the northern Chukchi Sea create distinctive baskets with whale baleen. In the vast interior Athabascan groups, such as the Ahtna, Dena’ina, Hän, and Gwich’in, work with birch bark and willow. And nonwoven containers, culturally considered baskets, are made of items like fur and walrus stomach.

CEDAR BARK & SPRUCE ROOT BASKETS SOUTHEASTERN ALASKAN FORESTS are filled with evergreen trees used for basket making, especially spruce and cedar, including Pacific red cedar and yellow cedar. The bark and roots are carefully stripped and processed to create flexible materials that can be plaited or

twined into baskets used for food gathering, storage, hats, and more.

Wearing her grandmother’s hat in a dance group inspired Lisa Telford (Haida) to weave when all of the dancers wanted hats like hers. Lisa works with cedar bark and spruce root to create functional baskets, but she has also become known for innovative objects such as high heels and bustiers of cedar bark. Lisa taught her daughter and granddaughter to weave and works with apprentices.

“Everyone can weave, but few can weave well,” Lisa tells me over the phone.

“Weaving well is practice, practice, practice; desire, desire, desire.” She gathers red cedar in the mountains of Washington, 200 miles from her home, and gathers yellow cedar in Alaska. “A basket is only as good as your material,” she stresses.

Processing the materials requires roasting moist spruce roots on hot coals so steam can loosen the bark. The basket maker then peels the bark and splits the root before weaving.1 Sturdy and upright, spruce root baskets are used for cups, storage, and for gathering clams and berries. They can even be used for

1. Sharon Busby, Spruce Root Basketry of the Haida and Tlingit (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 28–29.

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cooking, by adding hot rocks to food and water in a tightly woven basket and stirring until the food is heated. Designs are achieved through varied stitching patterns, or with false embroidery by adding beargrass and stems of Western maidenhair fern.

The Alutiit of Kodiak Island and Prince William Sound have woven spruce root baskets in plain twining with false embroidery decoration. Known as Pacific spruce root baskets, these were often mistaken for Tlingit baskets despite having distinctive design elements and pattern layouts.2 The Yupiit split spruce roots to twine spruce wood splints into fish traps. This wonderfully strong root material is used throughout the North.

GRASS BASKETS GRASSES ARE THE MOST WIDELY USED materials in Alaskan basketry.

Edna Wilder (Iñupiaq, 1916–2011) wrote that “basket grass” is also called “beach grass, salt-water grass, rye grass.” Leymus arenarius and its close relative Leymus mollis, also called sea lyme grass, is gathered, dried, then moistened when it is time to weave.3 These coiled grass baskets have a number of uses, like food preparation and storage, as dance fans, and even toys. Artists from many Alaska Native cultures weave these baskets, including Carrie Herman (Cup’ik). Carrie learned to weave grass baskets when she was nine years old. “My sisters taught me how to make baskets,” she recalls. “I used to make them big, little, oval, and mask types, like a face,” she says, then smiles, “I was a teacher too,” referring to her daughter Emily Johnston (Cup’ik). I met them at the Charlotte Jensen Native Arts Market in Anchorage where they shared a table.

Emily acknowledges, “My mother taught me to weave. She used to unravel them. I learned.” She continues, “It is really hard to work with seal gut because it slides around on the grass. I have to be very careful. Lilac is the natural color of the Platinum grass; it’s hard to find.”

Platinum grass refers to a prized strain of

sea lyme grass from Platinum, Alaska, that naturally grows a brilliant red but fades to a delicate light purple when dried. Of the dyes Emily uses on seal guts, “Some is Rit, some is cranberry, blueberry, mossberry—little round black berries that grow on the ground. On this basket, the red dye on the grass and on the seal gut is cranberry.”

above, top Unknown Tlingit artist, Twined Tray, spruce root, sea lyme grass, pigment, 95/8 in. diameter, collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1942.337.

2. Molly Lee, “Pacific Eskimo Spruce Root Baskets,” American Indian Art 6, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 66–73; and “If It’s Not a Tlingit Basket, Then What is It?: Toward the Definition of an Alutiiq Twined Spruce Root Basket Type,” Arctic Anthropology, 43, no. 2 (2006): 164–71.

3. Edna Wilder, Secrets of Eskimo Skin Sewing (Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., 1976), 119.

opposite Lisa Telford (Haida), Rattle Top Basket, 2013, red cedar bark, yellow cedar bark, dye, 3½ × 3½ in. Image courtesy of the artist.

above, bottom Agnes Thompson (Unangax̂), Grass Basket with Lid, ca.

2017, sea lyme grass harvested from Attu Island, glass beads, dye, Photo: Lisa Hupp, Alaska Region US Fish and Wildlife Service. Thompson is a descendant of the Unangan who lived on Attu Island.

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Emily Johnston (Cup’ik), with coiled baskets of Platinum grass and seal gut with natural and commercial dyes, some fur-lined, Charlotte Jensen Native Arts Market (CJNAM), Anchorage, 2019. Photo: B. Potter. above, top left

above, top right J u n e Pa rd u e demonstrating weaving with waxed Irish linen, CJNAM, 2019. Photo: B. Potter.

Unknown Unangax̂ or Yup’ik artist, Cuukiiq or Kumatxax (Sock), sea lyme grass. Photo: William Channing, Werner Forman Archive. above, bottom

opposite Julie Dock (Yup'ik), Basket

Tray, 2019 with natural and dyed grass and dyed seal gut, CJNAM, 2019. Photo: B. Potter.

Working as an artist, Emily demonstrates and teaches in villages and museums in Sitka and has even demonstrated basket weaving on a cruise ship.

Emily gathers sea lyme grass every spring and fall, trimming it near the ground and bundling it to hang dry. The flexible pieces are used for stitching. “The other grass that does not make the grade as wrapping or sewing grass is called filler grass and is used to provide form.” Emily

uses sedge leaves too, as “sedge has a nicer coloring than does rye grass and makes a more ornamental piece of work.”4 Sedges in the genus Carex are also used in twined baskets and coiled baskets sewn of braided strands by the Deg Xit'an, an Athabascan people of western Alaska.5 Laura Kolerok (Cup’ik) makes grass baskets with very slender coils. She tells me that her mother “made huge grass baskets. When I was growing up, my mother traded the big baskets for flour, sugar, yeast—the staples. I watched my grandma on my father’s side. In October, when the grass was turning yellow, she’d cut it with an ulu.” When Laura was little, dye was not sold in the store. Her mother “would get the crepe paper, like the Christmas decoration, the long pieces, red and green. She boiled it up and made a stain for a dye.”

Julia Dock (Yup’ik) from Kipnuk is an emerging basket weaver. “Most of the time I buy grass from Platinum, Alaska,” she says. “It’s expensive to travel there, so they send it out. They send it dried and ready to go. It’s beach grass. I soak it in hot water for weaving; it makes it pliable.”

Julia uses commercial, water-soluble dye for her grass and seal gut that she weaves as decoration into baskets.

Julia began weaving as a young girl.

“I used to sit by my mom; she’d have me try to do the start. I kept doing it until I could. So now I weave baskets. I keep up the tradition. My mother is still weaving at 85.” Julia has baleen, and she hopes to find someone to teach her how to weave it. In turn, Julia is teaching her four nieces to weave grass.

Sisters Gemma Gaudio and Colette Brantingham (both Yup’ik) learned to weave from their mother, who made big baskets she used for barter—“a good source of income,” Gemma explains. “My baskets are made of beach grass. It grows near the sand dunes in Hooper Bay. I pick it in October when it’s still a little green and hang it to dry about three months. It turns white. Then I put it in a dry place. To use it, take a handful, soak it in saltwater a half hour to an hour, shake the water out, wrap it in plastic Saran Wrap, put it

4. Emily Johnston, “Emily Baskets & Stuff,” George W. Johnston’s homepage on Alaska.net, February 2, 2001, web.

5. Cornelius Osgood, Ingalik Material Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 142–43; James W. VanStone, “The Cherry Collection of Deg Hit’an (Ingalik) Material Culture,” Fieldiana Anthropology, no. 27 (1996): 12–14.

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in the refrigerator overnight, and it’s ready the next day. I dampen it and use a small amount of water, so it doesn’t crumble when I weave it.”

The baskets that Gemma had available when I met her ranged from miniature to teacup size. She also weaves earrings. “When I first started, the earrings I made were really small, but now they keep getting bigger!”

Colette learned to weave when she was six or seven, but didn’t start again until after college. Colette coils a small mat as she tells me about studying to become a bilingual teacher in Oroville, California. While classmates spoke Spanish, her language was Yup’ik.

For now, Colette teaches basketry in Seward, Alaska. “There are about ten in the class. More than that is too many to teach.” Gemma taught basket weaving occasionally, “maybe about four months a year for three years. I would show them how to do it at the elementary schools.

When my grandchildren were in middle school, I would come in and show them how baskets were made, how they picked the grass. It was fun!”

Alaskan mothers have included their children in weaving for generations.

They even wove children’s toys, such as Alaskan yo-yos. Usually made of fur or fish skin, Alaskan yo-yos consist of two balls on cords that swing in opposite directions, while you hold a handle.

Annie Don (Yup’ik) from Quinhagak is one of the few artists who still weaves them out of grass, including precious Platinum beach grass. “It’s a dying art.

Nobody hardly makes them anymore,” she laments. “I was taught by my mother.

I showed my granddaughter, but she’s lefthanded, and it’s hard. My mom showed me how, that’s why I try to keep it up.”

Twined grass baskets feature many varieties of grasses. According to the Alutiiq Museum, Leymus mollis, known as Imanit or Tapernat in Alutiiq, is woven into backpacks, cups, mats, mittens, socks, and more. 6 Cupiit and Yupiit artists weave twined openwork baskets. Close twined, oval-based baskets come from the Kuskokwim River area,7 but finely woven Unangan lidded grass baskets—often

decorated with feathers, sea mammal intestine, silk or wool yarn—are better known to art collectors. Baskets from the now-abandoned Attu Island, the westernmost point in Alaska, are particularly sought after.

June Pardue (Alutiiq [Sugpiaq]) teaches basketry throughout Alaska.

While studying extremely old baskets at the Kunstkamera Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, she discovered a different technique: “There were two legs they were weaving the stitch around—it makes it stronger. We don’t call it wefts and warps, we say legs. Two weavers make the stitches in twining, and two legs keep the basket’s base stronger. When I’m adding, to keep it neat inside, I’ll add a leg at the halfway point.” June demonstrated by separating the two legs, folding a new leg in half, and adding it in by catching it with a twining stitch. “Not many Sugpiaq weavers are doing this, but now that I’ve figured it out, I’m teaching my granddaughter Serenity June von Scheele and my grandson Devon von Scheele. They are my youngest apprentices, and they’re only learning this way.”

For years, June searched for someone to teach her how to make cuukiiq, the grass socks worn inside mukluks. She had been researching them when the Wells Fargo Museum in Anchorage commissioned her to make a pair. June says she worked with Rosemary Carlton, who was the curator at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka at the time, and was able

to inspect close-up photographs and learn “how to turn the heel, how to decrease and do the upper part of the sock. I think it’s just wonderful that museums have collections that I can look at and revive.”

This year June is teaching regalia makers in Kodiak how to make cone tassels for parkas. Some 19th-century tassels are part of the Pinart Collection at the Château-musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer in France. June studied the antique cones, determined how they were constructed, taught herself how to recreate them, and is now teaching the next generation. She is reviving yet another lost art.

BALEEN BASKETS ALTHOUGH BASKETRY is an ancient craft, baleen basketry began about 100 years ago. The first baleen basket was made by Kinguktuk (Iñupiaq, 1871–1941) at Utqiagvik (Barrow, the northmost settlement in the United States) between 1914 and 1918, after commercial whaling came to an end. The development of baleen basketry as a tourist art has been well documented.8 Baleen, the fibrous plate found in whales’ mouths, can be up to 16 feet long. The pliable material is cut down to strips, then coiled into baskets.

This distinctive type of black basket will usually have a base of walrus ivory and a lid with a carved walrus ivory finial.

One weaver of baleen, Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin Unangax̂), a student of James Omnik Sr. (Iñupiaq), makes

6. “Beach Rye, Beach Grass, Lyme Grass,” Alutiiq Museum, accessed June 11, 2019, web.

7. Violet Virginia Cavana, Alaska Basketry (Portland: Beaver Club of Oregon, 1917), 43–44.

8. Molly Lee, Baleen Basketry of the North Alaskan Eskimo (Seattle: University of Washington Press and University of Alaska Museum, 1998), 13.

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this art his own. “For the Aleut in me, I wanted to do something more resembling a grass basket,” Don says, referring to an Aleutian-style lidded basket he made. He has also carved paddlers in walrus ivory. “I had to do that for myself. A finial change, more in line with my Aleutian heritage, as Aleutians made bidarka, the first kayaks.”

Don explains his latest process: “I do a dry weave now; it is much harder to do than wet. Dry produces a better basket.

With wet, the threads transfer moisture to the dry insides which causes the basket to loosen when it dries. I was thinking about old, tight baskets.” He continues, “So then it came to me, they weren’t wetting the material—they were weaving it dry.”

Don speaks from experience.

“Baleen is split and hand shaved. If you don’t do that, you can’t dry weave. The material will fray, burn, fall apart, and not make a good basket. There’s the easy way, but it’s not the right way.”

While Johnston is Unangax, the overwhelming majority of baleen makers are Iñupiat men from Point Hope and other communities in the North Slope Borough of Alaska. Iñupiat artists such as James Omnik Sr., James Omnik Jr., Harry Hank, Sheldon Bogenrife, and others can commend high prices for their treasured art form.

WALRUS IVORY & FUR BASKETS

above, top Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin Unangan), Qagaxtag (Love), 2017, baleen, walrus ivory, 6¾ × 6½ × 6¼ in., collection of Jerry K. Cowdrey. Photo: Craig Smith, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ. above, Middle Glenda McKay (Knik Athabascan), Ingalik Charm Basket, 2015, sealskin, smoked braintanned deer hide, antique 20° to 26° micro beads, 11° and 15° seed beads. Image courtesy of the Cherokee Nation Businesses, Catoosa, OK. left Glenda McKay (Knik Athabascan), Small Charm Basket, hide, seed beads, walrus ivory, 2 ¼ × 4 1/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Unknown Athabascan artist, Basket, birchbark, spruce root. Photo: Angel Wynn, Danita Delimont Photography.

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BASKETS ARE TYPICALLY woven from fibers first, but in Alaska, many other containers are also called baskets. Mildred Apangalook and her daughter Barbara Apangalook make unusual baskets.

Mildred (Tlingit) uses walrus stomach to form containers. Her creations look like soft, muted glass lanterns—very thin, yet surprisingly strong. To use the walrus gut, Mildred says you must first “soak it in water to make it soft, then put it over a glass mold and let it dry, then put on the ornamentation, leather, sealskin, seal fur … beads, or a different fur.”

Obtaining walrus stomachs is not easy, and every bit of material is used.

Hunters travel miles out to sea for their prey. “You get quite a few baskets out of a walrus stomach, depending on the size of the walrus and the size of the baskets.

Some of the stomachs are really big,”

explains Barbara (Siberian Yupik/Tlingit), holding her arms out wide. Walrus stomachs are also used for rainsuits, drums, food storage bags, and other items.

Using a base of wood or heavy cardboard covered with felt, Barbara adds polar bear fur, sealskin, and tips of walrus tusk to make her distinctive containers. With the warm fur decoration over the felt, Barbara’s works invite hands to caress them.

“You used what you had where you lived, whether it be animal or vegetation for baskets of all styles,” notes Glenda McKay (Knik Athabascan). “We do all styles of baskets depending on where you are and what you need it for.” Glenda is known for her charm baskets of fur and beads. As a little girl, her grandmother gave her one. “It was to hold all [my] prized possessions,” Glenda’s grandmother told her. “When I started making them, they became more detailed, with elaborate beadwork and hand-carved ivory charms.” Glenda does most of the hunting and tanning of the hides she uses in her art, and she uses tiny, centuries-old beads for the intricate floral designs.

“The charm baskets are not just art but also help to carry on and preserve my culture,” Glenda says. She also makes baskets of walrus stomach. “I always try to challenge myself in everything I do.”

BIRCH, WILLOW & TAMARACK BASKETS MINNIE ALIITCHAK GRAY (Iñupiaq) began making birchbark baskets in 1934, when teachers at the BIA school in Shungnak decided to hire Mr. and Mrs. Tickett, local villagers, to teach students practical skills, including basketry. Gray’s book Aimmiłiq Quaġumik (Birch Bark Basket Making) illustrates the process of making a berry basket and a woven birch basket. In both cases, willow support rods are added and stitched into place with spruce roots.9 Glenda McKay has made miniatures with birchbark. As with other materials, Glenda gathers her own birchbark, plus blueberry vines or spruce roots to edge the basket.

The late Belle Deacon (Athabascan, 1905–1995) learned basketry by watching her grandmother. She dug willow roots and dyed them with plant dyes made from alder and blueberries, as well as commercial dyes. She then wove the willow into edging for her birchbark baskets.10 Athabaskan groups from the Alaskan interior—Dena’ina, Deg Xinag, and Tanana—weave root-coiled baskets with single-rod foundations of willow and tamarack. Today, willow-root baskets usually have brightly colored floral designs, but 100 years ago the coiled baskets of the Upper Yukon and Tanana River areas were “rigid and water-tight, practically unornamented … although a few Hudson’s Bay beads were sometimes caught on the stitching.”11

FINDING THE BASKETS ANNUAL NATIVE ART MARKETS provide excellent opportunities for a collector to buy directly from basket makers: the Alaska Native Customary Art Fair is held every mid-October in Fairbanks, and the annual Charlotte

Jensen Native Art Market in Anchorage will take place March 4 to 8, 2020.

Because traveling to these markets is difficult, baleen weavers in Point Hope and Utqiagvik are often represented in fairs as part of a collective. In 2019 the Omnik family baskets were available at the Point Hope and Tikigaq Corporations’ tables at the Charlotte Jensen Market. The Alaska Native Medical Center Craft Shop in Anchorage carries baskets from across Alaska, and basket sale proceeds fund hospital needs.

Large basketry collections can be found at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and Wells Fargo Museum, all in Anchorage; at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau; and the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks. Native Alaska basketry has also been collected and treasured by museums across the United States, Russia, and many more countries. These remarkable baskets serve as containers of cultural expression by allowing artists from far-flung villages and towns throughout Alaska to share their visions and weaving skills with audiences throughout the world.

Bryn Barabas Potter is adjunct curator of anthropology at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. Through BBP Museum Consulting, she works with tribes and institutions primarily on basketry projects.

9. Minnie Gray, Mary L. Pope, Tupou L. Pulu, Aimmiłiq Quaġumik (Birch Bark Basket Making) (Anchorage: National Bilingual Materials Development Center, 1981).

10. “Belle Deacon,” “Masters of Traditional Arts,” accessed July 23, 2019, web.

11. Cavana, Alaska Basketry, 47–48.

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ROMA Cleo’s Story and Indigenous Depictions in Mexican Cinema

By Jeannette Martinez

B

EAUTIFULLY AND INNOVATIVELY SHOT on 65mm black-and-white film by the world-renowned Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón and named after Colonia Roma, one of Mexico City’s upper-class districts, the movie Roma captures an important period in Cuarón’s life that unveils memories of his childhood that allude to an awakening of social structures in modern Mexico.1 He dedicates Roma to Liboria “Libo” Rodríguez, the real nanny in Cuarón’s upbringing who inspired the film.2 Like Libo, Cleodegaria “Cleo” Gutiérrez, played by Yalitza Aparicio Martínez (Triqui/Mixtec), tells the story of an Indigenous woman that moves to Mexico City for work. In interviews, Cuarón has asked if films need to convey a message, which implies that Roma was not created with a specific message in mind.

Rather, the film serves more as a moving memory from the director’s childhood through the lens of Cleo’s narrative as an Indigenous housemaid for a middle upper-class family. Through Cleo’s story, Roma nonetheless encourages dialogue about race, class, and social dynamics that impact Indigenous communities in modern Mexico, especially in metropolitan areas such as Mexico City.3 Indigenous female characters have been a part of Mexican film since the

above Yalitza Aparicio Martínez (Triqui/Mixtec) at the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris, Mexico City, 2018. Photo: Milton Martínez / Ministry of Culture of Mexico City (CC BY 2.0). opposite Alfonso Cuarón and Yalitza Aparicio in Roma (2018).

Image courtesy of Netflix / The Hollywood Archive

early stages of Mexican cinema. They are especially notable during the Mexican Cinematic Golden Age (1936–1959), a period that has also been called the era of Indigenista film.4 During this era, Indigenous female characters played a significant role in classic films such as Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936) and María Candelaria (Xochimilco) (1944).

Many times, incorporating an Indigenous character as a housemaid was a form of acknowledging Mexico’s Indigenous past and present, and through the submissive nature of their roles reinforced a cinematic stereotype, la India bonita (the pretty Indian). Furthermore, during the time of President Lázaro Cárdenas, mestizaje, a mixture of Indigenous and European blood, reinforced a new sense of national identity and la India bonita became a symbol of this new understanding of national identity.5 Using indigeneity as a means of creating a national identity may seem positive, but it created an image of the Indigenous woman on the big screen that was one dimensional, inaccurate, and exoticized. La India bonita stereotype was coined after and inspired by a 1921 beauty contest of the same name, created by a local literary magazine in Mexico City, El Universal Ilustrado.6 This contest sought out the most beautiful Indigenous

1. Jonathan Risner, “Roma by Alfonso Cuarón (review),” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 3, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 167–68.

2. “Close Up: Alfonso Cuarón Talks Finding ‘Roma’ Star Yalitza Aparicio,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 14, 2018, YouTube video, 1:03:06, web.

3. “Close Up,” The Hollywood Reporter, web.

4. Martin Lienhard, “La Noche de Los Mayas: Indigenous Mesoamericans in Cinema and Literature, 1917–1943,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (March 2004): 35–41.

5. Apen Ruiz, “‘La India Bonita’: National Beauty in Revolutionary Mexico,” Cultural Dynamics 14, no. 3 (2002): 283.

6. Ruiz, “La India Bonita,” 283.

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woman in Mexico. As an “Indian of the ‘meshica’ race,” 16-year-old María Bibiana Uribe was named winner of the contest.7 Scholar Adriana Zavala sheds light on the making of La India Bonita contest to establish indigeneity in Mexican national identity: “While the India Bonita contest appears to have been conceived as an entertaining spectacle for El Universal’s bourgeois readership, by August the contest had become the nexus for the public sorting of several key issues, among which were the following: what defined an Indian? Her culture, class, or race? How best could Indians be incorporated into the national polity? And which aspects of so-called Indian culture were of value in the articulation of a new postrevolutionary national culture? ”8 Zavala continues, “These goals were implicit in El Universal’s announcement of

the India Bonita contest. Titled ‘Which is the prettiest Indian?’ the announcement declared that contrary to the usual custom of holding contests in honor of ‘beautiful women,’ El Universal would celebrate Mexican independence by sponsoring a ‘completely racial contest.’ … ‘Never before,’ the announcement states, ‘has a [Mexican] newspaper dignified its pages with the strong and beautiful faces of the infinitude of indias who hail from the nation’s lowest social class.’”

This patronizing language, which was employed in the contest announcement, “reprinted several times a week throughout January, February, and March, thus betrays the contest as revolving around stereotypes of class, race and gender.”9 The context Zavala’s analysis provides of the India Bonita contest aligns

with the typecasting of Cleo’s character in Roma. Zavala elucidates how indigeneity in Mexico has consistently come into play with topics of class, race, and gender— all topics that are heavily incorporated in Roma. Due to social perceptions of Indigenous women that created events such as La India Bonita contest, the film industry responded by also portraying Indigenous women as the help. Their roles were of servitude with character traits of submission, obedience, timidity or fearfulness, and silence, a trope evident in Roma too.10 The irony of Indigenous women not being cast for Indigenous roles early on also bares racial and class inequalities. Las Indias bonitas were usually played by Mestiza actresses like Dolores del Río, María Félix, and Esther Fernández.11 Representation of Indigenous women, and indigeneity in Mexico overall,

7. Ruiz, “La India Bonita,” 283.

8. Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010): 162.

9. Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition, 162.

10. Ruiz, “‘La India Bonita,’” 284.

11. Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition, 238–69.

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has come a long way since La India Bonita contest of 1921, as is apparent by the nature of Cleo’s character in Roma. The first significant difference Roma possesses in comparison to its predecessors is that Cleo is played by Yalitza Aparicio Martínez, a Mexican Indian in her first acting role (and the first Indigenous woman nominated for an Oscar!). Cuarón makes a point to unfold the complexity of her character by casting an Indigenous woman while simultaneously crushing the stereotype with a vivid reality of being an Indigenous woman living in modern Mexico City.

Although arguably problematic, Roma presents the Indigenous woman and identity with less stigmatization and exotification by making Cleo’s narrative the focus of the film. She is the object of a man’s affection, but their fate unfolds with a more realistic ending. She is a housemaid but also a woman of substance and depth.

Although Cleo’s occupation and how she is treated by others is stereotypical, Roma does not objectify her in the way La India Bonita contest objectified Indigenous women in 1921. By highlighting how Cleo navigates through social stigmas she faces, she also embodies an understanding of Indigenous representation in Mexican film and in national identity.

Cuarón also makes sure to incorporate the Mixtec language, reflecting Aparicio Martínez’s heritage, into Cleo’s dialogue,

further supporting a more comprehensive take on the role of indigeneity in Mexican culture and film.

Cleo and the other housemaid in the home, Adela, speak Mixtec to one another throughout the film. The Mixteca region is centered in Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico and includes portions of Puebla and Guerrero. The Mixtec, also called the Ñuu Savi or “The People of the Rain,” make up the third largest group of Native Mexican peoples. 12 The Mixtecs have been recognized as a people of movement, and frequently migrate to other regions of the Mexican republic, such as Mexico City.13 Like in real life, Cleo’s character emigrates presumably from an area like the Mixteca region for more work opportunity in Mexico City, leading to frequent code-switching between Mixtec and Spanish. Through the code-switching Cleo and Adela do throughout the film, they demonstrate the race and class structures navigated in their daily lives.

Cleo and Adela speak in Mixtec mostly when the family cannot hear them.

Although it is not overtly said, passive statements and gestures from the family indicate to Cleo and Adela, and thus to the audience, that speaking Mixtec in the household is not acceptable. For example, when arriving home from picking up the children from school, Adela alerts Cleo in Mixtec that the young man from her

village, Fermín, is waiting to speak to her on the phone. The youngest child of the household, Pepe, asks Adela and Cleo what they are saying; they ignore him as they are both preoccupied by what Fermín would like to talk about with Cleo. Cleo tells Adela to go away. While this conversation is happening, the child again asks for them to clarify what they are saying in Spanish. As Adela leaves, and Cleo picks up the phone, she sees the child still waiting near the door for a response. She looks at him and tells him to go upstairs, to which the child responds, “Don’t talk like that anymore.”14 A seemingly innocent statement, yet what Pepe says is representative disregard for Indigenous languages in metropolitan and upscale areas. His response indicates that there is an understanding between the help—Cleo and Adela—and the employer, the husband, wife, and children, that their Native language should only be spoken privately by Cleo and Adela and not to them. Although not said explicitly, it is apparent throughout the film that Cleo and Adela feel more at ease speaking Mixtec in their comfort zones, such as the kitchen and their room.

Even though they have restrictions around speaking Mixtec, their language and culture nonetheless influence the family. For example, the daughter of the family, Sofi, embraces Cleo’s Mixteca

12. Lynn Eddy-Zambrano, ed., “About: Migrations,” Mixtec.org, accessed July 31, 2019, web.

13. Eddy-Zambrano, “About: Migrations,” Mixtec.org.

14. Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, performed by Yalitza Aparicio Martínez, Nancy García, and Marco Graf, Esperanto Filmoj and Participant Media, 2018, film.

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identity. Throughout the film, Cleo appears to be responsible for putting the children to bed. Toño, Paco, and Pepe appear restless to do so, but Sofi looks forward to Cleo saying a Catholic prayer with her and then singing a Mixtec lullaby together before bed. The child learns the Mixtec lullaby, which consoles Sofi, and also consoles Cleo, knowing she can transfer a bit of her culture to the family.

In these two examples with the children, Aparicio Martínez’s character conveys the difficulties of navigating between two social classes. The kitchen scenes are also significant, as the space becomes a haven for Cleo and Adela.

While preparing the next meal for the family, they jokingly chat with one another in Mixtec, keeping them connected to their community and culture left in the countryside. The lightheartedness of their conversations when they speak Mixtec suggests Cleo and Adela feel a sense of home and belonging when they freely speak their Native language. Moving to Mexico City immediately uproots them from their culture, and the film incorporates notions that they have rejected their community for metropolitan life.

Other scenes in Roma that exemplify Cleo’s longing for a sense of home and belonging are created through land allegories. This is especially clear when she travels to the home of Señora Sofia’s brother, Pablo, in the countryside. While

there, Cleo constantly takes in the landscape, reminiscing about her homeland.

Cleo says, “It looks like my village here.

It’s drier there, but it feels like it.… It sounds like it. And smells the same.” This quote shows how land, something that is shared by all, can be seen and understood so differently. Although the terrain is profoundly similar, Cleo recognizes she is experiencing the landscape through the life of an entirely different social class.

Cleo compares her life before moving to Mexico City to the life lived by the upper class in the countryside and constantly navigates where she fits within Mexico’s social, racial, and gendered spectrum.

I conclude by presenting Cuarón’s question once again: “Do films need to convey a message?” If you answered this question by solely watching Roma, perhaps you’d be inclined to say no since on the surface it does not seem to be created to teach the viewer. But below the surface lies a great depth of content to unpack. Although subtle, many moments—or perhaps a better term would be memories—tell stories and lessons that need to be heard and seen.

Films do not need a message to be created, but more times than not, they will have something to say. In the case of Roma, at the very least it presents important dialogue about one narrative of indigeneity in modern Mexico by telling Cleo’s story through her eyes.

Jeannette E. Martinez is the academic advisor at the University of Nevada, Reno. She earned her master of arts degree in art history, criticism, and conservation from the Ohio State University.

above, top Yalitza Aparicio and Marco Graf in Roma (2018). Image courtesy of Netflix / The Hollywood Archive. above, bottom Cover of El Universal Ilustrado 4, no. 224 (August 17, 1921) featuring María Bibiana Uribe (Mixtec), the winner of "la India bonita" contest (PD). opposite, left María Félix (Mestiza), publicity photo. Image courtesy of Ridiculeando (CC BY-SA 4.0). opposite, middle Esther Fernandez (Mestiza) in a publicity photo for Two Years Before the Mast (1946), Paramount Pictures. opposite, right Dolores Del Rio (Mestiza), vintage postcard. Image courtesy of Deborah Swain (CC BYSA 2.0).

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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

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist the structure of design, 2019, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 11¾ × 10 inches

benjaminharjojr.com

Saguaro Lands, acrylic on canvas, 12” x 12”, 2019.

Available at the IAIA MoCNA store in Santa Fe through January 2020

Karma Henry Owens Valley Paiute American Indian Arts Marketplace at The Autry Nov. 9–10, 2019

KarmaHenry.com FALL 2019 | 43

PROFILE

HOPI/CHOCTAW PRINTMAKER AND PAINTER

LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

By Jean Merz-Edwards “For decades Linda has been a prominent figure in contemporary Native art.

Her paintings demonstrate a wonderful strength informed by her culture placed in a contemporary context.”1 —Joe Feddersen (Okanagan/Sinixt)

O

PPORTUNITY RARELY AFFORDS us the benefit of visiting with a living legend.

Whether it be the scarcity of such individuals or our proximity to them, an encounter with such a person happens once in a lifetime—if we are lucky. Fortunately, within the world of Native American art, one need not look any further than Hopi/Choctaw artist and educator Linda Lomahaftewa for this experience. From her early days as part of the avant-garde group who helped birth contemporary Native American art and throughout decades of a thriving career, Lomahaftewa has been central to the story of Native American art.

BEGINNINGS “FOR ME, the artistic process can be described as unlearning and remembering: ‘unlearning’ the overlay of European culture values and ‘remembering’ the basics, where I receive my strength …” Lomahaftewa once wrote.

“My imagery comes from being Hopi and remembering the shapes and colors from ceremonies and landscape.”2 Since her post-World War II birth in Phoenix, Arizona, Lomahaftewa’s connection to family and place remains a theme in life and work. Her parents, Mary (Choctaw) and Clifford (Hopi, 1920–2002), met at Phoenix Indian School.

Mary, who sews quilts and ribbonwork,

taught Linda how to sew. Clifford was a member of the Sun Clan and regularly took Linda and the rest of the family back to his home at Songòopavi on Second Mesa. Linda’s parents and four siblings continually encouraged Linda in her art.

Hopi Spirits (1965) and Unknown Spirits (1965) mark two of Lomahaftewa’s earliest known works and illustrate her connection with Hopiland. In Hopi Spirits, abstracted figures represent Hopi spirits. In Unknown Spirits, however, the abstracted subject matter does not so easily reveal itself. A layer of white-overdark underpainting in the upper third of the canvas moves downward to meet with peak-like structures. These peaks crown the variations of blue, grey, and plum that dance in a mist of white, similar to mountains in a snowstorm.

Taken together, Hopi Spirits and Unknown Spirits offer insight into the artist’s early training. According to

Lomahaftewa, in the spring of 1961, “I got a phone call from my mom, and she read in the paper that they would be opening up this new Indian art school in Santa Fe, and it’ll be headed up by Lloyd New, who was one of her teachers when she went [to the] Phoenix Indian School.”3 That summer Lomahaftewa and her mother filled out the application. In the fall of 1962, Lomahaftewa began her sophomore year in the first high school class at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).

As an IAIA student, Lomahaftewa developed skills under the guidance of teachers such as Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache), Charles and Otellie Loloma (both Hopi), Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation), Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), and Josephine Wapp (Comanche). Another of Lomahaftewa’s teachers, the assistant director of arts, James McGrath, wrote, “People working with her will be puzzled by her silence, but this is her strength. She works, knows, and feels deeply.”4 The synergy among the talented and emerging artists in those early days at IAIA gave birth to a new art. Lomahaftewa recalls, “Painting was all experimental.

There was no technique taught in the class. We all learned from each other.…

They would bring visitors and show us examples of other people’s work, but when it was time to paint, they said, ‘Go for it!’ … As a group, we were making contemporary Native American art.”5 Classmates in this group, many of whom would become lifelong friends, included Earl Biss (Crow), T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), Karita Coffey (Comanche), Phyllis Fife (Muscogee), Hank Gobin (Tulalip), and Kevin Red Star (Crow), among others.

During her senior year, Lomahaftewa changed her major from commercial art

1. Joe Feddersen, email to author, August 18, 2019.

2. Linda Lomahaftewa, “Artist’s Statement,” in After 5 P.M. … and on Weekends (Santa Fe: Institute of American Indian Arts, 1991), 39.

3. Transcript of Oral History Project, 2008, IAIA-MS012.01, Linda Lomahaftewa archive file, Institute of American Indiana Arts, Santa Fe, NM. 4. Correspondence from Jim McGrath to the San Francisco Art Institute Scholarship Committee, n.d., Linda Lomahaftewa archive file, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM. 5. Unless otherwise noted, information and quotes attributed to Linda Lomahaftewa in this article derived from discussion with the author, August 2019.

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LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

to painting and began working in oils.

Astonishingly, Hopi Spirits and Unknown Spirits are two of her first paintings, completed when she was only 18 years old. They each express her connection to place through absence and presence.

An abstract vision of Hopi spirits gaze from an intimate distance outward and amplify Lomahaftewa’s absence from her home in Arizona. In contrast, a distant view of mountains—much like the Sangre de Cristo Mountains visible from Santa Fe—solidify Lomahaftewa’s presence in a place with unknown spirits. Finally, they denote the starting point of a journey centering Lomahaftewa within the story of Native American art.

CALIFORNIA DAYS “I WAS TAUGHT to believe in myself, that’s how I grew up,” Lomahaftewa shares. “I was painting landscapes while they were painting from models.… I explained myself to my teachers, and they never bothered me again.”

Long before decolonization entered popular culture’s vernacular, Linda Lomahaftewa embodied it as a college student. In 1965 after her IAIA high school graduation, Lomahaftewa headed to the San Francisco Art Institute in pursuit of her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts. For the first time she encountered European teaching methods for making art. Unlike the experimental approach of IAIA where tribal identity grounded one’s creations, SFAI’s approach rooted itself in European practices, like drawing from a live nude model and adhering to the rules of perspective.

The miraculous thing is that Lomahaftewa gently and successfully resisted this approach. Sure, she appreciated and learned from the different aesthetic presented. Who doesn’t appreciate the colors and shapes of a Kandinsky masterpiece? However, she did not succumb to the story of a universal aesthetic in the guise of a masculine, European art. A teacher once asked if she knew what she was doing—painting a landscape with corn and other things she knew—while her classmates painted from a model. Instead, she continued developing an autonomous aesthetic rooted in her connection to family and place.

Landscapes, barren or occupied, show up again and again in Lomahaftewa’s art and appear distinctively original. In Pink Clouds and Desert, painted in 1970 at SFAI, three pink clouds correspond with one another through their curvilinear, biomorphic forms as they hover above a landscape comprised of colors, patterns, and shapes that work together to create a formation that recalls patchwork quilts.

This style speaks about the artist’s relationship with place, her home back in Arizona, and her relationship with her mother, an avid quilter. Coincidentally, while Lomahaftewa painted this work in San Francisco, three hours away, Judy Chicago was launching the first Feminist Art Program—a program that celebrated

above Crescent Moon XIV, 1999, monotype on paper, 151/8 × 111/8 in., collection of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, H-396. Both images courtesy of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. opposite Linda Lomahaftewa.

Photo: Jason Ordaz.

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above Untitled, ca. 1965–1975, watercolor and ink on paper, 9 ¾ x 6 ¼ in., collection of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, H-396. opposite Unknown Spirits, 1965, oil on canvas, 51¾ × 49¾ in., collection of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, H-12. Both images courtesy of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

“woman’s craft”— at Fresno State College (now University of California, Fresno).

Within the larger student body at the San Francisco Art Institute, Lomahaftewa belonged to a smaller, close-knit group of Native American art students, many of whom had also attended high school at IAIA. Friends like Earl Biss, T. C. Cannon, Doug Hyde (Nez Perce, tribally designated artisan), Hank Gobin, and Kevin Red Star provided the much-needed support for her in this new and unfamiliar place at SFAI. As part of settling into this new environment, the

group of young, emerging, contemporary Native American artists connected with Rupert Costo (Cahuilla) and Jeannette Henry Costo in San Francisco.

Rupert, who grew up on the Cahuilla Reservation near Riverside, spent his life advocating for Indigenous rights.

Together, Rupert and Jeanette founded the American Indian Historical Society and the Indian Journal in order “to correct the record, to write history as it should be written, to interpret correctly the aboriginal past, to report honestly the immense contributions to modern society made by the Indian American.”6 In their unwavering quest to educate the public, the couple “fought for the scholarly representation of Indians rather than the stereotypes they found prevalent” 7 and helped establish the American Indian Studies program in the University of California system. Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo connected the young IAIA alumni with the greater Native American arts community in the Bay Area. Under the mentorship of the Costos, Lomahaftewa exhibited her work with the American Indian Historical Society in San Francisco among other venues in California.

According to Lomahaftewa, a rich sharing of cultures occurred between the Native artist community in the Bay Area and the IAIA alumni studying at the San Francisco Art Institute. In these exchanges, Lomahaftewa met Frank LaPeña (Nomtipom Wintu) and Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu) who would become her close, lifelong friends. Before his passing earlier this year, LaPeña was working with Lomahaftewa to exhibit work in When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California. The show will open at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento on October 20, 2019.

Consistent with her quiet way, Lomahaftewa’s form of activism shows up gently and poetically in her art. Beyond resisting European narratives at SFAI, making art in a style that feminist artists were only beginning to embrace, and befriending some of the most significant

6. Ian Chambers, “The History of Native American Studies at the University of California Riverside,” in Indigenous Nations Journal 2, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 84.

7. “Rupert Costo; American Indian Scholar Who Fought Stereotypes,” Los Angeles Times (October 23, 1989), accessed August 24, 2019, web.

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LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

figures from Native American art and history, Lomahaftewa also participated in the Occupation of Alcatraz while she was a student in San Francisco. The young artist exhibited work inspired by Alcatraz and Wounded Knee in exhibitions of politically-conscious artwork.

Fortunately some of Lomahaftewa’s art from her SFAI student days remain.

The Heard Museum, which holds Lomahaftewa’s archives, has in its collection a few majestic oil paintings from this period. IAIA also has a large collection of works and documents from Lomahaftewa’s prolific career, including SFAI work. In 2017 IAIA exhibited a small collection of various sketches from Lomahaftewa’s college notebooks. Consistent with her general oeuvre, each sketch reflects the art of a woman central to the story of Native American art, whether a colorful, mountainous landscape or a conglomeration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures that emerge from intricate ink patterns to form a surreal landscape.

THE TEACHING YEARS “I TELL MY STUDENTS that individuality and the ability to reach deep within their cultures is what’s important,” says Lomahaftewa. “It’s fine to copy the style of another painter as an experiment, but it’s important to achieve a unique style of your own.”8 After earning her MFA in 1971 from the San Francisco Art Institute, Lomahaftewa took her first full-time teaching position as an assistant professor of Native American art at Sonoma State College (now Sonoma State University) in Rohnert Park. Teaching and commuting between Sonoma and San Francisco were balanced with mothering daughter Tatiana (b. 1969) and son Logan (b. 1973), a remarkable feat. In 1974 Lomahaftewa transitioned into the role of professor of painting and drawing at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Native American studies department.

While she thrived in California, Lomahaftewa yearned to be closer to family and to Hopi. After a year of recruitment by IAIA, she moved back to Santa Fe

and in the fall of 1976 began teaching in the studio arts program until her retirement in May of 2017. During her 41-year tenure at IAIA, Lomahaftewa raised Logan and Tatiana (now curator of collections at IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts), taught thousands of students, and grew into a prolific artist before advancing into the most important period of her artistic career.

At the 2017 commencement ceremony, IAIA awarded Lomahaftewa an honorary doctorate of humanities. IAIA President Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation) stated during the ceremony, “Linda Lomahaftewa is being honored for her accomplishments as an artist and her lasting contributions to the Institute of American Indian Arts for the past 41 years. Lomahaftewa’s mark on the field of American and Native American art is one achieved by very few women artists.

This honorary doctorate recognizes her contributions to the field of Native art and

her role in the education of generations of artists who have passed through IAIA under her guidance.”9 Within a few years of being back in Santa Fe, Lomahaftewa returned to the canvas—this time in acrylic. Acrylics afforded Lomahaftewa the opportunity of a quick-drying and less expensive medium, something the young professional and mother needed. She drew inspirations from the Awatovi and Pottery Mound sites.

In the 1980s Lomahaftewa experienced what she calls an “artist’s slump,” where her painting came to a near standstill. She has often spoken of the challenges to balancing personal and professional commitments, and at this time in her life she needed to find a new way. Craig Locklear (Lumbee), the printmaking instructor at IAIA, serendipitously convinced Lomahaftewa to try printmaking and taught her monotype techniques. Although it took her a

8. Richard Sealey, “Impressionistic look at past symbols,” Santa Fe New Mexican (August 19, 1988): 49.

9. Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, “Linda Lomahaftewa Receives Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from IAIA,” Canku Ota (Many Paths) 15, no. 7 (July 2017) accessed August 21, 2019, web.

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PROFILE

California, though homesick, she went on to earn her MFA degree whereas the Native men who went there at the same time all dropped out. When Lloyd Oxendine wrote that memorable article on contemporary Native art for Art in America in 1972, Linda was the only woman that he mentioned out of something like 24 men. All these years she has taught and nurtured Native students, many who have gone off in the world to carry on her wonderful teachings.”

Smith concludes, Recently she received a well-deserved honorary doctorate from IAIA. Linda is a hero and a role model in my book.

She has continued to make paintings and prints that are all about beauty. She is the true example of a Woman Warrior.

It wasn’t easy for a Native woman back then and especially making a life as an artist and raising children alone too.

Always kind, gracious, with a good heart, Linda has a contagious laugh and she makes me feel good when I am with her.

Anyone who knows Linda is truly blessed by her presence in their life.10

above Choctaw Bond Family I, 2012, monotype on paper. Both images courtesy of the artist. opposite Remembering Choctaw A n ce sto r s , 2 0 1 0, a c r y l i c , monoprint, paper, photocollage on canvas, 151/2 × 371/2 in.

while to learn, this new medium allowed Lomahaftewa “instant painting,” something she needed as she balanced her roles in life. Learning to monotype brought her out of her slump. In the 1985 landmark exhibition, Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage, curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Sqelix’u/Métis/Shoshone) and Harmony Hammond, Lomahaftewa exhibited a monoprint.

“Linda has some stellar statistics in her long and illustrious career,” shared Smith. “When offered a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute in

In the late 1980s Lomahaftewa returned to photography and collage. In contrast with her earlier work, such as the portrait Maria Martinez and Frank LaPeña (1977), Lomahaftewa did not shoot the photographs she used but instead used historic portraits, like that of her Hopi great-great-grandfather in Honanie (1989), and inserted these figures into symbolladen, abstract landscapes that conjure up real places. In Honanie, the seated figure of Lomahaftewa’s relative floats within a desert landscape as a symbolic lightning bolt strikes him. This action lights up the sky in layers of bright yellows, oranges, and reds, within an iridescent blue panel that evokes rain clouds just beginning to shower. In the distance beyond the figure’s left side, a formation resembles Black Mesa, while on his left another shape looks like a mountain.11 Lomahaftewa was an early collaborator with Indigenous peoples throughout the world. In 1995 she traveled to New

10. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, email to author, August 24, 2019.

11. In a conversation with the author on March 14, 2014, Lomahaftewa shared that her great-great-grandfather was part of a Hopi delegation sent to Washington, DC, in the late 19th century. For a more complete conversation about the symbolism in this and other art by Lomahaftewa, see: Jean C. Merz-Edwards, “Gender, Place, and Cultural Memory: Intersections of American National Identity and the Art of Hopi-Choctaw Artist Linda Lomahaftewa” (master’s thesis, Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2014).

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LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

Zealand as a special guest artist at the first International Indigenous Wānanga Symposium of Contemporary Visual Arts where she worked together with Māori and Pacific Islander artists. She recalls, “There was a cultural sharing of history where we all blended together through an instant connection. We had similar stories … creation stories where we respect other people, nature, and the spirit world.”

In the late 1990s, new landforms emerge in Lomahaftewa’s artwork.

The landscape in Crescent Moon XIV (1999)—one that contains a hilly, raised area—suggests a deeply rooted connection to her maternal Choctaw family and the sacred mound sites of her Southeastern ancestors. The association was not at first obvious to the artist, perhaps because Lomahaftewa spent most of her life in the Southwest immersed in Hopi culture.

When friend and fellow artist Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) asked Lomahaftewa about the “mound” in one of her monotypes, Lomahaftewa recognized this topography had been “present all along.”12 More over t connec tions to her Choctaw heritage show up in Lomahaftewa’s work during the 2000s.

For example, Remembering Choctaw Ancestors (2010) features an anthropologist’s photograph of stickball player Jim Tubby (Mississippi Choctaw) from 1908 recontextualized into a print of various Mississippian pottery designs. Likewise, a series titled Choctaw Bond Family (ca. 2012) features a family portrait of

the artist’s grandmother, two uncles, great-grandmother, and great-grandfather, whom she knew. This portrait is duplicated and adapted into various abstract “ghost prints” of places marked with various Eastern Woodlands designs and indexical marks.

These specific works materialized after a life-changing journey. In 2011 Lomahaftewa traveled with former student and close friend America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) to ancestral mound sites across eight Southeastern states. In Mississippi, Lomahaftewa connected with the Choctaw Mother Mound, Nanih Waiya in a personal way. 13 Featured in the 2012 show, Moundbuilders: Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands, Lomahaftewa’s Year of the Dragon (2012) embodies the impact of her new awareness. The monoprint includes familiar spirals and a dragonfly—however, new imagery also emerges. For example, the design of two winged serpents printed in bright red derive directly from Mississippian pottery vessels excavated at the Moundville site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The combination of these images from the Southwest— the spiral representing how the Hopitu came into this world, and the dragonfly

representing Lomahaftewa’s place in the Hopi Water clan—fuse with the artist’s emerging, artistic vocabulary derived from the Southeast and her Choctaw family. The blending of Hopi and Choctaw iconographic signs suggests a full-circle moment when Lomahaftewa intentionally unites her paternal and maternal lineage within the context of her art.

LOOKING AHEAD THESE DAYS, besides spending as much time as she can with family, Lomahaftewa contemplates her Hopi and Choctaw background through sketches of mixed media—paint, markers, collage—with a deep understanding of what her Choctaw ancestors lost along the Trail of Tears. This only drives her forward in the unfolding story of contemporary Native American art. When asked about her best work, she declares, “My best work is to come!”

Fortunately we will have a chance to experience this and other works in her upcoming solo show at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts to be curated

by Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation) in 2021.

It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit with a living legend.

LINDALOMAHAFTEWA.COM Jean Merz-Edwards earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Oklahoma and was granted a certificate in women’s and gender studies and the Alice Mary Robertson Award for her scholarship on the life and art of Linda Lomahaftewa.

12. Linda Lomahaftewa in discussion with the author, March 15, 2014.

13. For additional information about the sites visited, see America Meredith, “Exploring the Ancient Southeastern Woodlands,” Ahalenia: Native American Art History, Writing, Theory, and Practice, September 6, 2011, web.

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PROFILE

PLAINS CREE PHOTOGRAPHER

MERYL MCMASTER

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

I

N MERYL MCMASTER’S WORK, exploration of the self is conflated with exploration of nature. The artist designs and creates fantastical costumes, and photographs herself donning wearable sculptures in historically and culturally significant landscapes around Canada.

Her images are inspired by personal experience, First Nations oral history, written history, the environment, theater, and dance. Birds, specifically the raven, and the color red, usually in the form of ribbons, emerge as consistent motifs.

McMaster is influenced by her father’s community, the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, and is a member of Siksika Nation in Alberta. Her maternal side is British and Dutch. Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, she earned a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Just three years after graduating, she was recognized with the prestigious Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Today her work is included in more than 35 museum collections across the United States and Canada.

An early-career retrospective, Confluence, curated by Heather Anderson, has traveled to six locations since 2016, and McMaster just closed a solo exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.1 This year she is traveling to exhibit work in Australia, France, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, in addition to several provinces in her own country. This star is rising fast.

For art history connoisseurs, Meryl McMaster’s work might be described as Hieronymus Bosch (sans torture and sex) meets German Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich, Arnold Böcklin), steeped

in petroglyphs and ancient art, with ties to Nick Cave, Andy Goldsworthy, and Cindy Sherman. In one way or another, all of these artists’ work can be described as cinematic or theatrical. None are interested in realism. All produce a constructed pseudoreality outside of time with a mysterious dreamlike atmosphere.

Her sources of inspiration range widely, but each has a clear relationship to her practice. She loves dance and theater and has been particularly moved by performances by Bangladeshi-English dancer Akram Khan, whose choreography is often rooted in epic narratives. The artist also names Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul Ojibwe), Georgia O’Keeffe, and Shary Boyle as important influences.

It takes McMaster two to three years to create a series, which typically consists of ten to fifteen images. Since

being honored with the Eiteljorg fellowship, McMaster has produced three major bodies of work: In-Between Worlds (2010– 15), Wanderings (2015), and As Immense as the Sky (2019).2 She frequently selects a suite of three images from a single shoot, creating triptychs that suggest a narrative sequence. Human-animal hybrids, perhaps representing spirits, are the protagonists.

The series As Immense as the Sky derives from 14 different sets—that is, 14 elaborate costumes paired with a particular landscape. Many of McMaster’s fantastical, spirit-like figures appear to be animal caretakers. As Canadian curator cheyanne turions states, these series “are concerned with leaving the everyday behind, of transporting the viewer out of ordinary life, of inviting in the strange.”3 The Seussian character in Harbourage for a Song could pass for someone in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

For this image, she wears a dark, heavy coat and stands in a lush landscape with a body of water. It is L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, the site of Norse arrival about 1,000 years ago. A cluster of tiny apartments for birds sits atop her head, and she carries another complex of apartments mounted on a stick. Canaries and goldfinches populate the circular doorways. Her eyes confront the viewer defensively, as if caught off guard by an unknown presence.

The implied narratives and myriad references to art history suggest an artist engaged deeply in a range of texts. My interview with her confirmed this is true.

When asked what texts have most influenced her practice, or what she is currently

1. Confluence was produced by Carleton University Art Gallery. Heather Anderson et al., Meryl McMaster: Confluence (Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2016).

2. In-Between Worlds is addressed by Ashley Holland (Cherokee Nation) in Red, the Eiteljorg catalogue. See Jennifer Complo McNutt and Ashley Holland, ed., Red: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, 2013 (Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2014).

3. cheyanne turions, “Close to Frostbite,” in Meryl McMaster: Confluence, 12.

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MERYL McMASTER

above My Destiny Is Entwined with Yours, 2019, digital C-print, 40 × 60 in. Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. opposite Meryl McMaster. Photo: Neeko Paluzzi. Image courtesy of the artist.

reading, she was not sure how to prioritize: “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane got me thinking about paths that we walk and the history that is imbued within the landscape,” she shared.

“A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees by Dave Goulson … reading about our collective impact on the environment. For my new body of work, I am reading Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature by David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson.” She also cited Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past, an anthology of Indigenous reflections on Canadian history.

My Destiny is Entwined with Yours (2019) is McMaster’s version of the Rückenfigur—a lone figure facing away from the viewer—specifically Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818).

Friedrich’s white male stands on a rocky outcrop wearing a 19th-century coat,

overlooking a vast expanse hidden by grey fog; a place he does not know and is separate from. In contrast, McMaster’s black figure, androgynous and markedly Indigenous, sees clearly a land they know and from which they originated.

Indigo bunting birds accompany this barefoot seer. A storm brews in the distance, but this hilly green landscape is not foreboding. McMaster’s title could be a message from a local figure to the arriving European, or from an emerging artist to an “Old Master”: a demand for recognition. Like Cindy Sherman, she embodies different identities through self-portraiture. We see her but cannot know her.

Growing up surrounded by art books and frequenting museums nurtured Meryl’s creative mind. Her father, Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree), is an internationally renowned curator and writer.

Equally as important, her mother read

aloud to her throughout her youth. The artist spoke openly about her struggles with dyslexia, which makes reading a continued challenge.

“Academics wasn’t always my strength because of my learning disability, so the visual was something I gravitated to because I could express myself. There wasn’t a wrong or right.” She credits her mother’s stories as cultivating an active imagination. She describes how “the mind pieces together a visual narrative” when listening to stories, and laments that most people lose this as they grow up. “Images come to me in a dreamlike thought,” she explains. Her elaborately staged self-portraits can be seen as glimpses of narratives only fully known to the artist.

A single rower slips through a calm body of water toward an uninhabited place at twilight. This describes both McMaster’s There Are No Footprints Where I Go (2019) and Arnold Böcklin’s FALL 2019 | 53

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above Time’s Gravity, 2015, giclée print, 30 × 45 in. Both images courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. opposite Calling Me Home, 2019, digital C-print, 40 × 60 in.

19th-century composition, Isle of the Dead. In the former, McMaster is blindfolded but turns her head toward the viewer as if she heard something. Stillness is an attribute she shares with the German Romanticists. The genre suggests only a faint wind. Böcklin’s rower transports a coffin. Turning this symbol of death upside down, an enormous raven perches on the front of McMaster’s boat.

Here the artist plays with duplicitous meanings. In European or settler-colonial belief systems, the raven has symbolized death and ill omens. But in some Indigenous narratives, raven can be a cultural hero or Trickster. In McMaster’s narrative, raven carries a lantern to light the way. She shares, “My images represent a quasi-fictional experience that reflect my thoughts and feelings. I create theatrical embodiments that speak to different aspects of myself, in which I hope to extend the boundaries of identity beyond what is known and understood.”4

The Wanderings series revolves around the Ottawa River. In Time’s Gravity (2015), the artist stands on snowy ground among bare winter trees. “I’ve used winter a lot.… It feels like a magical time.

Everything is frozen; it feels like it’s being held in that moment. It’s sleeping. There is also this feeling of solitude. When I go on winter walks, I feel like I do a lot more reflecting than on my summer walks.

Winter is also an adverse time. It brings an urgency to the images.”

Wearing a navy dress, she impossibly balances a set of books on her outstretched arms, pressing them up against both sides of her face. She closes her eyes in mindful concentration. A red ribbon hanging from each book appears like fringe, fluttering in a soft breeze. Each volume is a journal representing one year of her life. Inspired by winter counts, each is labeled with a unique pictograph on the spine, symbolic of a significant event from that year. The first is a swaddled baby,

4. Meryl McMaster, email message to author, July 23, 2019.

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MERYL McMASTER

denoting the year she was born. Year nine is a camera; year 22 is a wishbone.

Childhood years rest on her right arm; adult years on her left. Speaking about this image, she said, “I was imagining history books and, again, the pressure of knowledge—it’s very heavy and hard to hold.”5 Some work is inspired by particular narratives. Asked to describe Calling Me Home (2019), McMaster conveys: I stand as a reimagined spirit of the Buffalo Child Stone at the shores of Lake Diefenbaker in Elbow, Saskatchewan. The stone was a gathering and sacred place for the Plains Cree. The subject of this Cree story was an infant who fell from his parents’ travois during travel and was found and raised by the bison. One day he had to choose between his human family and his bison family, but he could not bear to be only one or the other, so he chose instead to

become a stone bison for eternity. This story makes me think of belonging to multiple families and loving both as the Buffalo Child did. In 1966 the sacred stone was destroyed in the construction process of this man-made lake.6 McMaster often photographs herself within culturally and historically significant sites, though this may not be evident to the viewer. Her diptych Edge of a Moment (2017) was photographed at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, a crucial site where Siksika and other regional nations hunted for more than 6,000 years. In these McMaster wears a black beaver-skin top hat adorned with bird’s feathers and a long, dark coat embellished with prairie chicken footprints. The artist explains: Head-Smashed-In is a world heritage site that relates more directly to the ancient practice of bison hunting,

where the bison were chased over a steep cliff. The prairie chicken is a small bird that was once numerous in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. Their habitat has been affected by large-scale farming practices leading to displacement or disappearance. The image recognizes the erasure of key species (the bison, prairie chicken, and beaver) in my ancestral ecosystem. This prairie chicken also has significance to northern Plains people. For example, the Prairie Chicken Dance originated with the Siksika (Blackfoot) in Alberta, where it is still danced today.

Their style of dance done during the mating season was the inspiration. As well, their tail feathers were further inspiration for the type of bustles worn by traditional men’s dance at the powwow. For me, their absence represents the dangers due to unsustainable use of the land.7

5. Heather Anderson, “Heather Anderson in Conversation with Meryl McMaster,” in Meryl McMaster: Confluence, 61–62.

6. Meryl McMaster, email message to author, July 23, 2019.

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above There Are No Footprints Where I Go, 2019, digital C-print, 40 × 60 in. Both images courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. opposite Harbourage for a Song, 2019, digital C-print, 40 × 60 in.

McMaster’s process involves scouting locations to shoot and sketching compositions and costumes before constructing her handmade attire. Each costume takes many months to complete.

She often incorporates found materials from her walks, such as pine cones (as in Victoria, 2013). The challenges of photographing oneself in unpredictable outdoor settings necessitated some technical changes.

“I have changed cameras over the years,” admits McMaster, “but I did start out using an analogue camera such as a medium-format Bronica. I found it quite challenging to continue using the analogue format, especially when I started experimenting with self-portraiture, performance, and all the elaborately built elements within the photos. Out of necessity, I switched to digital. The camera I now use is a Canon EOS 5DS.” Some viewers may wonder about post-production manipulation. McMaster

comments, “I do use Photoshop to assist in simple editing techniques but try not to manipulate the image that much. What you see is what I did. In other words, you might see how I’ve arranged my installations or how some of the costumes are put together (i.e., wires connecting birds to a hat). I prefer this aesthetic rather than to hide the process.”

McMaster has also played with different printing formats: digital chromogenic prints, giclée, and inkjet. The photographs in the Wanderings series are all pigment on watercolor paper.

7. Meryl McMaster, email message to author, August 4, 2019.

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When I am editing the photographs, I will think about the paper and printing process. I sometimes will have an idea of how I want the images printed. Other times I will need more time to decide. So getting different test prints to see how the image is reading on different types of paper and printing methods is very helpful in my process.… For example, watercolor

MERYL McMASTER

papers have a texture to them, which emulates the tactile quality of a book or a drawing. Then sometimes I prefer the continuous tone of a C-print on luster paper, for example. It is fun to experiment.

In the future she is interested in experimenting with film and video, and perhaps more collaboration with other artists. Her father posed for some images in the early Ancestral series (2008–10), which overlaid projections of animals and 19th-century portraits by Edward Curtis, Will Soule, and George Catlin onto both his face and her own. Her only other collaboration to date is the performance Wandering Together (2015), for which she worked with multidisciplinary, Torontobased artist Johannes Zits. McMaster transferred a blind contour drawing of her body onto Zits’s body, which had been painted white (like her sitters in the 2010 series, Second Self). Several feathers were

tied to his left hand with red ribbon. She tied red strings and faux birds to branches of a tree inside a gallery. Zits dispersed white sand around the tree and then lay down on the sand with his feet at the trunk of the tree. His movements created a temporary sand drawing. “I’m very shy and I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing a live performance in front of an audience,” McMaster explained. “He’s someone who is very comfortable with his body in front of an audience, and our ways of thinking and our process are very similar.”8 One can relate McMaster’s work to particular narratives and art historical precedents, yet in the end she embraces ambiguity. As she remarked to Canadian curator Heather Anderson,

I don’t want to speak directly to what [my images] mean. I don’t want the viewer to think there’s only one reading for an image. I want them to feel like they can enter it from any perspective and any background. A lot of images are very personal to me, and I don’t even know if at this point in life I want to talk about it … maybe when I’m 80. They are very personal, but I want them also to be general in certain ways, so that anyone can get lost in them and come away with some of their own thoughts.9 McMaster is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and PierreFrançois Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal.

MERYLMCMASTER.COM Andrea L. Ferber, PhD, is an art historian and independent curator. She has taught for seven universities and worked at four museums. Her current project is parenting a teenager.

8. Meryl McMaster, email message to author, June 14, 2019.

9. Heather Anderson, “Heather Anderson in Conversation with Meryl McMaster,” 61.

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PROFILE

MEXICA/OTOMI PHOTOGRAPHER

JOSUÉ RIVAS

By Vivian Zavataro

I

HAVE KNOWN JOSUÉ RIVAS now for years. The more I get to know him, the harder it gets for me to define who he is. He is an incredible artist who does not solely care about himself or the aesthetics of his work; he genuinely cares about those close to him and those that our society ignores. Josué’s works narrate powerful stories in a deeply emotive way.

His images are able to speak to the viewer’s heart and mind. He constantly challenges mainstream narratives and stereotypes of Indigenous people. Through his photographs and videos, he is able to translate his ideals and frustrations about current issues. He is not only a talented artist but also an activist, an amazing father, and a caring friend.

VZ: Your father is a photographer, which exposed you to the medium but at the same time kept you away from it due to your relationship with him. What was the turning point that made you pick up a camera and start documenting people?

JR: My father has been a photographer since his early 20s. When I was around 22, I realized that I really cared about people and connecting with people. I noticed that when I had a camera around, people would open up a little more. There was an exchange happening; I would be around these folks that were going through some really hard stuff, living on the streets, using drugs, and things like that. I think getting them to be in front of the camera in a dignified way would make them feel special and seen. That is when it really hit me I could use photography as a tool. I was living in Fullerton, California, around the time Kelly Thomas, a man living on the streets, got beat up by the police and was killed. I started documenting the protests around that. It was a powerful experience, and my photos were used in newspapers and multiple blogs. It was

then that I realized that I could not only connect with the community but also spark some change as well.

VZ: Did your father’s work influence your style back then and now?

JR: Not really. He does a lot of events, like weddings, quinceañeras. His photographs are all very posed. On the other hand, ever since I was a little kid I would always see him talking to people and arranging people in a certain way, so that influenced me in a sense, where I was not afraid to approach people and talk to them. But our styles are completely different.

VZ: When you started photographing, who were your earlier influences?

JR: The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and Manuel Álvarez Bravo [1902–2002, Mexican photographer].

VZ: You moved to the United States from Mexico in the early 2000s. How did moving to a new country affect the way you approach photography today?

JR: Being in another land, going through a process of assimilation and getting to know another culture were really interesting experiences to me and also very

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hard. I didn’t speak the language; I didn’t have a sense of what to build here. A lot of the experiences from my earlier days in this country influenced me and my work.

It made me see that a lot of people who are in the shadows of our society are often forgotten in photography and imagery in general. When you see them in images, they are often portrayed as poor people and marginalized. They are never celebrated. You know, the familiar narratives, the immigration, or the poverty story. It also made me realize how special my family, my grandma, our heritage are. My grandmother was a full-blood Otomi. She spoke her language, she kept her traditions, she cooked traditional foods. These memories I have were kind of like making a bridge, when I was able to connect with more Indigenous people here.

VZ: It seems that you connected even more with your Native background once you moved to the United States. Is that accurate?

JR: Yes. In Mexican culture there is often a shame about being Indigenous and even brown. Some of my family members hate themselves for being brown. The complexity of this background with coming to America and the dominant culture here saying you are not enough made me question a lot of things.

With the camera, it is almost like a rebellious act to photograph a Native family being really happy. That in itself is like saying that being who we are is not something to be embarrassed about.

People speaking their own language can also be considered a rebellious act in itself.

In the work that I do, whether it is film or photography, I am always thinking about these things.

VZ: In 2017, you were in Santa Ana, California, a self-proclaimed “sanctuary city.” You have a lot of personal history

JOSUÉ RIVAS

above Last prayer at camp, December 2016, digital photograph, Oceti Sakowin Camp, Cannon Ball, North Dakota. opposite Josué Rivas, 2018. Photo: Merrick Chase Photography. All images courtesy of the artist.

tied to this city—it was where you first lived when you arrived in the United States. How was it going back there after 18 years?

JR: Again, the Mexican-American culture is racist in a lot of different ways. That is what I felt going back. These people I met when I was younger—I saw them and they were still trying to be white, but they will never be. Culturally and aesthetically, it was really interesting to think about that.

VZ: One of my favorite images of that series is the one that you overlap the photo of the bridal shop where your mother used to work with what is there right now.

JR: Being there again made me feel nostalgic. That was the neighborhood where I spent a lot of time during my first years in the United States. I remember going to that specific street and waiting for my mom to get off work. That series of photographs … ties into the other work I

have been doing about land reclamation.

Gentrification is very real. Santa Ana is a great example of gentrification. A lot of the businesses were gone. It was very emotional for me to see that shift.

VZ: One of the aspects of your work that I love the most is the fact you use your media to capture issues/themes you truly believe in. In a sense, your work uplifts the voice of those who need to be heard. Was your work socially engaged from the beginning?

JR: The social engagement aspect is the reason why I started doing photography.

I remember this picture—it was a few days after I got my first digital camera.

There were these guys hanging out in the back of the art community that I was part of. They were picking cans, these two Mexican guys, and I just went outside and helped them for like an hour and asked them if I could take a photo. They said yes. It was just that instinct—when you

are an artist and you hear your instinct instead of thinking about the aesthetics, you can produce something honest and raw. Because I have always used my instinct, my work is consistent, from my first images to now.

VZ: Do you consider yourself an activist as well?

JR: Yes, I do consider myself an activist.

I think artists are activists by nature, whether positive or negative. Art is activism—the act of creating art is a way of communicating your thoughts and ideals. But I don’t like to only label myself as an activist even though there are aspects of my work linked to activism.

When I am creating a piece and there is something that needs commentary I am definitely going to state my ideas. I try to do the right thing.

VZ: In your opinion, how can the arts affect sociopolitical issues in a positive or negative way?

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JR: At this moment it is about sensitivity.

I feel that we are moving toward a place where art and artists don’t only have to think about the finished product but also about the process of making it. So what I am doing now is making a series of photos where it is actually going to be a collaboration between me and the person I am photographing. It is going to be about Indigenous folks telling their own stories and reclaiming their narrative.

They are going to have the power to make their own image, and I am going to be the facilitator. The process itself is meant to be meaningful for the person in the image; creating a bond and a trust. And when the image is released to the public or on social media, the photograph already has that energy attached to it.

You know, images of Natives can be depressing or stereotypical. I want to change that, change the perception. I want to hold space for Native folks to practice their own sovereignty, to do what they want, to tell me what they want. I want them to control how they want to be seen and their own narratives, instead of me, the photographer, telling them who they are.

VZ: Besides politically engaged themes, what else inspires you?

JR: Right now, my family. We are an interracial family. We are from worlds and cultures that are so different but at the same time so connected in many ways. Just looking at my son, at how he is and how he looks and what he is going to grow up to be—there is a complexity to it.

I wonder, by documenting those closest to me, how is that going to affect the work that I do in the next 20 years? This has grounded me a lot as well, to know that I will be able to share these stories and tools with my son. It is also healing, given that I grew up with my dad sharing his experiences not in a very good way.

VZ: In your portraits the essence of the person is always so palpable to me.

What goes through your mind when the camera is between you and the other human in front of it?

JR: Especially with portraiture, I see myself in that person in front of me, and we kind of morph in a way. It’s kind of

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a psychedelic experience, where I realize that they are me and I am them. What I am doing is creating a reflection for them to see themselves. The first time I had this experience was when I was photographing homeless folks. I lived on the streets myself when I was around seven years old. I just remember thinking, “I know what you are going through, and I get it.

You have dignity and you matter. You are safe here. You are safe in this intimate moment.” So that is kind of what goes through my mind. It is an exchange, but it also helps me feel grounded and it helps me feel that I am doing something good.

VZ: In 2017, you got a fellowship at the Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Program. Tell me about this experience.

JR: That was life changing. It changed how I saw photography and image making. I learned that photography does not have to be so linear. My mentor, Fred Ritchin, taught me so much. He is always 20 years ahead. Before Photoshop was around he was already talking about how the

JOSUÉ RIVAS

above Brothers, ca. 2011, digital photograph. opposite Sanctuary City, 2017, digital photograph, Fourth Street, Santa Ana, California.

manipulation of images was going to change the way we see images and believe in them. He made me see that there is so much more to photography than we understand. That was pivotal for me. He made me see that I’m on the right path and that I can do something big with this; that it’s my responsibility to make images that are going to be impactful for generations to come, not just now.

VZ: What were your goals when you started the fellowship? Did they change during your time there?

JR: My goals were not set at the beginning. I wanted to learn not only about photography but also the landscape of the media industry. I was not expecting much, but I was excited about it. I quickly realized there was not a lot of diversity in the media and photo industry. Place after place had a lack of representation. Even though there were a lot of stories about Indigenous people, there was nobody of

Indigenous descent telling these stories.

Seeing that changed me and made me recognize what needed to be done. That led me to cofound Native Photographs with Daniella Zalcman from Women Photograph.

VZ: What is the goal of Native Photographs?

JR: It is a resource for photo editors and other professionals who are doing commercial work to find professionals of Indigenous background in Turtle Island, also known as North America. A lot of our members are working on long-term projects and in their communities. So firstly, it is a resource. Secondly, it’s an opportunity to gather and talk about the industry. We have a Facebook group.

We have campaigns that we get behind collectively. We have these conversations that are important to us and our communities. One of the things that I am looking forward to doing in the next year or so is

create workshops for our members and provide grants. I want to be able to get funding for people who are working on important issues.

VZ: You are also the founder of the Standing Strong Project, which is an incredible documentation of what actually happened at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Can you tell me about the time you spent at Standing Rock?

JR: That time, which was about seven months, was life changing and a sacrifice to me and my family. It was so much more than a protest. For me, it was a big lesson and an awakening for myself, but I also saw it as an awakening on the larger scale as well. People are waking up to understanding and allowing Indigenous cultures and narrative to enter the mainstream consciousness. I think of it as a big wakeup call for humanity in general.

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above Thanks-taking, November 24, 2016, digital photograph, Oceti Sakowin Camp, Cannon Ball, North Dakota. opposite A woman walks in the snow during a blizzard, November 2016, digital photograph, Cannon Ball, North Dakota,

VZ: Your TEDx talk in Rapid City was incredibly powerful. There you also described your time at Standing Rock and how you approach your work as a photojournalist. How did this experience affect your work?

JR: Before Standing Rock my work was still in the process of developing. Time has shown me how much your environment and experiences shape and affect your work. With photojournalism, you are supposed to be unbiased, just documenting your surroundings. At Standing Rock, it was personal. After that experience, I consider myself an artist, not only a photojournalist. That experience made me realize that the press badge did not mean much. People documenting the movement with their phones was way more powerful than the images taken by the New York Times’ photographers who just flew in for the weekend, for example.

Photojournalism evolved for me. Now I just look at it as a language.

VZ: Those seven months resulted in the Standing Strong photo book, which won the FotoEvidence Book Award in 2018.

Tell me about the book.

JR: The book was an incredible learning experience. The way I wanted this book to be challenged me, the publisher, and the press as it is bound in a very unique way—not linearly. The end product is something that I am really happy with.

I never thought that one day I was going to actually print my work. Now that I see how much impact that it can have, it inspired me to work on a larger scale. I want to work on murals now.

VZ: Selecting these images must have been a hard process, to relive these movements and know the aftermath.

How did you feel about it?

JR: I did end up going to therapy, for not only this but a lot of different things that I have been dealing with in my personal life. Being Indigenous in these times can feel heavy, but we are healing ourselves so

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that the next generation does not have to deal with this pain. Therapy helped me to work on letting go of a lot of those things that I saw and lived. It was a wound that was deeper than Standing Rock that was open. Seeing the resilience and the beauty of our people but also seeing the amount of trauma that our people have gone through and just how deeply embedded in our DNA colonization is. For me, I am still processing that part. It affected my own personal growth, my understanding of my place in society, a person who prioritizes his family.

VZ: Are you inspired by other Native artists?

JR: Cara Romero, photographer based in the Southwest. She is one of my most favorite photographers. And Tekpatl Kuauhtzin. He is a young photographer and an incredible person. There is something about Tekpatl’s imagery that talks to me in a very personal way, and I can’t wait to see how his body of work develops.

JOSUÉ RIVAS

VZ: Most of your work is in black and white. Why? JR: Honestly, because I want to master it. I want to learn how to take it to the next level. By that I mean that there is so much potential for black-and-white photography. There is so much room for it to bring a new wave of photographers who are not following the same old recipe.

Take, as an example, Sebastião Salgado— his images are amazing and inspiring, but I want to create my own aesthetic and challenge. Maybe one day I will see photography in color. To me, black and white is similar to the way I see things.

I like to dig deep into the shadows. I see a lot of beauty and so many interesting things happening.

VZ: For the past couple of years, you have been branching off and exploring another medium: video. How did it start?

JR: It started out of necessity. First I started doing it for fun, then during

Standing Rock I had to push myself to do it right. Now it is almost part of who I am.

It is a new way of expressing myself in an artistic way.

VZ: Do you prefer photography to video or the other way around?

JR: I like them both, but there is something about photography that I like more than video for sure.

VZ: Any exciting projects in the horizon?

JR: The Standing Strong Project—Chapter 2. It will focus on Indigenous identity. We briefly talked about it earlier. The process of making the image is going to be something I have never done before. The people being photographed will look at themselves in a mirror and a monitor; they will

have a shutter release so they can photograph themselves. I will be the facilitator.

I almost look at myself as a messenger.

Me and the subject will go deep into these feelings and ideas that they have of themselves. They get to open up and they get to photograph themselves. They get to show and portray themselves how they want to be seen. They have control over their image. The idea is to think about their legacy for future generations.

Indigenous people have been portrayed by non-Natives for such a long time that most people have a stereotypical or romanticized idea of us. I want Natives to create their own images and then blow these photographs up into large murals and place them in large cities across the West Coast. We are still here and will be taking space now more than ever. And see a new vision of Native America coming.

JOSUERIVASFOTO.COM Vivian Zavataro is the interim director of the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art at University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a masters in museum studies from the University of Amsterdam. Diversity, inclusion, and creativity are essential aspects of her practice.

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COWICHAN/SYILX PAINTER AND SCULPTOR

LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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SELF-IDENTIFIED MODERNIST history painter, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s artwork examines a breadth of subject matter ranging from federal politics and the natural environment to treaty rights and the reserve system.

Yuxweluptun also draws on Coast Salish cosmology and Northwest Coast design elements, like ovoids, to create recognizable color palettes and uncompromising visions.

Yuxweluptun, born 1957, is based in Vancouver, British Columbia. At the age of 14, he was given the Salish name Yuxweluptun, which translates as “Man of Many Masks,” during his admittance into the Sxwaixwe Society. In 1983, Yuxweluptun graduated from Emily Carr School of Art + Design with an honors degree in painting.

I n 2 0 1 6 , t h e Mu s e u m o f Anthropology at the University of British Columbia hosted a major retrospective of Yuxweluptun’s career spanning more than 30 years. That same year, Yuxweluptun led a widely publicized campaign to legally change the province of British Columbia’s name to denounce its colonial history under the hash tag #RenameBC. In May 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Emily Carr School of Art + Design, for his outstanding contributions to contemporary art. I had the opportunity to speak with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun over a series of phone conversations beginning in March 2019.

MRS: Let’s get started with your creative process. How did you turn to making art and what keeps you coming back?

LPY: My life became art. I was carving a thunderbird at the reserve when I was five. I’ve been an artist since then. We like creative things that no one has ever seen

then create great art. That’s important. If there’s anything I’ve learned about art, it’s to research what you’re doing and enjoy what you’re doing. Whether it’s good or bad, it doesn’t matter. You have to go through the process and create. Artists should be there. That’s what I’ve done.

I tell the younger generation of kids to always have their sketchbook with them in their pocket or purse or beside their bed to record or write dreams. Deal with these things. When you’re young, you can have ideas and concepts. When you’re older you have 20 or 30 years of concepts to look at, so you have no excuse not to create.

before. Sometimes, my messages are really hard, but I also make beautiful, chaotic paintings. I have been creative all my life.

I’ve always enjoyed it. I’ve always found it exciting. I just can’t get away from it.

My instinct is to create—just keep making and making and making. It’s very selfish.

I think one of the things that I’ve learned about myself is that I sacrificed family, time, and relationships because of being selfish with my time. That’s just a downfall of artists, and it almost goes without saying. Some people are successful at relationships. Some are not. That’s the nature of who I am and what I’ve been.

MRS: You earned a BFA in painting from Emily Carr School of Art + Design, and the school is awarding you an honorary doctorate for your contributions to contemporary art. What do you take from that formal education to this day, and what have you consciously unlearned from that time?

LPY: It’s important to grapple with everything. You pick and choose your subject matter. Create great ideas and concepts,

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MRS: As a young man, you mailed copies of the Native Voice, the first Native newspaper in British Columbia.

Clearly, you’ve always been interested in the political potential of visual art.

Can you pinpoint how you approach art through politics (and vice versa)?

LPY: Often I’m dealing with landscapes, and the subject matter is always different.

Some of the work is political, sometimes it’s not, depending on what I’m working on. There’s a painting [of mine] in the National Gallery of Canada called Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky (1990). It’s a painting about “you can’t blame the Indian and his sorry ass for making a big hole in the sky. We’re not to blame for that, we didn’t do it.” Natives are sitting on reservations since the Canadian Confederation and the same thing in the States: they were kicked onto colonial concentration camps. There is no we in this situation. There is just a matter of being under control, under the gun, ruled by the gun—that’s the power of the world. Guns, steel, germs—that’s the reality of our history. I’m just here at a time when things are under occupation, and the events of the world and the day are compounded with Native life and existence.

LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN

above Killer Whale Has a Vision and Comes to Talk to me about Proximological Encroachments of Civilizations in the Oceans, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 110¼ × 72½ in., private collection. All images courtesy of Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, unless otherwise noted. opposite Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Image courtesy of the artist.

MRS: With respect to the events of the day, what does the new conservative government in Alberta mean to you?

LPY: We have conservatives in Alberta marching at our doors trying to tell us that they want their oil and have their way. The oil industry is long gone. The technology of cars has increased. The last thing we need is oil. I think Albertans need to grow up and smell the roses. That industry is dying, and they need to get out of it and move on. They were indoctrinated into something that was such an easy money scheme, but it no longer works. We have a biosphere that is very fragile, whereas Alberta has many billions of dollars of contamination. They’ve made a mess of Alberta. They’ve made a mess of the water, and they’ve fracked everything. They’re ecosystem destroyers. It’s a colonial society that’s part of the British

regime and the British ideology to steal everything and destroy. They’re not here to protect. They have no preservation concept. So, saying they’re “in Canada’s best interest” is bullsh—. That’s the reality.

We’re facing creepy people. That’s not easy to paint. It gets really ugly. It’s difficult to paint something that’s loving and caring and supernatural.

MRS: Can art and activism be separated in your work or are they symbiotic?

LPY: Can a Native person ever have an existential thought while living under the Indian Act? 1 Are you allowed to think under the Indian Act? These are important questions. I shot the Indian Act [in the performance An Indian Shooting the Indian Act (1999)], because it’s such a racist ideology of colonialism. A lot of us were sitting in bars talking to each other

and having a beer, but we were always talking art and creating. I sat around with Beau Dick, drank beer, and talked art. I’m an artist and my job is to relate to the world. Am I supposed to paint some nice daffodils and look the other way?

Am I supposed to make some Abstract Expressionist painting and insert some conceptual ideologies and expect the art world to love it? This is a difficult thing to do when you’re looking at chaos.

MRS: So, your work scrutinizes the chaos of the world?

LPY: Sure. How do people look at Native culture: as traditional or nontraditional?

We still have the right as an artist to look at everything. How do you traditionally carve an Indian that goes outside, and his children follow him then his children freeze to death in the snow?2 Are we

1. Prior to confederation, the colonies of Canada forged official policies like the 1876 Indian Act to force assimilation of Indigenous people into Judeo-Christian ways of life.

2. The deaths of two young girls occurred in Saskatchewan’s Yellow Quill First Nation in 2008 when a drunk father took his underdressed children outside in the cold where they later died of hypothermia.

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I just ignore everything? Should I be painting a self-portrait with a peace pipe giving offerings to the sun gods, having this romantic “Native moment”? That I’m this noble savage and everything is perfect? I could do that. If everything else fails, I could become an Indian artist, but is life really like that?

MRS: So, modernism, to you, is this uncompromising representation of reality?

LPY: I feel I can deal with everything, and nothing is out of bounds. I can’t ignore the world. I’m not a traditionalist in the sense that I’m making regalia, carving a mask, and I’m dancing a traditional song, and I’m going to be a real savage. I’m not that person. I am a Sxwaixwe mask dancer, I am a Black Face dancer,3 and I did those things as a young man. There were so many things encroaching upon me as a person that outweighed my ideologies of traditionalism. The modernalities of the world came knocking on my door.

MRS: Aesthetically, your work is often beautiful with towering trees replete with ovoid shapes and Northwest Coast iconography, and totemic mountain ranges. Politically, your subject matter ranges from reserves and the natural gas and oil industry to deforestation and corruption. How do you reconcile these two extremely different elements in a single work? talking tradition or are we talking condition? I’m interested in how we deal with these events.

above Indian World My Home and Native Land, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 84 in., The Bailey Collection. opposite Caution! You Are Now Entering a Free State of Mind Zone, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 71 × 108 in., private collection.

MRS: You’ve also talked of the intersections between modernism and history painting in your work, which is contradictory since modernism is usually defined as a rejection of history, with a stubborn use of abstraction. Tell me what modernism means to you.

LPY: I made a painting titled Alcoholics on the Reservation. In the painting, I showed an Indian inside a bottle drinking himself.

Was he drinking to drown himself or to stay afloat? Since I’m a modernist, do

LPY: I think that at this point in history people are not ready to give up a capitalist ideology in the face of global warming.

It’s not a matter of stopping it, there’s no will to do so. Think about this: your community has to go catch a fish and your fish are contaminated, so you go to the Department of Indian Affairs and the officer there is looking at you, and you think you’ll get an answer but don’t, so you go instead to the Environment Canada office and think you’ll get a fair answer there but don’t, so finally you go to your chief and say, “Hey, my kids are being mercury poisoned,” but this is a beautiful sunny day sitting on the reservation. That’s the reality.

3. The Black Face dance, or tubcádad, is a ceremonial winter dance among Coast Salish people. See: Kathryn B. Bunn-Marcuse, “The Northwest Coast,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 3—The United States and Canada, vol. ed. Phyllis G. Tortora (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), PDF accessed through academia.edu.

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LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN

MRS: What you’re saying is that beauty can destroy reality and reality can destroy beauty; that this cycle is at play in your paintings?

LPY: A lot of artists like to create work that has no reference to the hard realities of this country. Somebody has to look at this stuff. Somebody has to look at the tar sands and global warming. [Prime Minister] Trudeau is trying to push his carbon tax, and you have all these provinces trying to stop him. That is what people have to deal with. We’re one of the biggest problems of global warming, and we still have people that are fighting it, because they want to get wealthy and stay wealthy and ignore all the business that has to be done to rectify our global carbon. If we don’t change the global carbon, we’re going to run into major problems.…

How many logging trucks do we need to cut down trees in BC? How fast? At

what rate? We have the biggest clear-cut in the world in BC. You don’t have to go to the Amazon to talk to an Indian about his trees being cut down. I’m sitting in the middle of a clear-cut right now in the middle of a big city. They’ve destroyed thousands and thousands of acres. They’re not prepared to deal with the consequences of these actions. That’s the reality of the hardship the planet has to pay.

MRS: What is required then for change, and where do you think we go from here? Is it a matter of education or politics or both?

LPY: Seventy-eight percent of Native people do not complete their grade twelve education. We need access to education.

This system is failing them. Native men are not being educated in this country, and we’re just filling up jails. The system is designed against them. The reserve history; the apprehension of Native children, the

“scoops”4—we have over 50 percent to 78 percent of Native children in the welfare system. This is Canada! We have class-action lawsuits because doctors believe they have the right to sterilize Native women.5 And then people wonder why we have a problem with reconciliation?

MRS: Let’s keep going with the concept of reconciliation in Canada. Broadly speaking, reconciliation involves an unfolding dialogue about memory, history, and experience that strengthens the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

For you, what is lost in discussions of reconciliation?

LPY: Why do we have the Indian Act? Why am I not a Canadian citizen? Give me citizenship! If I have citizenship, I have equal rights to my land, my resources, and my territories, all of it. This is why colonialism does not give me citizenship. Let’s

4. The “scoops” can be defined as the systematic separation or “scooping” of Indigenous children from their birth families beginning in the 1960s, and their subsequent adoption into non-Indigenous families. A project of forced assimilation, the result left many with a loss of cultural identity and ancestral heritage.

5. Cases of sterilizing Indigenous women with coercion or without consent have been verified in Canada as recently as 2017. Approximately 60 Indigenous women have filed a class-action lawsuit against Saskatoon Health Region, the province of Saskatchewan, the Canadian government, and healthcare professionals. For more information, see: Nickita Longman, “End forced sterilizations of Indigenous women in Canada,” The Washington Post (December 4, 2018), web.

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on your reserve, but at least I’m going to acknowledge you.”

MRS: You’re opp os e d to l and acknowledgments in Canada?

LPY: It doesn’t do me anything. Native people are being oppressed in this country.

We have the highest suicide rate, we have thousands dying from fentanyl, and we have 52 percent of the Native population under the age of 19. That is the majority.

Out of that percentage, 72 percent of Native people do not get educated to grade twelve. That’s 72 percent of 52 percent who will not reach their goals of education because this system has failed them. In 19 years, what is going to be the result of this population? You might as well start building bigger jails and a system that can apprehend these people and their kids now. Give me equality, and I will give you reconciliation.

MRS: South Africa held their own Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, which some critics view as a failure. As you may already know, when the South African government created the apartheid system and the racial segregation that followed it, they consulted the Canadian government’s reserve system and the legality of “Indian status.”6 Ironically, these systems remained in place as the Canadian government openly opposed apartheid on the world stage.

above The Intellect, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 36 in., private collection. opposite Gone Green, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 72 in., The Bailey Collection.

be perfectly clear: Natives are not citizens of this country. I would like to be recognized as a human being. Reconciliation is really about hate. It’s not about love for Indian people in this country.

Emancipate the Indian under colonial rule. Emancipate me from the Indian Act. Give us our freedoms and rights to protect our freedom, land, and equalities.

And yes, we would agree to mining and sharing resources. This ideology of “This is your land, and we are on your traditional territory. Thank you, you can sit

LPY: We started with apartheid and then it went to despotism. Canada is an apartheid system under a colonial regime.

That hasn’t changed. We will never have reconciliation until they free Native people. Native people will never accept the Canadian flag. They’re just not that patriotic. I love my motherland, but I don’t love the flag. I don’t sing the national anthem, and I don’t like the queen. I am not the only Indian saying this. Natives have the lowest life expectancy in this country. I have seven daughters, and I have to worry about them every day. It’s scary. That’s their everyday life. That’s a difficult colonial pill to swallow.

6. The full quote reads: “1940s: Inspired by what it has read about Canada’s Indian Act and its legal classification of ‘status Indians,’ the South African government examines Canada’s Indian reserve system and later models elements of apartheid after the Canadian system.” Brett Popplewell, “A history of missteps,” Toronto Star (October 30, 2010), web.

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LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN

MRS: What is the relationship between education and reconciliation?

LPY: Natives want to integrate into the system, but they should be allowed to integrate in a proper way with the support systems they need. They need educational systems that will help. They need Native high schools. Residential schools didn’t work, because it was forced segregation.

If you make a Native high school where Native kids feel safe, won’t be bullied, and won’t be ashamed, they will go. They need their education. This is the time that Native kids should have possibilities for their future. These kids need all of our support.

I have a two-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old girl. I want to make sure that my children have the best capabilities for a great education. I’ve seen residential schools and public schools, and I know the downfalls of both systems. The most important thing is we give Native teachers the support they need. We need a national educational chief. We don’t need a national chief. We need a national

educational portfolio. We need one designated separately to strictly deal with education across this country, because the government chiefs are not doing their job.

I would give them a failing grade.

MRS: Do you see your paintings as social documents? By documenting and critiquing current events and injustices, do you see how your paintings will inform history 400 years from now?

LPY: I hope that we won’t be sitting on reservations for the next 400 years. Do we have to be interned on colonial reservations forever? I have an instinct to record history. We do need the traditionalists, because they are keepers of culture. I’m more of a modernist, because of the things that encroach on Native people and threaten their way of life. I couldn’t ignore it. Fish farms are not traditional, so how

am I supposed to create a fish farm when it’s not traditional? Fish on farms are prisoners like people on reservations. These are things I understand; they’re prisoners just like me. My swimming brother needs help, so I have to say something about it.

MRS: What projects or exhibitions do you have planned for the near future?

LPY: Being an anti-colonialist isn’t going to get you exhibitions. I find that there is a lot to talk about and create. You have to make art that makes you happy. Your job as an artist is to deal with the world. You should be making art that heals people.

You can make art that makes people happy, you can make art that makes people sad, you can make art that pisses people off. Why piss off one person, when I can make one painting that pisses off a million at the same time? [Laughs.]

LAWRENCEPAULYUXWELUPTUN.COM Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD, is the curator at Glenhyrst Art Gallery in Brantford and Canadian section editor of the Art Market Dictionary. Smith works in London, Ontario.

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NEW YORK

Whitney Biennial 2019 Whitney Museum of American Art

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S T H E L ONG E STRUNNING SURVEY of “American art,” the Whitney Biennial is one of the most important exhibitions for US-based, contemporary artists. Each biennial is organized by different pairs or teams of curators and features the work of artists from various disciplines including painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, dance, music, and film. For many of us, the Whitney Biennial 2019 will be one to remember. In fact, for many of us, it will be the first one we’ve actually followed. Why? Because for the first time in 79 exhibitions, a critical mass of works by Indigenous North American artists were featured. In fact, for the first time in 79 exhibitions, the artists represented within the exhibition were “unusually diverse”1 with more than half of the artists being people of color and half of the artists identifying as women.

Ostensibly signifying the multiplicity of artists featured in the exhibition while evoking the imagery of the US flag, Mississippi Choctaw/ Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s Keep on Moving (2019) hangs above the ticket desk and greets visitors as they enter the museum. Fringe hangs down the left side, and phrases such as SHE REWRITES HIS STORY, THEY SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE, THEY IDENTIFY AS SHE, THEY FIGHT FOR THE LAND, and THEY FIGHT FOR CLEAN WATER are emblazoned across the strips of mostly neon fabric. Quintessential Native American materiality “replaces” the 50 white stars on blue in the upper left corner with a star quilt design and an embroidered message: “Thank you for the

space you hold. Know you are loved. Keep on moving. Don’t stop.” Gibson’s banner speaks to all Americans.

Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta curated this year’s biennial. Hockley explains, “The Whitney at large has been really trying to think through this question of American-ness. Where do Indigenous artists fall in that? Where do Puerto Rican artists fall in that? Where do American artists living outside of the United States or non-Americans living in the United States fit into that?”2 Rather than shying away from these and other difficult questions, Hockley and Panetta’s choices interrogate our current discord and polarity by using this moment in our history as an opening for dialogue.

As they explained in their curatorial statement, Over the past year and a half—an undeniably intense and polarized time in this country—we made hundreds of studio visits. While we often encountered heightened emotions, they were directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, the re-envisioning of self and society, and political and aesthetic strategies for survival. Although much of the work presented here is steeped in sociopolitical concerns, the cumulative effect is open-ended and hopeful.3

To us, the inclusion of Indigenous artists—and artists from other underrepresented communities—isn’t merely about diversifying representation. Rather, in this moment of dissonance, in this moment when many Americans are feeling like their government doesn’t represent them or respect them, who better to turn to? Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC) communities know how to survive in these moments, and artists from our communities have always helped us to imagine better futures. Although some critics dismissed the work in the exhibition as “anxious,” “half-hearted,” and “derivative,” the works in this show provide pointed critiques while simultaneously welcoming viewers into conversation.4 During my time in the gallery, many visitors were drawn to what appeared to be a flickering television screen in Tlingit/ Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2017).

The rug, woven from wool and cotton, expresses the complexities of contemporary Indigenous experiences and critiques historical uses of whiteness as a means “to obliterate the voices and rights of generations of people and cultures regardless of complexion,” as its label reads, and goes on to describe “white noise” in recent years as a “source of increasing intolerance and hate.”

1. Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport, “What this year’s Whitney Biennial says about contemporary American art,” PBS NewsHour, June 28, 2019, web.

2. Terence Trouillot, “‘We Were Seeing and Feeling Anxiety’: The Whitney Biennial Curators on How Artists’ Struggle With Debt and Real Estate Shaped the 2019 Show,” artnet News, May 13, 2019, web.

3. Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, “Whitney Biennial 2019: Curatorial Statement,” Whitney Museum of American Art, web.

4. Lindsay Nixon, “You Want Our Art but Not Our People,” Canadian Art, May 23, 2019, web; Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “Opinion: The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” The New York Times, July 5, 2019, web.

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above Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), Keep on Moving, 2019, canvas, cotton, acrylic felt, repurposed quilt, nylon thread, cotton thread, glass beads, nylon fringe, Velcro. Photo: John Lukavic, PhD, digitally altered. opposite Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), My Soul Remainer, 2017, video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

While Galanin and others confront issues of racism, many works within the show reflect the growing American anxiety around global climate change and extraction. Laura Ortman’s (White Mountain Apache) six-minute video installation, My Soul Remainer, features Ortman playing the violin in a mountain landscape while dancer Jock Soto (Diné) responds to the music and the environment. Directed by Nanobah Becker (Diné) and filmed by Blackhorse Lowe (Diné), My Soul Remainer serves as a reminder of our relationality to one another and the land.

Indigenous artists and artists from other underrepresented communities within this show are working on the boundaries of expectation. If anything, these works are subversive; they are not halfhearted. The 75 artists in this year’s biennial addressed themes of global climate change, gentrification, the possibilities and limitations of technology, misogyny, homo- and transphobia, and basic human rights. The museum itself became the focus of criticism as artists and activists shed light on the pervasive

practice of “toxic philanthropy” within museums and other nonprofit organizations. Whitney vice chairman Warren Kanders, owner and CEO of Safariland, a company that sells tear gas and other “nonlethal” weapons to police, military, and US border patrol agencies, was protested by groups like Decolonize This Place and Indigenous Womxn’s Collective.

Combined with the withdrawal and threatened withdrawal of several artists, the dissent ultimately led to Kanders’s resignation.5 Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk)—whose film, Visions of an Island (2016), showed in the Whitney Biennial 2017—curated one of three weekends of film programming that closed out the 2019 exhibition on September 20 and 21. He selected films

by Indigenous and Mestizo artists and art collectives whose work addresses the presence and possibilities for Indigenous futures in the face of ongoing colonialism.

Titled What Was Always Yours and Never Lost, the program posthumously featured the following projects: Colectivo los Ingràvidos, who produced Itzcóatl (2014) and Impresiones para una máquina de luz

y sonido (Impressions of a Sound and Light Machine, 2014); Thirza Cuthand (Plains Cree), who created 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015) and Just Dandy (2013); Adam Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe), Zach Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) with The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets (2017); Caroline Monnet (Algonquin descent) with Gephyrophobia (2012), Creatura Dada (2016), and Mobilize (2015). As an apt tribute to the life and work of James Luna (Payómkawichum/Ipi, 1950–2018), the program also included a screening of The History of the Luiseño People, created by Luna in 1993, the same year his performance piece Shame-man was featured in the Whitney Biennial.

It remains ridiculous that the leading survey of “American art” has up until this year failed to effectively represent the US population in its selection of artists.

However, I’ll take my lead from the artists in the exhibition and see this not simply as overdue but as an opportunity.

—Jami Powell (Osage Nation)

5. Siddhartha Mitter, “The Whitney Biennial Called. How Will They Answer?” The New York Times, May 9, 2019, web; Jasmine Weber, “Indigenous Womxn’s Collective Stages Protest Inside 2019 Whitney Biennial, Hyperallergic, May 16, 2019, web.

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above Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw), Seven Blessings, 2017, acrylic on canvas. Photo: A. Meredith

OKLAHOMA CITY

Brenda Kingery: A Retrospective Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery, Oklahoma City University

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E AT H E R L U N S F O R D , director of the Oklahoma City University School of Visual Arts, and Emily Santhanam, curator of exhibitions at the Chickasaw Cultural Center, organized this retrospective for Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw). The show features 23 paintings from 1981 to 2018, all large-scale and ambitious. While Kingery has exhibited widely—and currently is part of Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art (2018–2021)—the curators felt it was important to expose more Oklahomans to her work.

Though Kingery is based in San Antonio, Texas, her birthplace is Oklahoma City and she earned her BFA and MFA degrees from the University

of Oklahoma. While an OU undergrad, Kingery studied Abstract Expressionism as it reached its zenith in American art.

Yet, she also fell under the sway of Mughal miniatures painted in South Asia during the 16th to 18th centuries.

In 1968 the artist’s husband, Tom Kingery, who served in the US Air Force, was deployed in Okinawa Prefecture.

There Brenda studied sumi-e, calligraphic black ink brush painting, at the University of the Ryukyus. While she also drew inspiration from the rich textile-making practices of the region, most importantly, Kingery did not imitate Asian artwork.

Instead, she created her own style of painting with a unique visual language.

Through this lens the artist reflects upon her life experiences, family stories, Biblical and Judaic histories, experiences from her many travels across continents, and increasingly, Chickasaw history.

A 1994 visit to the Red Earth Festival rekindled Kingery’s interest in Oklahoma tribal cultures. While her titles and artistic statements discuss powwow regalia and tribal clothing, such as tear

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dresses, Kingery’s resulting artwork is something completely different from the sources—channeled through her imaginative and painting processes.

These works read as if they are mixed-media with a panoply of textures and strokes, yet according to the labels, they are all acrylic. The wall text says, “she still begins with thin ink washes,” but otherwise the work is acrylic, showing the incredible range this humble medium is capable of when unleashed by the right hands. No doubt based on her sumi-e studies, Kingery uses true black, often considered a transgression in painting that produces dead spots on canvas; however, her works have no dead spots. Although her generous use of tans read as gold, she seldom uses gold or the metallic and interference paints currently available.

Indeed, almost all her paint is matte, yet the works are vivid, pulsing with an intensity achieved through her masterful command of textures and techniques.

Kingery does not preplan her works; her process is extremely spontaneous and calls to mind dancing in their pattern and rhythm or the Automatism of the Dadas, in technique if not in the avoidance of subject matter. Her paintings demand time invested to take them in. At my first glances I was struck by how consistent her palette was—tans, blues, blacks, creams, brick reds—but after an hour, I began to distinguish the compositions far more clearly and see why the curators placed certain paintings together to heighten the dialogue occurring between the works.

An artist since infancy, Kingery only showed works from the last 38 years, so her earliest student work is left out.

Instead, we see the artist’s development from the time she found her voice and had hit her artistic stride. The earliest work in the show is Minshuku in Yonaguni (1981), which Kingery painted during her second time living in Okinawa. While she taught at the University of Maryland, Far East Division, she stayed in a 民宿 (minshuku), or a family-run bed and breakfast. This painting, the most literal and rigid, is still elegant and resolved.

Delineated into several rectangular fields, the work portrays two views onto the ocean with stones, gates, and plants in varying degrees of abstraction. In the corner, indigo leaves pay homage to the plant dye’s role in kimono making.

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The paintings progress counterclockwise, hung gallery-style in a loose, semi-chronological order across the four walls, with two additional works on a freestanding wall. Such an array invites comparisons and a search for artistic evolution. But Kingery’s work does not move in a straight line, instead she revisits and reinterprets earlier themes and motifs, like waving bands of black and white, vertical figures holding staffs, plants, stars, and beaded rosettes.

An earlier work foreshadowing Kingery’s mature style, Grandfather’s Journey (1990) transforms a relative’s chance encounter with a mountain lion into an explosive abstract work with loose brushstrokes and splatters. At first pass, the image appears nonobjective, but then the big cat’s profile and skull reveal themselves, as do stylized mountain ranges. Some paintings fall into her powwow series or liturgical series, but the impetus behind the paintings serves more as a catalyst than a subject to be illustrated.

Seven Blessings (2007) is a mature work that fully manifests the virtuosity of Kingery’s painting techniques. Possibly named for the ‫תוכרב עבש‬‎ (Sheva Brachot) of a Jewish wedding ceremony, the massive, square canvas reveals seven monochromatic beaded rosette forms floating toward the top, while diagonal bars provide structure and an upward thrust to a form of atmospheric washes and bleeds punctuated by solids, leaf shapes, and fabric-like parallel and overlapping lines.

The forms seemingly undulated inward and outward from the painting surface, achieving a sense of depth in both form and content.

While Chickasaw history threads its way throughout her oeuvre, it gains prominence in more recent works. The Chickasaw Nation is exemplary in its support for its artists, and the tribe has honored Kingery in many ways, including declaring her the Dynamic Woman of the Year in 2017 and inducting her into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame in 2019.

All tribes should promote their artists to help counterbalance mainstream’s society’s dictates of what constitutes “good” Native art. With the support of her tribe, Kingery will not be left out of the

Native art canon, like others such as Adele Collins (Chickasaw/Choctaw, 1908–1996) have been in the past, because her experimental work doesn’t conform to outside stereotypes of American Indian painting.

No doubt Kingery’s intercontinental perspective has expanded her universe. As Cherokee actor Will Rogers said, “There is nothing thickens one like travel.” Studying the cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Americas has expanded Barbara Kingery’s perceptions, and it also brought her back to her Chickasaw roots.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

RENO

The Art of Jack Malotte Nevada Museum of Art

T

HE EARLY JUNE SUN decided to finally show up and warm up the town of Reno, enticing people to get out of their houses. Many flocked to the Nevada Museum of Art to see The Art of Jack Malotte, which opened on the first Thursday of that month.

Despite the thick crowd and the buzz of people talking, the power of Jack Malotte’s work was palpable.

Jack Malotte (Western Shoshone/ Washoe) is known for his renditions of the Great Basin’s rich landscapes and his provocative and politically charged pieces.

The exhibition encompasses his artistic career from high school years to today; from drawings, silk-screens, and paintings to mixed media. The selection of works, design of the exhibition, wall text, together with the publication, provide the visitor with a full scope of Malotte’s creativity, talent, and impressive productivity.

Born in Schurz, Nevada, and raised on the Walker River Indian Reservation, Malotte moved all over the United States, never settling in a place for more than three years. After attending high school in Reno, Malotte moved to Oakland, California, and enrolled at the California College of Arts.

He worked as a firefighter for several years and did not find his way back to Nevada until the late 1970s. Now he lives on the Duckwater Reservation, and has been

1. Will Rogers, Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams, Volume 1, The Coolidge Years, 1926-1929 (Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1978), 86.

there for 20 years. Due to his isolation— Duckwater is at least five hours away by car from any urban hub—the past two decades have been his most prolific years.

Malotte has dedicated a lot of his art and time to different political and environmental issues affecting Native communities around the country. His work can be pungent and charged with an array of sociopolitical topics—he has never been afraid of exploring controversial themes. During his academic years, his professors discouraged him from exploring such subjects, but that did not stop him. His determination to fight for these causes is only one of the reasons he is internationally recognized. His art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Berlin, Germany, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Stockholm Museum in Sweden.

A couple of days after the opening of the show, the museum featured Jack Malotte in conversation with Ann M. Wolfe, senior curator and deputy director.

By watching the two of them talk to each other, one could feel the friendship that flourished in the process of making this exhibition happen. Wolfe’s extensive selection and organization of works offers the visitor a comprehensive view of Malotte’s artistic path. The exhibition is divided into four main themes: Early years and Mid-career, A Satirical Lens, Screen-prints and Experimentation, Art and Activism. These subjects offer the visitor the chance to get to know the artist, his media of choice, processes, and ideals.

Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors are greeted with A Creation Story (2012), a remarkably poetic beginning.

In this piece, with only ink and paper, Malotte explores the Western Shoshone creation story together with a Duckwater narrative. The black-and-white picture is quite intricate; the artist finds a way to use his abstract, geometrical motifs to embed the image with symbolism. Petroglyphs together with the familiar Great Basin landscape represent how two sisters and Coyote brought Western Shoshone people into this world. In the sky, flying wolves unveil the Duckwater story, in which they attacked the Western Shoshone people.

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SANTA FE

Beyond Standing Rock Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

M where 100 mostly polychromatic pieces are displayed in salon fashion. These encompass the artist’s work from the 1970s to the 2000s. By placing all of these together, Wolfe gives the viewer a glimpse of Malotte’s productivity, inventive flair, and incredible ability to work with different media.

In the next space, works such as Don’t Dump on Us and Mother Earth Is Not For Sale, both from 1983, exemplify Malotte’s dark humor and bold views on controversial issues, such as the government’s exploitation of Native lands and outsider’s stereotypical views of Native folks. Don’t Dump on Us draws its title from the sign held by a lonely protester.

The image depicts a beautiful, colorful landscape, but in the foreground of muted browns and greys, an asphalt road leads to dead vegetation past barb-wired fencing with signs warning, NO TRESPASSING and TOXIC WASTE DUMP. A cloud-filled sky is disrupted by lightning and a fighter jet, a recurring symbol in Malotte’s oeuvre that represents US military occupation of many sacred lands. This piece is especially touching in its exploration of the ongoing issues faced by many tribes across the country. Pertinent to this specific work, Malotte mentions the Mojave tribe and the nuclear waste dump on their sacred sites.

Even though the work is from more than 30 years ago, the image is still relevant as many Natives are still fighting to protect their sacred lands, Mauna Kea and Ward

Valley being two of the many current examples.

Tying the whole exhibition together is a display case filled with Malotte’s personal items. Sketchbooks, photographs, brushes, postcards, and a hand drum draw the audience into the artist’s world.

To accompany this retrospective, the Nevada Museum of Art published a 240-page monograph. Wolfe, Ben Aleck (Pyramid Lake Paiute), Victoria Bomberry, Allan L. Edmunds, Bob Fulkerson, Debra Harry (Pyramid Lake Paiute), Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/ Achomawi), Sheila Leslie, Sharon Malotte (Western Shoshone), Arlan D. Melendez (Northern Paiute), and Virginia “DeDee” Sanchez (Duckwater Shoshone) contributed to the catalogue.

In The Art of Jack Malotte, Wolfe offers the public a complete view of Malotte’s incredible career, not only as an artist but also as an activist fighting to protect his community and heritage.

As David Walker, the Nevada Museum of Art’s CEO, writes in the preface of the show’s publication, the museum “is dedicated to amplifying the many artistic voices that tell the story of the state of Nevada.” Seeing this major exhibition gives me hope that museums are becoming more inclusive places, in which the art displayed truly represents the different voices in our society.

—Vivian Zavataro

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USEUM EXHIBITIONS don’t always reflect contemporary events. Given the lengthy process in most institutions, it can take years to plan a show, which can contribute to an impression that museums are out of touch. To counter this, Devorah Romanek, curator of exhibits at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, organized a series of rapid response exhibitions, including Last Supper & Ecologies of Resistance about healthy Native foodways; No Hate, No Fear about immigrants and refugees in the United States; and Entering Standing Rock: The Protest Against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Expanding their scope, Romanek and C. L. Kieffer Nail, archaeology instructor at the University of New Mexico, co-curated this reprisal of Entering Standing Rock at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC). This exhibition is on display through October 27, 2019.

Beyond Standing Rock highlights efforts of the activists who tried to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which crossed sacred tribal lands and threatened clean water supplies on and off the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

The protests drew nearly 15,000 people from across the United States and globally to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Sioux Nation of Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota from 2016 until February 23, 2017. Though the protesters were forced to leave, the momentum continues. The action brought together different tribes, using social media to communicate and share information rather than relying on mainstream journalists to describe events.

With a full-size tipi and an oil barrel bearing textual information about the proposed pipeline, this exhibition features a range of material that also includes fine art photography, sculpture, paintings, promotional posters, prints, videos, and legal documents relating to Indigenous issues. Zoë Marieh Urness (Tlingit) has four photographs in the show, including

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the Pulitzer-nominated December 6, 2016: No Spiritual Surrender. Urness captured the winter scene protesters faced in December 2015 when thousands of veterans marched to the front lines despite blizzard conditions. She was standing above the scene when she saw a figure wearing a Tlingit button blanket. In an artist statement, she says, “My goal was not to capture a photograph. I wanted to go there and be on the ground floor.”

A painter known for his Pop-inspired images, Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga) created a piece for the show, in his series Snow Globe—Welcome to Native America Now Go Home!, which shows the NoDAPL site being attacked by a tank inside a snow globe. Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara sculptor Kathy Whitman-Elk Woman’s piece Choosing Oil Over Water … Water Is Sacred, with a mask-like face guzzling oil, underscores the insatiable appetite for oil and the dangerous greed by American companies.

To share information and promote the protesters’ work, several artists created posters and prints with memorable images, many of which are included in the show.

Noted cartoonist Marty Two Bulls Sr. (Oglala Lakota) created a series of posters including Lakota No Access with a man in a feather headdress holding the head of a black snake, which represents the pipeline, and Water Is Life with a woman defending a child from an attack by shadowy wolves.

The exhibition also includes mirrored shields designed by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/ Lakota). These shields were intended to protect protesters from the assaults with water hoses and other things, but they were also part of what could be described as performance art. Protesters held them in the faces of the police in their riot gear, forcing them to see how inhuman they were. Luger created a short instructional video while on a residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts to teach others how to make these mirrored shields, so anyone who wanted to contribute could.

The shields were sent in from across the country so others could “embed your activism in your muscle memory,” as Luger described it, without going to the camps. Luger realized, “I have incredible privilege, and with that privilege I have to do something more than just self-benefit.”

He found that the shields were not only carried by protesters but also used as sleds or roofing material.

The curators also placed an array of documents into one of the museum’s vitrines from the protests, such as peer-reviewed journal articles that document the impact of industrial pollutants on Indigenous lands and legal paperwork detailing cases brought in Standing Rock, Wyoming, Colorado, and other areas. The placement of legal documents into glass museum cases suggests a broad scope for the show beyond just material culture; the legal issues were paramount as well.

On February 23, 2019, MIAC hosted an artist panel with Urness, Whitman-Elk Woman, Luger, and painter Tony Abeyta (Diné) describing their actions at Standing Rock. The discussions focused on their experiences visiting the camp, the challenges they faced, and the sense of kinship and purpose this effort inspired.

Abeyta and Urness described taking supplies to the campsite and hearing so

many different languages from peoples across the world. Whitman-Elk Woman also expressed her awe at seeing so many tribes represented in one area, united in their purpose.

As Lakota descendants, both Whitman-Elk Woman and her son Luger were especially involved in the protests, bringing supplies up to the area and helping with campsites. Though their efforts did not prevent construction of the pipeline, all members of the panel considered the protests successful, as it brought new momentum and attention to Indigenous issues.

The Maxwell Museum and MIAC are not the only museums to address NoDAPL. The Autry Museum in Los Angeles hosted Standing Rock: Art and Solidarity in 2017.

Hopefully, these exhibitions, though small, will inspire museums and other venues to join the conversation and highlight how artists can educate about—and affect— current events.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

above Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga), Snow Globe—Wish you weren’t here #2, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 48 in. Image courtesy of GalleryFRITZ. opposite Jack Malotte (Western Shoshone/Washoe), Four Feathers, 2015 mixed media with acrylic, private collection.

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VENICE

Volume 0 Zuecca Project Space

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HE VENICE BIENNALE 2019 provided the impetus for an original and thoughtprovoking art installation Volume 0, exhibited May 10 to June 30, 2019. This was a collaboration between Zuecca Projects, Dr. Max Carocci, curator, and two distinguished North American Indigenous contemporary artists, Nadia Myre (Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation) and Alan Michelson (Mohawk of the Six Nations at Grand River).

The choice of engaging Myre and Michelson was inspired, for both figures have received accolades from the wider arts and cultural establishment. Nadia Myre was awarded membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts (2012); won a Sobey Art Award (2014) as well as the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec Cultural Ambassador Award, Montreal (2019). Alan Michelson is the first Indigenous artist to have a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which opens October 25, 2019. His commissioned work, Mantle, was the winning entry in a competition to create a public sculpture that honors the federal recognition in 2018 of many of Virginia’s Indigenous peoples.

The original concept for Volume 0 was Max Carocci’s determination to give contemporary First Nations artists the opportunity to show a “new response to [the] textual authority that Indigenous artists or arts have never been given or allowed before,” at least in this sort of European context or venue. He had been examining the earliest visual records of Native American peoples and cultures, especially those records created in Venice, a city known for its printing and book publishing since the 16th century.

Carocci focused on an influential set of volumes published in Venice by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle Navigationi et Viaggi (Of Navigations and Voyages), which appeared between 1550 and 1559. The curator proposed the idea that

Indigenous artists should have a chance to destabilize these 16th-century accounts and present decolonized and multivocal understandings of those originating encounters. Such an intervention into records of early contact and its visualization might be conceptualized as an exhibition of Ramusio’s “missing” volume, which Carocci titled Volume 0.

As an Italian curator, Carocci had two further ambitions. First, he realized that this Venetian/Italian connection with overarching views of Indigenous North American cultures was not recognized generally and needed to be retrieved as an historical episode. Secondly, glass seed beads, used extensively in the North American “Indian trade,” were produced on the Venetian island of Murano, famous throughout Europe for its glassware.

This was a crucial historical linkage— or entanglement—that had been left out of wider art-historical or curatorial discourses, at least in Europe.

In the context of the Venice Biennale, with its large national pavilions and generally bigger spaces for exhibiting contemporary works, the dimensions of the Zuecca Project Space could be viewed as somewhat constrained: a shop-sized venue divided into a front and back room.

However, both artists worked effectively with the space and created visually impressive, site-specific pieces that engaged viewers, drawing them further inside. Myre’s work took up the brightly lit area in front, and Michelson’s installation made use of a darkened area beyond.

Nadia Myre’s installation consisted of a chapel-like space with a soundscape

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top Alan Michelson, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), 2019, four-channel video with sound, marine buoys, variable dimensions. Both images courtesy of the author. bottom Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin), Volume 1, 2019, earthenware, beads, threads.

Wallpaper: Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Algonquin), Damask (Volume 0), 2019, wallpaper installation.

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background that added to its auratic presentation. A repeated pattern of printed wallpaper designed from engravings found in Giovanni Ramusio’s third volume (based on Jacques Cartier’s account of his travels) and from other European-designed symbols covered all the walls of this “sacred room.”

The wallpaper pattern told viewers of the entangled and syncretic mingling of cultures that constituted the real circumstances of contact between American Indigenous and European invaders from the start. Dominant cultural symbols such as the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart and European sailing vessels were repeated in the pattern and joined with a ring-shaped image of the circular, wooden surround of the Iroquoian village at Hochelaga (where Montreal would eventually be situated), all interlaced into the repeated damask patterning of European manufacture.

Cohabiting in the same design were flower-shaped bundles of tobacco leaves and Sky Woman, whose fall onto the back of Turtle would form the continent of North America (Turtle Island) as is told in Haudenosaunee origin stories.

In the center of the room a golden, human heart was placed upon a velvetcovered cushion filled with Venetian sand, draped with a lace-like, richly colored, seed-beaded mantle inspired

by Indigenous motifs. For this viewer, given the reliquary-like presentation of this object surrounded by the syncretic imagery on the walls, it represents not merely the Sacred Heart repositioned in an Indigenous context, but also all the love and goodness that was available in Indigenous culture had Europeans truly recognized who and what they had encountered and had learned to treasure this new knowledge and experience.

Alan Michelson’s work was titled Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the Orb of the World), using the title often used for an atlas in the Renaissance but also playing more generally on the use of Latin in many of the early books and maps printed about the Americas. Michelson’s darkened space contained four internally illuminated globes standing a few feet from the ground and positioned to indicate the four sacred directions in Indigenous cosmographies. But they also

signified the European Renaissance notion of the “four parts of the world” in which geographers sought to make sense of the unexpected American encounter resulting from voyages across the Atlantic. On each globe was projected a series of images in video format entailing the four themes chosen by the artist: Les Sauvages, Viaggi, War Dance, and Relations. Michelson also used sound in his work. As one moved between the separate spheres, the viewer became aware of recorded statements, Christian hymns sung in Mohawk, and baroque compositions at times overlaid upon each other yet remaining distinguishable. In the video projection, the juxtaposition of a young Haudenosaunee dancer in regalia with the accompanying soundtrack of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Harpsichord Suite in G Major titled Les Sauvages represented the gulf between a genuine Indigenous person or group and the fanciful baroque representations of it at the time. But the juxtaposition also refers to those who sought to contain or even annihilate a different culture by calling it savage. Moving between the four “worlds,” alternative narratives of the European arrival in North America were articulated from the Indigenous vantage point. The viewer was also reminded of present-day situations with the women-led, Indigenous activism of the Idle No More movement and of the issues surrounding Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women currently being raised by activists and protesters.

Carocci had approached those Indigenous artists who might have a direct stake in such early visualizations of the Atlantic seaboard and its original peoples and in those accounts of French voyages sailing up the St. Lawrence River in Canada. Volume 0 was a successful use of the Venetian context and its histories and gave new relevance to North American Indigenous perspectives in the histories of colonial encounter. Bearing in mind the preconceptions and clichés that still dominate so much of European comprehension of Native American culture and history, these interventions in Venice were powerful demonstrations of the need to think again.

—Stephanie Pratt, PhD (Dakota)

TAOS

Susan Folwell: Through the Looking Glass Harwood Museum of Art

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N VIEW through January 5, 2020, Susan Folwell’s exhibition presents audiences with a prismatic dialogue that refracts between her curated selection of paintings by the Taos Society of Artists and her ceramic artworks as narrative responses. Through strategic pairings, Folwell (Santa Clara Tewa) enacts new stories about northern New Mexico within a northern New Mexico museum. The phrase “through the looking glass” situates Folwell’s position as artist rather than subject. Many models from Taos Pueblo collaborated with the Taos Society of Artists, a renowned group of twelve Anglo artists in Taos who primarily painted American Indian subjects during the early 20th century.

Offering viewers an Indigenized perspective of northern New Mexico, Folwell’s clay vessels convey her knowledge of Santa Clara and Taos Pueblo, where her family members reside. On her artworks, Folwell paints figurative scenes that celebrate her ceramicist peers, the creative power of Pueblo women, and the sustenance provided by the region. These storied ceramics commemorate the Tewa and Tiwa peoples and their homelands in clay, a foundational medium critical to Pueblo peoples’ continuance and care for one another. Pottery also functions as a cross-cultural symbol understood in different ways by the Pueblo communities and the Taos Society of Artists. Both groups frequently featured Pueblo vessels in early 20th century paintings. In this imagery, the clay vessels, as living beings, reflected the artists’ and subjects’ stories. Indigenous ceramics bear witness to these practitioners’ imagined and painted narratives in both Folwell’s and the Taos Society of Artists’ works.

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above Susan Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), Baking Bread, 2018, Santa Clara clay, acrylic, wood stain, India Ink. Image courtesy of King Galleries Scottsdale/Santa Fe.

However, The Cacique (ca. 1932) by E. Irving Couse (1866–1936) is the only painting in this exhibition that clearly features pottery in its composition. This allows Folwell’s ceramics to step into the role often held by historic Pueblo vessels in the Taos Society of Artists’ compositions. As such, she has relocated the pottery presence from these early 20th-century paintings to her own 21st-century vessels that contribute new stories to northern New Mexico’s history.

In the gallery space, Folwell’s narrative ceramics mirror illustrative scenes back to the early 20th-century paintings on view to create multifaceted conversations.

She paired Couse’s work with her vessel, The Artist (2017), which honors her ceramicist colleagues through illustrations of pottery in the styles of Diego Romero (Cochiti) and Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo). Folwell’s visual narrative underlines the ongoing significance of

ceramic arts to Pueblo communities and calls attention to Romero’s and Swentzell’s individualized aesthetics, indicative of the diversity of Pueblo pottery.

With an emphasis on Victor Higgins (1884–1949) and E. Martin Hennings (1886–1956), the exhibition features 19 of the Taos Society of Artists’ paintings curated from the collections of the Harwood Museum of Art, the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, the Couse-Sharp Historic Site in Taos, and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. For the past three years, Folwell has been studying the Taos Society of Artists’ paintings and creating narrative ceramics that speak back to these early 20th-century depictions of northern New Mexico.1 Nine vessels from this ongoing series are on view and grouped with Taos Society of Artists’ paintings. Folwell also included a bronze sculpture by Santa Fe-based artist Ed Smida called The Goose

1. An interview with Susan Folwell on June 27, 2019 significantly shaped this review.

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Hunter (2016), which translates Couse’s The White Goose (1911), a painting not on view, into a three-dimensional form designed to appeal to multiple audiences in its concepts of journeying home.

Folwell became familiar with the Taos Society of Artists by way of her husband, Davison Packard Koenig.

He is the director and curator of the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, a preserved campus and living museum that includes Couse’s home and studio in addition to two studios used by Joseph Henry Sharp (1859–1953). Folwell’s fascination with the Taos Society of Artists’ paintings grew from this exposure. She finds much beauty in these painters’ portrayals of the Taos Pueblo, Hispano, and Anglo community members of northern New Mexico as well as the flora and fauna of the area. She intertwines this imagery within her own painted narratives that depict her memories and perceptions of the people and places of the region, both from her own experiences and histories known to her through familial legacies.

Folwell’s grouping of Winter in New Mexico (ca. 1930) by Walter Ufer (1876–1936) with her vessel, Baking Bread (2018), creates a more complex juxtaposition than what meets the eye.

Her depiction of Pueblo women’s central roles as food providers is a mirror image and an interpretation of Ufer’s The Bakers (1917), a painting of a similar scene that is not displayed. A curatorial challenge Folwell encountered was that some of the Taos Society of Artists’ paintings were unavailable for loan. Instead, Ufer’s Winter in New Mexico offers a regional scene of two Native women wearing blankets over their dresses and walking through a mountain pass. Portraying a female-oriented event, Folwell’s Baking Bread features adobe dwellings, hornos, and Pueblo women in regalia as cultural identifiers. Further emphasizing femininity, she overlaid this narrative on a ceramic that has a basket-like shape.

Contextualization also plays a key role in the juxtaposition of Higgins’s Sleeping Model painting (n.d.) with Folwell’s Sleeping Model ceramic vessel

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(2018). Higgins’s closely framed portrait of a seated and sleeping woman convinces audiences of the subject’s Pueblo identity through her dress, shawl, moccasins, and leggings. He omits any other clues of place, choosing to keep the focus on the patterning found in the woman’s attire and the striped rug underneath her feet. In her recasting of this work, Folwell uses the vessel to create an environment around the sleeping woman. She transforms the striped rug into a sewer grate and replaces the blank background with a desert landscape of rock formations, blue skies, and animated clouds. For Folwell, the subject’s Pueblo attire serves as a beginning point of a conversation filled in by the icons of home behind her.

One of the most complex ceramics in the exhibition is Folwell’s The Twins canteen (2017), which is placed with four of Hennings’s paintings. An open jug on its side, this vessel reimagines Hennings’s The Twins (1923). Folwell’s jug spills out four clay water droplets arranged next to a clay cork. A large droplet portrays chamisa with roots hauntingly styled into mushroom-cloud forms, a departure from Hennings’s serene portrayal of these local plants in Chamisa in Bloom (ca. 1923). A medium-scaled droplet depicts burros hooked to a wagon, while a smaller droplet features a corncob pipe. In its reflections of northern New Mexico, Folwell’s work inspires commentary on the labor and the consequences of land-based industries and their conflicted histories.

Overall, Folwell’s narrative ceramics demonstrate how her close studies of the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists inform her cross-cultural recollections of the area.

Folwell tells these stories through clay, a medium integral to the northern New Mexico region that continually connects her to her family. She moves “through the looking glass” and shifts the gaze to a reciprocal position. Here, new dialogues emerge from the museum and interweave with audiences’ memories.

In this exhibition, Folwell recasts the looking glass as a window.

—Michelle J. Lanteri

BOOK REVIEWS Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote, PhD University of North Carolina Press, 2019

D

URING THE LAST FEW YEARS of the 19th century, a sociopolitical movement known as American Progressivism began. The term encompasses a variety of responses to the negative economic and social effects of rapid industrialization in which reformers aimed at improving society. While thousands of books on this topic exist, few explore a Native American response, and none explore it from a Native American perspective—until now.

D r. Je n ny To n e - Pa h - Ho t e , associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the American Studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently published Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era. Based on her dissertation and according to Tone-Pah-Hote, this monograph offers “an examination of expressive culture through the lens of a nation in those tumultuous days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the federal government constrained their

choices about self-government, the access to their territory, and cultural and political expression.”

Expressive culture, a term from the field of cultural anthropology, refers to the intentional use of the human body to engage in performances of group identity.

The scope of expressive culture for this study includes regalia, such as that worn by fancy dancers in the emergent powwow arena; adornment, such as beadwork and German silver jewelry; figural art, such as paintings by members of the Kiowa Six; and dance, such as performances at the American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Through her interdisciplinary approach, which includes biography, h i s t o r y, a n d m at e r i a l c u l t u r e , Tone-Pah-Hote harnesses a broad range of sources and delineates a new path for scholars. Each of the four chapters begin with a visual analysis of an image rooted in Kiowa expressive culture from the Progressive Era. For example, chapter 2, “Circulating Silver: Peyote Jewelry and the Making of Region,” begins by examining a tie clasp created by Murray Tone-Pah-Hote (Kiowa, 1911–1968), the author’s paternal grandfather.

After looking closely at the material object crafted by her grandfather, Tone-Pah-Hote enters into a complex discussion about how Native artistic production of jewelry during the Progressive Era subverted attempts by the United States government to disconnect Native people from the Native American Church and a subversion of the “cash economy to serve the ends of the silversmiths.” The chapter shows that German silver and silver jewelry with peyote religious imagery from the time “carried importance because of their political layers and meanings, but they were also significant because they present an example of Indian consumption of goods made by other Native peoples.” Ultimately, “the jewelry and emerging identities parallel one another.”

The other three chapters likewise discuss how “Kiowa and other Native American people have hung on to and transformed art, song, and dance in FALL 2019 | 79

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the face of assimilative pressures they have experienced since the turn of the twentieth century.” In chapter 1, “Beyond Feathered War Bonnets,” Tone-Pah-Hote argues that Kiowas “created transformative cultural space” within places such as the museum. Chapter 3, “We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance,” focuses on the intertribal spaces of dance by Kiowa men, and chapter 4, “We Worked and Made Beautiful Things,” centers on how women, beadwork, and their representations “demonstrate both the boundaries and the bonds of Kiowa as a tribal nation.”

As noted by the author at the end of the preface, the intended audience of this academic publication includes “those of us interested in the survival and adaptation of Indigenous people because cultural producers played central roles in our survival.”

Without a doubt, Tone-Pah-Hote successfully achieves what she set out to do in Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era. She clearly shows how Kiowa people used expressive culture to survive and navigate the assimilation era and the early 20th century with arts as a central position of self-representation.

…Cultural producers played central roles in our survival.

Yet the success of this densely packed, intently researched text reaches beyond its written pages. It helps to advance the conversation about Progressive Era Native American art and identity from a Native perspective and complicates the existing monolithic narrative of American history.

Considering its many strengths, Crafting an Indigenous Nation may pose a minor challenge for readers looking for visuals in that only a handful of art photos are included. Despite the lack of imagery, the book thoroughly documents for the historical record how the Kiowa people mobilized their sovereignty through expressive culture from the 1870s to the 1930s.

—Jean Merz-Edwards

Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD, and John Drury Museum of Glass, 2019

“H

OW DO WE KNOW if history is true?”

The question was asked of Dr. Miranda Shkik Belarde-Lewis by her nine-year-old son. Belarde-Lewis (Tlingit/Zuni) is curator of Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary’s extraordinary and immersive installation, Raven and the Box of Daylight, which opened at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, on October 3, 2018.

The question opens her essay, “Building One Box of Daylight Story from Many,” in the exhibition catalogue. Reflecting on the question, Belarde-Lewis writes, “When it comes to Native history, we have to get the story right every time we tell it.”

Of course, “right” is relative when it comes to Native stories, for which the distinction between the labels “historical” and “legendary” is complicated. Stories of ancient origin change depending on the storyteller, the listener(s), the context, and even the historical moment. They change depending on the memory and vocabulary of the teller. They change depending on the language in which they are conveyed. To write down a story or narrate it via an art exhibition is to make it stand still for a moment, to determine

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which of its elements are “true” or at least necessary. It is a risky undertaking, for judgment inevitably comes from every direction, especially from one’s own community.

Singletary takes the risk with Raven and the Box of Daylight, which is based on a popular Tlingit story that tells how the sun, moon, and stars came to reside in the sky. Through full-color photographs, an interview, and two critical essays, the catalogue attempts to describe the artist’s and curator’s awareness and handling of the complexities inherent in translating the Tlingit story to glass.

Museum of Glass executive director Deborah Lenk writes in the foreword, “This catalog and exhibition document a story told through an immersive journey in glass that is truly magical and life changing. For those who have seen the exhibition, my hope is that this publication is a poignant reminder of the personal impacts they experienced in the galleries. For others who have not, I hope to honor the Tlingit people through a greater understanding of their traditions while inspiring deeper thinking about our own ancestry and legacy.”

Singletary’s work on the exhibition began with Tlingit mythologist Walter Porter, who walked on six years ago while the idea for the exhibition was still being developed. Porter’s mentorship and influence, especially his way of interpreting stories through a universal lens, permeate the catalogue. Both Singletary and Belarde-Lewis constantly acknowledge Porter’s work, particularly in Belarde-Lewis’s opening essay, which presents four elements of the story as translated by several tellers. She discusses each element as a way of explaining how she and Singletary developed the illustrated narrative that weaves through the exhibition as well as the catalogue itself.

Of the choices they made, Belarde-Lewis writes, “Our primary goal is to honor the essence of the story without veering too far off into one version of it. We have made it a priority to acknowledge the people and the details they know to be true. We have an obligation to them, to recognize and honor how they understand their own history as it is embodied in this particular Raven story.”

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The majority of the catalogue is taken up with full-page photographs of the luminous and startling, often large-scale pieces that make up the installation. In an interview with Singletary conducted two-and-a-half years into the Raven project, the artist explains, “I would like people to really understand that this is one of our old, precious stories that a lot of people might potentially know. Trying to create it in a visual way, I want them to be immersed in a different place.”

Well-known glass artist, writer, instructor, and curator John Drury, half of the influential art duo CUD (with Robbie Miller), contributes a rambling, meditative essay, “So Goes Raven,” accompanied by historical photos. The essay seeks to express the ineffable quality of Singletary’s work in unconventional language while situating it in Native history and art history.

S i ng l e t ar y ’s wor k , w h e t h e r expertly lit in museums and galleries or photographed for this catalogue in striking detail, does take on an otherworldly quality that can make you forget someone actually, physically made it, much like one might forget the sun, moon, and stars were at one time locked in boxes before Raven released them. However, in both Belarde-Lewis’s essay and her interview with Singletary, articulate yet plainspoken explanations of the personal, artistic, and scholarly challenges not just of creating but of presenting the exhibition deepen understanding of the Raven story as well as the story of the exhibition itself.

Singletary candidly relates his awareness of what it means to be a Tlingit person who grew up outside of his community, creating art based on that part of his cultural identity. Belarde-Lewis and Singletary also discuss the financial and commercial concerns involved in this

THEATER REVIEW Between Two Knees Written by the 1491s, directed by Eric Ting Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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ODAY, INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL survivors and their descendants suffer intergenerational trauma caused by abuse, molestation, forced assimilation, and missing children whose untimely grave sites are sought. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a non-Indigenous mother alleges on an Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) review page that her ten-year-old child was traumatized to tears by a play, Between Two Knees.

This 2019 theater season, rogue Indian forces ambushed and massacred the face of American Theater. Riding together as the 1491s, playwrights Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee); Dallas Goldtooth (Dakota/Diné), Migizi Pensoneau (Ponca/Ojibwe), Bobby Wilson (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota), and Ryan Red Corn (Osage) battled through the Western world’s fourth wall and shattered the alabaster proscenium arch.

This brilliant piece of intergenerational, trauma-laced historical fiction takes the audience on a runaway war-pony crash course in Native American studies.

Rectifying American historical narrative untruths, the 1491s expertly maneuver their captives into seeing history through an Indigenous lens.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival website describes the 1491s as a “sketchcomedy troupe,” but don’t expect a full-length version of their YouTube video shorts. You will laugh, but (as promised by the play’s complimentary Indian Guide) you’ll also be uncomfortable, your motivation for laughter or sadness dependent upon your cultural identity.

Co-commissioned with New Native Theatre as part of the OSF American Revolutions series (a total of 37 new plays representing artists throughout the country highlighting moments of change in the United States), Between Two Knees defines key moments in Indigenous American history, including the Civilization Fund Act (the start of the domestic terrorism Indian boarding school era), the Indian Relocation Act, Indian termination policy, and more.

exhibition and in glass working in general.

Asked about the most challenging part of the show, Singletary answered, “Finding a balance to try to make a living and then also create the show at the same time.” Just as Raven had to transform himself to a humble spruce needle (in some tellings) in order to accomplish his mission to bring light to the world, artists have to make a living while they create meaningful art. Including this part of the exhibition’s story in a finely produced, visually stunning catalogue helps make the book a more “true” historical document of the exhibition and Singletary’s art while still giving readers a sense of the immersive, emotional experience Lenk describes in the foreword. Overall, the catalogue reflects the respect and attention with which Singletary approached and translated the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight.

—Stacy E. Pratt, PhD

Because American history largely consists of more than 500 years of institutionalized racism and/or exclusion of Indigenous peoples by the Western world, this production has the power to leave the predominantly white, season-ticketholding audience feeling the unfamiliar wounds of imperialism. These wounds are so painful, many have retaliated with seething OSF website comments and/or escaped their captors by vacating seats at intermission.

Can audience members be blamed for their hostilities or for leaving because they felt, as another attendee commented, “threatened” by the characters and content in this play?

Perhaps it’s not their fault. For example, from my experience as an educational narrative writer, many school districts in the United States ban curriculum designers from using the word imperialism, causing American history to appear unstained, and just this year, the first comprehensive history textbook for children that includes Indigenous points of view was published.

From An Indigenous People’s History of the United States for Young People (which includes the word imperialism),

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Debbie Reese (Nambé Pueblo), and Jean Mendoza, the FALL 2019 | 81

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above Between Two Knees tells the story of the key 83-year period in American Indian history through the saga of one family. Beginning at the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, the narrative culminates in 1973 with the American Indian Movement and the occupation at Wounded Knee. The actors are Stephen “Wotko” Long (Muscogee), Rachel Crowl, April Ortiz, Derek Garza (Wichita), and Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Photo: Jenny Graham. Image courtesy of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

description of the 1960s-era Indigenous civil rights activists of the American Indian Movement could also be applied to the 1491s: “Their activism can be described as persistent, organized, and increasingly intertribal resistance to federal policies that undermined Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.” In fact, the 1491s created a phenomenon where the audience is safe to empathize with those suffering the excruciatingly painful effects of federal policies, yet without the misery of actual life consequences.

Upon entering the theater, each audience member is offered a land acknowledgment map honoring the Indigenous peoples of precontact and present-day Oregon, which gives recognition to historical occupation of the land. I observed approximately half the audience accept the handout.

Immersed in satirical American Indian stereotypes of the highest appropriation degree, the Native and non-Native cast and crew of Between Two Knees performed well under director Eric Ting and choreographer Shaun Taylor-Corbett. Each spinning fiber of history was sprinkled with Broadway musical-style stardust, sugarcoating atrocities committed against the main characters.

The play’s hero, Isaiah, and heroine, Irma, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at the hands of the majority audience of forefathers and foremothers. The narrative follows their family’s triumphs and losses while simultaneously weaving the fabric of a pivotal 83-year period of American history. Beginning at the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, the play focuses on the characters’ resilience of spirit throughout boarding school crimes against the most vulnerable of humanity, fallaciousness at the hands of New Age “Native American” ceremonies, and circles back to the American Indian Movement occupation at Wounded Knee, when the audience is blatantly confronted by demands they leave this land. In this way, the 1491s relate the Indigenous characters not as victims, but as resilient peoples who are forced to take sovereign action against a colonial paradigm of oppression.

The First Americans never built a proscenium arch into their storytelling; so when historical truth tears down the Western world’s pacifying fourth wall, the Indigenous audience celebrates acknowledgment while many of the non-Indigenous audience appear shell-shocked. It is, after all, unprecedented for an alien perspective to be highlighted in a distinguished Tony

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Award-winning venue with a total yearly audience of 400,000.

Maybe those audience members who feel uneasy or “threatened” when brought face to face with the brutalities of cultural genocide should allow the 1491s to provide (in a mere two hours) what 13-years-plus of education did not deliver, and instead turn their hostilities toward their own censored educational system.

Is it the playwright’s responsibility to leave an audience feeling good about themselves, or should productions inspire theatergoers to remove their colonizer-tinted opera glasses and vicariously experience new perspectives about cultures and life experiences other than their own? For the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival audiences, the answers may vary between those who fled at intermission and those who stayed to endure an audience participation, harsh reality lesson about the colonization of this land.

The OSF audiences have been gifted an unmatched, comically tragic, vicarious, Indigenous experience. The only possible comparison would be to a Mel Brooks (times five) concentration camp, intergenerational, trauma-style musical. However, until American institutions are inclusive of the Indigenous perspective and we are all on the same page, the OSF website, ticket venue, and complementary Indian Guide at the beginning of the production all warn that the play contains “violent imagery and some profanity.” In other words, this 1491s play is for mature audiences who are not afraid to see American history Between Two Knees.

Currently, the real-life descendants of the Wounded Knee Massacre are lobbying the United States Congress to pass the Remove the Stain Act that would rescind the Medal of Honor from each of the 20 US Seventh Cavalry men who, on December 29, 1890, committed acts of genocide and murdered more than 300 Lakota children, women, and elders in South Dakota.

Between Two Knees by the 1491s runs wild through October 27, 2019, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

—Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nation)

BETWEEN THE LINES CROSSWORD PUZZLE Number24 ANONYMOUS 1

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Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc), detail of Willow and Basket, 2018, mixed media with willow on canvas, 40 × 30. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Indigenous dog blanket 1. Yuxweluptun: Man of _____ 1.6 Gilcrease _______ DOWN 2. Coup d’ _____ 6. Indigenous dog blanket 1 Yuxweluptun: Man of ____ 7 Lawrence's target 3. Dorothy Grant’s people 7. Lawrence’s target 4. Blackfoot band Japaneseink calligraphy 8.8 Japanese painting ink 2 Coup d' _____ 5. Linda’s classmate 9. Baleen basket origin 3 Dorothy Grant's 9 Location of 6-Across 8. people Basket material 10. See 11-Down. Lakota seven 11.

Seven Council Fires, first word 12. a _____ 4 Blackfeet 10 That’s See 11-Down 12.

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Basket material 5 Linda's 12 Choctaw That's a _____ 15. mother mound, first word classmate 16. Dance from Southeast 17. Fit and _____ 8 Basket material 14 Wapiti 18. Michif 19. Yellow Robe’s milieu 20. _____ change only 22.

15 _____ MotherDomini Mound (Choctaw) 11 Council of 7 Fires 21. HBO drama set in N’awlins 23. Language in Roma 12 See 15-Across 17 Unangan Cursory haircut 24.

Answers online at 25.

Hog feed firstamericanartmagazine.com/ 13 Basket material 19 Yellow Robe's art 26. City of yəhaw̓ crossword —Travis D. Day 22 _____ Domini

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Assiniboine Actor, Poet, and Playwright

WILLIAM S. YELLOW ROBE JR.

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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AISED IN NORTHEASTERN MONTANA, William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (b. 1962) is an enrolled member of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. He studied writing and performing arts at the University of Montana. Yellow Robe has written more than 50 one-act and full-length plays that have been performed in venues throughout the United States, including the Public Theater in New York City, Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. In 2009 he published a collection of full-length plays titled Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories, as well as Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays. SUNY Press will publish his newest book, Restless Spirits: Plays, in spring 2020.

Yellow Robe is a founding member of the American Indian Playwrights Guild and the National American Indian Theater and Performing Arts Alliance. In 2014 he

received a prestigious residency from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Yellow Robe taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Brown University, and the University of Montana. Currently he is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maine, Orono, and a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, and Penumbra Theatre, St. Paul, Minnesota.

MRS: What is the relationship between playwriting and other forms of writing?

Does your philosophy or method shift when you write a poem as compared to a play?

WYR: Both require different needs and attention. When I write something, it’s not as the spokesperson for all Native people; it’s just my voice or my relatives’ voices in my work.

Playwriting is more difficult, because you have to visualize how it will look on stage. You start seeing characters, hearing their voices. But a Native playwright [will have] different responsibilities. If I write

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something, it’s not to applaud myself or glorify myself. When I write, in the end, it has to help the communities. It’s not about me. If you take, you give back.

Playwriting can be very powerful, more so than poetry, because to do a play you need a community. You have to be very careful about who you invite into your camp. Sadly, today we’re seeing an encroachment of would-be Indians, people who are self-proclaimed but have no tribal or community connection. What is really disturbing is that their roots are in American-Eurocentric styles and methods, and it’s very appealing to white people.

When I write, I don’t write for an audience. I broke the first rule of playwriting, which is “Do you think of your audience?” At one time I did, because I got a playwriting professor mad at me. He said, “Who is your audience?” I said, “Well, it would be my community.

It would be an Indian audience.” He responded, “They don’t come to see your plays!” I told him, “Ya, I know, that’s a problem.” He was mad at me [laughs].

But it’s true.

I’m an older generation. When I was starting, you rarely saw Native people on stage. You rarely saw Native people direct or act or write. Now it’s flourishing. But because of its flourishing, we have more encroachment from non-Natives. It’s sort of the problem with this country, in that Indigenous people have always had these things. When they start applying them and using them and giving them life again, non-Natives come in and try to take it away or claim it as their own, just like natural medicines and natural healings.

MRS: How much of writing is listening—listening to others, to things, to the world?

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WYR: A lot. A lot of it is listening. leg and that would wake me up.

I was taught by my grandmother.

What really pushed me over is that I used to go to her house, and she my niece died. She died of heart would sit there in her chair. She failure. She didn’t need to die, but would have a cup of tea and she she was using meth and alcohol. would be smoking a cigarette. She MRS: I’m sorry to hear this. always smoked Kool menthols.

There was a thunderstorm coming, WYR: It got me so angry, so frusand she never went outside, but she trated that we are losing a whole said, “Do you hear it coming?” I generation right now. I’ve had some went, “What?” She said, “The thunfriends and other relatives commit derstorm!” I looked outside and it suicide. I’m all the way in Maine, was kind of sunny, so I thought and Fort Peck Indian Reservation “Holy smoke, she’s going insane on is a couple thousand miles away me.” Within three hours this huge from me. It gets me angry that I thunderstorm would blow in. We can’t do anything. The historic would listen to the rain falling on trauma of violence I grew up with, the roof. When I tried to ask her a I saw it as an expression. I saw it question, she would say, “Shh!” Just applied to spousal abuse. At one listen, listen to the rain. time, it was a running joke. They That goes all the way back to would say, “Oh, she got Indian living in my community because loving.” You mean, so he beat her you were taught to listen. You up? I think it was because people were taught, as a young person, to were just traumatized by it and be quiet and let those around you finding some means of grasping talk. But also, you need to take how someone would do this. That’s your turn. What’s happening today above Restless Spirits: Plays (SUNY Press, 2020). what happens. Sometimes we turn is that no one really listens. opposite William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Image courtesy of the our humor around. It’s not meanThe other thing that is playwright. ness, but it’s the only way we can important is that you have to listen deal with this right now. brothers who represent different times of to the environment around you.

You really do, because if you ignore it, my life; some of the character Craig Robe MRS: Truth and humor are at the crux you ignore a whole part of life. One thing in Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, of your writing, yet humor tends to be that saved me these past two weeks is the which represents some of my life. Then, undervalued or ignored as a meaningful river outside of our house. With all the it’s kind of strange but a newer play called approach to understanding the world. rain and melting snow, the river was rising One Step Away, where an Indian man has What is the connection between humor and moving fast. It was nice to go outside lost his leg and he goes to heaven. Because and truth? Or, how does humor get at and just listen to it. he wants in, the angels tell him, “You can’t the truth when nothing else will? come in.” He asks why and they tell him, MRS: There’s almost a spiritual “Because you’re not a full-blood anymore” WYR: What’s so amazing about humor, dimension to listening. for me, is that it allows me to breathe. If [laughs]. it’s really funny I’ll laugh, and after I laugh WYR: Yes, there is. You have to listen MRS: Is there a character that still sticks I can see the reality of what I’m looking to your heart, you have to listen to your with you or haunts you after you’ve at or what I’m thinking about. Laughter mind, you have to listen to your soul, and moved on to writing other works. If so, allows me to clear my system out so I you have to listen to your body. why? can accept things. When you see a car wreck, you can make jokes about the car MRS: I’m curious to know how you build WYR: It’s not so much a character. I’m a wreck, but the humor eases the tension your protagonists and other characters. child of violence. I saw so much violence and the fear so you can actually see what More specifically, how much of your growing up, and it’s caused this historic happened. personal philosophies and imagination trauma that I have. I’ve recently been are imparted into them? diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and There’s a difference that we forget WYR: There are only three plays where PTSD. What set it off is that I lost my leg here because of the influence of Euromy character exists. That’s SNEAKY, two years ago. I actually had nightmares American ethnocentrism. There’s a the one-act play. SNEAKY has the three where I could hear the saw cutting off my difference between hearing something FALL 2019 | 85

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above Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories, (UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2009). right Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009, ©2000). opposite William Yellow Robe Jr. at left in One Step Away, directed by Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo), at the second annual National Native American Ten Minute Play Festival, Gremlin Theater, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2017. Photo: Jeff Schad Imagery. Image courtesy of William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

and judging something. In our society, we are too quick to judge, and we’re not seeing the full story. To give you an example, we have a problem of homelessness and alcoholism at Fort Peck. When I was growing up, men and women used to hang around in the streets and they were alcoholics. Some of them were war veterans. They had PTSD, but at that time they didn’t have that phrase for it.

I was with my mother and made fun of this wino, and she turned to me and said, “That’s your uncle. Don’t make fun of your uncle. These are your relatives, remember that.” I felt so ashamed for making fun of him. Living in Wolf Point, Montana, going to a white school, that’s how you were trained to see things. That’s the sad thing … as Native people we [were] taught to see ourselves in a negative way for so many years, and you don’t deprogram that kind of thinking overnight. It’s interesting

that humor helps us get through that.

Humor allows us to make fun of ourselves so we stop beating ourselves up, stop the self-loathing, stop the self-hatred so we can laugh at it.

MRS: What does writing do for you that nothing else can?

WYR: For me, writing is a healing component. It helps me grow. If there’s an incident in a play that’s based on my life, it teaches me to see all the elements around it, so I can get a more in-depth look. That’s what I like about playwriting; it sharpens my observations; not only to see the subject but the relations of that subject and all their internal relations.

MRS: What is something that every writer should explore or examine?

WYR: I think that every writer needs to

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sharpen their skills of listening, so that they not only listen to the spoken word but the unspoken word. Not everybody and everything will come out and tell you what they think and feel. You have to develop some kind of empathy. You have to work toward being more of a human being. The other thing that is important is observation. When white writers say observation, they say, “What did you see?” But it’s not a question of what you saw with your eyes, but a question of what does your heart see, what does your body see, what does your soul see. Let that inform you as well because sometimes your eyes can mislead you. Within observation, don’t be judgmental. We’re in a process now that if we see something, right away we label it and we judge it. What’s really scary is that we discard those things that are bad.

Tragically, for some, they discard their relatives that way.

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DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A REALITY SHOW

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EY, YOU GOTTA MINUTE? Must have, you’re here.

Let’s talk. My name’s Justin Redman.

Oh, hell no, I don’t think we’re related. I understand you might be the great, great, great, great grandson of the woman who braided the hair of princess Pocahontas. I’m an Indin, from this continent. I’m Assiniboine. Yeah, yeah, I know.

Never heard of my people before. We’ve probably never heard of your people to but here you are. Yes, Assiniboine exist, and if you still don’t believe me contact your resource center, Target, but if you’re a Trump supporter, Walmart.

I wanted to talk about the two-ton pilgrim in the dance arena.

Yeah, we need talk about this. You’ve married a wasicu, oh, white man, or woman. And now you have a white husband or wife, with kids who are part white. You might go golfing on the weekends with the relatives, share lawn care tips, or wish you had a Costco nearby. That doesn’t matter. What’s important here my cuzin, is this. Do you still claim to be Indin, or toss your whole Indin identity to side and only claim it when the in-laws want to go to the local quaint Indin pow-wow, or new museum exhibit?

Don’t lie…and don’t get mad. It happens. Some folks only put on their Indin culture like a piece of clothing. The weekend powwow warrior. And by the way, does this give them the right to talk about mascots or issues in the Native tribal communities?

Hell no! They are just married to Sacagawea, or Squanto, they haven’t been enrolled and get free bingo cards—oh no.

I’m going to be writing a self-help book due out in the fall. It’s titled, So You Married a Wasicu and Do I Have to Tell Them about Eating Puppy Soup? Or, I wanted to de-colonize but wound up being colonized—do I throw out the tripe?

I don’t mean to pick on our white brothers and sisters. In fact, what’s important here is you. Some Indin folks are ashamed of being Indin, hate being Indin. This type of self-loathing and oppression didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a slow process.

Don’t forget the brothers and sisters who were adopted out in the past for no other reason other than they were Indin. Being disconnected from your people is a fucking tragedy. There’s no one to blame. There are actions and ideas that can be blamed.

Don’t get all stuck up too. We have relatives who are Indin and Black. Just because you might have friends who practice hate, doesn’t mean you have to. There is a big difference in being “traditional” and white trash. Remember those phrases we are all related and all my relations. They aren’t just words in a prayer.

So, if you are part wasicu, married, related; don’t hate yourself.

If you are part Indin, then be Indin. Don’t be playing the entire field. Learn to take a stand.

Don’t play one side against the other, respect all of you. Pinamiya.

—William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine)

LEG ANCESTRY As my leg and stump dangled from the bed, Leg Ancestry told my stump that it has ‘leg ancestry’.

“Leg ancestry,” thought the stump.

Yes, your leg, ankle, and foot are there.

You sure?

Yes, they are there and you can walk and run, why, you can even stand right now if you like, Phantom pain came for a visit about this time.

Leg ancestry shriveled back from phantom pain.

Phantom pain reminded me, the stump, all of us, that we are missing some parts, Phantom pain reminds us of reality, reminds us not to lose focus, We had these things, but now, they are gone, so we mourn, we pray, we decide ‘leg ancestry’ is not like the real thing, we are happy we have us….

—William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine) FALL 2019 | 87

MEMORIAL

CHESTER KAHN February 24, 1936–June 1, 2019

above Chester Kahn (Navajo) at his workbench. Image courtesy of Tony Kahn (Navajo).

A

JEWELER, PAINTER, RUNNER, AND ACTIVIST, Chester Kahn (Navajo) traveled the globe sharing his deep understanding of “Native American culture, Navajo arts, world peace, and unity,” his son, Tony Kahn (Navajo), relayed by email. Born in Pine Springs, Arizona, Chester was Bit’ahnii, Under His Cover clan, born for Tséńjíkiní, Honeycombed Rock clan. Chester’s relatives included many prominent artists, such as textile artist Mabel Burnside Myers, his maternal aunt. Kahn learned silversmithing by observing his maternal uncles, Tom and John Burnside, and his parents John and Alta Kahn. “Mr. Kahn recalls doing drawings on cardboards and on canyon walls with great joy while herding sheep when he was about seven,” wrote curator Jeanne O. Snodgrass.1 Chester went off to Shiprock Boarding School in 1946 and to Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada, in 1948.

There he took weekly art classes taught by Beatien Yazz (Navajo, 1928–2012) and exhibited extensively in Carson City and Reno.

After graduation, “Stewart [Indian School] hired several Navajos after they finished school so they could interpret for the teachers who didn’t speak Navajo. I did that for a while until I married,” Chester recalled. “We came home in 1958.”2 Chester and his wife, Annie Tsosie Kahn, and their six children returned to their family homelands in the Lukachukai, Tsaile, and Pine Springs areas in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Nation.

At the time, he recalled, “Many Native American artisans and traders were becoming very concerned that not many young people were learning the arts.” To address this problem the

Rockefeller Foundation and University of Arizona spearheaded the Southwestern Indian Art Project, where Chester studied jewelry under Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1991) and painting in 1960 and 1961. “We were introduced to modern techniques and modern concepts.”3 Working as a commercial artist and sign painter with his brother Franklin in the 1960s and 1970s, Chester honed his drafting skills. In 1968 he became director of the Navajo Economic Opportunity’s Chinle office and served the nation in numerous capacities throughout the years, as a community developer and builder. He also illustrated two books, Warriors of the Rainbow: Strange And Prophetic Indian Dreams (1962), Strange Journey : The Vision Life of a Psychic Indian Woman (1964) and The Winds Erase Your Footprints (2002).

Chester exhibited his jewelry and paintings widely— at Gallup and Scottsdale galleries, the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, Arizona State Fair, Navajo Tribal Fair, and Philbrook Art Museum. “In 1972, I had a partnership in Turquoise Hogan located in Scottsdale and was working fulltime making jewelry,” Chester recalled. “When the boom came we made as much as we could.”4 Joe Tanner of Gallup then became Chester’s primary dealer.

Gallup features more than 100 murals by Chester Kahn. He painted his first one in the Gallup Indian Community Center in the early 1960s. In the 1980s El Rancho Hotel commissioned him to paint 36 murals. The city commissioned Chester to paint Native American Trading Days on the external wall of Tanner’s Indian Arts. Ellis Tanner commissioned his most famous murals, Circle of Light, 64 murals depicting prominent Navajos from all walks of life. These are found inside Ellis Tanner Trading Company. Painted from 1994 to 2001, Kahn’s Circle of Light portraits are realistic with dramatic backgrounds referencing the subjects’ accomplishments, designed to inspire Navajo youth. “Chester Kahn, muralist, expresses himself in a loving and respectful way with clarity of form and soft glowing colors,” states the City of Gallup. “Yet his message is always strong.”5 Among his many honors, Chester was named a Living Treasure at Gallup Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial in 2008 and an Arizona Indian Living Treasure in 2011. “As a teacher and award-winning jeweler, he taught many of our own Diné people the art and trade of jewelry making,” wrote Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez. “Reflecting back on his life as a sheepherder as a young child, to a revered artist throughout his life, we are truly thankful to our Creator for blessing us with his life and his contributions to the Diné people.”6 —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Jeanne O. Snodgrass, American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968), 90.

2. Chester Kahn, Interview, Perry Null Trading Company, October 17, 2014, web.

3. Lois Sherr Dubin, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999): 521.

4. Kahn, Interview.

5. City of Gallup, “5. Native American Trading Mural,” Gallup Real True, web.

6. Jonathan Nez, Letter to the Family of Chester Kahn (Window Rock, AZ, June 4, 2019), private collection of Tony Kahn, 1.

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MEMORIAL

MARVIN OLIVER July 1, 1946–July 17, 2019

Q

UINAULT/ISLETA PUEBLO artist Marvin Oliver was called home on an early July morning, while surrounded by family. Though he will undoubtedly be remembered for his grand artistic legacy, those who knew him will also remember his big ideas and his madcap, creative joy. His enthusiasm was contagious and inspiring. His generosity was humbling and genuine.

Born in Shelton, Washington, to Georgia Abeita (Isleta Pueblo) and Emmett Oliver (Quinault), Marvin grew up in the Bay Area. He regularly spent summers near Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he visited his mother’s side of the family.

In 1970 Oliver earned a bachelor of arts degree from San Francisco State University. In 1973 he received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Washington where he had taken classes from Bill Holm, a scholar of Northwest Coast Native art, and celebrated artist Jacob Lawrence. A year later he joined the University of Washington as a professor at the school’s department of American Indian studies. Eventually he became its director. Earlier this year, the university honored Oliver’s legacy with the 2019 Charles E. Odegaard Award. This award recognized his exceptional leadership as a mentor and educator and how he “exemplified the former UW president’s work on behalf of diversity.”1 Beyond teaching at UW, which Oliver often remarked he couldn’t believe he got paid for, he founded the school’s Raven’s Feast, a now annual graduation ceremony for American Indian and Alaska Native students. In addition to providing salmon for the celebratory meal, Oliver would create and frame a limited edition print and give one to each American Indian graduate.

He did so for more than 40 years.

In the Odegaard award video, Oliver notes that the feast was born out of his experience at the occupation of Alcatraz. His father had served as chairman of the Bay Area Native American Committee, the group that led the takeover in 1969. When Oliver relocated to the northwest, the feast was a way to honor the Native students who had been involved there, but also a way to encourage those at the UW to continue with their education. Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine (Apsáalooke), director of UW’s wәłәbʔaltxw Intellectual House, credits the feast with his coming back to finish college. In the video he admits that while he doesn’t know where his diplomas are, his Oliver prints are on display, proudly hung in succession.2 In addition to working at the University of Washington, Oliver held roles as adjunct curator of contemporary Native American art at Seattle’s Burke Museum, and a part-time post at the University of Alaska, Ketchikan, where he and his wife Brigette also operated Alaska Eagle Arts gallery. She and his children were an important part of his creative journey, always by his side at art shows as he claimed honors such as being selected

above Marvin Oliver (Quinault/Isleta), Spirit of Our Youth, 1996, cast bronze, earthwork, 312 × 144 × 24 in., King County Arts Commission, Seattle, Washington. Image courtesy of Brigette Ellis.

as the 2007 Santa Fe Indian Market poster artist, winning Best of Show at the 2013 Heard Fair, and more.

The Seattle Times called Oliver a “master of all mediums,” referring to his ability to create monumental bronze sculptures, vibrant prints, intricate glass figures and objects, and wooden formline carvings—each skillfully composed, conceptualized, and crafted, no matter the material.3 His skills across media are especially apparent in his ambitious public art pieces. These include Mystical Journey, a 26-foot-long, 12,000-pound, steel-and-glass piece at the Seattle Children’s Museum; Sister Orca, 26-foot-tall, bronze-and-glass orca fin installed in Perugia, Italy, as part of the Sister City program; and carved cedar doors at the National Museum of American Indian Art and the Museum of International Folk Art. Oliver carved totem poles that can be found in locations around the world, such as the Toyota Corporation in Japan and the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

While there is a profound sadness in realizing that no new Marvin Oliver art or ideas are to come, the extraordinary body of work, influence on Native art, and mentorship that he leaves behind will unquestionably live on.

—Staci Golar

1. Ana Mari Cauce, “In memoriam: Marvin Oliver, ’73, artist and professor emeritus,” University of Washington, Office of the President, July 18, 2019, web.

2. Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, “2019 Charles E. Odegaard Award Recipient, Professor Emeritus Marvin Oliver,” YouTube video, 5:51, May 17, 2019, web.

3. Nicole Brodeur, “Renowned Native American artist Marvin Oliver, ‘master’ of all mediums, has died at 73 in Seattle,” The Seattle Times (July 17, 2019), web.

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COLLECTIONS

COLLECTIONS: DENVER ART MUSEUM

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

D

ENVER LIES within the historic lands of the Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne, and is surrounded by the lands of Pueblo peoples, Shoshone, Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Diné, Dakota, and Lakota. The 1858 discovery of gold near Denver and the subsequent growth of railways attracted thousands of settler-colonists from all over the United States.

By 1893 (17 years after Colorado statehood), a group of residents in the city of over 106,000 decided to form the Denver Artists’ Club, which eventually became the Denver Art Museum (DAM). DAM was one of the first art museums to collect Native arts with a focus on aesthetics.1 In 1925 its board purchased 46 Navajo textiles. A year later, trustee Anne Evans initiated a committee devoted to acquiring American Indian art.

DAM’s commitment to Indigenous artists has grown such that today, Native art makes up nearly 26 percent of its permanent collection (more than 18,000 objects in a collection of 70,000).

DAM commissions works from Native artists to fill gaps in its collection, and began an artist-in-residence program in 2011 wherein Indigenous artists create their work in the museum for up to four months.

Beyond building a strong collection, DAM and other Colorado museums have set the precedents for tribal collaboration and repatriation. In a recent article, journalist Kevin Simpson stated this about repatriation and respect for Native perspectives: “In Colorado, the conversation predated the federal law that demanded it.”2 Anthropologist Chip Colwell goes even further, stating, “In Denver, the modern repatriation movement first began.”3 Only a portion of the museum is open during a current renovation and expansion. Curator John Lukavic is planning five exhibitions in addition to a new installation of the permanent collection. When the museum reopens in 2021, newly

commissioned works by Marianne Nicolson (Kwakwaka’wakw), Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock), and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Haida) will also be unveiled.4 Lukavic juxtaposes historical and new work, an approach that constantly reminds visitors Native people are innovative, contemporary artists and invites consideration of myriad relationships among objects.

For example, he placed Marie Watt’s (Seneca) Blanket Story: Confluence, Heirloom, and Tenth Mountain Division (2013) next to 19th-century totem poles. Watt’s tower of folded blankets suggests a new kind of totem representing a diverse community.

Each donated blanket is tagged with a note about its origin and special meaning.

One of Lukavic’s first exhibitions after joining DAM in 2012 was Sovereign: Independent Voices, which featured work by Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), Kent Monkman (Cree), and Rose Simpson (Santa Clara descent). Lukavic also curated Revolt 1680/2180: Virgil Ortiz (2015), Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967–1980 (2015), Why We Dance: American Indian Art in Motion (2016), Stampede: Animals in Art (2017), and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (2018)— all documented in elegant exhibition catalogues.

Lukavic’s strong advocacy for Native arts follows a legacy of highly influential curators at the museum, namely Frederic Huntington Douglas and Nancy Blomberg. Douglas became the first curator of Indian art in 1929. His zealousness is reflected in the fact that until 1944 (when new director Otto Karl Bach shifted the focus of acquisitions to European art), 95 percent of the works acquired were from the tribal cultures of North America. In his account of the Denver Art Museum’s beginning, Lewis Wingfield Story, the assistant director of the museum, relays that Douglas and his family gifted “hundreds of objects and provided funds for the purchase of over 3,500 more.”5 Douglas actively cultivated personal relationships with tribes and artists:

1. The Brooklyn Museum was the first and began in 1910.

2. Kevin Simpson, “To right historic wrongs, Colorado museums embraced spirit of a law that repatriated Native American artifacts and remains—largely by listening,” The Colorado Sun (March 1, 2019), web.

3. Chip Colwell, “Native American artifacts and lessons learned in Colorado,” The Denver Post (March 15, 2017), web.

4. John Lukavic in discussion with the author, June 5, 2019.

5. Lewis Wingfield Story, “Building a Collection,” in The Denver Art Museum: The First Hundred Years, by Neil Harris, Marlene Chambers, and Lewis Wingfield Story (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1996), 82.

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COLLECTIONS

“During the 1930s … he personally drove to Oklahoma to the Southern Cheyenne Reservation, which had maintained the rich beadwork tradition, and picked up a Southern Cheyenne elder, Mary Inkanish. He drove her back to Denver and they filled a steamer trunk with historic Cheyenne beadwork from the Denver Art Museum collection. With the trunk and Mary, he then drove to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana.”6 For the next six months, Inkanish and Douglas held beading workshops on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to reinvigorate the local beadwork practice.

Douglas and curator Rene d’Harnoncourt organized the fine arts section at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, where Haida carver John Wallace demonstrated his skills.

Douglas and d’Harnoncourt collaborated again in 1941 on the famed Indian Art of the United States exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1974 DAM founded the Douglas Society in his honor.

This later became Friends of Native Arts: The Douglas Society.

In 1990 the museum hired Nancy Blomberg to steer Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) initiatives. She worked to establish an annual Friendship Powwow and made numerous major commissions. One of these is the iconic sculptural installation, Wheel, by Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne), completed in 2005. The work consists of ten red tree-like posts, each twelve-feet tall and arranged in a circle on the museum lawn, like a Medicine Wheel. Text and pictographs painted on the posts present a history of atrocities against Native people (“1868 Washita River Massacre,” “1973 Wounded Knee Remember”). A stone wall framing the work features the Cheyenne words NAH-KEV-HO-EYEA-ZIM (“we are always returning back home again”).7 Blomberg commissioned Santa Clara Pueblo ceramic artist Roxanne Swentzell to sculpt the eleven-foot-tall Mud Woman Rolls On in 2011. Swentzell made the work in situ to mark the entrance to the American Indian galleries. Built on an armature of coiled, straw wattles, the clay sculpture depicts a mother and four children, each a different earth tone and successively smaller in size. Swentzell explains, “This style of figure is known as a Storyteller. Pueblo Storytellers are about how knowledge is passed down through generations.”8 Blomberg was recognized for her masterful reinstallation of the permanent collection, which utilized interactive technologies to enhance viewers’ understanding of some works. One of these was Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s (Sqelix’u/Métis/Shoshone) Trade Canoe for Don Quixote (2004). The mixed-media piece comprised of four canvases references Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) amid symbols of war. Touch-screen displays provided visitors with extended explanations for various elements. With the work, the artist poses the question, “Can we trade all of this for peace, respect, kindness, friendship, sustainability and a caring for our planet and all its inhabitants?”9 6. “Friends of Native Arts: About Frederic Douglas,” Denver Art Museum, web.

7. This installation had to be removed for the expansion, and in consultation with the artist, will be relocated nearby.

8. Roxanne Swentzell, “Mud Woman Rolls On: About—What Inspired It?” Denver Art Museum, 2011, web.

9. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, wall text, Trade Canoe for Don Quixote, North Building, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.

above, top Marie Watt (Seneca), Blanket Story: Confluence, Heirloom, and Tenth Mountain Division, 2013, blanket installation, 240 in., collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2013.75. Amid numerous other artworks. All photos: Andrea L. Ferber. above, bottom Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne), Wheel, 2005, porcelain enamel on steel, stone, 660 in., collection of the Denver Art Museum, 1997.1452.1-11. opposite Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s (Sqelix’u/Métis/Shoshone), Trade Canoe for Don Quixote, 2004, mixed media on canvas, including acrylic, pencil, charcoal, oil, 60 × 200 in., collection of the Denver Art Museum, William Sr. and Dorothy Harmsen Collection, by exchange, 2005.62.

FALL 2019 | 91

COLLECTIONS

top Rose Simpson (Santa Clara descent), front to back: Explorer, Warrior, Nurturer, 2013, clay, mixed media, collection of the Denver Art Museum, gift of Vicki and Kent Logan. opposite, top Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo), Mud Woman Rolls On, 2011, unfired and fired clay, and plant fiber, collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2010.570.

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Melanie Yazzie (Diné) was one of the first participants in DAM’s artist-in-residence program. Yazzie worked prolifically over several weeks in a studio accessible to the public. She simultaneously painted dozens of canvases hung floor to ceiling in the museum studio, and produced numerous relief prints and serigraphs. Since 2011, the museum has invited ten artists to create work on site.10 While DAM is renowned for a focus on contemporary art, it also has an excellent department of pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art established in 1968. Former curator Margaret Young-Sánchez oversaw the publication of a concise survey of the pre-Columbian collection in 2003, in which she notes the encyclopedic, Costa Rican collection and ceramics from Maya territories, Teotihuacán, and Western Mexico. In 2004 Young-Sánchez organized Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca.

Current curator Victoria Lyall is planning the new installation from that collection of more than 5,000 objects.

Repatriation and collaboration reinforce DAM’s commitment to tribal communities. In 2002 Roger Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) authored a comprehensive, 237-page guide to NAGPRA detailing particular cases at DAM. One poignant clarification reads, “NAGPRA refers to [the document reporting human remains] as an ‘inventory,’ but the Denver Art Museum prefers ‘census’ because this term reflects the fact that human remains represent people, not objects.”11 DAM has repatriated cultural items to many tribes, including Cochiti Pueblo and Zuni. Like many other museums, DAM has a high-security storage area for Indigenous items held in consultation with particular nations. Lukavic gave examples of different kinds of restrictions: some objects can be held only by men, others by women only; and some must remain covered with a cloth. Accommodations have been made for individuals to leave offerings such as cornmeal and even burn tobacco (requiring the fire department to temporarily disarm the sprinkler system). Lukavic explained, “When museum staff meet with tribal representatives, we want to have stronger relationships at the end of the day …” Lukavic also serves on the board of the Denver Indian Center.

DAM continues to evolve in many different ways. Title XI programs provide outreach to urban Native youth who often feel disconnected from their cultures. All museum labels are now printed in English and Spanish. DAM recently hired Dakota Hoska (Lakota) as assistant curator of American Indian art.

The new welcome center will connect the seven-story North Building, designed by Gio Ponti and opened in 1971, with Daniel Libeskind’s sleek Hamilton Building, which doubled the size of the museum in 2006.

As museums come under increased scrutiny for ethical relationships with colonized people groups, DAM remains exemplary in its commitment to changing art historical canons, cultivating Native artists’ careers, and engaging in conversations about repatriation.

10. After Yazzie, artists-in-residence have been Walt Pourier (Oglala Lakota), Will Wilson (Diné), Marie Watt, Rose B. Simpson, Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/ Cherokee), Tom Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota), Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute), Jan Jacobs (Osage), and Wendy Red Star (Crow).

11. Roger C. Echo-Hawk, Keepers of Culture: Repatriating Cultural Items under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2002), 20.

CALENDAR

CALENDAR

RICK BARTOW

BESTIARY

October 2, 2019–January 26, 2021: Albuquerque, NM HERitage: Pueblo Women Paving Cultural Pathways at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW. Reception: Wednesday, October 2, 5:00–7:00 pm | (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.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: Kansas City, MO Generational Knowledge, solo exhibition for Mona Cliff (A’aninin), at Travois, 310 W. 19th Terrace, 6:00–8:00 pm | (816) 994-8970 | travois.com October 4 & 5: Tishomingo, OK Southeastern Art Show and Market (SEASAM), hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at the Historic Chickasaw Capitol Grounds, 411 W. 9th Street (580) 272-5520 | chickasaw.net October 4–6: Bentonville, AR 3rd annual Native American Cultural Celebration: Tradition through Pop Culture at the Museum of Native American History, 202 SW O Street (479) 273-2456 | monah.us October 4—November 2: Albuquerque, NM Sweet Oblivion: Bryon Archuleta (Ohkay Owingeh) at Mariposa Gallery, 3500 Central Avenue SE | (505) 268-6828 | mariposa-gallery.com October 4, 2019–February 15, 2020: Missoula, MT Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain at the Missoula Art Museum, 335 N. Pattee Street | (406) 728-0447 | missoulaartmuseum.org

Falco, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 72˝x 73˝

FROELICK GALLERY

October 4–December 29: Norman, OK Misunderstood! Indigenous Art and Poetry as Political Resistance at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Avenue | (405) 325-3272 | ou.edu/fjjma.html October 5 & 6: Quitilipi, Argentina 8th annual La Feria de Artesanía Aborígen Quitilipi at the Museo Artesanal René James Sotelo, Av. 25 de Mayo 479, featuring 350 to 400 Wichi, Qom, and other Gran Chaco artists | +54 9 0364-455-7123 | fiestasnacionales.org October 5, 2019–March 2020: Flagstaff, AZ The Force Is with Our People at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org

714 NW Davis Portland, Oregon 503.222.1142

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

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 & Sunday, October 12 & 13 | (877) 779-6977 | cherokeeartmarket.com October 11, 2019–April 12, 2020: Washington, DC Picturing the American Buffalo: George Catlin and Modern Native American Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets, NW (202) 633-7970 | americanart.si.edu 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 October 12–TBA: Santa Fe, NM Di Wae Powa: Tewa Pottery at the Poeh Museum and Cultural Center, 78 Cities of Gold Road. In partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. Reception: Monday, October 12, 10:00 am–4:00 pm | (505) 455-3334 | poehcenter.org

(855) NAAA-INC INFO@NAAAINC.COM VISIT WWW.NAAAINC.COM

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FALL 2019 | 93

CALENDAR

KESHi thezuniconnection

October 14: Phoenix, AZ Rise: Indigenous People’s Day Poster Show at Evolve Gallery, 918 N. Second Street, 6:00–9:00 pm | (602) 796-6795 facebook.com/events/2587154151361116 October 19: Martin, SD 6th annual Lakota Film Festival at the Inland Theater, 306 Main Street, 12:30–5:00 pm. Sponsored by CAIRNS | (605) 685-6484 | nativecairns.org October 19, 2019–January 26, 2020: Windsor, ON 60th Anniversary: West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative Cape Dorset/Kinngait WBEC Studios at the Art Gallery of Windsor, 401 Riverside Drive West +1 (519) 977-0013 | agw.ca October 19, 2019–January 26, 2020: Windsor, ON Northern Narratives: Cape Dorset Prints at the Art Gallery of Windsor, 401 Riverside Drive West | +1 (519) 977-0013 | agw.ca October 19, 2019–January 26, 2020: Windsor, ON SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut at the Art Gallery of Windsor, 401 Riverside Drive West | +1 (519) 977-0013 | agw.ca October 20, 2019–January 26, 2020: Sacramento, CA When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street | (916) 808-7000 | crockerart.org October 24, 2019–January 11, 2020: Warm Springs, OR 26th annual Warm Springs Tribal Member Art Exhibit at the Museum at Warm Springs, 2189 US 26 | (541) 553-3331 | museumatwarmsprings.org

since 1981 jewelry fetishes pottery 227 Don Gaspar Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.989.8728 www.keshi.com Hiram Peynetsa, Bear with Cub

Arctic and Indian arts st for the 21 century

26 Maine Street Kennebunkport, Maine 207 967-2122

October 24, 2019–January 20, 2020: Rapid City, SD Song of the Sea: Carvings of the St. Lawrence Island at the Sioux Indian Museum, 222 New York Street | (605) 394-6923 | journeymuseum.org October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020: New York, NY Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street | (212) 570-3600 | whitney.org October 26: Dragoon, AZ Amerind Autumn Fest: Celebrating History, Art, and Culture of Zuni (A:shiwi) at the Amerind Museum, 2100 N. Amerind Road, 10:00 am–4:00 pm (520) 586-3666 | amerind.org October 26: Anadarko, OK Native American Arts & Crafts Fair, hosted by the Caddo County Kids, Kites & Frights, at the American Indian Hall of Fame, 851 E. Central Boulevard, 8:00 am–5:00 pm. Native American exposition dancing from 10:00 am–1:00 pm October 26, 2019–January 23, 2021: Tucson, AZ Pahko’ora/Pahko’ola: Mayo and Yaqui Masks from the James S. Griffith Collection at the Arizona State Museum, 1013 E University Boulevard (520) 621-6302 | statemuseum.arizona.edu November 1: Kansas City, MO Playing with Fire, solo exhibition for Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/Muscogee/ Cherokee), at Travois, 310 W. 19th Terrace, 6:00–8:00 pm (816) 994-8970 | travois.com/news-events/first-Fridays November 1 & 2: Clewiston, FL American Indian Arts Celebration at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum at 30290 Josie Billie Highway, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (877) 902-1113 | ahtahthiki.com November 1–December 13: Las Vegas, NM 2nd annual Native American Art Show at the Ray Drew Gallery, New Mexico Highlands University, Donnelly Library, 900 University Avenue, first floor. Reception: Friday, November 15, 5:00–7:00 pm | (505) 454-3401 galleries.nmhu.edu/ray-drew-gallery

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Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets shop online: www.homeandawaygallery.com

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November 1, 2019–June 21, 2020: New Haven, CT Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street (203) 432-0600 | artgallery.yale.edu November 4, 2019–January 3, 2020: Albuquerque, NM 40th annual Native American Student Art Show: Continuing My Culture at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org

CALENDAR

November 8–23: Santa Fe, NM Native American Nacimientos at Adobe Gallery, 221 Canyon Road (505) 955-0550 | adobegallery.com

November 10: Albuquerque, NM 8th annual Pueblo Fiber Arts Show and Sale at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW, 9:00 am–4:00 pm | (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org

November 9: Fargo, ND Native American Juried Arts & Crafts Festival at the Plains Art Museum, 704 First Avenue North, 11:00 am–4:00 pm | (701) 551-6100 | plainsart.org

November 10, 2019–March 16, 2020: Overland Park, KS Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes at the Johnson County Museum, 8788 Metcalf Avenue. Group exhibition curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) | (913) 826-2787 | jcprd.com

November 9: Santa Barbara, CA Supak’a: Sharing Chumash Culture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State Street, 12 noon–5:00 pm, includes dancing, singing, storytelling, basket weaving demonstrations | (805) 682-4711x170 | sbnature.org

November 10, 2019–October 4, 2020: Santa Fe, NM Laughter and Resilience: Humor in Native American Art at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo, curated by Denise Neil, PhD (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation) | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org

November 9: Oklahoma City, OK Oklahoma Native Women Artists in Conversation at the Oklahoma History Center, 800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive, 1:00–3:00 pm, cohosted by First American Art Magazine | (405) 522-0765 | okhistory.org November 9: Palm Desert, CA Gathering Under the Stars at the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert, 75080 Frank Sinatra Drive, with Native American art, dances, and singing, hosted by the California Indian Nations College | (780) 834-0593 | cincollege.org November 9 & 10: Los Angeles, CA Autry American Indian Arts Marketplace, hosted by the Autry National Center, at the Autry in Griffith Park, 4730 Crystal Springs Drive, with 200 artists (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org

November 10, 2019–TBA: Santa Fe, NM Conversations: Artworks in Dialogue at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo, curated by Zach Miller (Chickasaw) (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org November 16–Fall 2021: New York, NY Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green (212) 514-3700 | nmai.si.edu/visit/newyork November 19–24: Los Angeles, CA 13th annual LA SkinsFest at the TCL Chinese Theater, 6935 Hollywood Boulevard (323) 466-7400 | laskinsfest.com

November 9, 2019–March 16, 2020: Kenosha, WI Oneida Traditions: Voices of the Onʌyoteˀa·ká, with Karen Ann Hoffman and Dawn Dark Mountain (both Oneida Nation), at the Kenosha Public Museum, 5500 First Avenue | (262) 653-4140 | museums.kenosha.org

November 23: Albuquerque, NM 6th annual Pueblo Market at Isleta Resort and Casino, 11000 Broadway SE, 9:00 am–6:00 pm | Ron Martinez Looking Elk (505) 250-5996 | isleta.com

November 9, 2019–November 1, 2020: Toledo, OH Expanded Views: Native American Art in Focus, Part II, at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street | (419) 255-8000 | toledomuseum.org

November 23 & 24: San Antonio, TX 6th annual Yanaguana Indian Arts Market at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, 210 W. Market St | (210) 299-4499 | briscoemuseum.org

ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE FROM COVER TO COVER. What You’ll Learn May Surprise You. • “Cherokee Newspapers, 1828-1906: Tribal Voice of a People in Transition” • “Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees” Volumes 1-7 • “The Development of Law and Legal Institutions Among the Cherokees” • “The Life and Times of Reverend Stephen Foreman” Enjoy these and many other hard-to-find books on Cherokee history and culture.

21192 S. KEELER DRIVE, PARK HILL, OK 74451 888.999.6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG FALL 2019 | 95

CALENDAR

November 29–December 1: Collinsville, IL 15th annual Native American Holiday Market at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 30 Ramey Street. Friday, 12 noon–5:00 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm | (618) 346-5160 | cahokiamounds.org November 30: Rapid City, SD 5th annual Black Hills Winter American Indian Art Market at the Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn, 505 N. 5th Street, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. More than 40 Native artists from the Black Hills and area reservations | (605) 341-3339 November 30, 2019–March 2, 2020: Barrie, ON Bewabon Shilling: Between the Forest and the Sky at the MacLaren Art Centre, 37 Mulcaster Street | +1 (705) 721-9696 | maclarenart.com December 3, 2019–January 11, 2020: Portland, OR Joe Feddersen at the Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street (503) 222-1142 | froelickgallery.com December 5, 2019–February 17, 2020: Barrie, ON (In)tangible Archives: Films by Isuma at the MacLaren Art Centre, 37 Mulcaster Street. Reception: Thursday, December 5, 7:00–9:00 pm +1 (705) 721-9696 | maclarenart.com

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

December 5, 2019–March 8, 2020: Barrie, ON Northern Convergences: Felix Kalmenson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Charles Stankievech at the MacLaren Art Centre, 37 Mulcaster Street | +1 (705) 721-9696 | maclarenart.com December 6–TBA: Phoenix, AZ Maria Hupfield: Nine Years Towards the Sun at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org/exhibits December 7: Washington, DC NMAI Native Art Market at the National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street and Independence Avenue SW, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (202) 633-1000 | americanindian.si.edu/artmarket December 7 & 8: New York, NY NMAI Native Art Market at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center, 1 Bowling Green, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (212) 514-3700 | americanindian.si.edu/artmarket December 7, 2019–February 15, 2020: Brantford, ON From the Hands of Our Ancestors: The Art of Cornhusk at the Woodland Cultural Centre, 184 Mohawk Street | +1 (519) 759-2650 | woodlandculturalcentre.ca December 13, 2019–May 17, 2020: Brookings, SD Articles of a Treaty, group exhibition of 34 Oceti Sakowin artists, at the South Dakota Art Museum, 1036 Medary Avenue | (605) 685-6484 | nativecairns.org December 14: Orono, ME Maine Indian Basketmakers Holiday Market at Hudson Museum, University of Maine, Orono, 2 Flagstaff Road | (207) 581-1865 | umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum December 14 & 15: Phoenix, AZ 43rd annual Pueblo Grande Indian Market at the Pueblo Grande Museum, 4619 E. Washington Street, 9:00 am–4:00 pm | (602) 495-0901 | pueblogrande.org December 14: Santa Fe, NM IAIA Annual Holiday Market at the Balzer Gallery and painting studio, IAIA Campus, 83 Avan Nu Po Road | (505) 424-5704 | iaia.edu December 21, 2019–March 1, 2020: St. Petersburg, FL Spirit Lines: Helen Hardin Etchings at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, 150 Central Avenue | (727) 892-4200 | thejamesmuseum.org December 21, 2019–July 11, 2020: Los Angeles, CA Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Boulevard | (323) 857-6000 | lacma.org Compiled by Travis D. Day and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation).

For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR 96 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

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NOVEMBER 10, 2019 – OCTOBER 4, 2020

Wheelwright Museum Untitled (Santa Fe Coyote), n.d.

Ricardo Caté, Santo Domingo

704 CAMINO LEJO, SANTA FE, NM 87505 (505) 982-4636 • wheelwright.org