First American Art Magazine No. 26, Spring 2020

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

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

NO. 26, SPRING 2020

DISPLAY UNTIL JULY 6, 2020

INDIGENOUS THEATER, 1960S & ’70S

THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

RYAN! FEDDERSEN

DIXZA RUGS & ORGANIC FARM

TOMMY JOSEPH

HISTORICAL PARFLECHES

LUANNE REDEYE

THE CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ART BIENNIAL KAHWATSIRETÁTIE : TEIONKWARIWAIENNA TEKARIWAIENNAWAHKÒNTIE HONOURING KINSHIP APRIL 23 - JUNE 21, 2020

Image: Jon Corbett, Four Generations (detail), 2015

CURATED BY DAVID GARNEAU WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF RUDI AKER AND FAYE MULLEN

LA MAISON DES RÉGIONS LA GUILDE PIERRE-FRANÇOIS OUELLETTE ART CONTEMPORAIN ART MÛR STEWART HALL ART GALLERY MCCORD MUSEUM TIOHTIÀ:KE (MONTREAL) WWW.BACA.CA

NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN ART MARKET Best of Show Art Preview & Reception September 25, 2020 7:00pm to 8:30pm Old Courthouse Museum Sioux Falls, SD

Art Market September 26, 2020 10:00am to 6:00pm September 27, 2020 10:00am to 4:00pm Convention Center Sioux Falls, SD

Artwork by Terrance Guardipee - “Blackfeet Holy Couple”

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1 5 TH A N N U A L

CHEROKEE

ART MARKET OCTOBER

1 0 & 1 1 , 2020

“The Passing of a Generation” by Troy Jackson

Sequoyah Convention Center at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa cherokeeartmarket.com | 877.779.6977

ᎤᎦᏙᎲᏒ ᎠᏣᎳᎩ

EXPERIENCE CHEROKEE

21192 S. KEELER DRIVE, PARK HILL, OK 74451 888.999.6007 • CHEROKEEHERITAGE.ORG

ON VIEW THROUGH OCTOBER 2020

Wheelwright Museum 704 CAMINO LEJO, SANTA FE, NM 87505 (505) 982-4636 • wheelwright.org

Tom Farris (Otoe-Missouria/Cherokee) My War Pony, 2017

issue no. 26, spring 2020

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Making Masks, Spinning Webs, and 49 Rhythms: The Native Theater Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States

By Candice Byrd (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nation)

20

Dixza Rugs and Organic Farm: A Benizaa Family Strikes a Balance

By Rosa Cays (Chicana)

26

Parfleches: How Native Women Pushed the Envelope of Abstraction

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

34

Recent Developments 13

By Mariah L. Ashbacher and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Seven Directions 16 Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Spotlight: Scenes of Kiowa Life

By Mariah L. Ashbacher 50

58

ARTIST PROFILES Thiago Cóstackz: 50 Mestizo/Potiguara Interdisciplinary Artist

By Vivian Zavataro 58

Tommy Joseph: Tlingit Armor-Maker and Woodcarver

By Christopher W. Smith

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64

REVIEWS 80

Book Review 91

Ron Senungetuk (Iñupiaq)

By Tammi J. Hanawalt, PhD

78

Knokovtee Scott (Cherokee Nation/Muscogee)

By Candice Byrd (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nation)

79

cover RYAN! Feddersen (Okanogan/Arrow Lakes), Coyote Now: Bones, 2016, ink on board, cast crayon, 6 × 6 ¼ × ½ in., edition of 16. Photo: Jose Angel. Image courtesy of the artist.

Luanne Redeye: 70 Seneca Beadwork Artist, Painter, and Printmaker

By Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Exhibition Reviews

Art+Literature 93 Vera Marlene Starbard: Tlingit/Dena'ina Author, Editor, and Playwright

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

IN MEMORIAM

This Is Ours, Not Yours: 40 Breakthroughs in Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights in Latin America

By Heidi McKinnon

RYAN! Feddersen: Okanogan/Arrow Lakes Installation Artist

By Jean Merz-Edwards

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"Presented as a set of eight crayons cast as colorful, yet realistic, replicas of Coyote bones, the piece combines the recognizable tools of creativity with Plateau lore. The only way to truly tell if Coyote’s adventure is at its end is by his death, and conversely, each new saga begins with his resurrection. Sweat lodge gave his cousin, the Fox, the ability to revive Coyote if even a shred of bone or fur remained.

"These cast crayon bones, symbolically become these remains, offering the opportunity to bring Coyote back to life.

This reference to the vehicle of Coyote’s immortality serves as a reminder that we can make the choice to continue the authorship of cultural practice, to be active in creating and reinforcing cultural identity while embracing Indigenous methodologies. Essentially, through our creative labors, we wield the power to bring Coyote back to life."

—RYAN! Feddersen

SPRING 2020 | 9

Coe Center Connection and learning through Indigenous arts

issue no. 26, spring 2020 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: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Mariah L. Ashbacher, Staci Golar, and Jo Ann Reece Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Social Media: Mariah L. Ashbacher, Staci Golar, 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 (Ottawa/Ojibwe/Pottawatomi) Northwest: Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni) and RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Editorial Advisory Board

First Friday 1-4 pm • Free!

open monthly each first Friday or give us a call to plan a visit!

heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw) Jonathan Batkin, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian James T. Bialac, JD Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo) 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 Representatives

East: Heather Cox (Odawa/Ojibwe), heather@firstamericanartmagazine.com West & International: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com International distribution is by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services.

Save the dates April 18

Creating Side-by-Side Public Program with artist Adrian Wall (Jemez Pueblo)

May 8

(I’m Nostalgic for) Memories I’ve Never Lived Before The Coe Center Hands-On student curatorial exhibition opening

Lorna Hill (Cayuga Nation ), Bird Whimsy, n.d.

1590B Pacheco Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505 coeartscenter.org / (505) 983-6372 10 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

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REBECCA BELMORE FACING THE MONUMENTAL On view February 21–May 31, 2020 Image: Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2008, courtesy of the artist © Rebecca Belmore

fac.coloradocollege.edu 30 W. Dale St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903

KAY WALKINGSTICK

Kay WalkingStick, Nez Perce Crossing, 2008, oil on panel, 40˝x 80˝

APRIL 15 – MAY 30, 2020 | Exhibit Reception, Thursday, May 7, 5–8pm Conversation, Saturday, May 9, 11am Kay WalkingStick and Portland Art Museum curator Kathleen Ash-Milby | portlandartmuseum.org/event/conversation-kay-walkingstick

FROELICK GALLERY 714 NW Davis, Portland, OR 503.222.1142

EDITOR'S GREETING

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S I WRITE THESE WORDS, we are still living in the early stages of COVID-19 hitting the Americas.

Situations are rapidly changing and doubtless will be dramatically transformed by the time you read this.

Already heartbreaking firsthand accounts of healthcare workers in overwhelmed hospitals are pouring in from New York, Seattle, and New Orleans.

During the Heard Fair, I hadn’t yet read much about COVID-19. As soon as I got home, I began reading up on the virus including Tomas Pueyo’s excellent article, “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now” in Medium that explicitly spelled out the gravity of the impending disaster. After 9/11, where I felt safe being in Norman, Oklahoma, I read about the 1919 Red Scare, when violence between factions of veterans and labor activists erupted into riots and even bombings. We survived that, we can survive this, I thought at the time. By that logic, I began to watch documentaries about the 1918 influenza epidemic. Yes, as a species we did survive that pandemic but the suffering during the outbreak was incomprehensible. In two years it had killed at least 50 million people1 or almost 3 percent of the entire world’s population. Those lost include painter Crescencio Martinez (San Ildefonso, 1879–1918) and illustrator and arts educator Angel De Cora (Winnebago, 1871–1919). The outcomes were made so much worse by the tragedy of World War I and the suppression of factual accounts of the disease in the media—except in Spain, where newspapers published the truth.

Medical researchers reassure us that our current pandemic will not reach the scale of the 1918 pandemic. We can build upon our historical knowledge, we have a better understanding of vaccines, and we have better communication. Still, contemplating the impending exponential rise of infection rates calls to mind the fear that our ancestors must have felt as wave after wave of diseases introduced from other continents swept across Indigenous communities with no explanation. After all the diseases moved farther and faster than the foreigners themselves did. Those poignant illustrations of smallpox victims from Mesoamerican codices and Plains winter counts take on a new relevance. Like all other Indigenous Americans, I am a descendant of the mere 10 percent of Native peoples who survived those waves of disease.

This sense of dread is juxtaposed with my lived reality. I try to be grateful without succumbing to an “I’ve got mine” attitude, since we are all very much in this together. Every day I am able to take my dogs out for walks in deserted parks around Norman.

Turtles bask on logs in the sun. Songbirds sing, as flocks of geese and ducks honk and quack. Waves of blue and purple emerge in fields as early spring wildflowers bloom—henbit, bluet, speedwell, storksbill, and wild violets—just as the redbuds brighten the unfolding leaf canopies above. It is a glorious spring.

I am grateful for online connections with friends and family. For memes and gallows humor to give us strength. For people creating innovative solutions to our isolation. A brilliant

above America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, 2003, egg tempera on true gesso panel, 8 × 61/2 in., private collection.

Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte (Omaha/Ponca/Iowa, 1865–1915) was the first Native American woman and third Native American to become a Western physician. She fought for public healthcare reform and fought against allotment.

example of this creative problem solving is the Social Distance Powwow, cofounded by Dan Simonds (Mashantucket Pequot), Whitney Recountre (Cow Creek Dakota), and Stephanie Hebert (Mi’kmaq). Dancers and singers share videos, vendors set up virtual booths, and friends and strangers chat and share jokes.

First American Art Magazine is sharing our second-rarest issue, No. 20 (Fall 2018) for free at our virtual booth.

Despite these innovations, the economic impact on the art world will be real and crushing. Waves of markets and exhibitions have been canceled. Art museums, galleries, and community centers all have to close for an unknown length of time, and art institutions are already laying off workers. Since we depend on advertising, primarily for events, I am not entirely sure how FAAM will navigate the upcoming months. We’ll certainly tighten our belts so we can continue.

The first step is: We have to survive this pandemic. Take care of yourself, because you are an integral member of our Native art community. We look forward to rebuilding together once we reach the other side.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 Virus),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 20, 2019, web.

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS TRIBES The PUEBLO OF TESUQUE in New Mexico has opened the first-ever film studio owned by a Native American tribe.

The Pueblo of Tesuque Development Corporation is investing $50 million in a repurposed 75,000-square-foot facility, formerly their casino, to establish Camel Rock Studios. Tesuque is already familiar with movies using their land as location shoots, with over 20 feature films shot there over the years. Universal Studios is already using the studio to shoot the Tom Hanks film News of the World.

The CHICKASAW NATION Arts and Humanities Division announced two new appointments. Marcus Milligan (Chickasaw) will now serve as the executive officer of the Chickasaw Cultural Center. Milligan previously served as the director of the Chickasaw Nation Department of Visual Arts, Media and Design. James Wallace (Choctaw), formerly the visual arts, media, and design manager, has been hired to replace Milligan. The Chickasaw Nation Department of Visual Arts, Media and Design hosts the Artesian Arts Festival in Sulphur, the Southeastern Art Show and Market in Tishomingo, and the Holiday Art Market in Ada every year.

New York art dealer Donald Ellis pledged $1.5 million toward the VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’s new building campaign. Ellis also donated five works by Charles Edenshaw (Haida, ca. 1839–1920). The gift, consisting of two bracelets (one gold, one silver), and three silver spoons, is important for the gallery. Charles Edenshaw is arguably considered one of the most important Northwest Coast artists of the 19th century.

The NATIONAL COWBOY AND WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM in Oklahoma City received a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, in support of its upcoming exhibition, Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World, and the accompanying publication, Recovering Ancient Spiro: Native American Art, Ritual, and Cosmic Renewal. Eric Singleton, PhD, curator of

ethnology for the museum, is curating the exhibition.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded $100,000 to the MISSOULA ART MUSEUM in Montana. The museum will use the funds in support of continued programming with contemporary Native artists in conjunction with their Lynda M. Frost Contemporary American Indian Art Gallery.

ART MARKETS Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/ShoshoneBannock) won Best of Show at the 62nd annual HEARD MUSEUM GUILD INDIAN FAIR & MARKET in Phoenix, Arizona. Classification winners were Denise Wallace (Unangax), jewelry and lapidary; Russell Sanchez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), pottery; Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota), paintings, drawings, graphics, and photography; Alexander Youvella Sr. (Hopi), Pueblo carving; Cliff Fragua

MUSEUMS The ABBE MUSEUM in Bar Harbor, Maine, hired Christopher Newell (Passamaquoddy) as the new executive director and senior partner with Wabanaki nations. Previously Newell served as education supervisor for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. He cofounded the Akomawt Educational Initiative to provide Native history lessons to public schools. Newell also has appeared in feature films and was senior advisor on the documentar y Dawnland, which received an Emmy in 2019 for outstanding research. The film chronicles the historic Maine-Wabanaki State Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined decades of mistreatment of Maine Indians by child welfare agencies in Maine.

above Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock) with her Best of Show–winning cradleboard, Common Ground: Culture Isn’t Black and White, at the 2020 Heard Museum Guide Fair & Market, Phoenix, Arizona. Photo: A. Meredith.

SPRING 2020 | 13

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

(Jemez), sculpture; Venancio Aragon (Diné), weavings and textiles; Jamie Okuma, diverse art forms; August Wood (Salt River Pima), basketry; Catherine Black Horse (Seminole), personal attire; and Jason K. Brown (Penobscot), open standards. Junior award winners were Mosgaadace Casuse (Navajo/Ojibwe), ages 12–14, and Ben Haskie (Navajo), ages 15–17. Benson Manygoats (Navajo) won the Conrad House Innovation Award, and Angela Babby won the Idyllwild Arts Imagination Award.

AWARDS & HONORS The ONTARIO ARTS FOUNDATION awarded Shelley Niro (Mohawk) its $30,000 PAUL DE HUECK AND NORMAN WALFORD CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD for her groundbreaking photography. The Robert Langen Art Gallery in Waterloo is currently showing her most recent body of work, Something Cold and Hard like Winter, and hosted the official award ceremony in March.

Carmen Vázquez (Tzotzil Maya) won the NATIONAL PRIZE IN ARTS AND LITERATURE, Mexico’s highest cultural award, presented to recognize those who have contributed to Mexico’s cultural heritage. Vázquez, from Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas, was awarded for her work in preserving and promoting customary textile designs and techniques in the folk art category.

Though handweaving garments of the region is a practice in danger of disappearing, Vázquez continues to weave linens, blouses, rebozos (a long scarf), and men’s shirts and pants in the ancestral way she learned from age ten. Her designs feature intricate embroidery depicting the cosmology of the Tzotzil people. She has taught weaving to the younger generations in Venustiano Carranza since 2006. She is also one of the founders and the current president of the Cooperativa Jolobiletik Jun Ya’el, which makes and sells the work of ten women in the community.

The AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS bestowed its 2020 GWENDOLYN KNIGHT

I D Y L L W I L D

A R T S

LAWRENCE AWARD IN ART upon Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax).

This honor comes with a $10,000 grant, which is scheduled to be presented in New York in May at the academy’s annual ceremony. The award winners were chosen from a group of 28 artists who participated in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. Galanin’s sculpture, We Dreamt Deaf (2015), is featured.

REED COLLEGE located in Olympia, Washington, named Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) as its 29th annual BONNIE BRONSON FELLOW. Based in Chiloquin, Oregon, Ball earned her MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018. Each year a fellowship is awarded to a working Northwest artist in recognition of artistic excellence and to encourage intellectual and creative growth.

ARTTABLE bestowed one of four ARTS LEADERSHIP AWARDS upon Jami Powell, PhD (Osage), associate curator for Native American art at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New

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 Performances / Workshops idyllwildarts.org/nativearts

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

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Hampshire. ArtTable is a professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts. The first associate curator of Native American art at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum, Powell was hired in 2018. Powell earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

NATIVE WOMEN IN THE ARTS presented Joe Wood (Cree) with its BARBARA LARONDE AWARD in January 2020. Wood, a member of the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation, is also a member of the Art Fix collective of the Nipissing region of Ontario. She describes herself as a self-taught artist who uses her art practice as a way to release anger, probe the unknown, and to express experience as a two-spirit person. In recognition of the fifth year anniversary of this award, Native Women in Arts also featured a retrospective exhibition featuring the art of all five past award winners.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES KOMKOM, the Maya settlement in Belize, was looted; however, the 30-foot deep trench dug by the vandals narrowly missed an 8th-century royal burial chamber. Archaeologists of the University of Texas, San Antonio, have excavated more of the site. Insights into Komkom’s history comes from a ceramic vessel from circa 800 CE belonging to its ruler. Baylor University researchers pieced together the vase’s broken fragments to reveal 202 hieroglyphics.

Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the US Justice Department’s Criminal Division and US Attorney Michael Bailey of the District of Arizona announced recently that three defendants, accused of violating the INDIAN ARTS AND CRAFTS ACT by misrepresenting Native American jewelry imported from the Philippines, have pleaded guilty. Laura Marye Wesley, also known as Laura Lott, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit misrepresentation of American

Indian–produced goods, wire fraud, mail fraud, and entry of goods by means of false statements and smuggling goods, for her role in the manufacture, importation, and sale of knockoff jewelry as Native American made. Christian Coxon and Waleed Sarrar, also known as Willie Sarrar, were accused of similar charges in addition to selling the goods in their respective shops, the Turquoise River Trading Company in San Antonio, Texas, and Scottsdale Jewels in Scottsdale, Arizona. All three defendants face a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.

According to the indictment, Wesley and her father, 70-year-old Richard Dennis Nisbet, were the ringleaders of a seven-person operation. Nisbet died on December 24, 2019, in Arizona, however, and the three remaining defendants live overseas. They have been identified as Mency Remedio, a factory manager, and two jewelers, Orlando (also known as Erlando and Lando) Abellanosa and Ariel Adlawan Canedo. Their cases remain open.

SPRING 2020 | 15

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

STACY PRATT, PHD

Mvskoke Author, Singer, and Musician Shares Her Top Seven List

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STAFF WRITER AND ASSOCIATE EDITOR for an international women’s music nonprofit and an art writer specializing in Indigenous art and literature, Stacy Pratt (Mvskoke) wrote for the Altars of Reconciliation exhibition that features work by Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox/Mvskoke/Seminole), Bobby Martin (Mvskoke) and Erin Shaw (Chickasaw/Choctaw). Her reviews, essays, and poems have appeared in publications including Collateral Journal, Anomaly, and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and her poetry will be included in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (forthcoming September 2020, W. W. Norton), edited by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Cherokee), LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), and Jennifer Foerster (Mvskoke). The daughter of Mvskoke painter/designer Phyllis Fife, EdD, Pratt will write for an exhibition on the art and fashion design of the Fife women that will open at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Arts in 2022.

Pratt is the lyricist and singer for the heavy metal band Reliquario, and she also writes and performs as a solo singer/ guitarist. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

above, right, top Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke). Photo: Courtney Dudley (Cherokee Nation).

NORTH: SARAH WHALEN-LUNN

above, left Sarah Whalen-Lunn.

I have learned so much by following the work of Sarah Whalen-Lunn, an Inuk artist who lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Primarily known as a tattoo artist specializing in the Inuit ink–stitching technique, she is also a watercolorist and

above, right, bottom Sarah Whalen-Lunn (Iñupiaq), Return My Soul to the Land and Water, digital art. Image courtesy of the artist.

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an inspired printmaker. Sarah’s young daughters, Sandia, Denali, and Elsie, have begun printmaking as well, with powerful results. “My work stems from trying to facilitate conversation on the social issues facing us as a community," says Sarah. I’m a huge fan of Sarah’s work, and I hope to see it in real life someday.

Instagram: @inkstitcher

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

SOUTH: ADDIE ROANHORSE The Momentary is an art and performance space in Bentonville, Arkansas. Opened on February 22, 2020, the Momentary is affiliated with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. My high school classmate, Addie Roanhorse (Osage), daughter of artist Gina Gray, created Osage design elements that are worked into the architecture and glasswork of the building. I love that her design is part of their permanent structure. Roanhorse, a painter and graphic artist, also owns Big Rain Gallery in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. addieroanhorse.com EAST: MELINDA SCHWAKHOFER Last summer I presented with the artists of the Altars of Reconciliation exhibition at the conference, Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. Beyond the Spectacle, which will have its final conference this summer in Paris, is a scholarly project exploring the presence of Native North American people in Great Britain, both historically and in the current day.

There I met Mvskoke textile artist Melinda Schwakhofer who has resided in England for many years.

Getting to know her and her work has been electrifying. She’s working on a very intricate quilt, Road to Oklahoma, about Indian Removal and its generational results, and I’m following its progress with great enthusiasm. melindaschwakhofer.com WEST: SANTEE FRAZIER When I taught in northern New York several years ago, the poet Santee Frazier (Cherokee Nation), who was then at Syracuse University, came to our college for a reading. We didn’t know each other well, but I was assigned to take him to lunch in the cafeteria. That morning, a student had brought me a plate of deer meat and rice. Santee is a gourmet cook,

but I asked if he’d rather eat that, and he said yes. So we sat in my office and ate microwaved venison and talked about Cherokee County. Now he is the director of the IAIA “Low Rez” Creative Writing MFA program that produces so many great writers. What a cool choice.

Instagram: @santeefrazier

above, top Addie Roanhorse (Osage), Sky People, 2019, mixed media, 12 × 12 in. Image courtesy of the artist. a b ov e , b o t t o m Melinda Schwakhofer (Mvskoke), detail of Road to Oklahoma, 2020, quilt, photographic transfers on cloth. Image courtesy of the artist.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

CENTER: JOY HARJO The day Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Cherokee) was named poet laureate of the United States, the Tulsa Artists Fellowship held a reception. I was so excited that I raced over there straight from work. When I walked over to her, the first thing she said was, “This is for all of us.” She has been and is so good to other writers, including this one. Her 1989 book, Secrets from the Center of the World, changed the way I write and the way I see. joyharjo.com

right Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/ Cherokee), US Poet Laureate.

Photo: Shawn Miller, Library of Congress. opposite, left Cliff Fragua (Jemez), Spiritual Passage, marble, calcite, slate, magnesite, apple coral, granite, 28 × 10 × 8 in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, right Alien Weaponry, Left to right: Ethan Trembath, Lewis De Jong, and Henry de John (all Māori). Image courtesy of Napalm Records.

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4 pg FAAM .pdf

2/19/20

11:56 AM

KESHi

ABOVE: CLIFF FRAGUA The first time I went to the Santa Fe Indian Market, I had hugely overscheduled myself as a freelance writer. I had to run all over that swirling, crowded town, fighting wicked altitude sickness, interviewing people, photographing things, and trying to be professional. When I stepped into Jemez Pueblo sculptor Cliff Fragua’s booth, a sudden stillness descended upon me and I could breathe. I’ve had that same experience every time I’ve encountered his work since. singingstonestudio.com

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227 Don Gaspar Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.989.8728 www.keshi.com

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BELOW: ALIEN WEAPONRY Alien Weaponry is a very young, thrash-influenced Māori metal band from Waipu, New Zealand. They often compose songs in the Māori language about their history and culture. Musically, I wish they would stay in the well-worn grooves of classic thrash metal, for I am of that age, but they insist on being innovative and interesting instead. Whatever, guys.

Go listen to them. Loudly. (Thrash ’til death!) alienweaponry.com

CMY

K

since 1981 jewelry fetishes pottery

Bart Gasper Jr. Rainbow Maiden, detail

SPRING 2020 | 19

MAKING MASKS, SPINNING WEBS & 49 RHYTHMS The Native Theater Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States

By Candice Byrd (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nation)

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O BE AN INDIGENOUS CREATIVE working in theater during the 1960s and 1970s was to grapple with many issues. The Native Theater movement and the Red Power movement followed fast on the heels of the Native American Literature movement. All around the United States, Indigenous communities were dealing with the aftermath of federal relocation policies of the mid-20th century.

Relocated Natives joined displaced Native peoples from different tribes in relocation cities, urban centers where intertribal communities converged.

By borrowing and adapting Western, non-Western, and North American Indigenous forms of theatrical performance, the Native American Theater movement gained a voice in urban centers, in Europe, and in rural Indigenous communities. The recurring message of Indigenous voices in theatrical performance to their non-Indigenous audiences was unanimous: We are still here. Native theater artists of this era explored experimental performance techniques to reestablish a truly unique Indigenous performance style.

For the Indigenous communities, Native American Theater of the time presented two themes with sometimes co-occurring messages. Sometimes theater celebrated

and reaffirmed Indigenous identity: “Remember who your people/community are and who you are.” Other times, there was condemnation: “See how your actions or inactions are harming your relations and yourself.”

SCHOOL OF THOUGHT Not a “new,” but, more accurately, a “now” response.

—Rolland Meinholtz1

above Rolland Meinholtz, director of performing arts, Institute of American Indian Arts, ca. 1966.

Photo: Leo Downwind (Ojibwe, 1945–2008). Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico, RG03, Box 12, F1, I1. opposite Unknown performance at the Institute of American Indian Arts, ca. 1965. Photo: Kay V. Weist. Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico, RG03, Box 18, F32, I24.

IN 1965 ROLLAND MEINHOLTZ worked closely alongside Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002) and Juilliard School alumna, dancer, and choreographer Rosalie Jones (Little Shell Chippewa) to establish the performing arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. Lloyd Kiva New hired Meinholtz , a recently graduated dramatist, to be a drama instructor at IAIA. Meinholtz brought with him the naturalist performance technique of Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian director and actor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the minimal scenery influences of Jacque Copeau, the French theater director, actor, and critic who founded the Théâtre du VieuxColombier in 1913. Meinholtz wrote, “I was most interested in early theatre that did not use the proscenium stage,”2 the

1. Rolland Meinholtz, “Coyote Transforming: Visions of Native American Theatre,” in Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History, ed. Birgit Däwes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 77.

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classical, arched stage raised and separated from the audience. The early days of IAIA’s Performing Arts Program played out on a small thrust stage, in which the stage extends out into the audience and is surrounded by seats on three sides.

Between 1964 and 1970, Meinholtz and his students collaborated on Diné Bahane', a theatrical adaptation of the Navajo creation story; Black Butterflies by Meinholtz and students; and Moqwina/ Macbeth, an adapted Tsimshian saga using poetic verse. Students also wrote original works—for example, Mowitch by Monica Charles (Lower Elwha Klallam), about the Indian Shaker Church. New and Meinholtz envisioned creating a recognizably distinctive form of Native Theater, “as recognizable in its way as Japanese Kabuki theatre, Indian Kathakali dance, or Italian Opera.”3 Meinholtz trained his students in the classical Western forms of theater with works by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov. His student ensemble works incorporated masking practices from the Pacific Northwest and were influenced by cultural practices of the surrounding Pueblos. Meinholtz took his students on field trips to Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins National Monument for inspiration, as he sensed that relation to the environment would serve as a guiding principle in Native performance.

By incorporating the elements of modern dance, poetic verse, and masking work, and by cocreating pieces with students, IAIA’s performing arts program flourished. “Rolland Meinholtz was a good example of an ally because he stood back and allowed them to generate theater,” William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine) says.4 While exploring and experimenting, the IAIA ensemble found certain things worked for them while others did not. The students were invited to the Scottsdale Arts Festival in Arizona where they performed their adaptation of Moqwina/Macbeth using replicas of sacred masks. “Performance helped us realize that a copy of a traditional mask was not wise,” wrote Meinholtz. He felt

the theatrical masks should be reimagined as a new “interpretation of the mask’s spirit for people living in the present.”

Furthermore, the Tsimshian legend Chief Moqwina’s ending (who, in the original story, is not tragically killed but exiled) was mistakenly exchanged for the infamous Shakespearean ending. Meinholtz continued, “After a series of performances of this work, we knew our ending was wrong. We knew we had to find another way of creating theater.”5 In the summer of 1968, Yanowis, another play by IAIA student Monica Charles, was performed in Port Angeles, Washington, the playwright’s home community. Once again, mask work was used; however, this time the mask depicted the living protagonist—the playwright’s own uncle who happened to be in the audience. This mask had been carved by a student sculptor while he listened to Charles’s stories of her uncle. The audience’s reception was “electric” and “elated” according to Meinholtz.

Through ensemble work and experimentation of various performance techniques, a school of Indigenous performance theory and application began to

emerge. One of the most pervasive principles was the use of dance and movement.

“Every event in Indian theatre, whether called a ‘dance’ or a ‘play,’ would be permeated with dance,” Meinholtz recounted.6 The centrality of dance included repetitive movement, the importance of floor patterns, and relation to the earth as a source of power. Masking was also central to this approach, as Meinholtz wrote: “Our theatre would use masks to represent unusual or mystical characters; persons who have genuine spiritual power. The mask is one of the chief opportunities for literal and physical transformation in our theatre.” In terms of spacing and scenery, his theory also called for “non-naturalistic and non-scenic. Principle scenic elements used are costumes and properties.” In narrative structure, Meinholtz’s performance theory also sought to differentiate itself from Western forms in that “the arc of a dramatic climax in our theatre is flatter and is of longer duration than in Western theatre.”7 When the Occupation of Alcatraz began on November 20, 1969, Native Americans created a different type of public demonstration. The Red Power

2. Priscilla Page, “Imagining a Contemporary Native Theater: An Interview with Rolland Meinholtz,” in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses, ed. Joy Harjo with Priscilla Page (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019), 73.

3. Meinholtz, “Coyote Transforming,” 78–79.

4. All quotes from William Yellow Robe Jr., unless otherwise cited, from discussion with author, January 2020.

5. Meinholtz, “Coyote Transforming,” 80, 91.

6. Meinholtz, “Coyote Transforming,” 89.

7. Meinholtz, “Coyote Transforming,” 89.

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movement gained momentum amid demonstrations against the Vietnam War. According to writer and activist Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/ Muscogee), the political demonstrations were theatrical and dramatic.

Experimental theater groups and ensembles also participated in political demonstrations. These happenings were designed to catch attention and they succeeded. The Alcatraz Occupation grabbed national media coverage and the attention of the White House. Nineteen months later, the occupation ended. “The protests just grabbed the forefront, and whatever we had done did not seem to have ways of dealing with those situations,” Meinholtz recounted with regret.8

ALONG CAME A SPIDER ab ove, top A n u n k n ow n performance at the Institute of American Indian Arts, ca.

1968. Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, Mexico, RG03, Box 18, F32, I89. above, bottom Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/ Muscogee) performing as Gertrude in Hamlet. Image courtesy of Suzan Shown Harjo. opposite Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/ Muscogee), left, and Muriel Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock), right. Image courtesy of Suzan Shown Harjo.

You can’t do theater without it being a social experience. —Suzan Shown Harjo (Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee)9 NATIVE POLITICAL DEMONSTRATIONS swept through relocation cities such as Minneapolis, St. Paul, Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and New York. “We were looking at a really repressive government under President Nixon,” Harjo recalled. “All of that put historical

pieces in a new light. You could do a very militaristic version of Hamlet … and it made a lot of sense in that time of very tense warfare.…” Harjo played Gertrude, the mother and queen of Denmark, in Hamlet.

During those times, Harjo also coproduced a program on WBAI-FM Radio in New York City, Seeing Red, which focused on Native cultures, histories, and current issues facing Indian Country. The program reached thousands of listeners and was picked up by other stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and by Canadian networks as well. As director of drama and literature at the station, Harjo produced and performed in many plays during her tenure.

“There really wasn’t Native theater being developed except by just a very few of us until the Native American Theatre Ensemble came along in the early ’70s,” recalls Harjo. “They really were trying to do organic, alternative theater that drew out of their movement, group movement classes, improv classes, and exercises.…

They were trying to produce something that was uniquely Native.”

Harjo recalled Joseph Chaiken, director of the Open Theater in New York, as a friend and mentor who taught her how to use “public spaces and public forums for the common good.” She continued, “Muriel Miguel had come from Joe Chaiken’s work. They were the ones who workshopped what would become the musical Hair. All of that was called ‘experimental’ theatre.”

Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock) wanted to create theater with fellow Native women, so she approached Harjo with the idea to create Spiderwoman Theater. “We began working together and doing set improv pieces,” recounted Harjo. But that version of Spiderwoman Theater was not to be. Fearing for her family’s safety after escaping carbon monoxide poisoning, a knife attack in the subway, and a car wreck involving her husband and young son, Harjo accepted a position in Washington, DC. These events would alter the course of her career and shape US federal Indian policies for decades to come. Indigenous theater continued to develop in New York.

8. Page, “Imagining a Contemporary Native Theater,” 82.

9. All quotes by Suzan Shown Harjo from discussion with author, January 2020.

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GIFT OF THE SPIDERWOMAN You didn’t need a writer. It was stories from the group.

—Muriel Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock)10 “I WAS HEARTBROKEN,” says Miguel about Harjo leaving New York. 11 In 1975 Miguel cofounded Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo (both of Guna descent and Rappahannock) and became its artistic director. Spiderwoman is the longest-running Indigenous feminist theater company in North America. Mayo was an opera-trained mezzo-soprano as well as a student of both Uta Hagen, the German-American actress who taught her the Stanislavski method at HB Studio, and Charles Nelson Reilly, a comic actor, voice actor, and director who also taught at HB Studio. Gloria Miguel was a theater student of Bill Irwin, an actor, comedian, and clown.

A close friend of Muriel Miguel’s, Josephine Mofsie (Hopi/Winnebago, 1934–75), would occasionally perform with them. During one enactment with Miguel, Mofsie began telling the Hopi creation story of Spiderwoman as she was finger weaving. But before the new company premiered, Mofsie was tragically killed in a car wreck. “The company took the name Spiderwoman to honor her work and her memory,” wrote Ann Haugo, the interim director of the Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance.

“The name also defined and described their process.”12 Crafting the narrative from their own experiences, their first play, Women in Violence (1976), shed light on domestic violence and sexual assault within their communities and even within the Red Power movement itself.

Using various forms of dance, repetition of dialogue, and nonlinear narrative

combining past, present, and future—a means to represent the synthesis of generations of experiences—Spiderwoman Theater found a way to tell stories through performance that combined their formal training and Indigenous worldviews.

“Their stories intersected with ours: ours, with each other’s, and the threads that bound individual to community manifested themselves within the theatrical event,” wrote University of Toronto theater professor Jill Carter (Anishinaabe).13 This method came to be called stor yweaving. The Spider woman

ensemble performed locally and overseas in Europe. Muriel Miguel remembered how Spiderwoman polarized the audience of a theater conference in Baltimore and said, “You either loved us or you hated us.”14 After a performance in Toronto, three young Ojibwe girls and their mother introduced themselves to the performers.

“This is the first time they ever saw anyone of their color on stage and that they could relate to,” said Miguel.15 Today, Spiderwoman Theater remains active, having just finished a Canadian tour of their play Material Witness, which draws from Women in Violence.

10. David Bunn Martine, “Lisa Mayo, Muriel Miguel, Gloria Miguel, and the Spiderwoman Theater Ensemble,” in No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement, ed. Jennifer Tromski (New York: Amerinda, Inc., 2017), 173.

11. Suzan Shown Harjo, Muriel Miguel, and Soni Moreno, moderated by Betsy Theobald Richards, “The Rise of Native Theater in New York City in the 1960’s and 70’s,” Public Lab Speaker Series, Public Theatre, New York, March 10, 2009, web.

12. Ann Haugo, “Native American Drama: A Historical Survey,” in Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History, ed. Birgit Däwes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 47.

13. Jill L. Carter, “Repairing the Web: Spiderwoman’s Children Staging the New Human Being,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010), 13–14.

14. Martine, “Lisa Mayo, Muriel Miguel, Gloria Miguel, and the Spiderwoman Theater Ensemble,” 183.

15. Ibid.

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COYOTE GOES TO A 49 The most important function of the Indian dramatist is to communicate with his own people.

—Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware)16

above, top Performance of Foghorn in Berlin, Germany, 1 973 . D i re c te d by H a n ay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware).

Photo: Frank Roland Beeneken, Berlin. Image courtesy of La MaMa Archive, New York, OBJ.1974.0318.

Above, bottom William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine). Image courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. opposite Poster for Coon Cons Coyote (1973), an Indian "X-rated" comedy, directed by Hanay Geiogamah ( K i owa / D e l awa re) , i m a g e from the Library of Congress #2015648278.

IN 1971 OKLAHOMA PLAYWRIGHT Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware) founded the American Indian Theatre Ensemble. The 16 original members included alumni of IAIA’s Performing Arts Program. By 1973 the group changed its name to the Native American Theatre Ensemble (NATE). Muriel Miguel performed with them for a year before going on to establish Spiderwoman Theater. Ellen Stewart, the late founder and director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre company in New York, sponsored NATE. Stewart, an African-American fashion designer, created La MaMa as a space for all kinds of theater integrated with dance and music. For seven months, members of NATE studied the

experimental acting techniques taught at La MaMa and launched an original production in October 1972. The fledgling theater troupe listed their goals as a group: “1) producing and presenting plays ‘about Indians’ and reaching, with these plays, ‘every one of the 850,000 Native Americans, from reservations to urban ghettos’; 2) contributing, with this work, to the ‘over-all effort to achieve freedom, equality of life and true self-determination for American Indians’; and 3) combating, eliminating and replacing (‘as quickly as possible’) the ‘negative and defeating imagery which the media employs to portray Indian people’.” 17 The stereotype-challenging and politically charged works of Hanay Geiogamah and NATE enjoyed a successful European tour and two seasons in New York. In 1974 the company relocated to Oklahoma City. By then the ensemble had created a body of work spanning several genres. Robert Shorty (Diné) wrote Na Haaz Zan (1972), inspired by the Diné creation story.

Geiogamah finished four plays including Body Indian (1972), about nonphysical, lateral violence in an urban, intertribal community; Coon Cons Coyote (1973), an intertribal trickster story; Foghorn (1973) a satirical revisionist history; and the quasi-musical 49 (1975). The reception to NATE’s work in New York and throughout Indigenous communities as they toured the lower 48 states was positive. The Native American Theatre Ensemble disbanded in 1976 after several performers had had enough of being on the road.18 Several IAIA and NATE members continued writing, producing, and acting in plays, and some even started their own companies. In 1973 Robert Shorty, Geraldine Keams, and Timothy Clashin (all Diné) founded the Navajoland Outdoor Theater, while in 1974, John Kauffman (Nez Perce, 1947– 1990), Terry Tafoya (Mestizo), Donald

16. Jaye T. Darby, “‘People with Strong Hearts’: Staging Communitism in Haney Geiogamah’s Plays Body Indian and 49,” in Native American Performance and Representation, ed. S. E. Wilmer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 157.

17. Rachel Mattson, “The Native American Theatre Ensemble + La MaMa,” La MaMa’s Archives Blog, June 22, 2015, web.

18. Hanay Geiogamah, New Native American Drama: Three Plays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 3; Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby, eds. American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2010), 102.

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Matt (Salish/Kutenai), and Phyllis Brisson (Assiniboine) established the Red Earth Performing Arts Company in Seattle.

The body of plays crafted by Geiogamah and the Native American Theatre Ensemble became the first steps toward what he termed “ceremonial performance.” Geiogamah refined his theories and applied it to later work with the American Indian Dance Theatre, founded in 1987. To speak about creating American Indian Dance Theatre, Geiogamah uses the terms ritual and ceremony—not referring to established sacred practices but to the building blocks upon which a performance is created. He wrote, “A ritual can be a brief, singular, repeated action or a series of actions that form a larger action.”19

AND SEEN/SCENE Playwriting, and all other art forms, are political when People of Color do it because we empower ourselves, we take control of our past, present and future.20 —William S. Yellow Robe Jr. (Assiniboine) THE NATIVE THEATER MOVEMENT of the 1960s and 1970s inspired the birth of new theater companies, ensembles, and festivals and galvanized many Indigenous theater makers coast to coast—some of whom are still producing work today. Most importantly, these ensembles produced schools of thought in Indigenous performance theory and application. The rise of the Native Theater movement alongside the Red Power movement gave audiences accustomed to Western forms of theater something they rarely saw: Native pieces written and performed by Native writers, directors, and performers depicting their lives as they were in the present and intended for public performance.

“Before me, there was Hanay. Before me, there was Spiderwoman,” says Yellow Robe, stressing the importance of remembering those who laid the foundations for

an active Native theater scene today. As a new generation of Indigenous theater makers continues their advances in large playhouses and community spaces, it is fitting to remember many of them collaborated with those who had done it before them.

Madeline Sayet (Mohegan) cites Yellow Robe’s influence in her directing philosophy and theater making. Mary Katherine Nagle (Cherokee Nation) is currently cowriting a play, Reclaiming One Star, with Suzan Shown Harjo. As for her experience with Reflections of

Native Voices, a New York theater festival, Tara Moses (Seminole/Muscogee) writes, “The artists of Spiderwoman Theater have created a strong foundation of Native excellence in theater through unapologetic cultural expression, stories, and celebration that I and other young Native artist have had the great privilege of learning under. The influence from these elder artists like Muriel Miguel have sparked a surge of new, Native work all over Turtle Island that follows in their footsteps and builds up the great body of work that came before us.”21

Candice Byrd (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nation) is a theater maker living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She earned her MFA in performing arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her bachelor of science degree from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa.

19. James D. Watts Jr., “More Than Fancy Footwork: American Indian Dance Theater Defining Custom as Art,” Tulsa World, September 26, 1993, web.

20. Elvira Pulitano and William Yellow Robe, “Telling Stories Through the Stage: A Conversation with William Yellow Robe,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 10, no.

1 (1998): 19–44, web.

21. Tara Moses, email message to author, February 14, 2020.

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DIXZA RUGS AND ORGANIC FARM A Benizaa Family Strikes a Balance In the heart of Oaxaca, one Zapotec family plays the global market game while still honoring their ancient ritual of weaving.

By Rosa Cays (Chicana)

S

AMUEL BAUTISTA L AZO (Zapotec) cheered, “¡Stishbeu!” (“steesh-BHE-uu!”). Shot glasses and jicaras filled with varieties of mezcal were raised across the long table and clinked, as we repeated the Zapotec toast that roughly means “with the permission of the moon!” Merriment filled the room as our small group of yoga retreaters passed around dishes of homemade mole, salad, tortillas, and pitchers of jamaica, all organically prepared. Out in the courtyard at Dixza Farm (DEEZH-da, or “words from the clouds”), blocks from the center of Teotitlán del Valle and not far from Oaxaca City, we could hear the small trip of goats bleating as evening darkened the sky. The farm dogs, Botas, Pompis, and Dingo, napped on the porch as we feasted. This was the first of several meals we shared with our hosts, Mario, Leonor, Celestino, and Samuel, one of the many Benizaa families (Cloud People)—known to the world as Zapotec—of weavers in Teotitlán del Valle.

Outside our guestrooms, vibrant wool rugs hung along the long portal, and the complex treadle looms that bore their creation stood ready for the next round of weaving. Tables were heaped with skeins of yarn, some naturally dyed, some not, but beautiful just the same. Next to a 26 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

brightly colored, woven hammock were a stained metate, carding tools, and a weathered spinning wheel. Across the courtyard was Leonor’s outdoor kitchen, set up as if she was conductor of an orchestra in the round, where she simultaneously cooks meals and dyes wool.

Our quest was to immerse ourselves in yoga and self-discovery in this exotic and earthy setting. The unpretentious, natural beauty of our surroundings offered the ideal atmosphere to achieve this—no high-tech distractions, no politics, no hustle and bustle of urbanization.

Just goats, good food, and lots of yarn.

Despite its listing on Airbnb, the modern world temporarily melted away during our stay, which made it easy to be present, to be grateful, to be at peace.

above Samuel Bautista Lazo (Zapotec) preparing to cut a student’s weaving from the loom. Photo: Rosa Cays.

UNA HISTORIA BREVE DE LA COMUNIDAD

opposite The Bautista Lazo family: Celestino, Leonor, Mario, and Samuel, after Leonor won second place in the first Zapotec cooking contest in Teotitlán, June 10, 2018. Photo courtesy of Samuel Bautista Lazo (Zapotec).

TEOTITLÁN DEL VALLE—or Xiguie’a (“celestial constellation“)—was founded by the Zapotec in 1465 and lies in the heart of Oaxaca, Mexico, less than 20 miles east of the city of Oaxaca. It was one of the first villages founded in this region

by the Zapotec, whose culture in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca began with the domestication of corn roughly 9,500 years ago. This date, based on evidence found in the caves of Guilá Naquitz in Mitla, is the position decolonialized history is taking, according to researcher Guillermo Marín Ruiz, says Samuel.

Oaxaca is considered the most ethnically heterogeneous of Mexico’s 31 states. The two largest linguistic groups are the Zapotec and Mixtec, whose kindred, pre-Columbian ancestors harvested corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, chiles, pumpkins, and gourds. Early inhabitants also hunted turkey, deer, iguana, and armadillo, or fished the many streams and

rivers of Oaxaca. By 1521 the Zapotec and Mixtec had spread out to several hundred self-governing villages, which created an evolution of 64 separate Zapotec languages, with each one taking on a distinct identity from one community to the next.1 Teotitlán’s population is roughly 6,500 today, and most of its inhabitants are of Zapotec descent.

Before the Spanish invasion, the Aztec Empire, or Triple Alliance, was in control of Cemanahuac (the known Mexica world in Nahuatl), but not for long. It was in Tenochtitlan in 1519 that Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, after conquering the ruler of the Aztecs,

Moctezuma II, began ordering expeditions to other areas of Mexico, including Oaxaca in the highlands, “to contact and, if necessary, conquer the diverse peoples and kingdoms of Mesoamerica.”2 During the Spanish dominance of Mexica, the invaders took textiles from the Zapotecs as tribute payments. The Spaniards also acknowledged the weaving skills of the Zapotec and obligated them to weave for the Spanish colonies.3 Bishop Juan López de Zárate introduced the footpedal loom to the Zapotecs in 1535 and it remains in use today. Zárate was the Spanish-appointed bishop of Antequera, the Roman Catholic archdiocese in

1. John P. Schmal, “The Mixtecs and Zapotecs: Two Enduring Cultures of Oaxaca,” History of Mexico, Houston Institute for Culture, 2006, web.

2. Robert M. Carmack, Janine L. Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen, The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 5.

3. Andra Fischgrund Stanton, Zapotec Weavers of Teotitlán (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1999), 2.

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LA FAMILIA BAUTISTA LAZO

above Mario Bautista Martinez’s rug hanging by the dry corn stalks stored to feed their livestock throughout the year.

The dry season is very long in the Central Valley, from November to June, so farmers have to rely on and learn from cacti and bugs to survive on these lands. The wool was dyed with cochineal by Leonor and Samuel. Photo: Samuel Bautista Lazo (Zapotec). opposite Leonor weaving on a loom. Photo: Luvia Lazo (Zapotec).

Oaxaca City. He was also given credit for bringing Spanish sheep and the use of sheep wool to the region.4 Teotitlán del Valle has gained international recognition for the weavings (laadi in Zapotec) created there.

From a Western viewpoint, it would seem advantageous that the art of the Zapotec has been “discovered” and they can now monetize their craft, and in some ways it is. But this recognition has also been romanticized and has changed the Zapotec culture’s production system from one of ancestral ritual to capitalistic competition in the global marketplace.

SAMUEL’S FAMILY has a rich and deeply rooted history, as would be expected, but their interest is not in knowing who accomplished what or who was married to whom. Those things don’t matter in the greater scheme. His grandparents used to tell the foundation story of Xiguie’a, when the valley was an ancient lake at least 20,000 years ago.

“Everybody in this village traces their ancestry to this origin story,” says Samuel. “This land turned to marshlands, and when the lake evaporated, then the soil became fertile to plant corn and do agriculture. We still plant corn on some ancestral lands where we’ve found ancient burials of ancestors probably farming the same land.… It’s not like there is a record of our ancestry, but it’s the story we choose to believe; that we have always been of this land and have always taken care of it.”5 The practice of weaving has been passed down for generations. Samuel, his brother, Celestino, and their parents all weave. Samuel’s great-great-grandparents were weavers on his father’s side of the family. His great-grandfather was more devoted to their farmland, 14 to 20 hectares of milpa, an intercropping system of corn, beans, and squash. But when his great-grandfather did weave, he would weave rugs ten feet wide. Samuel’s father, Mario, learned from him. Mario remembers going with his grandfather to tend their cattle that grazed in the mountains, where they would gather bark and other gifts of the land for dyeing wool.

Leonor came from a family of butchers and would take pigs to sell at the village market. She taught herself to weave by watching her brothers and used to help her grandmother card wool. “Our personal history is communal,” insists Samuel. “Our village was founded on this sacred mountain that watches over us. We’re all related in this village. It’s small, and people tend to marry within the village.… My personal lineage? It’s more natural to describe it as a communal

4. Kevin Simpson, “Zapotec Weaving: The Resurgence of a Cultural Art Form,” First American Art Magazine 13 (Winter 2016/17), 24.

5. Samuel Bautista Lazo, in recorded interview with Tiśina Parker and the author, February 2020.

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history.” I asked Samuel how his mother and father met, but all he would divulge was, “Dad was perched on a tree and whispered some words to my mom.”

Ownership of land in Teotitlán del Valle is a somewhat foreign concept.

Curious about what it would cost to buy property in the village, I asked Samuel about this during our stay. “You have to be part of the community,” he told me, which disappointed yet pleased me. I liked this concept.

“It goes back to the origin story,” Samuel said. “The gods spoke to the people and said all the land they can see from the top of the mountain is for them to take care of. And so ever since, the land has remained communal possession. ‘You are stewards of this land. We’ll provide for you as long as you take care of it.’ It’s been like this for 20,000 years.” Only since the Mexican Revolution has there been a strong push to “legalize” the land and hand out papers of ownership, but Samuel says this is coming from the federal level “to have more certainty around investment. For us it’s about stewardship, not ownership.”

As a young boy of four or five years of age, Samuel recalls, he and his brother Celestino would help their father and grandfather cut alfalfa. This was when their farm was on the edge of town surrounded by alfalfa fields. “I remember slicing my thumb and index finger a few times,” he remembers. “Western cultures would be like, ‘Agh, child labor!’ But it’s part of our culture. It’s our way of life … When I was six, old enough to plant corn, I went with my grandfather, Samuel Bautista Jimenez, to a plot of land we called ‘the end of the mushroom gathering area.’ It was the first place I ever planted corn, and it was where we found ancient burials of our people.”

Samuel says he was a weaver before he was even born. “I was weaving when I was in the womb of my mother.… My dad used to weave on the ten-foot-wide loom with me on his back. My earliest dreams that I remember as a baby was me falling from the loom, tethered by my umbilical cord in the warp of the loom, where my dad was weaving on the other side. This is how connected I am to these looms, to my father, and my mom.

“I had this intense recollection of dreaming when I did my first ayahuasca ceremony. That dream that used to wake me up when I was a baby just kind of made sense. Our lives depend on weaving.

We’re weaving our lives in our culture. We weave because it’s written in our DNA; these double strands are intertwined and woven together, and it’s part of who we are as humanity. It’s an ancient skill.”

Samuel’s great-grandparents used to make five to ten rugs a year, mostly for personal use and some for trading.

His granduncle traveled and sold rugs to the fincas, including the large coffee plantations in Veracruz. He’d be gone for a few months, sell rugs, and come back with other items to sell at market in the village. For the Zapotec, markets are sacred. “Ghie’á is the word for “market” and also sounds like “flower” (ghiea),” says Samuel. “They are beautiful places where we gather and trade the fruits of our labor, and stories, and make connections and friendships.”

Samuel says today there are approximately 5,000 weavers in Teotitlán and SPRING 2020 | 29

industrial engineering and sustainable manufacturing, he now has the eyes to see and the words to speak about it in English: “To see these changes happening on the earth and to remember the ancient ways of my people, there should be a change, a rebalance that needs to happen.”

Samuel has a doctorate in sustainable manufacturing from the University of Liverpool. His parents were keen on Samuel getting an education; they wanted him to be prepared, to speak English, to be educated, and able to interact with “the bigger world, the current systems of power and economics that move the threads,” he says. “They learned from personal experience, living in this community as Native people. They’ve been discriminated against—I’ve seen it, in government buildings in bigger cities. We realized we need to play the game, speak the language, be part of this if we don’t want to be pushed down and stepped on … We’re doing it out of survival.”

Many Zapotec weavers have had to learn to play the game. “It’s human nature to be greedy, which is why capitalism works,” Samuel continues. “It’s not all like that. People have deep connection to the craft, who take pride and find meaning in weaving, who love it for the sake of it.

The whole spectrum exists: some weave eight hours a day and that’s their thing.

Our family has a connection to the land, like our ancestors. We farm and weave.

When it rains, we retreat to the looms.

When we get bored and get all crunched up from weaving, we take a break and farm, chase cows, ride horses. We take this natural approach.”

EVOLVE, ADAPT above, top Leonor dying wool in cochineal. Photo: Samuel Bautista Lazo (Zapotec). above, bottom Samuel feeding his flock of goats and sheep at Dixza Farm. Photo: Luvia Lazo (Zapotec). opposite Samuel and Leonor carding and spinning wool on their front porch. Photo: Luvia Lazo (Zapotec).

3,000 in two nearby Zapotec villages, Santa Ana del Valle and San Miguel del Valle. Between the three villages, weavers are producing 12 tons of rugs per month, in what Samuel calls an “Indigenous production system.” Networks of families and friends self-organize to meet demand and create their craft. But is it sustainable?

In his role as a weaver and now an engineer with a doctoral degree, Samuel sees himself as a “critic” of the current production system. Having studied

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SAMUEL DESCRIBES THE WAY the industrial world works now as a linear production system: it extracts, produces, uses, and discards. Recycling is not sophisticated enough to keep up. “What would it take for humanity to stop and rebalance?” he asks. “It’s why I share my stories, to teach people in workshops and inspire them to question the way they relate to weaving and clothing. We spend so much time hand-dying skeins, weaving thread by thread. It’s the only way we can

trade with the global economy. It’s the only thing we have that developed countries don’t have. People come and see how we relate to the earth, see how we work with raw elements and make them into pieces of art.”

It hit Samuel how significant the skill of weaving truly is when he saw an exhibition one day about Maya weavers and learned about Ixchel, the Maya goddess of textile arts. All over the world there are textile techniques or practices still flourishing, and the skills are shared across humanity. But today, weaving is often more about production than ritual, and the materials used are often heavily processed. Samuel says, “Ritual weaving is what deeply connects earth and the heavens, when grandmothers used to take six months to a year to make one piece of clothing (a huipil) that would last a lifetime or would be passed down

to a daughter, or maybe they would one day be buried in.” This is not a practical approach in our modern, capitalistic world, but Samuel thinks we can strive to get back to this. “How much clothing do we really need? How much is enough?”

Samuel didn’t really need to go to England to study sustainable manufacturing. It is essentially what his ancestors have been doing for centuries. To apply it to modern societal consumption was his challenge. He asks, “How do we take our heavy, industrial production system and transform it into something not only sustainable but what I call ‘growthable,’ something that can grow, flourish, and restore the life supporting systems of the earth?”

The doctorate degree has not influenced his family’s farming career and weaving; in fact, it’s the other way around. Samuel pursued his education in

order to learn what “we can do to help transform the industrial production and consumption system into something that looks more like what the Zapotec have been doing for thousands of years, which is totally sustainable. And when I say we, I mean humanity as a whole. The real question is what can we do, day to day, to transform this consumption system and nurture the life-supporting systems of the world and not just keep taking and taking from them? It’s a big question for all of us.”

As Samuel tells it, the notion of Zapotec weaving having been discovered with the advent of travel and technology wasn’t so quixotic. “Back in the day, we used to sell our rugs at the local market or take them to different states to trade for other resources or crafts. When the highway and airport were built, we were suddenly discovered in the world. Then came an influx of tourists, entrepreneurs, SPRING 2020 | 31

A Dixza rug in process. Photo: Hanna Flagg.

and then suddenly our rugs started to appeal to a worldwide audience.

“Then they were taken to the Southwest as a cheap alternative to Diné (Navajo) and Hopi rugs; they had better control of how rugs were sold and traded.

So Zapotec rugs were first presented as that, just a cheap alternative. Then wholesale buyers started coming to Teotitlán and buying rugs off the looms—at first not enough rugs were being made. But then as weavers caught up with demand, and production increased, they started to bargain the prices down, push that demand on the weavers, and take advantage of them to see who was willing to go lower with their prices.”

This model of commerce started a vicious cycle that led to weavers adopting cheaper, synthetic dyes because the increase in demand and low prices paid for their rugs made it impossible to keep using natural dyes. The demand for Zapotec tapestries has also made it impossible for local weavers to keep up the supply of naturally dyed wools, so many weavers now purchase yarn from mills and dye them with aniline dyes. “We can hand-dye close to 50 kilos of anilinedyed wool in one day, my dad and me, but when we dye natural-dyed yarns, we dye

five or ten skeins in a day, depending on the color, due to the slow process.”

Not only is there a shortage of naturally dyed wool, but there is also a shortage of sheep in Oaxaca to keep up with the demand. Families in Teotitlán now get their wool from families outside Mexico City who have early 20th-century, reconditioned mills, with old machines imported from Europe or the United States to spin the wool. “This is technology put to good use in a way, to make things go faster,” says Samuel. “It would be nice if they were powered with renewable electricity.”

This is how Zapotec weaving has evolved, but as rooted as the people are to their ancestral lineage, they also adapt.

“We were the first colonizers of this continent: explorers, curious, industrious,” says Samuel. “Tourism or markets tend to romanticize Native people, Indigenous people.” Now buses bring in the tourists to see the hand spinning, the crushed cochineal in the metate, the dyeing of the wool, all of it on display, which is not the way it used to be. “It’s the push and pull of

the market. Tourists bargain, so you can’t blame the weavers. They have to play the commerce game.”

In 2010 the Bautista Lazo family broke out of the “dog and pony” framework. They have increased their natural dye production, take things slower, and make smaller batches with higher quality.

Ironically, as they have gone back to their roots, so to speak, they have also been, “lucky enough to get found on Instagram, our website, other social media. People find us,” says Samuel. “Dixza is going the slow route and getting back to the old ways of natural dyes.”

The efforts of this Benizaa family of weavers is one step toward rebalancing, working with Mother Earth, not against her. And as the Zapotec people embrace and defy global trade, striking that balance, they continue to keep their collective heart close to the land and to the sky, honoring their commitment to be stewards of the land.

DIXZA.COM

Rosa Cays (Chicana) is a freelance editor and writer based in Arizona. She has worked with other publishers including Latino Perspectives Magazine in Phoenix and Schenck Southwest Publishing in Santa Fe and earned her bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Arizona State University.

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PARFLECHES How Native Women Pushed the Envelope of Abstraction

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

B

EFORE PIET MONDRIAN helped found the De Stijl movement, before Kazimir Malevich penned The Non-Objective World, before Wassily Kandinsky painted Composition I, even before the rise of modernism, there was the parfleche. Indigenous women from the Great Plains, Plateau, Great Basin, and Southwest painted abstract imagery onto rawhide containers to create bold, graphic artworks meant to be seen from a distance and meant to be seen in motion. Using a visual vocabulary of simple shapes and a limited palette, they created a corpus of paintings that continue to amaze and confound audiences today.

Unlike those early 20th-century European abstract painters, the Native women who painted parfleches did not create “art for art’s sake.” Indigenous artists, like the overwhelming majority of artists throughout world history, did not separate art from daily life. A parfleche is eminently utilitarian. Art historian Gaylord Torrence wrote, “The containers were lightweight, unbreakable, and weather-resistant, and their creation afforded women an important means of artistic expression. The superb utility of these objects, their compelling beauty as works of art, and their inseparable association with the horse all contributed to their importance in Plains culture.”1 Torrence is the champion of parfleches in the field of art history. Now

above Lakota artists, Parfleche Cylinders, Flat Cases, Boxes, and Envelopes, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institute. Photo: Taoboy49 (CC BY-SA 3.0). opposite Cheyenne artist, Parfleche, ca. 1890, rawhide, pigment, collection of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1981.28.4, gift of Mrs. Doane Farr. Image courtesy of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City.

the senior curator of American Indian art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Torrence curated The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting at the Des Moines Art Center, with a catalogue, back in 1994. Torrence strives to teach new generations to appreciate this once widespread art form.

While closely associated with the Great Plains, parfleches come from other vast areas including the Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Subarctic, and Prairie cultural regions. Tribes as far south as the Lipan Apache of Southern Texas and as far north as the Tsuu T'ina of Alberta made parfleches, as did tribes as far west as the Wasco, Wishram, and Tenino of Washington and Oregon.

While parfleches predated the 16th-century Spanish reintroduction of the horse, the art form flourished with the rise of horse culture in the Western United States and Canada. The horse enabled agrarian Great Lakes tribes to move west and interact with tribes already there, and to create the new nomadic cultures that epitomize American Indians in popular imagination. Prior to the reservation era of the mid- to late 19th century, this was a time of great wealth. Parfleches simultaneously stored precious material goods and displayed a family’s skill at hunting and creativity. Torrence writes that “great numbers must have been required; they were undoubtedly one of the most commonly produced aesthetic forms.”2

1. Gaylord Torrence, “Parfleche Envelope,” in The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky, ed. Gaylord Torrence (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), 90.

2. Gaylord Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with the Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 24.

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The term parfleche, as early conservationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell wrote, derives from the French terms parer, “to parry” or deflect, and flêche, “arrow,” referring to rawhide shields. The term broadened over time to include a range of embellished containers crafted from rawhide.3 One reason why parfleches have not received more scholarship is they have historically been a women’s art.

Among Plains and neighboring tribes, painting historically was a gendered practice, with men typically painting figurative and narrative works while women painted abstract geometric works—on hides, textiles, and bodies. Instead of acknowledging the two genders’ painting practices, I have often heard the sentiment voiced that “Plains women didn’t paint.” Why does women’s geometric painting get so easily dismissed? Just as the abstract painters of early 20th-century Europe challenged public perception, the abstraction of parfleches continues to challenge the public. One could engage with this geometric abstraction on a purely aesthetic level or delve deeper into a quest to understand its symbolism, but it takes the ability to embrace uncertainty and engage with Indigenous perspectives from different tribes. It may take more effort and time to explore Indigenous aesthetics, but the rewards are great and the art helps us understand the artists’ worldviews—to hear voices of Indigenous women who have too often been silenced in the past and today.

Few historical parfleches can be attributed to named artists because they were collected with little accompanying information. However, based on studying 1,500 specimens in more than 100 collections in 1994—and far more since—Torrence developed a diagnostic methodology for attributing tribal affiliations to the many historical parfleches scattered in museum collections across the globe. Rawhide disintegrates rapidly, so it is extraordinary than any 18th-century examples are still intact in museum collections today. They may have been modeled on folded birchbark containers

ubiquitous in the Great Lakes region, where the Dakota, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes once lived.4 They also share aesthetics with painted hide robes, widespread across the continent, and in turn with Indigenous tattooing and body painting. “This fundamental vocabulary of visual forms consisted of geometric motifs, both straightedged and curved, organized into complex compositions with some type of rectangular frame,” Torrence wrote. “The images were based on highly elongated triangles, hourglass shapes, diamonds, rectangles, lines, and circular forms.”5 Some of the earliest parfleches in museum collections are unpainted or incised. Thick bison hides had dark epidermal surfaces that could be etched with fine lines and crosshatching to reveal a lighter layer of hide. Many early 19th-century parfleches combine incising with painting. Exclusively incised containers began to disappear in the 1860s and it is doubtful that any were made after 1880. Incising shared aesthetic qualities with woodcarving. It was particularly popular among Mescalero Apache parfleche makers who may have been influenced by Spanish colonial leatherwork.

The earliest painted parfleches reflect “a transitional form between robes painted geometrically and the final development of the parfleche envelope,” in which the painted design did not conform to the folding surfaces

but rather overlapped them.6 Later the painting aligned with the folded flaps, so a unified image would be created when the parfleche was folded into its final shape.

By 1840, distinct tribal styles emerged.

Parfleches were sculpted from rawhide, which is processed but not tanned, so instead of being soft and supple, the hide is tough and water-resistant and holds its shape. Bison was the preferred hide until American mercenaries decimated their herds in the late 1860s and early 1870s; after 1880, it was seldom found. A bison hide is darker brown than other hides and develops a craquelure over time. Besides bison, it is difficult to determine exactly which animal hide was used. Elk, deer, horse, cow, and even moose hide was used, and all were off-white to beige. The unpainted surfaces provided the lightest parts of the parfleche design. Typically a single hide could yield a pair of parfleche envelopes.

Ute and Jicarilla Apache artists made large pouches three to five feet wide that took up an entire hide.

Men typically hunted and skinned the animals, while women prepared the hides in a complex process requiring strength and skill. The artist staked a hide about six to ten inches above the ground, with its hair side facing down, then defleshed the hides by scraping off the muscles, tissue, and fat with bone or, later, metal hide scrapers. The hides shrank as they dried and were doused with water

3. George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), 244.

4. Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, 245; Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 30, 57.

5. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 30.

6. Torrence, “Parfleche Envelope,” 90.

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as needed to clean them and keep them workable. Drying needed to be slow and steady, and the hides were painted while still staked. Prior to painting, the artist often coated the hide with sizing, which sealed the hide. Sizes came from numerous animal and plant surfaces, particularly prickly pear juice.

To compose a design, women often used straight, peeled willow sticks that could be pressed into the wet hide to leave a mark for painting. “The finest parfleche painting always transcends the static, mechanical quality that would be imparted by too great a reliance on measuring devices,” writes Torrence,7 who also points out that the character of the

artist’s hand is lost in schematic drawings of parfleche designs.

Prior to 1850, parfleches had a limited palette of red, green, and black.

As styles evolved, Torrence wrote, “Green became an important color within the compositions, essentially replacing black as the predominant color counterbalancing red. Black, in turn, became the color used for the fine outlines delineating major motifs and for small units within the designs.”8 From 1850 to 1880, yellow and blue were added.

Natural pigments could be sacred, and some required great skill to make.

Ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore wrote that yellow ocher, mined on the

7. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 51.

8. Torrence, 35–36.

9. Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 116n1.

10. Clark Wissler, Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indians, Volume 5, Parts 1-2, 133.

11. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 47.

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Standing Rock Reservation, was ground into powder then heated to become a deep red: “The baking of this ocherous substance—a process which requires skill—is done by the women.”9 Clark Wissler, who conducted field research among Northern Plains tribes from 1902 to 1905, transliterated Blackfoot terms for their paints: “Yellow earth. Buffalo yellow (buffalo gall stones).

Red earth (burned yellow earth). Red earth (as found). Rock paint (a yellowish red). Many-times-baked-paint (a yellow earth made red by exposure to the sun).

Red many-times-baked (a similar red, as found). Seventh paint (a peculiar ghastly red-purple). Blue (a dark blue mud). White earth (as found). Black (charcoal).”10 Native black, made from iron oxide, lignite, charcoal, walnut hulls or roots, or sunflowers, leaned toward brown. Native artists used natural blacks long after commercial pigments were available.

Reds, the most common natural pigment, were primarily made from red ocher, that is clay with iron oxide, but also from buffalo berries, pussy willows, or cactus fruit. Yellows were mostly yellow ocher but could also be made from bison gallstones or wolf lichen. Green came from copper carbonate or dried green algae. Blue came from earth or even duck excrement. These natural pigments were dried and ground with stone mortars. Each color was stored separately in its own hide pouch.

The first trade pigment available in the West was mercury vermilion from China. Introduced in the 18th century, it is found even in the earliest surviving parfleches. Commercial pigments were commonplace by 1875. Colored crayons were occasionally used in the late 19th and early 20th century to enhance the depth of a color field.

To apply the paint to a parfleche, artists relied on styluses shaped from smoothed-down stone, wood, mountain sheep horn, or, most commonly, bone.

Torrence writes, “The porous bone soaked up and held the paint, and allowed it to flow smoothly when the tool was applied to the surface of the hide. Held in one direction, it produced a sharp, thin line; turned

to the side, the board edge could be used to spread the paint over a wide area.”11 Artists had a dedicated stylus for each color. They also made brushes by chewing the edge of willow or cottonwood sticks to loosen the cellulose into separate fibers. The rounded end of a stick was ideal for painting dots.

Paint is pigment with a binder.

Pre-reservation parfleche artists commonly used bison or other animal fat as their binder. With a little binder, pigments were sometimes formed into cakes, which in turn could be applied directly to wet rawhide, much like an oil pastel. Otherwise, powdered pigments were mixed with hot water and animal glue to create liquid paint. Each color was stored in its palette, often made from a tortoise or mussel shell.

After a painting was finished, the artist could coat it with more sizing or a tree-gum varnish such as wild cherry, piñon, or tamarack. Finally, the hide was pulled off its stakes, flipped over, and the hair was removed by pounding it with a stone or the back of an axe, scraping it with an elk antler scraper, or a combination of these techniques. The parfleche was folded, any corners pounded into place, and weights were used to form the desired shape as the container dried.

Tanned hide thongs were most commonly used to lace the parfleches. Artists burned holes with heated metal since these held up better over time than cut holes. Any fringe cut from single sheets of tanned hide or other embellishments, such as jingles or hawk bells, were sewed in.

Parfleches held everything from sacred bundles to everyday household goods. Grinnell recorded that parfleches held “ornaments, wooden bowls and dishes, small horn spoons, and any odds-and-ends. In fact, the contents of a parfleche were a perpetual surprise, for it might contain anything from an elk’s tooth to a twenty-dollar gold piece.”12 One of the few known 19th-century parfleche makers, Maxi'diwiac, or Buffalo Bird Woman (Hidatsa, ca. 1839– 1932), said, “Our clothes we put away in parfleche bags which were used only for

this purpose. We never used these bags or cases to pack meat or foods in, as we wanted to keep our clothes clean.… There was just one bag for the man’s suit and that of his wife. The war bonnet and trail were kept in the bag, along with the clothes.”13 Form followed function, and parfleche uses varied from tribe to tribe.

The most common forms that parfleches took were folded envelopes, flat cases, cylinders, and boxes.

Folded envelopes were by far the most numerous, and a family might own six to eight parfleches just for storing food.

Horses carried matched pairs hanging from both sides of their saddles. Envelopes were usually vertically oriented, except Plateau envelopes that were horizontally oriented. Made from a single sheet of hide, envelopes had interior and exterior flaps laced together and could expand at the center for more storage capacity.

Flat cases were made by every tribe that made parfleches. Blackfeet and Crow tribes used heavily fringed cases with strands as long as 45 inches for ceremonial items, while Cheyenne people used cases without fringe. “The addition of the fringes significantly transformed the visual emphasis of the case from the painted image to a balance between surface ornamentations and sculptural form,” wrote Torrence.14 In transit, cases hung from the swell (front curve) or cantle (back curve) of a woman’s saddle; while at camp, they hung from wooden tripods.

Some very early Wichita bison-rawhide

cases were unpainted. These flat cases may have evolved from twined pouches. Flat cases without fringe often stored women’s tools, sewing items, and foods.

Cylinder-shaped parfleche always contained sacred objects, including “medicine bundles, ceremonial clothing, feathers, and rolled feather headdresses.”15 Kiowas and other tribes rolled up feather headdresses and safely stored them in cylinders. Crow artists, in particular, added fringe up to 36 inches long. Cylinders ranged from 10 to 30 inches long and often tapered at the bottom. Artists typically painted a four-part design on the disk at the top of the cylinder. “Painted in this manner, the simple piece of rawhide was transformed into a cosmological diagram; it defined the circle as a universal symbol of the unity and continuity of all life and evoked the four sacred directions and the supernatural powers with which they were identified,” observed Torrence.16 “The final evolution of parfleche containers was the painted rawhide box, a form developed during the early reservation period and produced almost exclusively by Lakota women,” Torrence summarizes.17 Boxes grew in popularity as people traveled more by horse-drawn wagons than horseback. Artists painted five sides of the boxes but left the bottom plain. These served as tool cases and may have evolved from rawhide trunks. Dhegiha and Chiwere Siouanspeaking tribes collected Lakota boxes.

Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Meskwaki

below Sicangu Lakota artist, Pair of Parfleches, 1880–1885, rawhide, pigment, Native-tanned skin ties, 22½ × 133/8 and 22¼ × 127/8 in., collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ralph T. Coe Collection, Gift of Ralph T. Coe Foundation for the Arts, 2011.154.152.1, .2 (CC0 1.0). opposite Cheyenne artist, Parfleche, ca. 1890, rawhide, pigment, collection of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1981.28.4, gift of Mrs. Doane Farr. Image courtesy of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City.

12. Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians, 244.

13. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 62.

14. Torrence, 66.

15. Torrence, 69.

16. Torrence, 70.

17. Gaylord Torrence, “Parfleche Box,” in The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky, ed. Gaylord Torrence (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), 90.

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above, top Arapaho artist, Parfleche Bag, ca. 1900, rawhide, pigment, 26½ × 15½ × 1 in., collections of the Brooklyn Museum Collection, X1111.3, Brooklyn, New York (CC-BY). opposite Cheyenne artist, Parfleche Envelope, 1870, bison rawhide, pigment, 12 × 21/2 × 20 in., collection of the Oklahoma Historical Society, ID 00162, M. L. Andrews Collection. The artist was a female companion of Philip Block.

people repurposed Lakota and other Plains tribes’ envelopes into trunks to hold sacred items. The Meskwaki painted clan designs on these.

Artists used parfleche techniques and designs for other rawhide items including “burden straps, knife sheaths, quivers, horse cruppers and saddle ornaments, and sun visors.” 18 Worndown parfleches were recycled. “The usual fate of a gift parfleche is to be cut into moccasin soles,” wrote Wissler.19 Remnants of parfleches became cradleboard hoods, knife sheaths, toy cases, or any range of items still bearing traces of painted designs.

These designs are the enduring legacy of parfleches. Kiowa beadwork artist Teri Greeves said her sister Keri Ataumbi (Kiowa) taught her to appreciate the aesthetics of parfleche painting. “My sister helped me see the perfect, delicate lines, gorgeous muted colors of the natural pigments, and even the golden veneer of the cactus-juice stabilizer, which added to their visual depth—like looking through water to see the river bottom.” Greeves

continued, “I began to see into the negative space—its fluctuation between merely background and the definition of abstraction itself. What were these women painters saying? What rules were they following? What was their language of space, color, and line?”20 Bold and striking, parfleche paintings were meant to be seen from a distance and, like so much horse culture–era artwork, in motion. “In the most effective and carefully balanced designs, the visual reversal of figure and background constantly changes according to the shifting perception of the viewer,” writes Torrence.21 Parfleche painting shared a visual vocabulary possibly with basketry and twined pouches but definitely with hide painting. “Women across the Central and Northern Plains had shared this style” long before Europeans documented it, wrote art historian Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote (Kiowa) when describing a particular bison robe. “Though the exact meanings of these robes elude contemporary audiences, many scholars believe the design

symbolized the buffalo, central to the wellbeing of the historical Arapaho and all Plains tribes.… Women designed, made, and wore robes with this abstract configuration, visibly connecting themselves to the bison.” She continues, “Box-andborder robes are expressive works of art, carrying symbolic meaning related to the bison and aspects of spiritual life that imbue these robes with significance transcending the aesthetic.”22 Made from bison, carrying bison meat, many designs honored this life-giving animal.

“The ideas from the abstractions oftentimes came from the dream world, but they were also influenced by what and who the abstractions were for. The paintings on the outsides of these containers spoke to what was inside them; they spoke to the human being that they were created for; even the pigments themselves contained the life of the earth, plant, and animal worlds and interacted with the animal life the container was made from,” wrote Greeves.23 The Kiowa artist continues, “These women were not just following a prescribed design or pattern, they were deliberately working in the language of abstraction, and each artistic choice held significant personal and tribally specific meaning.”24 Parfleche artists created complex designs from deceptively simple elements: lines, dots, circles, quadrangles, frets, curves, crescents, and hourglass shapes.

These might be filled with color, crosshatching, or parallel lines. These designs were bound by a strong border and highly symmetrical. “The commonest feature in the designs is a double line extending longitudinally through the middle of the flap,” observed anthropologist Leslie Spier, who studied Nez Perce, Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute parfleches.25 The Tsuu T’ina term for this central column on parfleche envelopes, mi na wusa, translates to “vertical column, spine.”26 This vertical axis also can represent a pathway, physically or metaphorically.

18. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 74.

19. Wissler, Material Culture of the Blackfoot Indians, 81.

20. Teri Greeves, “The Women Were Busy Abstracting the World,” in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, eds. Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2019), 99.

21. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 78.

22. Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote, PhD, “Robe,” in The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky, ed. Gaylord Torrence (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2014), 178.

23. Greeves, “The Women Were Busy Abstracting the World," 99.

24. Greeves, 101.

25. Leslie Spier, An Analysis of Plains Indian Parfleche Decoration (Seattle: University of Washington, 1925), 100.

26. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 252.

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Jhon Goes in Center, an Oglala Lakota jeweler, wrote that “the designs on parfleche containers and other accouterments that were in essence maps that depicted geographic features such as a river as the circle of life and the mountains that hold us to a spiritual connection within our homelands.”27 Symbols might be shared between a tribe or a family or only be known to the maker. Alfred Kroeber studied Arapaho parfleches and observed that a single design carried multiple symbolic meanings. Conversely, a single concept could be represented by a range of different symbols. Placement and shape influenced meaning. “In painted designs a flat isosceles triangle often represents a hill; an acute isosceles triangle, a tent,” wrote Kroeber.28 “An equilateral triangle with the point downward may represent a heart; with its point upward, a mountain.”

He continued, “Crosses and diamonds often signify stars.”29 “The Pawnee painted cosmic symbols on these containers—the moon and its rays, the sun, the dawn, and the stars,” wrote Gene Weltfish, anthropologist and historian. “These cosmic designs could be painted only by a person with the necessary religious qualifications.”30 The Morning Star, or Venus, is portrayed as a four-pointed star by numerous tribes.

Dreams were powerful sources of imagery, and Lakota and Dakota women told Wissler “that such experiences were attributed to Double Woman, the feminine cultural heroine of that tribe.”31 Likewise, the spirit world shared designs with Arapaho through dreams.

Whirlwind Woman, an immortal, created the earliest Arapaho designs and shared them with mortal women. “It was she who first instructed Arapaho women in all the phases of parfleche-making and planning,” wrote Torrence.32 Tribes had symbolic systems in which certain colors represented cardinal directions and attributions associated with those directions. Anthropologist George

Dorsey recorded an interpretation of an Arapaho parfleche: “Six rows of colored designs represented the whole appearance of the earth (rough). Two white lines traversing two center designs denoted the paths of the sun and moon. White and blue lines at [the] edge of the parfleche mean the ‘Ocean’ and horizon. Blue paint, the sky; red paint, the earth; green paint, the glass; white field, water. This parfleche denotes the winter season.”33 Kroeber wrote, “When as many as ten or a dozen symbols having reference to each other are combined, a story can almost be told by them. In this way the stiff embroideries on a moccasin or the geometric paintings on a bag may represent the hunting buffalo, the acquisition of supernatural power by a shaman, a landscape or map, a dream, personal experiences, or a myth.”34 Over time, knowledge of this visual language faded. The slaughter of bison herds and confinement on reservations curtailed parfleche production in the late 19th century. Some tribes were still able to acquire hides through hunting, while others used domestic cowhides. Northern Arapaho continued to make parfleches until World War I, Blackfeet women continued until the 1920s, and Lakota artists continued into the 1930s. Tribes, such as the Crow, Shoshone, and Nez Perce, continued making parfleches into the 1940s. In the Plateau, early 20th-century wedding ceremonies included an exchange of goods in corn husk bags from the bride’s family and parfleches from the groom’s family. As symbols of earlier, better times, parfleches were hung from horses in Wild West shows and in Native horse parades. Fringed ceremonial parfleches were left empty as symbols of sacred power. Among Dakota and Lakota people, parfleches were distributed at giveaways.

Artists from a variety of tribes are dedicated to keeping this art form alive and evolving. Some of the leading parfleche makers today include brothers Juan and Shawn Espinosa (Oglala Lakota),

Lauren Good Day (Arikara /Hidatsa/ Blackfeet/Cree), Mike Marshall (Sicangu Lakota), and Debra Box (Southern Ute).

De Stijl painters such as Mondrian were idealists. They wanted to strip down painting to its essential elements of pure geometry and primary colors. They sought art as a means toward spiritual harmony. They wanted to completely fuse form and function. If only these European men had studied the parfleches made by generations of American Indian and First Nations artists before them, they would have realized their utopian dreams had already been achieved.

“These paintings were inseparable from the worldview of their makers, formed from their collective experience and culture role as women,” wrote Torrence, “from the details of their daily lives and the richness and love of family life and tribal associations; from the invisible spirit forces that filled their world and the profound religions and traditions that sustained their inner, sacred lives; and from their intimate relationship with nature and the sweeping, monumental landscapes and incomparable light of the American West, which was their home.”35

27. Jhon Goes In Center, “Native American and First Nations’ GIS,” Native American Geography (Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute, 2000), web.

28. Alfred Louis Kroeber, Decorative Symbolism of the Arapaho (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 308–09.

29. Kroeber, Decorative Symbolism of the Arapaho, 308.

30. Gene Weltfish, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 214–15.

31. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 248.

32. Torrence, 247–48.

33. Torrence, 249.

34. Kroeber, Decorative Symbolism of the Arapaho, 309.

35. Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche, 253–54.

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THIS IS OURS, NOT YOURS Breakthroughs in Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights in Latin America As Indigenous communities in Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico codify their intellectual property rights into law, they demonstrate to the world how to protect Indigenous communal cultural expressions.

By Heidi McKinnon

L

ATIN AMERICA LEADS THE WORLD in the effort to recognize collective Indigenous intellectual property rights. Across the region communities are demanding rights to their own cultural expressions and traditional knowledge, and some are promoting their own draft legislation at the national level. Through efforts spearheaded by a national collective for weaving cooperatives in 2016, the Guatemalan legislature began reviewing amendments to existing intellectual property (IP) laws. In 2019 Guna communities in Panama stopped a blatant case of plagiarism by Nike, backed by a long-standing legal framework for collective intellectual property rights.

Chilean artists began to protest and voice their dissatisfaction with current IP laws in 2019, as did Peruvian and Bolivian communities. In January 2020 Mexican copyright laws were amended to support Indigenous artists, and sweeping new regulations are currently working through the legislative process.

When addressing intellectual property issues, it is important to review the basic terminology and understand the complexity of Indigenous intellectual property rights. The World Intellectual

above Mexico, Guatemala, and Panama are marked on the map in burgundy. opp osite An Indigenous weaver works in a cooperative and market in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, near Antigua Guatemala. Photo: Guillén Pérez (CC BY-ND 2.0).

Property Organization (WIPO) is the main international body overseeing the development of international intellectual property rights (IPR) law. WIPO houses the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC). The IGC is mandated to negotiate and draft new international instruments for the protection of traditional cultural expressions, traditional knowledge, and folklore. The committee has hosted biannual working meetings since 2001.

Francis Gurry, director general of WIPO, defines intellectual property as the “value that is added by the mind to economic production and cultural production.”1 Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) is an umbrella term that refers to the rights Indigenous people have, and want to have, to protect and preserve their customary arts and culture.

WIPO categorizes Indigenous intellectual property in two ways: traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs). Traditional knowledge focuses on genetic materials and millennial knowledge of the use of plants

1. Arts Law Center for Australia, “World Intellectual Property Organization and Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property,” July 1, 2013, web.

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in biodiversity, agriculture and health, etc.

Traditional cultural expressions refers to all forms of artistic and cultural expression practiced by a community, from their long-ago stories to dance, music, writing, arts, architecture, textile production, and beyond. TCEs will be the focus for our case studies.

In most countries around the world, ICIP rights are in the public domain, but what does that mean? It means that the appropriation of collective Indigenous cultural heritage, such as textile designs or local knowledge of herbal medicine, for commercial use is legal in a majority of countries around the world.

“Appropriation” is a kind word for plagiarism. While there can be legal ramifications for plagiarizing Indigenous intellectual property in some countries, the underlying consequences not considered by companies, designers, and individuals are beyond the scope

of Western legal frameworks. When a design, art form, or expression is plagiarized, it is devalued in complex and nonmonetary ways. Even if the intent is to celebrate or esteem a culture, community, or artist, the result is the same. For the affected community, there can be moral, spiritual, social, or psychological consequences to the misappropriation of cultural expressions that legal rulings or monetary compensation cannot repair.

Currently there are no internationally binding legal frameworks that protect traditional knowledge and traditional culture expressions, although supporting declarations exist from the United Nations, International Labor Organization, and the Organization of American States. The United Nations approved the Declaration of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the International Labor Organization adopted the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples

Convention (No. 169) in 1989, and the Organization of American States adopted the American Declaration of Indigenous Peoples in 2016. All these documents urge recognition of the collective intellectual properties of Indigenous communities.

CUSTOMARY LAW & SUI GENERIS LEGISLATION BLENDING CUSTOMARY LAW with Western legal frameworks is complicated.

Finding mechanisms to blend the Western capitalist concepts of individual private property, authorship, ownership, and monetization with non-Western views of collective property, natural resources, and customary law is one of the reasons why WIPO negotiations to create international ICIP frameworks and laws have lasted nearly 20 years. Throughout the WIPO negotiations, Indigenous communities SPRING 2020 | 41

have regularly expressed a lack of representation and protection of cultural expressions in intellectual property law.

Issues include not only the lack of collective rights, but also the acknowledgment that Indigenous concerns about intellectual property are not always about uneven power dynamics, knowledge control, or legal frameworks. Spiritual and ethical concerns, moral and cultural aspects, or centering the discourse within a human rights foundation are of equal or greater importance.

One of the most successful approaches to address the breach between these two conflicted worldviews is the concept of sui generis legislation. In the context of intellectual property law, sui generis simply means “of its own kind,”2 or a unique law created to address circumstances that do not exist within the current legal system. Enhancing the authority and legitimacy of Indigenous laws must be central to any developments in the arena of sui generis laws.

These concepts of sui generis law are rarely present in national legal frameworks. The 1935 Indian Arts and Crafts Act is an example of the earliest sui generis legislation in the United States, although its focus is on consumer protection and it does not give Indigenous communities full rights to collective intellectual property. Peru developed sui generis laws in 2002 to address the appropriation of biological traditional knowledge. In Peru researchers Brendan Tobin and Krystyna Swiderska evaluated the role of contemporary sui generis laws as follows: “The role of a sui generis regime could, therefore, be to establish a bridge between indigenous/ local community and national and international legal systems, in order to secure the effective recognition and protection of rights which derive from customary law and practice.”3 Sui generis legislation regarding traditional cultural expressions is emerging in a handful of countries around the world while the WIPO consultations continue. Taiwan, the Philippines, and

Ghana have implemented legislation with varying degrees of restrictions, and many more countries are advancing legislation to safeguard traditional knowledge. It remains to be seen what will be the next forward-thinking country to take Indigenous collective intellectual property out of the public domain and bring it in line with international human rights standards. For now, Latin America is offering several examples that the world can follow.

PANAMA: LAW NO. 20 IN JUNE 2000 the Panamanian Congress passed Law No. 20, the most comprehensive sui generis collective intellectual property rights law in the Americas.

Unique in the world at the time, the law itself passed unanimously, but the process took more than 15 years of negotiation.

Law No. 20 evolved from a series of Indigenous sovereignty laws that the Guna General Congress and other Indigenous communities in Panama fought for and negotiated over decades, beginning with the Indigenous Rights articles in the 1972 Panamanian Constitution. The 1972 Constitution and consecutive laws and resolutions enacted between 1972 and 1999 addressed protections for land tenure, collective rights, culture and self-determination, bilingual education, traditional knowledge and sustainable environmental practices, traditional medicine, marriage, and women’s equality.

Panama’s laws safeguarding intellectual property evolved throughout this period as well, beginning with a 1984 law protecting Guna textile artists from the importation of commercially made molas. Mola is the Dulegaya (Guna language) word for a highly emblematic textile art form comprised of abstract geometric and figurative designs, which women embroider into layers of rectangular cloth panels using a reverse appliqué technique. The number of cloth layers indicates the intricacy of the design and mastery of the artist.

The earliest known mola blouses were made around 1900 when trade cloth began to appear in the San Blas Islands.4 A blouse is made of two mola panels sewn together to form the front and back with an added cloth yoke for neck and arm holes, and extra cloth front and back panels attached to the bottom of the mola.

The geometric and abstract molas naga can represent elements of nature and offer protection for the wearer. Molas goaniggadi are more figurative works, expressing aspects of daily life and the interplay between man and nature.5 Prior to the development of the mola blouse, designs were painted directly on the body using predominantly red, yellow, and black natural dyes. In the late 19th century, after hundreds of years of contact with French, Spanish, Scottish, and English explorers, women wore cloth skirts only and men wore simple tunics. Once they were moved to the San Blas Islands, where winds can pass through, it is possible that Guna clothing evolved again to protect the body from unfamiliar weather conditions.

By the turn of the 20th century, production of the mola blouse began. No two molas are exactly alike, and when worn together in a blouse, they express not only protection for the wearer, just as body paint designs would have previously, but they also reflect aspects of Guna cosmology and reinforce the personhood of the wearer.

Between 1918 and 1919 the Panamanian government began to implement racist attempts at acculturation, or more correctly, cultural genocide, by issuing a series of declarations forbidding Gunas from practicing their culture or wearing various elements of adornment and dress, including the mola.6 In 1918, some Guna communities were still loyal to Colombia, years after Panama’s 1903 separation from Gran Colombia, and the forced imposition of Western-style dress by missionaries and government edicts did not foster any loyalties. After years of protracted tensions and skirmishes, Guna leaders declared the San Blas Islands

2. Jane Anderson, “Indigenous/Traditional Knowledge & Intellectual Property,” Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain, 2010, web.

3. Brendan Tobin and Krystyna Swiderska, Speaking in Tongues: Indigenous Participation in the Development of a Sui Generis Regime to Protect Traditional Knowledge in Peru (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2001), 47.

4. Diana Marks, Molas: Dress, Identity, Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 67.

5. Paola Perdomo, “The History Behind Molas,” Indi Arts, July 20, 2017, web.

6. Marks, Molas, 86.

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independent from Panama in February 1925. Dozens of people were killed during the conflicts that followed. By March, a peace agreement was brokered by the US government, which gave Guna communities living in the San Blas Islands, or Guna Yala, independence from Panama. The years-long restrictions on Guna dress and cultural practices ended, and the development of one of the world’s most distinctive textile traditions began to flourish.

Sixty years later, starting in the 1980s, the international popularity of molas exploded, leading to plagiarized, commercially produced molas flooding the Panamanian market. During this time, non-Guna individuals and companies tried to register trademarks for mola designs through the Panamanian trademark office, called the Dirección General del Registro de la Propiedad Industrial (General Directorate of the Industrial Property Registry).

When Guna women of the Cooperativa Productoras de Molas asked the Guna General Congress to support them and stop the import of these commercial textiles, the congress created a commission to address copyright issues as well as the economic impact of commercial plagiarism on the cooperative.7 In 1984, under the Noriega dictatorship, the Guna commission worked with the Panamanian Congress to successfully pass Law No. 26, prohibiting the importation of counterfeit molas to Panama.8 Ten years later, in the 1990s, Guna lawyers and representatives from various Indigenous communities further advanced copyright and Indigenous communal intellectual property rights with a succession of laws addressing traditional knowledge and new plant species, copyright, and industrial property rights, as well as the promotion and development of crafts. The precedent-setting Law No. 20 codifying collective and perpetual Indigenous intellectual property rights was passed in 2000.

Writing a law is not enough to ensure proper implementation. After 2000 all seven Indigenous communities and

the Panamanian government spent years researching and documenting the designs and cultural expressions protected under Law No. 20 in order to develop regulations for implementation and enforcement of the legal framework in Panama. That said, companies and individuals can still get away with plagiarizing Guna designs

7. Aresio Valiente López, “Experience with Act 20, June 26, 2000: Panama’s Indigenous Intellectual Property Law,” International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, March 2002, web via Internet Archive.

8. Peter S. Menell and Mark A. Lemley, “Western Intellectual Property and Indigenous Cultures: The Case of the Panamanian Indigenous Intellectual Property Law,” Boston University International Law Journal 23, no. 2 (2005): 360.

top Guna woman selling molas at San Ignacio de Tupile, Kuna Yala, Panama. Photo: Kent MacElwee (CC BY 2.0). bottom Guna mola panels at San Ignacio de Tupile, Kuna Yala, Panama. Photo: Kent MacElwee (CC BY 2.0).

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because the agencies that support the law have staffing shortages and cannot always assist Indigenous communities in Panama with monitoring and enforcement.

Unfortunately plagiarism cases like that of Nike’s 2019 shoe—a design meant to honor Puerto Rico while featuring a Guna mola design, which Nike withdrew after protests—will continue until a binding international instrument from WIPO is ratified and codified into the national laws of member states.

FRANKLIN PANAMÁ & RESOLUTION NO. 1 LUCKILY THERE ARE COMPANIES in Panama that work with Indigenous communities to support and uphold collective IP laws. Franklin Panamá is one. In 2012 Panamanian lawyer Ana Deborah began to work with the Guna General Congress and their lawyers to define a partnership and endorsement for the licensing of appropriate mola designs to be reproduced on a collection of silk and cotton scarves and small accessories.

On June 21, 2013, Resolution No. 1 from the Ministry of Commerce and Industries, General Directorate of the Industrial Property Registry of the Republic of Panama was approved.

Franklin Panamá, the brand established by Ana Deborah’s company,

Panafranc S. A., has the first licensing agreement for collective IP with an Indigenous community in Panama, and the collaboration has been a great success for both the Guna community and the company. Proceeds from the sale of the collection go to educational and cultural programs, climate change mitigation in Guna Yala, and any other uses decided by the Guna Congress. Because Panama is the first country in the Americas to legalize and codify Indigenous collective intellectual property, Franklin Panamá’s government-sanctioned license is essentially unique in the hemisphere.

MEXICO: THE FUTURE IS HANDMADE NEARLY 20 YEARS after Panama’s landmark legislation, Mexico has now taken the lead in defining Indigenous IP laws in the hemisphere and internationally.

On January 26, 2020, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Mexico became collective copyright owners of all forms of their traditional cultural expressions for the first time under Mexican law. Previously all forms of Indigenous cultural expression in Mexico were in the public domain, as is the case in many countries.

Senator Susana Harp Iturribarría, president of the Cultural Commission of

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the Senate of the Republic, and Senator Ricardo Monreal Ávila have cosponsored proposed legislation to amend copyright law as the first step in creating Indigenous collective intellectual property laws in Mexico. To safeguard Indigenous collective IP rights for Mexican communities, the first step was to take traditional cultural expressions out of the public domain by amending the copyright law.

That amendment passed both houses of the legislature and became law in 2020.

The second step involved new legislation offering rightful protections to the profound richness of Indigenous cultural expressions across Mexico.

Senator Harp and her colleagues have been working on the legislation for five years. Passed by a unanimous vote in the Mexican Senate on December 3, 2019, it is currently in the Chamber of Deputies awaiting debate. The General Law for the Safeguarding of the Elements of Culture and Identity of Indigenous, Afro-Mexican and Equitable Peoples and Communities is groundbreaking for the breadth and extent of coverage that it offers. The law establishes Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities as the rightful owners of their traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, creates legal requirements for prior consultation with Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Mexico, and offers guidelines

for sanctions and prosecution in cases of plagiarism.

The international fast fashion industry operates on borrowing trends and replicating other brands, so in some sense copying designs, Native or not, is an accepted practice. But the fact that international brands like Nike, Carolina Herrera, Max Mara, and countless others do not have internal vetting processes to address copyright or intellectual ownership in relation to Indigenous communities is an unfortunate vestige of a colonial, racist mindset that fails to engage with laws coming from places like Mexico and Panama. Under the new law there will now be communities in Mexico that can finally, quite simply, say no. No one has the right to license or reproduce Indigenous communities' designs or sensitive elements of their cultural heritage if that is their wish. It will be a great day when the legislation finally passes.

The development of regulations that will manage all requests and the process for licensing individuals or companies will pass through Mexico’s Secretary of Culture (Conaculta). Both Conaculta and the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (INPI), or National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, will undertake a research process to confirm the rightful owners of the designs in question and facilitate consultations. INPI, the secretary of culture, and the Instituto Nacional de Derechos de Auto (INDAUTOR, or the National Institute of Copyright), will work with communities throughout the process for review, approval, and registration.

Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities can sue and demand sanctions of third parties through INDAUTOR if an entity does not comply with the legislation’s requirements.

After years of work and several rounds of consultations with Indigenous communities across Mexico, Senator Harp, who is an internationally renowned musician and artist herself, had a clear idea of what was needed. She says, “The first thing they ask for is respect. The second thing they ask for is respect. The third thing they ask for is respect. And the fourth thing they ask for is assistance to market their work.”9

The legislation itself is not focused on the same language used in the international discourse or by WIPO, such as intangible and tangible cultural heritage.

Instead the law refers to all aspects of cultural heritage as “cultural elements,” making it more understandable for a general audience. This new legislation is unique in the hemisphere, building upon the Indian Arts and Crafts Acts of 1935 and 1990 in the United States and Panama’s Law No. 20 passed in 2000.

The 1935 Indian Arts and Craft Act is mainly a consumer protection law that refers to visual arts and does not include

9. Senator Susana Harp Iturribarría, in discussion with the author, February 7, 2020.

above An example of respectful partnership with Indigenous designers: Carla Fernández Fall/ Winter 2016 collection, The Nest of Quetzalcóatl. Nagua wool skirts and wraps developed with Tzotzil artists like Manuela Patishtán Pérez from San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, Mexico. Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Image courtesy of Carla Fernández. opposite, left Silk scarf by Franklin Panamá, based on mola naga designs licensed and approved by the Guna General Congress. Image courtesy of Franklin Panamá. opposite, right Silk scarf by Franklin Panamá, based on mola goaniggadi designs licensed and approved by the Guna General Congress. Image courtesy of Franklin Panamá.

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CREATION & JUSTICE 1. Work directly with artisans who created and own the designs.

2. Use an external agent to pay artists fairly for their work.

3. Pay for samples if you want to maintain relationships. People have families and lives.

4. Finance the production, 50 percent up front and the final payment within a week.

5. Credit the artists whenever their work is on display, on social media, or in any public forum.

6. Commercial reproduction, which displaces the artist and disrespects cultural knowledge, is the definition of wasteful fashion, which feeds a chain of oppression, stealing of collective intellectual property, and the exploitation of the planet’s resources for the benefit of the few.

7. If a designer wants to digitally or mechanically reproduce Indigenous designs, they must ask the entire community that owns the design and leave it up to them to decide whether they grant permission or not.

—Carla Fernández Carla Fernández, “Manifiesto de la Moda en Resistencia,” in Inventar Lo Posible, Manifiestos Mexicanos Contemporáneos, ed. Luciano Concheiro (Mexico City: Taurus, 2017), 125–30 (translated and paraphrased by the author).

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protections from appropriation of other aspects of collective cultural heritage and identity, and the 1990 act is a truth-inadvertising law prohibiting the misrepresentation of arts and crafts created by non-Native people as being Native-made.

While the team who drafted Mexico’s legislation reviewed both the Panamanian and US laws safeguarding collective intellectual property rights for TCEs, Senator Harp believes: “None of them have teeth. This law has teeth.”10 By “teeth,” Harp refers not only to sanctions and strong legal frameworks for prosecuting cases of plagiarism and the lack of community consultation, she also means the strong blending of customary law with Western legal frameworks.

The Mexican General Law for the Safeguarding of the Elements of Culture and Identity is considered an authentication model of customary law or sui generis law, as discussed earlier.

While various models of sui generis laws exist, authentication models involve community approval and authentication of Indigenous designs. Mexico’s General Law for Safeguarding is expected to be approved and pass the Chamber of Deputies in the first half of 2020.

CARLA FERNÁNDEZ LONG BEFORE THE IDEA of a national legal strategy for Indigenous intellectual property began, designers with ethics and conscience developed their own mechanisms to address community collaborations. Since 2000 Mexico City–based designer Carla Fernández has forged her own path, working in partnership with Native communities across Mexico to develop collections of innovative, sustainable clothing and home accessories. For Senator Harp and the drafters of the new Mexican IP laws, Fernández’s respect for cultural heritage and collaborative work processes with Indigenous communities across the country are considered a model for how other companies can be commercially successful while honoring Native collective intellectual property rights.

“Twenty years ago I started working in Oaxaca and Chiapas, places where there is more diversity of Indigenous groups, there is a lot of tourism, and their crafts are sold well.

We have mobile workshops that travel to the communities. What we do is very simple. We go to a community that asks us to go, we sit with them, and they teach us what they do. From that we jointly develop the new designs.”11 At a recent Mexico City event called TEXTO, where 65 international textile masters gathered to discuss the future of heritage textiles, Fernández shared her vision, the importance of supporting a movement behind heritage textiles, and the roots of her work. As a child, Fernández traveled broadly across Mexico with her father, gaining a deep understanding of the importance of preserving and supporting cultural heritage and the richness of textile artistry in Mexico. After studying art history and design, working in the cultural sector, and strengthening her relationships 10. Senator Susana Harp Iturribarría, in discussion with the author, February 7, 2020.

11. Penélope Silva Guzman, “Carla Fernández: “Nuestra alta costura se hace en las montañas, en los desiertos, en las selvas,” Luster (April 21, 2017), web. Translated from Spanish by the author.

their network across Mexico to value and promote their work.

The artists price their work with the assistance of external evaluators to avoid any power imbalances in the process. Economic stability for artists is a hallmark of the long-term relationships the company has built with the artists’ network. “Fashion is not ephemeral: our planet is not, our relationships are not. Our links with the communities we collaborate with are lasting and endearing,” Fernández shared.

Because Carla Fernández was at the forefront of designing strategies for ethical collaborations in Mexico, the company does not foresee any obstacles. Their Fall/Winter 2019 catalogue outlines seven steps called “Creation and Justice” that other designers can use for collaborations that meet standards for intellectual property in order to avoid fashion waste, whether or not laws are in place.

As Fernández says, “I do believe that the future is handmade because I don't see how we are going to achieve environmental and social balance. For me the planet is not ephemeral; human relationships are not ephemeral. It is very important to maintain that balance, and how do you do that? Working locally; working by hand.”13

GUATEMALA: AN ENDLESS FIGHT FOR DIGNITY

above Angelina Aspuac, then President of AFEDES, presenting allegations of misuse regarding collective intellectual property rights to the Constitutional Court in Guatemala. Image courtesy of AFEDES.

with multiple artists and Indigenous communities, the brand Carla Fernández was founded in 2000.

The brand’s community development director, Itzel León, explains that research and respect are central to its success and the process of collaboration. Their team begins with research, spending time in a community, understanding not only the techniques and designs, but also the interests and needs of the artists. Then they move on to a design phase. The results are an equitable collaboration between Native artists and the design team, in which a stable long-term relationship develops.

“The artists work on what they want to work on. We do not impose anything,” says León. “We work together and play with colors and materials, motivate them and reinforce the value of their work. We assess their personal needs and help them with things like opening a bank account or listening when they need support. Their garments bear witness to history.”12 Carla Fernández showcases a model of sustainability and equity in the workplace. Artists are not asked to work exclusively with the brand, and the company connects other designers with

GUATEMALA’S SOCIETY AND ECONOMY have always functioned as a consequence of varying degrees of inequality, exploitation, and outright racism against Indigenous peoples.

All three are ever-present aspects of daily life there, and countless millions of Mayas, Xinkas, and Afro-descendant Garifuna have experienced complex layers of dispossession, injustice, and historical genocide over the centuries.

Today Guatemala’s Indigenous women weavers are deftly articulating a legal argument about systemic oppression that demands collective intellectual property rights for their textiles as a response to the historic dispossession of not only their traditional knowledge systems and their image, but their land as well. For Angelina Aspuac, former President of the Asociación Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepéquez (AFEDES) weaving cooperative in south-central Guatemala, the connections are clearly linked: “We must protect our textile knowledge just as we protect our territories. Textiles are part of the territories.

To protect water and land is to protect our textile art … they are our knowledge. Maya dispossession does not happen only through territory, it happens also through the dispossession of our ancestral knowledge.”14 In 2014 AFEDES sued the Guatemalan state for appropriation of ancestral knowledge in an attempt to define the norms, laws, and regulations to end plagiarism and unfair economic practices in the textile and tourism industries. Over the years that followed, the weavers took the initiative to understand what

12. Itzel León (Community Programs Coordinator, Carla Fernández), in discussion with the author, February 6, 2020.

13. Carla Fernández, “Manifiesto de la Moda en Resistencia,” in Inventar Lo Posible, Manifiestos Mexicanos Contemporáneos, ed. Luciano Concheiro (Mexico City: Taurus, 2017), 127 (translated and paraphrased by the author).

14. Manuela Picq, “Maya Weavers propose a collective intellectual property law,” Intercontinental Cry (March 14, 2017), web.

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above Angelina Aspuac and members of AFEDES weaving cooperative at the Guatemalan Congress with draft legislation they wrote to address collective intellectual property rights in Guatemala. Image courtesy of AFEDES.

was missing in Guatemalan intellectual property law and drafted their own legislation without the help of nonprofits or outside entities.

By 2017 these textile artists had formed the Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras Mayas (National Movement of Maya Weavers) with their allies across the country. In March 2017 the group formally proposed a bill to the Guatemalan Congress that would reform articles of five intellectual property laws and give Indigenous weavers collective intellectual property rights to their designs and artwork. The proposed legislation would cede both intellectual property rights and the rights to royalties by recognizing communities and weavers as authors of their own collective, traditional cultural expressions, so exports of Guatemalan textiles would be subject to royalties paid directly to the community. As Aspuac notes, “They speak about inspiration, but

really it is cultural appropriation, and we must begin to see it as stealing.”15 The effects of cultural appropriation are multifaceted in Guatemala and expose the contradictions of systemic racism. On one hand, there are no IP laws to protect weavers and designs, which means that commercially made textiles from China flood the market for unknowing tourists to buy, forcing local artists to compete with cheaper versions of their own designs.

At the same time, Indigenous artists or communities confront insurmountable obstacles in acquiring export licenses to sell their legitimate work abroad, because a small number of exporters control the licenses.

Some Indigenous women wear fewer handmade traje, or outfits, because of discrimination, or because it seems antiquated to Indigenous youth (in part because of discrimination). As Jovita Tzul Tzul (K'iche' Maya), a lawyer for the

National Movement of Maya Weavers articulates, “Our clothes, when we wear them, are [considered] little better than rags. When they are worn by white bodies they become something beautiful.”16 One of the most egregious offenses that women’s associations express is the use of their images and textile designs by the Ministry of Tourism to sell Guatemala as a tourist destination abroad without compensation or credit. As Aspuac says: “They see us as folklore and the human side is lost. In addition, they hire people who disguise themselves with Indigenous clothing; for us that is mockery.” She goes on to say that “intellectual property protection is a fundamental dimension of autonomy.”17 The constant cultural appropriation and misuse of huipil and corte designs and textiles by fashion designers is one reason why the dispossession of knowledge must stop, but it is clearly not the only reason.

15. Picq, “Maya Weavers,” web.

16. Aisling Walsh, “Cómo Las Mujeres Mayas En Guatemala Luchan Por Proteger Sus Diseños y Su Identidad,” openDemocracy (August 8, 2018), web.

17. Walsh, “Cómo Las Mujeres,” web.

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The Guatemalan Congress accepted the proposal Law 5247 for debate in 2017, but it is still in committee. While the proposed law has allies, it is unclear how long the legislative process may take or whether a resolution might not be the first step to gain some legal protection for Maya traditional cultural expressions.

Instead of waiting for the national law to advance or for WIPO to finalize their negotiations, which Guatemala would then have to ratify, several communities are already using customary law to declare their collective intellectual property rights of textiles as ancestral heritage. At least four communities are working with local authorities to insist that the weavers themselves have the right to register their own designs. As Aspuac makes the case: “The people are the artists and authors. What we ask is that the Indigenous peoples, not just individuals

or associations, be recognized as a collective subject.”18

THE FUTURE OF IP LAWS AS ARTICLE 27 OF THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS asserts, everyone has the right to their culture and the authorship and intellectual property associated with their culture.

Across Latin America, the movement to demand the human right to collective Indigenous intellectual property has made advances far beyond most of the rest of the world, and these demands continue.

Chile is advancing with their organization and articulation of new legal frameworks for IP laws ahead of the constitutional

referendum to be held in 2020, which arose from the social unrest underway there since October 2019. Peru has passed legislation safeguarding traditional knowledge, but it lacks the full safeguarding of traditional cultural expressions.

While the collective intellectual property rights are enforceable to varying extents on a national level in some countries like Panama, the Philippines, and Ghana, the international legal mechanisms that WIPO is advancing are a dire necessity. They are desperately needed not only to protect cultural expressions and traditional knowledge, but to reinforce core elements of human dignity and agency—the right to say: “This is ours, not yours.”

Heidi McKinnon, of Curators Without Borders, has worked in the museum field for 20 years with a focus on historical memory, human rights, and Indigenous communities in the Americas. She is currently working with museum and humanitarian partners in Mexico on emergency education programs for migrant youth.

18. Picq, “Maya Weavers,” web.

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist she heals from her heart gouache on Arches watercolor paper 20 × 27 inches 2020

benjaminharjojr.com

PROFILE

MESTIZO/POTIGUARA INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

Interview and translation by Vivian Zavataro incredible sensibility to find a sometimes imperceptible sense in different things.

This unique way of seeing the world, to me, always resulted in the creation of art.

I grew up extremely poor. I did not have any resources to purchase art materials, but that never stopped me. Since I was very little I would make art with whatever I could get my hands on. Objects and supplies I found in the trash, the remains in construction sites and kitchens— everything had the potential of being transformed into art. I drew constantly.

Sometimes in school I would be expelled from the classroom for drawing and not paying attention to the teacher.

I come from an artistic family. Many of my family members were connected to art somehow. Therefore, my first artistic experiences happened at home, especially with my great-grandmother Nazaré. She was Potiguara, one of the Tupi tribes. She taught me and influenced me so much.

It was with her that I started working with ceramics. Even though I have been creating since I was very little, it was not until I was 20 that I became a professional artist—now more than 15 years on this journey.

Eu sou meus ancestrais e eles são eu.

Eu estou neles e eles sempre estão comigo, pois vivem dentro de mim.

Eu sou o povo antigo e o povo antigo sou eu.

Eu já vivi neles e eles hoje vivem dentro de mim.

I am my ancestors and they are me.

I am inside them and they are always with me, as they live inside me.

I am the ancient people and the ancient people are me.

I have lived in them and today they live in me.

—Thiago Cóstackz

P

OTIGUARA means “shrimp eater.”

Poty is “shrimp,” uara is “eater.”

The term can also indicate “the one who is knowledgeable of the art of catching shrimp.” The Potiguara are Indigenous people whose homelands are in Northeastern Brazil.

VZ: I have known you for so many years now, but I have never asked you where everything started. When did you start creating art?

TC: I cannot say if every artist is born an artist, but I certainly have been one since I can remember. I have always had an

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VZ: When experiencing, studying, and observing your work, it is obvious that you are not only an incredibly talented multimedia artist but also a passionate activist. When did you start getting involved with activism?

TC: The love for Mother Earth has always been an intrinsic part of me. Therefore my activism also started at an early age, when I was around ten years old. Back then I would summon my school friends to go to the streets and protest for preservation, conscious farming, reforestation, and also against pollution of the water sources in my town. The sugarcane plantations would dump enormous quantities of

THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

waste in the Ceará-Mirim River. We were still in the middle of the 1990s then.

As you know, this debate would take many years to intensify, to be even relevant to authorities and such. Back then, voices like my own were not heard, but things are changing today. When I moved to São Paulo in 2007, I was 21 years old. My projects started getting bigger, I founded S.O.S Terra. More and more I have been able to stand up and bring awareness to environmental and Indigenous issues as well.

VZ: Tell me a bit about your childhood, where you grew up, and how that has influenced and still influences your work.

TC: I am from Rio Grande do Norte, a state located in the northeast of Brazil.

It is one of the poorest regions of the country. Growing up surrounded by so many difficulties and hardships made me more sensitive and open to understand what the core of Brazil really is. It made

above, top Mar de Plástico (Plastic Sea), performance and installation with garbage and porcelain sculptures simulating the bleaching of coral reefs, a project of S.O.S Terra, sponsored by Air Liquide. Photo: Patrícia Alves. above, bottom Floresta Branca (White Forest), porcelain and high-fire ceramic sculpture. opposite Ritual, shadows and red, 2017, performance still. Clothing by Dinho Batista. Photo: Lienio Medeiros, Fujocka Creative Images, São Paulo. All images courtesy of the artist.

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me comprehend the Brazil that is in the margins of huge metropolises, like Rio and São Paulo—the one that no one pays attention to.

Even with many scarcities, many times of hunger, I had a childhood of freedom. I would ride my bicycle to remote places. I hiked in jungles, fished, forged friendships with a great variety of people, listened to their stories, and learned a lot from them. Growing up I suffered a great deal of prejudice for being gay, “excessively” artistic, as the region I inhabited was so conservative.

When I was 13 I was banished from my own home and had to move in with my grandparents from my mother’s side. My grandfather’s family was marked by the history of slavery and my grandmother had Potiguara heritage. Living with them was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles became true friends and inspirational mentors. These people have so much empathy; their humanity is palpable. They were always helping people in need. Having them as examples, it is no surprise I became an activist and a person so conscious of social injustice.

My grandfather João was a great supporter of the arts. My aunts introduced

me to music and literature, and my great-grandmother Nazaré was always around teaching me about herbs, history, and ceramics. I feel blessed and lucky to have been raised in such circumstances as it makes me who I am today.

VZ: A lot of the concepts used in your work are influenced by your Indigenous roots. How do you connect your ancestral cultural expressions and incorporate these in your projects and visual art?

TC: My ancestry is part of who I am. I am a Potiguara man, artist, gay, with my roots in the northeast of Brazil. It is my duty to keep my culture alive—an act of resistance in a way. I am incredibly proud of carrying my Indigenous blood in my veins. I am a descendant of a warrior tribe of Amazonian origin, one of the ethnicities that bravely resisted the colonizer. Even though this heritage is unimpressive to many Brazilians, the Potiguara culture remains vibrant and alive even 500 years after the European invasion. In a general sense, the culture of the state of Rio Grande do Norte carries a lot of Indigenous ancestry in juxtaposition with the medieval European customs that arrived with the colonizers.

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My great-grandmother and her teachings keep coming back to my practice. There were so many stories, myths, and legends she shared with me that connect me with my roots. When producing art, I gather this ancestral knowledge—these stories—and transform them into references for my creative process. Many of my ceramic sculptures, performances, writings, and even some of my songs are engulfed with the sophistication of all of my cultural heritage. I believe my generation is rediscovering the meaning of belonging; I feel that I can collaborate with this reconnection, with this “return to home” through my work.

VZ: It is evident that you have an extraordinarily rich source of inspiration. Are you also inspired by other artists?

TC: I try not to look into other artists’ works so I do not deviate from my own authorial path. I end up being influenced and inspired by what I see in my daily life rather than the works of other artists. I know it is incredibly difficult to create something from nothing, especially after all that has been produced by many geniuses; we are all influenced unconsciously.

THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

My creative process can be associated with Gesamtkunstwerk, the concept of “art in its totality,” generally attributed to the German composer Wagner.

Gesamtkunstwerk incorporates different facets of art, resulting in the union of visual arts, music, theater, literature, and dance. I consider myself a Renaissance man of sorts; therefore, I work with many ways of producing art. I am influenced by the corporal aesthetics of the Renaissance period. I deeply admire [Sandro] Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. I am also captivated by the Movimento Armorial1 and its attachment to the Brazilian Northeast culture; Art Nouveau, with its natural and organic forms; the Pre-Raphaelites, the revivalist movements (including the one inspired by Native Brazilians). As a contemporary artist, I love combining, questioning, instigating, and deconstructing dogmas and obsolete minds trapped in time.

A lot of the artistic concepts that influence me are not necessarily connected to visual arts. For instance, music, science, anthropology, and literature are great portals of creative sources.

However, if I had to talk about artists, I would say that the unknown sights of my people left many vestiges that have survived through archaeological finds and oral history. In music, I am instigated by historic instruments and ancestral sounds.

I profoundly admire David Bowie, Abba, Queen, Igor Stravinsky, [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky, [William] Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, [Mikhail] Bulgakov, Franz Kafka (I am also partially Slovakian and also connected to this aspect of my heritage), Rita Lee, Caetano Veloso, Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, Hans Arp, Anish Kapoor, and other sages who have walked on this planet.

VZ: A great deal of your oeuvre has environmental action as a base. Can you tell us a bit more about how your project S.O.S Terra sprouted?

TC: Not all of my work has the environment as a central focus, but even when the main theme diverges, the artistic

production always respects strict rules of sustainability. I never use any materials that come from animals unless I know they were sourced cruelty-free.

S.O.S Terra is a project that utilized the instigative power of art to shine light on environmental issues of our times. It started in 2008 as a single event, an urban intervention on Paulista Avenue—the most well-known and popular avenue in São Paulo. As the situation of the planet continues to worsen, the project continues to be relevant and gain traction. In 2020, we are in the twelfth edition of this project.

S.O.S Terra matured into an international endeavor. We have done numerous interventions all over the world. These are also integrative educational programs in order

above Silence and Fury, performance with porcelain sculptures and hand-painted garment. opposite Made in Brazil, 2019, ceramic sculpture.

1. Movimento Armorial is an artistic, theatrical, and philosophical movement that draws heavily from Portuguese and Afro-Brazilian history. Brazilian playwright Ariano Suassuna (1927–2014), the prime motivator of Movimento Armorial, was interested in updating historical forms of popular expression. Launched in 1970, the movement is particularly inspired by the woodblock-printed pamphlets and music of Northeastern Brazil.

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to teach the public about our responsibilities as humans toward our planet. The intent is to promote debate and show how urgent the need is for humans to change harmful habits to our planet.

VZ: Tell me about some of these environmental actions that happen through S.O.S Terra.

TC: I am proud to say we have done so much in the past ten years. We have given away more than 60,000 eco-bags in São Paulo. We had an exhibition at MASP [Museu de arte de São Paulo], Brazil’s most important museum. We have organized parades with gigantic floats and 3D mapping projections of 546 square meters in the old center of São Paulo. We have exhibited numerous performances involving body art as a way to humanize the problems and environmental disasters that affect thousands of animal species.

My intention with these artistic interventions is to instigate and guide the viewer to reflect on the issues being explored by the works. For instance, our actions have brought attention to

many Indigenous communities affected by mining and farming in the Amazon.

We also show that not only Brazil but also nations such as the United States are negatively impacting the planet with their inhabitants’ habits of consumption.

People need to know that there is no point in having sustainable farming practices in Europe while their animals are being fed with harvests that caused the destruction of tropical forests. Therefore, the focal point of S.O.S Terra is to show that there is no “we” or “them” when we talk about environmental problems. Everything matters to all of us. There will not be any immune places with climate change, so it is extremely important that the general population have access to this kind of information, wherever they might be living.

Every event and action of S.O.S Terra is free of charge, therefore accessible to all. In 2013, we accomplished the first international expedition to ten threatened places on the planet. We covered more than 62,000 kilometers, in which works of art were installed,

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connecting these places with the environmental issues they are facing. These expeditions resulted in the movie and book Caminhando Sobre a Terra: Uma Viagem a 10 Lugares Ameaçados (Walking on the Earth: A Journey to 10 Threatened Places). Thousands of these books were given away together with talks in public schools around Brazil.

In January 2018, a book Física 2 (Physics 2) was published with data acquired during our voyage to the Arctic.

This book was distributed by the Brazilian government to millions of students attending public schools. In 2018 four other publishers used information from S.O.S Terra to produce educational books.

A whole lot more is coming. Go, Planet!

VZ: What fascinates me the most about your art is the way people interact with it. Besides the visual aspect of your work, how do you think your interventions affect the public, especially in big cities?

TC: Well, it is not every day that you see a gigantic octopus flying over your head between the skyscrapers of a big city. You

THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

have to be creative in order to engage the citizens of a city like São Paulo that has more than 22 million inhabitants [who are] always focused on their own lives.

I love these urban interventions as they change the landscape of the city—making the viewer stop and interact with the art.

People always want to know what the concept is, they stop to talk and take pictures. Some will engage deeply with the subject we are exploring. It is impressive to know that even with all the access to information we have today, many of the environmental issues and the human impact on the planet are still a novelty to many. Information and quality education still face barriers, especially in societies with great economic inequalities such as Brazil and the United States.

It is always interesting to see how different the reception to these interventions are, too, from city to city.

We have had happenings in Venice, Amsterdam, Reykjavík, St. Petersburg, New York, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt.

The result is always unexpected, and it varies depending on culture, the day, the season, the light at the moment, and even the mood of the people. In Amsterdam I installed an inflatable sculpture titled Mr. Planet that represented, in metaphorical form, the planet. There, people interacted, played, petted, and punched the art piece. Everyone was invited to relate to the work, showing how they “treat” the planet in their daily lives. The same piece was installed in Saint Petersburg, and the reaction was the complete opposite. Since Russian legislation prohibits protest related to human rights, people did not want to involve themselves with my work. In less than 15 minutes, after we placed the sculpture in a piazza, the police showed up. They were aggressive and almost arrested us.

VZ: In your book, Tupiland Goes to Greenland: Expedição 2019 à Groenlândia e Amazônia, you write about the journey of being an activist.

The question that you propose is, “What can art do when civilization collapses?”

So, what can art do to help our planet and environment?

TC: As I mentioned in the book, “Art is not necessarily created with the intent of being connected to activism, but if we can use its power toward activism, why not?” I do not believe art will save the planet, but I think it can be used as a tool, sort of a mirror facing us, showing who we really are as humans. It is impossible to not imagine art as a reflection of our times.

Therefore, what can art do when civilization is about to collapse? Maybe the answer is to instigate this civilization to face itself, to self-criticize, to ask where we are heading as a species and living beings.

How do we want to be remembered? If we are not willing to question ourselves we might endure indifference.

What can art do when civilization collapses? above Vênus Boy, 2017, performance still. Photo: Lienio Medeiros, Fujocka Creative Images, São Paulo. opposite Cactus on Ice, 2019, intervention with translucent fluorine acrylic sculptures, installed in Narsarsuaq Bay in Greenland and also on an iceberg that floated in the Arctic Ocean. After installation, sculptures were donated to the Narsarsuaq Museum in Narsarsuaq, Greenland.

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VZ: Your work is always political. You explore concepts of sexual and cultural identity. Tell me about your choice of including some of these themes into your practice. above Arctic Mother Goes to Amazon, 2018, performance

by Th i a g o Có st a c k z a n d Tuiúca people in the Brazilian Amazon, a project of S.O.S Terra, sponsored by Air Liquide.

Photo: Lucas Manhani. opp osite Jaguar Man in Greenland II, 2018, performance near melting icebergs in the Bay of Narsarsuaq, Greenland, a project of S.O.S Terra, sponsored

by Air Liquide. Mask and clothing created with leftover clothing, garbage, water-based paints. Photo: Patrícia Alves.

TC: I am an artist today, and as most human beings are, I am diverse, I occupy the multiple. Artists are sensitive beings, incredibly perceptive of societal changes.

Most of the time we are the first ones to notice some of these. The artworks we create are mirrors of our times; therefore, I could never ignore the struggles of minority groups—of peoples that are left to the margins of our society. We live in a time of change, of facing conservative forces that want to keep our voices silenced, that want to deprive us of rights and sometimes even existence. Therefore,

I am an artist of my time, an artist of the rainbow.

VZ: What does the future hold for you?

TC: At the moment, I am working on a project that has as its main goal to rescue the Indigenous culture of Rio dos Índios in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.

With this project I want to empower the community so they can be aware of their rights and be able to reestablish themselves as a Native people. Between April and May this year, I will be publishing my new book and documentary, in collaboration with Irmãs de Criação and Younik [a Brazilian video production company], titled A Terra de Frente (Facing the Earth).

This project could not have been possible without the sponsorship of Air Liquide, our biggest supporter in this fight.

CÓSTACKZ.COM Vivian Zavataro is the 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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THIAGO CÓSTACKZ

Canção de Kalaallit Nunaat

Song of Kalaallit Nunaat

Sassuma Arnaa—Nuna Akna (mãe Terra)

Nossa Terra, terra do povo do Norte.

Nossa terra, sem posse, sem templos, só parte de tudo.

Gelo azul, urso branco, bota vermelha.

Azul e branco, branco e vermelho.

Olhos pequenos, reverência e humildade.

Aquilo que se parece com areia e aquilo que se parece com um lago.

Proci ss ão fantasmagór ica de luminosas almas azuis.

Partem mais velozmente no verão, mas depois da máquina de cinzas, também no inverno.

Terra verde, gelo no horizonte.

Cobertor branco, manto frio sobre terra verde, hora sobre rocha, hora sobre verde.

Veneno que vem de longe, não há parede, caminha através da solidariedade silenciosa do ar.

Tornando o atmosfera levemente macabro e mortal. Metal que infecta o branco lácteo mammalis.

Povo pouco … norte da esfera.

Caçador mata, lança que rasga o som do vento frio.

Our Earth, land of the people of the North.

Our land, no ownership, no temples, just part of the whole.

Blue ice, white bear, red boot.

Blue and white, white and red.

Small eyes, reverence and humbleness.

Some aspects that resemble sand and others that look like a lake.

Ghostly procession of luminous blue souls.

They leave faster during summer, but after the appearance of ash machines, also during the winter.

Green land, ice on the horizon. White blanket, cold blanket on green land, time over rock, time over green.

Poison that comes from afar, no barricade, it travels through the silent solidarity of the air. Making the atmosphere slightly macabre and deadly. Metal that infects the white milk of mammals.

Small community … north of the sphere.

The hunter kills, spear that tears the sound of the cold wind.

—Thiago Cóstackz

Barco zarpa, montanhas me encaram e seus deuses parecem me guiar.

Eles são antigos, mais antigos do que os espíritos do ar, os demônios das águas e as danças do fogo. Ao longe, a entidade imaterial branca se impõe sobre o entendimento.

Racha, sangra e escorre em direção ao quente fluxo do escuro oceano do Norte.

Eu não sou dessas terras, mas elas me abraçam como se eu voltasse para casa, como se voltasse em um mau momento. A ilha é minha casa, mesmo que em um lugar secreto de minhas ancestrais vontades.

Sassuma Arnaa—Nuna Akna (Mother Earth) The boat sets sail, the mountains stare at me, and their gods seem to guide me.

They are ancient, older than air spirits, water demons, and fire dances. In the distance, the white immaterial entity imposes itself on judgment.

It splits, bleeds, and flows towards the warm flow of the dark Northern Ocean.

I am not from these lands, but they embrace me as if I have returned home, as if I have come back in an evil time. The island is my home, even if in a secret place of my ancestral wills.

—Thiago Cóstackz SPRING 2020 | 57

PROFILE

OKANOGAN/ARROW LAKES INSTALLATION ARTIST

RYAN! FEDDERSEN

By Jean Merz-Edwards

T

HROUGH INTERACTIVE MURALS, site-specific installations, and immersive public artworks, RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen upends power dynamics in the art world. She mobilizes this shift through an art practice that involves creating work as experience rather than commodity.

Specifically grounded in the concept of art as community practice, this approach finds deep roots in many Indigenous communities.

Feddersen grew up in Wenatchee, Washington, is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and belongs to the Okanogan and Arrow Lakes bands.

According to her website, she applies “Plateau storytelling” to historical and current issues and “creates material applications which interrogate official histories, examining how what we think has been formed by the information we have been taught.”

In addition to a rich creative upbringing, Feddersen studied at Institute of American Indian Arts (2005), Pilchuck Glass School (2008), and earned a bachelor of fine arts from Cornish College of the Arts (2009).

Presently, she is working on a master of arts degree in curatorial practice from the University of Bergen in Norway.

Her recent awards include a national fellowship in visual arts from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and a visual artist fellowship from Artist Trust. Feddersen’s active installations may be experienced in Sum Artists at the Minus Space of Hamilton College’s Wellin Museum of Art in Clinton, New York (through June 14), and in Audubon/ RYAN! The Naturalist and The Trickster at the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Washington (through May 10).

in art making. That made me evaluate more specifically what kind of artist I wanted to be.… It was about making things that were about and for community. From there I evolved into interactive work and to this idea that the value isn’t placed on the object that you can’t touch, that’s collected, that is separated from community, but it works where experience and access are forefronted.

JME: In a July 2018 Crosscut article you stated, “I don't generally make things that are salable. I think about action and how action can amplify metaphor.”

Would you speak to the connections between nonsalable artwork, action, and metaphor?

RF: For me, art does not live in the piece that’s made. It lives in the process. Since I make work that uses action and interactivity to understand the work through metaphor, it doesn’t always associate with work that is object oriented or results oriented. And so, it’s about shifting priorities to process and experience, and away from commodity.

JME: How did you come to that process?

RF: Well, a big part of it was inspired by a class I took at the Institute of American Indian Arts on Indigenous art history. … [Edward Wapp Jr. (Comanche/Sac & Fox, 1943–2016)] wanted to talk about the fundamental difference between the Western art canon and Indigenous values

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JME: When I walked through Coyote Now (Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2018), I thought it was brilliant.

That show engaged the global through storytelling about the environment and the local though topical issues participants engaged. Also, it reached little kids, big kids, and adults. How did you do that?

RF: Well, thank you. That includes other parts of my practice. I believe art and the artist’s role are fundamentally about service and experience. Art lies in the experience people have while engaging with it. That is a big part of why I think about interactive work.… When I’m making a piece, it is a meditation on the subject and is very introspective. It’s how I figure out the world. I am interested in sharing that experience and bringing in people’s action and engagement, particularly in ways that reinforce a symbolic metaphor within the piece. It’s a powerful way to communicate and create dialogue.

I’m not making salable work, because I’m thinking about making experiences more so than objects.

JME: This process disrupts the history of art and departs from the economic system currently operating within the art world.

RYAN! FEDDERSEN

RF: When you think about design or other industries, it’s very normal to think that if you want to have an experience, you need to compensate for it. I had a longtime interest in public art, because of this idea about making artwork and art experience for everyone, and not just a gallery or collection model. When I put my focus in that direction, it illustrates different working expectations and conditions, which I reflect into museums.

JME: Is there anything else you want to say about the collaboration between artists, museum, and museum visitor?

RF: One fascinating thing is seeing how engagement changes in different spaces.

I’ve presented variations of Coyote Now in different institutions and with different communities. Far from being a stagnant work that has typical results, I often see different things come from these spaces.

Timing also really affects how people interact with the show as well.

JME: Do you have any specific examples?

RF: Yes, an iteration went into Missoula Art Museum during Trump’s inauguration. And so, that conversation and conversations leading up to the inauguration were very much represented within the piece.

JME: Do you see all the installations when they close?

RF: No, different things happen in different places. I have the results of some of the projects. For example, I have this history of the different Coyote Now projects. In the case of the museum in Santa Cruz, they photographed it at different points in the project and then, at the end it just came down.

JME: In some ways it is like a theater production. It is not recorded live and when it’s over it’s over. The value lies in the shared experience between the actors and the audience. Is that true?

RF: Yes, I am prioritizing the experience.

These are hard to document. It is very much something that you have to be in the space to experience.

JME: I have noticed that you don’t use the word viewer. Do you use the word participant?

RF: Sometimes. I use the word audience, as well. I guess that ties to your connection of it being performative. Sometimes I think about the pieces as performances that I am choreographing with an audience that is enacting them.

JME: Who is your intended audience?

above Detail of Coyote Now, 2015, interactive installation with ink on board, cast crayon, 84 × 336 in., commissioned by the Tacoma Art Museum for the Northwest Native Celebration, Tacoma, Washington. Photo: Timothy Aguero. opposite RYAN! Feddersen.

Photo: Natali Wiseman. All images courtesy of the artist.

RF: I try and keep the work accessible. It’s important to me that it can be SPRING 2020 | 59

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accessed and appreciated by both Native and non-Native audiences, by both art educated and non–art educated audiences. I think about how when you are making works that are looking at social issues or histories, it’s not enough to just tell people about them. An audience that is well-informed and experienced in these issues should be getting something from the piece too. I try to incorporate a way to process the information that is being shared and not merely to spread the information, if that makes sense.

JME: It does. You empower the audience to process it in their own way. You’re not didactic, you’re not preaching to them. You detach yourself from the outcome. With Coyote Now, I observed how people were in dialogue with each other through the work. I could tell that people self-regulated, for example, if someone said something negative, someone else would scratch that out and replace it with something positive.

RF: It is a mutual responsibility, which is really beautiful. Someone comes in and tags a piece and makes a provocative

statement that’s intended to get attention.

People in the audience will feel responsibility towards the work and will color it out. It’s an interesting way of engaging with the piece, because it’s just saying, “It’s ours.” I have actually been policed in one of my early pieces, Bumber by Number (2011), a large-scale color-by-number parody of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1862–63). It was working with crayons that were [molded to resemble] food. A six-year-old girl thought I was using the wrong color. I had an asparagus, and she thought that it should have been a green bean. It was very cute. She came up and told me I was doing it wrong, that I had selected the wrong color. She provided me with what she thought was the appropriate piece to engage with. I didn’t tell her that I was the artist. And so, she was making sure everyone was following the rules.

JME: Speaking of being an artist, how did you know you were going to be an artist?

RF: Originally, when I was young, I thought I was going to be a lawyer,

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and I imagined the best job was being a Supreme Court justice. When I was about 13, I started working more in art and seeing these possibilities of all kinds of ways to affect culture and society. A creative practice is truer to myself and my skill set than the legal sector. I wanted to take some of the things that inspired me towards that area … like justice and change … and apply those to an art’s practice.

JME: Your oeuvre consists of a prolific body of work in addition to professional experiences such as curating. What are your strategies for shifting between creating your art and curating successful shows?

RF: I look at curatorial practice in a way that’s similar to how I look at artistic practice. It’s about sharing an experience. It’s extremely important to generate content and knowledge in exhibitions. I’m not interested in surveys or just showing artwork but in creating a dialogue with the works. I work in layered content, building opportunities for learning and understanding. There is a responsibility,

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above Bumber by Number Mural, 2011, installation of digital prints, cast crayon and cast paper, 96 × 288 in, upon completion. opposite Bumber by Number Mural, 2011, installation of digital prints, cast crayon and cast paper, 96 × 288 in., initial phase.

It’s not about one artist making it.

That doesn’t matter.

You need a lot. You need to overwhelm. as a curator, to really think through and appreciate your power in presenting that conversation. As a curator, you present more than create.

I’m thinking about a way to be a mentor and to build a network. My motivation for doing more curatorial work is that I want to build scaffolds, not ladders. Making room to bring more people up is how you build movement and momentum. It’s not about one artist making it. That doesn’t matter. You need

a lot. You need to overwhelm. I try and have a balance of representing emerging artists with more established artists. You have got to get people in that door and let them find out about artists they have not had access to yet. That is why I have had a focus on group exhibitions as well—to bring in more voices.

JME: What prompted you to move in the direction of getting a master’s degree in curatorial practice?

RF: I had a few experiences curating, and I realized that it was something that I wanted to continue to do. It is a good way to support work in my community and to expand the dialogue. You see a lot of repetition in shows that reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate an essential view of what it is to be contemporary Native artists. I want to provide opportunities that expand

and reflect what people are doing, and not just what some people think they should be doing. I see curating as an opportunity to do that. Also, I wanted to have better skills … and to expand my qualifications. When you are working as a guest [curator], there are institutions who want access to your knowledge but don’t want to put the same value on the work as they would if you were a “real” curator. I want my credentials to not be a question. I want to take out that obstacle.

JME: In a statement from your Native artists fellowship with the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, you said, “The more artists I meet like myself, mixedrace tribal members who struggle with authenticity, self-representation, and the perceived value of their voice, the more important I feel that it is for people to SPRING 2020 | 61

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above 900* Horses, 2015, social engagement project with pulverized chalk pastel–based paint, 2,000 square feet, at Spokane Tribal Gathering Place, Spokane, Washington. Photo: SpokaneArts. opposite NEXUS, 2019, bronze, steel, cedar, glass, ceramic, copper, etched concrete, at the Prairie Line Trail, Tacoma, Washington. Commissioned by the City of Tacoma with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. artist statement " Ta k i n g inspiration from childhood games of 'playing store,' NEXUS is staged as a trading space that you can step into, making room for imaginative play while also learning about intertribal relationships."

keep pushing the boundaries, to keep honoring the legacy of innovation in our culture and representing all aspects of their lives, including demonstrating cultural heritage, referencing colonial histories, and relating it all to our contemporary influences and struggles.”

Consistently, your art achieves these ambitions in the most revolutionary ways. What drives you to realize these standards and at such a prolific pace?

RF: This question relates deeply to my intended audience. Or if not my intended audience, the audience that inspires and drives me. I feel like standards are intrinsically scribed to my practice. I do love making things, and I have this creative drive that a lot of artists have, but what makes me do this every day as a practice and profession and with my life is working with larger ideas. For me, it is bringing purpose to the work that I do.

And prolific, I don’t know. I think that the work looks different, because I work at such a large scale. If I was making small works maybe it wouldn’t seem as prolific,

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but I guess I just keep working and getting excited by new opportunities and new projects and feel it’s the pace the world is moving.

JME: Despite heavy subject matters, your art has a playfulness and hopefulness that empowers visitors to engage difficult realities—such as damage to our natural environment—and contemplate our individual and collective responses.

What are some of the most significant responses you’ve had to your creations?

RF: One of the things that motivates me to use play and fun in works that are very serious is the mindset that it puts people in—one towards discovery. And, one where people can experience introspection and epiphany without feeling alienated, threatened, or called out. One of the most profound instances of this was 900* Horses (2015), a temporary community-enacted memorial to approximately 900 horses that were slaughtered by the US military as an act of intimidation during the Indian Wars. I had a conversation with

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a war veteran who was telling me that the piece gave him a different way to think about war crimes and to process some of his experiences, and to step outside of them and think back and reflect. That was a very powerful and surprising conversation for me.

JME: Within that discovery and self-reflection, there is a space for healing. I experienced a component of healing in your work. Some days, I’m so heavy because of what’s happening to the earth. And yet, when I went through Coyote Now, I felt like I wasn't the only one who was carrying this heaviness.

It was healing for me, in a little way, to remember that we are all in it together.

Do you see that at all?

RF: That pretty much reflects things I’m trying to communicate in these pieces, because I’m interested in introspection,

epiphany, and change. These are things I want to share. With 900* Horses, the participants were creating an effigy for each one of the slaughtered horses. It was a gift: the gift of your creativity, your time, your engagement. You’re actively giving something of yourself to honor an animal that was killed more than a hundred years ago. 900* Horses was the way a lot of people were learning about the history of this place. The intent was to learn about it from a different mindset that’s not polarizing, but an invitation.

JME: When you say you want change to happen, what changes are you

particularly focused on? What issues currently occupy your thoughts?

RF: It is multifarious. The core my work is about visioning better futures and challenging dominant societal norms.

Particularly, I’m looking at all relationships between the other living things, including the land. Our society is very much out of balance, particularly through those in power. It ripples out, and that’s very destructive. Continuously, there is an evolution of issues. And there are a lot.

I’m working to pick apart the ones that I have the most opportunities to affect and talk about.

RYANFEDDERSEN.COM Jean Merz-Edwards is an author and art historian based in Salina, Kansas. She earned her art history master’s degree 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 (Hopi/Choctaw).

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TLINGIT ARMOR-MAKER AND WOODCARVER

TOMMY JOSEPH

By Christopher W. Smith Joseph often blends and bends forms to tell stories and subvert expectations in Tlingit design. Joseph examines politics and identity through his art, in tune with what is happening in that moment, as seen with his Tlingit legging armor, Idle No More (2013), and the recent creation of a portable, political shame (or ridicule) pole. In 2019 Joseph and his carving went viral on social media for a shame pole that features Alaskan governor Michael Dunleavy and US President Donald Trump that traveled from Sitka to the state capital of Alaska in Juneau.

Often playful and engaging, this fusion of humor, culture, and design centers Joseph’s practice as an educator and artist.

THE TRUMP & DUNLEAVY SHAME POLE

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ORN IN 1964, Tommy Joseph is a Tlingit artist and educator of the Kaagwaantaan (Eagle/Wolf clan) living and working in Sitka, Alaska. Originally from Ketchikan, he made his first carving while in the third grade in 1972. In the ensuing five decades, Joseph has revitalized ancestral forms of Northwest Coast technologies and art to become one of the highest regarded Tlingit carvers alive today. Joseph has won several prestigious awards for his artwork, including grants and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, United States Artists, and the Rasmuson Foundation.

Joseph’s creations can be found internationally in fine public and private collections. Recent commissions include a three-piece wool suit titled My Ancestors (2009–2015) for the Fabric Workshop and

Museum in Philadelphia; a three-figure house post (2016) for the Department of the Interior Museum’s long-term exhibition People, Land & Water in Washington, DC; The Storyteller’s Pole (2018), a monumental sculpture for the Petersburg Public Library in Petersburg, Alaska; and a kinetic fish and seafloor sculpture (2018) that spins 360 degrees for the Sitka Sound Science Center. Since 2012, Joseph and his partner and apprentice, Kristina Cranston (Tlingit), have owned and operated Raindance Gallery in Sitka, which carries artwork by Joseph, Cranston, and other Alaska Native artists from the Sitka area and beyond.

Joseph deploys his artwork in the service of activism and education.

Known as a versatile artist who works in both ancestral and current styles,

“WHEN THE GOVERNOR cut the funding and made our arts council go away overnight, that hit everybody end to end, top to bottom,” Joseph recounts to me. “Alaska is a huge state with a lot of artists. I had jobs I was working on that just disappeared; people I was communicating with through the council on the arts were just gone. It immediately affected me with my jobs going away, and I was thinking that my teaching job at the university could also be in jeopardy.”

Conservative Alaskan governor Michael Dunleavy proposed a controversial state budget in 2019 that slashed funds to arts and education programs, resulting in the temporary shuttering of the Alaska State Council on the Arts (ASCA).1 Defunding the ASCA made Alaska the only US state without an arts council and was a contributing factor to

1. Zachary Small, “Alaska Will Become First State Without an Arts Agency If Governor’s $444 Million Budget Veto Holds,” Hyperallergic, July 3, 2019, web.

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TOMMY JOSEPH

the grassroots gubernatorial recall effort that is currently under way. The budget cuts also sharply reduced ferry services with the Alaska Marine Highway, a move that disproportionately affects coastal Alaska Native communities that rely on the ferries for transportation, access to medical service, and food security. In response to these budget cuts, Joseph and Cranston carved what is called a shame pole—this one bearing the likenesses of Donald Trump and Dunleavy. Regarding his motivation for the project, Joseph stated, “When things really start hitting you at home, when things start affecting you, I’m not a person to write or call my representative, but I did what I could with what I knew how to—by creating my art.”

Historically, when a Northwest Coast clan is owed a debt or has been slighted, the aggrieved party could commission a carving that publicly displays the crest of the offender or depicts them in an unflattering fashion until the debt or offense has been settled.

Joseph and Cranston’s pole is one of just three shame poles made in Alaska in recent years. The other two poles were raised in 2007 and 2017, respectively, by carver Michael Webber (Tlingit/Sugpiaq/ Eyak) for Exxon Mobil Corporation’s role in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill,2 and an updated iteration of the William Seward pole, by interdisciplinary artist Jackson Polys (Tlingit), that coincided with the sesquicentennial of the Alaska Purchase.3 At eleven-and-a-half feet tall, the Trump and Dunleavy Shame Pole is relatively flat and lightweight, allowing it to be easily transported by one or two people, rather than anchored and stationary as with most Northwest Coast poles.

Fittingly, the wood used for the pole is left over from a state-funded project that Joseph recently completed. The hybrid nature of the pole, with allusions to Northwest Coast design elements, Western realism, and the exaggerated features of caricature, is a style that Joseph has spent years developing in his sculptural work.

The Trump figure is depicted on the bottom of the shame pole, clad in a red tie, orange spray tan, a pair of white baby booties, bone spur, and a removable baby pacifier. At the top of the pole is Dunleavy, depicted in the same quasi-naturalistic fashion as Trump but with fewer accessories. Between the two political figures is a blank shaft covered with chalkboard paint featuring two “Twitter” style birds, allowing the shame pole to dynamically highlight emerging news and be deployed as a protest sign. Describing the pole, Joseph stated that the figures are “not really flattering images, but we’re trying to make a point.”4 To make that point, Joseph

above Tommy Joseph with the Trump and Dunleavy Shame Pole in 2019 at the Juneau welcome sign in Auke Bay, Alaska. Image courtesy of Planet Alaska. Photo: Yéilk’ Vivian Mork (Tlingit). opposite Tommy Joseph poses with The Storyteller’s Pole in 2018 after its installation at the Petersburg Public Library in Petersburg, Alaska. Image courtesy of the Rasmuson Foundation.

2. “Shame pole unveiled on anniversary of Exxon Valdez spill,” Indian Country Today, March 30, 2007, web.

3. Emily Moore, “The Seward Shame Pole: Countering Alaska’s Sesquicentennial,” Alaska Historical Society, accessed February 10, 2020, web.

4. Nina Sparling, “Ridicule totem shames Trump, Dunleavy,” KCAW Raven Radio, July 25, 2019, web.

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wanted to raise awareness about the effect of the budget cuts on Alaskan artists and communities by taking the shame pole to other parts of the state, including Juneau, Alaska’s capital.

Yéilk' Vivian Mork (Tlingit/ Sámi/Native Hawaiian) and Aakatchaq Schaeffer (Iñupiaq) are longtime friends of Joseph and co-owners of Planet Alaska, an Alaska Native, women-owned art gallery in Juneau. Planet Alaska is also the name of a popular social media page run by Mork and her mother, Vivian Faith Prescott (Sámi), that shares news, photographs, art, and other items of interest about Alaska on Facebook to a wide and diverse audience. When Mork and Schaeffer heard that Joseph wanted to travel the pole, they arranged for it to be displayed at their gallery in downtown Juneau. Once there, Joseph posed with the pole in locations across the capital, including the governor’s mansion, the welcome sign at the ferry terminal, and even at a protest for the reduction in

funds to the ferry system. Mork posted images of Joseph and the shame pole on the Planet Alaska Facebook page, which quickly went viral and caught the attention of local and national media.

The pole remained in Juneau at Planet Alaska after Joseph returned to Sitka, doing the work it was intended to do. “Not everyone was happy that I had the shame pole at the gallery,” Mork said, “but I think it initiated difficult and important dialogues between Alaskans, visitors, conservatives, liberals, Native, and non-Native people. That’s what good art is supposed to do.” Mork noted that the pole is now housed at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council. The effort to recall the governor and stabilize education and arts funding in Alaska is ongoing, and Mork and Schaeffer have so far raised $1,000 toward touring the shame pole to other communities with hopes that it will not only travel across Alaska, but the Lower 48 as well.

5. “The Battle of 1804,” National Park Service, April 26, 2016, web.

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TLINGIT ARMOR & WEAPONRY VIRAL IMAGES of a political shame pole notwithstanding, Joseph is best known for his work to revive Tlingit armor and weapon technology. Striking and elaborate, Tlingit armor is composed of a massive, carved figural helmet, face guard, elk hide undergarment, and slats of hardwood (often yew or spruce) lashed together to protect the chest, back, and legs of the wearer. This style of armor was highly effective in protecting against European weapons and often gave Tlingit warriors an edge in close-contact conflicts.

The year 2004 marked the bicentennial of the Battle of 1804, an important war in Sitka Tlingit history involving K'alyáan, the leader of the Kiks.ádi (Raven/Frog clan), and the Russian American Company and its leader, Alexander Baranov.5 This anniversary got Joseph thinking about Tlingit armor and weaponry and how to reproduce these

TOMMY JOSEPH

technologies in the present. He said, “I started digging into Tlingit armor, and there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there about the weaponry, armor, and battles. What I found wasn’t satisfying at all. The more I looked and the less I was finding, the more I wanted to know.” Information on the topic of Tlingit armor was sparse and presented Joseph with an opportunity for firsthand research and exploration. “I started with books and local museums around Sitka, then the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, and the Burke Museum in Seattle. A bit later I won a visual artist fellowship that allowed me to travel for three weeks around the East Coast and visit 19 Smithsonian affiliated museums.”

After completing that National Museum of the American Indian’s artist leadership fellowship in 2009, Joseph continued visiting museum collections in Europe, including Russia. He returned to Alaska after circumnavigating the globe.

Soon after completing his initial research, Joseph won a United States Artists award that allowed him to travel to more museums in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including St. Petersburg in Russia, to see the oldest Tlingit objects in public collections. Joseph noted that Russia, in particular, proved fruitful in engaging with early material and that “when Russians left Sitka, they took all of this weaponry with them. I went and saw it in person. What wasn’t on exhibit I got to handle in their storage facilities.”

Joseph’s comprehensive, hands-on study of Tlingit armor prepared him for the next phase of his research: to actually produce functional armor and weaponry.

Joseph won an individual artist fellowship in 2012 from the Rasmuson Foundation to upgrade his workshop and purchase articulated mannequins and raw materials to continue his work with Tlingit armor. “I got my Rasmuson grant to help boost me along on the armor project. I was creating a show and had six battle warriors in full armor, five male warriors and one female. I had been working on it for a number of years when I got a call from the state museum giving me a slot for a solo show,” Joseph said.

The exhibition, Rainforest Warriors: Tlingit Armor by Tommy Joseph, ran from April 5, 2013 to October 12,

2013, at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. Completed in collaboration with Cranston, the show featured six complete sets of body armor, associated weaponry such as daggers and spears, and historic examples of armor and daggers from the museum’s collection. After Rainforest Warriors closed, the Alaska State Museum purchased one set of armor for their permanent collection with funds from the Rasmuson Foundation.

Since this 2013 solo exhibition, other museums have featured Joseph’s armor including the Canadian War Museum

above K'alyáan’s Raven Armor (left) and Marten Female Warrior Armor (right) from the exhibition Rainforest Warriors: Tlingit Armor, 2013, brown bear fur, acrylic paint, hemp, copper, elk hide, deer hide, Chinese coins, operculum, seed beads, alder, spruce. Image courtesy of the Alaska State Museum. Photo: Sara Boesser. opposite Tlingit battle helmets from Rainforest Warriors: Tlingit Armor, 2013, polar bear fur, human hair, operculum, copper, acrylic paint, elk hide, alder. Image courtesy of the Alaska State Museum. Photo: Sara Boesser.

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above Idle No More from Rainforest Warriors: Tlingit Armor, 2013, acrylic paint, hemp, spruce. Image courtesy of the Alaska State Museum.

Photo: Sara Boesser. opposite K'alyaan Pole, 1999, red cedar, paint, copper, 35 feet high, erected to commemorate Kiks.ádi clan ancestors who perished in the 1804 Battle of Sitka, collection of Sitka National historical Park, Alaska, SITK 22619. Photo: Robert A. Estremo (CC BY-SA 2.5).

in Ottawa, Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, and most recently in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. Today Joseph is regarded as an authority on Tlingit armor and weaponry and is often called on to lecture about the history, production, and significance of historical Tlingit armor. A good measure of Joseph’s success in raising awareness of and educating about Tlingit armor within the community is the appearance of armor as regalia among dancers at the biennial Celebration gathering hosted by Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau.

TEACHING & SHARING ACROSS CULTURES BEGINNING AROUND 1980, Joseph studied under carver and printmaker Freda Diesing (Haida, 1925–2002) at the Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan.

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Diesing was a pioneering Northwest Coast female carver, and, through her involvement with the Kitanmax School of the Northwest Coast Indian Art, instrumental in teaching a generation of prominent, northern Northwest Coast artists including Norman Tait (Nisga’a, 1941–2016), Dempsey Bob (Tahltan/ Tlingit), and Don Yeomans (Haida). The University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka, hired Diesing to teach in 2002, but she died that year in a car accident.

Upon Diesing’s passing, Joseph was invited by the University of Alaska Southeast’s art director to teach in her place. “I had never taught before, but she was my teacher, and I couldn’t say no. So, there I was, teaching the same class I had taken from her some 20 years earlier.”

Joseph continues to teach carving and Tlingit customary technology, such as halibut hook and bentwood box making, at the University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka, and the Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan.

Even prior to his involvement with the university, Joseph’s work as an artist has always revolved around education and sharing. From 1990 until its closure in 2011, Joseph was a resident carver at the Southeast Alaska Indian Cultural Center (SAICC). In his role at SAICC, Joseph gave carving demonstrations, taught art classes, created monumental totem poles, and was the public face of Tlingit culture for tens of thousands of cruise ship visitors to Sitka every summer. Joseph remembered this time fondly, saying, “It was fun to meet people from all over the world and hear their stories. It was my job to educate, share, and sometimes point things out to misinformed people.”

Through his art and teaching, Joseph has had the opportunity to share his knowledge and skills with people around the globe. He feels an especially strong affinity with Māori people, who have hosted him over the years in cultural art exchanges. In the last few decades, First Nations and Alaska Native people of the Northwest Coast have built strong ties with the Māori people of New Zealand, pointing to shared cultural features such as clan houses, social structures, carved poles, and intricate, two-dimensional line

TOMMY JOSEPH

arts. Reflecting on his first trip to New Zealand, Joseph stated, “It was the most amazing experience. The first time I was there I was staying at the art school, and there’s a Māori guy walking by that I would swear was my cousin. He looked just like my cousin from Klawock!” But for Joseph, the connection is more than skin deep.

While in New Zealand, he examined Tlingit and Māori objects held in museums, noting, “You can start to make comparisons.

Māori fishing gear looks just like Tlingit fishing gear. It’s the same ocean, just opposite ends of the world. There are connections there.” Joseph has returned to New Zealand three times since that first visit and continued to explore cultural connections through artist exchanges and collaborative projects.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE: FISHING GEAR & STEAMED CANOES “I HAVE A 20-FOOT DUGOUT CANOE that’s almost done,” Joseph shared. “It’s going to have a mast and sail, and I’m going to make all of my own fishing gear. I’m making halibut hooks, trolling hooks, all the old-school stuff that I’ve seen and learned about in museums around the world, and I’m going to go out and fish them. I’ve planned everything in the boat as traditionally as I can, just to have the experience. I know people who have gone out with the wooden halibut hooks and caught fish on them, but I don’t know anyone who’s gone out in a dugout canoe with a paddle, sail, and done all of that stuff.”

Ask Tommy Joseph what’s on his mind for the future, and like so many Alaskans, he’ll tell you: fishing. The customary Tlingit way of fishing that only uses ancestral methods, to be exact. Tlingit fishing technology is astonishingly complex, fusing deep environmental knowledge with Indigenous engineering.

Carved two-piece wooden hooks cannot only catch large bottom-dwelling fish such as halibut but can select fish for size by adjusting the aperture of the hook barb.

While interest in reviving various aspects of Tlingit fishing has grown in recent years, including the creation of dugout canoes and two-piece halibut hooks, these projects have largely not been in conversation with one another. Joseph wants to remedy that through this fishing project, and like his work with armor, bring together his years of museum-based research and traditional knowledge and apply it to an embodied, lived, cultural experience. “I want to do it all—gathering herring in the spring with a herring rake, collecting seaweed, all of it. I also want to photograph and record the process so even though I’m doing it for me, others will benefit from it as well.” As in his other projects, Joseph’s work continues to innovate and teach on the art and culture of the Tlingit people of Alaska.

FACEBOOK.COM/RAINDANCEGALLERY Christopher W. Smith grew up in Alaska and is a doctoral student in museum anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

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SENECA BEADWORK ARTIST, PAINTER & PRINTMAKER

LUANNE REDEYE

By Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

above Dear Gram, 2018, selfportrait, oil, acrylic on panel, 40 × 30 in. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Jackie’s Hands, 2018, oil on panel, 10 × 8 in.

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AISED ON THE ALLEGANY I N D IA N R E S E RVAT I O N in New York, Seneca artist Luanne Redeye exhibits her work nationally as well as in Spain and the United Kingdom. She earned her BFA in studio art in 2008 from State University of New York Oswego and her MFA with distinction in painting and

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drawing in 2011 from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Redeye taught art and history classes at the University of New Mexico and served as an instructor at Central New Mexico Community College. After years of living in New Mexico, she moved back to New York in August 2019. There she teaches painting, including figure painting, full time in the Department of Art and Design at Binghamton University.

Redeye is known for her figurative paintings and drawings of Indigenous people, which comprise the larger body of her work since 2011. “All that work is about my drive to create this representation of Native people in the art world, in naturalistic painting or in realist painting,” explains Redeye, “to have the images where I don’t set up the photo or set up the person—it’s just as they are. I find that the most interesting. Just what they’re doing in that moment feels the most relatable and the most relaxed. People are able to connect to the image, because maybe they could see themselves or their family or cousins or friends within them, so it doesn’t have to be specifically Native. Part of my goal is to show who the person is, to show their likeness, to have them be represented, and to have them be seen.”

During her art residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 2018, she painted members of the IAIA community, including Tiffany (2018), which depicts Chemehuevi/Konkow/ Nisenan artist Tiffany Adams with her characteristic chin tattoos. Redeye also made large-scale monotype portraits of her uncle Steve, who looks out at the viewer with a gentle smile and kind eyes, his features rendered in loose strokes of black. The smallest monotype is six by four feet, which communicates a sense of this man’s importance to Redeye.

LUANNE REDEYE

Some of Redeye’s works are less direct, playing with the idea of what portraiture means. In the oil painting Jackie’s Hands (2018), the composition crops below the subject’s shoulders and above her feet, yet what is shown reveals a specific individual. A woman, presumably Jackie, sits on a soft, burgundy couch, her brown hands resting on her eye-catching skirt made with ribbons, patchwork, and a bat-print fabric. She appears to be older, with lines and visible veins on her hands, and gently bent fingers manicured with a mahogany red polish. Rings adorn her left hand. A smartphone is next to her on the couch.

Redeye refers to the oil painting Sheena (2018) as a “symbolic portrait” in which she painted a Polaroid snapshot of her cousin amid items on a shelf, including a corn husk doll and Christmas lights. In Becky (2018), Redeye painted a

woman in a bright blue, button-up shirt, dark red top, and denim skirt facing away from the viewer.

“I really like that one of my Aunt Becky,” says Redeye. “I like creating paintings where you can’t see the person’s face, because I feel part of my work confronts people’s perceptions of Native people in a way where sometimes I hear people say, ‘How do I know they’re Native?’ It’s like, Well, they just are, because that’s who they are. Rather than me trying to portray stereotypes … it pushes the work on to them to think about it, of why they’re having these misconceptions or thoughts about particular people. So that’s why I chose that image of her back turned—to do that. I feel, for some work, I can hold things back. I don’t have to give everything away. I don’t have to show their face.

It feels kind of mysterious. You don’t know what my Aunt Becky is looking at, or what

she was doing in that moment, but the personal story is she was just being nosy and looking out the window or door like, ‘Who’s that pulling in next door?’” laughs the artist.

Redeye regularly takes reference photos for her paintings, so much so that her family is used to her carrying a camera, which she considers to be a sketchbook. She looks at a scene for composition and formal qualities and later reviews photos to use. Sometimes she combines poses and expressions from different shots; however, she does not add in items that weren’t originally in the scene.

Redeye’s recent work includes a conceptual series of paintings and frames exploring her familial relationships as a way of processing experiences and opening up challenging conversations.

During her monthlong stay in 2018 as SPRING 2020 | 71

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above Like Air/“I’ve Said Your Name When I Needed It” from the Frame series, 2017, Opalux vellum paper, seed beads, thread; collage, gouache, acrylic on watercolor paper, 19½ × 19½ × ¾ in. opposite, left My Grandmother Lived Here and I Cried/“My College Girl” from the Frame series, 2016, grandmother’s nightgown, seed beads, thread; gel photo transfer, gouache, acrylic on watercolor paper, 19½ × 11¼ × ½ in. opposite, right When the Kinzua Dam Happened/“Now Who’s Going To Protect You?” from the Frame series, 2016, fabric, seed beads, porcupine quills, thread; gel photo transfer, gouache, acrylic on watercolor paper, 19½ × 11¼ × ½ in.

a Truth and Reconciliation resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, she expanded the series that she had started two years before, applying the idea of personal reconciliation and healing through making art. She used the time to think through new concepts and develop preliminary designs.

The frames draw from the formal qualities of Haudenosaunee beaded picture frames, such as beaded fringe, raised beadwork depicting leaves, flowers, birds, and other animals—and the rounded and curved forms of the frames themselves. Part of the artistic genre known as whimsies, beaded frames were curios that Seneca, Tuscarora, and Mohawk women made and sold to tourists in Ontario and New York, especially at Niagara Falls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“My first time beading was with our Seneca language teacher in middle school, and so he taught us. At the very beginning it was just a simple daisy chain,” notes Redeye. “They were more like language

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classes/culture classes that all the Seneca kids were in. And when we would have days that we would bead, he would show us things, but also other students who had already been beading and learned from their family would show us things, too. I learned more from my peers at the time.

And then from there, most of it has been self-taught.”

In addition to the frames and their respective images, Redeye created paintings, some of them with gel photo transfers as “sisters to the frames” in order to expand the series and provide more context and layers of imagery to each work.

While the first artwork in the Frame series dates back to 2016, the roots of the series began in 2010 and 2011. “Back then, it was just more of words that I wrote down in my notebook. At that point, I didn’t know how it was going to materialize,” Redeye says. “And it wasn’t until I became pregnant with my son that these words came back again. And I realized that those are now things that I want to address.” She wanted to use this series to help her son and “to teach him new ways to cope with things, and different ways to think about our relationship, because I wanted a different relationship with him than I had with my biological mother or father.” A frame protects an artwork much like a mother protects her child, and her series addresses challenges faced by her family. “Each frame within the series that I’ve made so far—there’s five—represents a different family member and our relationship, and things that we’ve experienced together as a family, but also larger—these things that also exist within the community, and I think beyond, too.”

My Grandmother Lived Here and I Cried/“My College Girl” (2016) honors Redeye’s grandmother who raised her and who passed away in 2005. The frame is made with her grandmother’s nightgown, a fabric with delicate florals. “It took me a long time to get to that point where I could let go of some of her things, the nightgown being one of them. I would hang on to them, and early on they still had her smell. So I didn’t want to do anything else with these things.… Through making the work and growing as the years have gone by, being able to use her things for

LUANNE REDEYE

something personal like this, I felt okay using her nightgown for her frame to give it that personal touch, but also that I could finally let go of this item.”

Sewn into the fabric of her grandmother’s nightgown are raised beadwork, five-petaled blue flowers at the top and lower corners of the frame. Flanking the top flower are two beaded plum-androse-colored birds with stemmed berries in their beaks perched on floral branches with silver swirls behind them. Silver beads edge the frame and comprise the hanger, as well as the looped fringe with accents of violet and deep cerulean beads hanging from the bottom of the frame.

White beads line the inside frame edge.

The words REMEMBER ME are beaded at the bottom.

“I feel like we really understood each other, partly because she had a mental illness,” Redeye confides. “So it always felt like there was family outside that didn’t understand, and then those that were closest who did, and so I wanted

that frame to show that more—that side of her that we knew and loved.”

The framed artwork is a gel photo transfer on watercolor paper, overlaid with gouache and acrylic. The two women in the collage are Redeye’s grandmother at different ages. She suffered from schizophrenia, which limited the ways some people saw her. “I think adding the two figures touched on her illness, in that people only assumed or saw what the illness was versus how she really was.

It’s hard to explain. Her daughters and her grandchildren, of course, knew her best, but the extended family just saw the schizophrenia, which made relationships tough,” says Redeye. The two figures stand in front of “the house that she grew up in, and then I grew up in, [and] my aunts grew up in. The little red window was her room. I feel like everything comes back and is connected to that house for all of us, so that’s why I included it in the work.”

The oil-on-panel painting I See You (2018) complements the frame. In

this domestic scene, Redeye’s grandmother naps peacefully in an overstuffed, burgundy chair wearing her nightgown and fuzzy boots with a cane beside her.

Her hands rest delicately on her legs.

Behind her a blanket serves as a window curtain. Next to the chair is a lamp and an assortment of objects on a small side table. A wooden TV tray and a flat-screen television complete the scene. The brown carpet and baseboard anchor the composition, and the blue walls echo the color of the woman’s nightgown. While the grandmother’s eyes are closed, a framed portrait of a child stares directly at the viewer.

When the Kinzua Dam Happened/ “Now Who’s Going To Protect You?” (2016) contrasts with the gentleness of I See You. Red-dyed porcupine quills haphazardly puncture the frame’s black fabric. Black beads edge the frame and create the frame’s hanger. Looped fringe tassels in black and burgundy beads punctuate the frame’s bottom. The collage includes a photo of a dam with a bloody river in the SPRING 2020 | 73

PROFILE

above This Is You from the Frame series, 2018, oil paint (hands), gel photo transfer (background) on panel, 40 × 30 × 2 in. opposite Elli from the Frame series, 2017, oil, acrylic, gel photo transfer on panel, 40 × 30 in.

distance. In front of this is a house, and at the forefront of the image is a woman in a pink suit jacket with her hands on the shoulders of a blue-suited male figure. Their faces are covered with paint.

The chaos alludes to Redeye’s traumatic connection with her biological mother.

“Our relationship was much more … I mean, there really isn’t one because we don’t speak, but when we were together it was very violent in terms of domestic abuse between her and her husband and then down to the children,” Redeye asserts. “So that frame was about those sorts of things, but more in a symbolic

way. I didn’t want to be cliché and show images of anything. It was more about the feeling that you get.”

The painting This Is You (2018) further explores this fraught relationship.

Redeye rendered a series of hands in oil, which reach from the upper left and lower right sides of the frame and center over a black-and-white gel photo transfer of Redeye as a child. “Similar to the frame, I didn’t want to portray things about abuse or violence directly. It’s more subtle, because for me those memories aren’t really about the anger or her face or other things; it was about the hands—grabbing

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or taking. And that’s what I wanted the hands to show, this aggressiveness, but also there’s one or two that are more relaxed, because it was that variation of her character.”

The multimedia piece Elli (2017), rendered with oil, acrylic, and gel photo transfer, depicts Redeye sitting on a rug with Elliot in her lap while they read a book together. Toys and books surround them. It becomes apparent that family photographs have been overlaid on Redeye’s body and clothes. A closer look at the large grey chairs and the rug show subtle linework patterns depicting birds, floral elements, and circles, as seen in Haudenosaunee beadwork. On the wall is a framed, distressed, black-and-white portrait of Redeye’s grandmother as a young woman, with white floral linework over the image. Domed shapes appear in the window on the left. What appears to be a newspaper clipping can be slightly distinguished behind the curtain of the other window.

The frame If We Forgive our Fathers What Is Left/“…” (2017) addresses Redeye’s father. “[This] was for my father who was absent, so I made the frame to be falling apart and unfinished, because that’s what our relationship felt like,” Redeye explains.

Beyond the white beads at the edges of the frame, the fabric is cut raw. Beadwork birds, flowers, leaves, and other forms are incomplete. Pieces of string hang from the forms. In the frame’s center, the fabric unravels around an image torn in half.

Even the image is not clear—what may be a figure is rendered in smudges of black.

Like Air/“I’ve Said Your Name When I Needed It” (2017) deals with Redeye emerging from depression related to the loss of her grandmother. She completed the piece during her time as the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in 2017, when she also made the frame about her father and painted Elli. This circular, scalloped frame is comprised of mostly silver-beaded flowers on white Opalux vellum paper, but three large flowers are beaded in color: one in purple with mascarpone yellow stamens, another with blue beads, and the last one with green and yellow beads. “I spent a month practicing each of those flowers over and over again until I felt confident that I could do it a final time and have it be attached to

LUANNE REDEYE

the frame,” Redeye emphasized. “I actually had a system going where because it was on paper, it was sort of translucent.

And I had a lamp under the table, kind of between my legs, and I would hold the paper over the edge of the table so that the light would show through … so I could see where I was placing the needle, and have it come up exactly where I wanted to.”

In the center of the frame, a photo with three women is covered with a pattern of white designs. While interacting with SAR’s collection at the Indian Arts Research Center, Redeye noticed how certain Pueblo designs parallel Haudenosaunee forms. “The symbols … are specific in that they have the domed shapes, which living in New Mexico, I realized are actually pretty similar to the raincloud designs that are in pottery, but also they’re supposed to represent the celestial shape of the earth in Seneca designs. I liked that connection. Thinking about water, thinking about the earth, and these things that are fed from it and grow from it, I saw myself as growing from this low time in my life, and then having the individual flowers represent people that I am close to, which is again personal.”

Dear Gram (2018) features a contemplative and realistically colored Redeye painted in front of an enlarged depiction of her as a child with her grandmother in shades of slate blue. Redeye wrote a letter to her grandmother in acrylic on the first layer of the painting, which she then painted over in oil. “I was thinking about her, because then I was writing about her—actually writing to her, because I do that pretty often.… If I’m having trouble thinking of the words to explain an artwork that I’m wanting to do, or just [thinking] of other things happening, I’ll write her a letter, then save those,” Redeye reveals.

Redeye showed the Frame series at her 2018 exhibition, Remedy/Reconcile/ Rebuild, at First Fridays at Travois, a nonprofit corporation in Kansas City, where she sold several works. She will further expand the project with more frames representing different people. “A new one will focus on my cousin Sheena, who I am really close to,” says the artist.

“We are more like sisters than cousins.

That one will touch more on our humor between each other, so that one will be much more fun and lighthearted.”

Redeye will also create a frame for her aunt. “Since my grandmother passed, my oldest aunt became the matriarch, essentially, and the person that everyone goes to for things. She takes on a lot of this burden that I feel sometimes she could say no to, but she doesn’t, and I feel that there’s this weight on her. I wanted to make this frame that on the outside represents this weight of having beadwork just piled on

and piled on, and then hidden beneath, it would be her portrait.

“The third frame would be for my grandfathers. This one I am still unsure of how I am going to do it, because I didn’t know my grandfathers. I didn’t know their names or who they were. So, that one I am still thinking about, but I don’t know.

In my mind I am thinking of thread, of making the frame just out of thread, kind of like a spider’s web. Something that you can see, but isn’t totally tangible. If you touch it, it falls apart.”

LUANNEREDEYE.COM Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) is a graphic designer, visual artist, writer, and photographer based in Santa Fe. She manages Neebin Studios and the Native Graphic Design Project.

SPRING 2020 | 75

SPOTLIGHT

SPOTLIGHT: SCENES OF KIOWA LIFE

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above & opposite Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke (all Kiowa), Scenes of Kiowa Life, 1936, 16-panel distemper-oncanvas mural, US Post Office at Anadarko, Oklahoma. Photos: Mariah L. Ashbacher.

N 1935 DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, the Kiowa Indian Agency in Anadarko, Oklahoma, received a new building. This new agency building would be graced by a mural commissioned by the US Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, formed in 1934 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Until its 1943 closure, the section commissioned artists to create more than a thousand murals across the country.1 Included among those murals are 16 panels designed

by Kiowa artist Stephen Mopope, and painted with assistance from Kiowa compatriots Monroe Tsatoke, Spencer Asah, and James Auchiah.2 These artists, along with Lois Smoky Kaulaity and Jack Hokeah, are collectively known as the Kiowa Six. In June 1936 Mopope received a federal commission to create murals at the new Kiowa Agency building, and the project was completed in November 1937.

Today, the mural panels can still be seen in the lobby of the same building, which became a US Post Office in 1947.3 The paintings collectively portray a typical Kiowa year prior to the reservation era.

They recorded lifeways that had passed by the time the artists painted the murals.

The murals hang in the lobby oriented from north to south, with two main entrances on the east side of the building. The cardinal orientation of the building is symbolic, referring to the annual north-south movement of the Kiowa with the buffalo. Beginning with the northernmost mural, Buffalo Skull with Crossed Arrows, the first group of panels can be read counterclockwise to the southernmost painting, Fresh Buffalo Head. When read in order they tell the story of the Kiowa year, beginning with winter in the northern portion of their territory represented by the buffalo skull, symbolizing that food will be scarce in the winter because the buffalo have moved south. The Medicine Man’s Shield and Lance depicts the emblems of ceremony the medicine man will use to advise the chief that it is time to move the tribe south with the buffalo. A deer hunter returns with a buck he has skillfully dispatched with his first and only arrow shot. However, he is reporting that the other game they also depend on have also become scarce as winter descends.

1. “WPA Art Collection,” US Department of the Treasury, September 21, 2015, web.

2. Denise Neil, “Representation and Misrepresentation: Depictions of Native Americans in Oklahoma Post Office Murals” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2017), 44–45.

3. “U.S. Post Office,” City of Anadarko, accessed March 6, 2020, web.

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SPOTLIGHT

The Kiowa Moving Camp is an elegant depiction of efficiency and organization, which made their migratory lifestyle possible. The contents of their camp are shown bundled on travois and packhorses. In mural number 13, the Kiowa once again set up camp as a scout prepares to set out to find a buffalo herd.

Then, three skilled hunters atop horseback have set upon four buffalo. The Buffalo Hunter’s Shield, positioned above the elevator at the southwest corner of the lobby, depicts the shield of a successful hunter who “prepares his shield with two buffalo facing the rainbow, as an emblem of success and the bright winter, which confronts his household after his fortunate hunt, chase, and kill,” as a brochure available at the post office states. Lastly, panel number 16, positioned in the southeast corner, directly opposite from the winter buffalo skull, shows the head of a buffalo, a fresh kill, and a symbol of the season of plenty for the Kiowa.

All the mural panels on the east wall show Kiowa ceremonies, dances, and spectators. Continuing the reading in the same counterclockwise direction, from the panel immediately following Fresh Buffalo Head, the viewer first encounters two women and a child seated on a buffalo hide spread on the ground. They stare to the north, and the child points with some enthusiasm. They are engaged as spectators with the next panel depicting Eagle Whip and Flute Dancers. In the remaining images moving north, the artists have painted a woman with an infant in a cradleboard, a seated war drummer, the drum chief in a Scalp Dance, a Fancy

War Dancer with Eagle Flute, Two Eagle Dancers, and finally Two Men in Council.

This panel completes the cycle. The dances represent the various purposes, functions, and seasons in Kiowa tribal society. Dance was used to socially engage, pass on oral history, recount heroic deeds, welcome visitors, send men out with well-wishes before raiding parties, and celebrate their victorious return. Two Men in Council shows the chief of the summer Sun Dance, holding the ceremonial fan, perhaps planning for the next annual buffalo hunt.

Details about Kiowa life can be teased out through clothing, weaponry, communal activities like tanning hides, and the placement of elaborately painted tipis in camp. Young boys wrestle, playing at conflict but also honing skills for the day they will join the men on hunts and raiding parties.

The murals also demonstrate contact with non-Natives, including the horses brought into North America by the Spanish in the 16th century. Some of the men in panels wear Westernstyle clothing. Various objects, such as a warrior’s knife sheath, moccasins, armbands, and the cradleboard, are painted to appear beautifully embellished with colorful glass beads obtained through trade, first from Europe then Asia.

In 2019 the panel known as Kiowas Moving Camp was featured on a US postage stamp from the Post Office Murals Forever stamp series—a fitting tribute for a mural portraying nomadic Kiowa lifeways through space and time.

—Mariah L. Ashbacher SPRING 2020 | 77

MEMORIAL

RON SENUNGETUK 1933–January 21, 2020

Ron Senungetuk in his studio in Homer, Alaska, 2015. Photo: Sven Haakanson Jr., PhD (Sugpiaq)

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ÑUPIAQ ARTIST AND EDUCATOR Ronald Senungetuk devoted his life’s career toward elevating concepts of Native Alaskan arts. Celebrated today as one of Alaska’s most important artists, he made a significant impact on how Native American art was defined. Through his stylistic innovations, advocacy, and mentorship, he opened avenues of artistic expression for generations of artists.

Senungetuk was born in 1933 in Kingigin (Wales), at the northwesternmost tip of mainland Alaska. His artistic training began at childhood, when he and his brothers learned to carve walrus ivory in the form of small mammals from their uncle Andrew Seetook (Iñupiaq, 1914– 1981). The brothers supplemented their family’s income through carving. Ron’s brother Joe, an internationally acclaimed artist, commented that they sold the carvings at the village store “to make a little spending money for ourselves.”

Senungetuk's formal training in Wales ended when he was 15 and sent to Mt. Edgecumbe High School, a boarding school in Sitka. He described this as a

time of “cultural torment.” Speaking very little English and faced with unfamiliar social behaviors, Senungetuk resorted to watching others to learn how to act, as he later recalled, “I really did not know how to use forks and spoons. The plane that took me to the boarding school in Sitka left lasting impressions. It was a social shock, but it probably taught me to be quite observant.”1 George Fedoroff, a woodworker and art teacher at Mt. Edgecumbe, first introduced Senungetuk to Western art and artists, such as Henry Moore, who influenced his style. Recognizing Senungetuk’s burgeoning talent, Fedoroff encouraged him to attend the School for American Craftsmen (now the School for American Crafts) at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

Senungetuk earned his bachelor’s degree in 1960 despite the interruption of his education to serve two years in the US military during the Korean War. He continued his art training at the Statens håndverks- og kunstindustriskole in Oslo, Norway, where he studied sculpture and

1. Ronald Senungetuk, “Statement of Ronald Senungetuk, University of Alaska,” Alaskool, 1969, web.

2. Michael Walsh, “Ron Senungetuk,” Bunnell Street Arts Center, Vimeo video, 4:40, 2014, web.

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metalsmithing as a Fulbright scholar.

There, immersed in a learning environment fostered by artistic exploration and experimentation, he met his wife, Turid, a talented metalsmith and jeweler.

Early in his career Senungetuk recognized the need for change in Native arts, asserting that “you’ve got to try to understand that we had no art [in Alaska], Native or anybody else. The only art was those pioneering who were interested in painting Mount McKinley and pretty Eskimos in their sleds with huskies.”2 Changing this image of Alaskan art became Senungetuk’s goal and he lead by example. In his artworks are references to historic Iñupiat art. This blending of cultural and artistic knowledge resulted in Senungetuk’s meticulously carved panels of wood stained in various colors that represent the Alaskan landscapes, people, and animals.

Senungetuk accepted a Carnegie grant in 1961 and began teaching at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF).

The next year the school hired him as a faculty member, and he taught there for 25 years. In 1965 he founded and became acting director of UAF's Native Arts Center; it was the first university offer was the first university to have a Native art degree program. Significantly, Senungetuk taught Alaska Native students to draw on their heritage but to also be fearless when it came to using different media. He encouraged all under his tutelage to reject the definitions of what others thought their work should look like and instead express their individuality.

Awarded an honorary doctorate in 2015, Ronald Senungetuk became professor emeritus of art at UAF. His artwork is in public and private collections worldwide, and he has been recognized with numerous awards. He died after a long illness in Homer, Alaska. His legacy will continue through his artwork, the many he taught to become artists, and the many those artists will teach.

—Tammi J. Hanawalt, PhD

MEMORIAL

KNOKOVTEE SCOTT February 10, 1951–December 21, 2019

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NOKOV T E E W I L L IA M SCOTT was born to Effie Downing Scott (Cherokee Nation) and Reverend Kenneth Scott (Muscogee) at the Claremore Indian Hospital in Claremore, Oklahoma. He was born with his fist clenched. With this in mind, his parents gave him the Mvskoke name Knokovtee to describe the way he had entered this world and enrolled him as a Cherokee Nation citizen to honor the matriarchal customs of both tribes. These foundations would be the things he would return to repeatedly in his artwork. He died at his home at the age of 68.

Growing up in a family of artists, Knokovtee pursued art and earned his bachelor of arts degree at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 1969 and his master’s degree in education from the University Center at Tulsa in 1987. He also attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1972. There he studied Southwest-style inlay, overlay, and tufa casting with turquoise. At this time Knokovtee began to ask himself what precontact jewelry were made by Southeastern Woodland Indian peoples.

He participated in a sweat lodge ceremony where an elder told him, “Take a step back.” Afterwards he studied the iconography of the Mississippian mound builders of the Southeastern Woodlands and Maya cultures, but his greatest inspiration came from the shell designs at Spiro Mound. “Spiro was where my design work started.… It’s one of the places that has the most fantastic, elaborate shellwork that’s ever been found.”

In 1975 Knokovtee found what he was searching for while looking for arrowheads in the Long Bay Recreational Area in Wagoner County, Oklahoma: the pink-purple mussel shell. With his carving tools, Knokovtee drew inspiration from the symbols of the past but always interpreted them in such a way that this wearable art form could be worn with a present-day flare. With a gentle and calm voice, Knokovtee often told his students, “You can still work with the concepts, with the motifs from the old,

but you can make it your own.” In the classroom, he was patient and generous with his students.

According to his longtime friend Mike Daniel (Muscogee), Knokovtee was one of the leaders of the Southeastern Woodlands Iconography Revivalist movement along with Bill Glass Jr. (Cherokee Nation) and Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell (Cherokee Nation).

Their goal as artists was to perpetuate and promote the use of the ancient motifs of Southeastern Mississippian art, not only in large museums and art institutions but within their home communities.

In 1988 the Cherokee Nation passed a resolution to rename the local purple mussel shell as the Mankiller Pearl Shell after former Chief Wilma Pearl Mankiller. In 1990 Knokovtee was named a Cherokee National Treasure for his work in revitalizing the sleeping art form of shell carving. To date he remains the only Cherokee National Treasure recognized for shell carving.

In 2004, Knokovtee was chosen as an artist-in-residence for Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South at the Art Institute of Chicago, which lead to the publication of his work in the exhibition's landmark catalogue.

In 2014 several Cherokee National Treasures launched the Cherokee National Treasure Master/Apprentice Program to teach and pass knowledge

above, top Knokovtee Scott teaching at the Cherokee Arts Center in Tahlequah. Both images courtesy of the author. above, bottom Shell gorget by Knokovtee Scott.

of their art forms to a select number of Cherokee students. I had the distinguished privilege of studying shellwork with Knokovtee through this program.

Even as he aged, his clarity of mind stayed sharp. His mission to teach as many Cherokee students about the Southeastern Mississippian iconography remained his focus. Though diminishing health hindered his eyesight and the dexterity of his hands, his skill to shape an iridescent, symmetrical pair of shell earrings or gorget never faded. I recall him bent over his lapidary wheel, shaping and turning shell ever in a counterclockwise motion, and saying, “Now, that fire’s really starting to come out of the shell.”

—Candice Byrd (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nation) SPRING 2020 | 79

REVIEWS

ALBUQUERQUE

Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration University of New Mexico Art Museum

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HE EXHIBITION Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Art Museum in Albuquerque highlights work that is rarely focused on: the print work of Native American women artists. It illustrates how printmaking can encourage the creative process and it celebrates the role of master printers to achieve the artist’s vision. Curator Mary Statzer, PhD, was inspired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (2019–20), the first coast-to-coast museum survey to emphasize the role of women in the history of Native American art. In the Raymond Jonson Gallery in the lower level of the museum, scheduled through May 9, 2020, this exhibition shows the possibilities and challenges in the media as well as the beauty and skill of the artists.

Indelible Ink features the work of Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), Andrea

above Julia Buffalohead (Ponca), Trickster Showdown, 2014, serigraph and lithograph on paper, 36½ × 64¾ in.

Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Cree/ Shoshone), Wendy Red Star (Crow), Ramona Sakiestewa (Hopi), Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Marie Watt (Seneca), Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), and Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo).

The artists represent a range in age and tribal affiliations across the United States.

Statzer interviewed the artists and used wall texts to describe both the finished artworks and the processes by which they were made. The pieces span three decades, dating from 1993 to 2019, and include a range of print media including lithography, serigraphy, monoprinting, photogravure, and letterpress.

Some of the women were already familiar with printmaking, including Whitehorse, who has trained as a printmaker, and Smith, who has worked in different print media. Smith credits printmaking with helping with her art practice in general: “Moving among painting, lithography, monoprinting, writing, public art, teaching, curating, politicking, gardening, traveling, and drawing all stretch me in different ways, causing me angst … but also forcing me to think more creatively so I don’t get in a rut.” She also notes the added pressures of working in a print studio, especially

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having to create under a strict deadline and not being able to work at her own pace. “Printmaking is a masochistic process for me, and it’s hard-wrought to get a successful print, although sometimes I don’t know if it’s successful or not, until later.”

Statzer chose works from the museum’s archive and the archive from the Tamarind Institute (affiliated with UNM since 1970), in addition to works from five other print studios that have collaborated with Native artists, including Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts, in Pendleton, Oregon; the Fourth Dimension Studio in Santa Fe; and Highpoint Center for Printmaking and Sister Black Press, both in Minneapolis. Many of the printers from the different studios trained at Tamarind. Each studio is identified by their chop mark, an embossed symbol placed in the corner of a print.

The importance of collaboration is stressed throughout the show. Wall texts detail where the prints were made, the names of the master printers and their working philosophies, and how the studio helped to achieve the artist’s vision. These all elucidate how printmaking is a collaborative effort.

For some artists, collaboration is fundamental to their practice. Much of Marie Watt’s work includes textiles,

REVIEWS

and she often organizes sewing circles to complete her large quilts. The social experience of creation is as much part of the artwork as the finished objects.

Dyani White Hawk recounts working at Tamarind on Trust and Loss (2013) and how she had hoped to reproduce the background from a 19th-century newspaper. The printers were able to separate the background and text, so the print looks like it was printed on antiqued newsprint. For the artist, collaboration fits into Lakota worldviews.

White Hawk notes, “My work is merely part of a greater lineage, made possible by the people before and surrounding me today. In particular, with printmaking, there were many skilled hands that worked together to create these pieces.

These prints would not exist without that important collaboration.”

White Hawk’s series Takes Care of Them (2019) depicts four almost life-sized Plains dresses printed in brilliant colors and decorated with dentalia. These describe a deep reverence for Lakota women. Printed at Highpoint Editions, these dresses relate to the practice of asking four veterans, such as the artist’s mother, to stand in the cardinal directions for protection during certain ceremonies.

These women serve as guardians who take care of family, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends. The dresses are individualized with different bright colors and patterning, some with added ribbons, shells, and gold.

For Anti-Retro (2018), Andrea Carlson considered how the printmaking process results in multiple originals, which allowed for the images to be seen in different places at the same time. The ability to cover more ground and spread ideas was appealing. Carlson noted, “I wanted the content to reflect that resilience of propagation. I made them to be sigils that work against loss and scarcity, using the multiple [originals] to promote the idea of a robust and plentiful culture. There is an Indigenous fear of losing our things and cultures. These prints address that fear.”

Bright and bold, Indelible Ink reveals the possibilities available in printmaking and what makes it unique as a medium, from the vivid intensity of the ink to the ability to layer images. It encompasses different tones, from Julie Buffalohead’s

playful Revisionist History Lesson (2014), which features a fox rolling on its back surrounded by shadow puppets, to Emmi Whitehorse’s meditative lithographs and Wendy Red Star’s boisterous lithographs about HUD housing.

With the growing corpus of writing and exhibitions about Native printmaking, hopefully Indelible Ink will promote this medium toward even greater respect and attention.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

MONTREAL

mazinigwaaso/to bead something— Barry Ace: Bandolier Bags as Cultural Conduit FOFA Gallery, Concordia University

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S OUR LIVES BECOME more technologically complex, many scholars and artists are turning towards the digital humanities as a way to reach broad audiences with open-access works across multiple platforms, including social media, websites, and gaming. Barry Ace’s work forms part of a complex history of Indigenous artists expanding the conversation about the digital world to include Indigenous technologies and visual culture.

The word “digital” broken down refers to the human hand, thus Barry Ace’s practice as an Odawa (Anishinaabe) artist, performer, and creator expands conceptions of the digital and the possibilities of media and Indigenous art. If we think about Ace’s bandolier bags and films, presented in the exhibition as mediations between the artist’s hand and the social, they pull us into a complex web of interconnected ecological and spiritual relations for Indigenous and settler communities.

Although at first glance the flowers on the bandolier bags seem to be made of glass beads, an expected medium, they draw you in for a closer look. The flowers, made of computer capacitors and resistors on beaded stems, are unexpected reminders of both the ecological beauty

and the devastation facing Indigenous and settler communities and landscapes across Turtle Island today. The media on Transformation Bandolier (2015) includes capacitors that fringe the bottom of the bag. The shoulder strap of the bandolier is made on white Arches paper, recalling the historical usage of white tightly sewn beads by Anishinaabe artists to complete and compliment their floral compositions.

Deconstructed circuit board beadwork climbs up the strap, reaching upward like flowers for an age when there will no longer be a bright sun.

Next the eye is drawn toward the fabulously elegant pointed purple shoes, Nigik Makizinan–Otter Moccasins (2014), projected on a digital screen. The shoes are made of otter pelt, velvet, electric components, synthetic porcupine bristles, deerhide, copper beads, and brass bells.

The physical shoes are currently on display at the National Gallery of Canada’s Àbadakone/Continuous Fire/Feu continuel, forming a sumptuous addition to that exhibition, which features Indigenous artworks from across the world.

When the American government passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, it made way for widespread settler colonial takeover of Indigenous lands.

In complicity with settler colonials, the American government forcibly relocated Indigenous communities, including the Anishinaabe, from their historical homelands onto reservations in the United States and reserves in Canada.

This sudden change in their natural environment disrupted their ability to harvest plants and to hunt, uprooting their self-sustaining practices. Settlers’ clear-cutting and removal of old growth forests across the Great Lakes devastated regional ecosystems. Word and image projections of archival photographs and hills and water, running through the bandolier bags on digital screens, remind us of our ecological relationships and the history of all our responsibilities as stewards of the land.

Brightly beaded, finely curving light and dark green leaves, blue berries, and red and pink flowers on Bandolier for Water and Plant Life (2019) recall the healers’ use of plants as medicine and to pay homage to the earth. Bandoliers were worn across the shoulder, connecting the wearer to the earth. The floral designs SPRING 2020 | 81

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trailed like braids over the straps of the bags, protecting the wearer. In this work, Ace’s bag is finished with ornate black tassels capped in brass tinsel-like cones.

Bandolier bags traveled throughout the Great Lakes, on Indigenous and settler bodies, as actors, agents, and communicators of the beauty and intelligence of Indigenous technologies of beadwork. The bags also traveled from Turtle Island throughout the globe, and many remain in European collections far from the Indigenous communities where artists created them. Now they long to return. In their mobility, bandoliers have a parallel relationship with the Indigenous dancers in the films shown in the exhibition: Homage to Four in Paris (2018) by Shelley Niro (Mohawk), recording Barry Ace’s A Reparative Act performances in Paris, France, in 2010.

The regalia Mino bimaadiziwin (2017), with its finery— beadwork on velvet, sumptuous colors, and high attention to detail—is almost baroque in the sense that it is extravagant and radical. Barry Ace, in his beaded and quilled regalia, danced to restore the history and lives of an Indigenous dance troupe led

by Maungwudaus, or George Henry (ca. 1807–ca. 1888) of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, who traveled to Paris in 1844 and performed throughout Europe. Ace honors their legacy and takes up graceful space reclaiming the sites in Paris, including the Louvre and Place de La Concorde, for Indigenous peoples. A Reparative Act (2011), Ace’s four dance performances, restores the Indigenous dancers’ place in history as beyond anomaly. Facing Barry Ace’s performance on the other side of the intimate viewing space, a historic film of Anishinaabe dancers at Wiikwemkoong, Manitoulin Island, connects Ace with a long legacy of Indigenous dancers in cultural continuity.

Barry Ace’s bandolier bags and films call us to reframe our assumptions about Indigenous mobility and artworks in a continuum, opening new understandings of First Nations artworks and creation in a space beyond the spectacle.

—Gloria J. Bell (Métis)

MONTREAL

Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds | ᓱᕕᓇᐃ ᐊᓲᓈ: ᓄᓇᙳᐊᓕᐅᕐᓂᖅ ᓄᓇᕐᔪᐊᙳᐊᓂᒃ Galerie Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University

above Barry Ace (Odawa), Transformation Bandolier Bag, 2015, mixed media on Arches Platine paper, 391/3 × 121/2 in. opposite Shuvinai Ashoona (Inuk), Earth Transformations, 2012, colored pencil, Conté crayon on black paper, 48½ × 49 in., collection of Martha Burns and Paul Gross.

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APPING WORLDS provides a creative and expansive response to the current turn in art history towards ecocriticism, an interdisciplinary study of the environment. Shuvinai Ashoona’s creative vision of the past two decades takes center stage in the first major solo exhibition of her stunning work. Born in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Ashoona is an Inuk artist who has ascended from a long line of Inuit makers, including her grandmother, the renowned printmaker Pitseolak Ashoona (1904–1983). Organized by independent curator Nancy Campbell with assistance from Justine Kohleal, the show is circulating throughout Canada.

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Ashoona creates work in a studio space that is part of the longstanding practice of Inuit artists working in intergenerational cooperatives to create prints, sculpture, and other art forms.

Untitled (2017), drawn with fine liner pen and colored pencil, presents the viewer with a bird’s-eye view of artists in a studio space. We see the scene from above as a woman with red hair with her baby sleeping in a purple amautiq (an Inuit woman’s parka) writes in Inuktitut on a large piece of paper. Beside her another artist writes the words, “The Man Who dies in Linda Blair” referencing The Exorcist, a 1973 pop culture, cult film and favorite of the artist. A man diagonally across from her wears a baseball cap with Inuktitut syllabics. Ashoona draws inspiration from gothic and horror films throughout her practice layering English and Inuktitut phrases throughout this composition and many others in the exhibition, giving a sense of the nuances of Inuit literacies and her deft negotiation of Inuktitut and English.

Primarily creating drawings, Ashoona explores scenes of customary life and visions of transformation based on Inuit religion and ontologies. Motifs often used by the artist in this installation of works feature the globe, fantastical creatures, and the sea life surrounding her Kinngait studios, including polar bears, octopi, clams, and hybrid humans. In The World in Her Eyes (2011) Ashoona has centered an Inuit woman in the image— is it a portrait of the artist? Haloed by a goose whose tail curls into her temple, as well as a walrus, polar bear, and seal, the animals crown her head. Streams of bright color, like tentacles, twist around her as a ribbon of eyes and worlds pass through. At the ends of the streams is a set of tightly packed globes. The globes are in her eyes and throughout the pencil drawing—they are all different with unique continents and bodies of water.

The woman looks out at the viewer with a steadfast gaze, drawing us in to imagine other worlds. They are part of the artist’s personal iconography, expanding our understanding of what worlds could look like and centering the artist’s respect for nature, the environment, and the creatures present in her daily life.

Throughout the several spaces at the gallery, Ashoona’s innovative

works foreground the interconnected relationships between humans and other than human kin. The large scale of the works draw you into the intricate compositions, and standing in the galleries you can get a sense of the physical labor the artist has poured into creation.

Innovative in color usage and iconography Earth Transformations (2012) presents a reflexive and multilayered image. An octopus’s tentacles reach out towards an artist who holds a drawing up facing the viewer. In the drawing, which forms a frame within a frame, we see a hunter out on the ice in a landscape of snowcapped hills; a seal is on the ice in the background.

To the left of the drawing, there are curving lines of globes that trail from the person to the hybrid octopus. The globes also climb over the artist’s hand as it holds onto the work, uniting the drawing and the octopus creature in time and space.

The richness of purple tentacles and the blues of the undersides of the tentacles as well as the yellow claws, which curve around towards the man holding the drawing, are striking against the black background. The background forms negative space, and the all-encompassing

way it surrounds the subjects in the image provides an exciting contrast to unite the composition. The blackness also suggests the density of space and another world.

Ashoona frequently draws octopi, and here they have the possibility of reaching out to other worlds as well as surrounding the viewer. The image is reflexive. Looking at the drawing—a world within the frame of the image—we question our expectations around Inuit art, and we can appreciate the diversity of representations before us.

The curators also chose to screen the short film Ghost Noise (2010), directed

by Marcia Connolly, as part of the installation. This short documentary gives a sense of Ashoona’s lived experience and the sources for her complex visions of contemporary Inuit life. As she states in the film, “I do not draw simply the surface of the landscape. I feel I am capturing the breath and soul of the earth.”

Challenging our conceptions of what Inuit art is, Shuvinai Ashoona’s innovative compositions and stellar iconographies offer a much-needed extension of the dialogue of environmental art today.

—Gloria J. Bell, PhD (Métis) SPRING 2020 | 83

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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art Yale University Art Gallery

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CHEDULED THROUGH JUNE 21, 2020, Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art is the first exhibition of North American Indigenous art to be shown at the Yale University Art Gallery. Organized and curated by then undergraduate students at Yale, Katherine Nova McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa/Cree), Leah Tamar Shrestinian, and Joseph Zordan (Bad River Ojibwe), with assistance from postdoctoral fellow Kaitlin McCormick, the exhibition brings together works from many collections at Yale. The fresh perspective brought by these young curators makes Place, Nations, Generations, Beings an exciting exhibition with a great deal of clarity and without the hierarchies museums often impose, such as distinguishing between so-called fine art and craft.

For the immense task of covering 200 years of art, the curators opted for simplicity in concept. The thoughtful wall texts are not so numerous or long that they distract from the art. The title represents the four themes of the exhibition, Place, Nations, Generations, and Beings, and all emphasize relationships and relationality, echoing the act of assembling objects from many distinct collections. All art without biographical information is labeled as Artist Once Known, a pointed move to acknowledge that though artists’ names may not have been recorded, they were indeed known. Fittingly, the gallery also includes a land acknowledgment for the peoples and nations native to New Haven.

The exhibition begins with a line of pottery, including early 20th-century Piipaash (Maricopa) bowls and works by contemporary potters Dominique

above Installation view of Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, Yale University Art Gallery. Photo: Jessica Smolinski.

Toya (Jemez Pueblo), Les Namingha (Hopi-Tewa/Zuni), and Clarence Cruz (Ohkay Owingeh) in the theme of Place, backdropped with deep purple walls.

Next, the eye is immediately drawn to First Teachers Balance the Universe (2015), a two-part hanging piece by Marie Watt (Seneca) that takes on the concept of flying predators and prey. Our Lands Are Not Lines on Paper (2012), by Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1957–2018), overlays a printed tan basket form with river and mountain patterns in grey and white to indicate the landforms as historical barriers. The presence of Goshorn’s work near historical basket examples from Tlingit and Cherokee basket makers illustrates the continuity of basket making. The exhibition is also not without nuance, with decisions such as listing the names of the free and enslaved people at Diamond Hill, a plantation owned by basket maker Peggy Scott Vann (Cherokee, 1783–1820), whose I-hya Talu-tsa (ᎢᎯᏯ ᏔᎷᏣ, River Cane Basket) (ca. 1810–15) is also on view. The elaborately patterned basket takes on new meaning through this spotlight.

The Nations-themed galler y, its walls painted a light pink, begins with three photographs from Diné artist Will Wilson’s Critical Indigenous

1. Julianne Jennings, “The History of ‘Ten Little Indians,’” Indian Country Today, October 11, 2012, web.

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Photographic Exchange (CIPX), his longstanding, tintype photography wherein he gifts sitters with originals and keeps digital images as his art. Nearby, the mixed-media book by Rick Bartow (Wiyot/Yurok, 1946–2016), 10 Little Indian Boys (2009), is opened to a page of a graphic drawing of a man wearing a headdress and necklace with pops of orange and green. The title subverts the genocidal nursery rhyme, “Ten Little Indians”1 with hand-drawn portraits of adults rather than “boys.” The gallery also showcases historical objects such as a late 19th-century Dakota vest with elaborate porcupine quill embroidery of flowers and the American flag; Lakota and Arapaho pipe bags; an 1876 sketchbook

by Howling Wolf (Southern Cheyenne, 1849–1927), and 19th-century drawings

by Bear’s Heart (Southern Cheyenne, 1851–1882). The mix of objects and periods demonstrates different ways of conceptualizing a nation, particularly how existing nations came to understand the United States.

The final two themes, Beings and Generations, fill the back of the long rectangular gallery. The deep red walls in Beings echoes bits of the artworks themselves, including the masterful Sea Monster Mask (1999) by Richard Hunt

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(Kwakwaka’wakw). Placed on a tall stand, Sea Monster Mask is mesmerizing, with precise carving and crisp linework patterns of black and white, green, and red, with woodgrain showing through.

A fine 19th-century naaxin, or Tlingit Chilkat robe, is displayed around a dress form. An early 20th-century Pomo gift basket is equally dazzling for its delicate shellwork and the tactility of its yellow and black feathers. Drawings by Johnny Kit Elswa (Haida, fl. late 19th century), depict important Haida beings and cross-cultural exchanges with settlerexplorer James Swan, whose notes in English fill the margins. Perhaps most poignantly, this gallery includes a maple wood bowl with a quahog shell made by Mohegan artist Justin Scott, gifted to the gallery after Yale returned hundreds of objects to the Mohegan Indian Tribe of Connecticut. The small back gallery that houses Scott’s piece is the only one in the exhibition without a mix of temporalities and includes contemporary artworks by Rick Bartow, Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/ Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota).

The Generations gallery highlights the fact that ways of making are often passed down through families, including the creation of objects for sale like models of totem poles or boats. Against deep blue walls, pottery, drawing, carving, and weaving demonstrate intergenerational skill. As in other galleries, there is tremendous diversity in object scale, with all pieces given equal focus. Fittingly, the two standout pieces of this section are greatly different in scale. A large, pristine Eye-Dazzler Blanket from the late 19th century by a Diné Artist Once Known entrances with its elaborate diamond patterns that seem to undulate.

At the edge of the gallery, a small ink-onreindeer hide piece, Reindeer Roundup, by George Twok Aden Ahgupuk (Iñupiaq, 1911–2001) is spellbinding for its depth and sense of atmosphere. This ink drawing demonstrates the logistical prowess needed to move such a great number of animals.

Inclusion of this piece hints that beyond art making, many skills are passed down through Indigenous families that relate to lifestyle, place, and engaging with nature.

Ult i mately, Place , Nation s , Generations, Beings makes a strong case for breaking down divisions between Indigenous art and non-Native art that natural history museums reinforce. The themes’ color coding is a useful tool to allow viewers to know explicitly the theme these objects are meant to reinforce. Hung with plenty of space to contemplate each object, this exhibition communicates the power, connection, and continuity of Indigenous North American art. As the first major exhibition of Native art at Yale and one initiated by undergraduate students, it is all the more impressive that Place, Nations, Generations, Beings is such a successful show. This exhibition demonstrates how fresh eyes can breathe life into a large, complex collection.

—Marina Tyquiengco (Chamorro)

NEW YORK

Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Painting National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center

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N VIEW THROUGH FALL OF 2021, Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Painting showcases masterful works by Native American painters from the 1930s to today. Stretching the Canvas demonstrates the true breadth of 20th- and 21st-century Native American painters through a great variety of materials, style, and subject matter. The curatorial team consisting of Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), Ann McMullen, David Penney, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche/Choctaw), and Rebecca Trautmann assembled an exceptional slate of painted artworks.

The themes of Stretching the Canvas are useful in conceptualizing Native American painting but are somewhat disjointed in content. Themes of “Training Ground: New Mexico” and “Training Ground: Oklahoma” highlight the significant stories of early 20th-century Native American artist education. Themes of “Reclaiming the Abstract” and “Indian

Pop” relate to style while “Cosmopolitans” and “Grand Ambitions” emphasize larger concepts and higher aims of artists in producing work.

Stretching the Canvas is drawn entirely from the NMAI’s permanent collection, a truly expansive collection that continues to grow. At one end, the exhibition begins with a work of art— small in scale but large in impact—by Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996) in the “Grand Ambitions” galleries. West’s Spatial Whorl (1949–50), a swooping, colorful, abstract oil on canvas, would be an interesting addition to any exhibition of mid-20th-century abstraction, particularly for its contrastingly diminutive scale. “Grand Ambitions” is fitting for perhaps all the works in the exhibition; artists are progressive in both theme and technique, drawing from major art trends of their times as well as personal experience and Indigenous knowledge.

The individual works are breathtaking, showcasing major figures of Native American art such as James Lavadour (Walla Walla), Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation), Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005), George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000), Rick Bartow (Wiyot/Yurok, 1946–2016), and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Sqelix’u/ Métis/Shoshone). The skills, diversity, and ambitions of these heavy-hitting artists are indeed grand.

An unexpected standout is Brooklyn (2004) by Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui), a massive acrylic painting with edges of raw canvas and bridge-like and tentacled structures that capture the gloomy, frenetic energy of New York City.

From the gallery layout, it is not immediately clear that America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Judith Lowry (Maidu/Hammawi/Washoe), and Julie Buffalohead’s (Ponca) exceptional figurative paintings are part of this theme.

A small side gallery houses the themes “Training Ground: New Mexico” and “Training Ground: Oklahoma.” On view are highly accomplished works of the Santa Fe Studio School, including works by Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994), Fred Kabotie (Hopi, ca. 1900–1986), and Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso, 1893–1949). Introducing SPRING 2020 | 85

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ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

Spirit Lines: Helen Hardin Etchings The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art

W this temporality of the late 1930s and early 1940s creates an exhibition within an exhibition and can present a valuable lesson about the history of North American Native art. However, these works can almost be missed due to their placement in the exhibition.

The importance of this early training school for Native American artists in the Southwest and thus for successive generations of artists is outlined in the wall text. Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi, 1912–1989) in Three Eagle Dancers (ca.

1935) places his subjects against a stark, neutral background facing away from the viewer, posed gracefully in their regalia, a sweeping line of feathers topped with orange and yellow headdresses.

Each piece in the gallery is a small wonder: diverse artistic creations amid the constraining force of mostly white teachers and patrons who wielded a great deal of influence on Native American art in this period.

Moving back to the main gallery, the theme “Reclaiming the Abstract” highlights the role of abstraction as a strategy of mid-20th-century artists, recognizing its power in the mainstream art world and relating it to existing Native American pictorial systems.

The “Indian Pop” gallery demonstrates how Native American artists employed the language of pop through easily

recognizable objects, graphic styles, and bright colors. Finally, the gallery showcasing “Cosmopolitans”—like “Grand Ambitions”—displays work by artists in or around New York City and the diverse perspectives and styles in their work. In the “Cosmopolitans” gallery, Standing Water (2002) by Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) dazzles. The off-white and deep purple of the piece evoke an atmospheric sense of water and abstracted sense of landscape, while the floating circular shapes suggest musical notes or microscopic marine life. Like many pieces in Stretching the Canvas, Whitehorse’s work stands up as a great American painting, full stop.

Despite the exhibition title, Stretching the Canvas, little attention is paid to the materiality of painting, a crucial aspect of modernism as well as a strength of the included paintings. The painted works are acrylic, oil, casein, paint, pencil, and encaustic on linen, canvas, paper, and board. This variety supports the show’s thesis that Native American painters have indeed matched their better-known, white American counterparts. Ultimately, the paintings of this exhibition are extraordinary and make Stretching the Canvas more than worth a visit.

—Marina Tyquiengco (Chamorro)

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HEN I CONSIDER the many definitions of the word line, a few specific ones come to mind as they relate to the title of the exhibition Spirit Lines: Helen Hardin Etchings. In Pueblo pottery the spirit line is one or two thin lines that surround the rim of the pot whose purpose is to release the spirit of the potter. Historically, Pueblo potters have been women. Their style and technique are passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter. This multigenerational custom of art making is emphasized in Spirit Lines.

The mathematical definition of a line includes the concept of infinity, which is communicated through the artwork in this exhibition: the infinity of life expressed through birth, the physical death of the body, rebirth, and the continued life of our spirit. Lines as elements of visual art are prominent factors that show up repeatedly in the artwork of Helen Hardin (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1943–1984), as well as in the art by the other related artists throughout the exhibition. The various concepts of lines are seen individually within each diverse piece of art, yet they are combined in one exhibition beautifully and thoughtfully planned by Emily Kapes, curator of art at the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

The exhibition features all of Hardin’s 23 first edition, copperplate etchings. Her original copperplates are displayed side by side with the finished prints, revealing they are themselves works of art that could stand on their own merits.

Kapes explains her ideas to expand the exhibition beyond Hardin’s prints: “Though Hardin’s etchings can certainly stand alone, I took the opportunity to include select works by other Santa Clara women artists connected to Hardin through family or heritage. The artists include [Hardin’s mother] Pablita

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Velarde (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1918–2006), [Hardin’s daughter] Margarete Bagshaw (Santa Clara Pueblo descent, 1964–2015), and members of the Tafoya family of potters. I included them to enhance understanding of Hardin’s story—I also added three of her own paintings—and also to show how Santa Clara artistic traditions and influences are passed down through generations. The additional art, loaned from several private collections, includes paintings, etchings, pottery, and bronze sculpture. Spirit Lines is the James Museum’s first exhibition of art

by Native women, and they deserve the recognition,” Kapes says.

The exhibition sheds light on the process of printmaking by displaying three photographs of Hardin working in her studio. Hardin’s preferred printmaking technique was the copperplate etching.

Using a flat tool, printmakers draw or carve an image on a copper sheet incised with acid. The plate is then inked and pressed onto paper to produce a predetermined number of prints. The exact processes and precise techniques of copperplate etching were fitting for the labor-intensive, detailed compositions created by Hardin. In one of the photographs of Hardin’s working studio is an image of her etching the copperplate for her print titled Contemplation. Displayed next to these photographs is the actual copperplate along with the finished print of Contemplation. Underneath the print sits an exhibit case full of printmaking tools. This visual combination contributes to a better understanding of the entire printmaking process.

Hardin’s use of linear, stylized Pueblo designs is highlighted throughout all 23 of her prints. Her skilled ability to capture and create an image with line shows in her print Changing Woman (1980). The precise lines reveal no hesitation, rapidly changing movement and direction. They flow softly in one portion then burst with energy from another. The lines form a recognizable image of a woman, although she is not realistic. Lines create geometric shapes to make the eyes, nose, and mouth. Lines that invoke beadwork encircle her face.

Bold lines of yellow and orange stream from her mouth. Hardin explained her

interpretation of these pouring lines: “Streaming from the mouth is the fact that something is going on inside me. I’m trying to say what is happening, but all I can say is that I am changing.”

Changing Woman is the first in what Hardin simply called Woman Series.

Medicine Woman and Listening Woman followed in order. Hardin said, “So, I feel this need, this compulsion to do a series of my best works to show the noble women for what they are: intelligent, thinking, hardworking, and spiritual.” Changing Woman speaks to women of all ages.

Hardin herself felt that “every six years I become aware of myself as a woman, as a person growing through changes.”

above Helen Hardin (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1943–1984), L i s t e n i n g Wo m a n , 1 9 8 2 , copperplate etching on paper.

Image courtesy of the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art. opposite Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui) with his painting, Brooklyn, 2004, acrylic on charcoal on canvas, 84 × 144 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution 26/5375.

Photo: A. Meredith

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This encourages self-reflection.

There have been stages in life when I was more outspoken and stages when I was more absorbent of others’ thoughts, perspectives, and energies. And then there are times when I need to circle back around to where I started, no longer being the calm, healing woman that is portrayed in Medicine Woman. Again, I am aware of the meaning of lines. My own spirit lines.

My own life lines.

Hardin is no longer physically alive to continue creating art. Her spirit, however, lives on in her artwork and is revealed in every line she created. Her paintings and prints are still here for us to reflect upon. Within them we find ourselves. We find our spirit in our past, now, and in our future.

—Michole Eldred (Catawba/ Eastern Band Cherokee)

SANTA FE

Laughter and Resilience: Humor in Native American Art Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

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T R U LY B E L I E V E t h a t sometimes the only way to process the hurt we endure is to find the humor in an otherwise dire situation,” says Denise Neil, PhD (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation), curator of Laughter and Resilience: Humor in Native American Art. Entering the museum, I’m greeted by Caricature Drawings, a large pen-and-ink drawing on paper by Chad Browneagle (ShoshoneBannock/Spokane). Rendered in red, white, blue, and grey, the piece depicts the likenesses of ten artists featured in the exhibition. Beyond these caricatures, the exhibition features 68 art works, including 22 that reside in the Wheelwright’s permanent collection. Sets of objects, such as the beaded miniature arbor and its accompanying figurines, are counted as one piece, and the work was created between the 19th century and 2019 by Laughter’s 37 artists.

The sociopolitical critique of David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe) reminds me to consider my own shortcomings and look at what I might be contributing to an off-balance picture. While the sense of playfulness and whimsy in the work of Valerie Comosona (Zuni) says it’s okay to be light of heart, especially when the heart really needs it. The unflinching advance of the Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache) and his false-narrative-annihilating truth-machine renews my permission slip to question superficial authority and keep working to get to the real story. And the always life-affirming work of Judith Lowry (Maidu/Hammawi/Washoe) tells me: we will persevere. “Take it from an Indian. You can forgive, you can move on,” says Lowry, while musing about American Indians’ ability to adapt and survive in the face of anything.

Stepping into the familiar, nautilusshaped exhibition space of the Hástiin Klah and Friends galleries, I soon encounter animated coyote koshares

by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946–2006), and a more realistic portrayal of the coyote, perched atop a blue, velvet armchair by Steven J. Yazzie (Navajo/ Laguna). Standing between these pieces, I’m reminded of words from Stealers Wheel’s 1972 song: “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am.” But, as the curator informs us, the humor on the surface of these works belies a weightier substance. Fonseca’s black-and-white, melon-munching jester pays homage to the sacred clowns, commonly seen in Pueblo and Hopi culture, whose roles include entertaining the crowd with their over-the-top antics. Tossing watermelons from the kiva tops or initiating a waltz with an unsuspecting visitor during summer feast days, sacred clowns temper the more serious undertakings of ceremony, in which they become agents of healing. Yazzie’s steely-eyed trickster is surrounded by a single trapping of modern urban living (the chair), a giant cactus, birds, and the remnants of once-thriving trees. As the artist’s quote on the wall text reads, coyote “plays an important role in our stories of unpredictable and ambivalent behaviors, constantly testing and pushing the limits of harmony, discord, and order,” and

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here coyote embodies “adaptation in the face of extreme environmental changes and continued population growth in the natural world.”

A few steps later, I’m looking at American Highway. The etching by Diego Romero (Cochiti) captures a widely relatable moment in the lives of the Chongo Brothers, fictional characters whose many adventures are chronicled in the artist’s long-running and much-loved series. In this frame, the brothers have rolled into a service station somewhere in the middle of a butte-studded desert, their truck apparently in need of repair.

But with a coyote working under the hood, their travel plans have come to a screeching halt.

The northeast corner of the exhibition is dedicated to showing several early episodes of Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

Playing in a continuous loop, spanning nearly an hour, the sounds of Wile E.’s misadventures echo through the rest of the space. Painted silhouettes of classic Pueblo dwellings, ladders and satellite dishes protruding from their multistoried roofs, cover the walls bordering the colorless films. Modern technology is now a familiar sight in most Pueblo communities, where historic local architecture still stands, but these silhouettes are a powerful commentary on how technology has become part of virtually every landscape on the planet. A three-walled nook holds a trio of works by Heidi K. Brandow (Navajo). Each depicting her familiar and monstrously delightful characters, who bring to mind Where the Wild Things Are

by Maurice Sendak.

Meriting Santa Fe Indian Market’s 2019 Innovation Award, Tools of the Trade (2019) by Tom Farris (Otoe-Missouria/ Cherokee) explores Manifest Destiny through an antique slot machine, reworked by the artist to register images such as a Bible, whiskey bottle, and covered wagon—some of the devices used to subjugate and exploit Native people while removing tribes from their ancestral lands. Because the piece is a functioning machine, when your spin lines up the pictures just so: Ka-ching! you hit the jackpot. Though it may suggest a handsome payoff, Tools begs the question, “For whom and at whose expense?”

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above Ryan Singer (Navajo), Galactic Combo #2, 2018, acrylic on canvas.

Around the bend, My GreatGrandmother’s Cherokee Princess Dress

by Kenny Glass (Wyandotte/Cherokee) stitches me with a thread of melancholy.

The misappropriation of Native identity by non-Natives inspired the garment. The floor-length gown, with its poofy shape and fairytale-like sparkle, conjures images of both Elizabethan nobility and animated princesses of the big screen. Delicately colored, masterfully constructed, and extravagantly embellished with a peplum of white chiffon and metallic sequins and bands of Cherokee basketry designs worked around the bodice and at thigh-level, Glass’s Dress commands the space around it.

Iconic pop-culture characters of today and yesteryear—from Mickey

Mouse and Darth Vader to SpongeBob SquarePants—are well represented in the exhibition, as are some of the logos of corporations that have staked out ground in the Native experience. Galactic Combo #2 by Ryan Singer (Navajo) features an unexpected pairing of these ingredients.

The Last Indian Market (2015), an epic photograph by Cara Romero, is perhaps one of Laughter’s most powerful pieces. The stately image based on Leonardo da Vinci’s, The Last Supper (1490s), is grand in presentation and lavish in setting. Its subjects, dressed in fine clothes and adorned with Native jewelry of various tribal origins, sit on the other side of a table, each one appearing to plead with a buckskin suit–wearing

Buffalo Man, seated at the center of the gathering.

It’s difficult to choose a favorite among so many smile- and laugh-inducing works, but Toy Horse is definitely in the running. Standing about a foot high, the hand-carved, wooden toy is hinged on its back legs. It wears full bridle and a saddle complete with a sterling silver saddle horn and stirrups over a tasseled woven blanket. Thin strips of rawhide make the reigns, and the bit has more silver. While the horsehair tail and fur mane lie perfectly still inside the glass case, it’s easy to imagine them swaying gently when the child who held this companion dear made believe he was real and galloped him over the still-cool sand of early spring’s playgrounds. Among the oldest pieces in the exhibition, Toy Horse is one of several works accompanied by the museum’s interactive system, which offers visitors the opportunity to learn more about selected works by using ear buds and a cell phone to access recorded narratives from the museum’s director, Jonathan Batkin.

The overall presentation—display and placement of objects, lighting and shadow, the overall vibe of the space— are excellent, a hallmark of this museum.

Small but effective details, such as the comic book bubble-shaped text panels throughout the exhibition, add to the collection’s cartoon atmosphere.

Ranked among First American Art Magazine’s Top 10 Native Art Events of 2019, Laughter and Resilience is not afraid to confront controversial subjects and does not attempt to divert politically charged opinion. On the contrary, its laurels rest on Denise Neil’s refusal to exclude hard truths from the Native story, as retold by the artwork. This exhibition and Neil’s notes reveal her deep respect for the healing power of laughter and its role in her own resilience, and that sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Art Dealers Association of America, Laughter and Resilience fights for truth, justice, and the American Indian way through October 4, 2020.

—RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Tewa) SPRING 2020 | 89

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TULSA

Place, Nations, Recall/Respond: Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Gilcrease Museum Collaboration (Phase II) Gilcrease Museum

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S A PARTNERSHIP between the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (TAF) and the Gilcrease Museum, Recall/Respond was a pair of exhibitions that facilitated opportunities for current and past TAF participants to create a dialogue between their artworks, the museum’s collections, and the social landscape of Oklahoma.1 Like a two-act play, Recall/Respond offered viewers new interpretations of the state’s culture and history in two juried exhibitions at this museum built by oilman Thomas Gilcrease (Muscogee, 1890–1962) on his allotment land. Phase I showed from June 21 through October 13, 2019, and Phase II exhibited from November 15, 2019 through March 15, 2020. In the project’s second phase of works by eleven artists, installations

by Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) and Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee) invoked visual propositions of cultural exchange.

Begun in 2015 by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the TAF places value on the growth of Tulsa’s creative community while supporting artists at varying stages in their careers. Each year, applicants from diverse cultural backgrounds are selected, including a number of fellows from Native nations. As current fellows, Fields and Young contest a single-perspective narrative of history through their work while affirming place-based knowledge.

An Osage wedding coat and feather top hat ensemble, Fields’s To Know Your People are Beautiful (2018–19) articulates concepts of wearing culture and of connecting with history through clothing and lexicon. Corresponding to

embroidered letters on the coat, the installation’s upper section is a group of cut paper pieces suspended from the ceiling.

These shapes are made from facsimiles of the museum’s archival documents and cut into Osage handprints and letters that call out the tribe’s ways of knowing in both motif and language. Fields’s work represents the Osage Nation’s reinvention of American military coats into Osage women’s wedding clothing as well as a 1930s reimagining of the coats as gifts put forth for “paying for the drum” during the Ilonshka, or Grass Dance.2 This artwork recalls an initial moment of contact between the coats and the Osage people in 1804, when President Thomas Jefferson gifted military jackets to Osage delegation chiefs who in turn gave these garments to women of the tribe; they wore them during high-status, arranged marriages between the Earth and Sky moieties.

After these negotiation gifts ceased, the Osage people wove military-style coats for weddings, and, in the mid-20th century, the coats’ function shifted to use in non-arranged marriages as well as in representations of leadership during the Ilonshka.

On the interior of Fields’s colorful coat of wool and satin, archival images printed on silk evoke cross-cultural histories of the Hominy, Oklahoma, area—near the artist’s home. The visual collaging of songs, maps, and photographs embodies a complex social fabric of shared iconography. For example, the heart, the deer, and the oil tower recall complicated memories for varying communities while the beaded human figures at the front edges of the coat’s interior symbolize Osage understandings of humanity and relations. The luminosity of the navy blue beaded figures and their gold beaded outlines suggests a radiance of being and bridges this work with Fields’s ceramic sculptures that fuse human figural forms with Osage patterns. The paper cutouts in the upper zone of this installation recall a child’s mobile above a crib. From the air circulation in the room, these letters and symbols move continuously while one

above Anita Fields (Osage/ Muscogee), To Know Your People are Beautiful, 2018–19, wool, satin, image prints on silk, embroidery thread, sequins, feathers, facsimiles of archival documents. Photo: Michelle J. Lanteri. below N a t h a n Yo u n g (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee), Unpacked Fan, 2019, digital photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

1. Artwork information was sourced from gallery labels. For a recorded interview about the Recall/Respond exhibitions, see Rick Fisher, “Recall/Respond: A Tulsa Artist Fellowship/Gilcrease Museum Collaboration,” Public Radio Tulsa FM 89.5, audio recording, 28:58, July 1, 2019, web.

2. “History Behind A Giving Heritage,” Sam Noble Museum, 2019, web, and, “Minneapolis Institute of Arts to Present Major Traveling Exhibition of Native Women Artists,” First American Art Magazine, July 25, 2018, web.

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REVIEWS

looks closely at this work. This kinetic action gives form to the installation’s overarching theme of Osage motion as a constant through time.

A series of photographic prints on paper, Young’s Peyote Boxes Unpacked, Expanded, and Reimagined (2019) highlights material culture associated with the Native American Church in a reorganization and rethinking of personal and institutional collections.

Functioning like portraits, each image isolates a single object or a group of objects, some of which belong to the artist’s friends and family and some of which are works from the museum.

Through the installation of two groups of these photographs surrounding a doorway, Young creates context of associated themes and composition.

The images foreground objects in high definition where many details crisply emerge against either plain white or plain black backgrounds. This style presents audiences with several moments of decontextualization among a common, thematic context in this body of work. The effect is a smooth dissonance, recalling museum displays where Native objects are placed on white or black supports that highlight form but visually disassociate cultural items with community use.

Born in Oklahoma, Young positions his installation to metaphorically point back, forward, and out, all at once. These images recall the establishment of the Native American Church in Oklahoma Territory in the late 19th century and the artist’s longtime participation in the church’s rituals as a member of a particular chapter. This body of work creates a dialogue with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978—a joint resolution that included legal protections for the ritual use of sacraments like peyote by Native Americans.3 Born of a conflicted history, this policy was implemented after Native peoples were being prevented from practicing ceremony by state and federal laws. Young’s images celebrate the inception and continuum of the Native

American Church as a communal site of Native perseverance, expression, and sovereignty.

The objects portrayed include loose feather fans, metalwork, beadwork, gourd rattles, a hide bag, a prayer feather, and a broom.4 In these close-up photographs, Young honors the artistry of these works. He puts forth a familiar iconography with lived-experience associations for members of the Native American Church and presents a new visual language for those unfamiliar with these practices. In Young’s selection of objects, the peyote bird appears in multiple works in metal and is evoked in other media. Its form wraps around both sides of the inlaid turquoise at the center of a cuff, while its tail is recalled in the loose fans and the metalwork fan.

As such, Young’s photographs highlight the beauty of the ritual objects of the Native American Church while refusing to disclose which works are personal belongings on loan and which are from the museum’s collections. Blurring the line, the histories of the museum’s works overlap both personal and institutional categories.

As the exhibition’s introductory panel states, Recall/Respond takes place in a crossroads. It privileges new considerations of cross-cultural histories through the artists’ critical installations.

Fields blends multiple languages to recall the Osage Nation’s use of wedding coats as a central expression of identity and a site of fluctuating cultural practices. Her work invites viewers to notice the different aspects of tribal iconography in fine regalia, distinctive language, and specificity of place. In his photographs, Young questions museological concepts of organizing knowledge and puts forth an Indigenous ordering of Native American Church items. These images function as pulse points that activate audiences’ personal experiences with the church or any recollections from museum contexts.

In this exhibition, culture—as a series of ongoing actions—takes center stage as the relation between the artworks on view.

—Michelle J. Lanteri

3. Stephen Pevar, The Rights of Indians and Tribes, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 225–26.

4. Daniel C. Swan, “Objects of Purpose—Objects of Prayer: Peyote Boxes of the Native American Church,” Museum Anthropology Review 4, no. 2 (2010), 156–89.

BOOK REVIEW Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas Douglas & McIntyre, 2019

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HE INDIGENOUS ART AND LITERATURE WORLD is very conscious of the thin line between cultural appropriation and cultural collaboration/exchange. Before I even read Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga, I did wonder where Haida manga would fall on that line. Haida Manga utilizes the Japanese manga format, Haida imagery, and Chinese brush technique.

Ultimately, the melding of the styles and techniques respectfully and playfully creates space for the Haida-based tale to spread out and take shape outside the confines of the expected narrative arc.

Yahgulanaas (Haida), who was raised on Haida Gwaii, served on the Council of the Haida Nation for many years and has spent much of his life working for environmental and community causes. Carpe Fin is the story of a group of unlikely heroes who set out from their industrially poisoned home to the remote island of Lord’s Rock, where they hope to hunt a sea lion to feed their community. Being out of “dinosaur sauce” for a ship, they instead take an old carved canoe with its maker’s elderly granddaughter, Marie, at the helm. A storm arises. Its cause is deliberately left unclear but definitely has to do with someone’s SPRING 2020 | 91

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behavior. In the ensuing chaos, Carpe is accidentally left on the island where he encounters creatures who, in the least sentimental way possible, help him become the person his community needs him to be.

Yahgulanaas, a self-taught artist who works in many media, learned Chinese brush painting in the 1990s from Cantonese master Cai Ben Kwon. He calls the merging of that technique and other Asian styles with Haida imagery “Haida manga.” Carpe Fin is the prequel to Red: A Haida Manga (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), which references Haida oral history and which, like Carpe, began as a mural.

I am familiar enough with manga to have opened Carpe Fin from the right, which is how I accidentally saw the ending before I read the beginning. But time, action, and even state of being are pretty fluid in this work, which begins, “Once upon a time this could be a true story …”

Of course, the full-color formline graphics using Chinese brush technique are the first thing most people will notice in Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga, including this one. The precise, thick lines of formline are softened by the brush

technique more so in Carpe than they were in Red, but the lines still function as guides separating time and space, both physical and otherworldly, in a way that comic or even manga panels could not. The lines are part of what make this rendering of Carpe’s adventure particularly Haida, especially when they are placed in the context of their original mural form.

Both books could be taken apart to recreate the murals (in fact, readers were encouraged to buy two copies of Red in order to do so). The Carpe mural can be seen on the inside of the hardback edition’s dust jacket. The original two-bysix-meter Carpe Fin mural (2019–20) is in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

The intriguing graphics of the book are enhanced by the wit of its sparse language. Carpe Fin plays with language, from the title to the final word. Carpe Fin refers to the book’s main character, an out-of-work carpenter named Carpe, whose name recalls, of course, the Latin phrase, Carpe diem. Fin refers to what happens to Carpe—impossible to explain without spoilers—as well as the Latin fin, which is the last word of the book

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(and you will find that funny and/or meaningful, but I will ruin it if I tell you why). In between the title and the final word is wordplay that somehow recalls both Beowulf’s kennings and the groan-inducing one-liners common to uncles and dads across the Native world. There is also a totally unexpected reference to The Who. Several reviews of Red comment that its narrative is difficult to follow, and on first reading, that can be the case with Carpe Fin as well. However, a second reading reveals that it may be the reader’s expectation of the narrative arc that makes it “difficult” to follow. I am Mvskoke, and compared to the narrative pattern of Western stories, our stories (both ancient and current) can seem to meander in, wander around, and meander off without resolution. When I reread Carpe Fin with that in mind, all of its humor and seriousness came into focus, just like its lines do when the pages of the book are placed in the context of the mural. That context/consciousness-shifting element of Haida manga may be its most important quality, and it is strongly present in Carpe Fin. —Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

ART+LIT

Tlingit/Dena'ina Author, Editor, and Playwright

VERA MARLENE STARBARD

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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ORN IN CRAIG, ALASKA, Vera Marlene Starbard belongs to a Tlingit and Dena'ina Athabascan family. Due to her father’s profession as an Alaskan state trooper, she frequently moved around the state at an early age. Starbard has drawn on her Indigenous heritage for writing inspiration since the first grade. She was the editor of the East Anchorage High School newspaper and graduated in 2000 and began editing newspapers professionally, including serving six years as the editor of Anchorage Native News. In 2013, she became editor of First Alaskans Magazine, a position she continues to hold.

In 2016, Perseverance Theatre produced her first play, Our Voices Will Be Heard, which was also shown in Juneau, Hoonah, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. The following year, Our Voices Will Be Heard appeared in the anthology Contemporary Plays by Women of Color published by Routledge and was then recorded as a nationally produced radio play.

With her husband and colleagues from the Alaska Native Playwright Project, Starbard cofounded the Alaskan theater company Dark Winter Productions, which promotes Alaska Native playwriting and acting. She is the first ever Alaska Native to be selected for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program, which was recently extended into 2022. Her first play commissioned by the residency, Devilfish, premiered at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau on September 2019 and in Anchorage the following month.

Earlier this year, she wrote several episodes for the PBS Kids animated children’s program Molly of Denali. For her writing and journalism, Starbard has received numerous awards, including those from the Public Relations Society of America, Alaska Press Club, Rasmuson Foundation, and the Alaska Literary Award.

above Vera Marlene Starbard. Image courtesy of the author.

MRS: Thank you for speaking with me, Vera. First, I’m interested in how your Tlingit and Dena'ina Athabascan ancestry influence your writing?

VMS: Gunalcheesh for asking! It’s hard to separate what, from my heritage, influences my writing, and what doesn’t, and I wouldn’t want to separate it. My heritage, both Native and non-Native, is my memory, my perspective, how I engage with the world, how I’m seen by the world.

It’s as much as saying how being a woman influences my writing—it’s simply my perspective 100 percent of the time.

I do make a conscious choice to center my characters, story, and point of view around Alaska Native perspectives.

There’s so little of it when compared to a white, male dominant culture that I feel a responsibility to put as much out in the world as I can.

MRS: How does your professional experience as an editor influence your creative writing and playwriting?

VMS: I have been in some form of journalism my entire professional life and have been an editor in some form since I was 15 years old. The emphasis on deadlines, a quick turnaround, being able to produce a piece on a topic you hadn’t even thought about an hour ago—this is a great training ground for being able to be a productive writer. When it comes to theater workshops, it’s not uncommon for me to come the next day with 20 or 30 new pages for actors to try. Working on a tight deadline through the night is just part of my life, and so applying that to my creative writing is second nature now.

Journalism also stresses the importance of backing up your story and doing enough research, interviews, and background to know you have the most accurate version of the story you can. When it comes to fiction, especially plays, there are so many moments that need an accurate background, and I’m constantly putting my research and interview skills to the work from inception of a new work through final production.

MRS: For those who are unfamiliar with your play Our Voices Will Be Heard, can you provide a brief synopsis and explain how this project formed?

VMS: Our Voices Will Be Heard is a fictionalized version of what happened when my mother found out about the sexual abuse I had experienced for years at the hands of my uncle—her brother. It’s set in a late 1800s Tlingit village and is woven with the legend of Wolverine Woman, told by a storyteller in the future, in a time where sexual abuse is so unknown, you have to tell it as if its fiction.

The play began as a short story in a highly allegorical form that I wrote at the age of 18. I set it aside for over a decade, and then it was accepted into the Alaska Native Playwright Project, where I proposed it as a play idea to SPRING 2020 | 93

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to figure out what the lead character is going through. Trauma is something that cannot be avoided in life. We’ll all experience it. And the Tlingit people had such a beautiful, communal, smart way of dealing with trauma. I wanted to celebrate that in the play and introduce people to this mode of healing.

MRS: In what ways can theater deal with trauma? More specifically, how do trauma-related plays assist Indigenous peoples? above Animation still from Molly of Denali. Image courtesy of PBS Kids.

spend the next year on. Through a year of mentorship and writing, it turned into a full-length play and kind of exploded from there. I didn’t really intend for it to become what it was, but now it’s been produced in multiple communities, published in the textbook Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, and even has a one-hour radio version that premiered during Child Abuse Prevention month in 2018. It was a piece of art that was really me processing what had happened and trying to explain it to my family, and it grew into this beautiful thing that touched so many people.

several episodes for a national television program, I had written several short and full-length plays in various stages of drafts, I had traveled a ton and seen so much more theater across the country and world. And over all that, I recognized and owned that I had a valid voice to be heard and a cultural perspective I had a responsibility to share. The difference between the two plays is not so much in the style as the confidence and ambition in which I approached the production itself.

MRS: It is approximately three years since the opening of your first play and the opening of your most recent play, Devilfish. Can you discuss how you’ve evolved as a playwright during this time?

MRS: Devilfish is set in ancient Southeast Alaska and involves a sea creature that destroys a village. The lone survivor is a young girl who is compelled to join a group of strangers to survive. The play’s central themes engage folklore and community trauma.

Why was it important for you to tackle both folklore and trauma in Devilfish?

VMS: While I was an established writer, I had never written a play before I wrote Our Voices. Just understanding the format to write in and what was stage right and stage left was a learning curve during Our Voices. But more than that, I wasn’t as confident in my own voice being accessible to audiences, and so I (ironically) gave up my voice more than I should have for Our Voices Will Be Heard. While I learned so much from so many people during that time, I also wasn’t as good at discerning when I should listen and when I should hold to my own expertise as a storyteller. By the time Devilfish hit production, I was much more confident in my own voice and my own cultural perspective and practices. I had written

VMS: The term folklore itself can be pretty loaded and not something we use much.

Tlingit legends and histories certainly play a huge role in Devilfish and, really, any work I do. When I was little, my parents would read books to me and my siblings at night. But I would always ask them to “tell me a story with your mouth.” I loved oral storytelling, whether it was of their own making, or histories from the clan.

And although my parents didn’t know it, I was experiencing sexual abuse throughout that same time. Stories, books, legends— they were all an escape from what I was experiencing.

Devilfish is not autobiographical, but I certainly lean on my own experiences with post-traumatic stress disorder

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VMS: It’s not at all specific to Indigenous people, as everyone can benefit in the same way. But I also know that the Tlingit people used performing arts for thousands of years as a way to heal as a community, as part of the cycle of communal grief, as the relaying of history, as enforcement of identity. And in very quick fashion, it was not only stripped away from us, but most forms of it were made illegal.

The historical trauma and ongoing trauma Indigenous people in this country are experiencing can not only be powerfully addressed in theater, but the act of performing itself is reclaiming a space of communal healing we were separated from for so long.

The most powerful healing from trauma generally happens when you find a safe space to examine that trauma, come to terms with it, and figure out how to safely release it. Theater is an ideal place for that.

MRS: Is the act of writing a spiritual exercise or something else entirely?

VMS: When I’m really into my favorite mode of writing—my husband calls it “the zone”—it’s entirely immersive. Every part of me is in it—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. My mental load is experiencing what the characters are experiencing, which can get incredibly emotional. I feel physically different and may not notice things like my hand cramping up from so much writing for hours on end. And yet my body will tell me things about the story itself I want to listen to. During a recent writing phase, I had the biggest craving for a food I had not eaten since I was a very little girl. It just got more and more insistent until I finally went and

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found it. And for whatever reason, that opened me up to some of the emotions I was trying to home in on.

And ultimately, I know if my spiritual self has engaged in it. I’m incredibly private about my spirituality, but I can say that any work I’m actually proud of has a strong perspective of my faith and beliefs at the core of it.

MRS: What does writing do to you, mean to you?

VMS: It is therapy, it is empowerment, it is claiming my voice. Writing, to me, is putting a Tlingit woman’s voice into the world and believing it will make a difference.

MRS: Do you consider your audience before writing, during writing, or after you’ve completed a work?

VMS: I always begin a story with one person in mind. Every piece I’ve ever done, including nonfiction, I’m writing to one person. It’s not the same person—it’s usually someone I just want to understand this piece the most. And I never tell that person or really anybody who that is. I find that if I really want to open up my heart and be vulnerable, I can’t think about hundreds of people at once. I just want to tell one good story to one person.

It’s in the editing phase that more people come in. But even then, I have a pretty narrow focus. Having too broad of an audience tends to make me try and include too much context, and waters the story down. In the case of Devilfish, the broader audience was the Tlingit people of Alaska. I hoped they would walk away from the play feeling proud of Tlingit people and culture. And in the end, it spoke pretty universally in some ways because it had such a narrow focus to begin with.

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MRS: What is something that you continuously struggle with when writing?

VMS: I don’t know if I’ve always struggled with it, but something I struggle with the busier I’m getting is balancing so many projects at once. When I’m writing a story, I’m immersed in that world. If I’m really into it, the “real” world can even seem to merge with what’s going on in my head. But now I might have six deadlines on different stories in several stages of draft in the same week. And they could range from creative journalism to children’s television writing to heavy theatrical fantasy. Pulling myself out of one world and into another is difficult at best, and sometimes seems impossible.

I’m having to really figure out how to balance when I’m able to fully submerge and when I need to be okay with a much more left-brain version of the story for that specific draft.

MRS: Miigwech, Vera.

VMS: Gunalcheesh! Chin’an!

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Excerpt from Scene Two

OUR VOICES WILL BE HEARD LITAA is noticeably older, and a little slower. She pauses in her scrubbing to stretch and rub her back. KUTAAN sits beside her, sewing a nightgown, her hair up in the bun of a young lady. Both work in silence, and LITAA stands slowly, holding her back.

LITAA: Daughter, let us sing the nooskw song.

KUTAAN: Oh, Mother! Why that one again? It is a child’s song.

LITAA: You still miss the last parts. You only learn the parts you like, and you do not bother to learn the difficult parts.

KUTAAN: But I do not understand why we even sing the old clan songs, Mother. You said yourself our clan does us no good out here.

above Unknown Tlingit artist, Naaxin (Chilkat cape), ca. 1895–1900, mountain goat wool, yellow cedar bark, dyes, collection of the Textile Museum, George Washington University, TM 84.1. Photo: Daderot.

LITAA: We sing them because they teach us things. Our ancestors put their wisdom in the songs so we can still learn from them. It is not like those silly dleit kaa songs.

science and animals. But the teacher was going so fast, and some of the little ones, like this girl Ganook, could not understand her and what she was saying. So the teacher asked Ganook to describe the behavior of a deer. She left her village when she was a baby, and did not know how a deer behaves.

KUTAAN: What dleit kaa songs?

LITAA: Oh, that one about those three mice, and they could not see, and they cut their tails or some such thing. Silly! They teach nothing. But these songs, these clan songs come from those with wisdom. So we will learn them, and maybe one day we will understand better.

LITAA: But you knew the answer, did you not? Did you tell the teacher?

KUTAAN: No! I mean, yes, I knew the answer, but I did not tell the teacher.

LITAA: (sits back) All right, Kutaan.

Tell me.

KUTAAN: Well, when we stopped for lunch, I started to tell her a story.

You remember the story of the deer and the bear that Sigeidi used to tell?

I told Ganook that story, and how deer was a strong creature at first, but then he is scared, and spooks at everything, especially bear, who wants to eat him.

LITAA: Ah, I always liked that one.

LITAA: (not looking up) I hope you have been behaving.

LITAA: (sighs) Kutaan, we have been over this year after year. No matter how the teacher treats you, you must learn what she is teaching and make sure she knows you know it.

KUTAAN: And the story helped her!

When the teacher started picking on Ganook in class again, she just started reciting the behavior of a deer, just like that! All right from the story!

KUTAAN: (getting excited) Yes, but listen! We were learning about

KUTAAN: But this is even better. I helped Ganook!

—Vera Marlene Starbard (Tlingit/Dena'ina)

KUTAAN: (sighs) Yes, Mother. But, may I tell you something that happened in school first?

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